Indy Stone Mod development stops - News at 9

[Motoki]

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.

I disagree. I don't want to have to monitor and worry aboutr moving all the damned sims in town when needed. I don't want that responsibility. It's not how I play my game and it is tedious to me. If I want to control a whole town I will play Sim City.

I just want them to move sometimes in some manner that makes some kind of sense and has some reason while also not having the number of the moves be excessive. As long as the whole town isn't moving every night and sims aren't making totally nonsense moves like moving from a 300k house to a 100k one, then I am fine with it.

To me I would like story mode to take care of the town and run it and have it be dynamic so that I can sometimes observe the townies and have my sims interacting with them if I choose. That would be the ideal for me .

If it gets to the point where I am constantly having to switch houses and set things up, get them to do things, move them when needed, make sure they have the right furniture bla bla then I don't even see the point of Story Mode. That's just like TS2, keeping the town going by rotating playing different houses.

[Doc Doofus]

As long as the whole town isn't moving every night and sims aren't making totally nonsense moves like moving from a 300k house to a 100k one, then I am fine with it.

I agree with the not wanting the whole town to move.  The 300k to 100k thing, I suppose I agree, but I'm not as upset about it.  The problem with awesomemod is that when you first enable it, the very first night, and the next few subsequent nights, it tries to OPTIMIZE the housing situation according to some formula, with some massive migration pattern.  And that its totally unrealistic.  People may change hotels overnight, but not homes, which are a long-term investment in the real world; even when real people are unhappy with their current home, they are slow to move because of the logistics and financial hurdles.  A better way to handle it would be to restrict it to one or two optimizing household moves per night.  And there should be some rational decision making process that would keep them from oscillating between the same two houses.

[J. M. Pescado]

I agree with the not wanting the whole town to move.  The 300k to 100k thing, I suppose I agree, but I'm not as upset about it.  The problem with awesomemod is that when you first enable it, the very first night, and the next few subsequent nights, it tries to OPTIMIZE the housing situation according to some formula, with some massive migration pattern.

If you're getting mass migrations on first activation, your neighborhood is *VERY* out of whack. The situation should settle into a logical state once neighborhood balance is properly achieved.

And that its totally unrealistic.

Yeah, well, the neighborhood doesn't normally consist of mindless drones that suddenly acquire the glimmerings of intellect and reason at the sudden press of a button, either.

People may change hotels overnight, but not homes, which are a long-term investment in the real world; even when real people are unhappy with their current home, they are slow to move because of the logistics and financial hurdles.

That is actually reflected in the system already: Sims have a cooldown between points at which they can move.

And there should be some rational decision making process that would keep them from oscillating between the same two houses.

Happens already. Are you sure you're using AwesomeStory and not EA? EAxis has practically no sanity constraints. AwesomeStory will only move if their house is inadequate to contain their population, or if their home is bought by another sim trying to move up.

[Doc Doofus]

It's been a while since I started a new neighborhood from scratch using the latest awesomemod.  But when I started Riverside with awesomemod, the very first night it was musical houses.  I'm sure AM has gone through a number of iterations and improvements since then.  But I sort of regret that I didn't got to see the original neighborhood the way it was set up, with sims in the houses EA made for them with EA descriptions in them.  (I can always make another Riverside to look at it.)

[jwaas]

Although I've really resonated with a lot of the things that Motoki and Doc Doofus have said, I've come back to the AwesomeMod.  I've noticed the musical houses in my new Riverview game too, but I'm reassured knowing why it is happening.

In another thread, I posed the question as to whether the unmodded story mode could be adequate for those like me who play only one family.  Doc Doofus said I'd come back to the AwesomeMod as soon as a Sim moved out of town that I cared about.  And now he gets to say he told me so.  I had made TS3 versions of Skip, Brandi, and child-age Dustin Broke, and played them using the unmodded story mode.  When the three boys had grown up, I decided to play Beau and leave Dustin and Caleb (as I always called the youngest) to their own devices.

Soon Beau started receiving phone calls from a Dustin Ursine.  Turns out he had married some homeless townie, taken her last name, had a daughter, and moved in with some random family, but without his wife and daughter.  All attempts to get Dustin's wife to move back in with him failed.  Finally it was all I could do to change Dustin's last name back to Broke, and his daughter's as well for family tree purposes.  Both he and his wife had the Commitment Issues trait after all.  I can live with that, I said.

But then Caleb completely disappeared.  I'm guessing he likewise married a homeless townie, and took her last name so I wouldn't notice when they moved out.  The last straw was neighbors living on empty lots containing only a mailbox and garbage can.  They'd come home from work and disappear into an invisible house.  I must really be non-awesome not to have noticed this BS earlier.

