Semi Permanent Platinum hack - slow decay for permaplat Sims

[Hook]

Ok, I broke down and studied the code for an inordinately long time and finally came up with this.  It's my first time, be gentle!

Bored with your Sims who have achieved permaplat status?  Want a bit of extra challenge?  Try this mod which causes your permaplat Sims to have aspiration decay. 

Normally a Sim will take 8 hours to decay from top of platinum into gold.  This mod will cause permaplat Sims to take 12-13 hours to decay to gold.  Normal Sims take 16 hours to decay through gold to green, this mod will give permaplat Sims around 24 hours of gold.  It's not a major change, but it is noticable.  At least now you'll have a reason to check your Sim's wants at least once a day.

If a permaplat Sim experiences a fear, the aspiration meter will drop the normal amount, and will NOT refill at the top of the hour.

If you try this, let me know if the decay is too fast or too slow. 

SemiPermaPlatN is for Nightlife.  I've been playing with it for several hours and it seems to work well.

SemiPermaPlatU is for University.  It has the same changes made to the University code but is totally untested.  If you use it, let me know if it works, ok?

If you decide you don't like the effect, take the mod out of your downloads folder and your Sim will return to full platinum at the top of the next hour.

EDIT:  The OFB version of the BHAV file I modified is Spaghetti Code from Hell.  Do not use the other two versions with OFB, as the changes are major.  Even if it appears to work in OFB, it doesn't.  If I get ambitious enough to try to take the OFB version apart enough to understand it, I'll make a new version.  Let me know if there's any interest.

NOTE:  The version I use in my game has decay set at 1/2 normal rate instead of 2/3. This seems to work well in my game.  Or it did, before I got OFB.  Bleh!

Hook


[404'ed!]

[Ness]

nice idea!

I will add it in and check it out, but seeings as I just reinstalled (and wiped out the entire neighbourhood), it's going to be a while before I even get close to seeing a permaplat sim!

Ness

[Ivy]

Ahh excellent Hook I have always hated the permaplat state anyway

Thanks so much!


Ivy

[MsMaria]

Thank you, Hook! This will really come in handy!

[ZephyrZodiac]

I rather like permaplat, but I wish it was possible for those sims who have it to generate a new (and unusual) LTW, which if it wasn't fulfilled within, say, 7 sim days, would cause the permaplat to drop.  (By unusual, I mean, for example, a Romance sim who wants to graduate 3 children from college, that sort of thing.  I've had elder Romance sims who want grandchildren, so that doesn't seem such an unlikely thing for them to want.)

[Hook]

I used to like permaplat until I realized that I had a bunch of Sims who had absolutely nothing to do!  I'd often check their wants and fulfill a couple just to give them some purpose in life.

When you have a Sim who is permaplat, maxed all skills, has all the money they'll ever need and has even has maxed the aspiration counter (327,670 points), what are you going to do with them besides raise Sim children? 

The effect I was shooting for was to have a permaplat Sim decay just fast enough that I needed to fulfill a couple of wants at least every other day to keep them in platinum.  If your Sim sleeps 6 hours a day and works 6 hours, that leaves 12 hours of decay if your aspiration meter is maxed out.  On days that they don't work, or days they spend a lot of time on community lots, they'll need to fulfill a few wants to remain platinum. 

After playing a few hours with SemiPermaPlat, the Sims who don't have permaplat yet seem to decay really really fast.  While SemiPermaPlat isn't a huge change, it's certainly noticable, especially if you have a permaplat Sim and a normal one in the same house.

Hook

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I guess it might be useful at some time, but I only have a few permaplat sims.  One couple are gay male romance sims, they've changed careers at least three times, written novels, raised three kids (one their own thanks to SimPE) and still like to woohoo at least once a day (with each other!) and never seem to get bored.  They haven't maxed out all skills yet, but then, they aren't knowledge sims so does it matter?  They've maxed the ones they needed and the ones they wanted.  They have at least thirty best friends each, and just keeping up with them stops them getting bored!  One's Leo, one's Aquarius, and I think so well-matched that they have a life most humans would envy!  I woouldn't want to jeopardise that!  Oh, and the Aquarius strays occasionally, the Leo never!

