Okay so I've been playing Sims 3 for a while now, filling it with different mods from here and other places, when it came to me that the original trailer for Sims 3 made it appear that the Sims would leave the house of it's own accord, and more of less live it's life, so I put the idea to the modders.

How about making this a reality, allowing Sims to leave the house to complete wants/promises. e.g Joe Blow want to gain a point in logic by playing chess, but does not have one of his lot so he travels to the park to do so.

Jane Blow want's to become a police women and takes a drive to the police station and joins up.

Now I'm not a modder, I'm just a gamer, I don't know the insides and workings of the games files, so I don't even know it this would be possible, but if it could work, then maybe this would bring more life to a game lacking a soul.

Have you tried Awesome Mod or Twallan's Nraas Story Progression?

I dunno that the sims actually leave the lot autonomously with either of those. Awesomemod was supposed to have that happen but I couldn't get it to do so. Though that might be fixed since last time I tried.

I've caught sims outside the house that are under the direction of the Supreme Commander in Awesomemod...these are npc characters I've switched to.

I'm currently running all of Twallan's mods, I've found no option to allow the kind of Autonomous gameplay I'm suggesting, as for awesome, the two aren't compatible with each other last I heard.

And just to make it clear, I'm not talking about NPC's I'm talking about the family that is under my control, I prefer to play as myself leaving the others to do as they will, my sister in the game likes to read, now I would rather she ride to the library to read a book then me having to place a bookshelf in the house just so she can achieve a want/promise, I know I can send her to that library to read but I want her to do it, surely if a neat sim can decide it's time to clean the house or a garden sim using a mod will harvest and water their plants would mean that with a lot of skill this kind of mod would be possible.

Awesome mod and Twallan's SP are compatible, but of course you can't have two story progressions at once, so awesome mod's SP will be disabled if you use awesome mod and also put in twallan's SP.

I don't think I would like if the Sims of the active household would wonder around town on their own. Imagine trying to have your kid fed dinner and he's constantly running off to the neighbours house or the park or something. You'll just end up sounding like a crazy person screaming at your pixel kid to sit down and eat the damn spaghetti.

It would be nice as an option though - maybe not for the actual sim that has the plumbob, but for other members of the family. I once did a challenge where I was only allowed to control one specific sim, it would have been useful then.

Awesomemod has a Supreme Commander function that you can access by control-clicking your sim...there is a dropdown menu of behaviors you can select from.

[Expanded StoryProgression] does include a scenario to push the active sims to visit community lots (it is disabled by default). I use it in my game while I'm overseeing the town, so my actives don't go Stir Crazy.

However it simply relies of the general meta-autonomy to decide where the sim should go, there is no higher purpose to the action.

Although a neat feature, it seems it would only be useful for sims or families that you would never play. I would hate if I left my active house and came back to find that they adopted a pet or took a new job because they "wanted" to.

Twallan any chance you can tell me where I can find the option, I've looked but can't find it?

Maybe you'll get lucky and Twallan will answer here, but in general, you should get support for his mods at his site Same with Awesome and other mods.

In any case any modders out there reading this, lets get your opinion if this kind of mod is even possible to create.

It sounds like it'd be really, really, really complicated.

To get a sim to automatically do something requires they know how to do it. Like...if a sim is hungry, they know "go eat food", to put it really basically. If they have to pee, they know "search nearby for toilets, then use them if they exist". That's why sims will pee themselves on a lot with no toilets- they scan the area, don't find any, and thus can't automatically do anything.

It is possible (see: supper controller or whatever the Awesomemod thing is) to get a sim to find objects on lots other than their own- when using the awesomemod thing, sims will gladly wander all teh way across town just to shower even though you have the most amazing bath tub in your house. But even then, they're still following simple in-game functions, just in a more expanded way.

To get a sim to automatically respond to wishes would require putting all of those wishes in as something the sims themselves can recognize. A sim doesn't "know" that they "want" to go to a simfest, and they don't "know" that if they go to a simfest, they'll fulfill that want. You'd have to do "If the sim wants to go to simfest, check for a simfest, then go to it" (again, really basic explanation). And you'd have to have something like that for every single wish so the sim's can recognize what they have to do. I don't know if it's even possible on a basic level for the game to read what wishes you have and relay that information to autonomy to begin with, but if it was, it'd take a LOT of effort to make it so sims recognized any given wish and knew how to fulfill it.

I don't think this is something that would ever happen.

Ohhh okay I get what he's asking, at first I thought, doesn't Twallan's Sp already do this. But he wants sims smart enough to fulfill there wants on there own. Smarter AI would be great, an although I love Sims 3, I have to admit the Sims 2 AI was much smarter. I'm not sure, but isn' t Twallan's dream catcher something like this already?

