TUTORIAL - Interactions 2 (Patreon)

Let's start breaking down the tuning of some interactions, and this will probably take 2 or 3 tutorials. I can't cover, nor I know, all the options an interaction can have, so it's vital to have the TDESC when dealing with interactions, and looking at them when unsure about something (when the TDESC are not sibylline like sometimes they are).

We'll start with a relatively simple one, and the one I chose is a SocialSuperInteraction. So it's yes, a social interaction, but a standalone one.

Right at the beginning we have a icon value. This is simply the icon you see in the queue... nothing really important her:

In this case, the icon is the face of the sims you're sending away.

Party size weight is a vector value, and fair play to you if you can figure out what this does by reading the TDESC. I never had the need to mess with this, anyway.

Saveable: if the interaction can be or not saved with the sim. If enabled, when you save the game, and reload, the interaction will still be performed. If not, the interaction will be cancelled.

Social group type: this is one of those options that is specific to this kind of interaction, and it's the type of social group this interaction will use.

Attention cost: this has to do with multitasking, it's meant to simulate the human ability to do more things at once. the smaller is this number, the less likely a sim is to multitask when performing the interaction. 0 means the sims will be fully focused on this interaction and will not pick any other one to do while performing it. It only affects autonomy, user directed interaction can still be multitasked.

Basic content: to put it simply, this defines the nature of the interaction. Often, it's only the animation, but this variable can have various options enabled.

Basic extras: another variable that can contain multiple things. These things that always happen when the interaction runs. In this case, it contains a loot that runs at the beginning of the interaction (by default, but you can tune it to happen at the end), a command (ask_npc_to_leave, what makes the other sim go away), a buff that is given when the interaction runs, and a destroy situation (it ends the sim visiting the player).

Basic reserve object: the object the interaction will reserve when running, none in this case.

Content score: this is used by the autonomy to decide how likely a sim is to perform the interaction in question, disabled in this case.

Display name: needs no explanation

These are information that are passed to the UI to display the name.

The animation the sim will play while waiting for the interaction to start

The tags of the interaction, these are used in various ways, like, for example, in buffs to tune the autonomy: correctly tagging these allows to pick all the interactions tagged that way and affect the autonomy of them all at once.

If the Targetsim is or not considered invited into your home after the interaction is performed.

The animation the sims plays when listening to this interaction

Here, this is one of the most important parts of the interactions but it's not required. You'll find yourself messing around with this a lot. The outcome is the result of this interaction. In this case the outcome is always only one, but it's not always the case... outcomes can be dual, partial, potential... and the outcome can contain way more than just a loot.

This tunes the preference of performing this interaction near to other sims. 

Lastly, the other very important part of an interaction, the test global, this decides who, when, where, in what conditions this interaction can be performed.