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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 10:30 AM
I think I've discovered why EA Story Progression has gotten worse.
Firstly, before I get onto the topic at hand, greetings! I'm not quite one for introduction topics, but I'm a long time lurker and, frustrated with my computer not being able to handle Twallan's StoryProgression mod I've been looking at modding the EA Story Progression and I've discovered something I think may be of note.

I'm quite new to Sims 3 modding, but I have experience with XML in general (from games such as Civilization IV) and I'm an experienced game developer, so I recently started playing around with the XML scripts that control EA's Story Progression, intending to try and make it a little more likely to actually force townies to have kids and get married instead of simply moving in new families to populate my town.

As some of you probably know, EA Story Progression has gotten gradually weaker since the game's inception: it used to have no problem randomly spawning babies, for example, but some time around the Pets patch (at least, this is when I noticed) it got toned down considerably. Townies now seem to only reproduce very randomly and relationships never seem to progress beyond Romantic Interest.

As far as I can tell, the main XML that handles EA's Story mode is the Demographics.xml. This section in particular seems to contain all the functions related to handling the town's population:

Code:
[<Actions>
  <Name>Create Household</Name>
  <Multiplier>1.5</Multiplier>
  <Category>1</Category>
  <Delay_Min>1</Delay_Min>
  <Delay_Max>2.5</Delay_Max>
 </Actions>
<Actions>
  <Name>Create and Move In</Name>
  <Multiplier>2</Multiplier>
  <Category>1</Category>
 </Actions>
<Actions>
  <Name>Emigrate Household</Name>
  <Multiplier>1.5</Multiplier>
  <Category>1</Category>
 </Actions>
<Actions>
  <Name>Have Baby</Name>
  <Multiplier>2</Multiplier>
  <Category>2</Category>
 </Actions>
<Actions>
  <Name>Add Sim</Name>
  <Multiplier>3</Multiplier>
  <Category>2</Category>
 </Actions>
<Actions>
  <Name>Kill Sim</Name>
  <Multiplier>1.5</Multiplier>
  <Category>2</Category>
 </Actions>


Of most interest to me is the <multiplier> value. This seems to determine how often the game fires that action, as for the purposes of an experiment I changed the Emigrate Household's multiplier to 0 and, lo and behold, this actually disabled the emigrations -- I haven't had a family move out of the town since. Following this logic, it seems that one could simply increase the multiplier of the Have Baby function while decreasing (or disabling outright) the Add Sim and Create Household functions and the story mode would be more inclined to generate babies instead of moving new families into town when it needs a population booster.

That's all pretty simple, but increasing the multiplier doesn't seem to lead to more babies in town, at least in the few weeks or so I've played my test game. Here's the reason I think this may be: there is actually a limit in place that prevents the game running more than a certain number of story actions each day. Considering the Demographics.xml is now bloated with heaps of EP actions (such as AddAcademicsDegree and all of the functions that handle occult, pet and celebrity growth), it's far less likely that the game will actually select the Have Baby function due to the sheer number of other actions available. I'm thinking that perhaps removing such superflouous actions from the code might be an effective way to make EA Story Progression a little more effective (mainly for those who, like me, are on weaker computers and experience lag with Twallan's mod).

What does everyone think?
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 1:28 PM
It may have been turned down because of how much stuff is required to be calculated as time went on. Many of the EPs added some kind of "baggage" that forced the game to give all Sims something random - Astrology, Outerwear, Degrees, Pets (household and world), ect., as well as paparazzi, tourists, worker NPCs, Sims who live in apartments, etc. Also, many players are generally unhappy with the system, so they could have altered the files to attempt to please the masses, but nothing really worked out well for EA.

And are you the same Dark Gaia who made those RPG Maker horror games? I love those.