With Twallan's mods, I find the Sims 3 sims do much better, even if I don't play them. I have an 'apartment building' using lockable door mods and sometimes I only play one couple in one apartment. The other sims get up on time, eat, go to work, sculpt, paint, write, or whatever without any help from me. I ignore them and they do not fall apart. They do not fulfill wishes but that is okay with me since some of those wishes are rather silly. I really don't want my Sim to run off to Egypt or buy a pet without my permission...mostly due to game bugs.

Dream catchers simply leave the dream managers running on the inactives, so when you return they don't simply reset back to the beginning again.

Such does not attempt to fulfill those wishes though. Coding something like that would be a massive undertaking, considering the vast number of wishes that are available.

I don't know why this can't be done. Basically, sims really only have the time, at most, to do one or two elective things per day. So, it seems that Sims would have a daily routine: Get up, have breakfast, go to work (or school), come home, perform an elective, eat, perform an elective activity, go to bed. I could almost be done on a schedule. The schedule could be tied to the Sim's work hours -- the sim gets up two or three hours before they go to work (or school), does their morning routine, goes to work, does their after work routine and goes to bed. Days where the sim does not go to work might be filled with elective activities in lieu of work.

Elective activities could be randomly selected from a table related to traits. For example, a couch potato might watch TV, a bookworm read a book, an athletic sim works out at a gym, a party animal goes to a party, and so on. In terms of programming, a number of tables would be set up for each trait and perhaps a few miscellaneous type tables. When it is t ime for an elective activity, a relevant table is selected randomly based on the sims traits. Then an activity is randomly selected from the table.

Roleplayers should immediately recognize this system.

I already explained why it can't be done. Twallan's latest post seems to confirm what I said. The game doesn't recognize wishes the way doing this would require them to, in any capacity.

I presume you were not replying to my post, as nowhere did I say it *can't* be done.

However, so far no modder has bothered to pour that much effort into a system that has such limited audience, and would entail such high performance requirements.

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If you wanted your active sims to act like inactives, then just don't play them. [StoryProgression] for instance will push sims in the active household around if you let it : simply use [MasterController Cheats]' "Advanced \ Selectability" to set them as non-playable, and the mod will proceed to handle them just like any other inactive sim.

Actually, I was not even thinking of your mods when I posted this. My post was more in the nature of hypothetical speculation about what could be done and how it could be done.

I also recognize that what I speculated about would be a huge project, probably well beyond the time and technical abilities of most modders. EA has teams of programmers, and they have not attempted anything near this ambitious, probably because the potential profits do not justify the time and expense involved.

That being said, there is probably no reason a daily routine could not be set for non-played sims (i.e. sims not part of your household). After all, most of us go through life with a pretty set routine, where we do the same things, at the same time, day after day. When push comes to shove, most of us only have the time to do one or two things outside of our normal routine every day. So what I was speculating about was a pretty "hard wired" routine, where the sims do the same tasks at the same time, day after day, while allowing them to perform one (and at most two) elective tasks every day. Of course, this might be as interesting as watching paint dry.

A scheme like this would entail disconnecting things like wishes, motives and most of the stuff played sims contend with. It would be replaced with a set routine and one or two elective activities, selected at random based on tables related to the sims' traits. All in all, this approach might be closer to Pescado's approach to story progression than it is to yours.

Last edited by High Plains Gamer : 19th Mar 2012 at 10:49 PM.

Definitely closer to Pescado's methodology.

Though I would suspect it would fit more into the Supreme Commander system, than say Story Progression.

Reading your thoughts regarding this idea is quite amazing.

Now I'm probably going to sound like an idiot for asking this but as it's been said at the basic level when a Sim wants to pee they searches the lot for possible toilets finds the nearest one and complete the need, also depending on which traits you have will depend on what activities they do such as paint as an art Sim or read a book etc, now how about altering the game to think painting, playing chess were needs, now I'm not saying fill the need menu with every possible skill to force the Sims to do them, but making the Sim believe that they need to play chess or needs to paint a picture.

As for going to other lots at the moment except for work and creator involvement they won't leave a lot so how about disabling the restriction that keeps them at home, now for all I know you would need a college degree in computer sciences to alter that kind of change in the game, but by the Sim noticing something out side the house they would go explore, hell my dog already does it in game on his own.
I'll find him two blocks away some times.

On a basic level, that's what would need to be done, which is what I was talking about. The problem is that it means every single wish would have to be shoehorned into a system that, right now, doesn't even exist. It'd be lots and lots and lots of work done completely from scratch. There'd also probably end up being lots and lots of loops unless it was even more complex than simply throwing them in as "if sim wants X wish, do Y thing"- say your sim wanted to eat pancakes, but there were no available counters in the house. If there was no check for whether or not they can actually make pancakes, your sim would endlessly be attempting to do so, then complaining of interaction failure, until they...died. Or you noticed and cancelled the wish.

It is probably possible, but it would just take so much work and create a few problems that I don't think any modder would bother with.

Pets actually have this type of autonomousy. My dog suddenly got an autonomous interaction to eat grapes, so he ran to one of the neighbours and started eating her grape plant.