Lot entry destination setting.

[landess]

As I continue to learn and tweak the sims 3, help is needed to understand and possibly change a game function.

 

Certain lots can benefit from being able to change the location of the 'arrival' point ALL sims use when first visiting a lot. For the most part the default locations work well enough, yet I find crowds of Sims bunched together and seemingly having trouble going about any activities. A good example for me, and why I decided to look for player input, is the Banzai Lounge in Bridgeport.

 

I've tried 'Set front of lot' to a specific location in the past, yet places like the Banzai Lounge seem to attract Sims to group together just inside the doors to the VIP side of the dual venue. Once there, they have trouble pathing around each other, and engaging with other Sims and activities most of the time. Short of removing the doors, entry ropes, and knocking out a wall for an arch at the top floor (between the 2 rooms), I was hoping to change a simple setting to have them arrive at the lot and go immediately inside to the top floor via the elevator. Once there IF they wanted to access the VIP area, they wouldn't have to fight the crowds, and likely would just engage locally.

 

As is, this venue and others with a similar problem are avoided by myself during game play. It isn't at all natural to go somewhere, and stand around 'outside' doing nothing for hours, while the interior (where the action is) remains empty for the most part. Any input or understanding of the issue would be appreciated. I'd rather not 'remodel' the location so drastically. I already use mods to reduce congestion for things like elevators and schools.

 

tldr: How do I set the arrival location for Sims when they first enter a PUBLIC lot to avoid crowding a particular spot.

[jdw6]

If it's not just my sleep deprivation talking to my memory, you know your way around s3pe and tuning mods.

 

Take a look at S3_0333406C_00000000_14C166293CD50B89_Venues%%+_XML.xml in it there are 3 settings for that you might try tweaking: HowLongSimsWaitOutsideBeforeEntering, MinLength, and MaxLength.  That venue is referenced internally as 'CocktailLoungeAsian' and has a minute delay before entering. Changing to 0 might be all you'd need to do.  But I'd also change the MinLength to 0 and MaxLength to, well, probably 1 so there is a small chance of delay to account for the elevators.

 

Since that one (and most in Bridgeport) have some connection to elevators to get in, you may also want to look at tuning the elevators (S3_0333406C_00000000_AF19D95BE1D5EB4F_ElevatorDoors_0xaf19d95be1d5eb4f%%+_XML.xml) so they're faster.  Key things to tweak there are:  kDefaultEffectsTime (drop from 2 mins), kLongEffectsTime (drop from 3 mins), kElevatorDoorOpenTimeoutTime (drop from 30 mins), and possibly kMaxSimsInElevatorLine (which is 12).

 

I have not found a way to either keep the bouncers from wandering away from the ropes or to stop being as chatty, yet.  The "no-ropes" option, I'd tried earlier in my TS3 BP playing, but (somehow) that wound up preventing any townies or NPCs from showing up to the venues.   (I'd deleted with shift-click | object | delete.)

 

Oddly enough, I found something else in that file which may help the "phantom" gohome pushes I've seen, as there's 2 venues for that: GoHomeWhenItsLate & GoHomeToFillQuota.  This is the ulterior motive I always have while trying to help... I often see something I missed earlier to help me out.  I also don't think I went far enough on reducing some of the aforementioned settings, since I'm still having annoying "sim standing in elevator sounding like a dumbass laughing and clapping while waiting for the damn doors to close" situation.

 

I know I found mods to download and use for most of that, but lost track of which I had used (I think there were 2 for the elevators that did similar) and the venue one was Shimrod's Townies Out On The Town, but it kept some of the waiting outside far too long for my taste.

 

Edit: Forgot to add, I've tried looking for and adjusting the public lot entrance point many times, but have yet to find a way to do it.  The "front of lot" thing doesn't (often) seem to be used.  I was thinking of suggesting building a bridge between the 2 venues for the fusion place before I saw you'd thought that as well.

 

[landess]

6 hours ago, jdw6 said:

I've tried looking for and adjusting the public lot entrance point many times,

Yeah. The whole set up seems counter intuitive, hense my inability to make or identify a change which from the outside, appears simple. I may try something -outside the box-.

 

Copy the lot, move it to another 'test' world, make it residential, and 'see' where the front door is located. This option to set front door isn't available for public lot's, and I have a sneaking suspicion, this may be the culprit.

 

Otherwise my guess at the congestion is simple pathing and queue issues: The lot drops sims off at this location before turning them loose. The location is closer to the VIP side, so the sims attempt to path to something behind a gate with requirements which they do not qualify for. As more sims arrive, the inequality in queue hierarchy causes a push-me/pull-you effect, which rarely let the sims out of this 'trap'.

 

In simple terms, because of the way the game works, one small thing like where they start 'free-will' has affected the ability for them to engage in it fully. Just a guess, but I should look into it with the experiment I describe above - hidden front door on public lot's. I prefer the front door be the one to the right facing the lot, nearer the elevators.