->> Check Out Checkout: Journey To Employee Of The Month! <<-

~ Just a click a day is nothing short of helpful! ~
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 1:58 PM
Why, yes I am

Anyway, that's what I was thinking -- the EPs just added a bunch of bloat to the scripts, basically making them less effective at the original Story Progression functions. What I'm kinda working on is trying to find a way to cut some of that bloat back out, somehow disabling or removing the functions that assign things like Pets, celebrity levels, social groups from UNI (yes, there are no less than SIX functions for these that are active in the XML) so that it focuses on population control once more. Don't get me wrong -- I've played for years with Twallan's, but the last few EPs have made my computer struggle. It seems to play silky smooth with EA's craptastic Story Progression though. It's a shame I can't seem to get it to at least make the single parent clone babies like it used to -- they're still vastly superior to just moving a new family in.

I've been testing with Awesomemod's InformOnStoryAction debug feature on (this gives a notification each time the SP does an action) and the progression does actually still seem to be in the game. At 1am every night, anywhere between 2 and 10 or so notifications pop up, but they're all for non-population related actions like Move Out Household or Raise Celebrity Level. On one night, I had it add academic degrees to like 20 different Sims. So it definitely seems to actually be working -- it just won't choose the right actions (which are still in the XMLs, so they can't have been removed or anything, can they?)

EDIT: Thinking about it, I can trace the "toning down" back to one of the older patchs -- 1.29 or one of the 1.3 ones. There was one where EA said they "fixed" Story Progression. Unfortunately, it seems they addressed everybody's complaints by making it so that it barely does anything at all.
Mad Poster
#4 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 2:07 PM
It could be a conflict of interest between the mod and the game. Like the game trying to force something, but the mod doing something else entirely. That, and mods generally increase loading times. We were told by a developer a short while ago that the engine for the game is pretty old (I think from 2005), so the engine takes a lot of abuse. That fact that it's still being put through trials almost a decade later is something to be shocked about. There's only so much it can handle, and if cutting/limiting certain functions was their answer, they have good reason.

->> Check Out Checkout: Journey To Employee Of The Month! <<-

~ Just a click a day is nothing short of helpful! ~
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#5 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 2:15 PM
You're not wrong there. Though I have a suspicion that the reason these functions were cut was to try and address everybody's complaints about how their families would get married or have kids without their input. It IS a very old, badly optimised engine (I remember reading somewhere that it even has code from Spore in it), but I do remember it running just as well as it does today with these functions intact. It's just interesting to me to see if there's a way of salvaging it. They still use the same XML to run SP functions that were introduced as late as the UNI pack, so there must be some way to force it to run the older Base Game ones too.

Or more likely, knowing EA, they actually cut those features out of the engine and left the tags there in the XML, which don't do anything. I think I'll set the multiplier of every function except Have Baby to zero -- just as an experiment -- and see if it will run it if it's the only possible action it can run.
Top Secret Researcher
#6 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 3:36 PM
Interesting discussion. Please, I would love to hear how the experiment goes. Since I'm a software and programming illiterate, it is news to me that one can actually modify the actual Story progression files, apparently without destroying it. Apologies if I said something incredibly dense just now. This is all Greek to me.
Alchemist
#7 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 8:42 PM
I can't live without Story Progression.
At first I did until a friend told me that without Story Progression the whole town will die out after a while.
After installing it I asked myself how I could have been living without it before I installed it.
It feels like NOW FINALLY people carry on with their lives and get children and etc.
Top Secret Researcher
#8 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 9:51 PM
Interesting point, simis bachelor turned into a vampire, aged up whilst I was not playing with him. It seems strange how when I leave other Sims to there own devises they seem to become zombies or die or breed pets.

"I know, and it breaks my heart to do it, but we must remain vigilant. If you cannot tell me another way, do not brand me a tyrant!" - knight commander Meredith (dragon age 2)

My sims stories: Witch queen
Nocturnal Dawn
Mad Poster
#9 Old 8th Sep 2013 at 10:22 PM
@ Dark Gaia: What you are writing is nothing new, it's been known for a long long time; at least by people in the know. These Demographics XMLs have also been modded for a long time, here for example:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=424796
I am not the only person to have modded these either, others have done it; although my mods on this are probably the most well known.

