Alternative Story Progression?

When I do use SP, which is rare and only in one save, I always use NRaas SP because of all the options. I tried EA story progression but the town ends up stagnant with mostly pudding sims. Bella and Mortimer didn't even get married! How un-iconic. :lol:

It's not easy to produce an alternative version of story progression, and that's putting things mildly. EA's, AwesomeMod's (Core Mod), and NRaas' (Script Mod) are the only viable versions out there, at least that we know of.

Never tried AwesomeMod... I've heard the community isn't so friendly if you need help. I'm also not even sure where I would go to download and read the mod's documentation but that's because I never bothered to look into it. That's just my reasoning for not using AM. I've been using NRass for years and years. Can't even remember the last time I used default EA SP.

NRass has everything laid out in documentation and is user-friendly (just requires a little reading + patience). The community along with the crew (including igazor) have always been willing to help.

Awesome's Story Mode, which is what its version of progression is called, takes a different approach to things than NRaas SP does. The events that Story Mode pushes must be acted out on screen, whereas SP reports on the results of progression by way of "story" notifications whether they really happen in an animated way or not, and thus can make things progress townwide much faster and in a more orderly or, if the player prefers though reachable mod options, a more chaotic manner.

I tried Story Mode before NRaas and ended up with not quite but almost the same ghost town syndrome that so often gets complained about under EA's version. A couple of my sims in an early generation had a total of something like two others attending their high school for example, and there weren't more than a similar very small number of children and toddlers behind them even though I had plenty of what I thought was suitable housing and careers to attract newly arriving sim households and for the existing population to move around and make babies on their own. I'm sure some of this might have been due to player error on my part, or not setting things up as well as they may have been required the Awesome way, but the idea of posting questions on that forum at the time sounded about as enticing as a series of root canals (no thanks). :/

"SimplyJen;c-17109112" wrote:
Never tried AwesomeMod... I've heard the community isn't so friendly if you need help. I'm also not even sure where I would go to download and read the mod's documentation but that's because I never bothered to look into it. That's just my reasoning for not using AM. I've been using NRass for years and years. Can't even remember the last time I used default EA SP.

NRass has everything laid out in documentation and is user-friendly (just requires a little reading + patience). The community along with the crew (including igazor) have always been willing to help.

AM has many of the same functions of NRaas separate mods all rolled into one. There is an online configuration tool that will set it to your preferences or you can edit the XML yourself. https://tinyurl.com/what-AMdoes

"igazor;c-17109370" wrote:
Awesome's Story Mode, which is what its version of progression is called, takes a different approach to things than NRaas SP does. The events that Story Mode pushes must be acted out on screen, whereas SP reports on the results of progression by way of "story" notifications whether they really happen in an animated way or not, and thus can make things progress townwide much faster and in a more orderly or, if the player prefers though reachable mod options, a more chaotic manner.

I tried Story Mode before NRaas and ended up with not quite but almost the same ghost town syndrome that so often gets complained about under EA's version. A couple of my sims in an early generation had a total of something like two others attending their high school for example, and there weren't more than a similar very small number of children and toddlers behind them even though I had plenty of what I thought was suitable housing and careers to attract newly arriving sim households and for the existing population to move around and make babies on their own. I'm sure some of this might have been due to player error on my part, or not setting things up as well as they may have been required the Awesome way, but the idea of posting questions on that forum at the time sounded about as enticing as a series of root canals (no thanks). :/

That makes sense, I supposed there would be a few different ways of going about it. I honestly don't mind the off-screen approach of NRaas, because (as much as I love The Sims 3) the game itself makes it hard enough to load up and render household events let alone neighbourhood-wide onscreen events.

I'll have to look into some of the more chaotic SP options later, I do enjoy a highly dynamic neighbourhood.

I've been using stuff from that particular community for years, and I totally get the unfriendly vibe y'all are getting. It's totally valid that you'd want to avoid their content purely from that perspective.

I have always been more of a lurker and a reader so I've never had issues with the MATY culture and I wouldn't, necessarily, consider it an unfriendly site, more along the lines of bristly for a reason (check out the faq sometime). Granted, it's not the place to ask questions if you don't have basic computer skills (like not knowing how to extract a file, unhide file extensions, or how to make backups), but if you search the site you have a good chance of finding answers to most of your questions.
If one is entering MATY with the expectation of being spoon-fed answers and hand held through the whole process then, yes, sporking is not unexpected.

edit: I think the forum censor needs to be re-educated on how not to replace words that contain banned words within them.

To put things in some perspective, the site with the funny but by reputation unfriendly forum is run by a programming genius. I mean, given no other alternatives, the game with AM will for many of us run much better or at least quite differently than without. Twallan did base many of the earliest features of NRaas mods on what AM does with the extra challenge of doing so without using heavy handed Core Mods (ErrorTrap being an exception to that rule). There was much mutual respect between the two developers even though they took different approaches to many aspects of the game and to how they themselves interacted with players. This is why AM is actually programmed to detect NRaas SP and AM's Story Mode will step aside automatically in favor of SP if it finds it running and in charge of progression -- although the two mods can co-exist peacefully, they both cannot be in control of that at the same time.

It's AM's programmatic heavier handed approach and lack of more complete player control that caused me to test out NRaas SP for myself so many years ago, not the Shaddup and Search Moar mentality of its forum. Such as it was, I mean the place is pretty much a ghost town itself now. I wouldn't necessarily say that our forum boards at NRaas are the wild hotbeds of posting activity that they once were either, the game is after all over ten years old, but we are still quite active and there for players who need some friendly assistance. And of course the NRaas folks are the ones who noticed I was hanging around helping other players, later locked me in a room, and wouldn't let me leave until I signed an agreement to become a wiki organizer (or some such sequence of events like that). :)

I always use EA SP. It is slow in workings, and not much happens, but I do not mind, the way I play I tend to make things happen myself by changing household, decorating and equipping lots a certain way, and by making the active sims behaving so as well hoping, mostly in vain, that my plans get thwarted, for the fun of it.

Being a newcomer both to the Sims 3 and the series, as well as actually posting in a forum I am very surprised by the attitudes towards both the game we all want to play, as well as to some of the third party additions to it. For personal interest I read a lot of the threads both here and elsewhere and find it somewhat hard to understand all the criticism towards, in this case, MATY. I of course agree that being kind and careful, especially here in this forum it being explicitly directed to teenagers, is the responsible and mature way of acting; and that a lot of threads at MATY are dwindling into regular dog fights, sometimes obscuring the point of them.

But that place is a very good place to go for information on the game, and most of the people posting there knows a lot about it, its mechanics, mods, how to test problems, how to use punctuation and how to spell, and not to quote posts as long as tomorrow making it hard to read through any thread later on.

I think the criticism usually afforded the place comes from the, perhaps young and inexperienced, that are surprised by anyone expecting them to try on their own before, in bad writing, demanding someone else to do it for them.

EA's SP always frustrated me a great deal; for example, when it arbitrarily moved out a family which you then can't get back. Particularly if it had been a family you had planned to play later. Poof! Gone!
I would agree with Auroraskies that MATY has a great deal of information about the game, but I am not young and inexperienced and I was annoyed by their deliberate rudeness. It was like children playing a game to see who could be continuously the most obnoxious. I never took it seriously but I certainly wasn't interested in participating in their childish culture, so I never bothered posting anything there.
Also, I think igazor is right about AM's shortcomings. I also prefer NRaas's more modular approach and how it allows more user control.