Story Progression
Created by Ray Mazza
The Story Progression prototype explored one possible mechanism for simulating a town full of Sims (100-200 was the target) in such a way that each Sim maintained a semblance of "temporal coherence" at the macro level as well as reflecting their progression and evolving state in their moment-to-moment behavior and interactions.
This was based on a "lightbulb moment" where I realized that as you zoomed out of a Sim from small actions like using the toilet, making a sandwich, etc. to higher level actions like getting a job, getting married, you might be able to choose which of those higher order actions happened in the same way that we currently selected using the toilet, albeit at a much lower frequency (hours or days vs. seconds and minutes). Moreover, events that happen to Sims like getting pregnant, being promoted, building relationships, getting hit by lightning, etc. could be incorporated into the same system such that an autonomous Sim could progress through life experiencing key moments just like a player Sim without having to simulate all of the peeing, eating, sleeping and studying that normally goes into it.
For example, an autonomous Sim in the law enforcement career wouldn't have to actually study to get promoted. We could just choose for him to gain a skill point from time to time as part of the higher-level simulation. Similarly, the chance of the promotion "action" could be modulated based on the Sims current skills and traits.
As a bonus, because moment to moment interactions are autonomously selected based on the current state of a Sim (motives for sure, but also career level, relationship status and levels, etc.), when the player happens to interact with an autonomous Sim, that Sim is likely to exhibit behaviors consistent with whatever life events were simulated for them up to this point.
In many ways, you can think of the whole thing as level-of-detail (LOD) for simulation.
In this prototype, the entire screen represents a neighborhood. The orange boxes are individual houses, and the yellow boxes, and in some cases, little purple and pink boxes are Sims (the latter being children). As the simulation advances, the various Sims are subjected to life events as detailed above, and they progress through life... including buying furniture, upgrading their furniture, making money, getting married, moving to a bigger house, things like that. There were a few simple tools interact directly and manipulate them, but for the most part, you let them simulate, follow along with their relationships and their life stories. There wasn't a whole lot of interactivity beyond that in this prototype.
This was based on a "lightbulb moment" where I realized that as you zoomed out of a Sim from small actions like using the toilet, making a sandwich, etc. to higher level actions like getting a job, getting married, you might be able to choose which of those higher order actions happened in the same way that we currently selected using the toilet, albeit at a much lower frequency (hours or days vs. seconds and minutes). Moreover, events that happen to Sims like getting pregnant, being promoted, building relationships, getting hit by lightning, etc. could be incorporated into the same system such that an autonomous Sim could progress through life experiencing key moments just like a player Sim without having to simulate all of the peeing, eating, sleeping and studying that normally goes into it.
For example, an autonomous Sim in the law enforcement career wouldn't have to actually study to get promoted. We could just choose for him to gain a skill point from time to time as part of the higher-level simulation. Similarly, the chance of the promotion "action" could be modulated based on the Sims current skills and traits.
As a bonus, because moment to moment interactions are autonomously selected based on the current state of a Sim (motives for sure, but also career level, relationship status and levels, etc.), when the player happens to interact with an autonomous Sim, that Sim is likely to exhibit behaviors consistent with whatever life events were simulated for them up to this point.
In many ways, you can think of the whole thing as level-of-detail (LOD) for simulation.
In this prototype, the entire screen represents a neighborhood. The orange boxes are individual houses, and the yellow boxes, and in some cases, little purple and pink boxes are Sims (the latter being children). As the simulation advances, the various Sims are subjected to life events as detailed above, and they progress through life... including buying furniture, upgrading their furniture, making money, getting married, moving to a bigger house, things like that. There were a few simple tools interact directly and manipulate them, but for the most part, you let them simulate, follow along with their relationships and their life stories. There wasn't a whole lot of interactivity beyond that in this prototype.
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The image to the left shows the life story or life event inspector. In this window you can select any sim and basically see everything that has happened to them so far in the simulation at a macro level. You can see every time they met somebody, fell in love, had a fight, got married, had a baby, got a job, got promoted, that sort of thing.
While we eventually dumbed this down a bit in the shipped product, this fundamental model was what ended up in the final design for The Sims 3 and has been carried forward in spirt (not so much design details or code) into future Sims incarnations. |