I think the situation with the SP getting "weaker" over time is because of all the extra choices being added in as you have said, there are 3 or 4 times as many choices as in 2009, so it will take three times longer (just approximate) before the dice will roll one specific choice, for example Have Baby.

It may be that there is an incredibly easy-peasy way to heat up the EA SP through this other XML, called Demographics_0x0blahblah. In this XML it says this, among other stuff:

<kNumDemographicDraws value="10">
<!--Range: [1, Infinity] The number of times we select a demographic to improve-->
<kNumActionsPerDemographic value="8">
<!--Range: [1, Infinity] The number of actions we consider per demographic-->

The SP makes it's choices at 1am every night, rolling the dice for the following day (or this current day which started now at 1am, or however this should be stated). Those 10 demographic draws can probably simply be increased to 20 or 30 or whatever, and the SP will be forced to consider changing 30 different things instead of 10, heating it up. I believe this 10 number they are using functions like a maximum though, I believe it can fail, and the dice roll doesn't go through; leaving you with 3 changes some nights, for example. I haven't actually tried altering this XML here, as I frankly don't give a darn about this issue and no one has aver asked me about it directly that I can recall. So if it does indeed work the way I presume, I can't know for sure.

MedievalMods and Sims3mods: Dive Cave Reset Fix, Resort Revamp, Industrial Oven Revamp, Will O' Wisp fix, UI Sounds Disabled, No Cars, Gnome Family Planner, Townies Out on the Town, No Martial Arts Clothes, Fast Skilling, etc. http://simsasylum.com/tfm/
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#10 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 2:43 AM
@Shimrod: While looking around yesterday, I actually noticed your mods. So yes, it seems this is nothing new. However, I'm still interested in modding things just to see if speeding things up is indeed possible. I have noticed so far that disabling many of the superfluous actions added in EPs does seem to increase the chance that one of the more desirable ones will be chosen -- disabling all of them except for Have Baby does seem to force it to choose that. However, as a consequence, the SP fires far less often, only choosing that one action once a week or so, instead of once per night.

This is where I think the XML you mentioned may come into play (by the way, which game package may I find it in? I can't seem to locate it in Gameplaydata.xml). I'll try upping that number and see what happens. There's also another XML contained within the Gameplaydata.package which includes this chunk of code:

Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<base>
  <Current_Tuning>
    <kActionsMin value="12">
      <!--Minimum story progression actions in a day-->
    </kActionsMin>
    <kActionsMax value="24">
      <!--Maximum story progression actions in a day-->
    </kActionsMax>
    <kDropActionsXPercentOfMaxScore value="0.01">
      <!--If the score of an action is < max score times this amount, we will drop it-->
    </kDropActionsXPercentOfMaxScore>
    <kTravellingTargetError value="3">
      <!--Target error level to stop story progression on travelling-->
    </kTravellingTargetError>
    <kTravellingMaxActions value="96">
      <!--Max actions to do during travelling fixup-->
    </kTravellingMaxActions>
  </Current_Tuning>
</base>


This looks like the code that determines if a given action will "fail" or not. I don't know exactly how the DropActionsXPercentOfMaxScore value is calculated, but it does seem to be the responsible function.

Basically, my goal is to try and improve the EA story mode at least to the point where it will conduct the bare neccesary progression on the town: force other Sims to have jobs and make them have babies. This would be a great alternative for those who can't run Twallan's.

@ZenGarden: There seem to be no less than TWELVE functions in the XML that handle pets and occult status. Meanwhile, there's only one Have Baby. This is probably why all it seems to do these days is make your Sims into vampires or give them new pets It simply won't choose the more desirable ones because the sheer number of other possible actions makes this far less possible than it used to be.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#11 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 9:33 AM
Time for a little update!