[Oddysey]

A most excellent hack, Hook. (A most excellent Hook hack?) Testing will commence as soon as I finish today's rounds on MATY. A good solution to the problem. Things were getting a bit stale in one of my neighborhoods since Uni sims usually hit perma plat within a week of being out of school.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Never happens to mine!  Takes them ages to get a job, never mind get promoted, especially the knowledge and fortune sims who want to be doctors!  and unless they've been very busy getting skill points additional to their needs, and for my CAS sims that's a lot of frozen time, then they don't even start very high up the ladder either!  Then of course, if they do start near the top, they get a promotion and three days off in a row!  Without Aging off, most of mine would still be lucky to reach platinum before they retire - and then, if they still haven't made chief of staff, what chance have they then?

Still, it's definitely a good idea, and should help keep those idle family sims busy!

[syberspunk]

I used to like permaplat until I realized that I had a bunch of Sims who had absolutely nothing to do!  I'd often check their wants and fulfill a couple just to give them some purpose in life.

When you have a Sim who is permaplat, maxed all skills, has all the money they'll ever need and has even has maxed the aspiration counter (327,670 points), what are you going to do with them besides raise Sim children? 

Awesome idea, but just to play devil's advocate, you could just play them like "normal" without regard to the Want system. I thought that was the point of permaplat anyways, as Pescado so poignantly er... pointed out. By fulfulling an LTW, you no longer have to be a slave to the Want system, and you can essentially just play your sim however you want. Make the stories you want (if you do that) and essentially play them as you might have in Sims 1, without having to pay attention to the Want system. You are essentially free to do as you will.

What I did with my sims from Sims 1 is that, once they reached the top of their job track, I just kept trying to build their fortune. They would progressively move into bigger houses until they could afford the mansion. With the later EPs, I became more interested in the minigames like in Superstar. The one thing that is sorta missing is how, after a long while "at the top" of a career track, the game sort of randomly forces a job switch. My sister informs me that the game doesn't do that any more. At first, when it happened to me in the old Sims, I kinda didn't like it, because my simself became a criminal after being at the top of the computer job career. I didn't like that it changed something I kinda worked hard at to become and best mimic my real life. But after awhile, I grew to like it because it was kind of boring having the same job. I then had to deal with the change in patterns and how my couple now had different working times and thus different sleeping schedules. So it was tough to try and get some social interaction between the two.

The other thing you could do is try to fulfill all the other LTWs. Unless you have the ltwvariety hack, which kind of stops that dead in its place. But if you don't, in a way, you have the option to try and go for those other LTWs, which do give you something else to do. The problem is that, once you fulfill all your aspiration related ones, youre stuck again. It would be great if you there was a hack that unlocks the other aspirational LTWs, or maybe a version of the ltwvariety hack that allows other random LTWs, maybe even ones that are outside the aspiration or completely unrelated. That could offer a challenge, like say, if a Grilled Cheese Aspiration got a have 30 lovers LTW. It would have been nice if Maxis had implemented the Uni career related LTWs, so that users had more of an incentive to try those careers, besides acquiring the career related aspirational rewards. I hope they fix this in the upcoming EP, and if they add more careers, that they have the appropriate related LTW implemented as well.

Anyhew, sorry for my long, rambly schpiel. I think your hack is a great idea, and I will probably end up using it when I, no doubt, eventually get bored of my permaplat sims. Hehe. I'll d/l it and tuck it away for safe keeping to play with it another day.

Ste

[Hook]

...you could just play them like "normal" without regard to the Want system.

You'll have to define "normal" here.  I haven't been a slave to the want system in a very long time.  I was playing today and had both non-permaplat Sims in the house actually decay into green, something that almost never happens in my games.  The want system simply gives a Sim some default actions if there's nothing else they need to be doing at the time.

