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Author Topic: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9  (Read 72396 times)
Buzzler
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #25 on: 2009 August 06, 06:42:48 »
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Well I think it depends on what you are talking about. Some things need rules to operate on to make sense. Like sim families generally shouldn't be moving to a cheaper home unless there is some good reason. That is a very blatant and noticeable thing.
I assume there's just no way the story mode engine could tell what you'll notice. I know it would annoy me if the story mode for example randomly promoted a neighbour in the sports career if I've just seen him doing nothing but scratching his butt all the time... Cheating in gaming engines is okay but it has to be done in a way the player doesn't notice it. And EA being EA did crap to cover up his cheating. I agree with Pescado that there's got be sense in it, amazingly enough "early" messages from the devs show that they probably actually had a bottom-up approach in mind very similar to Pescado's. I've got no problem in cheating from time to time by adding randomness to "microscopic" actions, there's randomness in real humans' actions too, but I find the idea of giving control to a top-down random event generator repulsive, no matter if somebody tries to beat some sense into the events afterwards or not.

Quote
But other things like romance to me is fine being random. I don't think it matters if they are compatible or not. In fact, it's kind of realistic if some couples weren't so compatible.
I agree partially. I think there should be no check if Sims are compatible but instead only a check if they're non-compatible, like a good Sim wouldn't get off with a bad Sim for example. But I wouldn't have a problem if one Sim of a couple loves the outdoors and the other hates it, I've met enough couples consisting of a party boy/girl (mostly girls actually...) and a couch potato. Some of them split up, some of them didn't.

On second thought I'd actually prefer if there were no checks at all and incompatible couples would just break up; I never liked how most playable Sims in Sims2 were pretty much untouched before marriage (who's got the endurance to do it otherwise?). Would add a little spice if Sims needed to go through a couple of relationships bevore finding the right breeding mate. They could even grow more desperate accepting formerly unthinkable partners... Wink
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Chocolate Milk
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #26 on: 2009 August 06, 06:58:25 »
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Two "dislikes children" sims who marry one another should have an extremely small chance of ever having a child at all.

ISM did have something like this, I believe. Family-oriented Sims have more children, too. And people are more likely to get jobs which fit with their traits.

As for considering traits in people getting together -- I don't think that's necessary. I know a lot of 'non-trait-compatible' couples IRL who work together just fine. Obviously 'commitment issues' should greatly reduce the chance of people getting married. But apart from that, why shouldn't a good Sim and an evil Sim get together? It's combinations like that which make the game fun. What I really dislike is the incompatibility of ages. The way my game's working out, almost the entire neighbourhood is related in some way, and I find it intensely creepy when a young adult fresh out of teenager-hood marries his elderly second cousin.  Undecided
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #27 on: 2009 August 06, 07:00:01 »
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Maybe my life has been unusually picturesque, but honestly, it does feel like whatever supreme being is placing those pieces is indeed a toddler.  I would have never guessed that the love of my life would be nineteen years younger than myself, just as an example.  Smiley
Well, there's no rule preventing that, so I don't see what's so intrinsically wrong with it. On the other hand, I'd watch your back. He probably has the Gold Digger LTW and intends to see you buried in the back yard.

Well I think it depends on what you are talking about. Some things need rules to operate on to make sense. Like sim families generally shouldn't be moving to a cheaper home unless there is some good reason. That is a very blatant and noticeable thing.
Yeah, see, "unless there is some good reason". Pretty soon there is a pile of reasons and exceptions that makes the code to FAKE the reason longer and slower than ACTUALLY HAVING THE REASON. Witness the original EAxis moving-around code. This is the original code, with no sanity brakes. Then witness the resulting 0100 lag that occurred when sanity checks were then imposed on a top-down system. This is top-down driven logic at work: The game has decided it WILL DO THIS ACTION, and does not want to take NO for an answer. The bottom up action is that it decides WHO will do the action, and then decides WHAT to do afterwards.

