Some musings about walkstyle overrides and run flags

Triplis

I think this is the first topic I'll make that's meant as an actual "technical discussion," not so much an "asking for help" thread lol.

Basically, I've been learning a bit more about how the commands work for prioritizing one walkstyle over another and run flags and all that. In doing so, I realized something fairly important I'd been missing before: As far as I can tell, interactions themselves don't actually support commands like walkstyle_behavior_override. At first, I thought maybe I was just missing it in the files, but the python code seems to confirm this; it shows up as part of buff commands, but not interaction commands.

I wonder now if this has a technical reason beyond just the command not existing?

It seems like it'd be a useful command to have. For example, with most ages, the Run walkstyle will only override Jog for very long distances if run is *not* allowed outdoors. So it seems if we want a sim to use the Run walkstyle no matter the distance, that requires first adding a buff that contains a behavior override and removes the run flag that allows run to happen outdoors (this seems to be true in my testing anyway... Jog is the overriding default for long distances on Child or older, so the Run walkstyle gets treated as overriding the "walk" style, *not* the "run" style).

So say I wanted to make a toggle that makes it so that the sim always uses the "Run" walkstyle; should be doable because the toggle will add an ongoing buff that affects run flags. But an interaction similar to Jog Here doesn't seem doable in the same way; without the buff and the run flags command, it will default to Jog over super long distances. I tried using basic_extras to have a buff added as part of the interaction, but that didn't work. I'm guessing that the walkstyle decisions are made at the beginning of the interaction, not on an ongoing basis as it runs. (It's also possible the basic_extras buff simply takes too long to register... I'm not sure it gets added instantaneously.)

But if this is the case, perhaps it's why a command like run_flags for interactions doesn't exist. Maybe having a command like that in the interaction itself wouldn't get prioritized properly somehow? Or maybe there was just never a need for it. But it seems like it would make the potential for walkstyles specific to interactions more robust.

Or I could be missing alternate approaches that cover this. *shrug* You never quite know with modding.