Some people use cheats that make their Sims needs never decay, their aspiration never decay, their relationships never decay, and for all I know their teeth never decay.   And they still enjoy playing, probably even more than I do.  This mod isn't for them.

Hook

[HelloKit]

So far the earliest I've achieved a LTW (actually the only one I've achieved) was one day before the sim's death of old age, so I don't yet have the problem of becoming bored with the perma-plat status. But to be honest, without the want system I don't know how I ever enjoyed TS1 (kinda like wondering how you ever tolerated TV without TiVo... lol). Yeah, you can set goals of maxing all their skills, reaching the top of every career, getting rich enough to move into the mansion... but for me this was all way too easy to do in TS1, especially since they never aged. By the time I finally quit TS1 to wait for TS2, all of my sims had maxed out skills and careers and were filthy rich.

(Okay, so the real reason I quit TS1 was because after yet another hard drive failure I was too lazy to again go through the 12-or-so CD reinstall that was TS1 with all the EPs. )

[qvcatullus]

Just thought I'd mention, in case you're keeping up with this one, that I had a CTD when I tried to use SemiPermaPlat. I don't have a lot of useful info, but I'll tell you what I can in case you want to hunt down the bug.

I installed SemiPermaPlat (correctly, as far as I could tell -- same way I do all my hacks, and it showed up in Clean Installer) and tried to play my favorite family of pretty sim people. I was loading the household when the loading page with the goofy family pick got to the middle bar (the sixth column of things that light up in the background, if that matters) and I got a strange noise from the compy and the hourglass kept turning but no progress was being made. Ctrl+Alt+Del gave me a friendly and helpful message that the application The Sims 2 Nightlife had crashed, I hit OK and Sims2 shut down. Tried again a few times and got the same result at the same place in loading. I used Clean Installer to disable the SemiPermaPlat since it was the only new hack I had downloaded since the last time I'd played the family, and the family loaded properly (although some custom items had disappeared from the house, probably as a result of my experimenting with what was causing the problem, and those poor pretty pretty people were horribly dressed in randomly generated clothes; I wept inside). Hence my being rather convinced that it was SemiPermaPlat that caused the trouble (although admittedly, it's more of a theory than a proven fact).

Now, since it crashed to the desktop completely when I was having the error I don't really know how to give you a helpful error report or anything. I suppose it might be a hack conflict, but here is where my information is less useful -- I'm sloppy with my downloads. Most all of my hacks are JM or TJ hacks, I have a smartserve that I think came from dizzy (since I had to replace that recently with the aid of the kind folks here), and I will admit (if I can be granted immunity from any abuse) that I use insim to debug the 1,001 problems that pop up in game.
So, I don't know if any of that helps, but I thought you might want to know, since it's your software. I'll just go without semipermaplat; would have been nice, but it's a tweak for me, not a really critical fix. If anyone can muddle through my muddle and fix my problem magically, I'll put it back in.

Thankee much,
QVC

[Hook]

Thanks for the input qvcatullus.

Except for the fact that there are two versions, one for Nightlife and one for Uni, I have no idea.  There are only a couple of lines changed in the original BHAV file.  It's not like this mod uses global data or anything.  It really shouldn't conflict with anything else, but it's a possibility if it overwrites someone else's hack.  Note that hacks are loaded in alphabetical order.  Changing the name of the file to "aaaSemiPermaPlat" will cause it to be loaded first, and any possible conflicting hack will be loaded afterwards and overwrite mine.

I've been using it in the game ever since I first wrote it without problems.  I've taken it out and put it back in, still no bizarreisms.

If you ever figure out if there is indeed a hack conflict, and which hack it is, please let me know.  I don't have a lot of hacks in my game these days so I'm unlikely to see any conflicts.

Hook

[ZephyrZodiac]

As an alternative, I presume the toggle Lifetime Want Bit in the FFsDebugger would change a platinum sim back to green, just as it changes a green sim to platinum.  Not a slow decay, of course, but useful if you want them to change careers and/or aspirations.