More Awesome Than You!

In Soviet Russia, you do not take break, break takes YOU! And you do not run business, business runs YOU!

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/terror/green.gif)
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/zip.gif) businessrunsyou.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/businessrunsyou.zip)

REQUIRES:
autosoc.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/autosoc.zip)
autoyak.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/autoyak.zip)
bathroomusesyou.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/bathroomusesyou.zip)
macrotastics.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/macrotastics.zip)
skillinator.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/skillinator.zip)

In Soviet Russia, Business Runs You! v0.6b for TS2OFBp0 - TS2OFBp1
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado & Doctor Boris)
Mesh By: Inge the Round Mound of Gray Fatness

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

FEATURES:
In Soviet Russia, you do not run business, business runs YOU!

COMPATIBILITY:
Compatible with all FFS hacks. Tested for TS2OFBp1.
Requires all previous FFS controllers.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

I would like to say THANK YOU for this new hack! And yes, I am  fully aware of the new Thanks buttons. :P

I suppose the only way to find out how this works is to play the game.  I presume there is something to click on?

There is, but all the options are rather self-explanatory to me and none of them need to actually be touched. Just have all of the relevant things in place and watch magic happen.

I have questions, but I guess I should try it out before I bug you about it...................however, what new options were added to the FFS Lot Debugger since I see its been updated.

Ahhh!!! I've been waiting for this for ages! :-* Off to try it out.

Question:  Is this version different than the test version I already have?

I tested this hack with a home business.  I keep getting multiple errors referencing "Visit Controller" (see attached log) popping up literally every few seconds.  I get these errors whether the business is open or closed, it doesn't seem to matter.  I have never seen this error before today so I figure it is probably related to this hack.  I didn't test with the "business uses you" object removed from the lot to see if the error still occurred.  I am running all the latest versions of macrotastics, bathroomusesyou, skillinator, etc.

On the bright side, I like the new "Be Restocker" option.  I'm sure it will come in very handy.

Karen

That bug is actually Phone Hack related. It is fixed. Go get the update.

Yes, this is newer than Fat Head Edition.

Not sure if this should be posted here or in the Macrotastics thread, but I noticed that Macro...Be Salesperson is now showing up even on home lots that don't have a business, and on business lots when the business is closed.

Karen

Will be fixed in next AutoSoc update. Option should still appear when business is closed, since it is now a stationkeeping mode like Power Idle.

Where is the Be Restocker option?  And how does this affect employee breaks?  Do business owners still have to tell employees to take a break and they're just coming back quickly or the employees take the break when they need it automatically?

I got errors with Employees multiple paid on two different Lots with different Owners  logs attached. Please help i dont know what causes this. Have the new  "Business Runs You"  on the Lots. All relatet hacks updatet also.

Restocker option is in "business" menue on the sim, and you have to send your employee to pause he get back to work after he got green moods

This problem is not related to Business Runs You. Your problem is caused by by something which appears to be non-awesome. Employees cannot be employees on multiple lots with different owners, so whatever you're doing is clearly not-awesome.

Business owners may tell an employee to take a break, whereupon they will do so, and once everything addressable is addressed, they will return to work. If an employee stops working due to motives, he will take a now-automated break and then return to work on his own automatically rather than goofing off until yelled at.

My employees are not on more then one  lot employees.

Cool stuff. Question, could LilAbner still add swedish translations to the awesome hacks? Reason I'm wondering is that the phones and business options duplicate, both a Ring and a Call pie menu option cluttering up the place.

I haven't seen him in ages. If someone would like to volunteer extra-language translations, feel free.

This works great. Very little attention needs to be payed to, well, anyone.

Question: Would this prevent interactions with the reporter NPC? I had one pop into the shop and do that stupid "I don't know where anything is" action and when I tried to "May I help you?" it would immediately drop out of the que. At the time that this happened, there were no other salespeople on site.

Hmm. An interesting possibility. I believe that might actually be an odd side effect eliminated in the next version, because I noticed this also, but it went away a few updates later in testing.

I volunteer mine, although I'm not sure most swedes would agree that Färdighetsfiffla is a good translation for Skillinate. How would I go about making translations?

You need to load it into SimPE.  You should see an item in the package which reads 'Pie Menu Strings' - to add a translation, you want to check the box which says 'Show Default for Comparison' if English is the default language, and then choose the desired language from the drop-down menu.

(http://www.omniloth.net/img/simpe_translation.jpg)

When you have the right one picked out, you should notice that it is presently devoid of menu strings.

Of course, there are other texty bits which may need to be translated (such as messages which are sent to the user via message box) but these follow a similar pattern.

Done so, written in most of the texts, just working on sleepclock and waiting for a brainstorm on Power Idle (Been using Supersysslolös, but it doesn't have quite the ring to it). Then some spellchecking to avoid public humiliation. And then how to send them on their merry way?

Loading into SimPE won't actually get me those changes for official incorporation, so it's best if you send them as a flat text file for cutting and pasting, simply in the order they were listed.

Färdighetsfiffla it is, although I'm open to suggestions and/or complaints.

Nice. I'll try to incorporate it. For future reference, the pie menu strings beginning with * require no translation because they will never be displayed, they are dynamically stomped by the Makeaction strings. Comments like "THIS SPACE FOR RENT" similarly are unused and require no translation.

Break time doesn't seem to be working for my employee Sims.  When it comes time to take a break instead of looking after their needs they pretty much just stand where they are doing nothing.  Even when they try to do an action they mostly jump out of it before it can do them any good.

It seems clear that there is a threshold at which they will not work, no matter how much they are coerced by the business controller.  If you unassign them then they are free to wander off and satisfy their needs, still using the functionality of Macrotastics.  Unassigning is of course not ideal since you will then have to re-assign them a task but it may well be that you want them to do something else after their break anyway.

I'm not sure which motives are mostly responsible for keeping them from doing their jobs, so any more speculation on my part would probably be fruitless.

Couple of questions about the business controller.

Is it possible to make members of the family assignable to be salesperson through the macro? I have a vamp family to run their downtown business. The Count owns it, but he isn't able to hire his wife - either by clicking on him or her, or for me to select her to be a salesperson autonomously. She can be set to do restock. She is an elder and is retired. He can hire staff normally.

Which leads to the next point. Would it be possible to have 'shop idle', like power idle, only staff and/or family do all business tasks as needed, swopping from restocking to selling to cashier as required?

I'll also go and update the hacks associated with this one in case I've missed something.

The Fairly Paid Regulator (http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=142863) at MTS2 can assign anyone to Sell, Tidy, or Restock (it was updated a week ago).  I'm not sure if it will work on controllables, since I usually control them ;)

Do you find any conflicts between JMs business controller and the Fairly Paid Regulator? I have both. I still want to self select a family member to 'be salesperson' or get the owner to tell them.

I haven't found any particular conflict, though if you're particularly mean you will want to continue to underpay all your staff.  What I have found, although I am still currently investigating, is that the regulator will tend towards paying fairly (obviously) rather than just what will not cause your employees to quit :)

Sorry, didn't see you say it was updated a week ago, I'll go and fetch it, thanks.

After taking a BRY-enforced shower or bath my employees wear their casual outfit, not their humiliating uniforms.

This is a Bathroom Uses You functionality, which was updated to make them wear their uniforms if they have one.

Thanks JM. You have no idea how badly I needed this mod! Now if you could/would only make a hack that sets limits to how much an employee gets paid.... one employee at the bakery, an npc, has worked enough to get a few badges and is actively making a few dollars more a day then the bakery makes. Its a reason to sell. lol

Maybe you want this (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.net/smf/index.php?topic=3821.0)?

Some conditions may be potentially unresolveable if the right utilities are not present on the lot. In particular, Social can be one of the unsatisfiable motives, since there are no really reliable ways to satisfy this. If a sim goes into social failure, there's no real way to tell, nor any way to really fix it. It's just one of those unsatisfiable motives. To prevent this, you should periodically scream at your employees, this helps.

Like real employees, sim employees may feel neglected and unneeded if not periodically shouted at, whipped, and abused. Beatings must continue until morale improves!

Sims pass up the opportunity to socialise while doing something else so often it's crazy.  They need a sanity check or something.

After installling the "business uses you" hack, the "too many interations" error box show up.  I made sure the all the supporting hacks were the most recent.  As long as I had the "business uses you" object in the home business, I didn't get the error.  I have attached two logs.  I currently don't have the hack in my game.

The too many iterations error doesn't show in the Business Runs You tree at all. The other error is unknown, but not believed to exist in the current test build, since I've never seen it. It's probably some sort of version incompatibility. You're certain you're using the most recent?

I rechecked my hacks dates last night before I sent the logs.  Unless you updated one after I sent the logs, they should be the most current.  Appreciate you checking.
Does this mean I need to bite the bullet and reinstall my game? 

Edit:  For good measure I just rechecked all my hacks' dates not just the hacks associated with "business uses you.  I found some that needed the updates.  Hopefully this will help.

Thank you for this wonderful addition to my game. Thanks a million for everything you have added to my game in order to really have some fun. ;D

I noticed this hack was recently updated.  JM, did you by any chance change something so that the salesperson also tries to restock in between sales pitches?  I kept getting out of item messages but no one was assigned to restock. 
I had a lot of instability also.  The server was still not doing her job even with the waiter fix hack.  The host kept trying to sell items.  I had controller token decay error messages.  Just weird...  But it was just one session.  I'm going to go back and play that restaurant again and reset everything or something.  So I probably just have a mixture of non-awesome hacks.  Gotta do more testing.

Employees with qualifications in other fields may perform those tasks as secondary tasks if their primary objective is satisfied. If your salesperson has a restocking badge, he will assist in restocking if nothing needs selling.

That seems unrelated, if the "Controller Token Decay" errors are forcing constant resets, your waiter won't be able to do anything. The host will naturally sell things, since he has gold sales, as a secondary task, and no customers need seating. Because no actual skill is needed to perform the seating, any employee may, as a secondary task, also seat customers (In truth, the host position is actually slightly superfluous now, since "putz with phone" is not actually a useful function).

There are a few known bugs with restaurants, although what exactly is wrong with them is unknown. In my game, I had problems with some kind of corrupted favorite food tokens, apparently because the format for NL and OFB food tokens was changed, and I wrote a mini-hack to simply zap the problem, but given that no one else reports the problem, I haven't put it out yet. I figure it might be an oddity confined to my own game.

Would this be the same problem?

(http://www.geocities.com/ashman1975/fooderror.jpg)

I get the squiggly lines of doom every now and then when customers (all townies) are browsing the menu at playable sims' restaurants and then when someone tries to "sell" them the menu. I haven't seen them on any playable sims while at a restaurant though.

I've never seen that, but it looks like data corruption is occurring somewhere. Is your game or neighborhood ported from NL?

...are those squiggly lines...people? There appears to be a green-faced one in the middle, on his knees with the back of his hand to his head and his elbow in the air...can you see it too?

Actually, it's every single conversational topic icon in the game compressed horizontally to about 2-3 pixels in width. No one knows why that always appears that way, but the way it looks appears to be some kind of corrupted memory access, and therefore, bad.

And since it's bad, the morons at Maxis decided it's the best one to use when soneone's badmouthing someone else...just to make our hearts jump everytime we see it! And to make matters worse, the animation is the same as Gossip.
*le sigh*

Yes, it is. So far this is the only time I've seen these symbols come up in a thought or speech balloon.

I have a problem with sims getting paid twice every hour. I have these hacks.


smartercashier.package 9/3/06
waiterfix.package 3/5/06
businessrunsyou.package 5/4/06  +skillinator et al
nolamehires.package 13/3/06
noreassign.package 19/3/06

NON-AWESOME_Hacks
MQ_Open_Closed_Sign_Fairly_Paid_Regulator.package 6/4/06
nopodiumphonecalls.package 4/5/06

The ching ching with the money floating upwards happens so fast, is there any way I can generate an error log at that time that would be of any use?

Hmm. Can't imagine why you'd be getting paid twice an hour, unless you somehow have a duplicate employee controller, or the Merolian Time Manipulator. None of which concerns Business Runs You.

Is it all employees or just one in particular?  The reason I ask is that a while ago I noticed that there is an additional ching ching at the bar if you have a non-controllable tending it.  It's the same pay that you get if you tend a bar on a non-owned community lot (this functionality was introduced in the first expansion pack as a way of letting students earn a little extra cash) when it usually comes up every 12 sim minutes.

However, because this functionality is supposed to be disabled on an owned community lot, you can get an extra ching which goes straight into the business funds, because it wasn't intended to seek out a specific Sim and pay them instead of the household funds.

Another possibility, with a bar at least, is that you're seeing the customer pay for their drink.  Provided your customers aren't lured away by other attractions, a bar can be a good way to make extra money in a place which already charges for entry.

No, the only businesses so far have been retail, it happens on both home and community lots. I emptied all hacks except JM's at one point and it was still happening. It happens to all employees hourly, two lots of the same amount float up.

How do I trigger a log file?

All you need to do to generate a log is enter debugging mode and shift-click an object on the lot to pop up the Force Error option.

Just pick Cancel when the error message pops up, but take note of the filename that the error log has been saved to - you should find it in My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Logs/ and since it will be the most recent log created, it will have the latest modified timestamp in that directory.

Forcing an error tends not to be too instructive if nothing is wrong with the errored object.

Yeah, I'm not getting an error popping up so I can create a logfile, so everything seems to be working OK. I'll keep monitoring and see if I can even get a screen dump when the staff get paid..

Edit:
OK. The scenario is a home business selling plants and flowers. The only two sims currently under control of business uses you are Rocky, the paid employee as cashier and the owner who is currently being salesperson. Rocky is the only paid employee of the business.

I managed to catch a screen dump of the two amounts floating up. You can see $42 by Rocky and the same on the far right under the business UI.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/2pays.jpg)

Edit last: OK I finally worked it out. I checked the money. In fact the $42 is being deducted from the family balance - the OTHER $42 I can see on the right is coming off the business cash flow amount. It's not two separate amounts but just the same amout being dealt with in two places. Phew. Never mind, I get there in the end!

