how to change fitness level

[cwurts00]

How do I mod the game to change how quickly the fitness level changes?  I mean the one that goes up when the sim is working out and down when the sim overeats.  I would like it to be harder for sims with certain genetics to benefit from working out, so they are likely to be fat all the time, while others seem to keep fit easily.

Also, how do I mod the game to make it more difficult to gain a skill?

[MissDoh]

Right now, lazy sims take longer to gain the body skill but I do agree they can get fit pretty easily.  You can always make sims fit, normal or fat manually using the "health controller" tool from the insim.

[cwurts00]

That's not exactly what I'm looking for.  I know some people are getting into simpe and modifying aspects of gameplay, and that's what I want to do.  I'm trying to see if anybody knows where to locate the data surrounding the fitness bar.  What are the numbers, what triggers it to rise; what triggers it to fall?  Then I want to manipulate the data, and change what the triggers are, and the events that a high or low fitness level can trigger.

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Specifically, I am trying to make fitness and body type genetic, and I think I can do it if I find out how to do certain things in Simpe.

I noticed that the body mesh does not seem to be specific to the skin it comes in on, because any of the clothes designed for that skin can be used by adults with normal skin.  This leads me to believe that the body mesh acts as a type of clothing, with the nude one being the one that is seen in the shower.  If there are no formal clothes designed for a mesh, then your sim will end up with a normal body when wearing formal.

So after a lot of thinking, I came up with the idea to have four skintones for each body mesh, and then the skintone could be secretly used as an indicator of which body mesh was used. (If a sim has the bodybuilder medium skintone instead of the normal medium skintone, it has no effect on gameplay except if the modder uses the info for specific purposes).

Next, I have to figure out how to create a new life stage.  If each body mesh has its own life stage, then you could set all the clothes for that mesh to be available only for that life stage.  I know life stages have been created by other modders; I just don't know how.

Next I have to find a way to trigger the life stage transformation at the proper time in the game.  I know other sim-players have changed their sims life-stage using in-game mods, but I want to use Simpe to make it happen when the sim reaches a certain fitness level. (The sim will transition from adult stage to new "muscular" stage, then they will have a new set of clothing, etc.)

I want to know about how the fitness bar works, so I can use it to trigger a life stage transformation, and since this makes it WAY more important to gameplay, I want to be able to adjust the settings for how difficult it is to make the fitness meter rise.

So if a bodybuilder sim has children, they will inherit his "bodybuilder medium skintone" and will grow into a normal adult until they reach a certain fitness level, and transform into the bodybuilder life stage.  Meanwhile, a sim with normal medium skintone will not make this transformation, since the game checked the skintone and it did not meet the requirements to make the tansformation.

[BeosBoxBoy]

cwurts you are walking over discovered territory

Marvine discovered and perfected this method over a year ago - leading to the explosion of "shower-proof" skins: TUTORIAL : how to link a genetic skintone to a specific not default nude mesh (11th Sep 2005)

Elven Ranger developed a method where mixed-gradient skintones that would mimic a mixed-ethnicity offspring would be made hereditary.

Modding the life-stage to be fitness triggered will require you significantly alter the game's over all infrastructure in a way that will have far reaching consequences.

Adding a life-stage would also require you be Maxis/EA and re-code the game from the ground up. Eric was able to create a pseudo life-stage, the independent teen, but the exact nature of that is a trade secret - but uses existing elements within the game to be sure.

Yes you can use SimPE to alter the fitness specification for an article of clothing, but that will ender all sims of the proper age group and fitness group to be able to use the clothing item.  Adding a skintone specification has mixed results.  sometimes it will alter the skintone texture of the sim when you use the clothing, sometimes this becomes a bug that leaves you with a Sim with brown body and white hands for instance. others it works well enough as you describe. At others it renders the file completely un-usable since the game now assumes it is a skintone. The various EPs and language versions are not 100% identical in their performance; and the differences between the Mac and PC versions make many things impossible to reconcile.

[marvine]

Mmm the new life-stage certainly is out of reach; at this point I'm wondering if Maxis does't plan a new "fit" morph of their own anyway, that would be part of an "olympics" EP or something like that - that would affect clothing in the same way as the pregnant morph. But this is just a guess.

Now, the genetic mesh-linked skintones pass the bodyshape along to the descendants; and if a skintone has only the fit textures linked to a muscular bodyshape, then the sim gets buff when naked only when he's fit; this leaves the clothing issue unsolved though.

Although I didn't look seriously into that yet, I tend to think that there should be a way to get clothing to use the same behaviour as with pregnant sims... Worth researching.