I think I did resize the bmp after the first few times of it didn't work... but it's possible that's because when I imported the sprites with T-mog it kept losing the bmp entirely and I decided to make absolutely sure it would stick after I was done doing that by making sure it was sized the way other catalog thumbnails were.

I was very excited that I successfully pulled the bmp out in the first place, though. XD

I want to share a small update on Level 3 purely because I thought I was going to release it tonight (after I fixed an issue where I put the wrong bed on one of the lot versions) but now I know I'm not. XP

...That's because I'm going to add functionality to it that preps each Sim's interests! Interests aren't one-to-one with the beta because different interests are in the beta versus the final game, but I'd manually edited the Edith copy's characters to at least vaguely resemble the beta's as closely as possible. However, on import to my complete install all but three of their interests are zeroed out, which really makes the scenario harder than it probably should be--when I did a test run I did succeed with it, but also when I left Sims to their autonomous devices just now they all decided they hated each other, so... XD

I think later EPs have more interests than earlier ones so I could also in theory make the prep EP specific, although I don't know that I WOULD do that... especially since every single non-beta version of the game has more interests than the beta, lol

UGH YEAH; the post (or pre?) XML importing object resource loss was a pain in the ___ for me in the early days of this thread. It's like brain cells! If you don't use them, they will be summarily annihilated for the rest of your life!



As you should Getting to manipulate this old standalone Maxis SPR2 viewer that handled the beta object sprites and opening the doors to having them gradually exported and ready for possible conversions was such an eureka moment I didn't have in such a long time. I overcomed my fear of speaking in English for more than 10 minutes in a row and Skyped my good friend Dan showing some sprite samples (he wasn't actively involved in the project, but he gave the classic moral encouragement away! All this to say... your useful life was not a waste of cyber energy, Skype (2003-2025)




Yeah and sometimes I do wonder if it wasn't an accident deep down? An old-ish fact that turned into a big head-scratcher for me upon discovering was the fact that Sims in the base game are born with randomized levels of interest in 3 additional talk topics that aren't used anytime in the game; and they'd be the cryptically labeled "Babies", "Beauty" and "Spooky Stuff". I recall a bunch of vintage fansites that casually purposed these icons for their hacks, so it took me some time to at last find out these were in fact Maxis's.







"interests" cheat dialog (as of 1.0 base game)


================================================================================

In keeping with "Child Sims Can Cook" child-allowed cooking powers, I found myself in the perfect mood to erase the beta fridges's age check so you can likewise ask kids too pick the grownup meals from them. A portion of "Child Sims Can Cook"'s script still is necessary for the kids to in fact know what to do with the food they just grabbed.

p.s.: I assume maybe it's the perfect timing for us to put together some sort of "mega happy pack" with all the objects zipped/rarred/exxed in one. Contrary to my original belief, downloading all the items one by one doesn't positively add up to users' cc shopping experience, it seems .

AS THE LEGACY OF THE SIMS CONTINUES, SO DOES OUR PROJECT'S PROGRESSION...


Maxis Beta Conversions Mega Pack

Players who are new to installing CC will also be able to download all (state-of-the-art) object ports at once using our new Mega Pack. Cursor/Walls/Scenarios from the "Miscellaneous Goodies" not included — only Buy/Build mode things that can be held with the Hand Tool!

Platform	Comments	Download
	1-Click Mod Install for The Sims Legacy on Steam. It automatically installs all objects for you! Recommended if you're new to installing mods.	lpx_betaobjs_megapack_steam.zip — 13.6 MB
	1-Click Mod Install for The Sims Legacy on EA app. It automatically installs all objects for you! Recommended if you're new to installing mods.	lpx_betaobjs_megapack_eaapp.zip — 13.6 MB
	1-Click Mod Install for classic The Sims (2000-2005). It automatically installs all objects for you! Recommended if you're new to installing mods.	lpx_betaobjs_megapack_original.zip — 13.6 MB
	Manual Install file. Can be used for all Sims versions. Recommended to advanced users who are used to installing mods.	lpx_betaobjs_megapack.zip — 14.1 MB

Figured I'd ask this here instead of using a whole new thread since it's directly related to what I'm doing in Level 3: Is it known which individual EPs understand interests in single digits 0-10 versus which understand interests in multiples of 100 (i.e. 0-1000)?

Because it turns out the zeroed interests are actually just REALLY REALLY low interests in a Complete Collection/all EP installation and thus I think I need to put in an EP check and modify the behavior accordingly... but I want to make sure which EP it actually changed with (and whether it's specifically "has the EP" versus "has that EP or any released afterward"). It looks like it MIGHT be Hot Date that did it which would make me think Hot Date+ rather than "has Hot Date", but I dunno. (What's not helping with that: The Unleashed families have low non-HD interests and only have normal HD interests.)

(The alternative is to just use hundreds everywhere--Edith doesn't seem to have a problem writing hundreds to the interests. But then depending on how a non-hundred-interests installation interprets it, it could inadvertently make things VERY easy.)

ooooh let’s investigate.

