More Awesome Than You!

i've been waiting for a game like this every since i posted that topic about receptionist desk. but anyways, okay i made a hotel but it seems that the front desk (or whatever you wanna call it) is not functional or it doesnt have anyone standing by it and checking in the guest for the rooms. how the hell am i supposed to run a hotel if i cant get that front desk to function? any ideas? help? what am i supposed to do?

okay i used the changelotzoning hotel cheat code and its works fine. but my main concern is that there is no NPC to cover the check in desk.. what do i have to do to have that NPC? also do i need to enter the cheat everytime i play the game?

You must have one registration desk and one hotel door on the lot to have it function properly. The hotel door must be placed correctly (the small plate facing out). 

Also, if you included a restaurant but don't have NL installed, that restaurant will be just an empty room.

Have you used a community lot to build it? Residential lots cannot be converted into hotels. It needs the community phone (and bin I suppose) to function properly.

yes emma,

 it is on a comm. lot but everytime i use the changelotzoning hotel cheat code there is no NPC by the check-in desk.

Are you able to book the hotel for a Sims vacation?  Have you sent any Sims to the hotel to check in?  If so, what happens?

Changing the lot zoning is not going to make any NPC pop up at the desk; they don't appear until the lot is actually played.

nothing happens.. idk b/c im running it as a bussiness... maybe thats why its not going they way its plan?

aww man.. BV SUCKS for not making sims run their own hotel! haha.. thanks anyways

I think it's actually that you can have a hotel running in any subhood, but you can't run one as an owned business anywhere.

Are you sure you are using the 'chagelotzoning hotel' and then exiting and SAVING the lot to fix the change?

i think so... but can i still run it as a business?

This has been asked repeatedly in the run up to BV, and the official answer has always been the same.  You cannot run a hotel as a business.  And since they were promising a lack of a feature rather than a feature, the Maxoids were right about this.

With a community lot sleeping hack you can mock up a hotel on your own terms as a venue, but it won't work like an official hotel.  Sorry, but them's the breaks.

May I suggest you to "trick" the simulator?

Choose any hotel you want, click on it, and package it to a file. You will find it in the Packaged Lots folder.

Enter the Packaged Lot folder (My Documents/EA/TS2/Packaged Lots), and change the lot's name.

Install the renamed packaged lot.

Enter the game, put it on a free space, redecorate it as you like (buy and build mode), and package the lot again.

Delete the present renamed from the lot bin, and move there the redecorated lot. Now you have a hotel lot, which you can put in any vacation hood you want.

and where can i download the simulator?

The Sim(ulator)s 2

Edit: Actually, it'd be Sim(ulation)s, wouldn't it? Simulations within the greater simulator. Whatever. Sims 2 = the simulator. SimCity = the other simulator. SimAnt = the best simulator.

Lol, you have it - it's the game itself. I suggested you to outwit it...:). I do it in all my community lots, like Bowling, 50's cafe, University Gym, etc. I chose the ones I want to visit, and then paste them instead of the original ones.

haha.. um okay... im going to sound stupid. but i dont understand.. haha

There's an Inn and a Hotel in the pre-built Maxis lots in the bin. Try those first.

okay! thanks.

I went in and pillaged all the lots in the prebuilt vacation destinations yesterday (moved them to house bin) for rebuilding purpose. They are all inte usual bin, every single hotel. Do I need to rezone them with the cheat to hotels after redoing them?

I am still playing around with the various ways of doing things,so I am not 100% sure. You might need to change the lotzoning to Community first, to enable you to alter anything, then you will have to change it back to Hotel when you are done.

Nope; just enable the dorm building cheat in build mode and you can make any alterations you like to the hotels (except maybe alterations to the actual building itself).

with the dorm cheat you can tear down the entire building if you want...  :D


I spent app. 12 hours yesterday 'remodeling' every freaking vacation hotel that was already placed in all 3 vacation subhoods (except for the couple I just bulldozed) and editing the vacation community lots  :P  Most of my hotels now have only 2 suites because why on earth would I want a bunch of suites for vacation townies.


my next step will be building new ones (hotels and community) to replace the ones on the huge lots because I woke up this morning knowing I will not enjoy taking my sims to those huge lots.   ::)   I like playable lots, something maxis/ea dosen't know how to build.

What happens when you replace the hotel doors with regular doors?  Can your sims sleep in those rooms even if you don't reserve them?  Although hotel lots are so laggy that I can't bear sleeping in the hotel, I just use maxmotives so they can get back to having fun at a normal speed.  This is the only place I have ever used maxmotives, normally I consider it too cheaty.

