Awesomod discussion/questions/helpful tips thread

[Tubbo]

Note: AwesomeMod contains critical bug fixes. Playing without for too long may cause irreversible neighborhood damage.

Ok, but for future reference. (such as when the mod is being updated for a new patch or expansion pack). You can uninstall the mod and play the same neighbourhood without it messing up the game? And transferring houses and families between hoods cause no problems?

Sorry for being persistent. I just want to be sure about what I'm doing. Now you've said that, I'll probably stick with the awesomemod, but I still need to know the answer to my questions so I'm not playing blindly only to encounter problems sometime down the line if I need to remove it again for whatever reason.

EDIT: I also want to move my families and houses to Riverview from Sunset Valley anyway because there's a lot more space there. So knowing if transferring families is safe would be helpful.

[eevilcat]

Running with what was the latest awesomemod yesterday and got a ctd when going to China. Loaded up the game and did fixall which sorted a number of things including '5 bad sims'. The information box said something about fixing minipartners, what's it all about? The game seems to be running fine since.

(In reference to comments a page or two back, sims in the new ambitions 'hood are very active on the romantic/marriage/pollination front but I did have to go around installing cots and single beds in most houses.)

[Motoki]

@Tubbo: You obviously need a lot of hand holding, consoling and reassurances so I will break it down for you.

Look, the creator of the mod said you can uninstall it by pausing, typing uninstall, saving and exiting then removing the mod. Regardless of what the "multiple posts" you could have sworn you read said, he is, you know, the creator of the damned mod so I would think he would know a little more about it than some random yahoo.

The irreversible damage he is speaking of by playing a game without Awesomemod's critical fixes applies equally to playing never having installed Awesomemod in the first place as it does to playing post Awesomemod uninstall. i.e. even BBStards who never touched or heard of Awesomemod could still experience such damage, i.e. if you play unmodified sloppy EAxis code use at your own risk.

He's not saying there will be a problem, and if there were it would not be caused by any residual effect of removing Awesomemod, he is saying that there are parts of EA's code that he fixed that could potentially cause errors if you aren't using his fixes.

Transferring families between neighborhoods is completely irrelevant to having or not having Awesomemod since you are not transferring your save files but rather just templates containing the looks and traits of those sims in order to recreate copies of them in the new neighborhood.

[J. M. Pescado]

EDIT: I also want to move my families and houses to Riverview from Sunset Valley anyway because there's a lot more space there. So knowing if transferring families is safe would be helpful.

Transferring famblies across neighborhoods is safe, with a few caveats: Relationships outside of the transferred household will be lost. The Twallanian Porter Device supposedly can allow you to mass-move extended famblies across different households, but as this is not an AwesomeWare product, we can't provide support for it, as I have no idea how or if it works.

[SJActress]

The information box said something about fixing minipartners, what's it all about?

I'm curious about this, too, as it's the only thing that ever comes up when I fixall.


Edited to fix tenses.

[shadow]

I get one that says "missing mini-partner." I had never seen that until recently but I never used fixall much either. 

[J. M. Pescado]

It's a technical term. Basically, sims are often stored in double-entry, with the result that romantic oppositions are stored in quadruplicate. These two records can diverge due to crappy EAxian coding, in particular, causing the bug where a sim cannot remarry after the death of their opponent, because the "Mini" record, used to track sims as they move between neighborhoods (Main & Vacation) incorrectly indicates that they still have an opponent, while their full "SimDescription" record indicates that they don't, causing the game to believe that the sim DOES have an opponent, who didn't accompany it to the vacation/mainworld. The opposite case, "missing minipartner", is where the Mini-record indicates no opponent, while your sim DOES have one, which is not presently linked to any visible error condition on its own, but still represents a data discrepancy found at the same time we look for other errors. A "dangling" entry is one where the relationship is not bidirectional: One record indicates that sim's opponent is some sim, but that sim's record doesn't corroborate this.

[Tubbo]

EDIT: I also want to move my families and houses to Riverview from Sunset Valley anyway because there's a lot more space there. So knowing if transferring families is safe would be helpful.