First, the obvious: Vanilla game logic still handles character talk interests using single-digit values (0–10). So, that’s not where we’ll find our answer.



Edith 2.0 (used for object programming up to The Sims: Hot Date) lets us peek at the BHAVs of objects made for the game until 2001. Checking out the scripting tree for Livin’ Large’s telescope, you’ll find the alien abduction code does more than tweak personality traits—it rewires the Sim’s entire set of interests, leaving them hyperfixated on aliens and violence. And yup, it’s still stored in that classic single-digit format.




House Party doesn’t seem to have an object with scripts that explicitly handle character interest scores, so I couldn’t dig into that expansion in detail. I skipped it for now.

Hot Date, on the other hand, introduces something different: the "just chat" phone feature (which made its debut on Hot Date as far as I'm concerned, and it's handled by a separate global iff) has conditional nodes that, for the first time, track Sims' interests in multiples of 100!!



I can definitely take a later time to raid a classic House Party CD copy to see if the any of its NPCs are born with 0-1000 or 0-10 interest scores, but it's safe-ish to say that the EP that modified the interests score system has has has to be Hot Date. It makes sense in the context that it brought the concept of interests that can be upgraded the same way as the work skills can— the decimals between 00 and 99 would basically serve to update the head icon that shows how much of the interest has been "learnt" as the sims read magazines.

...It only occurred to me AFTER that prior post (upon reading "check NPCs" in your post) that I could check the generated Sims' values and not just the ones that came with Unleashed. (I think it's likely this is a Hot Date+ situation and not a "Hot Date specifically" situation, but let's take a look at all Maxis created/generated Sims anyway.)

- Base game families: I'm making an assumption they're single digit still because the tool I cracked these open in for this quick check was SimEnhancer and it refused to read neighborhood 1??
- Mashuga (LL, Deluxe in my case): Singles for ALL values (most HD values are 0 but one (technology) is 2?)
- Townie (HD): Hundreds for all values
- Vacation: Hundreds
- Burbs (UL): Single digit interests for everything other than five of the Hot Date interests, which use hundreds (Johnny Burb, as a child, has no Hot Date interests and only has single digit interests)
- Charming (UL): Single digit plus five HD
- Goth Sr (UL): Single digit plus five HD
- Hick (UL): Single digit plus five HD
- Ginia Kat (UL): Single digit interests for everything other than five of the Hot Date interests
- Strays (UL): ... 🐶
- Somebody/Anybody (SS): Hundreds
- Strange (MM): Hundreds

At minimum this suggests the Unleashed families were created in an environment that did not have Hot Date style interests AND that an all-EP installation (which includes Hot Date in its EPs) generates hundreds-based interests. At most, this suggests all post-HD EPs generate hundreds-based interests (a Hot Date+ situation rather than a Hot-Date-needed one).

Perhaps it's safest to do a Hot Date+ check rather than a Hot-Date-specifically check and if there's some edge case where that's wrong then people who have some sort of higher EP but DON'T have Hot Date just get free super personality points. XD

I always knew there was something minimally weird about the Mashugas



I second that; when I checked the pre-Hot Date NPCs' "do I like topic" BHAV, they referenced single-digit interests, while they were in their hundreds when I checked the same tree in a Complete Collection copy via Codex, so maybe the game has its way of 'upgrading' the characters' interest system the moment we first interact with them



Just out of curiosity: how are you handling the characters' interest scores in the port? Obviously, topics like religion and that other Blah Blah Blah one didn’t make the cut, but are you trying to assign equivalent ones, or is the sorting done more arbitrarily? Oh and is there a specific piece of Level 3's code that checks the characters' interest score at all?

...Why did I say personality in my prior post? 0_o I meant interests the whole time. XP



Nothing in Level 3's original behavior from the beta looks at interests at all. The checks for progression in the level basically check if Ross has built the relationship to a certain level with one of the women and (barely) guides the player toward doing that until their relationship is over 95 (they both have to like each other; it can't be one-sided). (The extra version I've put together that allows Mercedes/Sam as a win (which is currently named Level (E)3 ) is the same other than that it includes a check for Sam and Mercedes liking each other.)

It's just that when I went to test it in my all-EPs game, it took several times longer than doing so in 1.1/Edith because interactions kept going negative, and my best guess as to why is that it's hard to talk about interests when you barely have any (and thus the game's built in social interaction logic is kneecapping the scenario because they don't like any topic). (And then when I just let them sit there autonomously after fixing some object issues on the lot and reimporting it, they all quickly hated each other.)

So adding an optional setting (i.e. not required in order to start the scenario) for changing the characters' interests is mostly a way to allow for avoiding making building a relationship harder than intended by at least making them have interests in the first place (since this is probably mostly a HD+ issue I could probably have gotten by with just offering a setting that's only available for HD people but I might as well offer it for everyone as a "hey, make the Sim's interest match the beta!").

