The Birth Control Mirror

[Buzzler]

You are not using an EventListener to handle birth announcements?

It appeared to me, that all this stuff is adding the Gossip to the active Sim, too, and I didn't see a way to avoid that. So, yes, I'm not using an EventListener right now.

[twallan]

It appeared to me, that all this stuff is adding the Gossip to the active Sim, too, and I didn't see a way to avoid that. So, yes, I'm not using an EventListener right now.

I'm simply pointing out an example of use.

My suggestion is create your own listener in your mod and do whatever you want in the callback function.  Namely display a notification of the birth.

Cheers.

[Buzzler]

My suggestion is create your own listener in your mod and do whatever you want in the callback function.  Namely display a notification of the birth.

Oh, boy, is it just me, or did this conversation just take an embarrassing turn? Like a million voices suddenly raising in laughter, and a single voice becoming silent in embarrassment?

Just two klicks more and it would have been obvious... in my defense: This stuff is pretty voluminous, and it's easy to get on the wrong track, at least if you got roughly a week of experience on your shoulders. Well, on the other side, I could have looked at your code, too... speaking of which: I've seen a lot of checks in your code after using SimDescription.CreatedSim. Can this actually return a null value, unless something's seriously borked?

[twallan]

Just two klicks more and it would have been obvious... in my defense: This stuff is pretty voluminous, and it's easy to get on the wrong track, at least if you got roughly a week of experience on your shoulders. Well, on the other side, I could have looked at your code, too... speaking of which: I've seen a lot of checks in your code after using SimDescription.CreatedSim. Can this actually return a null value, unless something's seriously borked?

Sims, such as homeless and Service NPCs, which are NOT currently out and about in town will have a CreatedSim == null .

Cheers.

[Buzzler]

Updated to Version 5. See first post for changes.
I think, I consider this thing done for now. So unless there are bug reports, or something is in need of additional tweaking, or there's a request which really intrigues me, I'll spend my time on something else, maybe a different mod that is haunting my thoughts, or maybe I actually play the game myself a little...

Sims, such as homeless and Service NPCs, which are NOT currently out and about in town will have a CreatedSim == null .

Good to know. Queries.GetObjects<Sim>() gets all Sims, right? If not, my backup method is useless...

[doyze]

Thank you Buzzler for this mod.

I have a question though: I had problems with my last game that NO babies were born at all anymore so I stopped playing that and started a new game. I removed all the cc (except Standalone Computer and nomosaic(can't stand the blur)) to test if its the cc. The stroy progression was slow but sims were at least moving into town. No marriages or babies though. Then I put this mod in (second version available). I did not pollinate anybody nor did I turn the Sustain-o-Mat on. After playing a while one of the NPC sims that was already married had a baby (can't remember which on). Then Blaire Wainwright even got married and pregnant and Pauline Wan also got pregnant. By now I had version 4 of your mod in my game. I configured the Sustain-o-Mat to be inactive for all options and the the mode thing was on gentle. I'm using it only for informational reasons (as I do the Supercomputer)

Now to my question: Has the babies being born have anything to do with your mod (with everything being off) or is the EA Story Progression actually working now and it was an issue of my old save game that I didn't have anything happening ?

[twallan]

Good to know. Queries.GetObjects<Sim>() gets all Sims, right? If not, my backup method is useless...

It gets all instantiated sims, yes.  It won't get all the SimDescriptions in town, unless all the residents are currently instantiated. 

Non-homeless should be instantiated all the time, unless some bug accidentally disposed of them. Or they happen to be a toddler left at home without a babysitter.

Good Day.

[Buzzler]

Now to my question: Has the babies being born have anything to do with your mod (with everything being off) or is the EA Story Progression actually working now and it was an issue of my old save game that I didn't have anything happening ?

I cant't tell you what the EAxis Storymode does, because I don't know. I can tell you, though, that this mod doesn't do anything unless you activate Sustain-o-Mat or Pollinate Sims manually. Even if there were some sort of blunderous bug in there, causing the Sustain-o-Mat to be active all the time (and I guess someone would have noticed by now), you'd still see the corresponding notifications.

It gets all instantiated sims, yes.  It won't get all the SimDescriptions in town, unless all the residents are currently instantiated.

Ok, I guess if someone manages to form a valid Romance or partnered relationship to an uninstantiated Sim, he deserves to encounter script errors or one of my "Something's seriously borked. You should panic now!" messages.

