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Optional genetic population progression: The hopeful answer to "No Story-Progression"
Godleyjeans
Posts: 336 Member
As this is my 20th post, I'm going to take a long break from making them after this goes up for the sake of other simmers, the gurus and myself.
With Story Progression being a delicate subject, one even the gurus are fearful of treading, I throw unto the universe the toggle for automatic population growth via a new toggle which could come in a large update: It does not affect sims in the same way to story progression, it requires permission via the simmer, it can be VERY selective, it can only be used on one neighbourhood, or household, again, depending on what you toggle. You can say one world is allowed to move forward whilst another stays barren, no children for one group while another is free to fill the land with their offspring.
Difference here being...it will not affect your sims path.
If you're a simmer who wants everything to be by their hand, just toggle off.
If you're a simmer who likes control but also enjoys giving their creations a little freedom, you can pick who gets to create and who doesn't.
If you're a simmer who just likes to throw caution to the wind and watch all plum break loose, you can enable complete freedom.
Yes, we could basically apply this to a sim's entire life, their job, their partners, we could have S.P without is technically being just that.
HOWEVER! for the sake of the constantly suffering gurus having to deal with our back and forth debacles, I present a compromise.
Enable the choice for our sims to procreate without our intervention, whilst allowing us to maintain some sort of control or total control, simply enable the options.
OPTIONS are key.
Now I know plenty of simmers will say this is basically story progression missing steps, and maybe it is, but I feel this is a more realistic reality for those of us who want to see our sims thrive without us playing a big role, or just for those of us who can't be asked to hand click every sim and make them do the dirty over and over until they get the music and telltale bump.
Give. Us. Options.
Welp, I'm going to play some Sims 4 and make my tragic painters life even more miserable than it already is, have a good night everyone and I'm sorry for all the spamming.
I'll still comment on posts, but threads won't appear from me for a good bit unless the matter is of life of death of the sims 4 importance.
Until then, Sul Sul
With Story Progression being a delicate subject, one even the gurus are fearful of treading, I throw unto the universe the toggle for automatic population growth via a new toggle which could come in a large update: It does not affect sims in the same way to story progression, it requires permission via the simmer, it can be VERY selective, it can only be used on one neighbourhood, or household, again, depending on what you toggle. You can say one world is allowed to move forward whilst another stays barren, no children for one group while another is free to fill the land with their offspring.
Difference here being...it will not affect your sims path.
If you're a simmer who wants everything to be by their hand, just toggle off.
If you're a simmer who likes control but also enjoys giving their creations a little freedom, you can pick who gets to create and who doesn't.
If you're a simmer who just likes to throw caution to the wind and watch all plum break loose, you can enable complete freedom.
Yes, we could basically apply this to a sim's entire life, their job, their partners, we could have S.P without is technically being just that.
HOWEVER! for the sake of the constantly suffering gurus having to deal with our back and forth debacles, I present a compromise.
Enable the choice for our sims to procreate without our intervention, whilst allowing us to maintain some sort of control or total control, simply enable the options.
OPTIONS are key.
Now I know plenty of simmers will say this is basically story progression missing steps, and maybe it is, but I feel this is a more realistic reality for those of us who want to see our sims thrive without us playing a big role, or just for those of us who can't be asked to hand click every sim and make them do the dirty over and over until they get the music and telltale bump.
Give. Us. Options.
Welp, I'm going to play some Sims 4 and make my tragic painters life even more miserable than it already is, have a good night everyone and I'm sorry for all the spamming.
I'll still comment on posts, but threads won't appear from me for a good bit unless the matter is of life of death of the sims 4 importance.
Until then, Sul Sul
12
Comments
this however IMO covers the fine line that is story progression Y/N and allows a neighborhood to constantly refresh new sims and continue premade sims legacys
Good to hear you like the idea! Rather than lose ones composure in the ever present battle for S.P, I thought about a compromise that would be easier for the Guru's and DEV team, whilst allowing us, the simmers, to feel they've actually taken on board our requests and delivered to some extent.
It's not perfect, obviously the design and coding teams will need to see what can be done with all of this, BUT, I imagine it working sort of as a biological clock, of course you design who can procreate and such, but for those ABLE to have families, the game goes by whose closer to passing that time scale. or perhaps it goes by traits and aspirations!
Say you have a sim who wants a big family or they have a certain trait which could be added via patches such as nurturing or something like that, the game looks at those traits and decides who most likely will have a baby, whilst also occasionally cursing those with the anti kids trait to suffer a surprise pregnancy.
Personally, I like the biological clock concept, game counts down the days to ageing up and thinks "OH PLUM SO AND SO IS GETTING OLD, TIME TO POP A BUN IN THAT OVEN", again, you get to choose which households can and can't have babies, then the game does its thing and bing bang boodles, baby time! Twins, single or triplets, that is as random as it is usually.
