More Awesome Than You!

I'm running a 1.3 patched game with the latest 1.3-compatible AM (and running crash-free, don't worry, this isn't gonna turn into another OMGCTD flail). I remember Pescado posting something about a 'brute force' solution to make sims go to work/school, and that seems to have been implemented with the latest awesome, because my sims are now dutifully attending both.

Or rather, trying to attend. The zergswarm at the school is so crazy that some of the kids never make it in, leading to a congested cluster of freaked-out teens and children in front of the school, and I've seen a couple reports on these boards of people having the same issue. Furthermore, at the times of day when the game is trying to squeeze everyone into their rabbitholes or poop them back out, my game performance takes a divebomb. From 8-9 am and then again in the afternoon from 2-5 pm, normal speed starts moving in 5 or 10 minute chunks and the sims take hours and hours to complete tasks that should take 30 minutes or less. So, while I was one of the people who wanted the work and school problems fixed, I now am having that "watch out what you wish for" feeling. I'm confident that the performance hit is caused by pushing everyone to their rabbitholes, because the same thing happened to me pre-patch when I tested twallan's modified AM from the 'inactive slacker sims' thread.

Changing graphics settings seems to have no impact on the issue. Setting dynamic avoidance to 0 didn't help either. Thinking that maybe my neighborhood was just too freaking crowded, I raptured half the town and this actually helped some, but the performance hit at rabbithole time still made things hair-pullingly slow. Is anyone else experiencing these issues? Is there any solution short of running a less populated neighborhood? I don't want to be forced to choose between the game being unplayable half the sim-day and having unemployed, failing sims, but still, could the 'force to work/school' feature be made configurable for large neighborhoods where having it on causes these problems?

How many sims do you have in your neighborhood?

My town has 33 households with 121 resident sims.  Of which 27 are school age children/teens.  I have the dynamic avoidance set at half its normal value.

When it comes time to go to school, the children appear to be quite apt at making it into the building, even though they all arrive at around the same time.

Good Day. :)

Pre-rapture I had around 36 households, 200 sims, with 35 or so school-aged. Post-rapture I'm running around 25 households, 100 sims with 19 or so school aged. I should add that everyone seems to be making it into the rabbithole post-rapture without clusterfucking, but the slowdowns still happen at the same times, which is mostly what I'm concerned about. If I could play through the day without the crazy lag and stuttering clock I wouldn't care if half the school-aged population stood in front of the school and passed out or starved. My computer is decent, I have 3GB of RAM and a top-end dual core processor with a good GPU, it really should be able to handle it. Maybe it has something to do with the 'loss of performance if you play too many active households' thing? I've actively screwed around in probably 15 or more of these households, and maybe I just need to limit that or get used to playing smaller neighborhoods.

I wish I could help. Mostly I am posting to thank you for a clear, well written and non-flailly post. I have read too many posts today that make me logout and go bang my head on a wall at the level of stupid that exists in humanity.

I hope Pescado will be able to help you, you have clearly done everything in your power to help yourself.

I actively control all my households, popping in whenever I think they need some guidance, so it's doubtful it has anything to do with how many homes are touched on a regular basis.

The stuttering clock issue was a major problem with my game, and I spent the last week hunting it down.  I eventually found it was a pile of junk car objects running in the background that was grinding my town to a halt.  After cleaning them out, the stuttering ended and my Speed 3 was actually fast.  However, I can't say whether this is the issue you are encountering.

I run a Dual Core AMD 3.0Ghz on Vista with 4GB of RAM, with a GTX 280 graphics card.  I also run with the graphic levels turned to the lowest to minimize memory leakage, as once the game reaches 1.5GB in memory usage it becomes badly unstable on my machine (Error Code 12 save failures and such).

Good Day. :)

Some building designs seem to put sims into roach motel mode. On the main lot I've been playing a while (3rd generation of a legacy thingie), the house has a raised porch at the front door (by extending the foundation 3 squares and putting stairs at the end), and if more than 4 or so sims visit for a party, they spend most of the time "no-after-you"ing each other until they have to pee, and leave.

I think it has something to do with that little pause they do before going through a door or at both ends of stairways - their "wait for this idiot to go by" time is huge, and they deadlock at the drop of a hat.

