Awesome Story Driver Beta-Testing reports

[rufio]

Not to support the whole crib thing (heh, cribs in non-played houses in my game are often on the lawn), but you've missed an obvious point in your argument.

I know that, and yet I still agree with BR that this is more micromanagement of the neighborhood than I really want to do.  I like sculpting the neighborhood to my specifications in TS2, but since that is impossible in TS3 I'd rather everything happen completely independently of me.  If I omit a crib in a particular household and put three in another that is more or less purposefully directing the sims to behave in a certain way.  I'd rather have complete control or none at all.

Since IndieMod is abandoned, why not swipe that code that allows the sims to breed regardless of cribs?

I don't think the issue here is that Pescado is unable to figure out how to make it happen that way.

[Eliste]

I liked it the way pre-beta version of awesomestory handled spawns. If there was a crib you had a message that "SimA was pollinated by SimB". If there was'n room/crib you had a message "SimA and SimB are unable to spawn at this time". Then I could go and have a look why and add a crib if I want/think it makes sence.
Can we have attempted spawn messages back please? Maybe as an optional feature? I like to be awere of the whole town and build a "Town story" in my head as opposed to "Family Story".

[Motoki]

Critical mass? The limit in TS3 is so extremely high that it is unlikely to be met.
The only risks involved with overpopulation are long delays for storymode calculation, crowded lots, and immense save filesizes. And these are just annoyances, the neighbourhood itself will remain intact.

That is not my experience. I honestly could not give you an exact number but my experience in going through several runs now is that once a neighborhood starts getting a lot of sims in it my game slows down and gets very laggy and seems start behaving as if broken not being able to do much and ignoring even their basic needs.

I wish I had hard data on it. I don't. I just know new hoods run quite well for me. Empty hoods run extremely well. Moderate sized does okay. Full may start to get some slowdown. Really full gets even more slowdown and autonomy issues and by that point I feel like I just start seeing a BFBVFS.

Other people may have been able to run very large overstuffed neighborhoods quite successfully for extended periods of time without problems but that had not been my experience.

[kuronue]

I've said this before, but the whole debate could be solved by making the crib requirement optional in the config file. Then those who prefer the realism can turn it on and those (like me) who never want to leave their one true fambily can turn it off.

[Motoki]

Motoki: yes, the hood will become slower as there's much more to calculate, but the integrity will remain. This was not the case in TS2, where the hood would become irreparably corrupted.

Well it's not just the slowness though. I start to notice sims seemingly unable to do anything on their own standing around whining, peeing themselves and passing out. The only common thread I've attached to this behavior was when my neighbors have gotten too full. Never really did find a way to fix though so I just start over. Supposed I could mass murder everyone. I did do discoinferno on one of those such hoods but even after 75% of the town perished I still have the autonomy and slowness issues.

[rufio]

To go slightly off-topic for a second, at what point does an TS2AL hood become irreparably corrupted?  I've for this here before, but have gotten results from around the NL/OFB era that say that 800 is too many sims and that nobody should ever need more than 500, and then later posts saying that Belladonna Cove comes with 900+ sims once you create all the subhoods.  Then again, my Belladonna Cove is (probably irreparably) borked, so maybe it is too many.

[J. M. Pescado]

To go slightly off-topic for a second, at what point does an TS2AL hood become irreparably corrupted?

That depends on the level you have in repair skill. Assuming you have maxed repair skill, a TS2AL hood becomes irreversibly corrupt when you pass 32767 sims. Game slowdown will become apparent at around ~2000 linked sims, however.

Motoki - I guess TS3's playability limit (the point where it becomes too slow to do anything) is lower than TS2s, because all Sims exist at all moments. In TS2 only one lot per time existed.

TS3 has no "hard" playability limit, although the fact that the size of the worldmap is fixed and cannot be embiggened will result in a sort of "soft" population cap. However, most likely your computer will give out first, so the playability limit is purely dependent on your computer.

[Enelen]

What I would like to know is where the "overpopulated" is for TS3. I know the hard-coded cap is waaay up, but how many families is "too much"? I always nuke the homeless, and just nuked a lot of pre-made families, too (replaced with mine, but fewer), but the original, populated hood is still going noticeably slower than the empty one. Does that mean that in the near future my town will go so slow that it will stop working properly? Granted, my computer is just so-so... still, I have 2 Gigs of RAM. I will buy a new, *high-end* one around Christmas, but not sooner.

[rufio]

To go slightly off-topic for a second, at what point does an TS2AL hood become irreparably corrupted?

That depends on the level you have in repair skill. Assuming you have maxed repair skill, a TS2AL hood becomes irreversibly corrupt when you pass 32767 sims.