Hm. Now that's an idea. Make a 1x1 room with a hotel door. Check in for all of $1$25, then sleep in the room next to it that has a normal door. You'd have issues with sims bogarting the potty, but apparently some have had issues with that already. Must try.

Just plop a BUY controller in all the bathrooms.

no clue, I got rid of almost all of the extra rooms, mostly by getting rid of the whole second floor *laughs*  At one place, I turned 1 room/suite into a TV/chess room and I put a pool table in another, switched the doors to archs. At a fancy beach hotel, I got rid of the second floor and turned one suite into a TV room.

I got rid of all the TVs in the suites, in every single hotel that had them.


I hate lag. If you haven't already then I suggest going into all those vacation lots and trimming them down. You won't believe how much stuff is on them. On some of the Island lots, there are flowers and bushes under the small trees, I never knew they were even there until i started deleting trees.

I actually had lag on some of the vacation lots in build mode and it always cleared up after I deleted a ton of 'extra' stuff, like plants/trees/fences. so I hope that is a sign that playing those lots will be better now.

I got rid of both of the 'Ruins' on the Island, made a 2x2 lot called "Monkey Ruins" and stuck the monkey fountain thing there for the memento, with a couple other things (bathrooms, food stand and stuff). The maxis/ea lots look really nice but suck to play IMO   ;)   In time, I will go back and dress up my Monkey Ruins a bit more (or redo it on a slightly bigger 2x3 lot). IMO, smaller lots are easier to make look nice and they play better.  Big/Huge lots always need tons of stuff just so they don't look empty.

That's a really good point.  Who cares where all those townies are sleeping?  Let them find their own accommodations!  :)  I really should do something similar.

Does anybody know how the pricing per suite is determined?  Is it based on the number of beds/type of beds/size of suite/environment score?  Or is it just random?

Karen

one two-square room with nothing in it (I'm talking $1 walls & floors & that's it) costs $25 a night. I know this because I needed to make my caravan park (well, beachside camping ground) realistic & playable as a hotel lot.

I was wondering about how the pricing per suite is determined also. I noticed in some of the 'cheaper' hotels that cheaper furniture was used, some I replaced with much more expensive stuff but haven't yet had a chance to play again. I'm hoping to see a big price increase since I'd like to make some nice small very expensive Hotels and some small crappy very cheap Hotels.

I haven't checked the guide about it yet though, not sure if it says anything about it.

Probably determined like the bills at a Uni dorm are, by the value of the contents divided by the number of rooms.

BTW, someone on insim posted a mini-hotel that looks pretty good.  Haven't downloaded it yet, but http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=60983

ok, the guide says

"A hotel's rooms are priced individually based on their size and the value of their contents. The bigger the room and the more expensive the objects, the more the room will cost to rent each day.

note: A hotel's Simoleon rating is based on the average daily rate of all its rooms."


sounds right from what I noticed in the different hotels I edited.

That makes sense.  Thanks.

So true.  I built a rental home that functions as a hotel.  Just tossed a registration desk in a small building at the edge of the lot, then proceeded to build the very nice home, placing the required Solidity door on the side so it didn't detract from the overall aesthetics.  It is decorated beautifully, has three bedrooms, three baths, and a large kitchen.  Waterfront of course.  Plus a fence to keep out the riffraff.  Only problem is that the daily rental is about $4,200.  Am using it for my very well heeled Sims but I'll probably toss a few more beds in the rooms and use it for my YAs' spring break playground.  Just have to remember to include a keg and other important accoutrements.

I plan to build a couple more private rental homes, but much smaller to get the rental price down.  I hate the existing hotels and my younger families don't have the cash to buy vacation homes, so "renting" is a good deal for them. 

Okay sharpen your sticks ... what exactly is the cheat to use to modify existing hotels? I have a feeling I am going to need it ...

Thanks in advance,

Cass :)

See, that's a lie. A hotel's "Simoleon rating" is determined by how many times you press $ while typing in the description. Period.

I use the dainty delicate technique of just blowing them up and starting fresh. 

If you want to modify a hotel, bring up the cheat window and key in changelotzoning community.  Save and exit to the neighborhood.  Reenter the lot and do your building thing and when your masterpiece is done, return to the cheat window and key in changelotzoning hotel.  Save and exit to the hood.

Just don't ditch the registration desk or the hotel door or it won't function.