Someone with some good knowledge in queuing theory needs to visit that code with a large axe, and possibly explosives.

I concur.  My partner located an issue with my personal mod...  While I was debugging the issue, I played her town for awhile.

She has IndieStone active, so has considerably more children in her town than I do.  The count came out to 51 children/teens swarming the school each morning.

We watched the sight and they did indeed all pile up in front of the door, and attempt to get in.  Eventually all but one bounced and decided to go home without attending school that day.

I changed the DynamicAvoidance to zero again (the recent patch reset the darn numbers).  After doing so, the children all made it into school.

Obviously having them all bounce attempting to enter the school is a serious EAxis issue.  Amazing it was missed.  Though with the old issue regarding not going to school at all, they probably never encountered the problem in testing. :P

Good Day. :)

This is driving me insane and has made my game all but unplayable.

I've been playing a family with 4 teens and they can't even get out of the house to catch the school bus (I have to go into buy mode and drag them into the front yard), then they stand out the front of the school until it's time to go home.  Did EAxis really believe the players would NEED to see each individual child walk into the building? I think they need to drop the animation altogether and as soon as they hit the sidewalk in front of the school they should be transported into the building. A bit like the lack of animation for actually getting into a vehicle.

OK, so that's my rant out of the way.  Now can anyone tell me how to change the DynamicAvoidance?

EDIT: NVM, I found the thread that gave directions.

Changing the DynamicAvoidance seemed to make a big difference in my game. Interestingly, however, changing it to 0 caused my game to randomly CTD during gameplay--which it had never done before.  Changing it to something more than zero, but less than the original value works fine, with no CTD after extensive play. More voodoo, probably.

Changing the DynamicAvoidance has helped with the swarming but I really can't live with all the waiting. There seems to be a 10 minute wait between every action they perform. Pause before going down the stairs, pause after getting down the stairs. Pause before going through the door, pause after getting through the door. It doesn't take 2 hours to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen and cook waffles. I won't be playing the game until there's a fix for this.

I´m having the same problem. My teenagers are crashing into each other in front of the school door; and the game clock jumps from 5 to 15 minutes making a simple "washing hands action" last for about 1 and half hour! :'(

How many residents do you have? I have a feeling our population cake was a lie. I had about 225 when I actually counted, plus 72 NPCs and 20-some homeless. So, a little over 320 sims. I was having the same time-skipping. I did a cleansing and now only have 60 residents. Time runs smoothly again.

My computer is not a POS, either.

For what it's worth, I tried ISM's 'wolfrun' concept, left the neighborhood running for about a day, and came back to all these same problems, lobotomized sims taking forever to go take a pee or whatever SupCom told them to do, unable to get to school or work or anything.  At times, fps looked like about 3.   I tried removing everything but awesome, tried lowering the graphics settings, tried a single sim fambly, tried gassing their asses, tried gassing more of their asses, and there was no change in the performance of that neighborhood.

 I started a brand new neighborhood and this was not the case, everyone in the same household, with the same mods (awesome, indie, couple various xml tunings), went about their business fairly efficiently.  Haven't played it long enough to tell if it will reproduce the problem, so, very well could be voodoo.

This sounds like the lag issue I was encountering.  If you still have the town, perhaps you could use my "NRaas Standalone CarLimo Cleaner" object to see whether there is a large number of global objects piling up in the background.

I would love to know whether your lag issue is the same one that I found in my game.

You'll find the object over in the Pudding Factory, if you are interested in taking a look.

Good Day. :)

I have had this experience as well but I noticed similar things when my old neighborhood got large even before Indie. I just think Indie on a wolfrun running fast speed just speeds up the process of create of LOT of sims in a short time.

Honestly, in my experience with this game there's a threshold of the number of sims in your neighborhood and I don't know what it is exactly, it may vary for some people, but once you get beyond that threshold it's just BFVFS territory with terrible lag that turning graphics settings down does not help and lobotomized townies who can't even take their asses to the toilet.

I think Indie just facilities speeding this process up by a great deal, but imo it can happen to all neighborhoods sooner or later if there aren't some means of population control in place.