But other things like romance to me is fine being random. I don't think it matters if they are compatible or not. In fact, it's kind of realistic if some couples weren't so compatible.
It is random. Just not totally random. I did think of that. What it does is that it basically assigns a weighted compatibility list, then picks a result at random with the weights assigned. They won't always end up with the perfect choice, but higher-compatibility results are weighted over totally incompatible results, and some of the compatibility boosters are "circumstantial" rather than intrinsic. For instance, "sharing a workplace" boosts the weighting, even though these this factor is not intrinsic to either sim. It just functions as compatibility boost because it is an abstraction of their increased odds of coming into contact at all. I could have just made it "pick a random person", but that wasn't as much fun, really. Plus, undirected shotgun romance like that doesn't result in any "lock on". This is what EAxis does: Undirected shotgun romance events. The problem is, this doesn't really work to form actual couples because it is like putting a mob of skittish, shotgun-wielding blind folk in a stadium and then telling them that you've released a hungry tiger into their midst.

And how do I know that some townie sim who just got a promotion wasn't sucking up to the boss and then asked for a promotion while at work away in a rabbit hole? I don't. It doesn't matter as long as the amount of promotions in town is tweaked to not seem excessive.
That happens already in the game.

I don't know, maybe I just don't have a very logic and mathmetical oriented mind and maybe I just feel like the end justifies the means as long as the town seems alive and runs itself okay.
See, here's the catch: Tuning the rules to create a "fake facade" of the real thing can quickly become a larger, more difficult, and more computationally intensive effort than simply CREATING THE REAL THING. THIS is the issue you're missing: When you try to create an entirely FAKE facade of the REAL THING, you end up having to invent wholesale so many additional rules to make sure the facade LOOKS real...that it would have cost less for it to simply *BE* real. It's like trying to create the appearance of a factory of immigrant workers by renting a building, installing some fake machinery, and then hiring a roster of minority actors to play the roles...which would have cost more than simply using an actual factory with actual immigrant workers.

Haha I was totally thinking that too, that sometimes life does seem like some toddler is just moving pieces around randomly.
Maybe to YOU. Me, I always have plan for everything.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #28 on: 2009 August 06, 07:14:51 »
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Quote
See, here's the catch: Tuning the rules to create a "fake facade" of the real thing can quickly become a larger, more difficult, and more computationally intensive effort than simply CREATING THE REAL THING.

I guess I need to be convinced of that, still.  But you're doing the coding for AM, and I haven't looked at the actual code (probably may never do so) so I can't actually argue with you too much on the point.  But the "more computationally intensive" part of your statement doesn't make any sense to me.  I have an admittedly preconceived notion that there has to be some terribly gross inefficiency somewhere that is being overlooked to create that kind of computational expense.  Chess is computationally expensive.  Millions of board positions may be analyzed by a good chess program in the seconds before it makes its move.  You can hear your CPU fan trying to cope with it.  There aren't millions of things in Sims 3 story mode to evaluate, so the problem would seem to not be the large number of evaluations that are made but rather some terrible inefficiency in the way any evaluation is made.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #29 on: 2009 August 06, 07:16:55 »
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Yeah, see, "unless there is some good reason". Pretty soon there is a pile of reasons and exceptions that makes the code to FAKE the reason longer and slower than ACTUALLY HAVING THE REASON. Witness the original EAxis moving-around code. This is the original code, with no sanity brakes. Then witness the resulting 0100 lag that occurred when sanity checks were then imposed on a top-down system. This is top-down driven logic at work: The game has decided it WILL DO THIS ACTION, and does not want to take NO for an answer. The bottom up action is that it decides WHO will do the action, and then decides WHAT to do afterwards.

You know, what you say makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice here is my experience with top down vs bottom up:

Top down:

Pros: Stuff gets done. Neighborhood will run on its own mostly.
Cons: Things sometimes appear to not make sense or have a good reason. Sometimes too much gets done.