 

I did remove the ropes and bouncer - slowly the sims began to move away from the location, with the VIP area getting very crowded. Watching how the queue selection works for items sims choose to interact with is not faith inducing when 'normal' architecture is involved. It explains a lot of why sims move to strange locations to perform certain tasks.

 

 

As far as mods - I have quite a few 'quality of life' mods which work exactly as advertised and should be included in the game no if's, and's, or buts. No school entry congestion, Faster elevators/no congestion are two good examples. Using the tweaking guide I posted from Steam makes sim pathing so much better - don't care if they occasionally 'clip' - we've all had to push by others IRL, both invading each others private space for the greater good.....

[jdw6]

15 minutes ago, landess said:

No school entry congestion,

I never noticed huge issues w/ the EA rabbit hole schools, but (related to your door thing) I created a new building for the KW school. They kept spawning on the right side of the lot if the front's arrows (when you drop a new lot) are pointing toward the street & you make street-side the front.  Got tired of them running around the school to go in (I'd only left a square or two between building and edge of lot, which caused issues... seems they can't step "off-lot" to go passed someone once they spawn on that lot.  I put a side door in & that solved the entry problem.  But doing a new door for a self-built building is infinitely easier than doing that for an EA venue building.  (Broke that bar by the criminal HQ in BP once by incorrectly trying to edit it to put a brothel upstairs... had to restart before the edits.

 

Fences might help direct flow, but you'd need a larger lot than their buildings currently are on (so there's plenty of space around the edge).  Had a paper deliverer, once, drop the paper directly under the back corner of the lot's fence, and another the front left, but still right under a fence post, instead of in the "hey moron, there's plenty of space for a newspaper to be dropped by the gate" area... pushing gate back twice as far solved that issue...  Basically I think all these routing issues are related, and I'm not so sure we have any control.  It's probably some random thing.  Kinda like how KW's NPCs (peepers & strays, at least) often spawn in basements if lots have a hill on them... or inside the fence if the fencing goes all around the lot.

 

I digress.  That experiment sounds interesting.  And, somehow I thought I'd saw a "set front door" option once on a public lot, but have tried to find that again & never have... so maybe I just changed the lot type & forgot I had.

[landess]

Allrighty then. Experiment results.

 

Didn't need to use a test lot. First I set the Banzai Lounge to residential. Immediately noticed it was treated as a high-rise apt. with the 'you can't change things outside your unit' crap. there was no option to set ANY door as front..... Yet I was able to change a few things. First I changed the 2 single side by side doors at each entrance to proper double doors. Then I changed it back to commercial/fusion lounge and placed a double wide rope barrier on the outside of the building, effectively blocking the usual gathering place.

 

Ok then - fast time to opening and then watch...   Sent my active sim to the lot, started MSCmod to 25 sims (max per mod) and they all chose the new doors on the right avoiding the bouncer outside the ones on the left and gathered near the elevator. I was frankly surprised. At this point they began to act normal. Some began socializing while others either continued up the elevator while others engaged the bouncer if not VIP. Any standing around usually had some queue waiting (show boobs/etc.)

 

So for the most part I succeeded. Yet I have questions concerning the venues with a 'lobby' in which Sims tend to congregate instead of being pushed directly inside like a residence where Sims will path directly through a front door to a predesignated location inside the 'home'. It's an odd way to code/script something from a players standpoint while also understandable when the default unmodded game is such a mess where pathing and congestion are involved. Fixing something broken by breaking other things is an poor way to proceed.

 

So ultimately I feel the pathing and object queues created for Sims are the biggest issues which end up with a snowball effect. Explains why I have to KW/Debug/Cancel interaction so much.

 

[jdw6]

On 3/10/2020 at 12:31 AM, landess said:

First I changed the 2 single side by side doors at each entrance to proper double doors. Then I changed it back to commercial/fusion lounge and placed a double wide rope barrier on the outside of the building, effectively blocking the usual gathering place.

Doh! I'd forgotten/didn't notice that they were single-wide doors there. Single-wide anything in TS3 seems to be an issue when there's more than one sim involved. Even if there's 2 of them, TS3 seems to route everyone* at the same time & so they all get the same route, instead of it doing one sim, then another, then another, and checking new routes against "just routed" routes.  That would've been more coding, taken longer, had more testing, and they were probably behind schedule working 16-20 hour days to get this out.

* actually, not every sim in the game or even every sim on the lot, I think I've seen a setting in the tuning mods, at least for receiving events that could trigger a response/reaction set to 10 sims each time, so I would assume routing would be similar.  Can't squeeze 10 through a door set to 1, no matter how hard you push. lol  Maybe they watched too many "Bar Rescue" shows and purposefully borrowed his "butt funnel" concept. 