I've been working with the routing algorithm and rabbit hole issues for the last 3-4 days, and may have found a solution (when combined with the latest force-to-work/school code).  The problem comes with the constant pushing and avoidance code that tries to stuff X sims into 1 rabbit hole at a time.

The last test I did (*without* the force code) had a 95% success rate in getting 13 sims into 1 hole over 20 tests, when all were delivered to the lot within the same ten sim-minutes (ten RL seconds).  I plan on doing some tests with the new force code (after I read up on it to see precisely what it does), and hopefully it will allow us to get a 100% success rate without the CPU-bashing, and within an acceptable time limit.

I just used it to check the town I had to scrap lately because it ran so awfully laggy (No difference between speeds 1 and 3 on a C2Q @3.8GHz!) and you're right on the spot: 1052 stuck limos. Flushing them did the trick, runs like a charm again. Additionally there are 148 Objects.Vehicles.CarBusSchool (at 4 a.m.), should be safe to delete them as well, right?

Thank you very much, this is a big relief cause the town I'm playing now has begun to slow down as well... so while you can just keep your shoes on, because I find just the imagination of kissing your feet repulsive, I am willing to bow down before you. ;)

Yes I delete the CarBusSchool objects as well...  I believe they are suffering from the exact same error as the CarLimo.

Make certain however that none are currently in use.  Preferably flush them at night.  I have code in place to stop inhabited vehicles from being crushed, but one can never be too safe with our children. :)

You can delete them both at the same time by flushing "CarLimo,CarBusSchool" (no quotes).  The operation takes comma delimited lists.

Good Day. :)

So, yeah. Turns out that having a metric assload of ghost vehicle objects littering your town can make your game performance suffer. I just flushed over 1000 of the things and the difference is amazing. Thanks, twallan.

I do still think that there are some issues to be ironed out with squeezing sims into and out of their rabbitholes - I think it's related to the vehicle issue since those are the times of day when all the car objects are firing up, but the solution is probably a separate one. Thanks to JBoat for looking at that.

Stopping now before I get a reputation for asskissery.

I suppose if I need more detailed directions on how to flush I am too un-awesome to use it?

I do like to keep a tidy game ...

But of course, it annoys me to see such idotic AI in this day and age when computers are so close to mimicking human intelligence.  To have such poorly planned routing algorithms is just a sin.

I believe I have the tweaks in place, the only thing stopping the code from being circulated is an infrequent and minor issue, but one that hurts in a big way when it happens.  Occasionally (once in 10-20 rabbit hole tests), I'll see a sim step onto the rabbit hole "pad" to enter, and then spontaneously forget where they were going.  They essentially lose their train of thought, and stand there clueless for however long they want, blocking other sims from getting in.  That's why I was keenly interested in this forcing code, though I think it is part of Supreme Commander and therefore won't work for sims not being controlled by it.

I think placing a sim in a Low Resolution mode while they are on their way to work/school can accomplish the same goal, since I've seen them waltz right into the school when I was in town map mode, and they had no trouble pathing past each other.  Not sure if that's something that will break animations and suspend belief or not, though I suspect it may.

As an interesting sidenote: the tweaks I've made to the routing behavior move much faster than the standard push-n-shove code that EA gave us.  During my routing tests at the School, that 13 students make it in around 9:45 or 10:00 with vanilla routing, but usually make it in between 9:00 and 9:15 with the new changes.  There is none of the typical shoving and pushing, and milling about like you'd normally see.

Provided I can fix the seeming "alzheimers" problem with some sims on their way into the rabbit hole, I'll gladly distribute what I've come up with.

I used your terlet and it reduced the lag considerably, 599 carlimos and couple hundred carbuses.  It did not fix it completely, which means (to me) that story mode is slowly borking the game in some other way as well.  We need that batman box thing that worked so well for fixing crappy issues in TS2.

Next version of AwesomeMod wil incorporate better monitoring for the invisible derelict vehicles.

The Batman box was awesome!