Bottom up:

Pros: Everything that happens makes sense and has a reason. You can watch some of the events happen.
Cons: Because of all the rules not much happens. Progression is slow. Neighborhood may require some maintenance and editing.

At the end of the day, if nothing else at least with top down stuff gets done.

I need to try and figure out a way to do a wolfrun on the fastest speed with ASM and see what happens long term.

Hmm, got to think about this. I know there's a no bill mod. And there's ways to keep an individual sim/selected household with again off and static motives while the rest of the town functions as normal, right?
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #30 on: 2009 August 06, 08:06:51 »
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At the end of the day, if nothing else at least with top down stuff gets done.
At the end of the day, you're dealing with ISM that has had a month or so's head start vs. an Awesomedriver that is in its first public test run. You should be happy it works at ALL!

I need to try and figure out a way to do a wolfrun on the fastest speed with ASM and see what happens long term.
I will consider integrating the Wolfrun thing, but part of AwesomeStory is aimed at making the game do stuff while you PLAY it. It is also somewhat more sensitive to existing bugs in the existing gamesystems.

Hmm, got to think about this. I know there's a no bill mod. And there's ways to keep an individual sim/selected household with again off and static motives while the rest of the town functions as normal, right?
Probably. Show up and lemme know what you find.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #31 on: 2009 August 06, 08:41:27 »
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I am glad it runs!  Grin I'm just worried everyone is going to grow old and die and not have enough damned kids to keep the hood going.  Undecided

The wolfrun thing is really more for testing the long term viability of a story mode driver than for actually playing it, so I think right now it would be useful. Later on down the line probably not as much. So far what I found is this:

No Bills is one of the Cyberops mods http://www.customsims3.com/forum1/YaBB.pl?num=1247107086

If you shift click on the mailbox you can select make needs static (for just that house)

Veezee has an xml hack to stop opportunities and phone calls (not sure if it's even needed for a sim with no job that doesn't know anyone) http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15908.0.html

The one thing I couldn't find was a way to turn off aging just for an individual sim or household. You can turn it off in the options of course, but that turns it off for the whole town so it's all or nothing.

Indie must have finagled something so that any sim with the last name "Wolfrun" wouldn't age, but everyone else would, but I'm not sure what they did. Their source is public domain now though.

Anyway I'm turred and off to bed, was hoping to set something up and let the game run ASM all night and see what happens but I'll do it another day. I'll poke into chat tomorrow.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #32 on: 2009 August 06, 15:02:57 »
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Well I think it depends on what you are talking about. Some things need rules to operate on to make sense. Like sim families generally shouldn't be moving to a cheaper home unless there is some good reason. That is a very blatant and noticeable thing.

But other things like romance to me is fine being random. I don't think it matters if they are compatible or not. In fact, it's kind of realistic if some couples weren't so compatible.

And how do I know that some townie sim who just got a promotion wasn't sucking up to the boss and then asked for a promotion while at work away in a rabbit hole? I don't. It doesn't matter as long as the amount of promotions in town is tweaked to not seem excessive.

I don't know, maybe I just don't have a very logic and mathmetical oriented mind and maybe I just feel like the end justifies the means as long as the town seems alive and runs itself okay.


In quantum theory, the Schrodinger's Cat thing is great: cat is alive and dead at the same time. Cool. It doesn't work that way in binary. It's either random, or it's not. You can't have it be selectively random--how on earth would the program possibly decide what needs to be random and what doesn't for any given player or situation? There's too much variability. You're just asking too much of a game, and of AwesomeMod. Really, I'm sorry, but you cannot have it both ways, and in binary, there is no "middle road 1" or "middle road 0".