Ah-ha! It was the save and exit I wasn't getting! Thank you so much!

Take this as a warning children ... don't Sim on muscle relaxants!

Cass :)

The dorm building cheat also works fine if you don't want to actually change the zoning of the hotel.  I don't remember it off the top of my head (boolprop dormenabledchanges or something like that), and don't have access to my game machine right now, but a quick search will turn it up here.

Note that the dorm building cheat works even when the hotel is occupied, so your rich sims can 'donate' an espresso machine (or whatever) to the lot while they're there.  I use that one so much that I have it aliased in my userstartup.cheat file. It comes in handy for plopping a BUY controller in the bathroom of the rooms the sims are staying in.

The hotels I pillaged from the standard vacation hoods, ended up in the "common" lot bin, but were still hotels when I put them down in the new custom hood. No need to change any lot zoning.

okay i've tried the "changelotzoning community" and the "changelotzoning hotel" cheat code.. its works fine.. now i can run a hotel.. but the problem is that i cant save.. any help with that?

I'm not sure how to say this any clearer, as it's been said earlier: it isn't in the game mechanics to run a hotel as an OFB business. You aren't going to get it to save.

I did something similar, with bookshelves, but they were not there the next time I had sims visit that hotel. I think the only way to add items permanently is to edit the hotel from neighbourhood view.

To those people who deleted hotel bedrooms because they didn't want townies staying there (and who does), I have these observations.  I imagine Maxis built the hotels with lots of bedrooms because you can take up to 8 people on holiday with you when you go and your hotels will need at least eight beds to accommodate the maximum number.  I realised this last night when I was making a hotel (a nice pagoda) for my 8-member family to stay it.  With little areas for eating food and ensuite bathrooms, TVs and wardrobes, it takes a lot of room.  Also, FYI, you don't get any holiday-makers if you use the clean templates before you generate the holiday hoods - it works just like the dorms, lots of empty rooms that stay empty.

Actually, that is good as it shows that the hotel is resetting properly after a sim leaves vacation and before a new sim comes to stay :)

I thought of that while making a base template hotel (rather then build a few, I made one and used copies of it). It has 2 bedrooms (1 suite) and I made sure I could fit more beds in if I need them without needing to add on.  I know you can visit other hotels and wasn't sure if tourists do so I built a recreation center in a separate building with a food stand placed between them.  Looks nice, in the mountains the Hotel looks like two mountain cabins.  I redecorated it for each vacation subhood.


It was to late for my new hood to use empty templates but is there one that just affects those vacation townies that get dumped into your hood before you even attach the vacation subhoods?  Those are the only ones that annoy me and it'd save me having to clean them out when I make my next new hood. The clean template thread just got me all confused so I quit looking.

Yes, there were 4 hidden hoods that came with BV - and one of those is the blasted Traveller family which I excised from my game as soon as possible.  Argon posted the empty templates on the thread in Peasantry about building a clean neighbourhoods with the templates.

Sorry, you said you got confused (note: read ALL the message before replying, Jen) - I'm trying to find the right post, hang on.

OK - it's
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.250.html
Message 258 - the V001 sub-hood is the one that contains (or in this case, doesn't) the Traveller family.  So that's the one you need to replace in the game files.

Thank you!

Do you know if new vacation locals would spawn with the correct clothes and stuff?  If they do then I wouldn't mind using those empty templates too. I'm not up to making my own. 

Sadly locals spawn with random clothes...

thats what I thought  :( 

Argon created a fix for turning townies into vacation locals (with proper clothes and behaviors) when using the townie and NPC creator. I decided to create my own and it didn't take long. I've made 8 for Takemizu Village so far and I want to see if that's too many or not enough before I create locals for the other destinations. But I don't see why it would be a problem to just turn the locals that the game spawns into townies and then back into vacation locals. That should fix their clothing.

As far as I can tell Argon fix does nothing for the clothing of the locals. The fix made the NPC Creator working when choosing a sim to be a local, but in my game at least, I still had to change their clothing to match the region I chose for them.
They were behaving correctly and appearing in the right vacation location, but their clothes were random until I changed them.

Thanks for pointing that out. Since I CAS made mine they were dressed properly, but for some reason I thought that Argon's thread said that it would fix the clothing too. I went back and reread the thread and I was wrong. I suppose the most important thing is that they behave correctly as locals, though, since clothing isn't too hard to fix.

Locals don't have a specific forced uniform. Some locals ship dressed funny out of the box, and it's trivially easy to cause them to dress funny with a clothing store.