As an intermediate step towards making a brand new social interaction, I decided to try to make a copy of an existing social interaction, utilizing the method shown here.

Let's just say I haven't been making much headway.

Basically, I made a clone of the social download test and the poke interaction, then attempted to combine them, replacing the poke's main and init functions with the social download test's, changing instance numbers where they conflicted, and replacing the poke's OBJD and NREFs with the social download test ones. I also made sure to change to simtype and make is global sim object 1. Then I changed the create object instance in the object menu command to point to the social download test (since that's the new social object).

The results were a tree table not found error (error log included with file below) and the interesting side effect that each time I attempted to use the cloned interaction, a copy of it would appear in the sim's pie menu (I believe this has to do with the way that the "create object instance" function interacts with the fact that the object has is global sim object being 1).

Anyway, I'm out of ideas as to where to go from here. So, rather than spend another month trying to figure it out on my own, I appeal to the brilliant minds here for assistance:

What am I doing wrong?

The main thing I'd suggest is not to try and combine them. Seriously though, combining objects which were created to be separate objects is a bad idea. Here's why:

The social plugin object is a "global sim object". That means that your your lot will always have one copy, and one copy only, at any point in time. When your sim is building up his list of possible interactions, he searches for all of the social plugin objects on the lot and add them to his own pie menu (if it is applicable to him).

The social interaction object itself is an instantiated object. When a social interaction starts, a new copy of object is spawned (create new object instance) and then all the participating sims run one of its interactions. When the social is complete, the object should destroy itself.

By trying to combine these two objects, you're going to end up in a bit of a bad way. Either the interaction can only be run once (at which point it will delete itself and no longer show up in any pie menus), or you'll end up with the interactions duplicating in your pie menus (as you've described, because they're spawning copies and not destroying themselves), or every sim in the game which wants to try and interact will try to do so on the same object, which has no presence in the world, causing all sorts of shenannigans. (Now, it is actually possible to combine these two objects into the same package, but not into the same object. That said, it's messy and confusing and ultimately not worth it.)

The second piece of advice I'd give is not to use the Social Download Test. I know that's what the thread tells you to use, but it's buggy and in need of some serious pruning before its usable. Instead, you might find it easier to take one of the social objects already available for download and reverse engineer that instead. You're welcome to use the ones here: http://modthesims.info/d/258224 (if you're changing it significantly, no credit is required). It has self-interactions and multiple-sim interactions so it should cover most of what you need.

So that's why no matter how much I searched, I couldn't find an example of the social download test being used that way (at least in a way simple enough for my purposes).

The first thing I notice in your code is that it looks pretty much like a normal object mod with a bit more complexity to it. That makes things so much easier to understand.

My end goal is actually a fairly simple interaction (which is why I was planning on just cannibalizing stuff, I would only have to change some animations and maybe write a couple of lines of code), but I think this is a step in the right direction. Thank you.

Last edited by reaper with no name : 6th Aug 2011 at 10:45 AM.