For me your screenshot is perfectly normal : +42 being paid to the cashier and -42 being deducted from the family funds.
It's always like that in my game since I have installed OFB...
Or do I miss something in your shot and explanations ?
Pioupiou

/me points and laughs.

Yeah. cheers mate.

K'n I buy ya a beer?   :-[

Any chance of getting something done about the stupid message you get when a sim moves neighbourhoods and tries to call to check on his businesses?  Or the way when you demote a manager, you have to actually cut his pay before promoting someone else and raising their wages?  After all, in a properly run modern business, there would be a pay scale which would be automatically applied!  And sometimes you don't want to fire the manager, just demote them since they aren't really very good at managing!

What stupid message?

I could implement QC-0 pay scaling, sort of like how Monique's whatzit tries to make everyone "fairly paid" (which, of course, I think is simply outrageous: How do you expect to run a profitable sweatshop like that?!?). Then employees will automatically be paid the minimum possible wage that they'll accept without quitting. :P

That would be perfect!

I second that notion! Even if sims are good at retail, $48 an hour or more is ludicrous. Retail is not a highly paid job. Though if the prices in the sim shops rise, so should the sim minimum wage, as presumably the business is then higher class and attracting more revenue.

I'm never sure how low I can pay sims before they quit (it's a pain getting new staff and dressing them etc etc.) - because I don't want them to quit so I've been using the fair wages sign - but those wages aren't fair, they're OTT.

Well, if you want less ludicrous wage demands, you might try "Relevant Wages". This greatly reduces the influence of skills on wages paid (since many skills are entirely useless in a business). Each badge-level otherwise seems to jack up a sim's wage demand by $5: Relevant wages makes it so only relevant badges affect this.

The wages are still pretty high, but then you figure it also costs $40 for a pizza. This produces the "Fairly Paid" wage, which is not necessarily the QC0 wage. For a random employee that doesn't really know the business owner, the "Fair" wage is QC0, but for better relation levels, you can get QC0 wages as low as the "Very Underpaid" mark. Ridiculously Underpaid seems to produce a minimum of about 3%, even with every other factor in your favor (max STR/LTR, plat mood), and in practice, this doesn't seem likely to actually trigger if you keep them from idling much.

*protects lips

Um... JM?  For some reason my BRU is all goobered up.  The last time I used it (probably a couple months ago-haven't been playing businesses lately) I was able to get "be a salesperson" or something like that along with cashier and restock.  Now I only get the  cashier and restock options.  I read all the posts above, got the new phone hack (just in case that was it), took out all download's except MATY and still nothing.  Any ideas?  I do have the Fam Fun Pack but that's about all that's different, I think.  Help, please? 

Does the sim in question have a gold sales badge?  The "be salesman" will only show up for sims with gold level sales badges.

OMG how stupid can I be.  Of course.  I'm not using cheats this time so I forgot about that important part.   ::)

Thanks SO much!

Hellllo everyone,

The main thing is I wish someone would modify how much energy is consumed on dazzling customers.  My manger's scenario is like this, dazzle about 3 or 4 times then this mod has him caffeinate because his  energy is halfway down.  And this becomes the vicious cycle. 

Thanks for any help,

Pcgeekri

That's not a vicious cycle. That's a BUSINESS cycle. If you have him running sales, that's what sales is supposed to *DO*. How else do you expect to make a profit? Clearly if he's choosing Dazzle, it's because your goods aren't peddling from a mere Hard Sell. Thus it bumps to the next level of action in an attempt to sell that product, and that is Dazzle.

Is it WORKING? Is that merchandise MOVING? If so, then that's what's supposed to happen. The energy thing? Cost of business.

Alternatively, you could get TwoJeff's static energy statue  (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1193.0) and stick it on the business lot -- that'll keep everyones energy from dropping.  If you really want to sell to beat the devil, check out Squinge's hacks/mods over on insimenator.net -- he's got everything from a hack that keeps dazzle from draining energy to a picture you can put on the business lot that keeps all motives raised (which is handy for sims that have multiple businesses and want a reasonable chance of running all of them in one day :)).

Me so sorry Pescado,

The latest version of Microtastics fixed all the problems in my business lot everytihing works great, so well in fact that I don't need a mod to reduce the energy consumption when dazzle is used.

Thanks everyone for your help,

Pcgeekri

The Dazzle Energy cost really shouldn't be considered a "bad" thing, it should just be regarded as "cost of business". Since Macrotastics is perfectly capable of handling this cost, there is no reason to cheat.

I so want this in my game, but goodness, did you really have to make the mesh a giant sickle and hammer? I mean, wouldn't it have been sufficient to have a tiny desk ornament or something. It just seems very odd that my capitalist entrepreneur sim would have a giant SU symbol in their business. Plus, it totally ruins my design schemes. I'm terribly picky about good design.

Perhaps you could replace the mesh w/ something simple, like a Maxis painting (I really like the small white modern one that came w/ofb)? Please? Pretty please?

I'm not going to replace the mesh, but I might make it morphable in-game into something. What objects do you suggest as morphs?

I use moveobjects and hid both the controller and the lot sync thingy (I'm lousy with names) inside plants and now I'm quite pleased.  They're still easily clickable too:

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v319/Starrling/macrohiding.jpg)

Here's a thought: Make it morphable into an open/closed sign, and add the open/closed functions to its menu when in that morphed state.

I'm having trouble with inviting sims over with this in my game.  Don Lothario is running a venue out of his home with the ticket machine, and whenever he invites Dina over, she shows up and leaves immediately.  I tried taking out all hacks and he was able to invite her over and have her stay.  I then put back only Pescado hacks, and Dina left immediately again.  I've narrowed it down to this hack.  Don wants to hire Dina, but he couldn't because she didn't show up in the list of sims to hire, and she wouldn't stay long enough when he invited her to be able to hire her.  He asked her out on a date, and they went to a community lot and had a dream date, but when he asked her back to his place, she left as soon as she got out of the car at his home, even though they still had a good 2 hours and some minutes left.  I thought it might be the no playable shoppers, but I tried taking it out, and that didn't fix it.  When she'd ask to bring a friend, she always brought Brandi over, and she would leave immediately also.  I don't understand what is causing this, because over in the No Playable Shoppers thread, JM says that if you invite a playable sim over, they will still be able to come over.

Open closed sign would be good, as it's easily distinguishable and unobtrusive.

I myself am fond of either the Maxis hanging fern (plants go in any decor, from modern thru traditional), or an unobtrusive little painting (like the small modern painting that came w/ OFB - good for modern, easily recolourable/hideable for traditional). Both look better than that gaudy green sign. I mean, what if you decorated in pastels?

I think this is the bum ejector at work. Dina Caliente probably has no money, and therefore makes an extremely bad, whiny shopper. I should update the tuning test to verify that the ejected bum is, in fact, originating from the Lot Populator as a shopper, not an invite. It will be included in the next update.

Yes please, just had that tonight at a birthday party. Had to keep scanning the guests for the complainers, then sic a member of the family onto the moaner with the socialise macro. At least 3 of my 7 guests complained.

I tried this out last night with Malcolm Landgraab on his latest business lot, the 1-2-3 Gym.  He had two members of staff, one persuading punters to buy a ticket (Ridiculously Expensive) and the other cleaning-up.  I noticed that both the staff members were going yellow, then orange, then approaching red, but I had no option to get them to take a break.  In the end, I had to unassign them, then assign them again.  Is it meant to work like that?  I thought they were automatically sent for breaks when they needed them.  The only possible explanation is that I've just realised I didn't have Bathroom Uses You on the lot, although it's in my Downloads folder.  Could that have made any difference?

Oh, is it possible to add something to this so that an individual member of staff can be sent home but not all of them?  I'm sure I could do that before, but if so I don't have that option now.  Didn't have it when I deleted the controller either, so maybe I imagined it. 

If you don't have Bathroom Uses You, the system won't be able to locate anywhere to use the bathroom, so yes, that's a problem.

There was an option somewhere to send an employee home, and then to summon an employee.  I was trying this with different employees when I noticed their little ball overhead was getting orange, and they started hitting the espresso machine.  I thought, why am I paying them to drink espresso and pee when I can send them home and then call them right back and they'll be all fresh?  So I did this a couple of times, and it seemed to work fine.  Could something like this be built into BRY so that when an employee reaches critical energy levels, it would send them home and then summon them back automatically?  That would be awesome.  Perhaps it could be a feature you could turn off and on.  I put showers in the bathrooms, so the only thing they can't do on the comm lot is sleep.  As long as they keep up their energy with espresso or some other means, they can stay there indefinitely.

Well, strictly speaking, you're not supposed to be able to dismiss and immediately summon back, because ordinarily they bitch and moan about being too tired to return, or whatever. There was also a bitch and whine somewhere about them refusing to come in because you didn't pay them enough (although I've never seen it), but I think I may have overshot when trying to bypass that, too, since you can't fire their lazy asses unless you drag them in first.

Besides, the espresso actually works faster than sleep, you can refill to max energy in about 60% of the time it would take to regain it by  sleep.

I thought it was odd that you could send them home and call them right back and they were all green again!  But I figured this was just one of the quirks of the game, like when you call a sim to your house and they leave because they are tired or hungry, and you can immediately call and invite them over again.

This doesn't work quite as well as of OFB, since sims no longer show up in a healthy shape and instead show up crabby and looking to pee. Instead of, you know, peeing at home like sensible people.

Yeah, that's what mom's always tell their kids before they leave the house:  Do you have to use the bathroom?  No?  Well use it anyway!

I'm getting errors with the controller when one of my employees is very low on energy and hunger.  He drinks espresso trying to restore his energy, but when he tries to eat from the serving plate that my sims prepared, an error pops up.  I also get errors when I assign him as janitor.  I think it was when he was trying to clean up a plate off the floor someone left in the bathroom, and the toilet paper must have kicked them out so they left the plate on the floor.  I have maybe a dozen error logs, so I'm not sure which would be most beneficial, but I'll post a couple of them.  They are all different.

Actually, I've posted three, and then the fourth is relating to trying to clean up the plate in the bathroom.

I'll look into it. Hunger is always a sticky point with visitors, particularly if the food has gone bad or is otherwise unavailable. Can you describe the exact scenarios that produce this, and what kind of equipment your business has?

Club Dante.  Malcolm married Marcia, the woman who was working for him at his electronics store.  They are running the place together, and his employee at Club Dante, Chase, I have assigned as bartender/janitor.  So he stands at the bar most of the time until BRY sends him to tend to his needs.  I have Marcia or Malcolm prepare a plate of pork chops in the kitchen, which I have remodeled with a dishwasher, espresso machine, refrigerator, and stove, plus I removed the double archway and replaced it with a door that's locked so only household and employees can enter.  I put TP in all the stalls in the bathrooms, configured for the appropriate gender, of course, and put uni showers in there for hygiene needs.  Chase is usually very tired and can't hold the espresso cup for very long before he puts it in the dishwasher and gets another cup.  I think when his energy gets up a little bit, though, BRY sends him to get a plate of food, but that's when the error pops up.  The food isn't bad because there are no greed clouds or flies.  Malcolm also has several plates of pork chops in his inventory.  I had him make several and I put out a plate for Chase, Malcolm, and Marcia to eat.  I use Monique's hack to keep food from spoiling as quickly.  The club guests eat from Inge's pay buffet with no problem.  Any other info you need?

I noticed today that when one of my business owners was more or less fully in the red on fun, the controller didn't send him to "Kick Stuff", which I would have expected it to.  Is it supposed to and if not, can that be programmed in, like it is when they're under the influence of the Skillinator?  It doesn't appear to send them to eat either, although that may be because there was only a barbecue on the lot and not a fridge or cooker or anything.

What do you have for kicking apparatus on the lot?  If you had a flamingo and it was stuck or something, then it wouldn't recognize it.

My flamingoes often get stuck in OFB. I usually have about 3 lined up, because they seem to get stuck more frequently than before. When the fun is in the red for an employee I try clicking the flamingoes. If you don't get an option to interact with them, you need to replace them. (The flamingo not the employee. ;))

I had this before OFB, and even prior to NL.  That's why I quit using flamingos.  Forcing an error on them works as well, but I got so tired of having to do this all the time.  I once had 12 flamingos on the lawn of a Greek house, and every freaking one of them got stuck eventually.  At first I couldn't understand why my students on a College Rampage were in the red on fun and would sit down to write a term paper and stand right back up, go get a book to study, sit down, jump right back up, and on and on.  JM suggested rotating the flamingos so they would kick them from the other side, but this is only a temporary fix, and it's hard to know which side they will kick it from anyway.  So I quit using flamingos.  If you're going to have to keep replacing flamingos at a loss, then it's worth spending a little more on a gnome which doesn't tend to get stuck.  If you're worried about them getting stolen, there are things you can do to prevent that, such as SaraMK's no gnome theft mod or placing them so they face a wall or fence.

The flamingos were fine, they were newly-placed and had never been used.  When I instructed the owner to "Kick Stuff", he was able to use them with no problem.  It may be because I placed them while he was on the till (i.e., after the business opened), although I wouldn't have thought that would make any difference.  I always place at least 3 because of the constant errors anyway.

No, it wouldn't matter if you placed them after, because I've seen them immediately run over to kick them after I've placed them (seems that's one thing I often forget when setting up a new lot ::)).

I've encountered another problem with this.  What is supposed to happen when the workers start getting tired?  I had one who was totally in the red on energy, yet she was still being kept selling.  Another one on another lot was almost in the red on energy, but he wasn't stopped either.  With the first one, there were no beds, but with the second he is a downtownie Romance teen on the door of my bordello, so there isn't exactly a shortage of beds!  I had to temporarily take control of them all the time to bump their energy up - I used to use Inge's PYP to keep their stats high, but I haven't been doing since using BRY because of possible conflict.  Quite often I see them in the orange and red and have to stop them manually - they are sent to the toilet and sent to eat, but nothing seems to be done about their energy, fun and social, so they're sent back to work when these haven't improved at all.  They do occasionally get sent on breaks, but most of the time they don't actually deal with their fun and social, they just use the bathroom, eat and go back to work, so I have to override it so they can sort those things out.