What kinds of things need repairing, and what are the symptoms that they are broken (but fixable)?  Or do you just mean "knowing how to avoid VBTs"?

[J. M. Pescado]

What I would like to know is where the "overpopulated" is for TS3. I know the hard-coded cap is waaay up, but how many families is "too much"?

Without a hardcoded cap, "too much" is defined solely by your computer. Unlike TS2, TS3 will happily run endless loops and long-running code without complaint, simply halting your entire game to do it if the work proves too much, or never ends. Therefore, there is no "too much" that can be given to you as a hard number, and any "too much" can be overcome simply by throwing MOAR COMPUTAR at it. If you have a presently existing problem with "too much", it will go away when you install MOAR RAMZ, pump liquid nitrogen into the case, and overclock the hell out of it. Unlike TS2, there are no realistically reachable hardcoded mechanisms that fail purely due to instruction count. In TS2, you can't exceed some 100K iterations in a BHAV, and the game will fail if you try to do so much: Various means of bypassing this essentially space out the work over several iterational cycles, but is a hard-hit on performance and lag will result no matter how good your computer is. Furthermore, the game itself is 16-bit and therefore will overflow. TS3 uses a great deal of 64-bit storage, which means the sun will run out of hydrogen before you run out of numbers.

What kinds of things need repairing, and what are the symptoms that they are broken (but fixable)?  Or do you just mean "knowing how to avoid VBTs"?

Both. As for symptoms...I have no idea. I'd know them if I saw them, but I can't predict them in advance because I tend to avoid doing things that would trigger them.

I liked it the way pre-beta version of awesomestory handled spawns. If there was a crib you had a message that "SimA was pollinated by SimB". If there was'n room/crib you had a message "SimA and SimB are unable to spawn at this time". Then I could go and have a look why and add a crib if I want/think it makes sence.

The previous version of AwesomeStory would just return an error, and that was the error. The current version does not return this error message because it is more advanced and forward-facing: Rather than waste an event on something that will fail to fire, it detects the condition in advance and culls that event from the possibilities list.

Since IndieMod is abandoned, why not swipe that code that allows the sims to breed regardless of cribs?

Because there is no code for such a thing. It's not that I can't force sims to spawn because of the absence of proper infrastructure, but because I don't want to. I specifically CHECK for this condition and then ABORT. If, for some sadistic reason, you want this happen regardless of cribs, several things will result:
1. The population will explode because there are no longer any constraints on reproduction.
2. Babies will be abandoned all over the floor at all times.

This, of course, brings up amusing potential for coding in penalties due to neglect and improperly stored babies being eaten by dingos, thus satisfying the requirement that I punish the behavior in 2 and prevent the behavior in 1. It will be explored at a later date. You may submit proposals for various calamities that should occur.

That's how it worked when I had it. I liked reading how so-and-so got married and had kids. Since it happened to sims I didn't care about, they hooked up all the time.

(There should be some sort of change log or description to AwesomeStory.

We have a Wikka. Use it? Add to it?

Yeah, there's the old Awesomemod manual, but that doesn't really explain the logic behind the moves.

Logic behind movement is simple: Sims consider moving whenever their present home lacks sufficient capacity for their current fambly and is not set Ancestral. They then move to an affordable appropriate house. In the event no such houses exist, they consider buying someone else's house. That fambly will then move to a different house, selling their old house to the newcomers. Otherwise, no one moves unless they are pushed by some population pressure. No more musical houses.

Like, how do we get new sims?

New sims occur from breeding, or by the Job Engine spawning new famblies to form coworkers and bosses.

Do they move away sometimes?

Never. You're born in the Vault, you die in the Vault. It is possible for sims to lose their homes and become bums, but this is not a random event, but rather, an event that is triggered as part of going bankrupt.

Like, what are the rules for the whole immigration thing? I understand that this is still being worked out, but there should be an faq eventually.)

There is presently no immigration outside of the Boss/Coworker Engine. If you don't get your sims jobs that cause other sims to spawn, and you don't introduce enough for a breeding population, your neighborhood simply remains barren and desolate until you do. We are presently entertaining proposals for how exactly this should work. Immigration for no clear reason is tricky, because it can result in your game being buried under an avalanche of sims that your computer chokes and barfs on.

Enelen: RAM is the least of your worries (it can always be swapped in the pagefile), TS3 is far more CPU dependent.