I believe I consistently mapped beta interests as follows:

Sports = Sports (sports is sports)
Religion = Outdoors (...I think my logic is that some outdoors people treat it like a religion? I dunno)
Art = Music (music is a type of art)
Politics = Politics/Pets (politics is politics)
Gossip = 60's/School (I think I based this on the logic that people gossip in school... even though the adult interest is the '60s)
News = Weather (weather is something you see on the news)

I left Travel/Toys and Violence/Aliens untouched.

🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈
I'm curious to see what the Sam/Mercy kiss dialogs will be. No spoilers, please



Dunno if it speaks for my chronic inability to sustain healthy relationship scores in HD+ builds, but....wow, this scenario might take a long time to be completed, even when they interest points are well ported!



First thing that came to my mind was the saying “if the mountain won't go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to the Mountain”


===

ooook, my next contrib would be porting the default beta food SPR2 —> or, at least, creating an alternate default replacement hack that only modifies the food graphics whose appearance stayed the same across versions, to those who are not on board with the concept of having diploma-looking items as pizza boxes! Some of the sprites didn't change much from their finalized iterations (if at all), plus they have the perk of being extravagantly ROTATABLE!

edit p.s.: The group meal graphic objectively is a plate with chicken/green beans/red potatoes! Dive into this design document (mind you, the food trivia bit is the least interesting bit in the great scheme of the document haha).

I've gotten the EP check into the Level 3 objects and have for the most part tested them! With the hundreds/singles fix, the level takes about the same amount of time in Complete that it takes in Edith. (Though it's worth noting: I tested these with the advent of being able to switch off motives (Edith) or use a Simlogical party plant to make social the only important motive (Complete), since my testing protocol was "make sure the win condition is achievable" and "make sure all dialogs can pop up provided the scenario runs in such a way that they're allowed to".)

The EP check looks to see if the game edition is more than 3 (HD or higher) and then additionally checks if the game edition is *exactly* 5 (the highest release installed is Deluxe, AKA Deluxe has not had UL/SS/MM installed over top), and if it is 5, it then checks if Hot Date specifically is also installed. I don't have an extra computer handy to test if my memory is correct (I found out when I was having reinstall issues that apparently every laptop in the house has multiple EPs installed, except for one which only has the base game... which no one here owns???? the lowest in this house should be Deluxe????), but I have vague memories of when I only had Deluxe installed and seeing single digits in the interests cheat, so Deluxe is treated like base game/LL/HP for that reason unless the user explicitly has Hot Date installed.

If my memories or assumptions are incorrect, this could mean that for someone with only Deluxe (or Deluxe and HP and/or Vacation but NOT Hot Date) the level could be harder than intended (if I misremembered and Deluxe actually uses hundreds). 🤔

Alright, in light of this thread hitting 50K views, here’s something different. I dug through some old unreleased files in my inbox and landed on this one—partly because a few folks had asked if there were any more prototype assets floating around. Turns out, I had an old email from Don Hopkins (The Sims engineer) with a 3d max mesh of an early plumb-bob iteration...



It’s now swapped in as a usable skn/bmf mesh, so if you ever feel like replacing the final plumb-bob with this beautiful thing, have at it!

Sample	Source	Comments	Author	File
	head-arrow.max	A late iteration of the plumbob accessory (still internally named as "head-arrow", taking its semantic approach quite too literally, shaped like a real-world plumb-bob. I almost certainly assume it's from March to April 1999. It's noteworthy that, prior to E3 1999, the plumbob was already finished. The zip file contains an "ExpansionShared" equivalent, if you also want it to be used during the dating scenario.	LUCPIX (courtesy of D. Hopkins)	lpx_early99_head-arrow.zip

On to a loose fact: upon opening the .max mesh, it'll warn you about a chunk of missing files, as well as their expected addresses... are the file names familiar to you?

It gives me the feeling the source code could be floating around as well! Stay tuned for the next chapters of this soap opera...

Ooh, that plumbob almost looks like a UFO, ha.

In completely unrelated news! I've done it! Level 3 is "done" so far as I can tell! http://www.simfileshare.net/download/5342236/

The houses and objects should be fine, though I created the readme so fast I'm convinced I left something out of it. It contains all the same options for importable houses as the other two (base game vanilla compatible, Steering objects, and Steering match). It has TWO versions of the object in the zip, though--the standard edition that matches the beta, which is what's placed on the prepared lots, and the "all pairs edit" (AKA "Level (E)3: The (Gay) Kiss") which is a version that is exactly the same (other than its catalog entry/icon) but counts Mercedes and Sam falling in love as a win too, and includes corresponding new dialog text for that branch of options. These are two unique objects with two different GUIDs so they can both be put in the game just fine (though I wouldn't recommend having them both running the scenario on the same lot at the same time, though ).

I've made a few changes to some of the Level 2 house versions (and slight changes to the Level 2 object itself) that mean I should probably put an updated zip for that together, too... but I don't wanna right now, lol.