TJ's energy statue works well for keeping energy values high on business lots.  Squinge has a sign that keeps all stats high (can be set for just the owner, just the employees, or both), which makes it really easy to run multiple businesses in one day. :)

If workers become tired, they attempt to macrocaffeinate. You will, naturally, require a proper caffeination station to enable this. Otherwise, energy is incurable.

Fun is dealt with by, naturally, THE SPORT OF KINGS. Your lot is properly equipped for the Sport of Kings, right? Energy is handled by macrocaffeination. You do have a station for this, right? Social is handled by AutoYak, if you have a phone or they own a cellphone, but once they run out of people to call, it becomes incurable, since there isn't any practical way for a lone sim to do anything about it. The problem is partially alleviated by the occasional coffee break where they chat a bit. Some jobs(foodmaking, any restaurant function), BRY will force them to keep chugging on, but other jobs (cashier, bartender), they balk at. At this point, without snapdragons, you have three options: Assign them to a task where they will either gain social from it(sales), assign them to a task where they can always manage to complete one iteration regardless (restaurant, food prep), or bitchslap the whiny loser upside the head a few times. Let them hate you, so long as they fear you!

Remember, flamingos frequently get stuck from repeated abuse, particularly when you have a million employees trying to do it as well. Gnomes are much more reliable, but have to be placed in some kind of locked enclosure, preferrably with APO (APO does not allow exceptions for people who have decided to leave, so people who have decided to "leave" can't bypass the lock!).

Also, I just updated many of the macro objects (Macro/AutoSoc/BRY) with some algorithm improvements to reduce deadlock and abandonment, so it's worth trying that out.

Hi JM. I just updated all your hacks and started playing. I wanted to hire a new employee, so I slected one that was unemployed - or so the blurb said. When I clicked to employ I got a message saying this sim is already employed.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/brynne.jpg)

Is this anything to do with businessusesyou?

No, this is a fairly typical bug caused by garbage data in the job fields. It's harmless.

The bartender I described above at Club Dante would frequently get in a bind where he was simultaneously starving and dead tired.  He would try to macrocaffeinate, but he couldn't get much energy from it, and when he tried to take a plate of pork chops, the error would pop up.  I haven't played the lot again since then, though. 

Ancient Sim, I've used Inge's PYP plant before with Macrotastics, and while I haven't used it specifically with BRY, BRY uses Macrotastics.  I wouldn't think it would conflict because Macrotastics works differently in that it only kicks in when a need becomes low enough and pushes the command on the sim to do something to take care of it.  Inge's PYP in my mind would be the equivalent of using debug mode to adjust the motive bars manually to keep them at a certain level, so that Macrotastics is never called.  I am going to have to get some snapdragons in my businesses.  Does it boost everything except energy?  I've been trying TJ's energy statue on some comm lot businesses, and they work great for the family, but it doesn't do anything for employees, only selectable sims.

Both lots have espresso bars (with automatic baristas) but they were never sent there.  Malcolm Landgraab can't leave his alone, he does nothing whatsoever but drink coffee, but his staff were never sent to it (this is on the 1-2-3 gym).  I would imagine the reason the owner of the bordello never bothered to go drink coffee was because he was too busy trying out the woo-hoo beds, but the sales guy didn't even go to those until I set him to "Unassigned", then he did.  And no, neither of them have flamingos (forgot about those), so I will try adding some.  Doesn't explain why they weren't sent for coffee, though.  Will try the updated thingumybobs.

Oh and Rainbow, I have been shoving them up with boolprop to keep them going, but I prefer to avoid it if I can because it's just too easy.  Trouble is, I was ignoring them thinking they would be taken care of and they weren't.  What surprises me is that they didn't just walk off home.  It's all very confusing really.  When it says they are underpaid I have no idea how much to increase it by because the option to do it via "Management" has gone, so I just have to guess.  It doesn't update for quite a while, so I never know if I've got it right.  That might be down to relevantwages though, not this mod. 

You need the standard espresso machines. The bars are too unreliable and couldn't be made to work in testing.

Ancient Sim:  Yeah, I'm like you, I know I can do that if necessary but I'd rather not.  I'd rather let BRY take care of them, but it seems that it lets their needs get too low.  And I've been using the standard espresso machine, not the espresso bar.

Once BRY hands control back over to certain jobs, the sims will work that job until a motive makes them quit and they go on break.

Other jobs have custom-written algorithms to improve the way sims conduct their task at all. For instance, Sales, all the Restaurant positions, the Cashier position, the Restock position, and the Tidy position all have special Macrotastics loops to handle them, and those will be more aggressive about motive maintenance.

By and large, you shouldn't worry about it, BRY + Macros handles them just fine. So what if they get a little low? It won't kill them.

The problem I was having was the stupid error message that kept coming up, and the fact that the bartender would get stuck trying to caffeinate and eat that he wasn't of any use.  So I finally sent him home for awhile, then called him back.  But he was soon back in the same fix.  I've installed the patch and downloaded the updated hacks, so I'll give them a try.

I've had good results tonight, four staff, all using terlets & coffee and food as and when. They also seem to be better at getting back to work, and their little circlular plumbobs are not getting so red and orange.

I have the 2nd patch and the updated hacks - well, updated as of about 12 hours ago.

LMAO - a totally red energy bar ain't "a little low" where I come from!!!  But yes, it did occur to me last night that it may be because I needed the standard espresso machines, so I will see to that.  Seems a bit daft to have one of those when there's a proper coffee area, but needs must and all that. 

I've got the second patch, and the 6/18 BRY. Lately I've noticed that, while  my Owned Restaurants run fine when I'm playing the owner on his lot,  but  if  I play one of the naieghbors and send him to that lot, no "Order" options are showing up on the server. At my restaurants  that aren't using BRY, ordering procedes as normal.

Has anyone else had this happen?

Should be fixed in new BRY/Macrotastics. You will be able to order when the Server shows up. Note that only "true" servers will continue to deliver food in the presence of selectable party.

Well, I'm not having the error messages pop up, but now Chase just stands there with the red ball over his head.  At first, he will try to macro caffeinate, but he'll take one sip and put the cup in the dishwasher, get another cup, take a sip, etc.  After several repetitions, he will just stand there in front of the espresso machine, frozen.  If I make him selectable, I see that his hunger and energy are way down in the red, and the BRY icon in his queue just flickers.  I try putting out some food for him, but he doesn't eat it.  Finally, I canceled the BRY icon and ordered him to eat.  He ate, then he went back to macro caffeinate, which he was then able to complete successfully.  I did have him be a sales person for a while, which worked pretty well, and he got up to a gold sales badge.  How is he supposed to deal with hunger, though?  Can he access the owner's inventory, or is he supposed to cook?  Or does there need to be food already available for him to eat?  The owner has plenty of food in his inventory, and there is a stove and fridge available.  There is also a buffet, which I know Macrotastics doesn't recognize, but it's for customers.  (I am using Inge's pay buffet.)

He probably doesn't know how to cook. He SHOULD be able to pillage his inventory, though.

Does the food need to be in his own inventory then?  Because right now all the food is in the owner's inventory (Malcolm).  Malcolm and Marcia both have no problems accessing it.

Interesting issue with BRY - whenever my salesperson sim (gold badge) gets a negative reaction from a customer (black cloud over their head), they continue to push the issue by repeatedly trying to dazzle them, resulting in even more bad reactions rather than backing off and picking on someone else. The only way I can fix this is to cancel 'be salesperson' and set them to 'be restocker' or to just tell the cranky customer in question to 'bugger off'. Are there any other solutions?

This is being looked into. Normally the attempts stop after rel drops to a certain point, but sometimes sims are bizarrely crabby and reject everything for no visibly apparent reason. It helps if you use the Customer Selector to designate your store's purpose so people don't show up for the wrong reasons and then just bitch and moan the entire time.

Ta muchly  ;D

I've only started using this, and should probably play more before I ask a question, but I'm gonna do it anyway.  ::)  All my employee's end up stinky, and won't take a shower. Is there some object like the toilet paper roll I'm supposed to install? I have installed 2 different showers, but no luck yet. By the way, showering was probably what they were best at taking care of on their own before I installed any of this stuff. I did install all the stuff that was required, put a roll in each toilet stall, and one business controller on the bottom floor of a 2 store building. The showers are on the top floor. Maybe there should be one per floor?

thanks,
-Beefshank

The TP roll operates both the showers and the terlets, so you want to arrange the showers either in the bathroom, or within the selected radius if you go to radial mode.

If the showers aren't in the same room as the toilets, you need to either add controllers for them, or widen the radius of the controller so it looks further to find them (I think it will find them on a floor above, if they're directly over the bathroom). Or, just redesign the bathroom to put the showers in there.  For a business, the dorm shower is fine -- no need to get fancy.

Ok, looks like TP in the showers then!

thanks!
-Beefshank

Pescado, can you explain what QC stands for and what the percentages mean in the Adjust Wage menu?

QC is quit chance, the chance your employee spontaneously quits. If it is zero or negative, it means it won't happen. The two values indicate maximum and minimum chance, depending on mood. Platinum sims will have both values the same because their mood cannot fluctuate out of the maximum range.

Oh that makes much more sense now.  I knew you said sims could be underpaid with the relevant wages mod, but I wasn't sure how to figure the least amount of money they would accept. 

I've had a magor issue with businesses since I installed OFB (obviously, I wouldn't have had the problem before I installed it now would I?  ::) ).
If I am running the business I have no problems with or without BRY (of course with BRY it runs better).
However, it's when I visit a sim owned business that my problems start.
  (a) without BRY, all the employees/owners/managers are there but they just act like normal customers, i.e. browsing, going to the toilet, etc.
  (b) with a BRY controller (and the relevant other items; BUY, espresso machine, sport of kings), again all the staff are there, but the only person who does anything is the owner. Even then it's only sometimes.

I have one business; a salon, where the owner has gold badges in sales, cashier, cosmetology and restocking and all she'll do is restock. Admittedly I did use the badge juicer for her and on the others I earned them correctly.
Another business is a combination bakery and restaurant. The owner will ring up purchases from the bakery and will greet and seat customers. However that's all he will do.

My first thought is that it's a hack conflict, but I've got quite a few hacks and some of them I can't even remember where I got them.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, and can anyone offer me some advice?

P.S. Is it safe to leave a BRY controller on a business when I sell it?

*Edit*: Dammit, I just found this thread:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5532.0.html (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5532.0.html)
That's what I get for not searching. Mind you, there are no answers to be had there either.  :'(

over at http://www.simwardrobe.com/
 (http://www.simwardrobe.com/)there is an object that can modify the number of sims visiting your business. I've not been able to get it to bring in more than the default number and the hack conflict scanner isn't coming up with any conflicts. Any chance there is a conflict between that and BRY that the scanner isn't finding? Or does it only deal with employees and not customers?

BRY only deals with owners and employees -- doesn't affect customers one way or the other.  I've had no problems with Paladin's customer adjuster, but it will cause lag problems if your computer can't keep up with the number of sims on the lot.  More often than not, I use it to reduce the number of customers, rather than increase them. :)

I've had 30 or so sims at a house party using boolprops before, so it shouldn't be a problem. Must be some other conflict I guess.  I'll try working hacks in and out and figure it out.

Sims who are not sufficiently Active to race across to lot to a new destination will not be drafted into performing secondary tasks, because it may take them hours to get there.

ok, I'm a complete dorkfish. I keep hearing about controllers for this thing. What are they and where can I find them in the menus? I've spent the past hour looking thru the buy section in my game and can't find anything.  ???

Misc/Misc: look for the big red hammer and sickle.

I've had some customers that are unclickable.  They're miming the "need help" motions but I can't help them.  Naturally, the BRY-assigned salesperson can't either.  I tried to bugger off the offending sims but their names don't even appear on the sickle as if they're not really at the lot.  This was the first time I've played this lot after installing GLS.  Just a glitch maybe???  I wish I'd thought to force error or turn debug mode but I was just bamboozled all I could do was yell, "Why can't I click on the idiot??!!!"
Needless to say, these sims walked out of my lot with minus signs over their heads.   ::)

I've gotten those Sims too.  They just stand there and bitch and ruin your business rating and there's nothing you can do about them.  I don't remember if I ever got them before I got the controller.

Yea, they've always been there.  I usually put one of Inge's Transporter bushes on the business lot to make them disappear. :)

What do they do if you force-error on them? I think that might make them behave after a reset.

I've only gotten these if they get reset while they're asking for help.

Oh? Strange, I sometimes force-error on those asking for help but are ignored by the employees, and they set off to the nearest rack right after the reset.

Okay Pes can I suggest some stuff? Well too bad, because I'm going to anyway. :P

Can you make the menu show the current assigned duty but have brackets around it like Maxis did so you can tell who owns a car when you click change owner? The reason being I was playing with 8 employees yesterday and it got confusing figuring out who does what. Now I can and did sit there and look and figure out which job was missing hencer which was their current, but it would be easier to have this at a glance.

Also could you possible integrate making food into the controller? Currently you can't assign it and if I do assign a sim to make food by clicking on the fridge and doing assign job make group meal bla bla then the BRY controller will not work for reassining them. According to BRY they are reassigned but they keep cooking and I have to have the owner or manager go up to them and tell them to take a break.

Another suggestion is could you add an assignement for an employee to gain cooking skill into BRY? I have a chef with 10 and so most of the foods my restaurant serves are high level ones but when the chef is on break I need someone else to do it. I had been training another employee as a backup but had to do it in a very roundabout way by having the owner sit and watch the Yummy channel and then invite her to join. Also I can't get her to wear a smart cap at all. I suppose I could only get the manager to do that since I can control her.

Training body might help too since it seems that servers need it, or at least they seem to gain it.

Overall BRY seems to be working pretty well for me now. I do also use Simwardrobe's don't sell to Sims in a bad mood hack and that seems to help the repeat negative sales. I only had it happen once yesterday when it used to happen a lot.

