Meaningful Stories Preview: More Interesting Conversations
Added 2019-04-19 16:40:47 +0000 UTCThe Meaningful Stories Preview has been updated to v1.1.0.0-5.0-preview, and includes a new feature that will hopefully be the beginning of a larger overhaul of sim autonomy.
Meaningful Stories Preview | Download link for patrons
When More Interesting Conversations is enabled, sims in conversation will autonomously choose specific social interactions more often, and use idle chat animations less.
You might have noticed that when sims are left to their own free will in a conversation, you can see them talking, but their action bar won't be showing any particular topic or action being taken. This is 'idle chat', and is what sims will mostly choose to do in a conversation when you aren't directing their actions. Only very occasionally will they gossip, or enthuse about a new show, or flirt, or claim to be a criminal mastermind.
With More Interesting Conversations enabled, you will see sims spend more of their conversation time choosing specific social actions, allowing their personality to show through a little more, and hopefully surprise you sometimes. When sims are capable of having a real conversation without your help, it becomes a little easier to imagine them as having their own mind.
The feature is similar to the effects of the mod Have Some Personality Please by Polarbearsims. But where Personality Please eliminates idle chat entirely, More Interesting Conversations in Meaningful Stories will still let sims idle chat briefly inbetween other social interactions. This means all of the varied animations and speech bubble topics associated with idle chat can still be seen, and there is a small buffer between autonomously-chosen social actions which you as the player can use to step in and change the flow of conversation if you choose.
Meaningful Stories Preview also now has a dedicated section in its in-game settings menu for new features.
Friends and +3 Inspired patrons have been testing various forms of this More Interesting Conversations feature for the past few months, and their feedback has improved it a lot. Now that it is part of the Meaningful Stories Preview, the plan is for it to stay there until I'm confident it is as good as it can be, and it is joined by the other autonomy improvements I have planned. Once I'm happy with my autonomy overhaul as a whole, I will set a date for its public release.
Once you've had a play with it, let me know what you think in the comments below, or on the Discord server!
Comments
OMG Your mods are awesome! Thanks a lot for this. But I have one question: Do you think that is possible to control how often sims try to interact with other sims? I mean, something like a switch where you can custom how often NPC's will socialize? It's a feature that I always wished Polar's mod had.
Marco Cantillo
2019-05-19 22:52:54 +0000 UTCEverything will work fine with both installed - combining won't cause any problems, and I plan to keep them compatible in the future. If you want to help me test the new feature in the preview, you can remove Personality Please for now, or you can wait until I add the compatibility options to disable Personality Please's idle chat feature and enable Meaningful Stories' version.
roBurky
2019-05-07 14:43:53 +0000 UTCDo you recommend taking out the Have some personality mod? I have both installed and the game works fine so just wanted to be sure :)
Andrada Petrovici
2019-05-03 07:22:00 +0000 UTCI'm so sorry roBurky scratch that last message, in my rush to just get all my mods updated I accidentally shoved 3 loose files into my wickedwhims folder without realizing it and one of them was a broken mod. When I removed those 3 files I stopped getting the LE with just mccc wickedwhims and meaningful stories in. Perhaps I need more coffee before I attempt to clean my mods folder....
AGirlWithAGun
2019-04-19 22:16:13 +0000 UTCThis file is from Wednesday. Is that the one you meant to upload? This error file doesn't include a lot of information, unfortunately. I can say that it doesn't look like it involves Meaningful Stories. It could be an error occuring inside WickedWhim's error catching functions, ironically, which might be hiding what the true error was. Or possibly something gone wrong in MCCC's function wrapping script.
roBurky
2019-04-19 20:37:24 +0000 UTChey roBurky can you tell me what it causing this? I got an LE before this update but figured it was a mod conflict from the recent patch so I took out all my mods except mccc and wickedwhims and loaded the new version of meaningful stories and got a new LE <a href="http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1020120/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1020120/</a>
AGirlWithAGun
2019-04-19 20:04:12 +0000 UTCGreat. Thank you so much for this update and also the information about conflicts with "Have some personality". I have this mod also installed and glad to found the info . Now I will try your update and send you warmest regards from Austria ;)
Evangelina Silvercloud
2019-04-19 18:36:51 +0000 UTCAmazing. Looking forward to checking this out. Thank you!
SimScandalous
2019-04-19 18:03:38 +0000 UTCthis looks amazing! can't wait to give it a go :) thank you roburky
AGirlWithAGun
2019-04-19 17:49:16 +0000 UTCThis is a great addition!
2019-04-19 17:33:29 +0000 UTCThank you!
WarriorPrincess
2019-04-19 17:29:28 +0000 UTCThis is a good point and something I forgot to address in the blog post! At the moment, the More Interesting Conversations feature will not have any effect if Personality Please is installed. In the future, I plan to add some compatibility options to the menu, so you can choose which mod's idle chat feature will take effect when both are installed.
roBurky
2019-04-19 17:19:44 +0000 UTCNow that's a very interesting development - can't wait to try it out! I do have 'Have some personality please' installed at the moment - what would you suggest? Are there conflicts? Should I remove it?
Doodleroo
2019-04-19 17:10:11 +0000 UTC
