Share Your Business Tips Here

Not sure I follow. I didn't try doing a restaurant so I'm not sure if this would work the same way. I think the community lot stove spawns a NPC cook so I don't know if that will affect anything.

 

I had a restaurant for a short time and my sim was the chef. You have to hire any employees just like for any other owned business.

Or maybe I'm just not following ...

 

I have completely abandonned all ambitions for running sims' businesses from their homes. The various projects I have tried have all ended in tears (mine) as I experienced rage of quite appalling magnitude. The final straw was my cutsey notion to have the Abelard family open a cake store.

If ever evidence needed to confirm that computer games cheat then a sims' home/cake store combo has to be the clincher. In the past, Pescado has observed that the mechanism by which a sim makes a decision is not always clear (even to him!) Well one thing is sure. Run a bakery & cake shop from home and you will see that sims choose their next destination strictly according to the rule that they must screw up the system as far as possible. So you have an employee quietly making many cheesecakes in the company kitchen (fridge, counter, cooker & smoke alarm - nothing else needed in there). Then at 13 hundred sweet li'l Pansy comes home from school and you send Pansy to the family kitchen to make some Santa Cookies that are getting kinda low in the virtual stockroom.

Oh what fun! Suddenly the game engine goes into a manic frenzy. Given carte blanc to be as cussed as possible it will ensure that the employee cook will automatically select the counter nearest the domestic fridge (that being the one automatically chosen by the householders when cooking). This occurs because Pansy has decided that the most effective place to beat up cookie dough is on the counter in the shop's kitchen. Using moveobjects is no help because they are not heading for counters but for destinations so swapping the counters achieves nothing except to double the length of the silly sims' pointless journeys. There is no limit to the amount of trecking they will attempt ... and the worse part is that employees will ignore locked doors until they reach them and since garage doors cannot be locked they're most apt to end up in the garage.

I can easily understand how this occurs (in the programming context) and the only way to understand the game designers' rationale in choosing such an idiotic mechanism is to assume that they actaully wanted the game to perform that way so as to cheat the player by robbing them of any semblance of reality. Anyone in doubt will not have seen the highly comical instance of a sim (holding a tray of comestibles) making a song and dance about being unable to reach a counter (inaccessible due to a building oversight - roof in the way) ... the joke comes when the sim completes the hoo-ha and deposits the tray of goodies on an accessible counter next to the fridge before, presumably, waiting to starve to death ...

So computers do cheat. It's official. They are out to get us and they won't stop until we are all enslaved aranoid:

 

There's a community to residential hack on MTS2 to let you buy the clothing racks and podium and all. Some people might find it a bit easier than the lot zoning change and it seems to work fine for restaurants.

Here's a tip, if you see sims hanging around outside looking through the windows, click on one of your displays and choose "show item to" and the name of the sim that's outside. Your sim will go out and get them and they'll come in and generally buy something.

 

I like the business perk, assess desire. I sell a lot more paintings now that my sim can assess which painting another sim would probably be interested in.

My home businesses work just fine, other than the stupid bakery cases stuck on the lawn. I like them better in some ways because my sims have access to everything they need to stay happy and can go goof off if there are no customers.

I'm afraid of cheats. I use some of Pescado's hacks, but (I'll probably get shot for saying this) one of them seemed to mess up my community lots. Once I deleted it all was fine.

So I won't be using boolprop, ever, or Merola's painting or the switch to res/comm cheat. But it sounds intriguing.

I think I'll stick to restaurants and clothing stores that aren't home businesses. Call me chicken, I've just had enough weird things happen without adding more stress to my game code.

 

Oh you can't leave it there. Which Pescado hack caused trouble?

 

Oh, sorry. It appeared to be the lot debugger, the yellow box thing. I installed it to get rid of flaming bags of poo. It worked great, but after I installed it every time my sims went to a community lot (didn't matter which sim) they couldn't stack actions. They could only do one action at a time, and sometimes they refused to do that.

Plus they suddenly jumped around a lot, which they had never done.

I removed the lot debugger (kept it in case I had the poo problem again) and my problem went away.

It could have been that I had some other download that interfered with it. Who knows. I keep getting the "can't interact with certain object" glitch. Maybe that interfered with it?

About that glitch, I thought it was gone, but right now, Max can't clear his dishes. That's usually the one I get, can't clear dishes. The maid can, other people can, it's just that one sim. Since he lives alone and can't afford a maid yet this is kind of a problem.

I don't want him to have to move but it's looking like he's going to have to.

The most serious was when Porter couldn't use his coffin. Eek.

 

Beep: Humanoid #8759303857401: Emma Wiliams: beep: speech sense: normal: 'I already know.'

 

SBW, do you have a "no clear dishes on community lot" hack installed? I had this problem before and it was b/c of that hack (I think by Crammyboy from MATY). Don't remember exactly what I did to fix it, but I believe I had to take the sim back to a community lot and home again, then everything was back to normal.
Also, now I believe that hack is not compatible with OFB.

 

Nope. Don't have that one unless it came hidden with something else.

I will try having him go to a community lot and back and see if that helps, though, so thanks for the tip. I can't remember if he did that before or after I got the glitch.

The boy goes out a lot.