This is a not-trueity, actually. However, TS3 is an old 32-bit era program and is incapable of using more than 2 GBs of RAMs anyway. With about 4 GBs of RAM, the maximum a 32-bit machine can handle anyway, you are set because you will still have 2 GB after Windoze eats half...unless you're using Vista, which eats 75%. Then you're fucked. However, "swapping to pagefile" is a MASSIVE performance hit that will grind your game to a halt. It is bad!

TS3 runs on a Renderware engine, which is already quite CPU dependent (its origins by far predate the current powerful GPUs), and all the calculations are run of the CPU as well.

Yes, TS3 is mainly CPU-bound. In fact, the problem with TS3 is not that it performs poorly on good graphics cards, but that it does so too well and causes overheating through unnecessary thrashing.

[Lady Moiraine]

Never. You're born in the Vault, you die in the Vault.

YES!  Do you play it? And if you do, do you make any tweaks for it?

[J. M. Pescado]

YES!  Do you play it? And if you do, do you make any tweaks for it?

No, and no.

[Lady Moiraine]

No, and no.

Too bad     I know you could have really enhanced the gameplay.

[J. M. Pescado]

Too bad     I know you could have really enhanced the gameplay.

It's possible, but I didn't get in on the entire Oblivion engine scene, so there's no point in being late to the party.

[Bouncing Pink Ball]

Since I do have my sims visit other households, I don't mind adding cribs (and I also threw in a few single beds) since I'd rather there was a suitable sleeping place for any extra spawn as they grow. I don't want my poor little sheltered sim kids wandering into houses where the unfit parents have spawn laying around on the floors and in the garden while they sit there watching the romance channel all day, having those crazy, arm flailing conversations with their televisions that all my sims do.

While I was crib adding, two of my hood sims popped up the "is pregant" alert, so the cribs fit right in. There were also a few houses with sad faced, cribless toddlers. I'm guessing this was left over from running Indie?

Now for an actual report on gameplay; I'm not saying this is absolutely ASDbeta related, but my game has frozen twice, requiring closing via task manager, immediately after clicking the X on an alert about sim whoever having no victims for romance. I never had a game freeze prior to turning on Awesome story driver. I see elsewhere that some people are experiencing similar game freezes after installing the latest patch, and I did patch, so it could be the beta, could be the patch, could be the two in unison or could simply be my computer. Rolling back the patch requires an reinstall that I'd rather not bother with today so I can't test the root cause right now. Just thought it was worth a mention.

[Motoki]

Too bad     I know you could have really enhanced the gameplay.

It's possible, but I didn't get in on the entire Oblivion engine scene, so there's no point in being late to the party.
[/quote]

Oh hell people are still modding for Morrowind even. Have done some nice things with that moldy oldy engine too, features it never was able to do.

Oblivion and Fallout are decent games. They could use a little more life and pizazz, changing some of the dumb stuff about them bla bla.

I've always wanted a game that was kind of a hybrid of Sims and RPG. One of the old Dragon Quest RPGs did a store sim that was a grossly simplified OFB before OFB as part of its game (you go questing and have the wife run the store or you can take over; can sell stuff you found etc), and Morrowind did the build the Raven Rock town scenario, which I guess is technically more Sim City than Sims. Oblivion and Morrowind tracks your relationship with npcs, Fable games let you play house to a limited degree, etc.

It's been done in tiny bits and pieces here and there but nobody every really took the ball and ran with it.

/off topic

The crib thing seems hotly contested and rightly so! It's still an annoyance for those of us who don't wish to engage in town maintenance and management. There are few cribs in Sunset Valley and none in Riverview.

I dunno, I would take a little chance of dingos eating babies if it meant I didn't have to place a damned crib in every house by hand.

[simwit]

Of course I agree with everyone who wants the crib requirement law to be abolished. I think we should join a potest at city hall. I'll bring Droopy, but he won't be complaining, because he's so happy. 

Unfortunately, I don't think El Presidente would show much respect for the angry mob outside. I think we would all be rounded up, horribly tortured, and finally executed.

But please don't hurt Droopy, Mr. President. 

[Solmyr]

To prevent baby overpopulation you could perhaps code a child limit beyond which parents won't go... say 1-2 kids normally, up to 5 if they have Family-Oriented trait or Surrounded by Family LTW, or zero if they have Dislikes Children.

[Enelen]

Could someone clue me in, if the spawning actually works in the latest-newest AM, or not? I don't get spawning messages, but I get freezes, so that can mean anything I tried to switch to IS in game, but what I got was IS enabled: true, ASM enabled: true, and Any Story Mode working: false I've read that the spawning is not coded in, then I've read that it's working with cribs, but I haven't seen any baby action yet. So: yes or no?

