u/AgeInteresting585

First of all, I'd like to make clear that I'm not a native english speaker. I was born in Brasil and, except for the one year spent abroad as an exchange student, it's where I've lived my whole life. Grammar is not my strongest suit in my own native language, let alone in a foreighn one. So I apologise in advance for my glaring misspellings and wrongfull uses of ponctuation. I'm aware this is a fairly overused excuse, but I can't help if my truth is so common.

I have a huge issue that I believe many here also might suffer with: I love creating stories but I seem to not be able to finish them. I'll will write pages uppon pages of world building, I'll fall deeply in love with the characters and the plot, get physically energetic about scenes —even cry imagining their sad endings. But somehow that seismic motivation, that once had led to sleepless nights of writing, fades away. During my teenage years (I'm 23 years old and studying psychology) I started creating webcomics and posting them. I didn't gather a huge audience but the people that did read them had nothing but positive comments. That leads me to believe I'm not that bad at making stories, which is great to know because diving into fictional dimentions and spending hours walking in circles to come up with the logic behind the way that universe fuctions is something that brings me immense joy. But on the other side of that is my inability to finish what I've started. It's not that I don't want to sever the parasolcial bonds I've created with the figments of my imagination by finishing the story —quite the contrary, I hate stories that go on for ever for no reason other then baseless financial or emotional attachment— it's really a matter of sudden lack of motivation. What usually happens is that I'll get extremely excited about a story, start convincing myself I'll work it to the end this time, only for something external to happen (like an illness or the start of my finals) that I then will start using as an excuse to stop writing. It's something that deeply disturbs me. I have so many stories that want to tell the world but it feels like my own mind is against that. It could be because of my perfectionism. It could be because my parents raised me to see everything as a business opportunity and always try to turn my rest into productivity, and now I can't just treat something I love as an enjoyable hobby. If you've dealt with simmilar issues and found a way to conquer that sudden creative tedium, I'd love to hear about it.

There is a seccond issue I wanted to adress: What do you think is an ethical use of AI in creative writting? More specifically, I wanted to hear some oppinions about the way I personally use it. As a non native (who also suspects they might have some dregree of dislexia) I often use AI for grammar checking, phrasing suggestions and extending my vocabulary. I aways write first, then ask for suggestions. I often have to instruct the AI not to give me unsolicited suggestions and keep to only doing grammar checks. It's also how I find most of the name suggestions for my characters. I'm also a huge fan of including miscellenous bits of curious informations and historical accuracies in my stories, and I feel AI is a great tool for finding books and articles about those specific things, and keeping me consistent with the time period I'm writting about by fact checking my writting. I'm aware most AI use is unethical, but I feel like it has allowed me to learn so many new things. I feel really saddened by the unethical use of AI because, if used as a learning tool, it could have so much potential for expanding our minds. I'm not trying to justify AI, I do believe it's use should be more limited by a strong set of laws (specially in education and mental healthcare). I know AI is just a big machine for making the ultra rich even richer and the everyday convinieces it offers are just an excuse to justify the horrors it brings (much like most things in capitalism). But should I feel guilty for using it like a cheap english totur and fact checker? If not guilt, what else should I feel? I was once berated online for sharing a use of AI that I considered ethical (reading text on several images and writting a list based on the color next to the words, a task that would've been very mechanical and tedious if done manually) and that got me thinking if my own moral compass could be broken. I'm aware there are some rules in this community about mentioning AI but I'm not sure where else to talk about this, and I desperatly want someone to talk about this with.

This is the part where I'd usually apologise for the amout of words that I've used —although I think I did a good job at liminting myself considering all I had originally intended to compose. But I really don't think this is the kind of community that would object to reading.

P.S.
I had originally written this to post on subs about creative writting, but it kept getting deleted, even after I edited it so to not mention AI at all. It explains why I'm writting something like this in a place that should be dedicated to AI writting: I don't know where else to post. I don't want to just send this to an AI for it to fabricate an indulging answer, I wanted to talk to real people bout it. I was really sad to be rejected in the other community, it made me feel a bit hopeless. I'm sorry if this post is out of place and would be happy if you could point me to where I can have this kind of discussion.

You might not know this, but you can use MCCC to control how the game generates outfits for new NPC Sims. What you need to do is change these settings by clicking on a computer:

• MC Dresser → Outfit Settings → Only Use Saved Outfits → Enabled
• MC Population → Populating Settings → Run Dresser → Enabled
• MC Dresser → Ages To Run On Age-Up → Enable the age groups you want

The problem is that for this to work well, you need a pretty diverse mc_dresser.cfg file. It's a text file listing saved outfits that MCCC can use. The second problem is that creating a big dresser file is a pain because you have to save every single outfit manually. When you're doing that for hundreds of outfits, it can be very tedious and time-consuming.

There are some creators like Tiasha, Authorspirit, and simslegacy5083 (and many others) who have uploaded their dresser files, so you don't need to build your own. The issue with that is they are not tailored to your game, so they might use CC and DLCs you do not own. That leads to some NPCs walking around without clothes. You could use a dresser file that only has BG items, but that can look a bit bland, right?

(Ad) If you want to follow the DIY road, the Helper for MCCC Dresser File Config is a must-have. It saves ALL outfits from ALL household members with a single command! It makes the process MUCH faster.

It even includes slots. So in a household that has 8 sims, you can save up to 320 outfits at once! Increase the household size (MCCC Settings → Gameplay Settings → Maximum Household Size) and maybe you can config your whole dresser file with just one command!

If you're making a mod where you need to know the IDs of the sim's skin tone and wants a way to visually distinguish them.

Let's say you're making a skin overlay that should be applied to all sims with a dark skin tone. You can use this to create a guide for you to visually select the shades that the overlay matches, and link that directly to skin tone ID (a sim info that pretty easy to access).

I'm pretty sure this is not the right place to post this. If you know somewhere better, where it'll be more accessible to modders, go ahead and share it. I'm not even a modder myself, I used AI to write the bulk of that. I have no rights over that info, use it as you want.

Skin_tones.json