Had a couple of minor issues. One of my managers kept caffeinating when her clearly didn't need to and I had to keep manually forcing him to stop, he went back and did it again several times too. Once he even did it right after he came out of the aspiration reward recharge machine and all his motives were at max.  ::) Not sure what that was about but none of the other employees did that.

I did have a sim visit the business on a date and it acted as if she was a manager or owner. She could assign sims and she made money too. Damn, wish I could walk into a restaurant as a customer and walk out with their profits.  ;)

Did have a stuck loop issue with sims spinning over and over but not going anywhere. Found out there were looking for showers and I didn't give them any. As far as I'm concerned they can sponge bath :P but I put some university showers in and that seemed to fix it.

Oh and I think your whole wage calculation thing is complicated and confusing but you're stubborn so I know you won't change it. :P I use another hack (Simwardrobe) to do auto fair pay adjustments. I know you say you can underpay them, but I've had sims quit on me before even with BRY and I'd rather not have to deal with figuring the optimal salary amount.

Will think about it. That's not quite as easy to do since every single string would require a bracketed and non-bracketed version as a result, and this essentially would double the stringspace needed...which has already been assigned to other things.

Research into foodmaking is already in progress, but it takes awhile, since it's an argument-based command, which is dependent on the food objects to build a menu. To sidestep this, I'm trying to code dynamic analysis so it will analyze what your store stock is and then make food to fill those requirements. This is not easy.

Vocational training programs are currently outside the planned scope of the project. This may be looked into later.

Servers already gain body skill just while working as a server, even when not serving.

Probably unrelated, as the BRY/Autosoc selection code is independent, although I increased the kick aggression for surly customers so they tend to sod off faster once they've become useless.

Not sure what prompted that, although managers have autonomous actions, especially when not given a chore they can do. Was he doing this EVEN though a "Be Something" was in the queue? Also, some "Be Something" actions aggressively caffeinate as an idle behavior even when energy is still green, especially when the job requires constant alertness. The last thing you want happening is for your minion to stand there forever until his energy runs out, which is generally when customers show up, and then he won't have enough energy for the next 3 hours while he recaffeinates. Thus, certain employees, particularly servers and chefs, will caffeinate anytime their work looks satisfied and nothing is imminently looming.

The "assign" options will appear in BRY even if you are not manager/owner, in case an employee has forgotten what he was assigned to due to attribute corruption and thus is preventing you from shopping. This was recently enabled. The "profit leakage" bug is Maxis.

If they can't repair hygiene, they can't work.

There's no wage calculation feature right now. What you set is what they get, and nothing changes it yet. A ZQC autoadjuster is in the works, which will calibrate underpaid employees for zero-quit-chance (ZQC) rather than "fair".

Maybe you could just do a separate report on current assigned status for employees then if the brackets are a pain.

The manager with the coffee addiction was doing sales so I guess that maybe have been why since they run out of energy really quick from all those dazzles. It's was definitely from BRY and not just a random autonomous action because it said "caffeinate" heh.

Sales employees will chug coffee compulsively, dazzles really drain you fast. The profit margin from doing it, though, is simply so massive that it's completely worth it. For the price of $30 an hour, you can move merchandise at a profit margin 50-100x better than without. The difference between selling a flamingo at $12 and selling a flamingo at $1000 is simply massive.

Sorry if this has already been mentioned but I noticed that even though sims are assigned to one task, they will leave their post and do another. I have one sim working the register and she is constantly leaving the register to do sales, even though I have someone doing that already. She will periodically run back to the register though, it's just funny watching her, she is working her tail off, lol. The guy doing sales however, never leaves to work the register, though sometimes he just stands there like he has nothing to do.

If your sim working the register is "active" and thus able to move about fast enough, AND has gold sales, he will attempt to perform sales while idling. A lazy sim, however, will simply hold position because trying to perform a secondary task may take him on a 3 hour chase and cause him to be unable to return in time for his primary assigned task. Sims with no other qualifications will also not attempt to perform jobs they are not qualified to do.

So is there any way to tell a lazy sim from an active one before you hire them? After I saw your post (and already have an active sim who is a stellar employee) I hired a guy with 6 body points, assuming that no one with so few skill points would have put most of it into body unless they were active. I was wrong. I told him to put on a uniform and got the "lazy spin". So I fired him. Probably the first person ever fired for dressing lazily.

Skillpoints for townies are random and correlate to nothing in particular. They are often assigned at random so that the sim qualifies for his similarly randomly assigned job.

As for how to tell, if you have "Call Over Hack" from More Awesome Than You, move a short distance and call over. If they respond snappily, they're good. Otherwise, learn from experience who = suck.

I'm having trouble with some employees that are assigned crafting tasks.  I'll see an employee that is supposed to be crafting standing in front of their bench instead of working. They will have the red comfort icon in their bubble. Finally I'll make them selectable. Generally their comfort and energy will be at zero (The halfway mark on the bar), but their other stats will be in excellent shape. They will have 2 items in their queue; their crafting station and BRU, which when hovered over says "be taken by break".  These 2 queue items will rapidly flip back and forth between each other. All the while the employee just stands there.

I have 2 expresso machines, a gnome, a sofa, food, and BUY available to the employees. These items are not being blocked when the glitch is happening. Cancelling all the icons and issuing an order to caffinate will temporarily stop the problem, but unless I manually fix all of their needs, the BRU controller takes back over and puts them back into the loop.

I lost track of one employee for awhile and when I found him he was standing still in a puddle of his own pee. Evidently he had been stuck in the loop for quite awhile. I've been sending these employees home and then recalling them when they go into the loop, but they shouldn't be going into a loop in the first place.

By the way, is there anything I can click on that will zoom me to a missing employee? Maybe I could have saved my sim the embarassment of peeing on himself in front of customers if I could have found where he was.

I just now downloaded the latest BRU, so if this problem has already been addressed, I apologize.

EDIT: Another question. I hired several employees for crafting that had no badges. But soon one employee (Brandi L) was demanding $80 an hour for her QC to be 17-19%, while her colleagues were getting $15 with QC 1-2%.  This was a new neighborhood. In a previous neighborhood I had made that sim a manager, but I can't see how she could remember that from a deleted neighborhood. So what's her problem? BTW, her and the owner are best friends, so it isn't because they don't get along.

You can zoom in on an employee by right-clicking their icon in the employees panel.  I think that's it, I don't have the game open right now.  If that doesn't work, try a left double-click, but I seem to remember right-clicking.

I thought I tried all that, but I'll try again when I load the game. I think the problem comes if the camera is a little "pulled back" from the lot so that you can see the whole thing at once. Then you click on the employee, but it doens't actually "zoom in", just kinda centers the camera.

Yeah, that's probably it.  It doesn't actually zoom in, it centers.  Wrong choice of words, sorry.  :)

Do you have "relevant wages"? It includes a fix where random binary garbage can cause a sim to be detected as a manager and start demanding manager-class wages for no reason.

Yes, I do have relevent wages installed. In fact, I put it in before I even ran the game with OFB installed.

And what about the crafting station problem?

There have been several fixes for unresolvable motive problems, as well as the annoying "non-loungeable" issue. Update the entire macrostuffeths set. Employees that run into unresolvable motive lock will instead be dismissed from the lot and resummoned in a few hours.

Maybe I'm missing this, but is there a choice for macro-badge building? Essentially, to assign a playable to a certain task and not have them wander off randomly?

Macro.../Skillinator.../(Badge name)

One of my employees tonight kept doing the rabbit spin outside the terlet, over and over again.  I'm not sure whether to post here or in Bathroom uses you, the error log seems to be talking about the terlet controller.

All my employees kept running around tonight whilst completely in the red.

These look like forced-errors, which don't say much. Most likely your controller seized up due to a failed exit attempt at some point, and now your sim is unable to eject properly. I'll try reducing or removing the "give up" timer on ejection and see if that helps...after I fix this other crap.

Yes I did force an error, the employee just kept spinning. Is that no good for error logs? I thought it might show you what was happening.

Forced errors usually don't help much because the error isn't caused by an object.  You can tell when a user forced an error because it will say "Hit break point primitive."

Oh OK, ta Rainbow. I thought error logs just reported currently running code, so that if there was an something wrong it would still, for instance, show why a sim kept spinning. You know, like the cause of the spin, why the sim was being told to do that action.

So in that sense I figured it wouldn't make any difference whether I triggered the error log or the game did.

The important part of the log is the stack frame. When you force an error, the stack frame only indicates that you forced an error, not necessarily what they were doing while you forced the error.

I understand now, thanks.  :-[
By forcing the error I'm basically overwriting what I'm trying to report.

Forgive me if this has been covered, but I seem to be having some problems with the reporter, possibly related to this mod.  A "reporter type person" showed up at my business, but did no reporter type actions.  They purchased an item and promptly left, no note taking, or anything; they acted just like any other sim (I am aware the reporter does not always review, but I am pretty certain they always at least act like a reporter).  I was pretty sure this person was a reporter since they paid at my ticket machine right away, without pondering first.  I had been running the business for a while, and hadn't had any reporter action at all, so it seemed, so as an experiment, I took the mod out.  Almost immediately, the same person as before (my "reporter type person") showed up, and was now acting like a reporter.  I don't know if this is normal reporter behavior, or if something in this mod is causing it.

I do have all EPs, including Pets, and I have the latest version of this installed, as of yesterday.

Thanks.  :)

Unrelated. I have reporters that report all the time, but sometimes a reporter appears as an ordinary walkby visitor instead, and when this occurs, he does not do any reporting. It's normal, and random what will happen. Even when reporters appear and act as reporters, if their visit is short and their customer loyalty didn't change much, they may not write anything at all.

K, thanks.  Guess it was just a coincidence then.  :-\

When putting my Sims in Salesperson or Restock mode, the controller keeps sending them to the bathroom when their bladders are only half full (or empty depending on how you look at it).  Is anyone else experiencing this?  It is a bit annoying because they are needed to tend to customers and they are not anywhere near bladder failure.  I do not recall having this happen in previous releases before Pets.

Edit: Also wanted to add that they are sent to eat when the hunger bar is only 1/3 full.  It seems that they could wait a little longer before eating.  It is hard to keep the business moving when your Sim is the only employee in a fledgling business because they decide that they want to go eat.

Aggressive bladder action has always been part of the tuning due to the serious penalties for ignoring it, but I'll try to move the check a bit so it will check for tasks first.

They will "scavenge" any food left available, so if some customer has left a half-finished plate, it will get pillaged immediately (as it will go bad if left unattended).

There's one thing on BRY I'm not clear about -- the 'assign unmanned owner' menu.  I have a sim with 3 businesses, and he has at least one employee in each of them.  I click on this, set him to be the salesman, but nothing happens.  Is this only for lots where there aren't any employees?

The way it is working in my game is that you assign a job to the owner for the owner to do when you have stopped controlling him/her.

I assign unmanned owner to sales. Then I tell him to macro clean, eat a sandwich, use the bathroom, and restock the one expensive item that just sold. After issuing these commands, I personally leave my computer and go into my kitchen for a sandwich. When I come back, the owner has finished his list of tasks and is now happily making sales pitches to the customers.

I play with free will on. I'm not sure how much time has to pass from the time you issue your last order and the time they let the controller take over.

Hmm, I guess I haven't waited long enough, then.  The one shop I gave it a serious try, the owner spent an hour just walking around and talking to the customers, rather than doing any sales,  I finally gave up and told him to be the salesman.

When it does "kick in" correctly, the sales icon will be showing in his queue just like when you manually assign him to be salesman. There have been several times that it didn't seem to "take" and I would just give up and issue the sales command. Either way, canceling the command lets you retake control of them.

I've also noticed that with the Managers that at the end of the day when I dismiss them, if I don't cancel out their queued command of sales, cashier, etc, that they keep working until I do.

Unmanned Owner doesn't control what the owner does when you're playing them. If you can tell him to do anything, he's not unmanned. Unmanned is when you visit the lot as another family.

Note that the sales behavior operates slightly differently in "unmanned" businesses. A salesperson will no longer attempt to sell normal objects when you're not playing the lot, and will only sell admissions and restaurant podium. This is because selling off craftables, for instance, only depletes the owner's inventory without any gain.

Ah-hah!  Now that makes perfect sense.  So setting it to 'cashier' means the owner will be running the cash register when I visit the lot with another sim, and there won't be a long delay until someone finally figures out my sim wants to check out. That's really quite handy, then.

Having a couple of issues with Business Uses You.

The first one, when one of my employees disappeared off the lot for several hours I see you've explained further up the thread JM.

When I use the Bugger Off option, some of the sims leave the lot but some of them don't. Tonight the ones that didn't leave, all made a beeline for the staffroom and helped themselves to the buffet. The door was locked to everyone but staff and household. The dismissed sims no longer appear on the BUY Bugger Off menu. Bloody gannets ate the entire buffet tonight. The sims that were seated when I dismissed them seemed to be the ones that hung around.

I had one sim that wouldn't be a salesperson no matter what I did. Freshly arrived in the morning I assigned him to sales. He stayed in the staffroom. I unassigned and reassigned, no luck. I tried sending him back to work via the management menu. He just paced up and down the staffroom as if he were waiting. There was another salesperson operating but also plenty of sims with the thingies over their hheads wanting to buy. I sacked him in the end. I didn't select him because then they don't operate as employees.

ETA: The same sim who wouldn't do sales had done the same thing on a previous business day.

Sims in the middle of actions seem reluctant to leave, and Maxian default door locks contain a security hole in which a sim flagged as "leaving" is allowed to walk through locked doors.

Unfortunately, sims don't always *LEAVE*, instead opting to perform some random action, and thus they manage to sneak past the doors. APO is much more reliable in its "NO MEANS NO" approach to door-passage.

If a sim isn't doing sales, it is possible that he isn't doing it because all of the potential customers would hate him due to bad chemistry or relations, and reject all sales, or because no customers require sales attention. Just because a customer has a buy bar does not mean he needs sales attention: The controller actually calculates the buy-delta, and if the bar would fill on its own, the salesperson is not needed and will not bother that customer.