If the 0100 lag is all I have to put up with to stop this nonsense (and said lag is much better than it was the last time I ran the AwesomeMod), plus I can have my no-CD crack and be able to edit Puddings in CAS, for now I consider it worth the tradeoff.

I think this is the part where I say "Baaahhhh." 

[Motoki]

The 300k to 100k thing, I suppose I agree, but I'm not as upset about it.

I think I mainly noticed because it was the Goths. Or maybe it was 200k to 100k. In any case, the home they moved to was much crappier and I could find no particular logical reason for the move.

@Pes: Does ancestral home still apply to ASM? I'd imagine it does but just checking.

As for the initial movement, I don't mind if it's to get the neighborhood to operate according to a logical ruleset and is only temporary until it can achieve some sort of stasis.

If the 0100 lag is all I have to put up with to stop this nonsense (and said lag is much better than it was the last time I ran the AwesomeMod), plus I can have my no-CD crack and be able to edit Puddings in CAS, for now I consider it worth the tradeoff.

The 1am lag should only happen now if you run with both ASM and ISM off and use the default EAxis story mode with awesomemod. Both ASM and ISM stagger movement and don't do it all at 1am. They also don't move quite as much as the EAxis does, but ISM definitely moves a bit more tha ASM.

[jwaas]

The 1am lag should only happen now if you run with both ASM and ISM off and use the default EAxis story mode with awesomemod. Both ASM and ISM stagger movement and don't do it all at 1am. They also don't move quite as much as the EAxis does, but ISM definitely moves a bit more than ASM.

In that case, I'll turn on Awesome story mode too.  From reading the beta-testing thread, it seems the only issues so far are the cribs thing (which I may or may not care about) and the Sims-standing-around-complaining-about-motives thing (of which there's always some anyway, even in a vanilla game).

ETA:  Didn't work, I had it completely hang on me after doing nothing I thought particularly special.  Unfortunately I couldn't get a saved game file for examination as even the side-scrolling was completely dead.  I'll revert back to both ISM and ASM disabled with the remainder of the AwesomeMod on, and go back to lurk mode.

[uknortherner]

Stupid question here:

Is ASM now actually integrated into Awesomemod or is it still a separate driver?

[cheriem]

Integrated

[uknortherner]

Great. In that case, I'll give it another shot then. The last time I tried it, it threw up a load of "fragrant error" messages, pointing to a nonexistent driver.

[Regina]

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I actually don't hate the crib/bed requirement in ASM.

Um, no, you're not the ONLY one here and I'm doing an arm pump and a resounding YES! YES! YES! over it!

Okay, now before I offer my head up to the chopping block to everyone who hates this (you can execute me later) I'll explain why it was I suggested this in the IndieStone forum.

I set up a Legacy family on a Sunset Valley map, everything in the default state EXCEPT the former Sims, which I obliterated with AM. At that point, ISM and AM couldn't do their thing together, so I played my Sim with AM running for several Sim days and every couple of days I would check for homeless families and move them in.  It took some tweaking on my part, making sure appropriate housing was available for these families then using the familyfunds cheat to get them the money they needed to move in to their new homes then I switched over to using ISM to keep the town alive (this was before ISM and AM could run together) and turned off immigration. All was going REALLY, REALLY well UNTIL certain of these Sim families started reproducing. I have a habit of moving single Sims into starter houses, married couples into larger houses that will accommodate having children, etc.  The problem came in when the single Sims started getting married and having families.  A lot of these other families are friends with my Legacy family and it also helps for these other families to have children for potential mates within the One Fambly.  Since these families are friends with the Fambly I play in that town, I occasionally have Sims I'm playing visit their friends and of course there's the whole "so and so would like to go over to whats-his-name's house after school" messages.  What I ran into under these circumstances were that my visiting Sims could often not even get into the house because while I had my back turned, these couples living in one-bedroom houses were having three or four kids, and my visiting Sim couldn't even get in the doorway!

To my mind it isn't that big of a deal to put in appropriate housing and make sure there is at least one crib in a house where families are going to live.  As someone mentioned a while ago nearly all of the default houses that come in the towns aren't even suitable for families, so I'm all the time tearing down and building or plopping new houses, and when I do that I add the number of beds and cribs that are suitable for the house size.  At the same time, I can understand why this bothers other people. I am into mostly playing the one Fambly but doing a bit of micro-managing on the side doesn't bother me--in fact, I much prefer it to not.  I want the towns I play to evolve into MY towns and not what EA shipped with the game.  That alone means much building and customization goes on during my play time when I'm not actively playing the Fambly.

