#4
7th May 2021 at 4:35 PM
Last edited by coolspear1 : 7th May 2021 at
5:16 PM.
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The sit while bowling element, I already tried modding that myself a good while ago. The results were not good. But, perhaps another modder may have more success. I came to the conclusion that you have to make chairs, sofas a snap on "child" element to the "parent" object bowing lane, so the sitting activity is recognized as part of the bowling event. Just as dining chairs snap to dining tables and are part of the dining process. Just putting in the coding to sit on any nearby seating was not enough. (Borrowing chunks of coding from the hospital "patients sit at reception" mod I did also did not do the trick.) I abandoned that idea. But, perhaps another modder may fare better.
By far the biggest problem with any type of object interaction, is other sims who are not involved in the group activity, who will get the random push to go talk with a sim who is involved in a group activity. In some cases such as bowling, this will cause the sim who has to take their turn bowling to take forever. Usually after a long enough delay getting their ears talked off, the game just ends the bowling session.
The game is rife with annoyances like this, the hot tub one of the most noticeable. Sim decides to get in a hot tub autonomously. Nice. But not a minute later gets out again. Annoying. Not because the hot tub is bugged. But 9 out of 10 times because another sim decided of all the sims on the lot, the hot tub sim is the one they now want to talk with. The ESP telepathic message is sent to the hot tub sim, they then get out and stand there waiting for other sim to come from miles away.
What the game needs is a new bit of coding from Maxis that is a "do not disturb" block. A bit of coding that can be placed on a single XML that then prevents autonomous, meaningless, random chit chat coming their way while engaged in an activity such as bowling, hot tub and so on.
Currently, the only way to do it with the XML coding Maxis do provide, is to blacklist the "is in hot tub" or "is bowling" hidden buffs on all the hundreds of chat interaction XMLs. What I call the arse-backwards way. I method I've used myself to stop romance sims forcing their partners who are eating to stop, get up and kiss them or some such. By blacklisting all the "is eating" and "is drinking" hidden buffs in all autonomous romance interactions. It works a treat, and as there were only 7 or 8 romance XMLs to work on for the mod it was tolerable to make the mod.
However for hot tubs, bowling, or so many other object interactions, you'd need to fetch out the hundreds of chit chat interaction XMLs to add in the blacklisted hidden buffs on each. That's a lot of work for a modder to do, hence Maxis need to make a new bit of coding and put it directly on the hot tub, bowling XMLs.
When it comes to modding bowling, I would concentrate on making it more seamless and smooth, much better transitions between sims promptly taking their turns. I have done a mod to make sims take their turns more quickly, and it helps to some degree. But there is also the general, widespread simulation lag that gets involved and scuppers just about everything, especially turn-based group activities. It would be more about taking things out to make it run smoother and transition better between each bowler taking their turn, than adding more new features such as extra cheering or booing. Given the Sims 4 engine and the simulation lag element, the "nice ideas" you want to implement to make it all go with a bang, a much more meaningful experience, never quite work out as imagined. The sims will end up taking even longer to take their turns, the simulation lag in between each step, each animation sequence, will ruin the effect every time.
Nice ideas. Wrong game to try them on. But I do wish you luck on trying to implement them and finding a good workaround for the inevitable simulation lag that will get involved in the equation.
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