I'm afraid that's just the way it is until we have true quantum computing.  Smiley
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #33 on: 2009 August 06, 18:18:33 »
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In quantum theory, the Schrodinger's Cat thing is great: cat is alive and dead at the same time. Cool. It doesn't work that way in binary. It's either random, or it's not. You can't have it be selectively random--how on earth would the program possibly decide what needs to be random and what doesn't for any given player or situation? There's too much variability. You're just asking too much of a game, and of AwesomeMod. Really, I'm sorry, but you cannot have it both ways, and in binary, there is no "middle road 1" or "middle road 0".

I'm afraid that's just the way it is until we have true quantum computing.  Smiley

I don't know about that..   I think Pescado could easily convince Schrodinger's cat to cough up a hairball on command, whether it was dead or alive at the time.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #34 on: 2009 August 06, 19:45:32 »
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What I want from a story progression mode is a large enough demographic so all my sims have age appropriate sims to associate with.  Babies and toddlers are irrelevant because they are not going to interract with my babies and toddlers.  (Although it would be nice to have a toddler birthday party with other toddlers.)  However, my children should have other children to bring home, visit or go home with.  My teens and young adults  should have enough teens to invite to a party, hang around with and date.  Adults and elders don't seem to be a problem.
There should be a minimum of 6 children, 6 teens and 6 single young adults in the game at any given time.  The the population falls below this, a new family should be moved in, consisting of 2 parents, a baby, a toddler and, perhaps, a child or a teen.  If there is a shortage of young adults, a household of young adults, a la Friends, should be moved in to share a home.
When a teen ages to a young adult, he should be moved out of the home and, if available, to a home of his own.  When young adults age to adults,  they should be matched with and married to another not incompatible adult and be given a baby, a toddler, and perhaps a child.
Without a story progression mod, I do this manually (by adding more sims to the neighborhood) -- I jusit wish we had a real character/family editor
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #35 on: 2009 August 07, 00:13:54 »
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My only hope is that someone comes up with a good story progression mod that works just as great.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #36 on: 2009 August 07, 00:46:42 »
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I think that it's more likely that someone else will take over development of Indie Stone, since they wouldn't have to start from scratch.

We'll just have to wait and see whether anyone is willing to take on that kind of commitment.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #37 on: 2009 August 07, 04:20:24 »
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I personally like the "bottom up" approach better.

I have a town I started from an empty town and populated.  I want to see the interactions make sense.  If I did a "wolfrun," to me that would be to see what would autonomously happen with the characters I created over several generations.  I like that ASM will simulate that fairly well, maybe as well as it can be simulated without ridiculous amounts of cpu being needed.

I think there is room for some hybridization in the sense of randomly or semi-randomly creating opportunities for romance.  Have a number of singles who aren't doing anything else at the time "decide" to go to the same community lot.  Make the AI for their starting romances have some knowledge of how to do that.

But then let them sort out who ends up with whom.  I don't think a Good and an Evil sim should end up as mates except in extraordinary cases.  Some people in this "singles bar" should strike out.  Those with the Loser trait should rarely find romance with much of anyone.

It would be nice to have an attraction system like the one that existed in TS2's Nightlife expansion, but without it just let compatibility, which isn't just similar traits, sort things out.

One thing, though:  Please let us turn off aspects of story mode as in ISM for specific households.  That's the one real advantage, to me, in ISM-- probably the only one once ASM is debugged and all.  There's a character I created who's supposed to be a housewife, but ASM keeps getting her jobs, even though the fambly doesn't need her working.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #38 on: 2009 August 07, 04:54:00 »
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One thing, though:  Please let us turn off aspects of story mode as in ISM for specific households.  That's the one real advantage, to me, in ISM-- probably the only one once ASM is debugged and all.  There's a character I created who's supposed to be a housewife, but ASM keeps getting her jobs, even though the fambly doesn't need her working.
Are you sure that it's ASM doing it? In ASM, there are several reasons why a sim would get a job:
1. The sim has an LTW which involves working. If you gave your "housewife" an LTW to work, then clearly she does not really want to be a housewife.
2. Ambitious/Workaholic sims want to work.
3. If your fambly is running into "Very Low Funds" mode, they will seek work, since the alternative involves losing their home and starving to death on the streets.