[doyze]

Thanks ! Than my story progression actually seems to work for now. I have not gotten any corresponding notifications.

[tjstreak]

I have played around with this for a while now.  It does seem to lead to an ever increasing population.  When I had over 200 sims, I had to cull the neighborhood manually, moving out a number of families.  I found at this point, sims would gather in places like the City Hall where the Grim Reaper would have a mass reaping.

This may be due in part to the SLAM lifespan package, which I installed (centi - Real Life).

As a result, I have turned off the automatic feature.  I do pollinate manually.  I check the population on a fairly regular basis and have been trying to maintain it at 90.  (This still may be on the high side, but it is a darn sight better than 200+!)  When the number of sims falls below this number, I manually pollinate a sim.

This might actually be a more simple formula for maintaining a population.  A sim dies -- another sim gets pollinated.  Since sims tend to have a fairly constant life span, it should keep things somewhat in proportion.  However, if one of my played sims gets preggers, I probably would let the system go wild to boost the population of similarly aged sims.  After the infant ages up, I would just let the population decline back to the target number.

[Buzzler]

I have played around with this for a while now.  It does seem to lead to an ever increasing population.

Your population size started at 90 and then increased to 200? How long did this take? How did the amount of fertile adults develop?

This may be due in part to the SLAM lifespan package, which I installed (centi - Real Life).

I'm not absolutely sure about it, but this shouldn't be the case. All calculations are based on the actual values.

This might actually be a more simple formula for maintaining a population.  A sim dies -- another sim gets pollinated.

This would work, yes, but to me this awfully smells like cheating. Nevertheless, if you really want, I can implement something like that. You'd have to test it, though, 'cause I really lost interest in TS3 in the meantime; I didn't play more than an hour after releasing V5. That's why it took me so long to answer and why there's no other mod from me.

[Finiksa]

Would it be possible to have the options to specify a sim to be pollinated by a random male, and to be able to specify a sim that will pollinate a random female?

Sometimes I have a sim that is either near the end of their fertility or life and want them to have one more kid beforehand, but would prefer not to choose the partner all the time.

[Buzzler]

Would it be possible to have the options to specify a sim to be pollinated by a random male, and to be able to specify a sim that will pollinate a random female?

Well, technically that would be possible, but I don't really see how that would be useful. If you specifically pick the mommy, it can't be that much of a hassle to pick the daddy too. To pick the daddy first might be useful - although it might be sexist and seems kinda weird to me - but since I'd have to boot up my cerebrum to do that, I want a petition of at least three people who claim they would find that useful.

[LVRugger]

I, for one, would find that useful. This is my current way to have a male impregnate a female:

- Use Twallan's computer to pick a female (no partner, no kids, right age group), selected at semi-random
- Pick the male I want
- Inseminate using that computer

Using your mirror to pick a random female for my chosen male would make the process a little easier and more random for me.

[Buzzler]

Wanted to release that a lot earlier (the stuff about the petition was actually a joke), but I was low on time, low on mood, and high on migraine for the last week.

Updated to Version 6. See first post for changes.
'Sustain-on-Death' is the sustaining method outlined by tjstreak. I added a counter for births and deaths, so SoD only auto-pollinates Sims if there are more deaths than births. The configuration of Sustain-o-Mat applies to Sustain-on-Death too. Like announced this one is pretty much untested, because I simply don't feel like playing the game for a couple of hours to see if it really does what it's meant to do. And it's still too cheaty for my taste.

Be aware that 'Second Victim - Random' really means random. Unlike in 'Sustain-o-Mat' there's no bias towards closer releationships!

[Finiksa]

Wanted to release that a lot earlier (the stuff about the petition was actually a joke), but I was low on time, low on mood, and high on migraine for the last week.

Updated to Version 6. See first post for changes.
'Sustain-on-Death' is the sustaining method outlined by tjstreak. I added a counter for births and deaths, so SoD only auto-pollinates Sims if there are more deaths than births. The configuration of Sustain-o-Mat applies to Sustain-on-Death too. Like announced this one is pretty much untested, because I simply don't feel like playing the game for a couple of hours to see if it really does what it's meant to do. And it's still too cheaty for my taste.

Be aware that 'Second Victim - Random' really means random. Unlike in 'Sustain-o-Mat' there's no bias towards closer releationships!