Ideally for me single Sims start out in starter houses. They get married and move into a larger house (they do, at least with ISM, combine their funds when they marry so it doesn't make sense they stay in a tiny house when there's a larger one down the street empty, and once in a while a newly married couple will move to a larger house).  With AM no family can move into a house that doesn't have adequate bed space, so it made perfect sense to me for them not to be able to have children if there are no cribs in the house. It gives me a way to fairly simple way to quickly apply birth control on families that I think need it (they already have more kids than they can support, they're close to being elders and will leave orphans when they die, etc.).

I'm just wishing I was in a position to actually play today and try the new AS. I've been too busy with other things this past week and haven't even started my game for at least six days.

I'll now offer my head for the chopping block for all of you who are hating the mandatory crib thing and will also add to the requests for your sake that it be made optional. It's something I need to save some of the little sanity I have left, but it's also something that will no doubt drive a lot of others insane.

[Motoki]

To me it is a big deal. It's forcing people to play in a manner which they don't want to play the game. I don't want to mess with the other houses. If someone wants to make a redux neighborhood with cribs (and while they're at it, just better houses in general) I will happily download it, but it's not something I want to be bothered with. He's modifying the game in way that really should have the neighborhood set up in a different way and I don't want to be the one to have to set it up.

If it means dingoes eat some of the damned babies so I don't have to be arsed with this crib nonsense then fine. Have it at dingoes. I support you. I just want the neighborhood to take care of itself while I play the one family and not have to run around playing Sim City mayor.

[Kyna]

I think that most of us who are against the mandatory crib thing are looking to have it made optional, not to be removed altogether.

I get that some people like to spend a week or more setting up their neighbourhood to be exactly right before they actually start playing.  I'm not one of them.  I want to create a sim (or family, or a bunch of families, depending on what I feel like playing), place them on a lot, and then get straight into playing the game.

With TS2 I used to make all my own townies, downtownies, dormies, social townies, hobby mavens, vacation townies, locals & NPCs.  I would put the townies/downtownies into jobs, give them appropriate skills, give them sexual preferences, make sure all the non-playables were dressed reasonably and give some of them turn-on features such as glasses or facial hair or makeup.  If I'd known how, I would have saved these background sims to templates so that I didn't have to keep repeating the process every time I started a new hood.

Setting up the sims who existed primarily as background for my playable sims in TS2 wasn't fun for me.  It was a tedious chore that cut into my actual game playing time.  It's not a chore I care to repeat in TS3.  I just want to place & play without a lot of fiddling around getting the 'hood exactly right.  This is why I have a story mode mod in my game (ISM once it was compatible with AM, now switched to ASM) - to do the tedious background stuff for me.

So yeah, it'd be great if the crib thing could be made optional.

[Solmyr]

A compromise could be allowing non-played families to have one baby without a crib, and then needing a crib to have more. Give us an announcement "so and so just had a baby, they need a crib!" so we can go and edit their house if we want them to continue reproducing.

[Regina]

I guess having this at the bottom of my post probably made it pretty near invisible:

and will also add to the requests for your sake that it be made optional.

I enjoy a particular play style that appears to be a hybrid between what a lot of people play. I would never want to enforce my play style on anyone else.

[twoftmama]

I've started making neighborhoods with a crib in each house. The one I have finished so far is SV with no residents, (I used "destroyallhumans"). I'm going to make an SV with residents intact with cribs, and a Riverview with cribs with and without residents. I was going to post them in the Pudding Factory as I got them finished, but they are too big to post. If anyone wants them, I'll figure out a way to get them to you. I can't afford a premium filesharing account atm.

[kuronue]

A compromise could be allowing non-played families to have one baby without a crib, and then needing a crib to have more. Give us an announcement "so and so just had a baby, they need a crib!" so we can go and edit their house if we want them to continue reproducing.

This will inevitably lead to population decline. Two parents = 1 babby means each generation, without intervention, the population halves. Eventually the only thing left will be playables who are all so intermarried incest is the only option.

[Zazazu]

Doesn't the crib rule cease to block future spawn if the youngest is a child+? My basic townie homes have six bed spots and one crib. A couple should be able to have four kids if they start early, with only one kid ever in a crib at a time.

[BobDob]

If it means dingoes eat some of the damned babies so I don't have to be arsed with this crib nonsense then fine. Have it at dingoes. I support you. I just want the neighborhood to take care of itself while I play the one family and not have to run around playing Sim City mayor.