I'm also having the swarming/routing issues with the patch. My sims moved around fairly well pre-patch, except for at-home parties, at which they all got stuck in front of the door for hours. Of course, pre-patch, almost every family except the active household slacked off at work and school. Now that they are all actually attending work and school, it takes a sim 2 hours to get out of the house for work, and the kids stand in front of the school until late at night. The upside is that they never have to do their homework, as it remains at 100% in their inventories.

I killed all the homeless, removed 414 carlimo objects, and adjusted the Dynamic Avoidance, and it helped a little. It still takes ineffably long to start an interaction and to get out of the house. Getting into the school is a bit faster, because they don't spend time saying, "After you!" "No, after YOU!"

I would attribute it to my older pc, except that I didn't have these headaches pre-patch.

My next step is to kill off most of the households, and to keep doing this as new ones move in. I did have IS with Immigration turned off, but it caused me so many other issues that I took it out.

Update: killed off half the EA-created families, and with that and maybe the latest Awesomemod (don't know if it tweaked anything to do with my issues), it's playable again! The sims still take longer than they used to getting out of the house, but the swarms are gone.

I`ve used the toilet and now the game works great!  ;D

Congratulations?

Oh yes, that could be taken so very wrong. :)

Glad to hear that a future edition of AwesomeMod will implement car monitoring.  One to rule them all!

Good Day. :)

Just a note that the work I've been doing regarding sim routing/pathing has taken a turn (not a u-turn).  :)  I'll be sending Pes all my findings so far, since he's doing work on his own to resolve sim pathing issues and rabbit holes.  Essentially I won't be producing a separate mod with XML tweaks unless I believe that the AM values can benefit from new ones.

One does wonder why these problems only happen to a fraction of the user base; it seems to be more mucking-up of existing games/towns, though. I went ahead and started up an entirely new game post-patch, with the new Indie Stone and core Awesome mod - and no issues - YET.

I wonder how much actual testing EA does with saved towns with an actual "history". Are these slowdown/clusterfuck conditions also happening mainly to those who've accumulated a number of "active" households over time, and/or with multiple sacred households? Or are the non-modded Sims players getting farked games too?

I have three households that I actively play, although I blessed about 10 before the rapture, and unblessed seven of those post-Rapture. It's going to be a problem when my sim has grandchildren, because I micromanage my favorite sims. The game has been much, much better since I cleaned up the EAxis households. I love Rapture, but I wish we had a guillotine in the park - it'd be more fun!

It's possible that my main family has accumulated so much stuff, books, points, skills, etc., that it could make a difference in game performance.

I took a screenshot at 1:11 pm and I had 23 students still at the door.  Needless to say, they didn't all get in.  I take control of the child that is causing the traffic jam and tell them to move,but it takes 3 hours their time for the child to move.  They are stuck.  There are days that are better than others.  Last knight, my Simmette didn't get out of school till 7:30pm.  So it also goes both ways.

Is that an assumption or did you find any clues that stuff, points, skills, etc. have an impact on game perfomance? I'm curious on what is affecting game perfomance for real and (stuck limos out of the picture thanks to twallan) right now it seems to me that game perfomance just degrades in time for no particular reason. Even if I save my families and all the "dummy"-families I just created to prevent the gerartric extinction of my hood and place them in a new hood (without killing off the default families!) there's no noticeable perfomance difference to an unaltered default hood.

Only one thing's for sure: The overall perfomance is badly affecting the pathfinding. I don't know the code but it seems obvious to me that the pathfinding is somehow turn-based and the lower the game perfomance the longer these turns are getting...

When you say "game perfomance just degrades in time", what exactly do you mean by "time" -- time that has passed in-game, or real time?

I noticed yesterday that my sims were abnormally slow when "taking their turns", and since the game had been running for rather a long time (several hours realtime, some of it paused) I tried simply restarting -- and that seemed to actually help; upon restart, in the same household, same situation, they suddenly started to move on.

I'm still on 1.2.7, with an old Awesome, so YMMV. Pathfinding has always been painful in my game (both 1.2.7. and pre-patch), not so much because of the slowness alone but because of the sheer idiocy of it .. a sim standing right next to the fridge will wait half an hour for another sim to hike all across the lot just because that sim is "first in line" to use the fridge. This isn't affected by restarting of course, but the time it takes to actually make the decision to walk to the fridge was noticeably shorter after restarting.