I've been playing around with the Demographics XMLs all day (in addition to the additional scripts highlighted by Shimrod above) and so far, things appear to be positive. By reducing the number of possible Story Progression actions to perform (setting the multiplier value of unwanted actions to 0) while increasing the multiplier of desirable actions, I've made the game more likely to fire actions that actually progress the town beyond simply moving in new families. So far, after testing for two Sim weeks, it's fired the Have Baby action twice, and the newspaper has reported a healthy number of weddings.

Increasing the values that Shimrod alerted me to definitely seems to help as well, as it increases the "speed" of the progression by upping the maximum number of actions it'll consider each night. While this has led to an improvement, I still need to isolate the code that causes actions to fail after being chosen and tweak it to not fail as often, as several nights still passed without any story actions running at all.

For the moment though, I seem to have somewhat restored the EA progression to how it used to be circa 2009: it performs a very superficial progression on the town, marrying townies at random and prompting them to have kids when it needs to boost the population. If these functions can be tweaked to occur more often, and undesirable actions (such as emigrating families, killing Sims or spamming pets/occults) can be completely disabled, the EA progression can actually become a viable option for keeping your town alive.

It's nowhere near as deep as Twallan's progression, and not as logical as Awesomemods, but it'll allow people who just want townies to have jobs, get married and have kids to be able to have a (somewhat) effective story progression system.

EDIT: Upon second inspection, there still seems to be some element that determines which actions run beyond simply rolling a dice. For example, making Have Baby the only possible action did not guarantee it would be run; instead, the game simply went several nights without doing anything, only actually running the action when it NEEDED to boost the town's population. As such, it's likely there's some check in place somewhere that determines which category of actions to run based on how many Sims exist in the town.
Mad Poster
#12 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 10:58 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Dark Gaia
Upon second inspection, there still seems to be some element that determines which actions run beyond simply rolling a dice. For example, making Have Baby the only possible action did not guarantee it would be run; instead, the game simply went several nights without doing anything, only actually running the action when it NEEDED to boost the town's population. As such, it's likely there's some check in place somewhere that determines which category of actions to run based on how many Sims exist in the town.


I think that's simply handled further down in the Demographics XMLs, like this bit here:

<Population_Density>
<Density>0</Density>
<Utility>0</Utility>
<Importance>3</Importance>
<Increase>Create and Move In</Increase>
</Population_Density>
<Population_Density>
<Density>0.2</Density>
<Utility>0.05</Utility>
<Increase>Create Household</Increase>
</Population_Density>
<Population_Density>
<Density>0.4</Density>
<Utility>0.1</Utility>
<Increase>Have Baby</Increase>
</Population_Density>

If the population Density is so and so much; then the Utility chance is so and so much, of making that Create Household happen or the Have Baby or whichever is written in there.

MedievalMods and Sims3mods: Dive Cave Reset Fix, Resort Revamp, Industrial Oven Revamp, Will O' Wisp fix, UI Sounds Disabled, No Cars, Gnome Family Planner, Townies Out on the Town, No Martial Arts Clothes, Fast Skilling, etc. http://simsasylum.com/tfm/
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#13 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 11:30 AM
Hmm, so it is. I don't have much of a head for math so I didn't mess with that for fear of screwing everything up, but I'll play around and see what I can accomplish
Forum Resident
#14 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 6:14 PM
Wow this is something I'm VERY interested in, I think you like your SP to run the way I wish mine would... I just want to be able to play a legacy style game with sims getting married and having babies on there own... And although Twallan's Story progression is great, I don't use it anymore because my game lags so much... Plus more interesting things happen on it's own without the heavy mods in my game... So when you're finished with your project I wouldn't mind helping you test it.... Just let me know!!!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#15 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 10:42 PM
@Simsdestroyer: I'm exactly like you, it seems: all I want is to play a legacy and see the other families in town progressing along with me. There doesn't have to be any logic or reason (my imagination can help fill in the "story" for the seemingly random toadings the SP does), I just wanted to see them at least SEEM to be living their lives in the background of my game. I like Twallan's mod, but it lags my game out far too much (which is strange because I'm running 8GB of RAM and a quad core processor). I also use Awesomemod in my game, but I find its built in Story Mode to be a little too slow and prone to break down unless you set your town up exactly right. I generally like the randomness of the EA standard (the deaths, for example, make the game seem more realistic to me -- if they were toned down a little), but EA basically bloated it up so much that it doesn't work at all how it used to.

