Testers Wanted: Dancing with Fitness and Body Skilling (Updated 9/16/2008)

[windy_moon]

Been playing with this for two days.

Yippppppeeeeeee!!!!!

Instead of saying "Thank You! This is Great!"

let me just report that your wonderful hack works wonderfully with no issues in my game.   

[syberspunk]

I love the features of this, but is there any way to get rid of the skill bar on top, while they're dancing, and yet still have them skill? It really ruins the group pictures at parties, unfortunately. And yet, how stupid is it for sims not to build body skill while dancing?

I'll try and take a look at this when I can. At a cursory glance, it won't be that easy (at least for me...) I may have to steal borrow more code from a certain someone who's More Awesome Then me.

But we will see what I can come up with.

Ste

[Sandilou]

Is this still okay post Patch, Ste?  I'm about to add it to my test neighbourhood.  Reading through the Patch checklist, I can't see anything that might relate to this mod and cause a conflict, other than a change to the skill level required to use the Electrosphere. 

[syberspunk]

Is this still okay post Patch, Ste?  I'm about to add it to my test neighbourhood.  Reading through the Patch checklist, I can't see anything that might relate to this mod and cause a conflict, other than a change to the skill level required to use the Electrosphere. 

I actually haven't installed the patch yet myself, but I would tend to agree, as you've said, taking a look at Pescado's list of changes, I don't see anything immediately that would interfere with this hack. The skill level thing for the electrosphere is probably something specific to that object. I can't see how it would affect skilling from by radios or music related objects.

I wouldn't think that they would change something on a global scale either if it was just a problem regarding a specific object. So I would venture to guess that this hack should be safe. But please try it out and let me know if you have any problems. I will probably get around to installing the patch sometime later this week.

Ste

PS. I plan to eventually look into the seeing if the skilling bars are removable/hideable (hidable? er... whatever ). But, since it's working right now as is, I kinda don't want to screw around too much with it and I'm too lazy right now to dig around. The reason why the other three "skills" (Dancing, and probably Pool and I don't even remember what the 3rd was supposed to be, Romantic maybe? But I don't think that is even really built up anywhere) are hidden is that they are stored differently. Well, I am assuming the pool skill is similar to the dancing skill. Dance skill is stored as a token along with Dance experience. Don't ask me what the difference is, and why there are two types of tokens. I didn't design it and I don't want to think too much about it. But as I understand it, experience is built up, and then after reaching certain levels, a new "point" is added to Dance skill.  This is different from how the other "regular" skills are stored, which as I understand it, are actual individual fields for individual Sim "person data" which have values that range from 0-1000. All that stuff happens "beneath the game surface" and the user only sees individual points 0-10.

Once again, I probably explained more stuff than necessary, but for anyone who was curious, I figured why not kill the cat, or kittens. Whatever.

[Sandilou]

Ste, its been working fine post Nightlife Patch2 alongside your other mods 'Dance Together' and 'Dance Goofy'.  I haven't used your workout feature yet.  It is showing up as an option on the Sim as programmed.    Thanks again for adding these fantastic features.  I've been using your Apologize Fix for ages, so thank you for that too.

Edit:  Active workout works fine.

[qvcatullus]

Half as genuine praise, and half just to annoy JM --

I finally got around to plugging this one in, and is does indeed work great! I was amused to see a toddler start dancing along with the music and start getting body points -- don't know if that was an intended feature or happened via bug in my game, but it made me laugh.

[jrd]

I noticed that Sims that dance to the medium cheap stereo don't show the progress bar. Is this just a cosmetic issue?

[ThyGuy]

They continue to do that stupid ass dance that causes other sims to show the "someone has lost their marbles!" animation, which doesn't cause any skilling. Getting them to do the normal dance is a struggle and half the time they switch back to the moron dance.

[syberspunk]

Half as genuine praise, and half just to annoy JM --

I finally got around to plugging this one in, and is does indeed work great! I was amused to see a toddler start dancing along with the music and start getting body points -- don't know if that was an intended feature or happened via bug in my game, but it made me laugh.