OK, I have APO I'm just lazy about setting it up, I'll use it on business lots from now on. Goopy was the worst offender, even when he actually left the lot, he'd return again within a short time.

The sim tonight who wouldn't do sales? There were other salespeople operating and finding new customers during this time. Could it be his personality didn't gell with any of the customers? There were generally 3-4 at any one time with bars above their heads.

I didn't know that BUY calculates which customers need sales, that's useful in understanding why the salespeople leave some customers alone.

whats the reason that you can't make your own sim "be salesperson" unless you get a gold badge?
its a pain in the butt to train my own sims manually while i can train my employee by just assign them to be the salesperson regardless of sales skill

Because without a gold badge, sims cannot actually effectively run sales. Employees can be assigned such, but BRY will simply ignore them and let them run crappy Maxis code until they get that gold badge. Nothing worthwhile will actually be sold until then, however. Your sims, however, cannot run this code. There are, however, Skillinator codes aimed at acquiring this badge.

And Monique's custom computers (over on MTS2) have a 'study at home' option where sims can use the computer to study for the badges.  Pretty handy when you have a sim you know will eventually have a business (or has just started one), and can walk in with gold badges for cashier, sales, and stocking. :)

i think this is a bug.
but "be farmer" is not working, the sim (with gold badge in gardening) just walks around the plants without doing anything, they sometimes talk to the plants, but other than that, they never tend or spray

This feature is being looked into. Currently, non-robot, non-teen, non-YA, non-Plant sims cannot spray, because this would turn them into plants. This restriction will be relaxed for non-playables in the next version. They should, however, still tend or talk to. Be sure it's not a vampire trying to tend an outdoor plant during the day, or other things like that.

So robots can be vampires and werewolves, but not plants? They both run on sunlight, but I can see how the water need would be hard. Hilarious, though.

Vampires can be plantsims, but vampires fry in the sun.  Someone asked about this in the Maxis chat, and they said that could be a little challenging, but vampire plantsims can sit under a sunlamp indoors.  ::)

If you're gardening in the greenhouse with those lamps up, that sounds like they'd make a good gardener, assuming their motives freeze at night like normal vamps..

the gardeners i used are humans and plantsims
all with gold badge in garden
they just walk around and talk to the plant, but they don't seem to tend at all
even when they are not doing anything
most of the time they just walk from plant A to plant B back and forth back and forth
a friend of mine has the same problem in his game.

Issue should be fixed by new Macrotastics.

I have a couple of problems with BRY.

When the staff are busy and I make my playable sim 'ring up these customers', if then BRY assigns someone to the till, my sim freezes and never completes the transaction. Then the sim is stuck and it seems to corrupt the till too.

Second problem is a combo of the security system, bathroom uses you and BRY I think. The owner of this store is a vampire, so I created a hidey hole for her during the day. There is one door that accesses the basement. In that room I have the security controller set to deny everyone except the vamp who is on override. This is the access to downstairs.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/layout.jpg)

There is a bathroom in the basement, the bathroom controller is set to deny employees and visitors.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/vamplair.jpg)

But the staff keep standing outside the basement door, frozen, I can't break and tell them to do anything else.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/waiting.jpg)

There is a staff bathroom attached to the lunchroom but no door through from the basement access - there was originally and I thought that was the problem, but the staff still keep standing by the door.

Edit: To fix the BUYs into BRYs. For the cognoscenti.

Next time you see this happening, force an error, attach the log.

Force an error on the stuck staff member? Sure - only I thought that overrode the problem in the log? I've finished for tonight but will upload a log in the morning.

I like your rickety stairs leading down to the basement. Also the general rustic atmosphere of your vampire's business is very appealing.

BUY = Bathroom Uses You; BRY = Business Runs You... You probably already knew that but you said "... bathroom uses you and BUY..." so I figured I would mention it for you.  ;-)

"BUY = Bathroom Uses You; BRY = Business Runs You... You probably already knew that but you said "... bathroom uses you and BUY..." so I figured I would mention it for you.  ;-)" - V

Cheers V, it was late and I was confused, obviously. I even tried it out in my head and thought, that's odd, why would JM name both things BUY?  ::) I kept thinking Business Uses You.

If you like the business I could package and upload for you.

First off, there's an error log attached as per request.

Second here are more layout pics of 'Fresh'n'Fruity'. I must say, I don't know if a farming business is viable. Three trees worth of oranges sold out in about 3-4 sim hours.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/shopoutside.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/shopinside.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/shopdownstairs.jpg)

You call *3* trees a farm? Psssh. Try 30-50 trees!

I was not able to locate anything interesting in the log. Next time this happens, force an error on the controller itself, instead of the sim, and attach that log also. Also verify that your controllers are correctly mounted on the walls and not illegally mounted with move_objects.

I'll also move the security controller - it is above the stairs and Maxian logic doesn't always recognise this as part of the room - wallpaper doesn't change in that spot.

Could you please explain the logistics behind the rule "do not mount controllers illegally"?

Would it cause a problem if controllers were mounted normally and lights, awards, etc were placed in the same space with 'moveobjects on'?

In a business I often find the need to place lights and controllers in the same wall space to have the controllers in a place that is easily clickable without blocking the view of something behind it that I might feel the need to click on, and to save wall real estate which could be used to sell paintings. I hate ceiling lights as I am always clicking on them accidently. I used to use Inge's ceiling light hider, but it seems that some of the light comes from the actual mesh and hiding the mesh diminishes the room light.

I use the invisible recolor on many of my business lots, and most often use ctrl+alt to place it over the open close sign (legally), or I place it directly above the island counter against the wall, close to where the register is placed. Or, I place it next to a painting or light fixture, rather than over...above a stereo, etc. Basically, I place it next to, or above something I can remember where it is.

Mounting BUY in an "illegal" place such as hovering in the air can confuse it as to what room it is in. The Hammer and Sickle is indifferent to location, though, and doesn't care where in the world you place it.

Where did you get the invisible recolor?  Did you make it yourself or get it from somewhere?

Quaerendo invenietis (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=6749.0).

Thanks breyerii. :)

OK I made sure all the controllers - bathroom, business and security - are seated properly with move-objects OFF

I also removed the small wall at the bottom of the downstairs, because it didn't enclose a separate room. I still have a stuck sim. I forced an error on the BRY controller.

I wanted an error on the bathroom controller, not the Hammer and Sickle.

Oh god - that's my BRY / BUY senility again. OK. Got it. Bathroom controller. Tomorrow.

All right, Witch, you completely defeat the purpose of the tiny print if you announce it loudly in the next post! ;)

And I do like your lot. If you don't mind packaging it, I would really like to add it to my new business neighborhood.

That was supposed to be tiny print?  It looked normal to me.  ???

It's too many hours in front of a monitor - it's given you xray vision.

PS Though I guess these days it would be macro-vision.  ;D

Hopefully I'll get to fire the game up tonight, package the lot and generate an error log on the bathroom controller. Otherwise it may be next weekend for the lot.

isn't macrovision a supplier of copy-protection techniques?

Yes; among other annoyances, Macrovision makes Safedisc, which doesn't actually keep anyone from being able to pirate the Sims but is a good target to curse out when your legitimately obtained CD won't read.  :-\

OK. File 1.txt is the upstairs bathroom controller. I'm not sure the sim was genuinely stuck.

I did notice that often when a sim became stuck, there was another sim using the staff bathroom. There was no little 'wait' timer icon above the stuck sim's head though.

2.txt is the controller in the upstairs bathroom on another occasion.

3.txt is the controller in the downstairs bathroom the vamp uses.

We still can't find any apparent reason for this. Try another error on another sim that faceplants into that door somehow. What task is your sim assigned to, and what skills and personality does he have?

Your wish is my command. Fresh and Fruity (http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=651.0).

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/Fresh%20and%20Fruity/dayff.jpg)

Also, I packaged up the house the vamp & plantsim live in. Out of Africa (http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=652.msg7167#msg7167). (Sims not included).

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/nz_witch/Out%20Of%20Africa/1.jpg)

And now that I've finished touting my lots, I return you to the regular programme.  8)

Seriously JM, I'll get a chance to play tomorrow night, so if I still get stuck sims I'll generate some more error logs.

ETA: and make sim notes.

OK. First off, I was going to report back about the sims who were getting stuck in front of the basement door. I updated some of your hacks and the other night I only got one stuck sim. He was the janitor, so I gave him an override to go down, he went and cleaned the basement bathroom. After I updated the hacks, I also deleted and replaced the various controllers, then reset them. I'm just about to have another session there, so I'll see if anyone still gets stuck.

Which brings me to the new problem. I have three farmers milling round in a garden plot  in the greenhouse, where peppers need to be harvested and they can't do a thing. They keep turning around in circles and generally wandering aimlessly. Error log attached.

ETA: This is with the BRY from 6/4/07, freshly downloaded before booting the game.

Uh, yeah, the Janitor would need keys and a service entrance to all bathrooms so he can clean them. The code has no way of knowing whether the route is clear.

Known issue fixed in updated Macrotastics. Constant tweaking of gardening is currently in progress already.

Yup, progress! I was happily pleased last night watching one of my "grunts" move to an apple tree with the command "sell fruit" going. Later I noticed eight apples in his inventory, so may I ask: is there a specific sell/harvest ratio? And will gardening sims also take care of selling vegetables?

JM - just had a thought about the milling gardeners from last night. I'm running patched seasons - what about Nec, V & you?

ETA: I tried again today. I freshly downloaded gpsign and fruitbowl, macrotastics, BRY and BUY. I also added phonehack & the talk module without checking for new one. (So I could get selected sims in the Taxi!)

When I tried Be Farmer today, they first swarmed the new planting patch & all planting went well. I had five family sims & a couple of employees going. When they finished the planting they looked for other work. Only my vamp went to harvest, but started turning in circles. An employee went to harvest the peppers and the same thing happened. So, no swarming to harvest, but harvest still not working.

Do I need the fruitbowl on the lot for harvest to work?

I forced an error on Africa, then made her Be Farmer again, then forced an error again when she started spinning round.

My Seasons is not patched at this time.

I created a pretty large farm with trees and gardens for a sim that I cloned from the gardener, Leo. He hadn't been tending it very long before he became a plant sim. Then I had him spawn 4 children and when they grew up one of them spawned 3 more (those are still toddlers).

When I was playing yesterday three of the grown plantsims got stuck in the same patch of the garden. There didn't seem to be anything that needed doing in that patch of garden; the only option that came up for any of the plants near them was "Talk To"

I paused the game, cancelled the "Macro...Garden" command, told them "Go there" to separate spots in the orchard that needed attention and then set the Macro...Garden command again. As soon as I unpaused, they ran right back to that patch of garden and started milling around again. I gave them a minute to see if they would quit it. Then I cancelled Macro...Garden again and commanded each of them to separate specific tasks in the orchard and queued the Macro...Garden for after those tasks. They finished their tasks and did not return to the garden until it actually needed something.

I only mention this here because Witch mentioned it first. It didn't occur to me that this would have something to do with BRY.

I have most of the FFS hacks. I play with testing cheats enabled and there were no error logs created when this happened.

Oh, and Thanks Witch for the great looking lot. I am going to try that tonight!

I am not patched, for the record. The latest version of macrotastics that was updated earlier today seems to have stopped the harvest shuffle. The giant garden runs like a well-oiled machine now. Yay!

And here I thought I had found a needed solution!  :D
After experimenting with 4x3 orchards, I had switched to 3x3 ones, with a Ladybug central on the middle, and found the routing problem completely gone. You say it's not necessary to tone down on orchard size, Nec?

For me, the problem was with the garden plots. I did not have that problem with the orchard tree, but.I haven't been on an orchard lot that is ready to harvest since the update, so I can't say for sure, however. Probably sometime later this evening I will, and will post results in this post as an edit, unless you get to if faster. :P

I have a error on one of my playable Sims at a owned Community Lot. Log Attached. His Name is Vincent.The Sim who let Vincent error out is Harvey a Gardenclub Member one of the Sims who swarm over the lot whit the notepad and say nothing. It is enough to hover over Harvey to get the reset on Vincent.

Your problem is completely unrelated and is apparently the Work of the Non-Awesome. It's dying in a check tree for a business social, which has nothing to do with anything Awesome, as nothing Awesome is known to modify that.

I was wondering if the business runs you could assign employees to "be instructor". This would be useful for my apocalypse survival lot. I am hoping to assign employees as instructors and have my visiting sims macro the body skill. Is this possible?

I'm currently having a problem with BRU.  I have a staff room set up for the employees.  Table with 4 chairs, and a couch.  There is also a coffee machine for them.  The problem i'm having is seats are becoming "corrupted/unusable".  I have a pretty good idea whats happening.   A sim normally gets coffee, pulls out a dining chair and sits in the chair at an angle, then when done, gets up and pushes the chair back.  With BRU they are sitting, drinking the coffee, then BRU seems to be forcing them back to work and the seat is not resetting to be usable again. Both the couches and dining chairs are having this happen, but with the dining chairs it's more easy to spot. If the chair is at an angle when they get up and leave, it's unusable after that. I can't tell for sure yet, but it also looks like it may be active sims that are causing the problem. They seem to run around for everything.

I suspect this may be a Maxis issue that is being made more apparent by high usage, but I will look into this.

The whole unusable chair deal happens in Uni, too, and it is annoying as hell.

Hi, I was looking for a way to automatically assign my home business employees to do a set task when they come in. I was referred here, but I don't really need all that other crazy hoohah...what would you recommend? Thanks in advance!

The "crazy hoohah" is necessary to make your sim actually carry out the task effectively. Otherwise the tasks cannot be performed effectively because sims are really stupid.

I have other mods that do little simple things that I want, such as refresh my employee's motives so that there's no need to take a break, and a sign that automatically calls in and sends home employees when I want them to, and so on. The only thing I want is to auto assign an employee a task when they arrive on the lot. I need to download all of this:

businessrunsyou.zip
autosoc.zip
autoyak.zip
bathroomusesyou.zip
macrotastics.zip
skillinator.zip

Just to do that? I'm aware that sims are stupid...but is that all really necessary?

