Story Mode
StormchaserOne:
Moondance we are onto something. You make it even more logical. That it was when they found they have Zombie Sims reading Rambo Part XXXVIII The Rambundo. So Story Progression was made for all those who read Rambundo to become a John Simbo.
And, you hit it right on, that is exactly what it is a random event generator. OOooooo Ahhhhh I'm a mental retard who loves Story Progression since it generates a stupid moronic event. And, EA knows you loves SIMs you will buy SIMs 3 and has a random event generator which was made by a mentally retarded EA Staff Member.
Enelen:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 July 16, 00:45:00
Quote from: tallinn on 2009 July 15, 17:55:34
Pescado, I did not understand your comment that the sims are not motivated to get jobs :-) If I start a new family one of their first wishes is always to get one. If I would have to create a concept how to micromanage sims by the PC I would follow the path created by the wishes that appear. Most often they make sense.
Yes, but here's the thing: While the wishes appear, sims do not, in any way, act upon their wishes, and simply hang around listlessly in Story Mode until forcibly dragooned into a random job by the job boss-and-coworker engine.
I know you have better things to work on, but I would dearly like a story progression where all they do is act on their wishes ;D Then I could make myself a coffee, sit out in the park with a wolfingrun (or equivalent), and watch. Would be fun. Sadly, I don't think that is moddable, though...
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 July 16, 00:45:00
2. A population that dies out simply fails the evolutionary test and will be replaced by new random immigrants. (The evolution simulation alone makes this interesting!)
The evolution simulation is pretty much the only thing TS3 has over TS2. And it doesn't work :(
Also, I know this is still not the requests forum, but I think random moving ins should be configurable on/off, so that if a population I created wants to die off despite my efforts and your storymode hack, then I would get a ghost town with empty houses I can use for my sims rather than random townies taking over and stealing the show... That is pretty much what EA gave us, no? I should be able to make a house and leave it empty so that it would lure my young sims in to create their own families, but now if I make a house, a townie will always move in at the next update. In fact, empty houses and empty beds/cribs could act as birth regulations: if I have living space and a loving couple, they will spawn kids. If the young adults have either space at home or an empty house, they will marry and move in together. With traits and a little randomness added in of course.
Then you could just drop the Awesome name and call is TS4 ::)
Kaliban:
Quote from: moondance on 2009 July 16, 05:00:42
That's about what I've been thinking. I think they threw in "story progression" at the last minute to try and cover the fact that their living, breathing town full of sims who lived their own lives was actually full of zombie sims who did nothing but sit on park benches and read about Raymundo all day. So they changed the release date and threw together a random event generator--calling it "story progression" to make it sound better. When they realized that their random event generator didn't do anything worthwhile, and the new release date was fast approaching, they said "screw it, our customers are stupid anyway," and threw in the ability for sims to clone themselves.
Ya know, I thought I was kidding when I wrote this, but it actually seems more reasonable than if they actually meant for it all to work the way it does.
It looks more like they spent much time "tuning" other aspects of the game play, at the active sim/household level, and ran out of time for developping the "neighborhood" gameplay/gameflow. It also looks like some decision takers thought the players didn't want any kind of story progression anyway, and would rather play TS3 as they played TS2, without using story. Sacrificing story design to respect the deadlines seemed not a big deal...
EA (and most of the industry) have problems understanding what building big games for a lot of customer means. They made a lot of work on "user content and creativity", but they still think they can produce a "one for all" game play, satisfying everyone - what TS2, Spore and TS3 showed is that, if you create a game that attracts a great number of layers, you HAVE to give the players way to personalize the game play itself, to easily configure each point of the game.
Back to the point. There are many ways to design a "story progression". Some players only want to have a "changing" neigborhood, where they can play without having to find jobs and lovers for everyone in the city. IndieStone does that well. Pescado has another approach, it is a good thing and will please other kinds of players.
The only problem is that as long as the highlander rule can't be cheated with, a player will not be able to take only what he wants from a modder. IndieStoneMod and AwesomeMod are not so much "mods" than different versions of the full game.
With TS2, the players could customize their gameplay by chosing the precise mods they wanted... At present time, gameplay customization on TS3 is just chosing between different "visions" of the game by different authors.
CheritaChen:
Quote from: Kaliban on 2009 July 16, 11:15:35
The only problem is that as long as the highlander rule can't be cheated with, a player will not be able to take only what he wants from a modder. IndieStoneMod and AwesomeMod are not so much "mods" than different versions of the full game.
With TS2, the players could customize their gameplay by chosing the precise mods they wanted... At present time, gameplay customization on TS3 is just chosing between different "visions" of the game by different authors.
The Highlander Rule is not something inherent to TS3, though. It's true of any software that if you throw multiple instances of how to handle situation XYZ at it, all of which have equal priority, the program is going to barf. Even with TS2 mods like default skin replacements, this was true.
A more accurate description of the issue is that each modder (of the major mods we're discussing) has tackled so many different pieces of code that they were bound to have at least one or two overlapping. People keep requesting new functions and fixes to be added to AM, and Pescado obliges where he can. Each one of those additional core changes is a potential conflict with something else done by another modder. If you want to have more a la carte selection for which mods you use, you're going to have to either persuade el Presidente to modularize his fixes, wait until someone else does it for you, or learn to do it yourself.
I don't really see a problem with having a Packages folder full of single-function mods. You just better make sure they're very descriptively named.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: CheritaChen on 2009 July 16, 11:56:42
A more accurate description of the issue is that each modder (of the major mods we're discussing) has tackled so many different pieces of code that they were bound to have at least one or two overlapping. People keep requesting new functions and fixes to be added to AM, and Pescado obliges where he can. Each one of those additional core changes is a potential conflict with something else done by another modder. If you want to have more a la carte selection for which mods you use, you're going to have to either persuade el Presidente to modularize his fixes, wait until someone else does it for you, or learn to do it yourself.
Actually, the underlying problem is imposed by the structure of TS3. Like in TS2, a given resource by TGI must be overridden in its entireity. However, in TS2, there were many resources, all distinct: A given modification required only that you override a small set of BHAVs, possibly only one, out of tens of thousands. An analogous situation exists in TS3, except that there are only about 3 BHAVs, and they are frequently interlinked. There are also many modifications in TS2 which could be performed by modifying only BCONs, which in TS3, are analogous to the many XML mods. While not as numerous as TS2 BCONs, XML tunings are still many and frequently seperate, so the potential for conflict is not quite as glaring here.
Quote from: CheritaChen on 2009 July 16, 11:56:42
I don't really see a problem with having a Packages folder full of single-function mods. You just better make sure they're very descriptively named.
The problem is that because there are only the equivalent of about 3 BHAVs, any change to the game essentially modifies these. Since a resource must be overridden in its entireity, this means that even a "minor" core mod is still a full core mod, and cannot be made compatible with another core mod. XML mods, are, of course, compatible with most things, except in cases where AwesomeMod has specifically also commandeered an XML tuning, such as Socializing/Careers/Traits.
Some research has been performed into improving the compatibility of core mods, but so far the requirements of those methods require that the core mods be assembled in a non-plug-and-play format that requires the user to assemble his own custom core mod from components, and furthermore, subjects the creator of the modifications to a number of constraints which are not suitable for advanced modification methods. As these present limitations are simply not acceptable for the purposes of AwesomeMod, we have not adopted this strategy at this time.
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