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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 7:10 PM Last edited by Candyd : 28th Mar 2017 at 7:40 PM.
Default Modding autonomy scores
I'm currently working on a mod that would essentially restrict some interactions to combinations of specific emotions and traits. The purpose here isn't to disable autonomy but to mod scores so, for example, a goofball sim in a playful mood is more likely to use a funny introduction, a mean sim in an angry mood is more likely to use a rude introduction, and most sims will by far prefer the friendly introduction if they don't have the appropriate mood or traits. I'm choosing this as an example. I've changed scores for other interactions and it works great.
So, I was quoting the above example because I was modding the funny introduction file and wanted to test new scores. Here I didn't mod the base score, only the mood preference and trait preference. To check that it was working fine, I decided to use a score of -155 for the uncomfortable mood so that it should act like blacklisted. I know I can disallow a mood, but this isn't the final purpose, as in the end, I don't want to blacklist a mood but make the interaction unlikely but not impossible with the mood, so I made this just for the purpose of checking that the game took my new scores into account. And I was baffled to see my sim in an uncomfortable mood still using the funny introduction. Same thing with the rude introduction. No matter what scores I mod, sims still use any kind of introduction indifferently, whatever their mood and traits are (and I've tested with all types of introduction with modded scores together, so that the game can take all scores for all types of introduction into account at the same time). I wonder what I'm doing wrong here.

E882D22F!00000000!0000000000006642.mixer_social_FunnyIntroduction_greetings.InteractionTuning
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Lab Assistant
#2 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 7:26 PM
An interesting experiment. I don't have anything greatly insightful to add, as I haven't really messed with autonomy scores yet and don't understand most of it.

I'm curious where you got the number -155 from? Perhaps the mood preference isn't weighted very much against overall autonomy pull, or the number is off somehow. The only thing I've really encountered about autonomy so far that makes clear sense to me is the "false advertisements" and they seem to be weighted pretty powerfully if the values are high.

♫ Improvising into a corner ♫
♫ No rhyme or rhythm in this verse cause I'm in a corner ♫
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 7:38 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CardTaken
I'm curious where you got the number -155 from?

-155 is the score used in mood preferences when an emotion should prevent an autonomous interaction from happening. I've seen it used hundreds of times in files, and not going any lower than this. So I use the same score when I want the same result.
Lab Assistant
#4 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 7:54 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Candyd
-155 is the score used in mood preferences when an emotion should prevent an autonomous interaction from happening. I've seen it used hundreds of times in files, and not going any lower than this. So I use the same score when I want the same result.

Odd. It sounds like it's not a hard-prevent though, like disallow, more of a soft-prevent? So maybe there is something else lurking somewhere that is affecting the autonomy of introduction types in particular and is effectively overriding the mood preference.

♫ Improvising into a corner ♫
♫ No rhyme or rhythm in this verse cause I'm in a corner ♫
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#5 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 8:27 PM
Yes, exactly. It's not something as strict as disallowing a mood, but into practice with a score like this the effect should look the same. It might be something hidden in another file indeed, as I've noticed that introductions have no mood preference, which I find weird as most social interactions have various scores in mood preferences. But as sims don't show a preference between kinds of introductions to use, I just wondered if developers skipped this part.
Maybe it's because the interaction starts as chatting, I wonder if it triggers a random choice. I'm currently trying to find if it's the case.
Lab Assistant
#6 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 9:23 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Candyd
Yes, exactly. It's not something as strict as disallowing a mood, but into practice with a score like this the effect should look the same. It might be something hidden in another file indeed, as I've noticed that introductions have no mood preference, which I find weird as most social interactions have various scores in mood preferences. But as sims don't show a preference between kinds of introductions to use, I just wondered if developers skipped this part.
Maybe it's because the interaction starts as chatting, I wonder if it triggers a random choice. I'm currently trying to find if it's the case.

Interesting. Very well could be some kind of random choice.

Could be there's something in the scripting that overrides it, though I have no idea where to look if so. I ran into something like that with a mod, where I thought sure it would show up in the XML and it turned out it was being done in the scripts.

♫ Improvising into a corner ♫
♫ No rhyme or rhythm in this verse cause I'm in a corner ♫
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#7 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 9:59 PM
It might be. For the moment I haven't found anything that I think could fix the issue. I'm now reduced to disallowing moods and blacklisting traits, but I know it won't be what I need for some other interactions (I haven't checked all files yet) and if they don't take scores into account, I don't know what I'm going to do, because completely disabling / completely allowing autonomy won't do what I wish to create, it's not flexible enough... At least as long as I don't have better knowledge of Python, so I won't have the possibility to make scripting mods immediately...
Thanks for your help anyway !
Lab Assistant
#8 Old 28th Mar 2017 at 10:37 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Candyd
It might be. For the moment I haven't found anything that I think could fix the issue. I'm now reduced to disallowing moods and blacklisting traits, but I know it won't be what I need for some other interactions (I haven't checked all files yet) and if they don't take scores into account, I don't know what I'm going to do, because completely disabling / completely allowing autonomy won't do what I wish to create, it's not flexible enough... At least as long as I don't have better knowledge of Python, so I won't have the possibility to make scripting mods immediately...
Thanks for your help anyway !

I think I see what you're saying about flexibility. You'd rather not disallow the interactions entirely... only disallow them through autonomy in select circumstances, but leave the player choice to do it manually? I'm in the kiddie pool when it comes to scripting this game myself, but I do wonder if it would be possible to use a script to change whether an interaction is set to "allow_autonomous", based on something like mood. I'm guessing the XML toggle "allow_autonomous" is built in the scripts as a hard setting, so it's probably not something that can be flipped through XML outside of the initial call to it in the body of the XML file, but you never know. Could be a dead end theory thing for all I know though... I get a lot of those when working out mod stuff lol.

And no problem. I hope you can get it figured out!

♫ Improvising into a corner ♫
♫ No rhyme or rhythm in this verse cause I'm in a corner ♫
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#9 Old 29th Mar 2017 at 12:08 AM
Actually, what I wish to do is even more flexible than this. I'm trying here to keep enough autonomy in restricted circumstances, and even a trace of autonomy in all circumstances. For a specific example, a good sim will only yell at another sim when angry, but less often than other angry sims ; and when not angry, a good sim will almost never yell at others... Almost. I don't wish to totally eliminate the element of surprise, because it's fun and it does happen IRL. It makes probabilities in Gaussian curves rather than black and white behaviors for all possible settings. This is something I did with another part of the project which was about other social interactions, I started modding exclusively scores instead of enabling and disabling stuff, and I must say it's pretty awesome because it has more natural results on behavior than just disabling autonomy, even for specific traits and emotions, as it's the only way to directly influence frequency of interactions.
I'll post here later if I find a solution to the current issue. And I hope you manage to find answers to your questions in scripts I'd like to start script modding one day too, if I have enough time in the future.
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