To be specific, pushing sims to actually play out the stories more. I was thinking about this because my computer is very, very high-tier, especially compared to 2009. AwesomeMod's story driver does it this way, but it's also less configurable and part of a much larger-scale mod. NRaas SP is nice, but it would be cool if there was a "high end" version, intended for better computers, especially since most computers from the last 3-5 years more than exceed the minimum requirements.

I'm not asking for it to be done, necessarily, I'm just wondering whether it's possible for it to happen without a crapton of recoding. I would think yes, since I think it would mostly require adding more pushes to the stories, but there might be technical difficulties that I am unaware of.

Might try doing it myself, if it's possible.

As I am certain you are aware, TS3 is a 32-bit application. The reason that SP works as well as it does is that by progressing the high number of inactive sims that it can through its offscreen story pushes and concurrently running Managers rather than strictly through on-screen activities, it can still up to a point keep our games comfortably under the 3.5 GB or so safety limit, give or take a little, RAM usage that the game engine can handle. Anything beyond that level of usage and the game becomes impossible to play no matter what kind of systems players are using or how much RAM they have installed and available for use, crashes and Error12s become the order of the day, etc.

The issue many of us encounter with the Awesome method of making these things happen on-screen is that progression overall happens much more slowly and encompasses a much smaller number of sims at a time than the SP method can manage. It's a total trade-off between the two methods of progression especially for players who like upwards of let's say 150 Resident sims in many of our worlds.

Maybe there is room for some kind of compromise between the two extremes. Those here who are actually coders could speak to that a bit better. But I already have to dial back SP's speed of progression in many of my busy worlds as it is in order to keep RAM usage at reasonable levels, many of us wouldn't necessarily be looking for more resource usage in these cases no matter how valuable the result becomes.

For those whose systems can handle it though, and for worlds that aren't quite so overpopulated, there are always the MC > Open commands and the HomeOpener mod that animate inactive Resident sims all of the time for that kind of effect rather than what became the EA way of having them hibernate inside their homes when not pushed out to community lots for any reason. That's admittedly not the same thing as acted out progression, but it's something to watch if you haven't tried it yet.

There is a way to have the game stimulate more inactive families in the background but it does come with a performance hit in terms of lag not so much in terms of memory usage (I think the most I'd seen in memory usage increase was a total of 50mb at a Max of 8). So if you have a powerful processor you might try that.
The option High Detail Lots also doubles as the max number of inactive families the game will periodically stimulate all the time on a rotational basis. Works better if your in Windowed mode and use a lower screen resolution like 1600x900. I've seen more activity from inactives in town view when in Windowed mode with a lower resolution and setting of High Detail Lots at the default of 4.

Possible? Sure. Practical? Not really. SP has enough performance issues. Effort put into making it worse isn't something I'd be interested in. As igazor noted, the game has a memory limit. No matter how loaded your system eventually you're going to hit that. Plus the game has an issue with task control and simulating more inactives adds to the queue. Eventually you're going to hit simulator collapse where your active Sim just stands around doing nothing cause the game has maxed it's simulating capabilities.

@sittingbear the High Detail Lots setting just controls how many lots around your camera are fully rendered. It doesn't control inactives activity. It used to back in the base game where your neighbors were fully simulated but it no longer does.

Possibly sittingbear is using High Detail Lots in conjunction with MC > Open or HomeOpener? Otherwise I'm not sure where that observation is coming from either, assuming a patched game.

Game patched fully yes. It was something I noticed in one of my test games. Tagger was always showing around 2 households that had activity going on in inside their homes when I had that setting at only 2 never used Home Opener rarely use MC Open. So I started playing around with the setting and noticed more activity from Town View while inactives where in their homes doesn't seem to centered around the active lot like it was in the beginning.
When traveling by their homes I could hear them active on the inside it may not control them like it once did but there does seem to be some form of stimulation going on at random intervals.

Thank you for the information. I was aware of the RAM limit, but was not aware of how badly it would limit what I described.

I have seen actual events happen with SP. One time I hovered my mouse over a sim in Riverview and it was something about 'attending a party'. There were other sims there. It wasn't one of the game's usual parties, it was a party for a member of the family who was getting married. I was shocked! But yeah, that example aside, I prefer to keep things as they are; with AM I once had a happily married sim assigned to be a town Casanova and got a message about him meeting someone and so I switch to that household immediately and he was at home holding his toddler.

Just sayin'. LOL

Igazor can you clarify what Twallans reason was for his fundamental change to the current caste/clique system design. I seem to recallthat my son's were getting individualized attention from the SP mod before this major SP overhaul. Like SO would push/progress Sims based on their traits and not what custom caste/clique you designated them to? So I'd see immersive things like obese but athletic Sims being pushed to jog/ work out around town. Recluse Sims would be found at remote and uninhabited parts of the map etc.

But since the caste system overhaul, I really don't see this as much

Seems a bit late to be having this conversation as we have had castes as part of SP for what, 5 years and 36 version updates of the SP mod now? But sure...

A caste is a group of sims, nothing more than that.

Some castes are Automatic -- sims become a caste member automatically if they meet the criteria that is set in the caste definition.
Some castes are Manual -- sims become a caste member only if/when the player adds the sim to the caste manually.
(let's leave inherited and other fancier options that not everyone uses out of this as they would only serve to confuse things)

Left alone on all defaults, all of the castes are Automatic. The pre-made ones exist to cover things that used to be covered by individual SP options, such as teens can't become pregnant and vampires don't age. In other words, left all alone, they change nothing about game play but they make such restrictions easier to find and manage.

Once a player starts fiddling around with them, castes become a very powerful tool to allow for all kinds of previously unfathomable things like graduated tax rates based on net worth castes, restricting sims from certain levels of certain careers if they don't have the associated Uni degree, deciding which sim attributes would be required for enrollment in a private school, and even allowing for Rotational Play by way of caste settings just to name a few specific examples.

But sorry, if left all alone by the player I can't really see how the caste structure has anything to do with overweight sims not being pushed to exercise or why it would have any impact on anti-social sims socializing more.