I noticed that Sims that dance to the medium cheap stereo don't show the progress bar. Is this just a cosmetic issue?

I'm not sure which one is the medium cheap stereo. I'll take a look at all the stereos and check this out today. However, this is a global hack, and should pretty much affect all stereos, music created by instruments, the DJ Booth, and the Karaoke machine.

The thing is, I hacked the global regular dance routines, so any sim that uses regular, non-goofy dancing will gain body skill. So yeah... that means that toddlers and children will probably, apparently gain body skill. I'm not sure if they also gain dancing skill/experience at that stage. But... for teens and up, if they do not have sufficient dancing skill/experience, then they will use the Dance Goofy routines, which I left alone. This is intentional and "by design" since in my opinion, I felt that if sims don't know how to dance, they won't really be working out as much, and therefore don't deserve to gain body skill just yet. However... after sims have gained enough dance skill/experience, where they start to dance like "normal" they should be able to benefit from my hack.

If you look at this post, you can see, in the last pic, Mary-Sue and Lilith are doing the Goofy Dance, and therefore do not gain body skill. However... in the very first post, you can see by then, Mary-Sue has gained enough dance skill to now actually gain body skill. Again, I felt that this would be one way to balance the mod, so it isn't super cheaty. Feel free to hack it and make your own changes. For now, I probably won't tweak this any further. If I feel like it, I may look into removing/hiding the skill bars. But other than that, no further design changes are planned.

Ste

[jrd]

I forgot about the 'some dancing skill required' bit. After more dancing sessions the skillbar did appear.

[ThyGuy]

Ah, I understand. They have to dance like morons for a little bit before they learn to start dancing for skill. This explains while this mysteriously dissapeared for sims after they danced for a little while.

[Sandilou]

I like the skills bar - it makes it obvious that the hack is working. 

[Sleepycat]

I like the skills bar - it makes it obvious that the hack is working. 

same here!

[cheriem]

The reason behind hiding the skill bar was for movie makers.

[HelloKit]

The reason behind hiding the skill bar was for movie makers.

There are cheats to hide overhead indicators for movie makers... which they'd have to use anyway to hide other skill bars and everything else. I would leave the hack as is.

[idtaminger]

I don't want it so much for movies/stories as for random documenting of my sims lives. So it's not so much meticulously planned pictures as just sort of fun documenting. And a million skill bars at a raging party just kills the pictures. A no-skill bar skill hack would be very helpful. Glad to know that you're still working on it.

[Sleepycat]

Anyone know if this one works with OFB?



I really love this one and hate removing it!!! but I know Maxis changed the dancing atleast a little for the children to dance with adults and teens, standing on their feet...


Someone posted over at mts2 that risky woohoo is working with OFB so I'll keep that one in and see what happens. 

[Sandilou]

Sleepycat I'm going to add this one back in too, but I don't have a kiddie in my test game, so I'll quickly  make a family and test it out.  I really like this mod too.

[Sleepycat]

Thanks Sandilou    I'll be crossing my fingers!

[Sandilou]

Sleepycat, the parent and child dance together works fine on this.  The skill bar shows after your sim has been dancing for a while - but not initially.   I'd forgotten about that feature.  The skill building is pretty slow though.  I still need to check to see what happens when the sim has completed a body point. 

[Sleepycat]

Thanks Sandilou 

I will leave it in for now then. I plan to install OFB in alittle while, once I check on a few more hacks 

[cwykes]

I'm playing with base game only and tried it today.  Dance together works just fine.  Unfortunately it screws up dance Solo - it drops straight out of the queue so you can't use that option at all.  As it's pretty useful at parties, I'm going to take the hack out of my game.  I tried it on several lots - same problem.  Could be a conflict rather than a problem with the hack as I'm a download junkie, so don't worry about it.  Thanks anyway.  I'll try it again when I get OFB.