Just had the opportunity to play again and had an elderly guy knock up some female before death.  Thanks so much!  I would've understood if you weren't joking but grateful that you were   Thanks again!

[Buzzler]

Just had the opportunity to play again and had an elderly guy knock up some female before death.

I didn't really dig into the .DLLs to find out what exactly happens when Sims die, i.e. whether or not they get deinstantiated. Since you explicitly wanted to have old folks spread their genes before dying, I didn't install any sanity checks on how far a Sim might be on the edge. At any rate if the prospective father gets deinstantiated during the pregnancy, the offspring will have no father at all. (Parthenogenesis, yay! I wonder if this is what happened to Jesus' daddy...)

Since this is due to the (totally hare-brained) way the EAxis devs have implemented pregnancies, there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Well, actually it could be changed by a core mod, but I'd consider that awfully risky.

[Buckets]

My BCM isn't working.  I can set configuration settings which always provides confirmation of the changes, but nothing else works.  Pollination commands do nothing.  Even selecting 'Raw Data' does nothing.  I only have ASM and Supercomputer mods installed.  (I had others but after removing them all, there was no change.)  The only other thing wrong in my game is that my pregnant Sim did not change to maternity clothes nor showed an enlarged belly, but the pregnancy proceeded normally otherwise.  Does this mean that my game is borked in general and your mirror is not broken?

[Buzzler]

My BCM isn't working.  I can set configuration settings which always provides confirmation of the changes, but nothing else works.  Pollination commands do nothing.  Even selecting 'Raw Data' does nothing.

Is twallan's supercomputer actually working without showing any oddities? If so, maybe the BCM file you downloaded, is simply borked. I'd suggest redownloading for starters.

If the mod file is ok, this is pretty bad, because it's almost definitely due to script errors preventing the code from being (further) executed. There's a slight chance, it's caused by a rare "constellation" in your game I didn't anticipate, but I doubt it. Especially Raw Data doesn't do anything sophisticated, so my guess is, that there are some dangling references in you game (i.e. non-null and invalid at the same time). That would be bad. Make that really, really bad.

If you upload your save file, I'll have a look at it.

[Buckets]

My BCM isn't working.  I can set configuration settings which always provides confirmation of the changes, but nothing else works.  Pollination commands do nothing.  Even selecting 'Raw Data' does nothing.

Is twallan's supercomputer actually working without showing any oddities? If so, maybe the BCM file you downloaded, is simply borked. I'd suggest redownloading for starters.

If you upload your save file, I'll have a look at it.

Yes, twallan's supercomputer works fine.  I redownloaded the BCM file with no change unfortunately.
So, there's a save file uploaded for you at http://ftp://ftp.kludgemush.com/incoming/ called BorkedBCM.zip.  My population was on a downward spiral so I ended up pollinating all females in a relationship using the supercomputer.  I need your tool to keep it going.  I don't know why ASM alone is not keeping my population going.

[Buzzler]

Updated to Version 6.1. Please redownload, because the squished bug existed at least since V2.

@Buckets: You could have warned me that the composition of colors on the active lot is quite ... unusual. There definitely was a bug in the code, but it's fixed and should work now. I'm a little confused though that this didn't come up earlier. What I can't say for sure is whether or not your 'hood had anything to do with it, i.e. if it is completely free of borkedness.

[Buckets]

@Buckets: You could have warned me that the composition of colors on the active lot is quite ... unusual.

Lol.  The colours in all the rooms are based on the occupants' favourite colours.  I agree, it looks outlandish but they love it!   

Thanks for looking at this issue and fixing it.  I can't test it because my desktop just completely crashed.  Can't wait though.

[Buckets]

I've got the new v6.1 and it works great!  Thanks.  But I put a mirror (with the birth notification active) in one household, switched to another and bought a mirror for it.  Then I set the birth notification to active on it.  Now I get two messages for each birth.

[Buzzler]

Then I set the birth notification to active on it.  Now I get two messages for each birth.

Looking at my code I see that I forgot a couple of static modifiers (Yeah, well, it was my first encounter with C# and object oriented programming.). That means variables which were meant to be global for all BCMs are actually unique for every BCM, so it's possible to add the BirthListener multiple times. I will look into it; I might as well simply revamp the whole thing into an object-less mod.

[witch]

I keep reading this thread title as 'The Birth Canal Mirror'.