... How do we go through doorways? Do we have to let go, go through, and then start holding hands again? ...
That's what me and my girlfriend do.
I just wanted to say, your answers to these questions are really fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
I am so glad to have the opportunity to discuss these things directly with you. Keep asking and i'll keep answering for as long as I can. I am pleased that we have managed to cover some good ground as we work through these questions - I am trying to take the time to explain the underlying systems instead of just answering the question and moving on. Hopefully I don't go overboard with detail too much :P
Oh and about that cooking thing, will that be considered a bug in the system?
I will make sure this gets entered into our bug database.
Just got word from our AI engineer that this (Sims getting food while someone is already making a group meal) has already been fixed and should come out in a patch sometime in the future!
Speaking of the broadcaster system - do you think you could increase family reactions - especially a dads when a new baby is being born. The dads I have seen in the game act like nothing at all is happening as his wife is in full labor and giving birth. Even in the animal world - animals have more of a reaction than dads and sibblings or grandparents are showing in the Sims 4. So I think the broadcaster needs kicked up a notch for births and also deaths. Most of my sims in a household just keep on doing what ever while someone in their family dies or gives birth as if it was nothing special. Life and death in real life is always tramatic so I think it really could use a bit of tuning up when it involves Sims in your own family and especially sims you are married to or related to. I do see life and death as extremes in an emotional robust game that needs a bit more dignity and acknowledgement if at all possible. I find myself getting stressed even because there is no emotional interplay at all.
In previous sims games sims went over the top - and not just relatives so I can see turning it down for other sims not in the household and not related but geez shouldn't a dad be a little bit excited he's about to be a dad?
On that same note it would be nice to have back the reaction when the child is born for the mom to be able to show the baby to dad and other family members and perhaps hand the baby to the dad or grandparent to cuddle and hold. These may be little things but to humans seeing little things like this matters a lot.
Thank you in advance.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
>I am so glad to have the opportunity to discuss these things directly with you. Keep asking and i'll keep answering for as long as I can. I am >pleased that we have managed to cover some good ground as we work through these questions - I am trying to take the time to explain the >underlying systems instead of just answering the question and moving on. Hopefully I don't go overboard with detail too much
I wanted to thank you for giving us detail, it makes us understand more why certain decisions were made over others, why adding certain features in the game would be easy or too time consuming, etc. I really enjoy reading this thread (and also the "ask a sim guru" threads btw).
SimGuruMax, I have a couple questions about the romance system.
I'm wondering if right now, is there any attraction scoring system in place that would make two Sims more attracted to each other than to someone else? For example, in Sims 2 and 3, Sims were attracted by having similar or complimentary traits, aspirations and Zodiac signs. Is there anything like this in place at this time, or can essentially any two Sims get together without a drawback? In other words, is there a formula or set up, such as with traits, we can use to guarantee "better" results in romancing a certain Sim over another, or is anyone fair game for success?
Next, as in the previous Sims series, do Sims 4 Sims have that "telepathy" ability and know if another Sim is already married or has a lover, and who that lover is? Or are they completely oblivious (if not having seen anything to the contrary)? Can Sims have a secret lover on the side which is unknown to anyone, or do Sims just "know" anyhow, and not care as long as they don't see anything actually happen? And then, how close in vicinity does the partner have to be to "catch" hanky panky going on? I ask, because in Sims 3, your Sim and lover could meet on a completely different lot, but upon returning home, your Sim would be confronted (slapped) by the cheated-on spouse --telepathy, you know.
I have a quick question where can we find copies of the lots in the worlds. i ask because i went to save oakenstead so i can view a house on that lot and when i went to save it to library i received message that a template already exists in my library and did i want to write over it save new or cancel? yet when i looked in my library i did not see this house there. we had copies of the original lots in the bin so where are the ones in sims 4? thank you for doing this.
"...One of the most complicated aspects of babies is that Sims could carry them around - babies aren't just another carryable: they cannot be holstered (Sims can magically disappear items in their hands temporarily to play animations that need the hand) due to believability issues and there end up being a huge number of weird rules about them not being able to be placed in different locations, etc, etc, etc. ....."
