TUTORIAL - Interactions 1

Ok... this cannot be postponed anymore.

Interactions are complicated. If you thought Commodities are confusing, think again... interactions will make them appear like the easiest thing in the world. They're complicated not only because there is a frightening amount of them:

...but also because they have a lot of options that can be enabled:

...and, even though they share some of them, there are some options that only a specific type of interaction can take. So, they're not the same.

Don't worry now, though... we'll mostly have to deal with Super Interactions, Immediate Interactions and Social Mixer Interactions... but let's give a look at the first important difference:

Super Interaction vs Mixer Interaction

This distinction is important. As I said, interactions need a script to be put in game (there are also other ways to put them in game, but the difference is important in that case, too) and Super Interactions and Mixer Interactions are not interchangeable. I cannot put a super interaction where the game needs a mixer one, and the opposite is true as well... messing this up causes a LE, and, in some cases (social interactions) also makes the sims unclickable.

Let's look at a SuperInteraction, and the best way to explain how this works is probably look at one you use constantly in game, every time you play:

Sim_Chat

This is the main interaction that it's running when two sims talk. You don't see it in the pie menu, you only see the various interaction that run when this main interaction is running:

Meaning: the Social Mixer Interactions. But the interaction that is running when two sims talk is always, only one, that calls other smaller ones that exist inside this Super Interaction.

Why is this? Because if they were all separated Super Social Interactions, you would need to run each one singularly, sims continuing to chat on their own would not exist... no other interaction could be autonomously picked to keep the chat going. 

Sim_chat is not the only super interaction to use this method... the SuperInteraction Cauldron_Experiment, and many other interactions, use the same logic:

It calls other mixer interactions inside it, and keeps calling them until you stop the interaction from going, or a tuned exit condition happens to stop the interaction from running.

We can think to a SuperInteraction as a one shot interaction, and to a mixer interaction as a smaller interaction that runs inside.

MC will sort the injection of the interactions on its own, but just to understand in what are different even better, there is a difference on where the interaction are injected in game:

A super interaction is added directly to an object (including Sims, as far as the game is concerned, Sims are objects):

These are all super interactions added to the object Sim

They can also go directly in the tuning of an object (in which case, they need no injection):

Or to buffs:

And in buffs (and other things) there is also a difference between the ones that you run by clicking on the sim owning the buff, and the ones you run by clicking on a target.

They can also go inside other interactions.

Mixer interactions (in this case, Social Mixer Interactions) are injected in a different way:

They go inside an Affordance List, and said list can be found inside the interaction Sim_Chat:

And it's nothing else than a list with all the social interactions of a specific type in game:

To recap: your social mixer interaction gets added to a list, that it's called inside the main interaction Sim_Chat, and this allows it to be picked along with all the other social mixer interactions.

The same difference exist when adding a mixer interaction to a trait (for example):

Where it wants to know the main super interaction where you want to put the mixer one, and the mixer interactions you want to add.

I hope this first, very important, difference is clear. Next time we'll break down the tuning of some interactions.