Object/BHAV development/analysis tools?

[dmchess]

Sorry if this is already answered somewhere; I searched on what seemed to be the obvious terms, but I may well just not know the right jargon.

What's the recommended set of tools and docs for fiddling around with objects and hacks and so on in the game?  Beyond Body Shop and Home Crafter, that is!  Are there tools that will extract and display (disassemble or decompile) the BHAV code from objects?  Is there a BHAV assembler, or even a compiler that takes some semi-high-level language and produces BHAV output?  (Or is BHAV already semi-high-level?)  Is there a language reference for BHAV anywhere?  I've poked around on the MTS2 Wiki a bit, but didn't really find much beyond half-finished descriptions of file formats and stuff (maybe my Wiki skillz are just lacking). What do y'all use to look around inside of and debug the standard (buggy) objects that ship with the game (for instance)?

Pointers, thoughts, advice, suggestions, derision, welcome,
DC

[RainbowTigress]

I'm not a modder, but I know most modders use SimPE.  You might try browsing the forums for SimPE.  A lot of stuff is over my head, but there is quite a bit of info over there.  I've used it quite a bit to make adjustments in my sims personalities and fix memories, and I've made a few recolors.  I haven't done any hacking or modding though.

http://sims.ambertation.de/index.shtml

[dmchess]

I'm not a modder, but I know most modders use SimPE.

Tx very.  I've played with SimPE a bit, mostly to browse around inside Sim Description files.  I see from the tutorials that it does have some code-related functions, but from what I've found so far they look sort of rudimentary ("change the 0x1004 in the upper-left box to 0x1005, and then put in a bunch of FFs, and then in the operand field put in the hex code for the motive you want to change from the table below").  Is this what JMPescado and Crammyboy and the other wizards use to do their fancy stuff? 

I guess (being sort of old-skool myself) I'm wondering if there are like command-line tools that dump BHAVs from a package file to a text file with comments and some kind of human-language translation, and re-assemble human-readable BHAVs back into package files and so on.  But maybe that's just me being all old-fashioned and XXth Century...   

I'd love to know how the really l33t modders do it; in the mean time I'll look harder at MTS2 and SimPE and see if maybe they have everything I'm looking for and I just haven't stumbled on it yet.

DC

[Inge]

Is this what JMPescado and Crammyboy and the other wizards use to do their fancy stuff?

Yup