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Bringing Characters to Life: The Autonomy System
🕑 Added 2025-05-09 14:05:01 +0000 UTCHi, Anna here!
Today, I’m excited to share some insights into the character autonomy system I've been working on recently. It's all about making our characters feel more alive and unique when they’re not directly controlled by the player!
🧠 Different Types of Autonomy
Autonomy in our game essentially covers how characters behave when they’re not being directly controlled. On the technical side, there are different aspects of it that are covered by different systems. Here is how we define them:
Idle Autonomy: what a character does when their interaction queue is empty.
Forced Autonomy: situations where the game interrupts or cancels current actions, usually due to important events (like going to work or fulfilling urgent needs).
Chained Autonomy: automatic follow-up actions based on the previous interaction. For example, a "neat" character washing their hands after using the toilet.
Town Autonomy: managing all NPCs and placing them in logical or interesting spots around town throughout the day.
Story Progression: NPCs dynamically changing jobs, forming new relationships, having children, or moving houses (this won’t be in the game yet and will first release in Early Access).
For today’s update, I’m focusing mainly on the first two types: what we call Idle Autonomy and Forced Autonomy.
🧹 Idle Autonomy: Showcasing Characters’ Identity and Keeping Them Active
Idle autonomy is activated when a character has nothing planned for a little while (5 or 10 in-game minutes). The game then picks an appropriate action for the character to do based on the current context. Here’s how it works:
The system first scans the surroundings for objects that are available and accessible (no blocked paths or objects already in use).
If the character has an urgent need, the system prioritizes an action that fulfills it. This is important because players often rely on autonomy to maintain their characters' well-being!
If all needs are okay, the system scores potential actions based on the character’s identity: talent traits, skill levels, and personality traits. There’s a bit of randomness to make it feel more natural: the game picks one of the top three scored actions.
For example:
A musically talented character with high piano skills is more likely to play the piano - unless they’ve already practiced it too much that day.
A "neat" character might autonomously clean dirty things around the house.
Some actions, like watching TV, might be a universally available pastime.
If your Para is really sad, you may see them go to the bathroom to cry it out…
This system is also fully moddable! Modders will be able to add their own interactions, with the scoring conditions and the priority rules they want. It is great for those who want to mod in their own personality traits, since the autonomous behaviours are a big part of how the player “feels” the personality of their characters!
These characters don’t have any repair skills, but they both have the neat trait, so I guess they’re doomed to clean this cursed bathroom forever!
😴 Forced Autonomy: Helping Characters Self-Manage
Sometimes, the game needs to step in to make sure things run smoothly. For example, when it’s time to go to work, the game will automatically queue the "go to work" interaction. It isn’t always about adding an interaction though, sometimes it is about cancelling one: if a character has been playing an instrument for hours and becomes bored or exhausted, the game will force them to stop and address their needs. These forced changes help prevent characters from getting stuck in endless activities when something more important comes up! (For the Para murderers among you, don’t worry, you can still cancel the autonomous interactions that fulfill needs or turn off the autonomy altogether…)
Forced autonomy also comes into play during group interactions. Characters might leave a group activity or refuse to participate in it if they don’t know the other participants well enough, or if they need to go to work, sleep, or fulfill an urgent need.
Nothing can stop these Paras from working out! Except maybe a quick bathroom break
🏃➡️ Coming Next for Character Autonomy
At the moment, this system is active for household characters only. You can toggle autonomy on or off for selected characters and for other characters in the household separately, allowing you for instance to focus on one while the others manage themselves.
In the future, we plan to extend this system to working NPCs on community lots. For instance, a barista at the café might autonomously clean tables or serve drinks with this same system.
However, for performance reasons, we can’t activate full autonomy for every NPC in the entire town at all times. Instead, we’ll develop a more optimized system for town autonomy, which will strategically manage NPC placement around town. I can’t wait to work on it and tell you all about how it works!
Just adding a few basic, simple interactions to the autonomy system changed a lot how alive the game feels. I hope you enjoyed seeing a little peek of it!
