First, I understand this forum is not hosted by NRAAS. But since the mods are wildly popular and everyone has experience with it, so here I try my luck... But nobody is "obligated" to answer...

Under Story Progression module, there are many tuning models such as "Cop and Robber (Contains the Robin, Cat, Vigilante, and Kingpin personalities)", "Lovers Contains the Bike, Casanova, Gigolo, and Tart personalities", "Meanies" ...

What are these exactly? It lists a lot of "personalities" ... are these the personalities that any sim can grow into, or there will be NPC sims who will adopt these personality? And in case a sim adopts one of these, how do we as players know? Will there be a tag saying "This sim is a Town Brat (Meanies)" and "this sim is a Casanova"...

I would normally try these out, but I don't want to muck up my game. And I should install these normally like other NRAAS mods?

Thanks much for responses from other NRAAS enthusiasts!!

I think it just tells you about townies NPC's being criminal sluts and lags up the game, not sure since I did not keep them for that long since I want my sims to be the only criminal sluts in their world.

they basically generate a running script of antics ostensibly being performed by the labeled sims. Personally, I don't use them, as just running SP with the extra, money, career and relationship stuff is a lot of overhead as it is, and I personally hate all the pop up notifications that the personality modules throw in on top of everything else. Still, you can try them, maybe individually to start, and see if they add to your gaming experience before vetoing the idea.

The sim tags that SP gives you anyway (you know, the ones where you can see everyone in the world) will show you whether anyone is a Casanova, Lestat, Slayer etc.

I keep them around because they add a little bit of flavour to the game -- the Robin will occasionally steal from rich sims and give to poorer sims; the Brat will occasionally 'shakedown' other kids for money; Slayers will hunt down any vampires and either kill or cure them depending on settings. It adds another layer to what inactive sims around town can do.

It has no effect on the current household, and they install exactly like any other NRAAS mod.

One thing you do need to do if you have ones like vampires and slayers, Meanies, etc. installed is to go into options and tweak the chances of a fatal attack occurring in order to set it to your liking. My husband had a game where he was constantly getting a notification that Nero Blackstar had beaten up another sim, and that sim had died from his wounds. Nero had murdered 40 sims before my husband tweaked the settings to prevent fatal attacks. Granted, Nero was immortal so he had a lot of time to be killing sims, but if you have a sim you are looking to marry into your family it's really irritating to have them killed while they are still vulnerable.

Basically, they are an add-on to add a little fun to your inactive sims. The mod will search out sims who fit the perosnality trait, and then label them and when said sim is not being palyed, it will act on the label

What they do is listed in the interactions section of the mod; like, for example, the Casanova and Bike are sluts, the Gigolo is basically a male prostitute, the Tart uses her beauty to control people, The Kingpin is a crime boss, etc. Each of them also has group of followers, whose roles differ depending on the personalities

I like them, most of them time; they usually peg the right sims I'd intended for that role anyway; it only gets annoying when pick the wrong the person for the job

Each of those personality modules ranks every eligible Sim in town based on certain criteria and whoever scores the highest becomes the personality in question (you get a message telling you who it is). However, if you don't like the choice, you can manually set the personality yourself. After that, other Sims will gradually fill in the supporting roles as members of their gang, harem or whatever. On the town map, they're usually marked with the same flag used for hotspots in Late Night.

Every so often the personality modules try to start a scenario in which stuff happens around town. That is the part that varies the most between the different modules. Sometimes it might just be a message that a personality did some thing or another, other times it goes as far as rivals starting fires on the home lots of their enemies or putting them in hospital with a chance of death from injuries.

If you do use them, make sure you read all the documentation first. Even though it's possible to drop them in and start playing, you'll be able to head off things you don't like from occurring if you set the options the way you want before the scenarios start.

Thank you for all the awesome answers. Will this impact the performance of the game? In theory, it should not, but knowing it is TS3, Murphy's law is strongly applied.

I mean, will it noticeably cause lag and hiccups more than usual?

The only nraas mod that made my game lag was StoryProgression Extra with the map tags.

Because "lag" has such a wide range of causes, it's hard to say, but generally speaking, if you can run Story Progression with little or no issues, the personality modules won't have a discernible impact on your performance. That's my experience, anyway.

It's time to turn Extra off then. Lag is there, but I generally can live with it. But I guess ... let me look closer to see what Extra really does.

I use Extra. Base (duh), Career and School. And I run with 80 FPS recording, 120 FPS not

The overhead for something like SP is going to reflect itself in CPU cycles, typically with short pauses and little lags. There is really no increase in graphical rendering demands from something like SP.

In truth, TS3 isn't all that graphically demanding, even with high details (assuming you have a reasonable graphic solution in your machine). If anything, it can easily run fps's of over 100, just as you noted. However, that's not always a good thing for your video card, and continued play at high fps's can lead to thermal hardware damage. You might consider going into your video card driver settings and forcing v sync on to limit it to say 60 fps, which is more than sufficient for smooth game play, to help prevent the game engine from "running away" and generating several hundred fps rates, which is known to happen (mostly in map view), as the v sync setting in the game's video options doesn't work. Assuming you have a "modern card" and up to date drivers, there should be an option for "adaptive v sync" (at least, that's what it's called in NVidia, not sure what the AMD name for it is), which will help eliminate the "microstutters" you can sometimes see when v sync is on. Some folks use an actual FPS limiter program to achieve the same thing, frequently setting it to 30 fps, which should be sufficient for smooth graphics, although, personally, I can tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps, and prefer the latter. YMMV.

Thanks eskie227, that was an insightful post. I have always been stumped on why TS3 is so laggy/resources demanding (my computer is only laggy in TS3 and not any other supposedly way more power hungry game).

Any recommendation for ATI card in term of FPS limiter?


What is your game setting? Window mode or full screen? Resolution? Details on sims and objects?

I keep everything at default. I turn down antialias, tree details, reflection (which I believe is taxing the TS3 engine a lot). High details lot I keep at 2. But ... I keep sim details and object details at highest. Reason? Well, sims are already enough pudding face as it is. Without high details on sims, we cant fully enjoy the custom skins.

I play with performance consciousness in mind. Most of my households are under decorated: no clock, no toilet paper (pure decor), barely any painting (if at all). For selfsim, of course I want to live a little, cluster up the house a bit to feel real, but I know to limit myself to a small/cozy loft apartment instead of a giant 64x64 castle (yeah, those TS2 days wanting to have the biggest and baddest everything are long gone for me).

With this, I suffer 30-50fps. 30fps when facing high details stuff (like another lot in the background). Pretty mediocre, but maybe it doesn't help too much that my selfsim lives up high in the middle of downtown (no matter where I look, TS3 has to display 3-4 lots in the distance).

If you go into the Catalyst Control Center (that's AMD/ATI, isn't it?) you should be able to set v sync there. Otherwise, there's a popular FPS Limiter over on MATY, but if you can can set it in the driver, it just seems easier to me.

I run full screen 1920X1080. Details are all very high, except for trees, that I just leave on high.

In the video options menu, you can set the number of lots to render at high detail. I leave it at 1, as the only lot I really want on high is the one I'm playing. If I move the camera to another lot, it renders in just a few seconds, so it works out fine for me. The only problem with that setting is if you're playing a houseboat, as the dock and boat are treated as 2 separate lots. In that case, I increase the number of lots to render in high detail so I can see both at the same time, but I haven't been playing with boats in a while.

I've been using this with my AMD
Works flawlessly.

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=512541