Writing books/naming. [ Edited ]

[Hroun_88]

When writing a book, sometimes the automated name can be the same as a previously written book that you are still receiving royalties for. Also the database that automated book names are taken from is very small, resulting in "Enter Book Name" after a very small handful of books written. (Might not affect most who choose to make funny book names, but for those who lack the patience to repeatedly come up with names may get a little peeved)

Origin Digital Deluxe,
No Mods, 
No CC, 
Windows 7 Ultimate x64, 
Intel i5 2500k, 
nVidia GTX 780.

[Hroun_88 · Accepted solution]

Books do not seem to affect royalty payments regardless of duplicate naming or quality. So there is no urgent issue here, perhaps I'll drop it into the suggestions forums that the game shouldn't suggest a name for a book that has already been used/still claiming royalties for, and to perhaps expand the list of name suggestions. Cheers.

[crinrict]

@Hroun_88 Does that result in any issues ?

[Hroun_88]

I wouldn't say it has any gamebreaking issues, more of a minor grievance and a little offputting from an immersion standpoint.

[crinrict]

So it doesn't bug your royalties out ?

[Hroun_88]

I will test to see if the money received from royalties is the correct amount despite duplicate names in the notification. I'll report back shortly.

[Hroun_88 · Accepted solution]

Books do not seem to affect royalty payments regardless of duplicate naming or quality. So there is no urgent issue here, perhaps I'll drop it into the suggestions forums that the game shouldn't suggest a name for a book that has already been used/still claiming royalties for, and to perhaps expand the list of name suggestions. Cheers.

[crinrict]

Yeah, I think that would be best. Thanks for your feedback.

[sagredo1632]

I actually think there is a more serious issue that occurs here. When a writing a book or comedy routine whose automatically generated title is a duplicate of a previously written work, the sim will autonomously halt writing the current iteration of that work. Sometimes this happens immediately, and sometimes this occurs after a brief period of time, but it occurs fairly consistently. I have noticed this happening with a comedy routine and a children's book. IIRC, the order of events in which to reproduce this glitch are:

1. write a work with an automatically generated title,

2. start writing a work in the same genre, whose automatically generated title is the same as the one generated above,

3. stop writing, then resume writing the work with the duplicate title,

4. sim will automatically halt/interrupt writing

No error messages pop up, and this behavior occurs with autonomy in gameplay options both at 'Off', and at 'Full', as well as 'Disable Autonomy for Selected Sim' both checked and unchecked. Sometimes the halt is slightly delayed, so that if you switch to another household sim you won't notice that your sim has stopped writing that particular work, but you'll find that it's nearly impossible to complete the given work unless you scrap it and create a work with a different name. This definitely happens if the same sim is generating two works with the same name, but it might also happen if the exclusion counts globally across the household (e.g. Sim A writes a book and Sim 2 tries to write a book with the same name), but I haven't tested the latter. Nonetheless, with the short title list, this is bound to occur with high frequency.

Issue is current as of October 1, 2014 patch.