Have a fantastic week,
Anna 🌞
Edit - June 5th, 2025: This post is now public, feel free to share it!
Comments
Pauline Blot
This looks great ! It would also be nice if a Para that has a cooking ability doesn't keep cooking new food when there's already food in the fridge or on the table. I find this terribly annoying when the sims do that in TS4. It's such a waste of money and food...
EaselEar
Paras actually doing stuff on their own that makes sense for their personality and interests is going to make things feel so alive, I can't wait!
Girth Lush
I can't wait to make all my opps, and put them through seven layers of hell ! ❤️
grumpy_muppet
I would love to see Para personalities influence which autonomous actions they perform. I'm so tired of other games where the only autonomous actions the characters perform are watching TV, using the computer, making a white cake, or playing with clay, regardless of their personalities or wants.
RomanEmpiree339
I would like to think a neat para will wash their hands as soon as they come into their home from work, before cooking, before eating, before getting into bed. Or maybe that’s not neat and just a germaphobe 😅 but I wash my hands “excessively” to some people
Lucie Baha
Me too
Catloverplayer
I hope paras in relationships will automously kiss the one there in a relationship with.
Sara Andersson
Hi Anna! How are you? I was just wondering. How long do you think it will take to build the whole town?
TnT_Terry
Bravo Team Para! I love how things are really coming to fruition, I honestly can't wait to get my hands on Paralives to create and play!
TnT_Terry
OMG I saw you say EA and was like huh???? Now I get what you meant, but those 2 letters do not fit in with Paralives lol. Curse EA! :p
Clara M Johnson
I hope the Story Progression won't be like The Sims 4 ( or The Sims 3 for that matter ) I don't like how Sims in TS4 are made to move out of a household or move in with another, with no real reason for doing it, the way it is you can tell it's totally random and it's not really like real Story Progression, it's just a way for the game to look like there is real story progression going on, but there really isn't. I mean I've seen families split apart in really weird ways, like where everyone left the house they were living in, moved in with another Sim, which was just some randomized Sim who the game had moved into a empty house, but the game left the families teenage daughter behind in their original home, it made no sense! Because of how bad the Story Progression is in TS4, I keep it turned off all the time, though because of bugs, sometimes the game kinda turns it back on, even though is says it's off, the whole thing of randomized Sims moving into empty houses keeps happening anyway, and then I have to evict them, though I also tend to delete the randomized Sims, because I really hate them anyway, lol! There are so many premade Sims now in the game we don't need the game to keep creating new Sims. Hopefully we won't have weird things happening just to pretend it's Story Progression going on, in Paralives. Maybe since you guys are having it in from the start, instead of adding it years later like TS4 did, maybe it will work better. Though The Sims 3 has it too, from the start, and it was pretty bad, we have single Sims for no reason, get a baby, even just a single man, including this old guy they had living in a shack in one of the worlds, and they have no bassinette for them, so they would be laying in the floor if you came over to their houses, lol! Nothing wrong with adopting as a single man, but, not if they don't have any place for the baby to be, lol!
Tella
I'm wondering that too 🤔
Chiara
I would like if the actions they take autonomously were based *mostly* on their personalities and vibes but there's also a tiny random factor in it, to make it a bit unpredictable sometimes. edit: I've re-read the post and I see that a little bit of randomness is indeed contemplated. Thank you. What I meant is that I'd like a little chance that the character would do something that you wouldn't expect them to do and totally random (a character with no cooking skills that nevertheless *very rarely* could have the idea of cooking something)
Chiara
Do you think that when you release the game in EA it will already be fully translated in all the other languages you planned? Will the mod system be translated (in EA or later in the future)?
Chiara
"At the moment, this system is active for household characters only. You can toggle autonomy on or off for selected characters and for other characters in the household separately" Can you clarify this please? Who are the "other characters" in your household? Is it possible to have a household where X characters live together but you manage only some of them and not others?
Sini861
This is sounding great! although I hope most paras wash their hands instead of just neat ones😅
