What i am really missing in sims 3 to be a true living world is the indoor autonomy in inactive households.
you all know what i mean? i've done an experiment to find out if inactive sims do stuff at their own when they are at home. i use nrass home opener, tagger and story progression with all modules for this experiment, with all expansionspacks in version 1.67.
i play a one man family and take a look on other households from the morning into the night, what is really happening behind the walls...
so i have bad and good news.
the bad news first: the autonomy of inactive familys is decreased, when their home!
they just standing around and do nothing. sometimes a sim read a book, is playing videogames, watching tv or is sleeping. so they just fulfill basic needs, but the rest of the time they are absolute idle, they dont interact with their environment at all, they act like they are in a rabbithole! i think this was done to decrease performance lags back when the game came out 2009, but for todays standards this is no problem anymore...
but the good news are: when i look in the inactive family, they start doing autonomous things at their own, like an active family! They start to act like that, only when the Player is looking into their houses.
So there must be a way to tune this value to make all the neighborhood acting like an active family, even when im not looking in their houses, or not?!
i'm not into modding, and dont know where to start, so my question is:
does anyone know how to tune this, which value, a xml-file or is there even an existing mod for this? a solution? i'm looking sooo long for this!
sorry for my bad english. best regards!:oops:
mod for inactive indoor autonomy?
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igazor
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mod for inactive indoor autonomy?
Hi there.
EA actually imposed the throttled activity on inactive sims in their own homes after the game was released; one of the very early patches set things up so that sims in their own homes are usually in states of semi-hibernation much of the time. The reason for this is not that players' systems were or are weak, it's that the game can only address just under 4 GB of RAM before crashing or otherwise losing its mind. At the time, the limit was actually 2 GB as the early versions of the game were not Large Address Aware, but that doubled with the release of Patch 1.17 somewhere in 2010.
The ~4GB barrier is not a hardware issue exactly, but rather a limitation that would be on any 32-bit application. Although a 64-bit version of the game does exist for players on the Mac version of the game (which unfortunately also comes with its own special problems to deal with) that therefore has no such RAM restrictions, there is no counterpart on Windows. Processors and graphics cards in typical systems have of course moved forward greatly since back then, but the RAM restriction remains in place no matter how much RAM a player's system has.
HomeOpener is one way to cut through the throttling as you have seen, but players will find that their games' performance suffers tremendously if they have more than say 10 or 15 households in town -- how many would lead to total resource overload would depend on a lot of other factors including size of the active households being switched between, how many EPs and other forms of content are in play, and whether resource preserving mods like Overwatch, ErrorTrap, and Traffic are in use. Many of us would usually recommend not using HomeOpener, but instead use MasterController to "Open" several lots at a time, then Close some and Open others. But an entire world being actively simulated and in action under their own autonomy all at the same time 24 sim hours per day for worlds of over say 100 or 120 residents is not going to run successfully on really any kind of hardware. Wolds with fewer households and with only one sim in the active household like the one you describe would do better, but would also most likely hit that performance barrier eventually.
Don't get me wrong, the open world concept that makes TS3 unique and so appealing to play is great. It's a huge part of why we still play this game. But we do have to be realistic about how much autonomy the game can really handle before malfunctioning or other bad things happening.
EA actually imposed the throttled activity on inactive sims in their own homes after the game was released; one of the very early patches set things up so that sims in their own homes are usually in states of semi-hibernation much of the time. The reason for this is not that players' systems were or are weak, it's that the game can only address just under 4 GB of RAM before crashing or otherwise losing its mind. At the time, the limit was actually 2 GB as the early versions of the game were not Large Address Aware, but that doubled with the release of Patch 1.17 somewhere in 2010.
The ~4GB barrier is not a hardware issue exactly, but rather a limitation that would be on any 32-bit application. Although a 64-bit version of the game does exist for players on the Mac version of the game (which unfortunately also comes with its own special problems to deal with) that therefore has no such RAM restrictions, there is no counterpart on Windows. Processors and graphics cards in typical systems have of course moved forward greatly since back then, but the RAM restriction remains in place no matter how much RAM a player's system has.
HomeOpener is one way to cut through the throttling as you have seen, but players will find that their games' performance suffers tremendously if they have more than say 10 or 15 households in town -- how many would lead to total resource overload would depend on a lot of other factors including size of the active households being switched between, how many EPs and other forms of content are in play, and whether resource preserving mods like Overwatch, ErrorTrap, and Traffic are in use. Many of us would usually recommend not using HomeOpener, but instead use MasterController to "Open" several lots at a time, then Close some and Open others. But an entire world being actively simulated and in action under their own autonomy all at the same time 24 sim hours per day for worlds of over say 100 or 120 residents is not going to run successfully on really any kind of hardware. Wolds with fewer households and with only one sim in the active household like the one you describe would do better, but would also most likely hit that performance barrier eventually.
Don't get me wrong, the open world concept that makes TS3 unique and so appealing to play is great. It's a huge part of why we still play this game. But we do have to be realistic about how much autonomy the game can really handle before malfunctioning or other bad things happening.
mod for inactive indoor autonomy?
Thank you for your detailed response and for taking the time. I have to accept that the game was actually developed for the entertainment of the player and not as a scientific laboratory experiment to create an artificial universe 
But sometimes it really feels that way. I am fascinated by the dynamics of a virtual world with people, and I have too many expectations and often forget that it's just an old game running on outdated 32-bit technology. Nonetheless, the simulation is very complex, and with mods, it becomes even more complex and realistic. There's still nothing like it to this day. I love it and will continue playing it. Thank you 
But sometimes it really feels that way. I am fascinated by the dynamics of a virtual world with people, and I have too many expectations and often forget that it's just an old game running on outdated 32-bit technology. Nonetheless, the simulation is very complex, and with mods, it becomes even more complex and realistic. There's still nothing like it to this day. I love it and will continue playing it. Thank you