While your answer was fantastic, and I did understand the actual meaning, I laughed for twenty minutes at the mental image of someone holstering a baby - dirty diaper as a sidearm? And when I pulled myself together to keep reading I kept imagining, "do not place baby here" signs, - "do not place baby in dishwasher" type warning signs, haha.
So I just wanted to say thank you for the detail you provide! (As well as the fun descriptive imagery) The Sims is a unique game, and many of the fans, even those not super technical, really love to delve into the details of what makes certain things possible or how to accomplish certain things. The way you describe things it makes it super easy to understand.
These broadcasters affect Sims by pushing interactions on them, which then add statistics to the Sim, which then trigger buffs like Jealous. If the Sim is already busy, they might miss the interaction as those interactions can time-out or get canceled by pressure (like from user-directed interactions).
Timeout could be largely solved by using a super-priority value which exceeds a user instruction - but in that case I would suggest splitting the jealousy interaction into two. First part (super priority) is the feel and look jealous - some sort of jealous body language. Then the feel-jealous interaction spawns the followup at a lower-than-user priority - any yelling or finger pointing they would want to follow up with *can* be cancelled by the player cancelling or issuing another instruction.
I know many people have referenced the "musical chairs" bug. This bug is an illustration of how delicate of a balance the social scoring system maintains. Where Sims stand/sit is a complex integration of several factors:
* Social positioning - this system looks at all the Sims in the social group and tries to maximize overlap between their field-of-view, which is a tunable shape (per posture) in front of the Sim. We then can assign a score, in meters, to each position the Sim could choose, and periodically we push an invisible interaction that has them re-evaluate the scoring and potentially adjust their position or sit down on an object.
* Object scoring - Sims prefer to sit rather than stand. That said, if the chair is facing away from the other Sims, then the bonus for sitting will be attenuated by the penalty for social positioning.
* Additional interactions - the TV has a cone and facing restrictions that must be aggregated with the scoring for socials and objects. The Sim will try to find a good middle ground between facing the TV and facing towards other Sims.
There are other factors too, but the point is that there are a huge number of factors that influence where Sims want to be in the world while socializing. If an interaction gets added or canceled, the balance can change and result in a Sim moving to a different chair for example. Sometimes this is exactly what you want, but sometimes it looks like the Sims are moving chairs for no reason. We will continue to polish and fine-tune this system, so hopefully it will get better over time.
How about giving a higher score to the chair that the sim is already sitting on? Or having a countdown which would affect the score proportionately, i.e. if the sim just sat down, he/she would be less inclined to change seats. Would that alleviate the musical chairs issue?
> SimGuruMax said: > Hi everyone! > > My name is Max Rebuschatis and I am one of the engineers of our love letter to y'all - The Sims 4 Simulation. > > Animation, design, modeling, and engineering all collaborated to create a fresh, exciting, and detailed take on our beloved virtual people. > There is surprising complexity in this system, and it is my pleasure to discuss various facets of the tech. > > I'll start with a couple examples: > > Did you know that Sims do, in fact, have an innate handedness? We determine the handedness of a Sim based on their unique id and roughly 75% of Sims are right-handed! This affects their default pickup hand and various other animations where mirroring is available. > > Ever wonder why Sims will walk some distance to eat near other Sims? We have a sophisticated scoring system that bakes a large number of preferences into meters, which then allows us to compare routing to different objects directly while including things like object types and relationships. > > Feel free to ask me anything you want about the simulation tech in this thread. I'll do my best to answer as much as I can within reason. > > -Max > > Note: this discussion was originally in Technical Discussion, but this seems like a more appropriate place for it. You can see the original discussion here:
Hi SimGuruMax :) It is so great that you are answering these questions for us!
This is off the subject but I noticed your reference to, what I'm guessing is Destiny. What I would like to know is do you and any of the other developers ever play The Sims 4 on your own time for your own enjoyment? I'm guessing not but I'm just curious if you or any of the other devs were or still are fans before you ever worked on the game. If that's too intrusive a question I apologize.
