More Awesome Than You!

Or is it just me.  I sent one at a time and when a half hour went the option for them to call them back was not there nor management...both employees.  I ended up overworking one employee the next day because I cant do break.. Im going to try the snapdragons but this break is supposed to work..

You had no get back to work option? It doesn't say anything like end your break.

If on break the negetivity of telling them to get back to work is almost negated.

Although if low paid and/or very low in needs they will never come back until you send them home for 6 hours or so.

Are you telling them to "take a break" or "send home for the day"?  "Take a break" means they will go autonomous for one sim hour (according to what I read in the guide) or so and fill their needs up.  When that hour is up, all you need to do is interact with them to break them out of whatever autonomous thing they are doing and they should get back to work.   If you "Send them home" or they leave the lot, they cannot return for 8 sim hours.

You can also just assign them a new task by clicking on them and they should hop to it. 

Right, the only way to get them back to work is to use the "Get back to work" ineractoin. The negative effects are unavoidable.

If you reassign them rather than tell them to get back to work, they take it well.  Of course, if you want them to do what they were doing before break, you'll have to reassign them twice.

Phyllis

I've come to the conclusion that it's not cost-effective to send employees on breaks.  It takes a long time for them to get happy again, and when they do go back to work, they become unhappy almost immediately.  I've had better results just telling them to go home when they start getting unhappy.

 - Gus

With the combination of snapdragons,the sleep on comm lots hacks, and a breakroom with nice beds, breaks work well. Otherwise they are worthless.

Taking a break has no real effect because they just mill around in confusion and then refuse to get back to work, they don't actually *DO* anything to resolve their break. A controller is currently in the works to tell them to actually address their issues when sent on a break.

I work my employees until they are red even completely surrounded by snapdragons. They head straight to bed!

Depending on the shop and if its run by one of my typical sims, they may get a nooner for their break as well.

The first one I sent on break spent the entire time talking to the shop-owner (well, she basically zoomed-in on him telling him jokes), the second just stood there as if he had no idea what to do and eventually went to use the toilet, the third hovered around the piano the entire time (a customer was playing it) and then wouldn't go back to work so I sent her home and the fourth chatted to some customers, then went back to making bouquets of his own accord, even though he was still in the yellow (so I sent him home anyway).  The first three were teens and the fourth was a adult.  In all cases, there was food readily available, but none of them attempted to eat it.  Ideally, I'd have two employees for each job and bring in the second lot when the first lot were tired (and sent home, no breaks), but the game insists on you calling in ALL staff.  I'd love a mod for this, because sometimes I don't want to call in all staff, I may just want one or two members, depending on whether or not I want the shop-owner to do some of the work.

I also find the hours confusing.  All the employees are shown as working 9-5, yet apart from one they've all continued to work after those hours.  Maybe they're being paid overtime?

As usual, you are on top of the most ridiculous of Maxis lack of forethought.  Thank you JMP!  All our shop owners thank you as well  :)

Which sleep on comm lots do you use? I found one by Echo at MTS2, and also one on www.djssims.com. I used both (not at the same time), but so far, I haven't found anyone to sleep autonomously.

Theoretically they should both work together. Do you have echo's latest version? He updated to in order to raise the sleeping thresholds. What happens is, energy normally needs to drop to about -90 in order for sims to choose to autonomously sleep. But on community lots, sims will want to leave if the energy drops below -60. :P So, echo updated his mod so the threshold was raised to -40. At least that's what I got from reading that thread. *shrugs* I haven't tried it out myself, but if you have an older version, you should get the 3/7/06 update.

Ste

I second this request because I like to use two shifts too, so I actually hope that the first shift workers would say "I'm too tired", because I need to use them the shift after  ;D l The problem, though, is if you have a sim to visit that comm lot, two workers would fight to work on the same thing. I visited Cafe Petite owned by the bakery lady, and two cashiers "dance around" each other over the register the whole time!

And Syberspunk, I think I have the updated version, I guess I will wait more and see. They don't sleep if they work on a home business, do they? I'm trying to run a hotel business, both at home business and comm business, so far, nobody stayed long enough to sleep  ;D

MTS2_248548_Echo_echo_community_sleep

Have you tried putting in a second register?

hmmm, that can be a solution, no, I didn't. It doesn't look good for a tiny Cafe Petite  :P

ok...i cant find the snapdragons.  Ive given up on the break things...yall are right..it does no good.  just wait until they are mad and send them home.  I have had 3 people quit on me.

Well Kewian, I don't know exactly what you mean when you say that you are not finding the snapdragons. If you just misplaced yours, nevermind this post, otherwise you have to make them yourself. They are the gold badge item in the floral arrangement station.

