EDIT 11/11/20: I've removed the preliminary documentation from this post, because I've added a draft of the release version of the documentation to a later post (post #8)! If anyone could give feedback on whether that documentation is clear enough, or too detailed/not detailed enough, it would be much appreciated. Also, version 0.6 of the mod is attached to post #8 with the new documentation, not to this first post like the previous ones!

EDIT 11/15/2020: I've split this mod from 2 parts into 3 for those who might not want everything it does - one part contains the polyamory features, one contains the attraction features, and one contains the common classes. The documentation in post #8 has been updated to reflect this, and the most recent files are attached to post #8; the files attached to post #1 are outdated versions, don't download them unless my latest change broke something and you need to go back.

Other points I'd especially appreciate feedback on are below, as before:

Wow, you've come a long way since we first talked Very impressive work.

Would love to help with translation to french if you're looking for support with that.

It's been a long journey

A French translation would be awesome! Right now all the notices and descriptions are in a very basic and straightforward form (not "fun" in a sims-like way, I'm not good at making up that stuff so I've been putting it off) but if you want to check them out when I post V0.1 after work today just to see what kind of things they're generally going to say, feel free. Also, the way I've broken some of them up to allow them to adapt for grammatical correctness in different situations may be hard to follow by just reading the STBL without seeing the code, so if you need to see the relevant code snippets and unhashed keys to make sense of them just let me know.

Version 0.1 is live! Also, as of tomorrow I will be on a 1-month modding hiatus; I will 100% be back though. Anyone who reads this, please feel free to post bugs or suggestions in this thread while I’m away, although I may not respond promptly and can’t make immediate fixes.

What’s new in version 0.1:

• Attraction overhaul: the mod comes with its own attraction scoring method (including new tunable bonuses/penalties, customize as desired - and let me know what settings you find work best). It’s compatible with NRaas mods; it’ll stop Woohooer’s version from running so they don’t fight over what the attraction score should be, and if Woohooer/StoryProgression is present it’ll use those mods’ settings to decide whether attraction is allowed between the sims in question.
  • Trait attraction bonuses are only applied for learned traits, career bonuses are only applied for learned careers *and* sims who (based on traits) should find career success attractive, level 3 money bonus only applies for sims known to be rich and only if the other sim has a personality that should find money attractive, zodiac compatibility (not just match) bonus only applied for learned signs and only for Supernatural Fan sims, Eccentric/Bot Fan/Supernatural Fan sims can get attracted to bots with the capacity to love, attraction bonuses and penalties based on fitness/fatness/age can be overruled by custom reward traits indicating a sim’s “type”, Supernatural Fans get attracted to occult sims, the range of occult types that receive the matching occult status bonus is expanded (not sure why they weren’t all included before), and probably more that I’ve forgotten I added
  • Off-Limits relationship type applies attraction penalty (discourages sims from autonomously canoodling with exclusive partners’ loved/hated ones unless the relationship is already on the decline)
  • Not Looking For Love hidden trait applies attraction penalty (discourages sims from autonomously pursuing new romances while in exclusive relationships, while preserving the ones they already had at the time they got the trait)

• Improved socials
  • All custom socials except Ask Relationship Status now have ITUNs, with advertising for default and custom traits as needed
  • All socials are autonomous (I may change it so Ask For Open/Closed relationship interactions are user-directed only, though, because those ones being autonomous has been a little annoying in my tests [this change was made in version 0.2]). This includes Ask To Include Sim In Relationship; if that one is initiated by a non-selectable sim, instead of a popup menu appearing to choose who they’re asking to include they’ll just pick one of their partners at random instead
  • All newly created romantic socials also have friendly versions

• New cheat
  • Enter “debugPolyamory” to toggle debugging messages on and off. This is faster for me than having to go through and comment out all my debugging messages before posting each version of the mod; also, this way testers can turn the messages on if there’s a problem and tell me if they say anything useful.

• Bugs identified
  • [Solved in version 0.2]Getting Open-Minded from books doesn’t seem to be working anymore, haven’t gotten that fixed yet
  • [Seems to be solved in 0.2]I’m getting a little more lag than I used to, and sims get frozen/stuck in loops during socials and need resetting more often - I’m not 100% certain this mod is what’s causing that, but it seems like the most logical explanation. I think the method that applies Off-Limits relationships may be the culprit, and it may need to be totally rewritten from scratch after my break because its logic is pretty gnarly
  • [A little better in 0.2; still takes about 20 seconds on a pretty decent computer, when activating the mod or loading a save with the mod active in Sunset Valley and Riverview]The severity of the lag when this mod is activated or a world where it’s active is loaded seems to depend on how large it is and how many sims it has, so I want to streamline my world load/sim instantiated/mod activated methods

Version 0.2 updates: fixed trait assignment from reading books; rewrote some twisted logic, which seems to have helped with lag and fixed a few bugs with jealousy and attraction; made Ask For Open/Closed relationship user-directed only; other things

Version 0.3 updates: More complex LHS rules for all the socials (especially Ask To Include Sim In Relationship - success now depends on how the target feels about the actor and also about everyone they're being asked to include). Better handling of Off-Limits relationships, through a whole new dictionary that will hopefully prevent there being leftover Off-Limits relationships after changes in relationship status. Sims should now be unable to confess to cheating or tell about someone else's cheating when they shouldn’t think any cheating happened.

