Awesome Story Driver Beta-Testing reports

[Jens]

My understanding is, the hearts should be removed from sims when they marry but this only started happening on the last few builds of AM. So sims who married before this will still have the hearts and therefore still cheat.

I'm still seeing this happen on a new save. The hearts seem to be removed on marriage (appear to change to friendship) but then on several sims they reappeared. Out of 4 marriages I've just tested, I selected each sim on marriage and no hearts remained in the relationship panel but when I re-selected a little later they had reappeared on 4 of the 8 sims. All of these hearts were from previous relationships prior to marriage (I double checked an older save to make sure). I've no idea how this happened, there were no ASM romantic actions involving these during testing

[J. M. Pescado]

I'm still seeing this happen on a new save. The hearts seem to be removed on marriage (appear to change to friendship) but then on several sims they reappeared. Out of 4 marriages I've just tested, I selected each sim on marriage and no hearts remained in the relationship panel but when I re-selected a little later they had reappeared on 4 of the 8 sims.

They "reappeared"? Exactly as before? Did this occur even though the sims in question had not interacted through storymode, or were they at it again?

[lefty]

edit: sorry, I posted in the incorrect topic

[Jens]

I'm still seeing this happen on a new save. The hearts seem to be removed on marriage (appear to change to friendship) but then on several sims they reappeared. Out of 4 marriages I've just tested, I selected each sim on marriage and no hearts remained in the relationship panel but when I re-selected a little later they had reappeared on 4 of the 8 sims.

They "reappeared"? Exactly as before? Did this occur even though the sims in question had not interacted through storymode, or were they at it again?

The romantic interests which reappeared were with the exact same sims they had prior to marriage. I received no story mode message to say they had been interacting again.

[byronh]

I too can confirm that old loves are not being dropped upon marriage/moving in with spouse. And I have noticed tons of married cheating but I wasn't able to keep track if it was only with the old romantic interests, but I would assume it was.

Sorry, haven't installed today's update yet. Hopefully that should fix it.

[ProfPlumbob]

I'm also experiencing a large dose of cheating sims. Large as in everyone who's married is cheating on their spouse with everyone else who's married as well as with available singles.

Neighborhoods with legacy retained romantic relationships may continue this behavior. You have to sorta start a fresh neighborhood to clear that, or wait until I add a command to globally clean out old loves. This behavior is sorta similar to how it was in TS2, where any romantic relationships are retained basically forever: Although it's easier for a player to manually terminate than before, NPCs didn't and thus were continuing to act on them. Newer versions automatically sever them, but old legacy neighborhoods will still have them.

I started my hood fresh with randomly spawned sims in 12 homes, and 85% of them were romantically linked in massive love triangles and octagons in just a matter of a week  Out of the 20 sims in my neighborhood now, only 4 of them aren't linked through the baby mama filled family tree, lol.  

dropoldloves wiped away a lot of old flings but is there a way to integrate this into the story mode so it wipes old flings automatically?  It seems to be on an individual sim basis and that's a lot of sims to go through oO

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, it SHOULD be occurring automatically anytime they reach a state that "sets partner", and I haven't observed any deviations from this behavior in my game.

[Lady Moiraine]

Only my families that have the bless don't cheat.  Otherwise, all my married couples cheat on their spouses.  I don't care about them, they are the game's families but even after they are married, they still cheat.  If I bless a family, they are fine and don't cheat after marriage.

[J. M. Pescado]

Only my families that have the bless don't cheat.  Otherwise, all my married couples cheat on their spouses.  I don't care about them, they are the game's families but even after they are married, they still cheat.  If I bless a family, they are fine and don't cheat after marriage.

If you bless them, they won't do anything story mode at all, that's why. As for the other families doing it, I have piled so many pieces of redundant code aimed at stopping this behavior that it is unclear to me how it is still going on.

[cheriem]

First Flagrant Error I've ever had.  Newest build as of 10 something am 9/5/09.

[mutchka]

I'm still getting a bunch of failed findhome executions and sims moving out of adequate housing only to find they have nowhere to go and get stuck sitting in the homeless pool.  Sometimes, the families are even rich enough and there are enough houses with the correct number of beds for them, but they still experience move failures.  I used to get these messages more often but then it died down, but recently the sims I placed myself and the spawns of my main family branches are getting kicked out of ancestral/nice homes.  Also, when I attempt forcemovein it just affects a single family (probably the ones I had last selected it would seem) and they move to completely empty lots when the homes they were in were just fine. 