Speaking of the broadcaster system - do you think you could increase family reactions - especially a dads when a new baby is being born. The dads I have seen in the game act like nothing at all is happening as his wife is in full labor and giving birth. Even in the animal world - animals have more of a reaction than dads and sibblings or grandparents are showing in the Sims 4. So I think the broadcaster needs kicked up a notch for births and also deaths. Most of my sims in a household just keep on doing what ever while someone in their family dies or gives birth as if it was nothing special. Life and death in real life is always tramatic so I think it really could use a bit of tuning up when it involves Sims in your own family and especially sims you are married to or related to. I do see life and death as extremes in an emotional robust game that needs a bit more dignity and acknowledgement if at all possible. I find myself getting stressed even because there is no emotional interplay at all.
In previous sims games sims went over the top - and not just relatives so I can see turning it down for other sims not in the household and not related but geez shouldn't a dad be a little bit excited he's about to be a dad?
On that same note it would be nice to have back the reaction when the child is born for the mom to be able to show the baby to dad and other family members and perhaps hand the baby to the dad or grandparent to cuddle and hold. These may be little things but to humans seeing little things like this matters a lot.
Thank you in advance.
The Broadcaster system could support the designs you suggest, and some of it is just tuning existing broadcasters like death (which does work in most cases from my experience). I agree that the Sims acknowledging each other's drama is really important for believability. Hopefully this is something we can expand upon in the future.
The thing that I dislike the most in the game actually is the Teens... Why are they exactly the same height and look exactly the same as young adults ?
My question is : Do you consider, and would it be possible technically to modify the teens at this stage of the game (after release) to make them shorter and possibly a bit different than the young adults ?
SimGuruMax, I have a couple questions about the romance system.
I'm wondering if right now, is there any attraction scoring system in place that would make two Sims more attracted to each other than to someone else? For example, in Sims 2 and 3, Sims were attracted by having similar or complimentary traits, aspirations and Zodiac signs. Is there anything like this in place at this time, or can essentially any two Sims get together without a drawback? In other words, is there a formula or set up, such as with traits, we can use to guarantee "better" results in romancing a certain Sim over another, or is anyone fair game for success?
Next, as in the previous Sims series, do Sims 4 Sims have that "telepathy" ability and know if another Sim is already married or has a lover, and who that lover is? Or are they completely oblivious (if not having seen anything to the contrary)? Can Sims have a secret lover on the side which is unknown to anyone, or do Sims just "know" anyhow, and not care as long as they don't see anything actually happen? And then, how close in vicinity does the partner have to be to "catch" hanky panky going on? I ask, because in Sims 3, your Sim and lover could meet on a completely different lot, but upon returning home, your Sim would be confronted (slapped) by the cheated-on spouse --telepathy, you know.
I asked this first question to the designer of our social system a week ago, in fact, and I will elaborate:
There is no system to *specifically* cause two Sims to be drawn to each other more than others, but this can happen naturally as a sort of emergent property of some of our other systems.
Most socials ultimately come down to a die roll. Socials have different outcomes, usually one positive and one negative. We tune probabilities which can be affected by skills, mood, buffs, traits, and the conversation tone. These are a lot of factors, and emotions and conversation tone combine to create some interesting instability from a few die rolls. I'll walk through two different sample encounters between two Sims.
Sally introduces herself to John. She tries to break the ice by telling a joke. Due to her skill in Comedy and her Playful mood, she has a 80% chance of succeeding.
A ) Sally succeeds and John laughs.
-John's mood turns from Fine to Playful
-The conversation is a friendly conversation
-They gain some relationship score
Sally tries to tell another joke to John. Due to her skill in Comedy, her Playful mood, his Playful mood, the friendly conversation, and her relationship with John, she has a 90% chance of success! She succeeds again and things go really well with John that afternoon. They might go on a date soon.
B ) Sally fails and shuffles awkwardly while John sighs.
-John's mood becomes Bored
-Sally's mood becomes Embarrassed
-The conversation is an awkward conversation
-They lose some relationship score
Sally tries to tell another joke to John. Due to her skill in Comedy, her Embarrassed mood, his Bored mood, the awkward conversation, and her negative relationship with John, she has a 10% chance of success. She fails again, their rel drops further, and he leaves. She is better off with someone else.
