Story Mode
Motoki:
Quote from: phyllis_p on 2009 July 14, 18:53:25
I've been trying to get my head around this concept of Indie being an "undead clockwork monstrosity," and how things like marriages and births could actually be witnessed. I may making too many assumptions here, but I think those two things are the "live events" that most story-minded people care about and why they feel Indie provides a "living, breathing town." 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.
I don't actually mind playing just one family and letting all but the heir move out, but when I move those young adults out and they never marry and rarely have children without my intervention, it gets sad. I don't care about Indie's messages regarding what's going on with other Sims (though I don't mind them, either) -- I can catch it in the newspaper, if I'm interested. What I care about is that the town isn't one huge, childless lonely heart's club and that I don't have to do anything to make it come about.
I find myself curious about what witnessable events you'd have come about, and how you define a living and breathing town if not by having a pairing, procreating, employed population.
Don't get me wrong; I think the things you do with Awesomemod are ... well ... awesome. This whole philosophical aspect of Story Mode is just interesting to me, that's all.
Exactly. I mean I think Pescado's philosophy is all well and good, but I feel like right now I am having to jump through hoops to get people moved in and keep the population going.
I also don't need to see every wedding or birth or what not. It's fine for me if these things happen behind the scenes and either I find out through an announcement or gossip or just running into those sims or maybe I never even do.
I agree with the bottom up philosophy about the jobs to some degree. I don't necessarily think the game should be cheating everyone through job promotions, but it also needs to make sure they go to work and perform well too, which seems not to be happening much of the time.
Relationships I'm fine with as random pairing method. Relationships are arbitrary anyway. I guess you could match traits but then how many couples do we all know that are opposites and end up together anyway? I think the only thing there is maybe the people with committment issues shouldn't be settling down so easily, or maybe not until they get older. And likewise those who hate kids shouldn't be having 4 or 5. But other than that, I think random pairings is fair game. There just need to be pairings period. If you get too stringent and picky everyone dies an old spinster and the town is dead.
pbox:
Quote from: Motoki on 2009 July 14, 18:11:52
I wish mine had more variations in their gossip. I feel like all I ever hear is so & so got a promotion.. :P
Actually, the gossip is one of the few things I can't complain about (too much) -- I have no comm lots in my game, hence no promotions, and whenever my sims gossip about something (as opposed to just "gossip", without popup), it'll be somehting real -- a birth, a death, or (a little too often for my taste) about Sim X being totally broke. Oh, and one sim peed herself at some point, they also gossiped about that. The only thing I haven't yet checked for is whether or not they actually gossip about something they know, or whether they're telepathic -- right now it would be hard to tell, since the town is so small (five households), it would hardly make sense for them to not know when someone has died.
In a word, it seems to depend on what is actually happening -- if you want different gossip, you need to make different things happen. I don't know if it is possible to enable new "gossip-able" topics perhaps (perhaps when a relative has maxed a skill or something), or restrict some (in your case, promotions -- in my case, I might want to eliminate the constant "broke" whining at some point).
Other than that, I don't think I'll ever use any sort of automatic progression anytime soon, but one aspect that I'd like to see and that I believe is closely related to it would a stricter handling of motives in general. Right now, it seems that the game resets everything all the time (I don't know when exactly, maybe every full hour?) depending purely on the time of day and nothing else, and even *that* seems to be broken. I often find myself manually adjusting motives to where they should be -- like when a sim has gone to bed at 10PM, and I select their lot at 5AM, and they have "Sleep until fully rested (6AM)" in their queue, it makes no sense that their energy is still nearly bottomed out. This is getting really old. The same thing happens when a sim has a visitor over, and they chat etc., and I select the visitor immediately after they leave -- their social will be half-empty again.
Can't this be handled differently? I know people say that EA are doing this sort of thing in order to "save processing power", but seriously, calculating the energy level of a few sims? That's something any pocket calculator should be able to handle, no? In my eyes, they probably tried to make everything nice and easy for the "one fambly" players (i.e. reset the social bar, so that the sims are more compelled to ineract with each other), but completely ignored what happens when people play the entire neighbourhood. This is manifest in so many ways .. plants on inactive lots never get weeds and never need to be watered (all that updates is their growth), sims that are out fishing all day still have nearly full energy meters at 11PM, sim basically never need to eat unless you happen to play them in the morning or evening, etc etc.
I can actually somewhat understand that inactive sims just stand around staring holes in the air when you check in on them -- I believe it would become very taxing if the game actually played all the animations of all sims, particularly in "normal-sized" neighbourhoods of 100-200 sims. But would it be possible to just silently keep track of the motives instead? So that it is recorded when they've just visited their uncle and chatted for an hour, consequently their social cannot be half-empty? Perhaps even remove random food from their fridge/inventory throughout the day whenever their hunger meter gets low (as an inexpensive way to "fake simulate" cooking)? At the very least, I'd like for the game to take into account whether or not inactive sims can even *possibly* fill certain motives -- sims on a lot with no shower or sink shouldn't have high hygiene just because it is 8AM, for example.