Once you add those to your game (and the sleepclock, and the lot debugger), you'll wonder how you ever played without them...

To put in context: it has probably taken you more time to whine about this than it would have taken to download the relevant hacks.

To be fair, I don't think Katuchan is complaining about the time it takes to download and install the hacks, just that so many are needed.  In my own case, I don't like having hacks that do stuff I don't want or need in my game, so I didn't install macrotastics or the skillinator until the other hacks had won me over.

Katuchan, try "bathroom uses you" just to see what these hacks are like.  It's worth installing just for the way it ejects idling sims from the bathroom.  And if you really don't want the excellent hacks that support BRY, go ahead and try BRY without them -- you won't get the best functionality, but it won't hurt to try it on its own.  If you're refreshing their motives instead of letting them take breaks, you are already doing the stuff that the related hacks would direct them to do when needed.

I was trying Business>Be fisherman and got this:
(http://pics.livejournal.com/gwillewyn/pic/0006aztd)

Make the pond more accessible.

In Uni, this is caused by the noassignmentlitter hack.  I was going to report it, but it had no thread, so I just removed the hack from the game because I figured it was less aggravating to have assignment litter than unusable chairs and the whining that ensued from the sims.  If you force error on the chair and choose reset, it will make the chair usable again.  Of course, if you continue to use the hack, the chair will just get stuck in the "in use" mode as soon as another sim sets homework down but does not sit down right away (whether from blockage by other sims, etc. or said sim found something else more pressing to do).

I have not found any correlation between noassignmentlitter and stuck chairs. I had stuck chairs before I added that, and I've not had stuck chairs after it, so the correlation seems weak at best.

Stuck chairs happened for me before, during and after noassignmentlitter.
It's definitely caused by dormied autonomously doiing assignments, but not by the hack.

It was a year ago that it happened to me.  I guess it was just a huge coincidence then.  It is just that I did not have the problem of stuck chairs before installing the hack, and have not had it happen since I uninstalled the hack.  It could also be the permutation of hacks that I was using vs. the hacks you are using now.  It could even be the use of non-awesome hacks in combination with that hack.  I really could not say since it was so long ago.  I do always run the hack conflict utility every time that I install new hacks, so I know that it was not a conflict.  Anyway, I use the hack that prevents the dormies from creating another assignment if one exists (cannot remember the name off the top of my head), along with the Grand Trianon desks which seem to make sims want to put assignments on them, and it all works out pretty well.

Is there a possibility to either exclude some employees from the influence of BRY or to take actions other than selling, restocking etc. into account? I've tried to run sort of a pay-to-stay coffeeshop (where visitors can help themselves from the buffet and have some coffee, but can buy cake too), but I cannot assign an employee to the coffee bar (the action keeps dropping out of the queue), and another employee assigned to cleaning doesn't do anything besides kicking flamingos ^^.

Am I missing something or do I really have to abandon BRY for this particular business :( ?

P.S. Yeah, necromancy :P

How do you know what's going on in an employee's queue, anyway? You should just be able to assign him to "Barista", and he should do his thing. Barista-being is a static, non-assisted job, and BRY only has an influence on that employee when he stops working from low motives. The flamingo kicking is how fun is raised to keep motives at a worky level. What things are not actually being cleaned?

Sorry, I should have made this clearer: I'm talking about the owner's queue here - when I try to assign a barista, I click on the coffee bar, choose an employee's name, the icon appears in the owner's queue for a split second, then vanishes. There's no reaction from the employee in question, and his/her name stays in the "assign..." menue. S/he just acts as if s/he weren't assigned to anything (which obviously is the case).


Yes, I'm aware of the fun raising aspect, I've been using BRY for all my other businesses for a while now. The employee fails to clear the empty plates (haven't tried it out long enough to see if she would clean the toilets) - the owner can clear them without problems (using macro... clean here).

It sounds like your employee may be suffering from the holdover effects of the "can't clean up plates" bug, or perhaps the use of anti-cleaning hacks.

No anti-cleaning hacks used in my game, so I'm going to investigate what else might be the cause for my employees' disobedience.

I understand that the barista and cleaning assignment *should* work with BRY? Phew - I'm really relieved to read that, I was afraid I had to run that specific business all by myself ;D.

Small question, is there a way to stop BRY's influence on employees? Like stop the 'Assign's I give them through it completely? I had one of my Salespeople be a BRY Salesperson, and I want to sever him from BRY completely and make him a salesperson the long Maxis way, as he is doing something I absolutely forbid: Restocking. Sims controllable by me are the only ones allowed to restock in my world, as I run businesses very carefully, and sales-restockers are messing up my careful plans, not to mention my profits. So is there a way to do this, or do I have make him a manager, ahead of when I wanted to, and try to get rid of it there?

If you don't want them to restock in between sales, simply don't have them earn a restocking badge.  It'll be cheaper to employ them under BRY if they have less badges, although they'll be less versatile.

I didn't have him earn a restocking badge, he came with a Silver Restocking badge, among others, I could actually promote him when I hired him. Although I will keep this in mind for the future, there is nothing I can do now. I'll admit, his 'help' is nice in the middle of the work day when I'm busy trying to help extra customers, but it's not appreciated when I am almost ready to close up shop but Mr. Wonderful decides to restock the entire store for me.

Just click on the BRY controller and dismiss him early, before he starts running around restocking. It'll send him home as soon as he completes whatever action he's currently doing, so at worst case he'll finish restocking the item he's working on and then leave.

Well, if that's all I can do, alrighty then...

You could always stop using BRY on that particular lot. Blasphemy, I know, but that's what I would do.

I've seen no-restocking-badge employees restock before, typically when I assign them before opening the actual store so they've nothing else to do.

I had a weird thing happen with this twice in the last two days.  Two different businesses, both have managers.  In the first one, the manager was being paid 60 simoleans an hour (she had two gold and a silver badge), which when she was promoted in the last pay session was listed as 'fairly paid'.  About 1/2 way through the business day, her listing suddenly changed to 'ridiculously underpaid' (yes, I have releventwages in my game).  I tried to use BRY to boost her pay, but it would only let me boost it by 1 or 5 simoleans at a time -- clicking on the 10-simolean option just returned me to the previous pie menu with no change in her pay.  I managed to get her up to 100 simoleans, but she was still listed as underpaid and quit before I could get it any higher.

Last night, same thing happened in another business.  Manager has two gold and a silver badge, was promoted in the last session, and was making 50 simoleans an hour.  This time I managed to raise his pay fast enough to keep him from quiting (again, only the 5-simoneon option worked), but I had to get it up to 115 to get him back to 'fairly paid'.

I have no other hacks in the game that affect business wages than this and relevantwages, and I did a HCDU scan to be sure there weren't any hidden conflicts. Don't know if it's a combined problem of this not raising wages by 10 and relevantwages being broken, or if relevantwages just noticed that the sim had been promoted a 'day' later, but something is borked somewhere.  I hated losing that manager, since it'll take a while for any other employee to get to the point where he/she can be promoted.

I have never really understood the pay scale methods on BRY so I just use the in-game method of clicking the petals until I see the reasonably happy face. ;)

It does seem as if the managers do get mad about their pay rather suddenly in the middle of the day, though. Until you mentioned it, though, I had supposed that was a feature.

The problem I hit is if the manager is under control of BRY ('be salesperson'), it's hard to catch them in between actions to manually raise their pay before the action drops out of the owner's queue, and they're off to do something else. The businesses are usually at level 10 by the time I hire a manager, so they're pretty busy.  I suppose I could just cancel BRY on the manager and have him/her wait for the owner to trek across the lot to do the raise, but it does seem that the time between the pay suddenly becoming 'ridiculously underpaid' and the sim up and quitting is very short.

You don't need to physically bother the manager to raise his pay if you use the options on BRY itself to adjust his pay.

Well, yea, but see my problem message a couple up (last message on the previous page) -- the manager suddenly dropped from 'fairly paid' to 'ridiculously underpaid', and when I tried to use BRY to raise her salary enough, the raise-by-10 didn't work, and I couldn't get her up fast enough with the raise-by-5 to keep her from quiting.

It sounds like you're missing the fix that was part of Relevant Wages which fixed a corrupted value. Note that if you JUST promoted the manager, his base wage demands go up by +70, which will not register until the game refreshes its cache values.

Hmm, I thought I had the latest version in my game, but I'll re-download and refresh it.  And yea, that sounds like what happened -- I promoted the managers at the end of the previous session, so the jump in wages registered during the next session.

But why didn't BRY let me raise their wages +10 at a time?  When I clicked on that, it just went back to the previous menu without changing the wage. Or is that caused by the relevantwages corruption?


ETA: I re-downloaded relevantwages, and it's the same version I already had in my game (dated 04/05/07), so I don't think that was the problem.

Are you SURE it didn't allow you to use +10? Because that option is not a conditional option. Also, you can use it while the game is paused, so it doesn't require speed.

Yes -- I tried it multiple times, and all it did was return to the previous menu (the one with the employee's name) without changing her salary at all.  Clicking on +5 worked fine, and the menu went away after clicking on it. 

I did forget I could pause and it would still work, though.  :-[


ETA: Ok, it gets weirder -- I tried it out last night just to confirm that +10 wasn't working, and it still wasn't.  So I tried the rest of the options, and found that +15 doesn't work either.  Nor did any of the - options other than -1.  So the only ones that worked for me are +5, +1, and -1.  Everything else just returned to the previous menu without changing the employee's salary.

It is not possible to "return to the previous menu" as a BHAV, so you must simply be fatfingering your mouse. The behavior you describe is not physically possible to do in a BHAV.

And yet it happens.  I'd say I was fat-fingering if it happened once, but it happens every single time. And with multiple values, as I said in my addition.

Well, it'll be a while before I cycle around to a lot that owns a business again, so I shan't be running into this problem again for a while.  When I do, I'll be extra careful to click on the exact center of the value box, and see whether the problem is me or something else.  ;)

If it actually is happening, it's an issue unrelated to BRY itself, and represents either a bug in the core engine, a driver issue, or a hardware issue.

Yea, that's what I'm beginning to suspect, since no one else reported it.  So it could be the latest ATI drivers (7.6), which I upgraded to recently, or the latest mouse drivers (Logitech), which I just downloaded recently. My money right now is on the mouse, since it also has issues with clicking on the center button to change the view angle (as in, it doesn't work).

ETA: It was the mouse drivers -- a new version was posted about a week later and the problem is gone.

I may be a litle off, but it just ocurred to me how great the "asign work" funktion could be used. The "be janitor" option is good, but would it be to much to ask to include "be nanny" so we could use this fine tool to hire a nanny from the neighbourhood an even pay by hour a custom fee. Also "be entartainer" would be nice for clubs or even tell the employes of an brothel to do their job? ;-)

Be Nanny is a nonfunction because it is not possible by default to hire a sim to be a nanny, as visitors do not count for the purposes of avoiding the SS. Meanwhile, the nanny itself basically has little or no jobs of real importance.

The default game does not include any ability to carry out such a function. The only way such a thing can occur is through non-awesome third-party items. It is not our problem to figure out how these work and to make them function in businesses. Just leave the job unassigned.

well the is also no janitor without the mod, or is there?
my idea was something like: home bussines. hire someone. use BRY to tell him/her "be nanny", set salary. Then whenever you need a nany, summon an watch. But of course im not awesome so I´m not sure one would be able to leave the kids alone with such a nanyy, know thart you mention it...
nay, nothin non awesome. Just ACR, wich works great, but I would like to tell the employes to go be friendly with the customers.

There is a "Tidy Up" task. Also, Janitorial duties are a well-defined set of tasks that exist in the core game, and thus an AI routine can be written for it. Prostitution, on the other hand, lacks this sort of algorithmic specification to it.

ACR is non-Awesome. I don't have it, and there's no defined rule by what procedure should be performed. Thus, no algorithm defining this job.

A i get it. Then it may be easier to to it on the side of ACR, asking the wrong person then.

just noticed twojeffs is gone, thats what happens if one blinks... Is all his work to be considered non-awesome then?
Well it was worth a try.

Clearly, Twojeffs has failed us. You must not!

Don't underestimate your equipment, IIRC autosoc has an auto-romanticate option which would serve in a pinch.  Or, at least it used to.  I haven't used it in a long while.  I personally wouldn't want this, but there aren't many things in TS2 which cannot be beaten into submission by the big club of macrotastics + BRY.

However, BRY seems to be borken for servos.  Not sure whether it was the latest update or the one before, but it now sends servos to clean showers.  It only seems to happen if the shower is the second object in the cleaning queue or later, and oddly enough it doesn't happen with macro-clean; only with Be Farmer-directed maintenance.

As ever, I double-checked with only Awesome hacks and an otherwise empty DL folder.

REQUIRES:
autosoc.zip
autoyak.zip
bathroomusesyou.zip
macrotastics.zip
skillinator.zip

suggested or needed ?

Breakdown of requirements:

Autosoc: Necessary for on-lot socialization.
Autoyak: Necessary for off-lot (phone) socialization.
BUY: Necessary for hygiene and bladder handling.
Macrotastics: Provides the commands for BRY to use.
Skillinator: Merged with Macrotastics.

Small & irritating problem. I have food theives thanks to BRY. I have a restaurant come bookstore that is BRYed, and it's all well & good, except that bry is making two of my guys steal customers food & eat it rather than grab what's in their inventories or use the mini fridge provided.

Hunger is at about halfway when this happens, usually, although I have also seen it happen with hunger of 75% full or more.

I am running all eps + ffs + gls. The only food hacks I have are dizzy's & moragues even more filling muffins & single serve desserts.

That's strange. I thought there was code to explicitly exclude customer food from grabbage. I will look into this at the next opportunity.

   The only time i've seen BRY make my employees eat customer's food, is when the customers are done eating and there is food left on the plate.
   This happens when i send a playalbe on a date to another playable's owned business. 
   Once i get a restraraunt started, i rarely play that business lot tho, no Pets/BV.  I'll test and see if that happens for Seasons.