As for the question of predisposition, some traits can affect this system, like Soulmate, so two Sims who both have Soulmate will be more likely to fall for each other. Evil sims aren't going to make friends easily unless those sims are also mischief makers. Again, though, this is mainly due to the way interactions are going to play out as influenced by the Sims' traits rather than due to some special-case logic that says "Evil Sims must love other Evil Sims". There are several others that have effects - just watch your Sims interact and you should notice the influence of their traits on the conversation.
Hi SimGuruMax,<br />
<br />
The thing that I dislike the most in the game actually is the Teens... Why are they exactly the same height and look exactly the same as young adults ?<br />
<br />
My question is : Do you consider, and would it be possible technically to modify the teens at this stage of the game (after release) to make them shorter and possibly a bit different than the young adults ?<br />
<br />
Thanks
Animation time is our enemy and we take our animation quality very seriously. Having a third height would have required a *huge* number of new animations. To save some time, we could probably have ported some of our existing adult animations onto the smaller skeleton. We have partially-automated processes to port animations in various ways already, so we could cut some time there too. Problem is, someone still needs to touch all of them by hand and some are going to require considerable rework to get right. And this is prior to getting into the animations that just don't make any sense at all on the smaller frame and must be done for the Teen from scratch, of which there would be many.
Much of what I end up talking about is tradeoffs. Its the brutal reality of building games, or really anything honestly. So we have on the right teens of adult height but substantially more animation time to devote to both teens AND adults, and on the left we have shorter teens and far fewer animations for both teens and adults. We made the right call.
I wouldn't hold my breath on teens getting shorter.
So we have on the right teens of adult height but substantially more animation time to devote to both teens AND adults, and on the left we have shorter teens and far fewer animations for both teens and adults. We made the right call.
Yes I think you probably did for the majority of players' satisfaction. I am a person who is not fussy about animation and in The Sims 2 I used to use the stretchskeleton cheat to make all the kids in a family different heights according to age, as well as some adults. It didn't bother me that the result meant that some sims were putting their hands right through the table to eat, and one sim was kissing the other one's neck while the other one kissed mid-air etc. But I know I am in the minority here! However it would be great if we had a way, maybe via a mod or cheat, to actually adjust the heights on the basis of at our own risk
These broadcasters affect Sims by pushing interactions on them, which then add statistics to the Sim, which then trigger buffs like Jealous. If the Sim is already busy, they might miss the interaction as those interactions can time-out or get canceled by pressure (like from user-directed interactions).
Timeout could be largely solved by using a super-priority value which exceeds a user instruction - but in that case I would suggest splitting the jealousy interaction into two. First part (super priority) is the feel and look jealous - some sort of jealous body language. Then the feel-jealous interaction spawns the followup at a lower-than-user priority - any yelling or finger pointing they would want to follow up with *can* be cancelled by the player cancelling or issuing another instruction.
First, "super priority" is really scary. We reserve it for the most critical of interactions such as Death and there is a good reason for this - the battle rages on against our old enemy, complexity. TS3 had a bunch of priorities and I and many other people felt that this had lead to many problems. It is easy for priority to create an arms-race where each new system wants to trump all the other systems.
How DO our interaction priorities work, anyway? We have three on TS4 and they are very simple
0) Low - for autonomous interactions and many optional, often invisible interactions
1) High - for user-directed interactions and many important, almost always visible interactions
2) Critical - for death (of this Sim) and fire - basically your "super priority"
An interaction will cancel another interaction ahead of it in the queue or in the active state if they cannot be multitasked and is of lower priority.
Splitting up Jealousy into two parts is a good idea, but I would first investigate the reliability of these broadcasters and track the interactions they are meant to push.
How about giving a higher score to the chair that the sim is already sitting on? Or having a countdown which would affect the score proportionately, i.e. if the sim just sat down, he/she would be less inclined to change seats. Would that alleviate the musical chairs issue?
