Tutorial - Let's Make an Interaction! (Patreon)

If you haven't, in order to follow this tutorial you need to follow the Let's Make a Buff, Let's Make a Loot, and Let's add options to our Buff! tutorials, first.

Before we start this, I need you to take a deep breath and also need to correct myself. I said in our first tutorial that someone suggest to set the group of the new resources you create to 00000000, now, I had to deal with group IDs in the past few days a lot, and went back to the source of the information that is TS4 Custom Content Guide.

Apparently, back in the days the only supported group was 00000000 but Maxis suggest since the beginning to set the high bit for modded custom content to 1, to avoid conflicts. I since searched for updated information about this, and the most recent one dates back to April 2019 where once again Maxis suggested to set the high bit to 1, and use, for example, the group 0x80000000, so use the group 80000000 for the new resources you create.

Now, I want you to take a deep breath because Interactions have a lot of options and a lot of lines, but we will only look at them for the most part, without the need to touch them. The changes we'll need to make are few and easy to do, so all this stuff is only apparently complicated.

Now, let's import back our interaction from Parenthood (I tried to search for a base game social interaction with a single outcome, but had no luck, and I don't want you to have to deal with dual or potentials outcomes yet):

We'll look very quickly at what all this stuff is, so let's collapse everything to better read it and expand bit by bit:

Starting from the very beginning we have the icon that will show in the queue, this is a friendly interaction, we're making a friendly interaction so we'll not need to change it (you'll never will have the need to change this, most likely)

On the next part we have the static commodities this interaction is linked to:

Now, these are pretty much standard, some interactions have different ones, they control the autonomous desire of a sim that has that commodity to perform this social interaction. it's really nothing we need to bother with for now, also because, I'm leaving the autonomy off. The tunable n="desire" is the value of this interaction for that commodity, so a sim that has the InHotTub commodity will have an higher desire to perform this interaction. When nothing is specified, the desire defaults to 1. You can refer to the TDESC to know more.

On the next part, we have the two setting to control if this interaction is allowed to be performed autonomously and directed by the user:

I don't think this needs an explanation, the values are bool, it just mean that this tunable (<T> is a Tunable) takes the values of True or False.

On the next part, we have the basic extras:

Now we can see a list of loots, these are actions that run when this interaction is performed and can be set to run at the beginning of it, at the end etc... they're pretty much in all the social interaction and we will not bother with them either. Here we have the action that control the culling of ghosts and the clingy childood phase, and the broadcaster that makes the jealous sim react.

Scrolling down more we find the category this interaction is going to belong to:

It will go in the friendly category and once again, we're fine with that.

Then we have the longest part, the content score:

This controls how likely this interaction will show up in the front page, and the timeout it will have once performed before showing up again, also the panality allpied to it (the more you perform it, the less likely it will show up again on the front page anytime soon) it also affects sutonomy and is followed by a veeery long list of moods, relathionship and trait preference for this interaction:

Now this, too, is pretty much the same for all the interaction (so far, in all the social friendly interactions I found, the good trait has a preference value of 5) so we can just collapse this all again because we don't really need to bother.

And we get to the first thing we need to change: the display name and the display name for the target:

This is very easy to understand so let's change the comment and the key for them, we'll later add these string in  our StringTable.

The display_name_text_tokens concerns the informations that are passed to the UI for localization:

Nothing we need to touch.

Interaction_category_tags is another list we can ignore:

They don't affect the gameplay, but hey... <L> is a TunableList.

Onto the next part:

There we are, the TunableVariant of the outcome of this interaction... <V> is a TunableVariant. 

This is the part where we need to do the most of our work. So as a first thing, this interaction's animation is the one for the Share Bad News:

We want our sim to be nice when running this interaction, though, so we're going to change it, and we can do two things:

Import another Social Interaction into our mod to steal the animation from there:

Or, import the animation directly and get the TuningId for it:

We'll just replace it and move on...

Next we have the balloon speech the sim will have hover his head:

I'm ... not sure i like it, so I'm going to steal the standard casual speech balloons from the othe interaction i imported before:

Not to do this, I'm going to collapse all inside the Balloon_choices part:

Right click "copy" and go back to my interaction, collapse everything and select in there too:

But now, I'm going to PASTE just on top of it, and it will replace all of it:

It's not going to line up perfectly, so I'm going to fix it because I can't stand it...

Now, this particular interaction has the option to display a notification enabled as you can see above. We could disable it by deleting all inside the "basic_extras" part, but I like it, so I'm going to keep it. I'm going to delete the last two lines though:

And change the comment and corresponding key of the remaining one, I'll add this too to my STBL later. (we could change the Tunable t="variation" to single, but I'm leaving it in case I later want to add more strings and variations to it)

Now let's scroll down to the loot list:

Now we need to place OUR loot in here and also... this interaction right now causes Relationship Loss... we don't want this, so first thing, let's put our loot in here:

The let's move on the other interaction we have, that has Relationship gain and steal the loots we want our interaction to run from there:

Replace the one in ours and delete what we don't want:

There we go:

For the next part, we have a pie menù icon in this interaction:

You can replace it if you want, I'm going to nuke it because I can't stand those, so I'm going to collapse all inside the TunableVariant pie_menu_icon and press delete:

What we have next is pretty standard "friendly social" content, this interaction is supposed to rise charisma but the rise is conditional so it may not...

Then we have the test autonomous, these are a series of conditions the sim must met to run this interaction autonomously, obviously, we care about this only if our interaction is autonomous:

In this interaction here, the refer to other testsets you can open to look at:

You can put conditions in here and the sim will need to pass those in order to run this interaction autonomously.

What's different from the next part, the test globals?

Well this one is applied to this interaction always, and the sim will need to meet all this conditions to have this interaction available to use:

Now if i were to put the bove condition in the test autonomous and remove the child age, the children would not be able to run this interaction autonomously, but you as an user would always be able to make them run it... if i remove it from here, the children will not have this interaction showing up for them AT ALL.

Most of this is pretty standard:

Like this interaction requires the two sims involved to know each other and also, is not available to Toddlers. We're fine with it. At the bottom though we have a condition we need to remove:

this interaction is whitelisted for the Bad Manners trait alone, so sims with the trait are the only one to have it. We don't need this in our interaction, so let's collapse and delete:

And now, let's do what we always do:

Change name and Tuning ID

Change Instance and Group

Add our strings to  the STBL

And the interaction is done.

Now we have another free spot for a buff to give to the actor running this interaction in our loot...

and now you have all the tools you need to just go on and make another buff, maybe a confident buff this time, to place here. So go on, and then we'll see how to put this interaction in game.