Story Mode
Tangie:
I downloaded Indie Stone for the first time yesterday and played it last evening, in Riverview. I set the story progession to the fast setting. Some of the announcements I got were the Newbies and the Jones' were expecting their second baby and the McDermott's were expecting their third; Rainer Kowling moved in with (?) Spenser and a day or two later there was an announcement that the two were married; and the Cowan family moved into a bigger house. When I checked, Kowling was actually living in the Spenser household and the Cowan's really did move. Too early to tell if there are any babies. No promotions or demotions at all, although only about 2 or 3 sim days passed while I played it. While one of my sim's was in the library the Broke's were flirting with each other so I wouldn't be surprised to see they are soon expecting another baby also. I do think I will turn the speed of progression down to slow, though, or things will get crowded pretty quickly! ;D
Overall I have to say that I liked it. I haven't played with it long enough to tell if it's blatently ignoring traits. Supposedly there have been checks added for that but I doubt if they're very stringent ones. I was focusing on one of my sim's downtown and I got a popup that my sim at home got a call and another sim wanted to chat with her on the telephone. The sim in question was standing a few feet away from my sim who just got off work, so, no, her evil twin is who actually called my other sim, haha. I imagine this would be normal EA programming actually, since sims who are "at work" can often be seen standing around the park, but yes, it would be nice if there was a check to see if the random sims chosen for these actions were not actually in view.
For now I will probably trade off using AM and Indie whenever the mood strikes (I don't use Supreme Commander so I can do that), but I'll also be interested to see what you can come up with for your story mode. I wouldn't mind having the ability to influence events, but I'd prefer to not have to micromanage everything in the 'hood, either.
quetzilla:
Quote from: Motoki on 2009 July 14, 22:36:01
Quote from: kewpie on 2009 July 14, 22:19:33
There are some things on modthesims I didn't mention on the Indie Stone thread, because they are less about how the mod works and more about my personal tastes vs. the creators. But here are some of my observations from it.
I ran in wolfing mode and kept the camera on the central park in the city. I figured out really quickly how Indie Stone worked by doing this. The first thing I noticed was that I saw two sims talking to each other near the swingset, and then one vanished and the other sim walked off. I got some random message that a sim had an untimely death. It was a bit creepy and funny at the same time. Less funny but more common, I remember watching a sim sit at a picnic basket in the park and while she was eating and seemingly minding her own business, she got married and concieved a baby! This happened a quite frequently.
Hmm, that kind of stuff should really be staying behind the curtain. There should be a check to make sure it is not happening while said sim is being observed.
The untimely death thing seems fine for me as long as we see the sim die and the sim they were talking to has the appropriate reaction. The marriage is something that should be schedule ahead of time rather than randomly decided. Player sims get engaged first, so story mode should follow the same progression - have two sims get engaged and when they do set a date for the wedding. On that date they get sent to a wedding venue and have the wedding. But you should be able to go and see it if you want to. I don't want things happening behind the curtain at all, they should be happening so you can see them (this is what Pescado means with 'Show, Don't Tell').
Doc Doofus:
Quote
Too many of us have seen our towns turn into retirement center ghost towns, with the only options for procreation being either fiddling about with making couples (and coupling them) ourselves, or enabling parthenogenesis.
Yeah, that's the problem we have right now.
I take this as a thread about general philosophy, rather than a comparison of two different mods, and that's how I would prefer to address it.
I don't think it's feasible to expect the sim townies to ever come near enough to playing themselves to make a viable neighborhood. The basic tools just aren't there in the game. But it can and should be improved. Thus I think a two pronged approach would not just be compatible but is even necessary. There has to be some kind of god-like mechanism in the background to give the overall town progression some kind of balance. The only question is just how heavy-handed that mechanism should be. Indie seems to be very heavy-handed, like with the town floozie aspect, which seems to be going above and beyond the call of duty and earns my respect.