Noted. Will also disable the Ethiopian Manuever for employees of current lot, even if not currently played.

i brought it up because my servers were plonking down the customer's dinner then snatching it before they got a chance to eat it. While it's amusing to watch, I've lost a couple of stars over it.

   Just finished with the test, and i stand corrected.  I have no idea if it's BRY telling them or if it's on their own.  So far, it's been the Podium girl doing it, she's done it 3 times.  She grabbed the plate as soon as a server sets it down for the customer.  I've also seen her eat a bite, stand up, sit back down and eat the rest.  Twice now, the plate she started eating (with food remaining), has been left, ungrabable except with move_objects on, then using the StuckObjectRemover on the plate and the chair she had sat on.  Owner has several plates and platters of food in his inv, but none have pulled food out.

According to the code, this shouldn't happen. Employees will not macro-eat anything that is at a customer-reserved table flagged with a dining controller. And I haven't seen it in my game. Perhaps they are doing so in the occasional moments Maxis-Stupid manages to assert itself.

Employees keep getting stuck while macro>caffienate-ing. I had to delete Brandon and summon him back. Error log attached.

I must be missing something here.

My employees won't eat at all if I just have a kitchen set up in the employee lounge, and if I try and just serve food or use a buffet, they spend more time eating than doing anything else.  I've had more than one employee go on a perpetual break between eating, peeing and caffinating...and never going back to work!

Am I doing it wrong or do they just not know how to feed themselves?  My owned sims have no trouble eating at all, they just make a meal from the fridge.  But managers and employees don't.

currently, I'm just placing snapdragons all over creation to compensate, but I'd rather not use magical daisies for my "realistic" neighborhoods...

I have never seen this problem, but I will continue to investigate.

I'm getting queue droppage on Business...be Salesperson. It's not really frequent; it happens perhaps every 2 sim hours. This has struck since installing FreeTime, and I am up-to-date.

I've had it happen in BV, but only with certain sims.  In that case it seemed like if someone came on the lot they were close friends with or very attracted to (at least 2 bolts), they'd drop out of the sales actions to chat or something. Real pain when I send a family out to work the business, and the one I'm not paying attention to goes 'off the reservation', so to speak.

I have just recently started using hacks and stuff from MATY, and I love most of them, they seem to be able to do more, and replace some things that are out here from others sites. I have in the past been using allot from Sim Wardrobe. the gardening controller he has is a great addition, But has problems keeping the employees busy, they take off, and wanter around, sometimes getting lose and forgetting about their work, So When I found this BRY, I thought super, this is perfect, and for the most part it really rocks. But there is a few problems.

Number one, the employees will not harvest anything, they take care of the plants, and do a wonderful job of that, they don't get lost, and they don't goof off. Having them stay on task, and going on breaks, and trying to keep their moods up on their own helps allot.

The other problem stems from the fact that they will not clean up after themselves, I have one set to janitor, and they will take out the trash, but will not clean bathrooms, or clean plates off of tables. I also use Sim Wardrobes auto fill buffet and when that food spoils, they refuse to clean it up. their environment will totally suck, with plates, and food oozing green, and they will still just pace, and do nothing untill somone else either drops edible food some ware, or drops something in the trash.

I thought I would be able to get rid of a few of the other hacks, Like DMA Stuff, the DMA Clock that will keep the employees needs in the green is nice, but I wanted to have them actually fend for themselves a little, but its not working out too good yet. Also, I have been using SW-Timeclock, it has the ability to set shifts, so that you can rotate the employees around to lessen the stress on them, and they will still do their duties, and with BRY It would work great, But its just not doing well. I think it might be all about FT, As even the built in Tidy function of OFB will not make any of them clean up the plates.

And, when having a fishing pond and setting like only 2 or 3 of them fishing, dont even try to get them to do anything else, you cannot even unassign them from the task as they will not stop, you cant talk to them, only way to break them away is to send them home. I took out the pond, then brought them back, set them to garden, and put the pond back in, they dropped and ran back to the pond, and we where back to the ignoring the owner again.. I tried to get them to do many things, but will not do anything but focus on the pond. I even fired them, then rehired them, and boom. right back at the pond. I had to actually get new employees to get them off the pond.
I don't have any logs to send in, ans all logs are blank, So Im not sure how to get any logs on the issue, But it is repeatable.. Soo, is this an issue with me? or the game? or something else I may have installed?

Thanks for your time, and energy in this, It is a perfect idea..

You must choose MATY BRY or SimWardrobe stuff.  They don't play nice together.

I Understand that, But without the gardening controller from SW, the employees will not harvest... anything, even with gold badges, Only the owner will harvest., and nobody will clean up the plates...

Are you SURE that you deleted all the SW stuff, and deleted the groups.cache file?  BRY harvests and cleans for me.

I will try that, As I didnt delete any of the stuff, just didnt use it, I will remove them, and try again, thanks..

Employees cannot harvest anything because any item harvested by an employee will, by default, go into their own inventory, and thus simply be pilfered. In order to enable employee harvesting, you must install the Fishing and Harvesting Fix. This will enable employees to harvest when BRY detects it is installed.

Really? That's not what I see. Be sure that your bathrooms are ACCESSIBLE to your staff. Male/female only bathrooms require an employee service route, generally a door punched between them or into the employee lounge. Otherwise your janitors get stuck trying to enter that room.

Non-Awesome.

Non-Awesome.

I will look into a manual-plate-disposer. The game seems not to place enough priority on plate disposal, anyway.

I have not observed this behavior, but you can try hitting "Unassign" first. That should wipe their queues when done.

Ok, thank you for that fix. I didnt know that the items would go into the employees backpack, as with the SW Stuff it did not. And I kinda liked the fishing thing where customers fish would end up in mine.. :) quick way to get fish...

Ok, I know SW Stuff is Non-Awesome, But it was working kinda for me for awile, and some of his stuff is good to have like the packing stations for veggies, and fish, I hope I dont have to get rid of them all to make this work...

Thanks for the quick replys, and help, Im still working on it.. :)

Ok, I finally just dumped out every hack I had except stuff from DC, and MATY, well, I'm guessing that had allot to do with my issues, although there where no hack conflicts, I'm guessing there was some arguing going on and confusing my poor sims, and their workers... as I am now getting better results from the janitor, actually cleaning, and even picking up plates.

After reading a few pages in this thread, I also found a few tips that helped with other problems I was having.

See, I took out the trash bin for the lot, and had only one trash can, and multiple compost bins, as I was using compost to fertilize the garden plots, I do this at my home lot also, and everyone drops everything to the trash, then takes it to the compost bins, and thus, I get compost. But to make it effective, you need to also not have a dishwasher, well, that was proving disastrous as all the cups from the espresso machine where going to the floor, and forgotten about, well, I put back the trash bin, took out the compost bins, added a dishwasher, and boom, plates go away... My janitor is actually cleaning up real good now.

Ok, 2 more minor issues,
On the matter of food, and eating. I have the kitchen set up(employees/owner/s only) I have a stove, fridge, counters, and dishwasher. Some of my employees do not have a cooking skill at all, will they still cook for themselves? or will they recruit someone that can/will? Or do I need to set something else for them to get food? I'm not trying to be rude, But Ive not had much luck finding any good setup plans for all of this awesomeness.. so I'm going by trial and error...

Next, regarding the BUY,
The set up on this is a little confusing to me, I'm not sure why, it all looks simple.
My bathrooms are set up like this.
Mens/Womens separate bathrooms, a door between them so the janitor has access to both, As they are only for employees/lot owners, I have the TP set to reject visitors. I have the stalls right next to each other in each bathroom, and in each bathroom the config for one matches the other one, But since the mens/womens stalls are far enough apart the TP Rolls do not get the config from the other bathroom, which is good. Now, I set to reject men from womens, and women from the mens rooms, But I'm seeing that lot owners will only use one stall, in the womans bathroom, it doesn't matter if they are men or not, they still use the womans room, now they go through the connecting door, but enter and exit through their gender based doors. So, I'm wondering is there a more detailed setup guide for it some ware? Its working better now than it was, But I'm still trying to get it just right.

Caffinating is a cool idea for energy, As I really would like to not use the PYP, for anyone, But they wont go get any until their energy is below 1/4 or less, is that a feature? can it be adjusted up a bit maybe? I'm still having employees going orange to red.

Anyway, I love this product, and this site for all the help it actually gives people.. Myself included..
Great job...

If the owner, manager or employees carry sacklunch in inventory, the employees will consume those. OFB-macrotastics is capable of finding a pretty wide range of cookables, but if the employee simply cannot prepare ANY food at all, and thus there is nothing to eat (or any other unresolveable motive condition arises which prevents work), Macro/BRY falls back on the dismiss/resummon to restore the employee to working condition. If your employee starts to leave the lot as a result, this is what is happening. Just ignore it and let it do its thing. It is smarter than you.

I have noticed that the business owners, if able to enter the room at all by any means, seem to ignore the gendering settings. I have not figured out WHY, but I have deemed the behavior harmless and given it a lower priority for investigation, since they never get stuck doing it. They seem to just be picking the closest bathroom by proximity search, and hey, it works.

hehe, gee thanks... :)

Ok, i agree with the owner thing, so im off to check some of the other things I just got downloaded. You have much more available that I had originally seen, I just got your DC, and will now see what all the goodies are about..

i've notice that on some shops, the visitor are always the same...
on a specific case, i've made an electronic shop, that is controlled by a townie, on that shop, there are always just 2 persons and always the same, did you have the same behavior ?

Sameness of visitation can be caused by sadorandom loading (EAxis), manually limiting your clientele to be so specific that those are the only two that fit (combo of noplayables or Customer Selector), or underpopulation in your neighborhood. If the shop is "controlled by a townie", then nobody owns it and BRY and Customer Selector do nothing, so blame EAxis.

ye ye.... another item to be added on the "blame EAxis for.."  >:(

Yeah, necromancy, mhmm. Sorry.

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if this is a problem with BRY.  I have a sim who owns an art gallery.  Customer accessible area contains merchandise and two public restrooms containing only toilet and sink.

Staff-only area in the back contains staff bathroom with toilet and shower, high-comfort sofa, Kick The Cheat, counter tops, waste basket, espresso machine and mini-fridge. 

The owner is the only worker, he has no employees. He has the gold business badges. He has food in his inventory, to wit; a platter of hamburgers, four plates chef salad and a pizza. 

BRY has him running around selling, restocking, cashering, BUYing, caffeinating, kicking, no problems. But he doesn't eat without my input.

BRY only makes him eat if I get the plate/platter out of his inventory and place it on a counter top. Then he'll go eat.
He doesn't go for the fridge unless I click it and tell him to feed himself.
He's been in the deep red hungerwise and still didn't eat, until I took the food out of inventory and put in on the counter, or directed him to feed himself out of the fridge.

From what I understand, they're supposed to pillage their inventories for food, but it's not happening. Did I miss something? Do I need to put in a dining table and chairs?  I'm at a bit of a loss here.

It's probably because of the mini-fridge. The sims can't cook proper meals with it-and even if you have food in inventory the sim will keep trying to utilise the fridge. Put in a full-sized fridge and see if it makes a difference.

Ah. 'kay, I'll give that a try and see if he can feed himself.

Edit: Big fridge works. In reference to comment below, I figured if the big fridge didn't work, I'd go without; but it's handy to have one on the lot in case I forget to fill his 'lunch box'.

Or take the fridge out completely, and the sim will also take the food from their own inventory.

Two unrelated issues:

1) I have a sim who has a home business:  an art gallery in the front part of his home.  The front part contains saleable stuff and bathrooms.  There is only one door to the rest of the house and it is locked to all but members of the household.  When guests come over, the business is closed and the door is unlocked.

The problem is that visitors tend to come up and Complain, even though the business isn't running right then.  It's annoying. Especially at a wedding.

2) I have read all the documentation, and I'm still not sure what "Assign/. . .Unmanned Owner" does.  Sometimes I visit an owned community lot business, and I've noticed that only the owner is there--not other members of the household, even if they were assigned to do various jobs before they left.  This means I suddenly don't have anybody manning the register--or restocking items, or what have you.  I don't understand this, as when I'm playing as the owner with BRY, I can bring members of the household with me, and the employees do sensible stuff (nobody at the register?  Restock for a while!)  Must I hire more employees so there is one for every job?

I'm sure it's something in the way I have it configured and/or set up:  I'd just like to know what the correct setup is, so I can change it.  My only business-related hacks are the Awesomeware ones:  I have the most recent for my game (BV, Mac, no official patch yet.)

PB

Assign/Unnmanned Owner lets you set what job the owner will have in the situation you described -- the owner will be the cashier when you visit the lot with another playable sim, for example, if you assign the unmanned owner to 'cashier'.  Family members don't count as employees, unfortunately, so they won't be on the lot when you visit it.  You would have to have at least one real employee assigned to a job on the lot for there to be someone other than just the owner on the lot when you visit it.

That's very helpful.  Off to hire some more feckless staff, or ruin sensible Sims' lives by Hiring them.

PB

I find that if you have just one sim visiting to grab something and run from another playable's store, it's not a big deal if only they are running the place. Typically your playable visitor is going to pick up everything they need before the other customers are done browsing.

Also, the BRY controller allows you to reassign the owner on the fly, while you are visiting with another family.

Example:

The head monk owns an off-site produce market.  The produce purchased by controllable visitors isn't removed from Brother Ezekiel's inventory unless it is restocked before they leave the lot, so when I set up the market, I assign Brother Zeke to restocker with the BRY.  When one of my playable families visits the market, they pick up what they need and once Zeke is finished restocking, I click the BRY to change his assignment to be cashier so they can check out.  That reassignment however, isn't sticky, so the next family who visits the market will find him assigned to restocker once again at the beginning of their visit.

It's good that BRY makes it possible for visitors to change settings.  I actually did that a bit.  This is a bit unusual, as the lot is owned by a legacy household, and so of course other families can't shop there.  It's a giant beach lot with a pirate ship and a lot of other free stuff.  The business part is  what amounts to a fairly small hut with overpriced souvenirs and a bar.  I figure it's kosher as long as the playable visitors just enjoy the beach and don't buy anything, but I'd like for the business to be running reasonably efficiently in the background. Anyway, I hired a few simselves as peons.