[Edit since it's been less than 24 hours:]
Version 0.4 updates: Better thumbnails for the reward traits, addition of unique positive/negative buffs for polyamorous relationships. Also, a question: I've now completed almost all the high-priority and most of the low-priority features that I wanted to add, so what's left is just cosmetic improvements, finding and fixing bugs, and the two high-priority features I'm totally stuck on (dreamtree and PDA reactions), plus some low-priority features that I'm wondering if I should even bother with. Is anyone actually interested in having event-based assignment of attraction rewards, asking sims to treat specific others as Off-Limits, less aggressive non-RM breakups, or autonomous non-RM relationship-defining socials as part of this mod, or should I leave them out?

Version 0.5 updates: Added preservation of relationships while traveling, fixed the bugs adding that created (at least those I've noticed). Fixed several buggy social rules, interactions should work correctly between sims who are less close now. Changed the organization of the code a lot, to start building a cross-mod namespace; fixed the bugs that created as well. Reduced the frequency of Reflection invocations, and hopefully made them more efficient. Discovered in my testing that it's very easy to create volatile relationship configurations by using Ask To Include Sim In Relationship to get sims who aren't close into relationships with each other, so I might make that interaction harder.

Draft documentation:

Summary
This is a mod to allow polyamory and other forms of committed non-monogamy, and guide sims' behavior in relationships in a more nuanced way. It doesn't allow multiple spouses or other EA partner types, because that would require a much more invasive mod; but it lets sims be in multiple committed relationships at the same time, gives relationships more customizable boundaries than you can get with just LTRs, and prevents hurt feelings as long as those boundaries are respected.

There are a lot of interacting parts here, so the documentation is a little long; please bear with me! And definitely read the installation, activation, and removal sections, if nothing else



Instructions
Installation
This mod is broken into 3 parts, in separate files in the downloads section: lizcandorCommon, lizcandorPolyamory, and lizcandorAttraction. lizcandorPolyamory contains the mod's polyamory-related features, such as social interactions and the Open-Minded and Prefers Non-Monogamy traits. lizcandorAttraction contains the mod's attraction-related features, such as the overhauled attraction scoring method and the age/body type preference and Not Looking For Love traits. lizcandorCommon contains common classes used by the other two packages, and must be installed for either of them to work.

This mod also requires two other mods to function: Arsil's Custom Traits Manager to allow the custom traits to load, and Battery's C# Script Utility for generating sim-selection menus and calculating sims' ages.

Activation
This mod is inactive by default, and has to be activated with cheats; this is meant to reduce the risk of your saves being exposed to it unintentionally. Before the attraction and polyamory features are activated, all they will do is prevent their associated traits from being assigned outside of Create-A-Sim, by removing them as soon as they're added.

To activate the attraction features, enter "activateAttraction" in the cheats console; to activate the polyamory features, enter "activatePolyamory". Activating the polyamory features may cause some freezing as everything is set up; this can last as long as 20 seconds. A similar amount of lag will occur whenever a world with this part of the mod already active is loaded.

Once each part of the mod is activated in one world in a save, it will be activated automatically in every world that's visited in that same save afterwards; this means relationships will be preserved while traveling, and it's not necessary to re-activate in every destination. Mod activation should not carry over between different saves.

Removal
Once the polyamory and attraction parts of this mod are activated in a save, they must be deactivated before removing the packages from your game. This is done by entering "deactivatePolyamory" and "deactivateAttraction" in the cheats console in every world you've visited in the save. The deactivation cheats clear the entire save's stored relationship data, remove interactions and event listeners, relinquish control over attraction, and - most importantly - remove the mod's custom traits and commodity kinds from all sims in the currently loaded world.

The traits and commodity kinds must be removed before removing the package that contains them, or your save will not load correctly afterwards (see the Custom Traits Manager for details). I recommend also waiting a few minutes before saving after deactivating the mod, so any sim who was in the middle of an interaction that's being removed has time to complete it and won't cause errors on reloading.

