Environment Motive Mod

UPDATE 1: Fixed a calculation mistake.

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION

I don't like the way the Sims 2 calculates the environment score. There is mostly nothing much that can be done to fix this. However, there is one particular issue which has annoyed me, and that issue can be fixed, so I made this mod. Before I tell you what this mod does, you should first know how the game calculates the environment score and motive.

The game calculates the environment motive differently when the sim is indoors, and when the sim is in the "original outdoor room" (room 0, this is where the road, mailbox and so on are located). If the sim is indoors, the game scans all the objects in the room, checks their original purchase price, multiplies that value by the object's Niceness factor (most decorative objects have a higher Niceness factor, meaning that most decorative objects increase the environment score more than non-decorative objects even if the decorative object costs less than the non-decorative object). The game then calculates the final value, and then checks the size of the room. There is a cap on how much objects can increase the environment score in a room, and that cap is determined by the number of tiles in a room. In an unmodded game, the game determines the cap by multiplying the number of tiles by 1000. So, if the sum of the original price of all objects in a 10-tile room is 10000 simoleons, then you have hit the cap in that room, and cannot increase the environment score any more by buying more objects. This object-price effect only supplies about 60% of the entire environment score, this is why even if you hit the object-price cap in a room, you will realize that the environment motive in that room won't be 100%. The remaning 40% is supplied by the total original purchase price of walls and floors, and the amount of LOCALIZED light (both artificial and natural) the sim is currently receiving in their exact spot. So, the game adds together the original purchase price of walls and floors and adds that to the environment motive, but then checks to see how much light the sim is getting. This light effect is local, meaning that it may change if the sim takes a single step towards a window during the day, or if they get in range of a light object. The light effect is very sensitive, in that the game checks the light type and also how much of that light is being cast on the sim. In other words, every sim is obsessed with light in this game. If you turn off the lights, environment will always go down. Finally, the game checks to see if there are any environment-decreasing objects in the room (dirty dishes and so on), and substracts their effect from the environment score. The environment motive of a sim is the result of this calculation. If the sim is in the original outside room, then everything is localized, in that the game checks every object which is within about 6 tiles of the sim and calculates the final environment motive in this way, and ignores all objects which are out of this range.

Now that you know how the game calculates the environment score, here is what this mod does: I dislike the fact that it is so easy to achieve a very high environment score in very small rooms as opposed to larger rooms. For example, it is extremely easy to achieve almost full environment score in a 9-tile (3x3) bathroom, because the object-price cap is only 9000. So, a sim who is in a 40-tile well-decorated room enters into this extremely small bathroom, and all of a sudden their environment score goes up significantly, even though there is only a bathtub, toilet and sink in that room without anything else. This does not make any sense to me. Why is the game punishing the player for building larger rooms? The fix for this is to heavily increase the object-price cap if the room is very small, so that it is very difficult to achieve higher environment scores the smaller the room is. This mod does precisely that. For example, a room of 10 tiles in this mod will have an object-price cap of 50000 instead of 10000.

You need the latest version of 7zip or WinRAR to get this mod.

Requirements: Base Game.

Resources: Environment Score Curves/0x7FD46CD0/0x000002BC