There are also additional reasons which fall OUTSIDE of AwesomeStory:
1. The EA Job Engine always wants to provide sims with coworkers and bosses: If your presently active household needs to roll these, a random sim, generally one who is unemployed, will be suddenly dragooned into this job to fill this role. This is NOT a story-mode job progression and is not controlled by AwesomeMod directly. Unfortunately, existing, "unemployed" sims tend to be indiscriminately dragooned for this.

I guess I need to be convinced of that, still.  But you're doing the coding for AM, and I haven't looked at the actual code (probably may never do so) so I can't actually argue with you too much on the point.  But the "more computationally intensive" part of your statement doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, consider: In order to create a "facade" of "Sims go to work and get promoted", I could just randomly hand out promotions or firings like EA/ISM does. But this has the result that everyone pretty much zooms straight to the top, and there is no apparently sensible logic of why this has happened, and furthermore, you may have just looked at it and know this COULDN'T have happened. This is computationally very cheap, but the results are utter nonsense.

Conversely, I can write a parallel engine to keep track of exactly when someone has been promoted, not promote them too often, etc. This involves the creation of an entirely new ruleset, the creation of an entire new data structure to index and track this information, and soforth, all very time-consuming to create, and incurring additional CPU cost to index, track, and compute. Alternatively, I could just SEND THEM TO WORK. Then we ALREADY HAVE a ruleset that has ALREADY been written and we are ALREADY paying for. Furthermore, the results are then intrinsically accurate: The game is playing by the same rules you are, and this can be done for no additional cost in programming and computation because the game is already doing this.

I have an admittedly preconceived notion that there has to be some terribly gross inefficiency somewhere that is being overlooked to create that kind of computational expense.  Chess is computationally expensive.  Millions of board positions may be analyzed by a good chess program in the seconds before it makes its move.  You can hear your CPU fan trying to cope with it.  There aren't millions of things in Sims 3 story mode to evaluate, so the problem would seem to not be the large number of evaluations that are made but rather some terrible inefficiency in the way any evaluation is made.
Well, terrible inefficiency is the rule of any top-down bureaucracy. A top-down story progression system, for instance, is like a system where the government decides what you work at, what level you are to be promoted to, and soforth. Guess what? This is called "Communism", and, to no great surprise, it is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT!
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #39 on: 2009 August 07, 05:50:19 »
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One thing, though:  Please let us turn off aspects of story mode as in ISM for specific households.  That's the one real advantage, to me, in ISM-- probably the only one once ASM is debugged and all.  There's a character I created who's supposed to be a housewife, but ASM keeps getting her jobs, even though the fambly doesn't need her working.
Are you sure that it's ASM doing it? In ASM, there are several reasons why a sim would get a job:
1. The sim has an LTW which involves working. If you gave your "housewife" an LTW to work, then clearly she does not really want to be a housewife.
2. Ambitious/Workaholic sims want to work.
3. If your fambly is running into "Very Low Funds" mode, they will seek work, since the alternative involves losing their home and starving to death on the streets.

Her LTW is the 20 friends one.  I knew I was creating her as a housewife and thus didn't give her a professional want.  She's not Ambitious or Workaholic.  And the fambly is doing pretty well financially.  That's due to cheats; but nevertheless, they have a good amount of money.

It is very possible that she was "drafted" by the basic TS3 engine to be a co-worker, though.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #40 on: 2009 August 07, 13:37:32 »
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I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm getting close to wanting to try the Awesome story driver.  The whole charity system thing is what is pushing me over the edge.  However, I don't want to have to go around placing cribs and doing other things to households that I have no intention of playing just to keep the town's population balanced.