If you're deactivating the mod but not removing it from your game, you'll still need to quit and restart to undo the changes it makes to EA interactions and (if Woohooer is installed) stop it from blocking Woohooer's attraction scoring. The polyamory component of the mod sets jealousy to none to stop EA jealousy from kicking in, and both components add some additional social rules and tests to romantic interactions; restarting after deactivation will undo this.

Compatibility
This is a pure script mod, and should not conflict with most other mods. However, there are a few special cases to note:

• Woohooer:
  • Romance and woohoo jealousy must be set to None in Woohooer's settings, or Woohooer will continue triggering jealous reactions even when this mod does not (each mod has its own jealousy method).
  • When activated, this mod will prevent Woohooer's attraction scoring method from running, and use its own instead. When deactivated, it will cede control to Woohooer again.
  • By default this mod follows EA's rules to decide whether attraction and romantic socials are allowed between sims, but if Woohooer is installed it will ask Woohooer what's allowed instead.

• Other:
  • This mod's attraction scoring method will prevent the EA one from running, but it uses the same tuning plus some additions; so attraction tuning mods won't conflict with it but their results may be a little different.

This mod was built and tested on patch 1.69, and may not work on previous patches.

Last update for a bit - fixed a few things I hadn't realized were broken after splitting the mods, and added 2 new interactions to lizcandorPolyamory to let sims appear to get engaged/married to multiple partners (these interactions do the animations for engagement and marriage without changing relationship status). Post #8 contains the most current files.

EDIT: Whoops, not the last update after all - one of the deactivation cheats was broken. Fixed now, all files are updated!

Hey Liz! I haven’t had the chance to test your mod out yet (IRL stuff), but I’m hoping to soon. I’ve wanted an attraction system like this for ages and I’m so excited that someone is bringing it to fruition! I do have one tiny suggestion: would it be possible to add hopeless romantic to the list of traits that like zodiac compatibility? Astrology does have some romanticism to it

Hey, thanks! I've actually found and fixed some minor attraction bugs since my last update and just not gotten around to uploading the new packages, so it's probably best you're not already testing the current version anyway. Adding Hopeless Romantic as liking sign compatibility is a good idea! And while I'm thinking about it, I should probably make all my lists of traits that get certain kinds of attraction tunable instead of hardcoded.

Weeks later, here are the most updated versions! Updates:

• Fixed blocking of romantic socials between non-attracted sims; majority of sims will now respond awkwardly to romantic socials from anyone they're not attracted to, sometimes neutrally in special cases. Flirty and Hopeless Romantic sims will behave as normal though. If this makes things too hard, it helps to expand the list of buffs sims are attracted to, or just raise the base attraction score or lower the attraction threshold.

• Timeout between interaction-triggered attraction updates is shortened to 2 hours for active sims; still 1 day for inactive sims.

• Fixed assignment of custom relationship types when sims go steady

• Made charisma a universally attractive skill

• I forget which change caused this, but the lag I was seeing before seems better now

• Hopeless Romantic sims care about compatible/incompatible astrological signs

• Put relationship-boundary-defining interactions in their own tab, "Define the Relationship", to reduce clutter in the friendly/romantic tabs

• Fixed (I think) automatic assignment of custom traits to sims who shouldn't have them

• Added to lizcandorAttraction 0.4 - fixed excessive attraction update notices.

Added asymmetrical attraction in lizcandorAttraction 0.6, sort of - there's only so much I can do on that, but the attraction mod now calculates and stores separate scores for both sims in any pair, and decides how sims respond to romantic socials based on those scores instead of the mutual one.

Symmetrical score changes: if both scores are above the attraction threshold, the attraction score in those sims' Relationship object (that's the score that decides if they get the attractive company buff) is set as the average of the two scores; if not, it's set to whichever score is lower. So sims only get the attractive company buff and the effects associated with it if the attraction is mutual. The attraction jingle and swarm of hearts will still play, but if the attraction isn't mutual, only one sim will get the hearts.

New asymmetrical score addition: mod consults the asymmetrical scores (stored in the custom class that tracks whether it's time for an attraction update, not the Relationship class) instead of the symmetrical one when deciding whether the target of a romantic social finds the actor attractive enough to *maybe* give a positive response.

The result of this is that if sim A went to the spa and got so many positive buffs that every sim around thinks they look amazing now, and sim B did nothing special, sim B may respond positively to flirting from sim A, but A will still reject B if B is the one to initiate the flirt. Whereas before, sim A being pretty would make them both attractive to and attracted to everybody, which didn't make any sense.

[Edit: I've realized the asymmetrical attraction is not fully Woohooer-compatible. The current version of Woohooer sometimes overwrites the attraction scores set by this mod; sims will still reject romantic socials from any sim my mod says they're not into, but they may still get the Attractive Company buff, and be pushed to initiate flirting with a sim my mod wouldn't let them accept that same flirting from. Not sure how to reconcile that, will come back to it.]