[CPS Overhaul] Progress Info / Update

Hello everyone and thanks for being here,

Last I'd notified you, we were starting early group testing for CPS overhaul, in slightly complicated circumstances on my end. Nonetheless we got some good testing sessions in. And they revealed one big thing.

After a few days of group testing, it came to a halt. Here's the reason: I was not satisfied with the on-screen 'flow' of the moments when Sims are taken away by Social Services. And contrary to my initial thoughts, quick tweaks to the emoting and animation choice was simply not going to fix it.

Sure, it worked, functionally, and testers were reporting so. But we're not all only about function here, are we ? We're also about story. So often, the point of my work and that of other modders is providing further building blocks for your stories. Flow is critical to that. Unfortunately, in the case of some scenes, flow had a tendency to go wrong.

To give you an example, infants might quite simply disappear from the lot (vanish visually, literally fade to nothing) very soon after being assigned to their foster home, instead of leaving normally. Also, agents would come and talk with the parents, but the children would still leave alone on their own steam.

So I made the no-fun-but-necessary decision to go back and start over the modding for these particular 'scenes'. I'm happy to report that it's looking much better now, and close to complete.

Since babies, infants, toddlers, children and teens all have different requirements in terms of animation and otherwise, it took a while to rebuild and assess the scenario for each of them. It's not all the way there yet (especially in terms of the reactions of sims around), but you can see that the infant doesn't disappear but properly gets picked up by the agents and walked off, while sims around pay attention; the rest is no big deal to keep tweaking.

Testing will therefore begin again very soon and we'll finally be seeing more of an end to the long tunnel that this mod development has become.

Thanks for your patience through this not-fun-for-anyone process