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Testers wanted: Multiple pollination technicians!

by fwiffo Posted 17th Jun 2005 at 5:06 AM - Updated 15th Oct 2008 at 9:32 PM by Christy1077
 
98 Comments / Replies (Who?) - 96 Feedback Posts, 1 Thanks Posts
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Test Subject
#2 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 5:22 AM
Haha awesome. I was gettin' tired of the original Pollination Technician!
Field Researcher
#3 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 5:29 AM
Yay, sounds great - I'll definately try it out.
Test Subject
#4 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 6:54 AM
Thanks so much!! Looks great - can't wait to try it out!
Field Researcher
#5 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 7:38 AM
hehehehe :twisted:

just when my simmies thought it was safe to stargaze again :twisted: this ownz man!!! :thumb:
Lab Assistant
#6 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 7:40 AM
Awesome. I knew this had to be possible somehow. Now my medieval sims can get kidnapped by fae folk if I can figure out how to edit the techs you've included. Thank you!
Test Subject
#7 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 9:06 AM
oh my... how should i say this? well i'm just going to put it out there..i love you
Instructor
#8 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 9:26 AM
this is great...especially the whole letting alien kids be abducted and impregnated part i cant wait to see your next technicians--maybe another "vulcan" one? or other alien skintones like pink purple or blue? you did a thanks
Test Subject
#9 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 11:08 AM
Sounds great! Can't wait to try it out. Thank you
Lab Assistant
#10 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 12:56 PM
no ofence but is it me or you but WHAT THE HELLS A Pollination Technician
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#11 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 1:25 PM Last edited by fwiffo : 17th Jun 2005 at 1:31 PM.
@lamina: If one of your adult male sims is abducted by aliens, they will come back pregnant with an alien baby. Normally, there is one alien called "Pollination Technician" that is always the father (with your sim as the "mother"). This mod lets you have more than one so that your alien babies can look different, and so they can get together with other aliens without it being incest.

@Jaedle: I'll post some instructions later on and some helper files for making your own PTs. It's actually easiest to create the sim you want in BodyShop then endow them with some special attributes in SimPE to make them work with this mod. Modifying one of the existing ones, other than swapping out the facial structure, is much more complicated. I'll probably post a thread a little later for people to post requests. If people offer up cool template sims, I'll do some of the heavy lifting.
Field Researcher
#12 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 2:27 PM
Thanks for the explanation. I had NO idea what they were either. Never had my sims abducted. Do all of these files go in the Download folder? I know the telescopes do.. but where do 'person' files go?
Lab Assistant
#13 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 2:28 PM
This is a really great idea! and also, much thanks for offering a way to get abducted, but is also random
( it's nicer when your not sure if it will happen, then if you get something that will make it happen for certin). thanks again!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#14 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 3:24 PM
Yep, everything goes in the download folder.

Also, if anyone uses the telescopes, please let me know how they work out. The modification is trivial (just changing one BCON), but I haven't had time to test them extensively (only long enough to be sure they they can cause abductions.)

@Jaedle: I don't know if midieval sims should be using telescopes - certainly, not a large aperature catadioptric like the Farstar. Modern 10x50 binoculars are much better, for instance, than Gallileo's telescope. :-) Maybe you need a hacked "mystical forest" (hacked tree) or "enchanted spring" (hacked hot-tub) or "scared cave" (hacked hole in the ground) for your fae folk to do their business? The "get pregnant" BHAVs are pretty simple and can be attached to any object. See my Ultra Gnome for an example.
Lab Assistant
#15 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 4:29 PM
I hope this isn't a far fetched request...but how bout a couple more additions? Like say various Star Trek and Star Wars figures? (Example - Chewbacca and Spock or an Ewok and a Klingon?)