We do have this, but it gets balanced with the other factors. If this value is too high, then a Sim could be left sitting in a chair facing the wrong direction when they start socializing with a Sim behind them.
In general, we had a number of use cases we tried to make sure always worked. Here are a few examples using Sims A and B:
- A sits on a chair and A chats with B, who is standing behind the chair. A should get up, walk over, and face B.
- A and B are sitting in back-to-back chairs and A chats with B. A should get up, walk over, and face B
- A and B are sitting next to each other at a 1x1 table. They should not move to sit across from each other (also the reverse)
- A and B are sitting at one table together and A does Sit Here Together on an adjacent table. B should get up and come join A at the new table instead of staying at the original table even though the original table is valid for the social group.
We tried lots of stuff like this and tried to have everything look as good as we could. I have seen the "musical chairs" issue happen and its almost always due to something changing that adjusts the score of where the Sims should Sit and a Sim moves to the now-ideal location.
At the end of the day, we agree with you. The weight for the Sim's current chair should be higher than it is. I think its worth trading some cases like the first two in my list (though I would want those two specifically to still work with the new tuning). This change is happening.
This is off the subject but I noticed your reference to, what I'm guessing is Destiny. What I would like to know is do you and any of the other developers ever play The Sims 4 on your own time for your own enjoyment? I'm guessing not but I'm just curious if you or any of the other devs were or still are fans before you ever worked on the game. If that's too intrusive a question I apologize.
We make games, we love games - the two really go hand-in-hand. I wouldn't hazard a guess at the percentage of people on the dev team that play TS4 on their own time but there are a fair number of people that do, though probably not as many as would normally for the following reason:
It is really hard to play a game that you have worked on. Keep in mind, I "played" TS4 for many hours a day for several years. You guys have a lot of catching up to do if you want to pass the playtime of most members of the dev team. "Played" is not really the correct term for what we were doing, though, since mainly it was forcing Sims to eat infinite slices of apple pie over and over again.
Through this process of trying the same silly thing a million times to perfect it, you get too close to the features and the bugs and everything about the game gets colored through a lens of knowing way too much about how it works and saturating yourself with playtime. And some of us STILL have stamina and are playing the game now that its launched.
One thing I will say that nobody will dispute - we all love The Sims! Even when I can't stand to look at them anymore, I love their guts out.
Not sure if this is a question for you or one of the other SimGurus, but I was wondering which production methodology you guys use? Agile/Scrum, waterfall, or a combination of both?
Hi SimGuruMax,<br />
<br />
The thing that I dislike the most in the game actually is the Teens... Why are they exactly the same height and look exactly the same as young adults ?<br />
<br />
My question is : Do you consider, and would it be possible technically to modify the teens at this stage of the game (after release) to make them shorter and possibly a bit different than the young adults ?<br />
<br />
Thanks
Animation time is our enemy and we take our animation quality very seriously. Having a third height would have required a *huge* number of new animations. To save some time, we could probably have ported some of our existing adult animations onto the smaller skeleton. We have partially-automated processes to port animations in various ways already, so we could cut some time there too. Problem is, someone still needs to touch all of them by hand and some are going to require considerable rework to get right. And this is prior to getting into the animations that just don't make any sense at all on the smaller frame and must be done for the Teen from scratch, of which there would be many.
Much of what I end up talking about is tradeoffs. Its the brutal reality of building games, or really anything honestly. So we have on the right teens of adult height but substantially more animation time to devote to both teens AND adults, and on the left we have shorter teens and far fewer animations for both teens and adults. We made the right call.
I wouldn't hold my breath on teens getting shorter.
This is really depressing to read. I can only assume you had more time with the other sims games compared to this? I feel like this is something worth spending extra time on, it's a lifestage, a pretty big deal
I hope you do something to make them different because right now it's just yet another young adult, and creating uncomfortable moment where you dont know if you are wanting to hit up someone that's a teen
Please do re-think and consider adjusting teens, there's a huge group of people enjoying playing with families and such and this is just yet another thing over object babies and no toddlers to just .. It's not great
A reminder that an expansion pack is coming along, and yet somehow there are still no Dishwashers.