I meant in-game time. I encountered slow downs after hours of real time (and switching out of the game and back numerous times) which didn't show up again after saving and restarting but this is not happening consistently.

Actually pathfinding is working out acceptable for me most of the times, but I lowered DynamicAvoidance and installed Pescados XML-hack (both seem to improve the situation at least a little) and my CPU is pretty fast...

I'm afraid it's just a guess. Post-patch, I had the terrible slow-downs and zergswarms. However, after flushing the carlimos, adjusting dynamic avoidance, deleting half the families, and the latest awesomemod, I no longer have the school swarms, and my sims are managing to get to work. They still do this very odd freeze before stairs, the door, etc, which they were not doing pre-patch.

I have an older pc - planning to upgrade everything this year. I've been playing this town for a long time, although I'm now using a copy I made after fiddling with Neighborhood Workshop a few days ago.

I've definitely noticed performance degrading if I play for a long time. In the worst case I've had Indiemod completely quit in the middle of my playing and revert to EAxis storymode, which one time I only noticed when I realized one of my playable families had suddenly moved out of town despite that being turned off both in Indie and Awesomemod. Now I make sure to save a lot and when I see the storymode notifications reverting from the Indie verbose notifications (and when I see teens getting jobs and elders retiring, neither of which happen with Indie in my game), I make sure to restart without saving :P

TS3 suffers from a wicked memory leak. I have a high-end gaming computer, and after 3-4 hours of play, I begin to notice short bursts of random lagging. After 5-6 hours of play, the game gets annoyingly slow at odd times, for no apparent reason (not the usual 1 AM storymode lag). This is despite having trained myself to automatically save the game each sim-day at around 2 AM. I have storymode notifications enabled, and use them as a reminder to save. The mind boggles as to why EA didn't fix the memory leak with the latest patch, but I've given up trying to fathom why they do, or don't do, certain things that are obvious and would seem to make sense.

I installed the new patch and newest AM on Monday, and the update went fine (all that worrying for nothing!). However, I am also experiencing the terrible lag now. I first played my newest saved game with just one male sim and I noticed some slowness and choppiness, but it really got ridiculous when I played another older saved game with a bigger family. I, too, have found the lag to get worse the longer the game is played; it is so bad that it makes the game nearly unplayable. It takes hours and hours for a sim to feed and change a toddler although the motives are not subject to the slowness, so the kids continue to cry and starve while the idiotic sim parent just stands there holding the crying kid until s/he decides to do something about it. Like others have said, the clock will also skip many minutes at a time. My sims and kids keep missing work/school because it takes about 4 sim hours for them to pee, shower, eat cereal, and walk/run-FREEZE-walk/run-FREEZE-walk/run-FREEZE to the bus/carpool in the mornings. Gah!

Needless to say, this is not enjoyable.

I wasn't sure when/if AM was cleaning out car/limos since I wasn't noticing any improvement in performance while playing, so I downloaded the standalone but it listed no derelict cars so I assume AM did it's job, it just didn't improve performance much for me. I play on what is basically a low-end laptop and this was a fambly of 6, two adults, two kids, two toddlers. I realize these are two big issues and are part of the problem, but the bottom line is that the slowness wasn't much of an issue until I updated to the newest patch and AM, soooo...Coincidence? If anyone has any other ideas to share on what I can try to fix the gawdawful time warp I would appreciate it. I guess I could try nuking half my town and see if that makes any improvements, but I am wondering if all the pushing to get all the sims in the neighborhood to actually DO things is what's making my system slow to a crawl? Or is this just a common problem with older 'hoods?

Tangie, have you tried the 'towderelicts' console command in the newest builds of AM? I find it hard to believe that you had no cars to clean up in an old neighborhood, the experience of others in that situation was a huge pileup of vehicle objects. And cleaning them up is the main thing that improved my performance. If you're still getting clock stutters and the vehicles really are cleaned up, then I would guess that yes, it's just the size of your neighborhood and your computer can't handle all of it.