Transferring famblies across neighborhoods is safe, with a few caveats: Relationships outside of the transferred household will be lost. The Twallanian Porter Device supposedly can allow you to mass-move extended famblies across different households, but as this is not an AwesomeWare product, we can't provide support for it, as I have no idea how or if it works.

Thanks for your help. =] And I hadn't heard of the Twallan Porter device, so I tried it out and it's saved me a lot of time in transferring my families so they don't lose the relationships. Perfect. And now I know I can safely uninstall the awesomemod whenever I need to, then I guess that's a bonus for keeping it.

[Freezerburn]

When I'm running a sim through Supreme Commander, I found out that the game lags for 2-4 seconds (real time) for the sim's next action, but when I play a sim that is not running Supreme Commander, it works fine, only the sims running Supreme Commander that makes the game lag for the next action, is this normal?

[J. M. Pescado]

Can't reproduce. Must be a side effect of your computer sucking. What do you mean by "lags for the sim's next action"?

[witch]

Dunno if my problem is the same, but when I have a sim on SC and I ctrl-click the sim, there is a distinct pause of maybe a second before the menu options pop up.

[Freezerburn]

What I mean is, when an SC sim wants to do his/her next action after completing the before, the game was like thinking what to do (and lags) for 2 seconds and after that, the action will be queued. I'm using the latest AM if you're going to ask me.

[J. M. Pescado]

Is this a new behavior? Because I don't see it. What kind of system specs does this occur on? What are your sims doing? Is this occurring right after your game boots up?

[LilRubyQueen]

I installed the new version of AM and I still get a lot of CTD's. I've reinstalled my game and try again but it produces the same results. Every time I delete the scriptcache.package it reappears again. I realize this happens when the game crashes after about a minute or two of gameplay. I think I installed AM into the right path- I did it manually first and then I used the Sims3FrameWorkAM1.5. I also changed my DEP and forced the LAA. I also think my resource file is written correctly but there's so much that could be wrong that I honestly don't know where my problem is coming from. I'm truly sorry that I don't know what I'm doing- I try to figure it out but I fail every time. I just need help with this.

Attached is my latest excerpt. I don't know if its going to help but I attached it anyway. Its the same every time I do something different to try to fix my problem when  it crashes.

Sorry if I asked for help in the wrong place. Thanks in advance.

[J. M. Pescado]

Suspect your crashing is due to unrelated factors, as I have gotten no crashing as of late.

[The_Goddess]

What I mean is, when an SC sim wants to do his/her next action after completing the before, the game was like thinking what to do (and lags) for 2 seconds and after that, the action will be queued. I'm using the latest AM if you're going to ask me.

I saw a lag similar to this in my husband's game, but only when he was playing on a rather intricate castle lot.  Between the ridiculous amount of crap on the lot, the size of the lot and the fact that the lot was full of effect foggers and triggers; his computer had a hard time keeping up.  SC seems fine when he uses it with other families. 
I'd have to agree.  It sounds like the problem is computer suckage.

[Freezerburn]

Is this a new behavior? Because I don't see it. What kind of system specs does this occur on? What are your sims doing? Is this occurring right after your game boots up?

Whatever SC option I use, it still thinks (and lags) what my sim needs to do for the next action. The lag doesn't seem to happen to non-SC sims. Here's my DxDiag.

It sounds like the problem is computer suckage.

Computer suckage? I had just upgraded my RAM to 4Gb!

[lordrichter]

SC lag as described above is nothing new, however, it is worse since 7/21.

Any Sim running SC has response lag from the moment the Sim is selected to the moment the next Sim selection is finished.  Pie menu selection lags when a new task is selected.   The entire game will lag when switching into a Sims with SC running (or out of, for that matter) and can get stuttery when changing tasks.  Since 7/21, lags can be quite long.  They were noticeably long on 7/21, even with the SC updates that were made this month, and are much longer now, on the order of 4-5 seconds at times.  Having no Sims running SC eliminates the problem for me.  I have been using "Write Book" more than anything else recently, but occasionally I need cash and do rock collection.  I have seen it on Skilling (Kung Fu related ones most recently) and Tomb Raider, as well. 

I solved my problem by simply staying with the 7/21 version.