Hey Max,<br />
<br />
Not sure if this is a question for you or one of the other SimGurus, but I was wondering which production methodology you guys use? Agile/Scrum, waterfall, or a combination of both?
Comments
That's what me and my girlfriend do.
I just wanted to say, your answers to these questions are really fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
"We've been attributing the state of The Sims 4 to greed but I think it's time to give sheer incompetence another look."
-Honeywell
I am so glad to have the opportunity to discuss these things directly with you. Keep asking and i'll keep answering for as long as I can. I am pleased that we have managed to cover some good ground as we work through these questions - I am trying to take the time to explain the underlying systems instead of just answering the question and moving on. Hopefully I don't go overboard with detail too much :P
um yeah, this is not a bug and my computer exceeds rec specs. It is what it is I guess. Sparkly 🐸🐸🐸🐸.
Just got word from our AI engineer that this (Sims getting food while someone is already making a group meal) has already been fixed and should come out in a patch sometime in the future!
In previous sims games sims went over the top - and not just relatives so I can see turning it down for other sims not in the household and not related but geez shouldn't a dad be a little bit excited he's about to be a dad?
On that same note it would be nice to have back the reaction when the child is born for the mom to be able to show the baby to dad and other family members and perhaps hand the baby to the dad or grandparent to cuddle and hold. These may be little things but to humans seeing little things like this matters a lot.
Thank you in advance.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
Yes -- my sim's husband washed the dishes while she was in labor.
>underlying systems instead of just answering the question and moving on. Hopefully I don't go overboard with detail too much
I wanted to thank you for giving us detail, it makes us understand more why certain decisions were made over others, why adding certain features in the game would be easy or too time consuming, etc. I really enjoy reading this thread (and also the "ask a sim guru" threads btw).
I'm wondering if right now, is there any attraction scoring system in place that would make two Sims more attracted to each other than to someone else? For example, in Sims 2 and 3, Sims were attracted by having similar or complimentary traits, aspirations and Zodiac signs. Is there anything like this in place at this time, or can essentially any two Sims get together without a drawback? In other words, is there a formula or set up, such as with traits, we can use to guarantee "better" results in romancing a certain Sim over another, or is anyone fair game for success?
Next, as in the previous Sims series, do Sims 4 Sims have that "telepathy" ability and know if another Sim is already married or has a lover, and who that lover is? Or are they completely oblivious (if not having seen anything to the contrary)? Can Sims have a secret lover on the side which is unknown to anyone, or do Sims just "know" anyhow, and not care as long as they don't see anything actually happen? And then, how close in vicinity does the partner have to be to "catch" hanky panky going on?
While your answer was fantastic, and I did understand the actual meaning, I laughed for twenty minutes at the mental image of someone holstering a baby - dirty diaper as a sidearm? And when I pulled myself together to keep reading I kept imagining, "do not place baby here" signs, - "do not place baby in dishwasher" type warning signs, haha.
So I just wanted to say thank you for the detail you provide! (As well as the fun descriptive imagery) The Sims is a unique game, and many of the fans, even those not super technical, really love to delve into the details of what makes certain things possible or how to accomplish certain things. The way you describe things it makes it super easy to understand.
*edits because my cat likes to tap my keyboard
Timeout could be largely solved by using a super-priority value which exceeds a user instruction - but in that case I would suggest splitting the jealousy interaction into two. First part (super priority) is the feel and look jealous - some sort of jealous body language. Then the feel-jealous interaction spawns the followup at a lower-than-user priority - any yelling or finger pointing they would want to follow up with *can* be cancelled by the player cancelling or issuing another instruction.
> Hi everyone!
>
> My name is Max Rebuschatis and I am one of the engineers of our love letter to y'all - The Sims 4 Simulation.
>
> Animation, design, modeling, and engineering all collaborated to create a fresh, exciting, and detailed take on our beloved virtual people.
> There is surprising complexity in this system, and it is my pleasure to discuss various facets of the tech.
>
> I'll start with a couple examples:
>
> Did you know that Sims do, in fact, have an innate handedness? We determine the handedness of a Sim based on their unique id and roughly 75% of Sims are right-handed! This affects their default pickup hand and various other animations where mirroring is available.
>
> Ever wonder why Sims will walk some distance to eat near other Sims? We have a sophisticated scoring system that bakes a large number of preferences into meters, which then allows us to compare routing to different objects directly while including things like object types and relationships.
>
> Feel free to ask me anything you want about the simulation tech in this thread. I'll do my best to answer as much as I can within reason.
>
> -Max
>
> Note: this discussion was originally in Technical Discussion, but this seems like a more appropriate place for it. You can see the original discussion here:
Hi SimGuruMax :) It is so great that you are answering these questions for us!
This is off the subject but I noticed your reference to, what I'm guessing is Destiny. What I would like to know is do you and any of the other developers ever play The Sims 4 on your own time for your own enjoyment? I'm guessing not but I'm just curious if you or any of the other devs were or still are fans before you ever worked on the game. If that's too intrusive a question I apologize.
The Broadcaster system could support the designs you suggest, and some of it is just tuning existing broadcasters like death (which does work in most cases from my experience). I agree that the Sims acknowledging each other's drama is really important for believability. Hopefully this is something we can expand upon in the future.
The thing that I dislike the most in the game actually is the Teens... Why are they exactly the same height and look exactly the same as young adults ?
My question is : Do you consider, and would it be possible technically to modify the teens at this stage of the game (after release) to make them shorter and possibly a bit different than the young adults ?
Thanks
I asked this first question to the designer of our social system a week ago, in fact, and I will elaborate:
There is no system to *specifically* cause two Sims to be drawn to each other more than others, but this can happen naturally as a sort of emergent property of some of our other systems.
Most socials ultimately come down to a die roll. Socials have different outcomes, usually one positive and one negative. We tune probabilities which can be affected by skills, mood, buffs, traits, and the conversation tone. These are a lot of factors, and emotions and conversation tone combine to create some interesting instability from a few die rolls. I'll walk through two different sample encounters between two Sims.
Sally introduces herself to John. She tries to break the ice by telling a joke. Due to her skill in Comedy and her Playful mood, she has a 80% chance of succeeding.
A ) Sally succeeds and John laughs.
-John's mood turns from Fine to Playful
-The conversation is a friendly conversation
-They gain some relationship score
Sally tries to tell another joke to John. Due to her skill in Comedy, her Playful mood, his Playful mood, the friendly conversation, and her relationship with John, she has a 90% chance of success! She succeeds again and things go really well with John that afternoon. They might go on a date soon.
B ) Sally fails and shuffles awkwardly while John sighs.
-John's mood becomes Bored
-Sally's mood becomes Embarrassed
-The conversation is an awkward conversation
-They lose some relationship score
Sally tries to tell another joke to John. Due to her skill in Comedy, her Embarrassed mood, his Bored mood, the awkward conversation, and her negative relationship with John, she has a 10% chance of success. She fails again, their rel drops further, and he leaves. She is better off with someone else.
As for the question of predisposition, some traits can affect this system, like Soulmate, so two Sims who both have Soulmate will be more likely to fall for each other. Evil sims aren't going to make friends easily unless those sims are also mischief makers. Again, though, this is mainly due to the way interactions are going to play out as influenced by the Sims' traits rather than due to some special-case logic that says "Evil Sims must love other Evil Sims". There are several others that have effects - just watch your Sims interact and you should notice the influence of their traits on the conversation.
Animation time is our enemy and we take our animation quality very seriously. Having a third height would have required a *huge* number of new animations. To save some time, we could probably have ported some of our existing adult animations onto the smaller skeleton. We have partially-automated processes to port animations in various ways already, so we could cut some time there too. Problem is, someone still needs to touch all of them by hand and some are going to require considerable rework to get right. And this is prior to getting into the animations that just don't make any sense at all on the smaller frame and must be done for the Teen from scratch, of which there would be many.
Much of what I end up talking about is tradeoffs. Its the brutal reality of building games, or really anything honestly. So we have on the right teens of adult height but substantially more animation time to devote to both teens AND adults, and on the left we have shorter teens and far fewer animations for both teens and adults. We made the right call.
