Sims 3 Motive Decay Project- WIP Looking for feedback and input.
Claeric:
I am working on a mod to alter the way the game works with Decay rates. As it is, the game is just too easy for me. This is my main problem with it. Your sim can eat one apple and be good for two days, for example. Motives drop too slowly and fill too quickly and there's no reason to improve any of your furniture or even pay attention to your sim.
So to start, I'm messing with decay rates.
By default, decay rates GO SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER the lower a motive is. From -100 to -81, the hunger motive drops at less than 1 per hour. But from 100 to -31, it drops at almost 12 per hour. What this means is that a "starving" sim can "starve" for over 20 hours before they die. This is closer to realism, but it's also totally destroying the whole "gameplay" thing that, yes, is hidden in the game behind all the immortal sims who are fully satisfied from a damn apple.
In my initial test I made hunger drop at a constant rate. That way, when your sim was at 0 hunger, they were absolutely halfway to starving instead of 40 hours away from starving. In this experiment, it took 16 hours for my sim to go from 100 hunger to starving to death. That was with a decay rate of 12 per hour. So I need to make the rate a little faster if I want sims to have to eat more than once per day.
The thing is, should the decay rate be constant? Or should it slow the higher the motive is? Meaning if a sim eats food, and becomes full, they stay full for a while- perhaps with a decay rate of 10 from 100 to 60. Then when their motive is below 60, it goes to full speed (20, perhaps? That means 8 hours until starvation), meaning the more often you eat the less often you have low hunger motives. I'd also probably make negative hunger motives show up earlier so that you are encouraged to keep your hunger full and not let it go below the halfway mark.
I guess what I'm saying with all this explanation is I need ideas. In a harder more sims-1-style game, how would YOU like the motives to work? Constant rate? Slower when full? Negative moodlets showing up earlier? What do you think of these ideas?
Here is my test file which changes nothing but the Hunger and bladder decay rates to be constant (for all ages including baby, toddler, and elder, though the rates are different for them). Hunger drops at 12 per hour and bladder at 15. Hovering over the motives with AM installed tells you the current number and the rate of drop. This is to get a feel for how much faster the motive drops when it doesn't slow down.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1xfcl1345ckghg5
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:22:27
By default, decay rates GO SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER the lower a motive is. From -100 to -81, the hunger motive drops at less than 1 per hour.
That is how things worked in TS2, too. Sims take significantly longer to drop dead from starvation than they took to get to starving in the first place because...
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:22:27
This is closer to realism
Because yes, STARVING TO DEATH IN 16 HOURS IS RETARDED.
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:22:27
In my initial test I made hunger drop at a constant rate. That way, when your sim was at 0 hunger, they were absolutely halfway to starving instead of 40 hours away from starving. In this experiment, it took 16 hours for my sim to go from 100 hunger to starving to death. That was with a decay rate of 12 per hour. So I need to make the rate a little faster if I want sims to have to eat more than once per day.
Why *SHOULD* they eat more than once per day? That's way too often as it is! I, myself, only eat maybe every other day or so. No wonder Americans are so fat.
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:22:27
The thing is, should the decay rate be constant? Or should it slow the higher the motive is?
Hunger is FINE. If anything, sims still are overly obsessed by food. Really, the motive decay is fine. It's either fairly close to TS2-standards, or in some cases, slightly worse.
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:22:27
Here is my test file which changes nothing but the Hunger and bladder decay rates to be constant (for all ages including baby, toddler, and elder, though the rates are different for them). Hunger drops at 12 per hour and bladder at 15.
Bladder drops fast enough as it is. If you look at the numbers, sims last 15 hours before they piss themselves. That's actually worse than it was in TS2 by a small margin. If you make it much higher, a sim would be unable to withstand even a standard plane trip without pissing itself. Maybe some people have that problem, but I'm sure it's not the norm.
Really, the difficulty was NEVER WITH THE MOTIVES IN THE FIRST PLACE. For anyone who isn't a child, managing to stay alive is not really an achievement and shouldn't be. The reason the game is easy is because it's too easy to "succeed" rather than "fail", and failure at life means more than simply pissing yourself, which, unless you have the incontinent trait, is easy enough even for Celestard to avoid.
Claeric:
Yes, and making motives drop faster makes it harder to succeed.
This is how Sims 1 was. I went back to Sims 1 after getting frustrated with Sims 3 being far too easy, and realized the reason it was too easy is because of the motives. in Sims 1, you spend so much time managing motives that you rarely get a chance to work on skills (Although that was more because cheaper objects took forever to raise the motives, and less because of how fast they dropped, but I can't go through every single object and change these things.) If you have a job, it's even worse. You really NEED to buy better stuff to have an easier time. But in Sims 3, motives can all be filled in a very short time and then you have the rest of the day to make 10,000 simoleons with no troubles whatsoever.
So I'm trying to make things drop faster so you have to spend more time dealing with motives. I don't want my sims to be able to stand and fish at the river for 15 hours straight before they finally have enough bad moodlets that they refuse to do it anymore.
Jeebus:
Quote from: Claeric on 2011 March 23, 23:35:58
Yes, and making motives drop faster makes it harder to succeed.
This is how Sims 1 was. I went back to Sims 1 after getting frustrated with Sims 3 being far too easy, and realized the reason it was too easy is because of the motives. in Sims 1, you spend so much time managing motives that you rarely get a chance to work on skills (Although that was more because cheaper objects took forever to raise the motives, and less because of how fast they dropped, but I can't go through every single object and change these things.) If you have a job, it's even worse. You really NEED to buy better stuff to have an easier time. But in Sims 3, motives can all be filled in a very short time and then you have the rest of the day to make 10,000 simoleons with no troubles whatsoever.
So I'm trying to make things drop faster so you have to spend more time dealing with motives. I don't want my sims to be able to stand and fish at the river for 15 hours straight before they finally have enough bad moodlets that they refuse to do it anymore.
Yes, but TS1 had no aging, so you had all the time in the world to skill, stupid shouty vole.
Claeric:
I don't know what I said that made it seem like I don't know that.
The goal here is to make it so that sims can't be level 10 of all skills and get to level 10 of 4 jobs and have a megamansion with one lifetime. The goal is to make it so sims can't constantly grind for skills and simoleons with 2 hour breaks to boost motives when they aren't sleeping. I thought some people may be interested. If you are not, I do not really...care.
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