[J. M. Pescado]

Now for an actual report on gameplay; I'm not saying this is absolutely ASDbeta related, but my game has frozen twice, requiring closing via task manager, immediately after clicking the X on an alert about sim whoever having no victims for romance.

I think the X is unrelated, because the dialogs tend to have a significant in-game delay, computerwise: By the time the dialog has appeared, the event in question has long since passed. However, you should reupdate, as many of these issues have been fixed.

Oh hell people are still modding for Morrowind even. Have done some nice things with that moldy oldy engine too, features it never was able to do.

Oblivion and Fallout are decent games. They could use a little more life and pizazz, changing some of the dumb stuff about them bla bla.

This may be true, but all the important stuff has been done already. That, and I tend to have little interest in modding such games. Frankly, I'm not normally into modding things at all. It really requires that a certain threshold of frustration be crossed before it gets to that point, and that is just never reached in a game which has an end. No matter how irritating some stupidities are, when the game *ENDS* anyway, I just can't be bothered to care. Sims is unique in that there's no defined goal and no ending, which is why I can play long enough to reach the level of requisite irritation to motivate me to take action. Otherwise I just kinda bull through to the end and call it a day, or flat out lose interest. That, and I have a fundamental aversion to being a late entrant in anything.

The crib thing seems hotly contested and rightly so! It's still an annoyance for those of us who don't wish to engage in town maintenance and management. There are few cribs in Sunset Valley and none in Riverview.

I dunno, I would take a little chance of dingos eating babies if it meant I didn't have to place a damned crib in every house by hand.

Mmm. Dingos.

Could someone clue me in, if the spawning actually works in the latest-newest AM, or not? I don't get spawning messages, but I get freezes, so that can mean anything I tried to switch to IS in game, but what I got was IS enabled: true, ASM enabled: true, and Any Story Mode working: false I've read that the spawning is not coded in, then I've read that it's working with cribs, but I haven't seen any baby action yet. So: yes or no?

With a project in motion, always go with the most recently dated report. Also, most of your bugs are oldversion issues.

[spatdrastik]

Penalties for no cribs is a good idea, there should be a chance that if a baby is outside it is eaten by dingos, or kidnapped by a homeless bum female with the family oriented and evil traits. Toddlers might also be kidnapped...if a next door neighbor has a swimming pool They might wander over there and drown...Maybe families without cribs living near sims with the family oriented and good traits or is in law enforcement would have child protective services called on them and the kids would end up in the adoption pool. There are alot of interesting possibilities here (as long as it's not automatic...It shouldn't FORCE placing cribs, but if a child is born to inactives you have some interest in then there is incentive to do so)

[Motoki]

This may be true, but all the important stuff has been done already. That, and I tend to have little interest in modding such games. Frankly, I'm not normally into modding things at all. It really requires that a certain threshold of frustration be crossed before it gets to that point, and that is just never reached in a game which has an end. No matter how irritating some stupidities are, when the game *ENDS* anyway, I just can't be bothered to care. Sims is unique in that there's no defined goal and no ending, which is why I can play long enough to reach the level of requisite irritation to motivate me to take action. Otherwise I just kinda bull through to the end and call it a day, or flat out lose interest. That, and I have a fundamental aversion to being a late entrant in anything.

For what its worth, the Elder Scrolls games don't really end per say, you just complete the main quest and it, like all the quests, has an end, but the game itself doesn't. You can still go and do any other quests you haven't already done, add mods, go huntings, annoy npcs, buy a house bla bla. Not much really changes, you aren't getting any huge world wide scenarios anymore, mostly it's just npcs go about their business etc, world runs business as usual. Same shit different day.

Actually it's a lot like The Sims in that regard. With both once I have no scenarios to run it gets boring after a while and I just start feeling like a hamster on a wheel.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yeah, but with Sims, you can watch them behave like bastards towards each other and be amused by them, whereas with Oblivious, well, they are just oblivious.

[Motoki]

Yeah, but with Sims, you can watch them behave like bastards towards each other and be amused by them, whereas with Oblivious, well, they are just oblivious.

Well you can insult them. Or better yet kill them. It's much easier to kill people in that game.

I remember reading this post about a guy who played Oblivion drunk and woke up the next morning to find he had slaughtered most of the population, heh.

[simwit]

Well, while you guys are going off topic about RPG games, I'd like to chime in that I rarely like them. But I've had a lot of fun with Neverwinter Nights 2 (and two expansions) even thoug I'm not so good at the combat part of it.

My favorite one is Mass Effect, however, probably because the combat system is a third person shooter. I must have played that game about 15 times in a row, lol. Who wouldn't want to have sex with a blue chick anyway?

(Or a blue ghost, for that matter, Motoki.)