Is there something specific that makes visitors to a closed home business Complain?  Are the business characteristics of the lot primary even when closed?  I have noticed that walkbys tend to come up and browse the art work even when the business is closed.  Through the wall, which is freaky.

PB

If you don't assign a job, the playable sim will do absolutely nothing intelligent and just wander aimlessly until it pees itself from shitty EAxis AI. Also, the business will be nonfunctional if any jobs need to be performed. Note that Macro-Sales runs much less aggressively when the business is not being played, so as not to deplete the shelves of materiel your playable may be coming to requisition, and drain the employee of power needed to perform secondary functions.

This is why I stopped playing home businesses, except as venues.  The business part never really seems to close to visitors.  They are complaining because they can't find anything to browse.  ('Cause the store is ummm... closed?!)  I think it's similar to the mechanism that causes townies to complain when you've fallen behind on restocking.  I don't remember walk-bys who wanted to browse through the walls, but maybe that's only because most of my houses tend to be built up on foundations.  I'm sure if they could, they would have peered through my walls, too.  :D

As far as I know, none of the Awesome hacks fix the screwed up AI that keeps pushing the browse interaction on visitors to home businesses.  :-\

I am currently running several family owned business.  I want the family members that live on the lot to automatically work at preset times on the lot.  Currently I use this hack to make family members fish, farm, etc.  I also use the macrotastic to make them clean.  But I would like a time component added to this and the macrotastic so that from 8:00 am - 4:00 pm Mon - Fri a particular family would run around doing a task.  Cleaning the house, farm, etc.  Like a real job.  In addition, would it be possible to add a sales feature to buisness runs you hack as well.

The BRY controller is designed for efficiency, and scheduling tasks rather than performing them as the controller performs them now would be inefficient and potentially destructive. Example: farming. What if a set of plants is being watered, and the watering action is cut off by the end of the schedule, so not all of the plants are watered?

As to the "sales feature", if you mean "Business.../Be Salesman", that exists.

One thing that may be confusing the n00b is that "Business.../Be Salesman" won't appear unless there's currently a customer on the lot with a sales meter. This makes sense, but when I first went looking for that and couldn't find it, I thought BRY was broken. Fortunately, I tried again when there was a customer and discovered how it works.

That's not true -- I've setup my sims as "be salesman" as soon as they arrived on the lot, before the business was even open.  It should always be available, at least if the sim in question has a bronze (or maybe silver) sales badge.

It's Macro-Skillinate-Salesmanship that requires a customer with an active sales meter. :)

Maybe the badges have some bearing, then, because I definitely have had a missing "be salesman" option that appeared later.

In my experience, Business-Be Salesperson appears once the sim has earned a gold badge. It's usually the first thing I queue up when the owner arrives at the business, even before it's been opened and employees have been summoned. But before gold badge, they can only skillinate on sales, which doesn't appear as an option until there is at least one customer with a buy bar.

Employees are different, however: they can be assigned to sales even without having earned a bronze badge.

Sims running on BRY macros with restock badges do not restock bookcases (which are not sold as pieces of furniture, but are holders of sellable books, like the magazine rack) unless explicitly instructed to.  They are restocking other things on their own just fine.

Do sims on EAxis-restock do it?

EAxis made a restock macro?  Hold on, I'll try it.

ETA:  Nope.

I recall having a bookcase in one of my businesses, and it could never be restocked -- but it disappeared one day, and the 'out of stock' sign appeared in its place.  I don't think you could ever restock them -- you just sell books until its empty, then put a new bookcase in its place.

While it is possible to assign untrained employees to run the EAxis routines for sales, they are basically useless while doing that, as non-gold sales is pretty much completely ineffectual on its own. As such, there's no point in making a macro to handle that because uselessness is uselessness.

I've not had any trouble restocking bookcases manually.

Fascinating.  How many books are in a bookcase?  Does it vary by expense?

Don't know -- never kept count.  It's a lot though; more than 10, maybe more than 20.  Took a while for the bookcase to be empty.

I am trying to download this wonderful hack but every time I click on the autosoc file to download it I am taken to an error page. Is it still available? I was able to download all the other required things and the business controller itself, just not the autosoc.

Autosoc is included as part of the macrotastics.zip file now, since you need macrotastics for it to work (and for this hack to work as well).

Employees assigned to work as baristas do not seem to be treated the same way as other employees by BRY - they are not made to use the bathroom, eat, caffeinate, kick stuff, etc. when their needs are low, and, in addition to what they are actually being paid by their employers, they receive $16 every 5 sim minutes or so from a mysterious barista-paying entity which IIRC has been around since it became possible to work as a barista on non-owned community lots in nightlife.  Can this be fixed?

BRY handles baristas just fine, but it's a "constant" action, so BRY won't kick in until the employee aborts for motives normally. Cannot verify existence of Barista Paycheck Bug, either.

I've had the BRY for some time now, and it used to work wonderfully with the SW timeclock (I had two shifts come in, one in the morning one at night, to tend, water, and harvest my plants)  I don't know when but BRY wont let my employees garden anymore.  Ive gotten rid of all my SW hacks, and installed the new version of BRY, but my employees won't garden.  They tidy just fine, but wander around aimlessly when there are clearly plants that need tending.  Where did I go wrong?

Did you set them to Farm?

Yes sir I did.  They take a few steps here, a few steps there, a few more steps in a third direction.  No plant tending occurs.

This sounds like normal "business-be farmer" activity on a lot where there are no plants that currently need tending.  Make sure you do not have a "perfect plants" or "perfect gardens" hack installed.  If all your plants are perfect all the time, there is no need to garden, and no farming or gardening can be done.  Your sims will continue to pace up and down with no purpose.  (You can actually give them something else to do while they wait for plants to grow, without dropping the "be farmer" thing from the queue.)

I don't have any hacks like that in my game.  I waited a while, and employees still wandered aimlessly when there were plants which needed tending before they arrived, and when plants grew weeds while they were on the lot.

I seached "server" and "clean" and nothing came up, so I assume nobody raised this issue.

So in a restaurant (home) business, the employee assigned as a server does not clean up plates after the customers are done. I observed for a long period of time; he would rather idle in the kitchen or go to clean the toilets than cleaning up the plates. When I assign my owner/family member to be a server, they clean up plates when there is no other urgent tasks. On the plus side, I'm happy to see the employee runs to greet customers (as the podium guy) in between serving.  Is it because I assigned him to be the host for a few times and he remembered that skill?

I use the latest BRY, 09-1-2.

No, I think it's actually an EAxis bug that prevents non-fambly members from cleaning up plates, because apparently, people complained that they used to do this constantly on community lots, so now they can't. It's not BRY-related.

Would it be possible to make cashiering more attractive to sims with the appropriate badges when there are customers waiting to be rung up?  I don't know if you changed something recently, but now it seems that employees will not cashier even if they have gold register badges unless they are explicitly told to.  My playable will cashier, but she seems to think it is more important to restock all of the shelves than to ring up customers before they throw down their bags and leave.

Also, when I wrote this:


I in fact meant bar tenders not baristas.  (I know, I r smrt linguist.)  Also, under more detailed scrutiny, I notice that the $16 is actually going to the business owner, not the bar tender - major DNW.  On a slightly related note, I dismissed said bar tender for several consecutive days, and then deleted the bar.  A few days later I called him back in and attempted to reassign him with the hammer and sickle - the pie menu on the H&S remained unchanged (with no options greyed out) and the business info continued to list the employee as the bar tender.  Is this BRY related, or did I break it by deleting the bar?

Cashiers treat cashiering as first priority. So if they're not cashiering as their next task after whatever they are doing now, something is wrong. I will ponder increasing the lookahead on the job, though.

Unrelated. What did you reassign him to? If there's no bar, the bartender option will no longer appear, even though he retains the job assignment until you give him a new one.

Thanks.  All of the sims in question were primarily assigned to sales, but I do recall in the not-too-distant past that sims assigned to sales with register badges would still be pretty prompt about ringing up customers if it needed doing.


First I tried to reassign him as a barista, and then simply to unassign him.  Neither worked, so I eventually just dismissed him and hired some other talentless peon.

A sim will always perform its primary task FIRST. So your salespeople will continue to perform sales, and only do secondary jobs when no one can be salesed to. Your mismanagement of personnel is not my fault. :P

Can't reproduce this issue, I was able to reassign bartenders just fine.

True. If you want them to always ring up customers when there is one, you should assign them to cashier, and they will ring, and then run to restock, sell, whatever, and then run back to ring. This works very well for me.

Never worked for me.  Cashiers seem chaiined to their stations, sales badges and all.  Maybe they need gold ones before they can be allowed to sales people as a cashier?  Ah well, I'll just go back to assigning everyone to restock, which seems to work right anyway.

Lazy sims don't automatically perform secondary tasks because it takes them far too long to get anywhere, so the risk of being away from their actual station for 3 hours to go someplace is too high. Hire some sims with a better work ethic and leave the slackers to starve.

I will keep that in mind in future.

Employees are borken.  Cashiers will go to the cash register and restockers will move away from the portal, but then they will just stand there twitching in and out of idle animations without actually doing anything, even when there is cashiering/restocking that needs to be done.  If I shift-click->force error->reset them, they will do one task (e.g. restock one item, ring up one customer) and then go back to standing around uselessly.  Unassigning and reassigning them via the hammer and sickle has this effect as well.  It does not seem to matter if my playables are there as business owners or shoppers.  The Businiess...Be Restocker/etc. options for the playable sims do not seem to be broken.

In order to preempt any accusations of tight pants, I ran HCDU (which turned up no unexpected conflicts), and then took BRY out of my downloads and went to one of the problem businesses, where everything was peachy (at least as far as employees actually doing their damn jobs was concerned).

Bug was already fixed in latest update.

Ahh, must have missed that one, thanks.

I'm setting up a Victorian brothel and used the customer selector to allow straight AND male AND rich. Then I used the phone to hire employees. I could only get males. I tried hiring and firing. Still only males. I took the business owner sim home and tried there. I got an even(ish) balance of genders for hiring.

I haven't gone back to the business lot to try turning off the customer selector yet, I was just wondering whether this might be related. I will get back and test, but not today.

Definitely unrelated, the customer selector does not influence the hireable pool. Although by default, you only get one crappy selection of a small number of hireables at any given time. Shiftclick and hit "Reset" to see a new selection if the current pool is exceptionally suck or the cache is old.

Reset on what? The hiring window/sims? I'll give it a go. Cheers.

I'd presume he meads the item the thread is about.

Didn't know it could do that. I'll have to try it next time I run a business. I'd been resorting to hiring tours  to get a large selection  of hireables in a short period of time.

(Each community lot you visit will have a different selection of Sims hireable by cell phone (or computer, if the lot has one). This selection won't change until midnight passes on the home lot, so you can go to one lot, evaluate the hireables,  go to another lot, evaluate the hireables there,  and if nobody beats what you found on the first lot, you can return to that lot and hire from the pool you had when you were there first.)

I get an "too many iterations" error when I try to sell via the bry object.
Only occurs when the sim's got some more items in its inventory like 1000 or 2000.
Am I supposed to give some (300 or so) items to another sim and sell the items with that one?
Or is there the possibility to fix that error somehow?

I have been running the DC, with one or two hacks taken out-the clothing thing and no stray respawn, for the last couple of months since I started playing the game again.  I had to reinstall my cc after a major problem but now I don't have the business option on a home lot, the only lot I've tried, with plants that do need attention.  As I recall, and I am new to your awesomeness, if there are seasons plants on the lot that option should be there even if it's not a home business.  I have all that is needed for the BRU, autoyak etc.  The one thing I am unsure of is the statement about needing all previous FFS controllers, if I had them before in my game and they are missing now I have no idea where I got them from and how to find them now.  If eveything needed is in the DC, then could it be that it's because the plants in this instance are not maxis plants but custom ones, Mary Jane from Pandora in this case?  I presume, as it's the way it was working for me before, that it's ok to put your DC into a subfolder?  Sorry for being a nippy sweetie, the DC is great and I don't know how I survived the game so long without it.  Thanks for all the fab work and especially for letting us divvies have a shot.

Yes, your problem is that you have no recognizeable plants, so the option does not appear because it is unable to locate any recognized plants. Strictly speaking, the check is by category, so if it can't spot the custom ones, they suck and are badly made, and probably don't comply with any of the rules because Pandora sucks.

Fair enough, thanks

Just wanted to say thanks!
The error does not appear any more.

So.. thanks ;)

Is there any way to do one of two things:
1. make the mod auto-sell the produce when charging a sim to "be farmer"? I've got six sims with 450 eggplant and it takes about 10 minutes per sim to delete them all from their inventory.
2. delete all of a category in a sim's inventory? As above, can I delete all 450 eggplant in one keystroke?

Thanks

There is an option on the hammer and sickle object called "Sell Fish and Produce" or something to that effect that does just that.

Using BRY, this sim (Ajay) was supposed to be making toy robots.  He started doing this (I think he was on a coffee break) after he'd been working for a while, throws them so constantly it's hard to pause to dismiss him via BRY, then, when summoned back, started throwing them again.
Is it BRY, my game, or me?  It looks like it refers to BUY.  He's not assigned a uniform since he just works in the back making robots, and the other robot makers haven't produced any errors.

Your sim seems to have corrupted outfit data. Using the clothing tool to dress him in something else, like formal, then switch him back.

I have a some questions:

1.  What determines whether customers react positively to sales socials?  Does it have to do with business loyalty, business level, presence/absence of BotB award/good/bad reviews, price, sales skill of the salesman, charisma of the salesman, etc., or is it just a function of LTR/STR like other socials?
2.  Is there a numerically determinable point (based on the above determinants) after which sales socials become impossible?  It certainly seems that way, as I frequently have one person in the store who repeatedly rejects BRY-induced sales socials, until at last, after many lost stars, I simply boot them with the controller.
3.  Is it possible for BRY to check for that eventuality, and have the salesmen stop harassing that person and/or simply ask them to pay for their things and leave?