On another note, does anyone know what it is that controls whether the 'hour til carpool' alarm goes off? Because I've noticed that in the case of the school bus, this alarm matters a lot. Basically, if I see it go off in the household I'm playing, all the school-aged kids in my neighborhood will end up getting pushed to school. Often, however, it doesn't fire. The bus still arrives and the kids I'm actively playing get to school, but when I check the neighborhood, none of the other kids have bothered to go that day. And whether the hour warning goes off or not seems completely random. I've saved a game at 4 in the sim-morning and run it over and over and over to check the alarms, and half the time it goes off, half the time it doesn't, even if I perform the same sequence of actions on the same clock speed. Weird.

I guess I might just have to make the leap to SC so I can get my control freak on with these damn kids since it's probably better than obsessing over whether or not the warning alarm has fired and whether I want to bother to hop around and force some kids to school if it hasn't.

What are you experiences regarding the token-based get-sims-sqeezed-into-rabid-hole-thing? For me there's only a little time improvement at the school (apart from the fact there's no shoving anymore). Everywhere else (the Bistro especially) iit's actually gotten worse...

Try updating AM again, there's already a new version. I only noticed a little difference (could be voodoo though) but people with slower rigs told me the perfomance has improved noticeably.

I have a hunch that there's a something like a hard junction between playable and non-playable perfomance. If your're above that you're well and it really doesn't make that much of a difference how fast your rig is but below that the gaming experience is just plain horrible no matter how resistant to low frame rates you might be.

Just for testing take the AM out and see what happens. For me perfomance degraded with the patch and degraded further with the AM for the patched game. Yet I still have no idea what's causing this long term perfomance degradation and I wouldn't even bet that Pescado could tell what he did or even if he did anything to affect perfomance...

I'm pretty much certain that older 'hoods are just slowing down. As for now I'm unaware of any possible ideas known to share. There's no harm in testing whether your game perfomance improves if you show your townfolks your bad side (just save your game to a different slot bevore that - should be obvious but you never know). Please post your findings. As I said population size has no perfomance impact for me but that could be due to the fact my CPU is pretty fast.

The new AM does a good job in nuking stuck limos. I already had ~200 stuck limos in my 'hood again and was just waiting for a good moment to flush them, then the update came and beat me to it.

I had that feeling the alarm wasn't going off every time but I thought it was just me clicking away the notifications and forgetting about it a second later...  ;D I'll have to check but I'm almost positive that it's far from "half of the time" for me though.

Thanks for all the feedback. I did try towderelects but I got an unknown command. AM had been running awhile before I DL the stand-alone toilet, so maybe the car/limos had already been purged by that time?

I have never actually looked at the school to see if they're getting stuck. If you don't actually look, you don't have problems. The game was not designed to have an entire neigborhood of kids get in the school building in a short time frame. It will all happen "off camera" as long as you don't peek! (This reminds me of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indy saying "Don't look, Marian!" when the Germans opened the Ark). If I did look, I have no doubt it would be just as excruciating as the way they are (NOT) moving around the house.
 
Just to update the speed thing further, last night I DL the newest AM but didn't install. Took the old out (without replacing, played w/o AM at all) and opened the same game and played for awhile after work today, and it was slightly better speed-wise but still very slow. So I got out of that game and started playing the McDermotts' (the "farmer" family) in Riverview to see how a new game would play. It still was a little slow. I sent Maximus (the teen) to pee at 7:30am on game day two and by the time he was actually out in front of the house running to the bus it was 9:30am. Two hours just to pee, OMG. Then at exactly 3PM game time, I had a hard freeze (nothing responded AT ALL) and had to close down via task manager. This was without AM at all, mind you. Then I added the newest AM back in but I'll have to wait until after work tomorow to play around some more to see what happens with it in, and how that compares. I also haven't tried reducing the size of my original 'hood yet to see how that affects game play. I'll post more after I try some additional stuff, including going back to the original game and trying the towderelects command again with the newest AM installed.

Well, you would if you typed towderelects.  Try spelling it correctly, towderelicts works in my game.