Mr. Pescado, could you please make a version for single family players, or at least have settings where we can disable this crib annoyance and anything else like it?

And I'm not really sure if I should be posting this in this thread or in the requests thread.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #41 on: 2009 August 07, 16:49:12 »
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I think I found a way to combine the two story drivers. Here's how I did it:

Configure the AM file so that IndieStone driver is enabled and AM Story driver is disabled.
Delete your script cache.
Start/load game as normal.
Type showconfig to check that the options above are set.
Type setconfig UseIndieStoneDriver false
Type setconfig UseAwesomeStoryDriver true
Check showconfig again to make sure that you got them switched.

What happened to me then is that AM story driver started working, but Indie did not stop, and the two ran together. You can configure Indie options to your liking and run both together for your ideal game experience. For example you can turn off careers and relationships in Indie and let AM handle those, while still enabling Indie to make babies. You can use both drivers at the same time for relationships and careers, even, although it may lead to some job hopping as Indie assigns someone a job and then AM makes them quit. However the two drivers seem to run together just fine, I had no crashes or other weird game behavior.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #42 on: 2009 August 07, 16:54:04 »
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I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm getting close to wanting to try the Awesome story driver.  The whole charity system thing is what is pushing me over the edge.  However, I don't want to have to go around placing cribs and doing other things to households that I have no intention of playing just to keep the town's population balanced.

Mr. Pescado, could you please make a version for single family players, or at least have settings where we can disable this crib annoyance and anything else like it?

Seconded. Tongue
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #43 on: 2009 August 08, 00:25:51 »
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I think I found a way to combine the two story drivers.

If you encounter serious bugs while doing this, please don't report them. This sounds like a very, VERY bad idea.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #44 on: 2009 August 08, 02:19:05 »
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I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm getting close to wanting to try the Awesome story driver.  The whole charity system thing is what is pushing me over the edge.  However, I don't want to have to go around placing cribs and doing other things to households that I have no intention of playing just to keep the town's population balanced.

Mr. Pescado, could you please make a version for single family players, or at least have settings where we can disable this crib annoyance and anything else like it?

Seconded. Tongue

I must make a vote also. I play maybe no more than 3 families, but don't play Supreme Commander. Disable the crib requirements will lessen the pressure of having to control households so we don't have to worry about them.  Right now, even after adding cribs to the lots and playing for 4 sim weeks, not one of the married couples or single sims have had a child.  My poor family kids wouldn't have a buddy if I haven't added sim families with children to the hood.

I guess the way the story mode settings are more favorable for those who play Supreme Commander, but doesn't help the gameplay of simmers who play one major family.
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #45 on: 2009 August 08, 02:30:54 »
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I think I found a way to combine the two story drivers. Here's how I did it:
That is not supposed to happen and represents a fatal error that will hang or crash one or both drivers eventually.
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Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off.
Chocolate Milk
Asinine Airhead

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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #46 on: 2009 August 08, 07:01:27 »
THANKS THIS IS GREAT

I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm getting close to wanting to try the Awesome story driver.  The whole charity system thing is what is pushing me over the edge.  However, I don't want to have to go around placing cribs and doing other things to households that I have no intention of playing just to keep the town's population balanced.

Mr. Pescado, could you please make a version for single family players, or at least have settings where we can disable this crib annoyance and anything else like it?

Seconded. Tongue

Fourthed. I like the idea of a top down approach, but I don't want to have to get involved myself to make sure things work. I just want them to work.
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Enelen
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #47 on: 2009 August 08, 07:43:13 »
THANKS THIS IS GREAT

Maybe instead of  the cribs, the births should be controlled by traits, so that the family oriented will have more children, the ones who hate children will have less... I don't know, maybe give all the traits a number of desired children and draw an average... It would be more realistic, too, because if a family wants kids and they don't have cribs for it, but have the money, they will buy one, no? I know sims cannot buy things on their own, but we don't have to know what they do in their homes, do we? We can just assume, that they bought that crib, if they have so many children...