Computer suckage does not apply here.  Quad core 8GB RAM and it will easily run 100FPS if I let it.

Personally, I suspect SC is hogging thread resources, possibly in a loop or check that is being called too often or takes too long to complete.  However, I have not had any reason to look to see if that is true, or even to see how EA is doing multitasking in the .NET part of Sims 3.  S.E.P.

For me, this is related to the posting I made on 7/18 (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,18136.msg545643.html#msg545643) in the bug report thread.

[J. M. Pescado]

Computer suckage does not apply here.  Quad core 8GB RAM and it will easily run 100FPS if I let it.

That's very strange, since your computer is more than adequate. Yet, I don't see this problem on any of the computers, including a test rig that's worse than yours. SupCom runs completely smooth there.

However, the new build adds some theoretical speed improvements by using more caching, so you might get some improvement there. Give it a spin.

Also, don't revert: Every older build has had at least one bug that was squashed in it, and if you get an FSE, don't save!

[lordrichter]

Computer suckage does not apply here.  Quad core 8GB RAM and it will easily run 100FPS if I let it.

That's very strange, since your computer is more than adequate. Yet, I don't see this problem on any of the computers, including a test rig that's worse than yours. SupCom runs completely smooth there.

However, the new build adds some theoretical speed improvements by using more caching, so you might get some improvement there. Give it a spin.

Also, don't revert: Every older build has had at least one bug that was squashed in it, and if you get an FSE, don't save!

For me, the theoretical speed improvements have worked.  Lag is down to the "normal" 1 second-or-so and decision making time is much improved.  Sim switching is not as fast with Sims using SC but it is on par with the 7/21 versions.

[J. M. Pescado]

For me, the theoretical speed improvements have worked.  Lag is down to the "normal" 1 second-or-so and decision making time is much improved.  Sim switching is not as fast with Sims using SC but it is on par with the 7/21 versions.

Not sure why sim-switching would be affected at all, since sims do their thing regardless of who you're selecting. One thing that MAY slow down sim-switching with SC is simply because SC tends to scatter your sims across the neighborhood in pursuit of their goals, which means if you switch, tons of graphical textures get to be loaded as you view another lot, because SC globalscans and picks the best actions based on the entire neighborhood, whereas normal sim-AI just picks random crap nearby.

[lordrichter]

Not sure why sim-switching would be affected at all, since sims do their thing regardless of who you're selecting. One thing that MAY slow down sim-switching with SC is simply because SC tends to scatter your sims across the neighborhood in pursuit of their goals, which means if you switch, tons of graphical textures get to be loaded as you view another lot, because SC globalscans and picks the best actions based on the entire neighborhood, whereas normal sim-AI just picks random crap nearby.

Most of the time, Sims on SC are on the same lot.  I use SC mostly to drive revenue from painting, authoring, and stuff like that for Sims that I have in support roles (infant/toddler maintenance, fixing things, etc).  They have on-site resources for these things since I hate having to chase them down when I need them.  I always assumed that the delay when selecting the Sim on SC was due to some sanity checking specific to the SC task, along the lines of "oh, I have focus now" type stuff.  The Sims can be in the same room and there will be more delay switching to SC users than others, so loading textures should not be a problem.  

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, that's not it, because SC runs agnostically to the user's attention focus. The only other possible explanation I can think of is that it is caused by the Tones list, since SC has a lot of tones that may be running display tests when you select them to determine which tones are valid for a given sim. But I never saw this lag on any computer.

However, increasing use of cached data should improve the search times of those after the first few times, as path-accessibility data is cached for a lot until something changes the routing on the lot, such as you going to buy mode, so the longer you play without interrupting it, the faster it should get as it remembers more about the environment.

[Simius]

Okay, stupid question:  Which config setting do I need to enable to see Awesomemod Story updates?  AMS is set to true in my showconfig so I assume it is running, but I haven't seen any updates for a few sim weeks.

I have Twallan's OverWatch mod and Twallan's MasterController mods, but not the story progression mod so I don't think that is overriding the AwesomeStory part of AM.

Thanks.

[J. M. Pescado]

"InformOnStoryAction", under Console/Debug.