I have to disagree on this point.
I am experiencing school zergswarm clusterfucking and intentionally avoid viewing the school while it's happening.
When I click the portraits of my school-age sims, the dropdown progress bar advances normally once 9AM hits.
Their actual performance bar(in the "job" tab) doesn't actually start moving until around noon, when it finally shows them as "Learning!" instead of "going to school." (They take no school performance hits as long as they make it onto the bus and into the crowd at the gates).
Even though the game should just teleport them into the building if you're not looking - hell, even if you are, I mean, what an arbitrary place to suddenly demand realism- I think it still insists on stuffing them in there one by one.

Is this AM forcing the issue for the sake of realism though or default game behavior? I've never noticed such things on the default EAxis story mode, they just sort of go and I never see them actually walk in.

Though the bar moves while they're waiting outside, any opportunities that are supposed to finish upon going to school don't until they're actually in the building, as I learned last night. I turned off the clipping avoidance hoping it would get all the kids in the building, but there's still a huge pileup of them until 12:00 at least. There's some sort of precedence thing because they will all stand and wait for one particular kid to get his ass in gear and move through the door before proceeding, no matter if there's a huge bunch of empty space and no one in the way for someone else to go. I don't care so much because at least they're going to school now, but, still. In my Riverview Indie wolfing run, before these latest couple of updates, I'd have kids go to school and end up playing on the playground all day when they got tired of waiting outside. That neighborhood is full of neurotic, insane, evil, inappropriate, etc. Sims now because they all failed school so very hard.

Also, there's a door at the back of the school building but it's apparently only a facade... I wonder if it's possible to make that an entrance too, somehow, though teleporting in is definitely no worse than the teleporting cars and bikes.

I believe having them selected amounts to the same thing as looking in that case -- they're being run on high detail simulation. In my game it's the same with sims who still have stuff in their queue when unselected -- as long as they do what is queued up, they're on high res.


I have a question re. the CarLimo .. what car exactly is that? On what occasions is it being generated? Asking because I seem to have *no* CarLimos (when checking with the flushy toilet). Not one. Could this be because I have none of the rabbitholes? Or is it perhaps a sign of upcoming trouble (cars being blackholed somehow, or something)? I'm on 1.2.7 with an old Awesome that doesn't yet have this feature, so they can't have been auto-flushed by AM.

As far as I can tell the "CarLimo" issue is generated by an improper cleanup after using a Limo for carpooling.

If none of your sims use a Limo as their carpool vehicle, then you will probably not encounter the issue.

Good Day. :)

I never noticed it before AM, but back then my hood only had the premade townies and one or two playables- possibly not enough to cause the issue.
Sure, but now we're talking about Schroedinger's students. If I'm not watching them, are they in school or not? When I click on them, anytime before noonish anyway, it shows that they're definitely not. Perhaps if I just ignored them from 9AM until 2-3PM their progress bars would fill just fine. If that's the case, then Heisenberg provides a more appropriate metaphor, because the very act of seeing if they're in school must boot them out. But in order to be booted out, they must have been in school to begin with and the progress bar shows they clearly are not. However, that's exactly what you would expect and I know that, so the poison must definitely be in the glass in front of me!

I guess I'm off to make more observations (and perhaps get involved in a land war in Asia).

BTW, just have to poke my nose in and giggle at the Princess Bride references in the post above....

I had a hospital zergswarm issue when my sim was in the hospital squirting out a larvae. The work shift arrived and no one could enter the building until she and her hubby and new pudding exited.

Ok, small update. My 'hour until' school and work alarms have gone away completely, nothing I have tried will bring them back. And, like I noticed before, since the firing of this notification seems directly tied to whether inactive households actually go to work/school, no one is going. I'm switching to a couple other households I play sometimes to manually send the kids to school, the rest of the little fuckers are just failing. I have been running AM storymode, and it seems to have a fallback 'go to work you idiots' as it catches many of the slackers a few hours into their shift and I get a debug message that they're going to work. School, however, is not happening.

So, does anyone with a better knowledge of the codebase know what might be making the 'hour until' alarms fail? Is there a way to retrigger them, and if so, would this start sending kids back to school as I suspect? Or am I the only one for whom these alarms just stop going off at some point?

EDIT/UPDATE: The NRaas Standalone WorkPusher (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,16412.0.html) has corrected this for me. It hasn't brought back the 'hour until' alarms, but whatever, as long as it makes the sims go to work/school I'll live without them.