Maybe, for a joke, you can witness a childs conception (That sounds wrong, lemme explain): Say you have a party, one couple sneaks off, you hear that familiar rattling of a bed, closet, bush, vault, etc, and they come down all happy and loved up, then once they leave you wait a day or so and maybe bump into them on the street, and speaking of bumps, you notice one partner is expecting, yes this works as long as one partner is able to become pregnant whilst the other is able to make others pregnant, so man, woman, neither, both, whatever, long as you have both components, it can happen.
For more puns, maybe you get a phonecall either thanking you, blaming you or simply announcing your party was involved in the creation of little Jim-Bob-Buttons, The gags go on but you get the idea.
Feel free to add more concepts but this, for starters, is just how I imagine it working.
Again, happy to hear you like it!
its a great idea, and some fun can be had with it. i dont like being the only household that grows so getting those kinds of options would add some spice XD
Also, at this point, there are many rotational players invested in their games and comfortable with the fact that the game does not interfere, so the devs would have to be very careful with how they implement something like that. By making it only affect unplayed households, it should lessen the chance of something going wrong.
> If there were ever any type of story progression added to the game, I think it should only affect Sims in the "unplayed" category. I would not want the risk of unexpected game bugs or errors destroying the many, many households I've created and filled my worlds with. I had something like that happen with MC Command Center and it changed a lot of households that I didn't want touched.
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> Also, at this point, there are many rotational players invested in their games and comfortable with the fact that the game does not interfere, so the devs would have to be very careful with how they implement something like that. By making it only affect unplayed households, it should lessen the chance of something going wrong.
This is a good point. Another point we should consider is that story progression will most likely contribute to lagging and worse for less powerful computers. I do appreciate MCCC but I notice that it does add a bit of lag to my game (especially in the middle of the night when most, I assume, of its functionalities are being implemented). At the moment the additional lag is so small that it does not bother me. You can see this in Sims 3 as well, where NRAAS will add to the game lagging. The difference of course is that Sims 3 already lags very badly even without NRAAS (due to, I suspect, open world and all that it entails). My poor computer (not top-of-the-line gaming but above min requirement for Sims 3) choked to the point I stopped playing Sims 3. I do upgrade my computer now and then, but "so I can play a computer game" is not a good reason (for me) to do so. Luckily my computer plays Sims 4 just fine.
I prefer to think that when certain functionalities are not in the game, it is due to financial/technical requirements rather than devs being mean. Not all of us play with top of the line hardware. Some simple story progression such as MCCC (only population I believe, unplayable do not really upgrade their skills, or improve their grades or get promotions) I can get behind. Some story progression in a non-open world such MATY for Sims 2 seemed fine. But the more complex ones involving all the above with all kinds of scenarios (selections, levels, going through every single decision for every single family etc) and open world on top of that? I have to start asking question about lagging, bloated saved files etc. Of course I am not a game programmer so I would defer to the opinions of actual game programmers.
Finally I'm glad MCCC populate my towns automatically but to be honest I used the mod mostly for "reset sims", "make happy" and skilling cheats because I am to lazy to type them. I don't really pay too much attention to the unplayed sims in my town. When my sim heir is ready for a family, I simply create a suitable spouse in CAS, plop him/her in a lot, introduce them and the rest is history.
Autonomous Romance: High, Moderate, Low, and Off
Autonomous Marriage: High, Moderate, Low, and Off
Autonomous Kids: High, Moderate, Low, and Off
Autonomous Moving: High, Moderate, Low, and Off
...And so forth, with separate toggles for played and unplayed households for full customization. So, say, someone who doesn't want their own played sims to be messed with by the game, but doesn't care what the game does with the NPC's can turn off all of those story progression options for their played households, but turn them on High for the NPC's.
TS4 is very, very short on save set-up options without a mod like MCCC. That's a huge shame, because it makes every player frustrated; freewheeling story progression lovers, rotational control freaks like me, and everyone in between.
I like this idea, and am very much in favour of everyone being allowed to play in the style that suits them so it's a good idea. I have read a few times though that they have major issues implementing toggles. Apparently it really messes with the game. Hopefully they can find some kind of compromise or work around that doesn't ruin anyones current saves or play style.
Edit: It would be far too much to hope to have anything close to the type of customization NRaas SP has, but it would be nice for a game to have a framework that someone could build on to make something like that. MCCC is incredible, don't get me wrong, but I don't think Sims 4 supports the same type of customization that Sims 3 does.
When you click on a household there can be another tab for story progression and you can toggle it on or off for each house. Career and offspring can be separate toggles. The households in your save tab will make sure the Sims do not move away/get culled.