I update AM before every play time.  Any ideas 

[Inge]

I was having findhome errors till I started a new hood.  I suspect earlier use of Indie may have put my hood into a funny state.

[Tangie]

Just reporting some experiences with sims 3 the past few days: I started a brand new neighborhood with twoftmamma's empty, cribbed 'hood. Then I created 4 separate couples and gave them all non-job-related lifetime goals and cheated them up some cash (I'm purposely keeping the 'hood as small as possible). Just to be sure I registered them all as unemployed using Twallan's part-time employment hack, because none of them are "blessed" since I want awesome story to do its thang when I'm not playing them.

The game generated lots of NPCs right off the bat (like 34 of them if I recall), but these must just be cab drivers, newspaper deliverers, etc., as none of my families employ a maid service. They also don't have any kids yet so there's no school issues yet. There is some jerkiness in their movements after I've been playing for a few hours but no major lag yet.

After starting them out in modest housing, I manually moved 3 of the couples to new housing - to two very nice houses that I had downloaded and a third house that I'd made but hadn't yet had a chance to play. This required cheating them up even more money. While I was moving the second couple, the first couple quit their "jobs" in "unemployment". One of my couples later gossiped that one of them got a new job, which I haven't checked out yet, but since I was trying to keep them unemployed so that no new sims would be generated that news didn't thrill me. Then while playing/moving the 3rd couple, I got a notice that the second couple quit their jobs in unemployment. I think that was probably due to them having plenty of money since there was some left over cash after moving, but when I went back to the 4th couple, I got a message saying that the 3rd couple, who I just moved to this fabulous new house, had moved to a smaller house. They have no children but I placed a crib in the house I'd moved them to so I see no reason for it other than I guess they thought the house was too large! Maybe it was the fact that the bedrooms all had double beds instead of single beds in them. Hmmm, I'll have to test that. But I had just had my sim start a garden at that house, too. Now I either have to make them move back or make him plant a new garden all over again.

Odd things start to happen after playing a few hours, too (nonawesome things). I sent sim A to the shower one morning then commanded her to eat cereal. While I was focused on sim B who was eating his cereal at the table, sim A walked over with her bowl of cereal and ... she was completely naked. WTF?? It was a riot! I clicked on her and commanded her to change clothes and as soon as she finished her cereal, she did it. I wasn't sure there for a minute if I'd have a sim walking around naked permanently or not. I have a sim in my Sims 2 game who NEVER gets dressed after bathing unless I send him to the dresser. This behavior is consistently reliable, even after just starting the game. Very wierd! Hopefully this sim isn't going to start doing the same thing all the time, although in sims 3 at least you don't have to have a dresser to get them to change into clothes.

Anyway, just reporting that my sims are also moving. If the ancestral home feature is working and we use that, that doesn't affect story mode, correct? Because sometimes I would like nonplayed sims to stay where I put them but I'd also still like them to be subject to story actions. Also, if things like double beds versus single beds affect moving, it would be nice to have a more complete understanding of the logic involved in how that works.

[Inge]

Is your nude sim insane or inappropriate?

[Tangie]

No, the nude sim does not have either of those traits. I played a bit today again and so far I have not seen a repeat of the flagrant nudity. In front of the toddler, no less. 

[ingeli]

New FSE. And the moving to community lots only works for first step, lot is visible and pickable, but, next step demands for a bed on the lot.

[myskaal]

Going back to the topic of romance, could we slow it down a little?

I have been trying to start a new hood lately, a sort of Legacy mash-up where it'll just be one played family throughout how ever many generations I can manage before the whole thing blows up. I create my patriarch and plop him down. Knowing the only sims auto-created with AM running will be work related and not likely any I'll want my sim to procreate with I then make and plop down a few more sims, both male and female to allow for future population of the hood.

So here's the problem:
I don't even get through a full 24 sim hours of play before all romantic prefs are run and the available females are snatched up by the available males as partners. If I do not create males, they are auto-generated for jobs and wham-o, snatch up all the ladies. This way at least allows a little more time to work on the woo-ing.

I did not consider creating premade couples and specific singles because I thought it would be interesting to see the partnering results.
Unfortunately it's leaving my patriarch sim in the cold for a partner.

So I guess my inquiry is: Is there anyway to get the auto-story partnering to slow the hell down? Maybe a 48 - 72 hour wait before any romantic prefs are initialized for non partnered sims?

[chaos]

Couldn't you just make them sacred?

[Absimiliard]

Going back to the topic of romance, could we slow it down a little?

