I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right forum category, or if I should go to “Other Sims Games” instead. If so, I can delete this post and repost it there.

So, I was recently digging through the Life Stories files. I wanted to see how “missions” (aka story wants) work, and whether this behavior could theoretically be replicated outside of Riley and Vincent's stories.

From what I've found, all missions can be found in Wants.package in TSData\Res\Wants.


I checked if the numbers under “springSet” mean anything, and yes, they are simply instances of the corresponding STR# file in the Wants.package file in TSData\Res\Text.


However, what interested me most in the Wants.package file from TSData\Res\Wants was that story wants don't have checkTrees.
CheckTrees are a group of BHAVs in Objects.package whose names begin with “CT,” and they allow the game to detect when a want is fulfilled. So if story wants don't have CTs, how does the game know when they are fulfilled?

I dug deeper into objects.package and found these BHAVs. As you can see, they are what fulfills the missions and display all the story pop-ups.



So, it seems that everything is written in plain SimAntics. The stories are not hardcoded in any way. Does that mean that, theoretically, it is possible to replicate this game behavior outside of Four Corners and Bitville, and perhaps even create custom stories?

Unfortunately, I don't know how to write SimAntics, so I can't do much with this knowledge, but I still think it's an interesting discovery that warrants further discussion. Thoughts?

Good research! It might be possible, or you might hit some walls if you try. I think it would be easier to experiment with modifying existing stories as a start.

I think it's possible to make scripted events even in the regular game, but that also requires a lot of manual writing of scripts which is hard and not fun so no one does it .

Barely anybody mods the Stories games, so that's going to be like a niche within a niche and it will be hard to find people to work with on this.

Interesting find! Although I would agree with lingeringwillx, it would be no fun to code custom stories. A lot of work for someone else to play it out once, maybe twice. And you as an author don't get to enjoy playing it at all, because you know the script and already sick and tired of it after testing 😁


Check tree is not about fulfilling a want. It is a way to prevent a want from rolling/appearing if specified conditions are not met. For example, a check tree for 'woohoo in a car' want may check if there is car on the lot, and if not, that want won't appear. Having these conditions is optional for regular wants. Maybe the story wants are designed in a way that CTs are simply not needed. They may have wants trees to take care of 'rolling sanity', so to speak.

Sorry, you're right, I misunderstood how CTs work. And yeah, I agree - creating your own stories would be very tedious. It would probably require an entire group of people to make. But still, it's cool to know that something like that is possible

You have 7C Wants Satisfy in the script. At this point the want is fulfilled. It's the same as with using an object. You choose at which point the want is fulfilled, for example, after entering and passing ten loops. Note that sim pe doesn't reveal the first field which is the want owner.

I wonder how they ensure that the right want remains up. Because there is a break point when wants satisfy is false.

I'm very much into any and all news regarding Stories, specifically Castaway Stories. I do have basic programming skills, but I haven't written anything complex in SimAntics yet.

The only thing on my mind story-wise (Castaway) as a fun (but tedious) project would be to change certain goals to have the game be appealing to a broader audience, e.g. removing/changing some story goals where the hero needs to physically fight in order to make progress, with something less socially primitive.

It's wild that Aspyr did it in the first place. They must have had some great development tools.

I have also thought about this idea, and yeah it would probably make more sense to recreate a storyline system in Sims 2 to have a bigger audience, but also to make most of the scenario construction something you do in-game, to not have to worry as much about Simantics when writing the story.