This is what I currently have.  It meets all my criteria which are to be playable without any wonkiness, to appear logical and require a minimum of hacks to make work.  Here is the wall layout with entrance tunnel exposed :



Detail view of the entrance tunnel :



View of the door with scenery and roof :



Zoomed out view of dome, with contents :

I had occlusion issues on the lot underneath the dome when I made the domes be world objects in my game.  There is a lot that is desirable about having the domes be world objects, but I was unable to build walls without them registering as colliding with the world object. 

Also, I could not find any graceful way to have an exit path through the dome when it was on a non-lot world segment.  There are no available objects that I could overlay to obscure the sims walking directly through the dome wall, which I found unattractive.  When it is on a lot, I can cut 'through' the dome with a tunnel that has doors on either side, and it looks good and logical.

I'll show what I mean in a bit.

Well ultimately, I decided against putting the domes off-lot because then you are restricted to a lot that is considerably smaller, so that the square fits entirely inside the dome with enough room to lay down no-pathing paint.  Remember, you can't paint a lot with no-path paint, so if the dome intersects the lot, the sims will squeeze out of the holes like ants crawling through a gap in the window.

@MsRaven: I think some of your assumptions may be incorrect.

@snowbawl: I acknowledge that.  I am not accusing you of that, but rather indicating that these two are trying to emulate you in an attempt to ingratiate themselves.  For good or ill, you are probably established.

Real estate is really not a problem.

I too like the idea of having domes be world objects, which permits the lots to not have any community objects on them, but so far I haven't been happy with the results.

How are you handling access and egress?  I found it was a very graceful soluition to put the dome on the lot, and then wall the property in with fences and build a hallway with doors that protrudes through the dome.  This way sims appear to go through an airlock of sorts to enter and leave the dome. 

Interesting.  I'm working on something very similar. 

The domes have to be in-lot, as world objects cause interference on the building plane. 

To constrain movement through the dome, you will have to build a wall.

The best way to position the dome over the lot is to build a 4-story square that is depressed 2 stories in the center of the lot, and then use that to change the elevation of the dome, then remove the squares you used to control the elevation.

That way the dome object won't occlude object/wall placement on the first 3 buildable 'stories', without being too elevated.

If you position it right, you'll end up with a nice concrete skirt in which to hide a low wall, so that your sims won't run through the dome itself.

I'll show some screenies later when I get home.

I'm currently trying to generate some lunar terrain that looks good using a paint program and importing the elevation table.  We'll see how that works out.

I was, they just couldn't see it. 

I'm curious though, what sort of games do we like more?  My disregard for their critcism or their clumsy attempts at ingratiation?  It seems that they are attempting to mimic what they assume is the most likely behaviour to be given approval and acknowledgement.

I've got no real problem with that, but I would say that I'm probably not the best candidate to use for those kind of transparent post-count inflations. 

I'm a firm believer in interesting > comfortable.  So, this place is amusing to me.

Well guess what, you've got that kind of tardery.   I'm here, and you aren't the boss of me.

I type fast and loose, and I edited that post a couple times but the edits didn't show, so you get the raw love of my sloppy typing.

sims3 has a simulator that runs, evaluating the various input conditions and producing output conditions.  Most parsers/simulators have a static value somewhere that says "how long do we let a given method/function run before we stop it?", that's called MAX_EVAL in some places, so I used that name for shorthand.

I don't know why this is happening.  I wish I did.  I suspect that something is in a loop, either self-referencing, bad references or loops... what we really lack is a way to break the program and ask it wtf it is hung up on.  that would help isolate stuff.

I wish we had a way to find out what the current evailuated thing was - I suspect there's something that is iterating to whatever MAX_EVAL is, and then aborting.  There seem to be numerous conditions that reach this - because I've seen it in a few games, even one utter stock game in a fresh adventure world with vanilla ts3.  Once it starts it seems that it can persist for an arbitrary time until the condition goes away or I lose my patience.

Clarify "not loading at all"?

I'm thinking actually that we should be abie to identify the crash based on the xcpt file.  Hm.

I prefer to use SVN even on projects that I don't collaborate with, because I make mistakes.  Sometimes tragic ones.

Except that you have no advice.

The the OP:

Q: Are you starting sims from the world adventures icon?

It works for me to have AM in the TS3 Mods/Packages folder

Follow the instructions carefully.  That's what I had to do.  The first time I installed it, I didn't read anything and didn't pay attention and got my game into a crashing state.  It does work, that's established.

Also, if you don't have any mods, I don't think the framework should be overwriting anything?   The framework should be (?) all new files.

Based on my fuckups, I'd say to double check:

1) Put the framework in both TS3 and the WA folders (if you have WA)
2) get the right version of AM
3) try am first in the ts3 mods dir, then if that shits the bed, try the wa mods dir.

I'm new here, so if any of this is incorrect it's that other guy's fault.

It's a lesser of two evils thing.  We can make the instructions clearer, or keep watching the same answers get put in the same topics over and over as each new person is confused by it.  Personally, I prefer to just cure the problem rather than bitch about it. 

Loving the mod, btw.  the stock story driver is so bad.  I'm impressed with the effort put into this. Thanks to all.

I think that defacto having a site reachable on the intarweb pretty much is catering to idiots.  In other news, I'll reserve the privilege of disagreeing with you that the wording is either perfect or clear.

Hello to you too.

And since people are, by and large fucking idiots, yes.

Having been burned by this, I figured it out, and it's been mentioned several times but needs to be addressed in the sticky.

The 'versions' in the download links are counterintuitive.  They should state more clearly that they are referring to your 'Sims' version, not the mod version.  Many people are downloading the wrong mod because the other one says 'experimental.'

The language reads :

1.7.9/1.7.11/2.2.8 VERSION:
MIRROR 1:  awesome.zip
MIRROR 2:  awesome.zip

1.8/2.3 TEST VERSION:
MIRROR 1:  awesome.zip
MIRROR 2:  awesome.zip

It instead needs to read something like :

Check your Sims/WA version before downloading!

Current: (beta) for WA 1.8 / TS3 2.3
MIRROR 1:  awesome.zip
MIRROR 2:  awesome.zip

Legacy version: (stable) for WA 1.7.9/1.7.11 / TS3 2.2.8
MIRROR 1:  awesome_legacy.zip
MIRROR 2:  awesome_legacy.zip