I agree. I posted on this a while back. And I've given it some more thought. Pescado's view is that sims will try to pair up, if you want to do it make 'em sacred. I do agree with that. The problem I was having is my Lothario types with commitment issues getting hitched 40 seconds after they were in the game.

Realizing that most people are probably okay with this, I was trying to think of an easy way to slow it down or make it less likely to occur I play on Epic and it stinks when the first teen turns into a young adult they are snagged up fresh outa high school by any odd-man-outs   from the initial romance-o-rama that happened at game onset (even if they're 3 days shy of being an elder).

I believe a solution that is in keeping with the current way the mod seems to work is to implement a ScaleRomanceTo Aging and RomanceLikelihoodScaling values to the config that would allow the user to tweak to their content.

PS. I've become more active on the boards of late, mostly to report errors or make demands. Please let me take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitudeto J.M. Pescado for even allowing for anyones input in his project, and my ugliest envy that I am too poor a programmer to figure this out myself. In my opinion the game would've been a complete peice of cack without the major revisions you've done.

[myskaal]

I could make them sacred but that would defeat the purpose of them performing as unplayed townies.
I don't want them to be untouchable, I just think it would be nice to slow the auto-pairing down and maybe force some more detailed compatibility checks. Just a note on my observations and me being curious if it is at all a possibility with ASM.

[unstuck]

Going back to the topic of romance, could we slow it down a little?

I agree. I posted on this a while back. And I've given it some more thought. Pescado's view is that sims will try to pair up, if you want to do it make 'em sacred. I do agree with that. The problem I was having is my Lothario types with commitment issues getting hitched 40 seconds after they were in the game.

I third the romance-is-too-fast motion!  The day after my female sim became a young adult, there was not ONE single man left in town.  NOT ONE!! She's Good but she's gonna have to be bad now 


The other problem with this system is the following:  I started my neighbourhood by populating it with young adults; some single, some already in couples.   I like my sims to play the field a bit before commiting to a life of changing diapers,  so by the time my sacred couple DID start having kids, all the other families had teens already.  Now my couple's youngest children don't have any peers; they are floating between the youngest of the first generation and the oldest of the second generation.  They have no classmates.

[Inge]

I agree the romance is too fast.  Pescado did say there was a tuning file where the chance of success could be tweaked.  If they fail a bit more often that should slow it down.   Though if that means getting rejected more often, won't it lead to lots of negative interactions and therefore negative relationship scores between sims who should have really hit it off well?

What I would suggest instead is that the non-played sims are a bit fussier about compatibility, and don't become less fussy until they are out of young-adulthood and their body clocks started ticking away furiously.   At least then the player might have a chance for a look-in during prime of life.

[unstuck]

Maybe there could even be a check instituted that would scan to see if there are any singles left before marrying off the neighbours -- ie, maintaining a minimum number of eligible bachelors/bachelorettes. 

Incidentally, I have not been able to make a sim go from zero to married in on day yet; no one in my town should either.  I like your idea, Inge, that Young Adults may or may not get married to their loves whereas adults will more readily. 

[edalbformat]

I have to agree that the romances are way too fast. I'm playing a system of overstuffed houses where I play each house separatedly, then I transfer the fully adjusted houses into another hood that has no possibility of increasing population. I found out that 16 sims in a house occupies less than half of the place they would occupy if they were in separated households.
So, a hood that would already be 49MB big, is only 27MB with the same number of sims in it.
The case is that I play those overstuffed houses for weeks, and I don't reach even a normal friendship between the household.
I place another household the same kind, so I have to switch away from the first one - I don't even finish placing the new household in town, and all the members from the away household are already paired. Notice that, when I was playing that household, many of the members were enemies and fight like hell just by being in the same room. Be also informed that I placed ALL the game characters together with mine. So I have Gunther and Cornelia as just roomates, as well I placed Nick Alto inside the house and he slaps every member of the household. Be also informed that I made everybody to YA, and reset the age to start. So, all the inhabitants of my hood are YAs and should not get into marriage so fast.

[Naples]

If Sims start waiting to get married until they are adults then wouldn't we be facing the same issue that we did with ISM? As in to many old farts with kids? I would not want that same issue to happen again. It was horrible when it happened in ISM, if this is what would happen please do not do it. Instead if you have a Sim you want your Sim to marry why not just have your Sim ask that one to break up with her/his lover? I know you get the ex in the relationships and a bad moodlet for like 3 Sim hours, but which is worse?