Out of curiousity - what level of skilling is it giving you? same as hifi, tv, yoga?  didn't see that posted.

[syberspunk]

I'm playing with base game only and tried it today.  Dance together works just fine.  Unfortunately it screws up dance Solo - it drops straight out of the queue so you can't use that option at all.  As it's pretty useful at parties, I'm going to take the hack out of my game.  I tried it on several lots - same problem.  Could be a conflict rather than a problem with the hack as I'm a download junkie, so don't worry about it.  Thanks anyway.  I'll try it again when I get OFB.

Sorry to hear that it doesn't work in the base game. I'm not sure how exactly I could trouble shoot that (I'm kind of lazy and unwilling to go through uninstalling and testing in just the base game ). You say it drops out of the queue... have you tried playing with debug mode on and seeing if it generates any kind of error logs/messages? Can anyone else with the base game only confirm this? Please let me know or post any error logs if you manage to get any. If I have time, I will try to look into this and see about making a base game only compatible version.

Out of curiousity - what level of skilling is it giving you? same as hifi, tv, yoga?  didn't see that posted.

I wrote this in the first post:

To balance this skill gaining, I have also added slight and increased motive decay to Energy, Comfort, Hunger, and Hygiene. Also, the skill gain should pretty much be the same speed as the Work Out interaction with Stereos. So, you will gain body skill, but it will be fairly slow.

Update

Minor update for OFB. There is a new BHAV which I think allows Sims to watch others dancing. I included it in the OFB version 1.01. The package itself is the same name, so you can simply overwrite your existing one. Please make sure you download the correct version i.e. use the OFB one only if you have OFB.

If you use the OFB version without having OFB, you may experience problems. On the flip side, there is no real "harm" using the older version, but you may lose some functionality i.e. presumably this new Watch interaction that seems to only be available in OFB.

Ste

[cwykes]

I wouldn't worry about getting it to work in base game only..  I don't find many people playiing base game only apart from newbies.  By the time people are addicted enough to find nice mods like this they usually have the EPs.  I posted mainly for info.  I could run it with debug on and see what happens, but I'm lazy too.   I'll try it again with OFB.

sorry for the stupid question - same level as stereo workout was a good choice. 

[cwykes]

Ran it with debug on and it does give an error message about a bad gosub tree number.  Here's the first part of the error log.  I don't have much experience with them, so hope this is the useful bit.  I only tried it on the cheap stereo.

Object id: 147
name: N004_User00058 - Paul
Stack size: 5
Error: Bad gosub tree number.
Iterations: 73
  Frame 4:
    Stack Object id: 250
    Stack Object name: Stereo - BoomBox
    Node: 7
    Tree: id 8196 name 'Interaction - Dance Solo' version -32698
    from StereoGlobals
    Prim state: 0
    Params: 250    Locals: 250 0 0
  Frame 3:
    Stack Object id: 250
    Stack Object name: Stereo - BoomBox
    Node: 21
    Tree: id 8233 name 'Function - Main - Process Autonomy' version 51
    from PersonGlobals
    Prim state: 0
    Params:    Locals: 250 0
  Frame 2:
    Stack Object id: 147
    Stack Object name: N004_User00058 - Paul
    Node: 6
    Tree: id 8283 name 'Function - Main - Loop' version 91
    from PersonGlobals
    Prim state: 0
    Params: 0 20 1    Locals: 0
  Frame 1:
    Stack Object id: 147
    Stack Object name: N004_User00058 - Paul
    Node: 5
    Tree: id 8193 name 'Function - Main' version 69
    from PersonGlobals
    Prim state: 0
    Params:    Locals: 1 20
  Frame 0:
    Stack Object id: 147
    Stack Object name: N004_User00058 - Paul
    Node: 1
    Tree: id 4096 name 'Function - Main' version 2
    from N004_User00058
    Prim state: 0
    Params:    Locals: