Questions From A NRaas Newbie

TinySpaceFox

I recently downloaded and successfully installed Overwatch to help reduce lag in Isla Paradiso, and I think it's doing a pretty good job so far. However, because I'm new to NRaas (and mods in general), I have a few questions.

1. Overwatch and ErrorTrap seem to be among the most popular mods. What's the difference between the two?
2. Why does Overwatch remove vehicles and turn off TVs?
3. Is Overwatch fine on its own, or should I use it with other mods?

I may have other questions in future, but for now any help is much appreciated.

Okblondee7

Calling on @igazor

igazor

Ah me, is there no rest for the weary?

1 - Overwatch "watches" for and cleans up after a very long list of known problem causing conditions and annoyances within the game throughout play. Just a few examples are stuck and unroutable sims, abandoned toddlers, laundry machines on public lots that otherwise never get emptied, garden plants that otherwise get stuck in an unusable state, sims' skill learning rates that get all goofed up, sims who get stuck in the aging process. It also does a huge scan and cleanup of your world, again against a long list of known problems, at startup and every night at 3 am (sim time).

ErrorTrap captures ("traps") error conditions that can often otherwise be crash inducing or cause other sorts of problems and reports on them by way of script logs. Along the way it also captures useless shards of data from objects that do not really belong in the world you are currently playing, and from objects and sims that have really already been deleted or have become corrupt beyond all possible repair, and cleans these things up.

The logs can be difficult to interpret at first, but we offer a guide to reading them on our site and will happily help you read them if you zip some together, upload them, and open up a message board thread on the ErrorTrap Issues message board.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/ErrorTrap+Reading+Logs
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/How+To+Upload
(free registration required to upload and post)

2 - Overwatch removes abandoned vehicles and those that otherwise have no owner. Some of these will be the free cheap cars the game issues to inactive sims who need to get around and who don't own any themselves or whose cars are not available to them at the time needed. Some will be the dozens or hundreds (thousands, even) of performance career limos, snack and ice cream trucks, boats, etc. that are generated behind the scenes when the game gets stuck in a loop. No one needs those vehicles, they will never be used, and they are just clogging up the game.

Televisions that are running on inactive lots use up a small amount of game resources each. There is often no need for them to continue running if no one is watching them.

3 - Either way. Overwatch doesn't really conflict with very much that is out there.

Pary

igazor wrote: »

Ah me, is there no rest for the weary?

Aww. Here, you deserve this -



Thanks for helping us all out with our problems I'm sure everyone here really appreciates it.

igazor

@Pary - Well, that was unexpected. And thank you!

TadOlson

You might want to add Master Controller to your Mods because it will allow you to fully reset your town if it started glitching out and I've got about 97 NRaas Mod files installed because it's what I needed to fix game issues.NRaas story progression can be set to stop too many things from happening at once which is what you get with EA's bug-fest and that one has caused others to get lagging games from households being stuffed full of too many pets.

TreyNutz

TinySpaceFox wrote: »

I recently downloaded and successfully installed Overwatch to help reduce lag in Isla Paradiso, ...

3. Is Overwatch fine on its own, or should I use it with other mods?

I may have other questions in future, but for now any help is much appreciated.

The next time you want to play Isla Paradiso, you might want to review this guide to reducing lag in that world. A save game with the fixes applied is linked on that thread.

3. The only other mod I'd suggest other than Error Trap is Traveler if your sims travel to WA destinations, University, or Oasis Landing.

StephSteb

I use Overwatch, Error Trap, and Traveler. They saved my game and I am forever grateful to Nraas for them! Half the time I don't know what they are doing, but my game actually works now and that makes me happy

SimKeats

If we gave @igazor a medal every time he deserved it, he would end up looking like:

igazor

As it so happens, I used to wear an eye patch. But didn't have the facial hair to go with it as I was 8 at the time...

KATENESS

igazor wrote: »

As it so happens, I used to wear an eye patch. But didn't have the facial hair to go with it as I was 8 at the time...

I was about to sneeze as I was reading this post and it turned into a sneeze/cough/laugh. Thank you, I guess.

xitneverendss

igazor wrote: »

@Pary - Well, that was unexpected. And thank you!

Yes, @igazor I agree very much! You have always been there to help me with every question I have had about sims 3. The community would be lost without you!

igazor

KATENESS wrote: »

I was about to sneeze as I was reading this post and it turned into a sneeze/cough/laugh. Thank you, I guess.

Usually I manage to catch 'em with a mouth full of coffee or soda, but that of course tends to ruin keyboards and monitors caught in the spray. And aww, you guys...

But I'd really like to hear if our responses did @TinySpaceFox any good.

TinySpaceFox

Thanks for the help, everyone looks like I'll be adding ErrorTrap to my list of mods.

@TadOlson 97 is a lot! Does it help, though (that's what matters)?

Speaking of which: I'm interested in StoryProgression. I'd like to find out, in what ways is it different from the regular story progression?

Okblondee7

TinySpaceFox wrote: »

Thanks for the help, everyone looks like I'll be adding ErrorTrap to my list of mods.

Speaking of which: I'm interested in StoryProgression. I'd like to find out, in what ways is it different from the regular story progression?

It works. Just being silly, but it really does so much. Have you read about it at the NRaas site? Maybe @igazor is around to enlighten you.

ETA: Sorry, meant to leave you a link. http://nraas.wikispaces.com/

igazor

"It works" is a pretty good summary.

EA's story progression even when it does work as intended is a bit too random and inflexible for many players' tastes. But the biggest drawback is that for many/most players, after a few generations if not sooner, it just gives up and stops functioning. Players find their sims living in what is becoming a ghost town with everyone else dying off (assuming aging is on), no new households moving in, no couples having formed or babies having been born for the next generation.

A good place to start reading is the SP FAQ page. Just skip past the 17 internal links to the readable part, most of it should be easy to follow even if you've never used such a mod before. And you don't have to know what all of the settings do to enjoy the mod, for the most part just installing the base mod to start and watching it work to see if you like what it's doing should be enough.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryProgression+FAQ

cwaddell

TinySpaceFox wrote: »

Thanks for the help, everyone looks like I'll be adding ErrorTrap to my list of mods.

@TadOlson 97 is a lot! Does it help, though (that's what matters)?

Speaking of which: I'm interested in StoryProgression. I'd like to find out, in what ways is it different from the regular story progression?

StoryProgression (and its add-on mods) controls how sims in your town interact. It is very powerful because it has so many options that can be used to tailor your town to the way you would like but because it has so many options it can be confusing. I would never play with StoryProgression with the default options.

For one I find so many notifications annoying so I would go into general: stories and change it to none then change again to blood relations and romantic interests. I could care less when every Tom, 🐸🐸🐸🐸 and Harry in town gains a skill level or gets a job promotion. I would then go and change the story options to residents on those things I do want to know about for the whole town, like births and deaths. Then on other things I would like to be notified about for my sim's friends I would add friends to romantic interests and blood relations under stories for that category.

The other thing I would change immediately is the time interval for the flirts and romance options being run. The default is 300 sim minutes (5 hours). So every 5 hours SP generates a flirt story and a romance story. As soon as a teen becomes a young adult it's only a few days before they are gobbled up into a SP manufactured romance leaving no one as a potential partner for your sim. I increase the time between running those 2 modules.

If you do install StoryProgression start with the base mod. Configure it the way you want before installing any of the SP add-on mods.

If Overwatch is the only mod you have currently installed then there are other simpler NRaas mods I would recommend before installing StoryProgression.

igazor

@cwaddell - There is, of course, nothing wrong with your approach. But there is equally nothing wrong with leaving everything with SP on default settings just at first to see how intrusive some of those things are to the player. Some of us actually like getting all of those story reports, or choose to be selective about them in other ways.

The default speed of the romance manager is going to have a harder impact on worlds where there are already many single sims for it to push around and be aggressive with the partnering up thing. If you increase its interval by extremely large amounts in worlds where most sims are already coupled up, it might feel like it's not doing anything. Again, different players will have different expectations there.

And many of us, myself included, find that dialing the entire speed of SP down to Slow makes things feel smoother and less aggressive on very highly populated worlds. But we have to feel the impact of Normal speed first so such can be a more informed decision.

cwaddell

igazor wrote: »

... Some of us actually like getting all of those story reports, or choose to be selective about them in other ways...

I think players who also played Sims 2 and like to play the whole town in Sims 3 would find knowing everything about everyone in town useful. I started playing Sims with Sims 3 and usually play one household so am only interested in the rest of the town if it effects my sims. Also the life span that a player uses would determine what speed to set for the various modules. I play on normal life span - 90 days. Only the flirt and romance modules seem too fast for me.

But that is what is great about NRaas SP it allows us to configure it to fit how we like to play.

HollyL73

I am still getting used to NRaas StoryProgression. I definitely had to change the story reports, holy cow I was getting a lot of updates about everyone in the town getting jobs, promotions, skilling up, etc. and it was completely overwhelming! I don't even know who half of those people are in my town!! So I have to say a big thank you to @igazor for directing me to the link that explained the whole thing, breaking it down for those of us who are (for lack of a better term) slightly illiterate when it comes to mods that can change the whole dynamic of the game. I am glad that I put it in, though. Still learning about it, and I have absolutely no idea how to "slow it down". I would probably like doing that.

igazor

SP consists of many engines, called Managers, running all at once and at all different speeds, such as the Romance Manager discussed above. Those can be adjusted individually, for example on City Hall or an in-game computer NRaas > SP > General Options > Options:Romance > Speed. Higher numbers are slower, so if 300 is way too fast for you, try 900 or even something like 3,000.

But without getting into the individual Managers and their all different speed settings, you can slow down or speed up the entire system at once with SP's overall speed setting. NRaas > SP > General Options > Adjust Speed and choose one of the two slower settings.

TadOlson

@TinySpaceFox -I've had to put that many NRaas Mods in just to get my game playable and I've also got well over 100 other Mods installed to fix the other bugs and glitches.
NRaas has a better story progression which can be customized for a lot of different types of games like SIms 2 rotational play like I did with custom household castes so I can apply some rules to a household.EA's "story progression" is a bug-fest and I've had it turn my towns into unplayable nightmares with too many pets in households and others breaking up and gettiing into new relationships or moving out and new families moving in too frequently.It ruined my towns and turned them into migrant camps with a soap opera for the"story" which is exactly what I didn't want.I have story progression turned on and use the working NRaas Mod version so my towns don't become unplayable nightmares.

TinySpaceFox

Thanks again for the input, everybody

I personally feel that story progression is a great part of TS3 - only it wasn't very well executed. I love seeing more and more shelter pets coming to town, and I enjoy having my Sim meet new neighbours, but I've heard stories where the game moves people (including friends of your Sim) out of town, never to be seen again. I also don't really like how the game pairs up inactive Sims.

I guess I'll be getting the base mod and playing around with it myself. Those links are useful, but I'll probably only be consulting them if I have doubts. I like to experiment with things for a bit first.

girlwhocriedtaylor

TinySpaceFox wrote: »

I personally feel that story progression is a great part of TS3 - only it wasn't very well executed.

I feel that way too... In one of my games in Sunset Valley, the Alvis, Ursines and Sekemotos all moved out. And Agnes Crumplebottom died from hunger. The game did move in some randomly generated sims who were interesting for about 10 minutes until I wanted my sim's friends back.

Also the fact that all the sims who aged up were unemployed and that inactive sims never had kids in my games. (before NRaas SP)