I was all for the crib control, too, until I actually went to play with the ASM and after two hours of placing cribs, still haven't finished with the hood  Shocked Still, if someone created a cribbed hood, that would be fine, too.
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Gastfyr
Horrible Halfwit
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #48 on: 2009 August 08, 07:58:31 »
THANKS THIS IS GREAT

I don't want to have to get involved myself to make sure things work. I just want them to work.
See, that's the problem with the Sims since the beginning, though -- I want to just start playing and keep playing and have things work, but EAxis doesn't even provide us with playable houses for our sims to live in, so I end up spending hours building a functional house for my sims before I can actually play the freaking game (appartment life was worse, since I had to build entire custom apt buildings since the ones that shiped with the EP were made of utter fail).  Now, in TS3 it seems I have to force funtionality onto a whole hood full of houses as well as comm lots (hell, comm lots generally sucked in TS2 as well, and I was always doing edits, especally those godawful vacation hoods).

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I actually don't hate the crib/bed requirement in ASM.  I mean, I do hate having to go through every house and manually add cribs and extra beds, but I do like the realisim in the end.  I often have my playables visit thier friends' houses, and so to me anyway, it matters what that house looks like.  For my own suspension of disbelif, it helps if a houshold of 8 sims including 3 todlers and 2 infants has more than just one double bed.  Yes, in real life people can and often do raise thier babies and todlers just fine without cribs, but in TS3 the only other option is letting them pass out on the floor, and, well, they do a hell of a lot of crying before that finally happens.  So really, it's not Pescado's stupidity here, but EAxis for insisting that todlers and infants can't co-sleep with thier parents or curl up on the couch for a nap.

Also, EAxis made a game where supposedly the whole hood would progress and age happly around your controlled sims, growing and ageing and having kids.  But the houses all those pre-created sims live in are not set up for such a senario, so sims have babies and leave them lying in the front yard at night.  Very realistic.   Roll Eyes

I have been spending hours this evening working on my "template" SV save, adding cribs and beds to everyone's houses.  It's borning, takes forever, and highly frustrating.  But I don't blame Pescado for how he coded ASM; I blame the f-tards at EAxis who should have just given us that living, breathing, fuctional world they advertized.
« Last Edit: 2009 August 08, 08:03:32 by Gastfyr » Logged

TS3: it's really cool if you don't look too closely! - bottles
edalbformat
Exasperating Eyesore
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Re: Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9
« Reply #49 on: 2009 August 08, 08:10:51 »
THANKS THIS IS GREAT

I had the Indie mod installed for a while before I checked it was not updated and took out from my game. From start I had the suspicion that This would be the mod that would give up after a while once it was very strange placed (made from somewhere else, hosted at MTS2). I had seen enough of people that one day or another get issues and throw the towel.
To be able to carry out modding from start to end, you should also be able to maintain your own site, independent of donations or not. This is a HOBBY, guys. Hobbies are from principle, very expensive.
Second, this is the BASE game and from previous experiences we know that the base game is not playable. We all know that format, shape, engine and all about will change probably dramatically.
I took out Indie mod and didn't notice any need for it.
Some of the features that were very uncomfortable, were already corrected - like the parthenogenesis for example.
Another feature that I suppose will need to be changed is the moving out rotations. This is something that the user can make self and would be much more logical. You would move your sims when space is critical in the house they live.
The way it is now is really a nonsense. As I control practically all the houses in a special way I found out lately, the game started to separate my couples. I constantly found my couples in different houses though there's no logical explanation like break-up or bad relationship.
This is not giving dynamics to the game but giving everytime more illogical to claim.
In fact I don't really care that events are shown to my eyes, I just require that there's a REASON for the happenings. I agree with Pescado, EA is giving a sense of a toddler playing chess.
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