Let me go back to what I always wanted from The Sims. The first time I played GTA Vice City (possibly the best game ever), I thought to myself, Why can't the Sims be like this? The realism was just breathtaking, even if you had played GTA3 before. It looked like a whole f'ing metropolitan city with crowded streets and sidewalks and people tanning on the beach and hookers walking the streets at night. But one reason they could do such a huge and realistic simulation is that NONE OF IT WAS PERSISTENT. As soon as you turned left, then turned right again, the cars and NPCs that you saw before were all gone or changed. As soon as you stopped looking at something, it completely ceased to exist, freeing up precious CPU cycles.
And that defines the very problem that EA has had to address in Sims 3, because the Sims must have some kind of persistence after you turn your back on them, although not necessarily graphic rendering. This may help explain some of the terrible tradeoffs they made, such as the godawful third-rate graphics, the lack of memories, and the huge holes in story progression. Story progression really should have been the easiest and cheapest part of the game for them to work on, because, since it is nongraphical and takes place in the background in a batch stream manner, it should have taken little effort to implement, ONCE THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED IT TO DO. And that's the only excuse I can possibly make for EA -- that they never reached a consensus on what story progression should do such that it was ever properly designed. The actual coding for it should have been a breeze.
I wrote my own simplified design pseudo-code in THIS POST for how relationships, marriage, and baby-making could be implemented in story progression to work more effectively than it does now. One page.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.msg453987/topicseen.html#msg453987
It would be nice if the townies were intelligent enough to meet people on the street, date, fall in love, all in full high-detail simulation. But I don't think that can be done for a couple of reasons. First, the people they meet aren't that random, and secondly, unless your chosen Sims are on community lots 24 hours a day, there is little chance of townies getting enough face time in high-detail to approach that. Some kind of jet-assisted-take-off device is necessary to finish the job.
And I think that's what story progression needs to do. Those actions we see townies do in the game should be CONSISTENT with story progression as far as they go, but they should not be the story. Like, "Wow, look at those two making out -- they must be in love." That kind of thing. The actual choice of who they fall in love with is less important, I think, than that they do have a chance of falling in love, at least enough chance to keep the population size and age distribution stable.
And we should also keep this in mind -- as computer power increases, as new EPs come out and the game expands in scope, it's likely that the size of the town and the number of max townies is going to increase over time, to the point (I don't know when, but I assume it will come) that we do have a big metropolitan city like Vice City with many thousands of distinct Sims leading their lives, too many for us to micromanage with ctrl-click. If you think that that is where we are eventually going, as I have always thought, then you have to realize that some kind of sensible background story progression is essential. If and when the time comes that we have computers that can render and calculate in real-time the actions of every Sim in Riverview and do it at a snappy speed, we will probably already have moved on to something bigger and more complicated than TS3.
quetzilla:
I don't even necessarily think it needs some method of 'maintaining an overall balance'. If we're going to take a theoretical view of this, I think the best way is to make an engine that produces behavior that is both chaotic and interesting (those tend to go hand in hand). You start the town off at relative equilibrium and as more and more things happen to the sims living their it *will* get more complicated, as marriages lead to jealousy and fights divorces, people being fired, houses being robbed, etc. Then, once you have an engine that can successfully do that, you build in feedback mechanisms that pull the chaos back towards order. So if the engine leads to everyone being angry at each other until every sim is fighting in the street with every other sim, you put in a police force that locks up sims who get in too many fights etc (this is sort of like how real society works). The point is that you make it able to generate interesting *first*, and only then can you attempt to make it not go out of control. Otherwise you fall into the trap of trying to make interestingness happen within a narrow set of constraints, not all of which everyone will agree on.
moondance:
After reading in the other thread about what Pescado has in mind, I'm pretty optimistic. I can't do anything this week, but if testers are still needed after this coming Sunday, I can most likely help out, and would definitely like to. #grah is alright with me; I go in there about once or twice a year, and no one ever remembers that I was ever there before, which I find kind of cool for some reason.
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