As much as I love the unified time, I more often than not feel like I have to battle the game for a halfwhat realistic sort of progress -- and sometimes more so than in TS2. The motives thing in particular makes it feel like the game is "auto cheating" all the time.
quetzilla:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 July 14, 17:42:57
Ah, yes, the promotions. Indie apparently hands them out like candy. Me? My plan is a bit more basic: I tell them to get a job. I set them to skill at work, and prod them to occasionally do something skilly when their personality and circumstances warrants it, like a low-intensity version of SupCom Work/School. From there? They are on their own! Show, don't telll.
I use Indie Mod right now because I like it better than default and I've heard many people complain about too many Elders with AwesomeMod, but I'll probably switch back to awesome once Awesome has story mode fixed etc. However, using the latest Indie Mod, I definitely don't see promotions being handed out like candy -- in fact I probably see more messages about people being demoted. What IS lacking is any sense that the promotion or demotions mean anything -- there is no why they got fired (a.k.a. maybe they skipped work to adulterate with their boss's wife,etc!).
So here's a vision of how I'd like to see AwesomeStoryMode as it interacts with the player vs. just the under the hood mentality. Basically things should weave into the player's experience without hitting them over the head with the idea that what just happened is a result of Story Mode. For example, say your sim Alice is friends with Bob. Bob is a couch potato so one day he skips work to stay home and watch TV and then gets fired. Since Bob is friends with Alice, maybe later that day he calls up
Alice to complain about getting fired, which would happen just like a regular phone call, and perhaps you don't even answer the phone with Alice so you never know anything happened. Maybe if y6ou do answer you got a pop up option (sort of like Sims 2 job challenges) where you can either try to make Bob feel better, or maybe you tell him he should stop being such a lazy shit. Then again, maybe that optional stuff is a little much for version 1, but I'd definitely like to see story mode events have player interactivity.
Another example would be say Alice is distant friends with Karen, and Karen decides to get married with her boyfriend. So then Karen sends Alice a wedding invitation (via the mailbox since they're distant, or by phone if theyre good friends, in person if they are best friends etc), which sets up the date and time the wedding will happen at. So then you can either have Alice show up at the wedding, or maybe you dont and then Karen gets mad at Alice, etc.
I'm pretty sure this is probably already a lot of what Pescado has in mind for this, but figured I'd throw in my 2 cents...
quetzilla:
Quote from: Motoki on 2009 July 14, 19:16:26
Relationships I'm fine with as random pairing method. Relationships are arbitrary anyway. I guess you could match traits but then how many couples do we all know that are opposites and end up together anyway? I think the only thing there is maybe the people with committment issues shouldn't be settling down so easily, or maybe not until they get older. And likewise those who hate kids shouldn't be having 4 or 5. But other than that, I think random pairings is fair game. There just need to be pairings period. If you get too stringent and picky everyone dies an old spinster and the town is dead.
I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all. Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with. If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc. Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships :P.
Motoki:
Quote from: pbox on 2009 July 14, 19:30:38
Actually, the gossip is one of the few things I can't complain about (too much) -- I have no comm lots in my game, hence no promotions, and whenever my sims gossip about something (as opposed to just "gossip", without popup), it'll be somehting real -- a birth, a death, or (a little too often for my taste) about Sim X being totally broke. Oh, and one sim peed herself at some point, they also gossiped about that. The only thing I haven't yet checked for is whether or not they actually gossip about something they know, or whether they're telepathic -- right now it would be hard to tell, since the town is so small (five households), it would hardly make sense for them to not know when someone has died.
I can live with 'telepathic gossip'. We don't see sims when they go to work so I figure they just overheard something from a coworker or something like that.
Quote
In a word, it seems to depend on what is actually happening -- if you want different gossip, you need to make different things happen. I don't know if it is possible to enable new "gossip-able" topics perhaps (perhaps when a relative has maxed a skill or something), or restrict some (in your case, promotions -- in my case, I might want to eliminate the constant "broke" whining at some point).
Well that's just it, I feel like I shouldn't have to make things happen for gossip. It should be things going on in the neighborhood in families other than mine. So if I keep getting the same types of gossip over and over again then it either means that the neighborhood is unbalanced and there's too much of one story action going on or that the gossip is not picking up all the actions going on that it could be.
Quote from: quetzilla on 2009 July 14, 19:41:55
I don't think straight up random relationships is a good idea at all. Best I can think of is semi-random based on who the sim knows and is friends with. If a sim doesn't know many viable partners then Awesome can sort of queue that sim up to be more likely to visit a community lot when your sims go there, or maybe even stop by your house to visit so that they DO meet people, etc. Rather than force sims into totally arbitrary relationships, arbitrarily force the sim to make semi-arbitrary relationships :P.
Well I would go with that except I don't think that sims are especially good at making friends and relationships on their own without player intervention. I guess you could go with coworkers or people who frequent the same types of places they do. *shrug* I don't think it can or should get too complicated though.
I'm honestly fine with a little Wizard of Oz magic behind the scenes I think some backstage sacrifices need to be made because you simply can't process a huge amount of actions for every single sim in the neighborhood on an constant basis. So if it involves making some instant friends or relationships for them, so be it. I mean heck as player if you get all the various charisma bonuses you are practically BFFs with someone as soon as you meet them so if a playable sim can do it then why not a nonplayable?
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