I like this hack. I just think it would be nice to have a variety of 6-12+ different variations. *grins devishly*
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#16 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 7:13 PM
I've put up a request thread. If you have some sims you'd like to be put in a multi-PT "pack", please post them there.
Forum Resident
#17 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 8:06 PM
Wow cool I love this thank you very much for these.
Scholar
#18 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 10:48 PM
These pollination techs are awesome, I can't wait to try them out. Thank you for sharing your incredible work with us.
Test Subject
#19 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 11:15 PM
i tried out the blue telescope and it worked fine, and like i think it's supposed to. i used it in one house for a while and no abduction then went to another house and used it. after a while, my sim got abducted. a couple of days later, another sim in that house got abducted too. i think i might have to swap it for a normal telescope to prevent alien invasion lol.

it's been working great so far. great job
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#20 Old 17th Jun 2005 at 11:50 PM
If you want to adjust the attractiveness of the telescopes, it's very easy to do with SimPE.

1. Open up the telescope package with SimPE.
2. On the left hand side, select "Behavior Constant". There should be one item on the right hand side - select it.
3. Select the "Plugin View" tab on the bottom half of the screen.
4. The tuning value you want to look at is the very last one (labeled 0x09). The default value is 5. The blue telescope is 25, and the red is 50.

Changes don't correspond to a direct proportional increase in probability of abduction because of the way statistics works. Here's a couple tables of probabilities I've calculated for reference. They're based on an assumption that each telescope animation takes about 6 sim minutes (which AFAIK is about right).

Probability of abduction during 1 hour of observing.
5 - 0.50%
10 - 1.00%
15 - 1.49%
20 - 1.98%
25 - 2.47%
30 - 2.96%
40 - 3.93%
50 - 4.89%

Probability of abduction during 1 night (9 hours) of observing.
5 - 4.40%
10 - 8.61%
15 - 12.64%
20 - 16.49%
25 - 20.17%
30 - 23.69%
40 - 30.28%
50 - 36.31%
Field Researcher
#21 Old 18th Jun 2005 at 12:02 AM
this is super cool! you mad genius you! can't wait to see some terminators, AI's, robots & cat people random invasions!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#22 Old 18th Jun 2005 at 1:49 AM
As promised, here are some instructions and a set of helper files for making your own set of pollination technicians with SimPE. The instructions break down into two parts - making your custom PT and modifying the hack to use your PT. It is very helpful to be familiar with SimPE's basic functions. Try to read and understand these instructions ahead of time to minimize the chance of errors.

Part 1: Making your own pollination technician

1. Download the .zip file (Multi-PT_kit.zip) that's attached to this post. It has some resources your pollination technician needs. Create a folder in a convenient place to be your workspace and unzip the zip file there.

2. Create your template sim in Body Shop. I've only done this with TS2U bodyshop, so I can't guarantee that templates made in other ways will work.

3. Move the sim you just created out of your "SavedSims" folder into your workspace folder. Give the file a useful name instead of the weird numbers that Body Shop gives it.

4. Open that .package file in SimPE. You'll see it has a bunch of stuff in it. We can leave all that alone.

5. Go to "File -> Add". Select the 6 .xml files you unziped in step 1. There should be two "BHAV" files, a "Catalog Description", "Global Data", "Object Data" and "Object Functions".

6. You'll now need to make a few changes to a couple of the things you just added. Scroll down the list to select the one marked "Catalog Description". Click on the "Plugin view" tab.

7. You need to fill in the name of your polli tech here. There are three strings listed on the left hand side labeled 0x0, 0x1 and 0x2. You can ignore 0x1. Click on 0x0 and type in the first name you want to show up in the family tree in the "Value" box (I've got "First Name" in there for you as a guide). While your cursor is there, click "change in all" so it fills it in for all the languages. They won't be in the right language, but at least they'll say the right thing. If you're multilingual, feel free to fill those in. Repeat this step for the last name (0x2).

8. Click "commit" so the changes here stick. Then scroll to and select the "Object Data" item. Getting the changes here correct is very important, so be careful.

9. In the filename box, put in the name you want for your PT. For example, one of mine is "Multi-PT - Birth Queen 44". When you've got the name you want, copy it to the clipboard.

10. Now we must get a unique GUID for your PT. The 0xFFFFFFFF value that's in there won't work. Click "get GUID". If you've made custom or cloned objects in SimPE before, you probably know this routine. If not, put in a username and password you want for registering with the GUID database and click "Register New User".

11. Paste the name you copied in step 9 in the box labeled "Object Name" and click "Register Object". You will get a unique GUID and it should show up now in your GUID box. Write this number down. If you lose it, you can come back here and look at your "Existing Objects" to find it again.