I wouldn't hold my breath on teens getting shorter.
Yes I think you probably did for the majority of players' satisfaction. I am a person who is not fussy about animation and in The Sims 2 I used to use the stretchskeleton cheat to make all the kids in a family different heights according to age, as well as some adults. It didn't bother me that the result meant that some sims were putting their hands right through the table to eat, and one sim was kissing the other one's neck while the other one kissed mid-air etc. But I know I am in the minority here! However it would be great if we had a way, maybe via a mod or cheat, to actually adjust the heights on the basis of at our own risk
First, "super priority" is really scary. We reserve it for the most critical of interactions such as Death and there is a good reason for this - the battle rages on against our old enemy, complexity. TS3 had a bunch of priorities and I and many other people felt that this had lead to many problems. It is easy for priority to create an arms-race where each new system wants to trump all the other systems.
How DO our interaction priorities work, anyway? We have three on TS4 and they are very simple
0) Low - for autonomous interactions and many optional, often invisible interactions
1) High - for user-directed interactions and many important, almost always visible interactions
2) Critical - for death (of this Sim) and fire - basically your "super priority"
An interaction will cancel another interaction ahead of it in the queue or in the active state if they cannot be multitasked and is of lower priority.
Splitting up Jealousy into two parts is a good idea, but I would first investigate the reliability of these broadcasters and track the interactions they are meant to push.
We do have this, but it gets balanced with the other factors. If this value is too high, then a Sim could be left sitting in a chair facing the wrong direction when they start socializing with a Sim behind them.
In general, we had a number of use cases we tried to make sure always worked. Here are a few examples using Sims A and B:
- A sits on a chair and A chats with B, who is standing behind the chair. A should get up, walk over, and face B.
- A and B are sitting in back-to-back chairs and A chats with B. A should get up, walk over, and face B
- A and B are sitting next to each other at a 1x1 table. They should not move to sit across from each other (also the reverse)
- A and B are sitting at one table together and A does Sit Here Together on an adjacent table. B should get up and come join A at the new table instead of staying at the original table even though the original table is valid for the social group.
We tried lots of stuff like this and tried to have everything look as good as we could. I have seen the "musical chairs" issue happen and its almost always due to something changing that adjusts the score of where the Sims should Sit and a Sim moves to the now-ideal location.
At the end of the day, we agree with you. The weight for the Sim's current chair should be higher than it is. I think its worth trading some cases like the first two in my list (though I would want those two specifically to still work with the new tuning). This change is happening.
We make games, we love games - the two really go hand-in-hand. I wouldn't hazard a guess at the percentage of people on the dev team that play TS4 on their own time but there are a fair number of people that do, though probably not as many as would normally for the following reason:
It is really hard to play a game that you have worked on. Keep in mind, I "played" TS4 for many hours a day for several years. You guys have a lot of catching up to do if you want to pass the playtime of most members of the dev team. "Played" is not really the correct term for what we were doing, though, since mainly it was forcing Sims to eat infinite slices of apple pie over and over again.
Through this process of trying the same silly thing a million times to perfect it, you get too close to the features and the bugs and everything about the game gets colored through a lens of knowing way too much about how it works and saturating yourself with playtime. And some of us STILL have stamina and are playing the game now that its launched.
One thing I will say that nobody will dispute - we all love The Sims! Even when I can't stand to look at them anymore, I love their guts out.
Not sure if this is a question for you or one of the other SimGurus, but I was wondering which production methodology you guys use? Agile/Scrum, waterfall, or a combination of both?
This is really depressing to read. I can only assume you had more time with the other sims games compared to this? I feel like this is something worth spending extra time on, it's a lifestage, a pretty big deal
I hope you do something to make them different because right now it's just yet another young adult, and creating uncomfortable moment where you dont know if you are wanting to hit up someone that's a teen
Please do re-think and consider adjusting teens, there's a huge group of people enjoying playing with families and such and this is just yet another thing over object babies and no toddlers to just .. It's not great
I am going to pass on this one, sorry!