I didnt realize that.  Duh...makes sense now. thanks....

I've found that calling them over to the break room has some effect on making them taking a proper break. You can lock them in the room if necessary. ;)

What we need are vending machines and pay espresso machines so we can make some extra cash off of them when they're on break. ;)

Maybe we need a break room uses you? lol

YES! The master is fixing things for the better yet again!  ;D I was just looking around for a hack to make their mood decay slower and here I find a design flaw fix  :)

I sent my employees on a break today and they returned by themselves.  On the previous day they had no breaks but helped themselves to food and went to the toilet as needed and then went straight back to work.   ;)

I believe Echo said on his thread that they *don't* work together, although there is a fairly simple fix to make them if you want and can do a bit of that kind of thing. (I can't... that's just what I understood from the thread).

I sent an employee to break and they disappeared from the lot.

This same employee is a co-manager at a community lot store and he never comes in.  When the lot owner or her husband call in the employees, and it doesn't matter at what time of day it is or how long I know he hasn't been there, he always gives the pop-up for "I'm too tired to come in".

I like having him run the place when the sim owner is not there, but I would like to have him around because he has a Gold Badge in register and without him, she only has one other employee.

Yeah, I saw that too. And honestly... I haven't tried it out per se... but barring all weird complications, theoretically you wouldn't even have to mess around with SimPE to fix it. Since echo's mod would load last, with mods loading in alphabetical order, his changes would override jfade's changes. As I understand it, the game loads the "code" that it reads from the objects.package. It then reads the Downloads folder and loads hacks in alphabetical order.

In most cases, as you may have seen with other mods, relying on this fact, it should theoretically be "safe" to have both mods in your game. I looked at both their changes, and they are essentially identical, except for echo's additional change regarding the sleep threshold. So I thought it'd just be simpler to try using them together without doing any SimPE editing. If anyone determines for certain that they are conflicting, then by all means edit the files as echo instructs. :) I just thought it might save people the trouble, especially for those who lack the knowledge or the confidence when it comes to using SimPE.

This method has been pretty reliable for a number of mods that would normally conflict, but have used this workaround to enable compatibility. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, this is sort of the basis of how the Flavor Packs of a certain kitten killing mod works, to customize and disable certain features. Actually, if you think about it, this is how hacks work in the first place. :P Essentially hacks are overriding existing code in the objects.package. So duh me, that probably would have made sense to point that out in the first place. ::)

Anyhew, I guess it depends on how you organize your hacks. If you do so by author named folder, then you may run into problems (assuming you are using an echo and a jfade folder). Personally, I sort my hacks by type:

objecthacks - standalone, completely "new" objects that are self-contained and shouldn't conflict with anything anyways
macrohacks - macro related or macro enabled hacks, essentially any macro related FFS hack, which are pretty much all self contained
gamehacks - any global hacks that modify game behaviour
meshhacks - new meshes
clothing - duh
skintones - duh
genetics - duh
testhacks - anything that i'm testing and not sure i want to definitely include yet

In this way, if I have any hacks that must load in a certain order, I have control over it, and don't have to worry about sub folders. Separating gamehacks by subfolders will get messy because if a certain hack by a certain modder must load first in one case, but then another hack should load last by the same modder, you wouldn't really be able to handle this if they are all in a folder separated from the other related hacks. Anyways, that's just my philosophy on organization. I don't have too big of a problem when it comes to this because the majority of my custom content essentially consists of gamehacks only. I pretty much avoid using other types of custom content, even if that means I have to suffer with Maxis made fugly crap. ::) I would rather deal with that than end up with Gigabytes of custom clothes, objects, genetics, and whatever else that only ends up slowing down my loading time and I never really use anyways. It's almost impossible to really use all the clothes that are provided in the first place. I have a few nice pieces that I do my best with to mix and match. Otherwise, I pretty much restrict my custom content to game modifications.[/end lecture] :P

Ste

Thanks Syberspunk, for the lecture......I do organize my hacks by authors, but lump all objects together, because somehow I'm worried if I have more than one copy of something in the downloads folder, it is bad for the game, and I download a lot of nice houses and clothes to play. Not like you, I hate most of the Maxis clothes.

Back to the break issue. My employees almost always come back to work after I gave them a break, unlike many of you complained here, they do take care of themselves a little bit, like using the bathroom, eat a plate (working vending machine and pay espresso would be nice to get some of the money back from them  ;D but for now, I give them free "perks"). I usually give them a break when their "dot" turns red, and they would come back with a greenish yellow dot. But, here comes my complain, their dot quickly turns red again, in a matter of one hour or two most sim time. So still, breaks are not worth it.