August 2018 - Coding and playworking

I had intended to get a post like this one out to you last month, but not a lot went as planned in my life last month.

Since finishing the True Happiness update in early July, I've continued work on adding the features of True Happiness to my upcoming Meaningful Stories mod pack. This has involved simplifying some of how the True Happiness features work behind the scenes, which will make it more reliable and easier to add to in the future, but it's also involved a big rewrite of how I use scripts to affect sims' moods.

This has been a big enough change that the mod isn't yet ready for another playable update. So I'm going to go into some detail of my process for you instead. This might get a little technical, so feel free to skip ahead if this isn't interesting to you.

The Mood Script Rewrite

Currently, I have multiple standalone mood mods available to download, and each of them adds a bit of code to the game to alter how the game decides what mood to put a sim in. To try to give the mods the best compatibility with future game updates, I always had my scripts let the game make its usual choice for the sim's mood first, and then each of my mods made their own tweaks to the result.

Doing it that way has made it tricky to track down some of the more obscure bugs and oddities, though, so for future versions of Meaningful Stories what I'm now doing is taking over the decision for what mood to put sims in from the game entirely. This is going to expand what I'm able to do with my mood mods, it gives me some more control over how moodlets display in the UI, and its allowing me to add better logging features to help with eliminating bugs.

The downside is it may make it harder for me to maintain Uncomfortable Overhaul and True Happiness as standalone mods in the future, so once the base Meaningful Stories is finished and goes public I might have to think about discontinuing support for the older mods and suggesting people switch to Stories.

The new mood script is not going to be compatible with the old mood scripts, which means that I will need to finish getting True Happiness integrated into Meaningful Stories before I release a new update for it to itch.io

The Near Future

I've recently finished some summer work at a holiday playscheme for children with disabilities that I help out at every year. This is why I've been absent from the discord and patreon comments for a little while. It's work that I enjoy, but it leaves me no spare time or energy so I am effectively offline for most of it. This year it's also left me particularly fatigued. But that's starting to improve, and I'm now looking into the feedback that people have left for me while I've been gone.

I will have freelance work to do over August and September, but I have made arrangements to ensure I still have time to work on Meaningful Stories and my other mods.

I am looking forward to getting this work on the core and bugfixing done, and getting to think about new features again!