I'm currently testing the project with my main legacy to see what happens. I have noticed that the number of marriages and births reported in the newspaper is considerably more than they were before I tweaked the XMLs (which was none) and it seems to basically do what I want it to do: force Sims to have kids and occasionally marry them to one another. Since there seems to be some interest in it, I'll probably release it here on MTS, but I'll need to work on it some more before I do that. My game is still sitting at 1.50 and so I'll need to look at the 1.55 XMLs and make sure it still works fine before I offer it for download.
Mad Poster
#16 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 11:05 PM
I've always wanted an "In Between" Story Progression i.e. EA's in its current state seems to be dead and too much is happening with Twallan's and my game lags when Twallan's SP is making its decisions. Removing some of the SP modules helps a little, but there are times when I get major lag.
Mad Poster
#17 Old 9th Sep 2013 at 11:27 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Dark Gaia
My game is still sitting at 1.50 and so I'll need to look at the 1.55 XMLs and make sure it still works fine before I offer it for download.


The Demographics XMLs were all changed with the 1.55 patch, so these XMLs from the 1.50 game will not be OK with the 1.55 and beyond.

MedievalMods and Sims3mods: Dive Cave Reset Fix, Resort Revamp, Industrial Oven Revamp, Will O' Wisp fix, UI Sounds Disabled, No Cars, Gnome Family Planner, Townies Out on the Town, No Martial Arts Clothes, Fast Skilling, etc. http://simsasylum.com/tfm/
Top Secret Researcher
#18 Old 10th Sep 2013 at 2:03 AM
I'd love to test but I can't play at the moment since my Sims3 computer is in storage until at least October. But I am very interested in the results. I don't have an issue with Twallan's SP, but right now it's so huge that I have lost all sense of whether it actually does with I think it does when I change settings.
Something like this, while not optimal, sounds like a viable alternative. At least for some game styles.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#19 Old 10th Sep 2013 at 7:32 AM
@Shimrod101: My girlfriend recently patched her game up to 1.57 so I'll compare her XMLs with mine and update as necessary
Eminence Grise
#20 Old 11th Sep 2013 at 3:17 AM
Moved to modding discussion, since that's what this is
Lab Assistant
#21 Old 21st May 2016 at 5:12 PM Last edited by Kagamine Rin : 21st May 2016 at 5:27 PM. Reason: addition
Default This is an old thread, but I need your help now!
Hello, It´s me! (I hope you don´t think I´m weird or stupid after my last thread...)
Anyway, nevermind that!
I don´t know if you have read my PM sent to you DarkGaia and Shimrod101?
If you are reading this, can you please, please help me?
But of course, if someone with the same reflections can help me I be fine too!
It´s about this subject about Story Progression you know...
This might sound toughly(translated from Google Translate),but as you may know at this point my Sims 3 town never ever progress!
No romantic interests, no marriages, no pregnancies and no babies!
The absolutely most important things that should happen in a The Sims 3 game!
Just some ugly sims with same face shape are moving in sometimes!
Vampires, Mermaids and (Stray) Pets still progress in my town.
After reading your brilliant reflections about this I want to fix this too!
I think it has to do with all the EP´s added to the game+the game patches.
How did you do it?
I would love you if you tell me!
I know I also can eventually fix it with a tuning mod with S3PE, but how exactly should I do?
I have tried but no luck!
Well, the things I want turned off worked fine.
But not the other things.
And I don´t understand about density and utility, how does that work?
Thank you in advanced!
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