So, I've been trying to make a global mod to slowly increase fitness when gardening - seems a little unrealistic that my sims can spend 12 hours a day labouring in the fields and still get fat. The fitness code seems to be very well hidden in the EA semiglobals - I can find lots of ends and no beginnings... but I've now downloaded Sophie-David's axe-throwing fitness mod, had a look at it, and I think I'm halfway there.

It seems fitness gain is controlled by two commands; Fitness - Delta - Set and Fitness - Delta - Clear. I presume the Fitness - Delta - Set is done outside of the interaction BHAV for Maxis stuff, since its absence is conspicuous, but David's mod demonstrates that it is possible to get this working simply by including Set at the beginning of the function and Clear at the end, which is what I'd like to do.

Now, here's where I come unstuck. I know that Delta refers to BCONs, so I'm not that surprised that using Literals in this command doesn't seem to work. It may be that I'm using the Literals wrong, though, in which case I'd love it if someone would point out what I should be doing. If not, then I'll have to use Constants and a BCON: which is fine, but I think I'm going to have to create the BCON from scratch, and this is where I come unstuck: how do I settle on the new BCON's Name, Group and Instance? Can I use any old thing, or does it have to be somehow related to the other values for this interaction? Do I have to reference it somewhere specific, or can I just plug it straight into the BHAV and go? Tutorials are just as welcome as explanations!

My current file is attached in case anyone wants a look. Feel free to ignore all the skill stuff - I initially had a brain fart whereby I forgot that body skill and fitness are not the same thing.

For BCONs the name is irrelevant. The group should be 0xFFFFFFFF, and the instance follows the same rules as BHAVs (ie, if they're local they have to be in the 0x1000 range, if they're semi-global then need to be in the 0x2000 range, and you can't have two with the same instance in the same object/semiglobal). You don't need to do anything special to make the BHAVs pick them up. I've never seen a case where you can't use literals in place of BCONs as parameters though.

I'd suggest starting by setting the params for "Fitness - Delta - Set" as follows: 07640007E8030A00000A000001000000. You've got a few unusual values hanging around in apparently unused parameters further on - it's not normally a problem, but let's rule out the simple stuff first.

I assume that everything else is still working like you'd expect? Sims still do their gardening? And you're testing in debug mode, so if there were any error messages you'd know?

I've tried those params, didn't seem to make a difference; also bumped the fitness gain up to an experimental 1000. Everything else is indeed working - sims garden, gain enthusiasm and skill, and there are no debug errors; just no fitness gain either.

I'm now having fun trying to find a BCON instance which isn't taken... it really would be useful if I still remembered how to count in hex. *sigh*

Well, I have the fitness gain working: moving it into a separate BHAV called by the interaction BHAV achieved that, I have no idea why. Most EA interactions seem to do it this way, but there are a few which include Delta - Fitness - Set in the main interaction, so I have no idea what the rhyme or reason behind that is. Now, of course, my mod to the Tend interaction has broken the Tend Many interaction - so it's still not precisely working, but I thought I'd post this anyway just in case it helps someone else at some point!