 

One other thought:  I somewhere, somehow found a way to tune (prob originally via some mod) the closeness between sims (or sims & objects) before it caused a routing error and reduced it quite a bit. I wanna say it was 0.5 "metres" (they had several on the team using British English) by default, which is a bit far for humans and tons too far for cats.  But I can't seem to find where that setting is or even think of the right term.  That might point you in the right direction, though.  But lowering it did seem to prevent a lot of their routing issues.

Did find this, that might be pertinent:

    <kConeAngleWhenRoutingToDoor value="110">
      <!--The angle in degrees around the door vector when routing to the door-->
    </kConeAngleWhenRoutingToDoor>

Looks like you have a little gropage going on in that screenshot.

[landess]

29 minutes ago, jdw6 said:

Looks like you have a little gropage going on in that screenshot.

It's actually the end of the romantic massage animation as the receiver 'stretches' a bit afterwards.

 

29 minutes ago, jdw6 said:

I somewhere, somehow found a way to tune (prob originally via some mod) the closeness between sims

From the Steam/Sims 3 tuning post I linked:

 

 

From Steam user - Anime_Boom

 

In The Sims 3 sims love to tap their foot and huddle all at a doorway that could easly have more than one person going throught it at once, this tweak makes it so that sims move more like they do in The Sims 4 when navagating around each other and objects.

Step 1 - Locate "Sims3.ini" in "SteamApps\common\The Sims 3\Game\Bin" and open it in notepad (or notepadd ++ makes things easier to edit and find)

Step 2 - When opened press "Crtl + f" a search bar will appear type in the search bar "DynamicAvoidance" and press enter.

Step 3 - In the "Config" Catagory change ONLY "DynamicAvoidance_FieldRadius, DynamicAvoidance_InactiveFieldLength, DynamicAvoidance_MinNonIntersectingDistance, DynamicAvoidance_FieldLengthPad, DynamicAvoidance_StopDistanceMultiplier" all to "0.1"

So From This



To This



Step 4 - Save and close the .ini File.

 

 

 

I myself have several tuning mods which already address some of the things here, and what you mentioned. Like: no more tapping feet, or complaining about routing fails. Also better elevator usage and no congestion at rabbithole school entrances. The game really NEEDS help, and I am so grateful to the players and other people whom know way more than I ever will and took the time to share it.

 

 

Call me suspicious, but I believe big companies like EA will purposely begin making their older and less profitable games somewhat broken by the 'last' patches released, so idiot sheep just shrug, and buy new....  (the 'Origin only supports newer versions of Windows' is a great example of sideways fucking a customer) 

[jdw6]

2 hours ago, landess said:

It's actually the end of the romantic massage animation as the receiver 'stretches' a bit afterwards.

Ah.... gotcha.  'twas hard to tell

 

2 hours ago, landess said:

It's actually the end of the romantic massage animation as the receiver 'stretches' a bit afterwards.

 

"Sims3.ini"
 

The game really NEEDS help

 

Call me suspicious, but I believe big companies like EA will purposely begin making their older and less profitable games somewhat broken by the 'last' patches released, so idiot sheep just shrug, and buy new....

Oh right!  I did make changes there.  I keep forgetting about it.    No wonder I couldn't find it in my tuning changes.  Hmmm.... I need to add those changes to my tuning changes project... ?  

 

 

2 hours ago, landess said:

The game really NEEDS help

If it hadn't been for all the mods, and customizations that they (for some reason) allowed, I'd probably given up on TS3 after the 1st game's generations ended... I keep learning new things, thanks to LL & other sites, and the weird way search engines "find" things they missed a year earlier.

 

 

2 hours ago, landess said:

Call me suspicious, but I believe big companies like EA will purposely begin making their older and less profitable games somewhat broken by the 'last' patches released, so idiot sheep just shrug, and buy new....

Seems like Apple got busted on that with an iPhone a couple years ago and their battery life.  I know for a fact that mobile app developers do it all the time.  Tons of website devs, too.  Oh, and then there's Mozilla fucking over every addon dev by doing an arbitrary change dropping any support for how it had been for a decade.  Come to think of it, it's kinda shocking EA didn't have some code that checked the system date and started erroring if the year is > some assholery date.  (Actually I worried about that when I started getting Error 12s every save, even though I'd changed very little in CAS.)

 

 

2 hours ago, landess said:

(the 'Origin only supports newer versions of Windows' is a great example of sideways fucking a customer) 

Yeah... I saw on here that royally bit someone in the ass hard. ? This "new groupthink" in the software world really gets my dander up, because I know there's absolutely no technical reason for it (only reason is greed).  Same as that a-hole UI team lead I worked with a while ago at a very large newspaper saying "the second a new browser version is released, we no longer support the old version".  I mean, WTF!  It's a public --- PUBLIC --- newspaper.  I guess he just ohhhhhh sooooo loves his parents & grandparents who don't have a clue about software and view updates as "it used to work, and then I let it update and everything is broken now".  SMH.