12. Check the box that says "update all MMATs" then click the "Update" link.

13. Go to "File -> Save". Your Pollination Technician is now trained for all his anal probing duties. If you have more than one you'd like to use, go ahead and repeat these steps for them now. Remember that they need their own unique name and GUID.

Part 2: Modifying the global hack to use your new PT

This is a bit trickier and will require you to modify the code for the BHAV function that is the core of the hack. Be careful. You may want to back up the "Multi_Pollination_Technician.package" file beforehand so you can go back and start from scratch if you screw up.

1. If you haven't converted a hexadecimal number to "little-endian" before (e.g. reverse the byte order), or that sounds like gibberish to you, you'll want to do a little excercise before you get started with this part. If that did make sense to you, skip to step 3.

2. The GUID you gave your sim (it will be something like 0x000B4A09) needs to be entered in a different way in the steps above. Ignoring the "0x" part, it needs to be broken down into pairs of digits, then reversed. For example, the number "0x12345678" would turn into into the sequence "78 56 34 12". Got that? Try it on your GUID now and write it down. The one I gave above would be "09 4A 0B 00".

3. Open up the file "Multi_Pollination_Technician.package" in SimPE. There should be exactly one item in it - a Behavior Function. This is where the magic happens and your game decides who gets to probe your simmies. Select the BHAV function and click on "Plugin View". You'll see a bunch of weird looking code and green and red arrows going everywhere. If you look closely, after the first 4 lines (a "Stack Object..." line and three "Coin Flips"), you'll see a pattern. There are four lines that are repeated almost verbatim four times. Each of those represents one of the four pollination possibilites.

4. Click on the first line in one of those groups of four (it will say "Set to Next..."). You'll see a bunch of numbers on the right hand side. The line that says "Operands" is the key. You'll see something like "FC B9 17 2E 87 0A 00 00". The first four of those are a GUID in that backwards little-endian order I talked about in step 2. In this case, it's 0x2E17B9FC - the original Pollination Technician. Mine are 0x000B4412 (the Vulcan), 0x000B4413 (the Birth Queen) and 0x000B4414 (PT #9 1/2).

5. Figure out which group has the one you want to replace with your guy. Click on the first "Set to Next" line in that group. It comes right after a "Set to Next" line from the previous group, so be sure you've got the right one. Change the first four operands to the numbers for your PT. If you had GUID 0x000B4A09, you'd need to fill in "09 4A 0B 00". Make sure you do all four and double check your work. Do not change any other boxes.

6. You'll need to repeat step 5 for the next line "Create New Object Instance", and then you'll skip down a line to the last in the group, another "Set to Next" line. Do the same thing here.

7. If you've got other PTs you want to use, fill those in in the other groups. If you want to just test just this one (a good idea if you feel comfortable with the editing you've been doing), you can fill it in each of the four groups so that it will always come up during abductions. When you're satisifed that it works, you can do the same for each of your others and test them as well. Once you're satisifed they all work, you can make the four groups different again, so the results will be random.

8. Click "Commit", then "File -> Save". Your hack is ready to go. Copy it into your downloads folder and give it a spin in a test neighborhood to make sure everything goes as expected.

Be sure that you remove the original Multi-PT hack package - they won't work together. You don't need to remove the custom PT files from that if you don't want to, because they will have different GUIDs from yours, and won't conflict.

If these instructions look scary to you, or make you light-headed, you may want to get some practice with SimPE on simpler tasks first and upload your sims to my request thread instead. If you've never really programmed before, editing BHAVs can be a lobotomizing.
Attached files:
File Type: zip  Multi-PT_kit.zip (3.5 KB, 2024 downloads)
Field Researcher
#23 Old 18th Jun 2005 at 7:20 AM
I will certainly have to try this out!
Test Subject
#24 Old 18th Jun 2005 at 3:50 PM
Never tried to marry two aliens off. but will try it mow with this Hack. Thankyou
Test Subject
#25 Old 19th Jun 2005 at 1:25 PM
Love, love, love this! Thank you; this is a much needed mod, imo.
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