I agree.  The crib thing is a perfect example of unintelligent sim behavior that isn't worth improving.  It is very costly to fix manually or, if even possible, automatically, and, in most cases, simply not observable to the user.  It's a change with low to no upside and high costs.

Even if you could have the sims place cribs automatically, odds are that the placement of the cribs would break believability more than having a proper number of cribs would increase it.

[Doc Doofus]

I don't think it would necessarily be that hard to spawn cribs in good locations.  Spawn them next to a bed.  Even if that's clumsy, it's not unrealistic.  Even when people don't keep their babies right in the bedroom, they keep the babies in hearing distance of their sleeping arrangement, even if it's just a baby monitor.  When you first get a baby home, if you haven't had one before (I've only had one so I can only speak for myself, heh), you find yourself arranging things in a hurry and that can include jamming a crib anywhere it will fit in the room, even blocking doors and TVs.

In TS2, when children got home from school, they would instantly try to place their homework on or as close to a desk as possible.  If the same object-of-a-type search routine is in TS3, a similar thing could be done for cribs.  Instead of identifying an empty spot close to a desk, it could find the closest empty spot on the floor close to a bed.  (The facts that cribs are two-tiles, though, might ruin that whole idea.)

[Bobbins]

A compromise could be allowing non-played families to have one baby without a crib, and then needing a crib to have more. Give us an announcement "so and so just had a baby, they need a crib!" so we can go and edit their house if we want them to continue reproducing.

This will inevitably lead to population decline. Two parents = 1 babby means each generation, without intervention, the population halves. Eventually the only thing left will be playables who are all so intermarried incest is the only option.

I disagree. It's the player's choice if they want the population to decline, and if not, Solmyr's suggestion means they would know which households to provide cribs for and when. This would make it easier (less hassle) to avoid population decline. Maybe it's possible to go further:

A warning when two sims start trying for a baby: "X and Y are trying for a baby... they're going to need a crib soon if they keep that up." Nice to know these things anyway.
Then when the baby pops, if a suitable spot with sufficient surrounding space can be found in the house, a crib could be spawned (and money deducted from household).
Otherwise the player can get another crib warning. If that's ignored, after a couple of nights of the baby sleeping on the floor, the social worker does their thing and takes the kid...
Then there may be a better home (with a crib) available, otherwise it's a drive up to Riverview with a sack and a bunch of rocks.

[alyria]

I don't think it would necessarily be that hard to spawn cribs in good locations.  Spawn them next to a bed.  Even if that's clumsy, it's not unrealistic.  Even when people don't keep their babies right in the bedroom, they keep the babies in hearing distance of their sleeping arrangement, even if it's just a baby monitor.  When you first get a baby home, if you haven't had one before (I've only had one so I can only speak for myself, heh), you find yourself arranging things in a hurry and that can include jamming a crib anywhere it will fit in the room, even blocking doors and TVs.

In TS2, when children got home from school, they would instantly try to place their homework on or as close to a desk as possible.  If the same object-of-a-type search routine is in TS3, a similar thing could be done for cribs.  Instead of identifying an empty spot close to a desk, it could find the closest empty spot on the floor close to a bed.  (The facts that cribs are two-tiles, though, might ruin that whole idea.)

What people don't seem to realize is that cribs are actually FOUR tiles.  When I jumped from house to house to place cribs I usually had to delete a piece of furniture simply because the Maxis houses don't usually leave four unobstructed tiles anywhere inside a house, especially not in the bedrooms.

[J. M. Pescado]

What people don't seem to realize is that cribs are actually FOUR tiles.  When I jumped from house to house to place cribs I usually had to delete a piece of furniture simply because the Maxis houses don't usually leave four unobstructed tiles anywhere inside a house, especially not in the bedrooms.

That is the *WRONG* place to be putting a crib.

[Gastfyr]

What people don't seem to realize is that cribs are actually FOUR tiles.  When I jumped from house to house to place cribs I usually had to delete a piece of furniture simply because the Maxis houses don't usually leave four unobstructed tiles anywhere inside a house, especially not in the bedrooms.

That is the *WRONG* place to be putting a crib.

I know why you say that Pes, but the other options in a lot of those EAxis houses are just as wrong: In the kitchen/dinging/living room right next to the TV/seterio (so babies/toddlers will constantly be worken up by the loud noises), and out on the deck/lawn (which just looks stupid).  I suppose there's always the bathroom...   

[Motoki]

Or no god damned cribs at all!