Is there still a portal bug?

[seelindarun]

If you're open to workarounds rather than rooting out the source of the problem, I'd suggest un-assigning the owned car first.  I have only a couple of plantsims, but they've held regular jobs most of their lives and had no issues with carpools.  Both were normal sims who sprayed too much, rather than being spawned from another plantsim.  I don't know if Seasons fixed things, but I always had no end of problems with disappearing cars and carpools when I assigned household cars, even the Maxis ones.

[Process Denied]

He does run a home business, but I don't like how the game lists business owners as being unemployed, so I use one of two custom careers for all of my business owners, Business Owner with morning shift or Business Owner with night shift. They are designed specifically for business-owning sims; thus, the work hours are only 3-4 hours per day, 3 days per week, either very early or very late. That way, the sims can still run their businesses but can be listed as Business Owner rather than Unemployed. Sorry if I did not make that clear in my earlier posts.

Edited for clarity.

That is really cool. My business owners are all wealth and they freak out if they don't have a job so that would be perfect.  They were only able to run their businesses on their days off so business were kinda pointless.

[baratron]

Thread hijacking in progress: I have what I think may be a portal problem, but I'm not sure. I have a house containing five plantsims, four of which are adults. Every time the adult male goes to work, he 'pops' back onto the lot after only having been at work for a couple of hours, and he is crouched in a driving position as though he is driving an invisible car, only there's no car (he takes the carpool). There IS a car on the lot, but it is normally assigned to one of the adult females. Assigning the car to the adult male seems to solve the problem, as he is the only one affected, but I'd like to find out what's causing the problem, so that I can fix it. His job is a custom career (business owner, night shift, found at MTS2). I don't think the career is the culprit, however, as I use it for all of my business owners, and this plantsim is the only one affected. Is the sim just buggy, or could this actually be portal-related? I've tried deleting the sim, saving, exiting, and re-entering the lot, to no avail.

In my not-very expert opinion, it's not portal-related. The portals are invisible squares that are the entrances & exits from the lot. There are separate portals for residents, visitors and NPCs. (I think residents + visitors share two of the portals and NPCs have the other two, iirc.) If the portals were buggered, you would have the same problem with all resident sims.

You say you use the custom career with all your business owners... are any of the others Plantsims? Does the custom career claim to be compatible with Seasons? I'm suspecting there is some sort of code conflict between the custom career and the Plantsim. If giving him the car solves it, go for that option - otherwise put him into a different career path (one of the standard ones that comes with the game).

You could try asking one of our awesome modders for help, but you know what Pescado will say about the custom career! ("It's the work of the Non-Awesome!"). See if you can find a standard career with the same bug, then he'll fix it .

[cwykes]

My solution for business owners is to employ them in another owned business and just not send them to work if I want them to do something else.  I used to think they didn't get fired for not going to work, but actually one did get fired the other day, so I guess you do need to track it a bit.   When you play his/her boss and their business, your sim is a useful employee because of their business skills and when you go back to the sim's life, he/she has extra skills for their own business.  I have a family business empire where a few family members own businesses, but all of them are employed in one of them - even the owners.  I move them around to suit as I play the business.

..........  I used the lot debugger in debug mode to change their last names bc I hear you not supposed to with SimPe.

Does Pes say it's not safe?  I've do that quite a bit so you've got me worried Dea!

[J. M. Pescado]

Changing a sim's last name in SimPE is safe. Changing a sim's first name in SimPE does not complete the namechange process, and vestiges of the old name remains. Always perform first-name changes in-game...and if you're already in-game, you may as well complete the last-name change in-game withh the Lot Debugger also.

[cwykes]

well I've done both in Veronaville  - it's amazing that hood has survived as long as it has!

afterthought - most name changes were for townies now I think about it and that's less convenient to do in game.

[jsalemi]

My solution for business owners is to employ them in another owned business and just not send them to work if I want them to do something else.  I used to think they didn't get fired for not going to work, but actually one did get fired the other day, so I guess you do need to track it a bit. 

I got two custom careers from N99 called 'Self-Employed Sim' and 'Happily Unemployed Sim' that someone here pointed me to ages ago. They don't pay anything, the car never comes, but they do fill the 'get a job' want and keep it from coming back. All my full-time business owners are 'self-employed', and I have a just-back-from-uni-and-living-with-the-'rents slacker or two who are happily unemployed.

[cwykes]

I'm just wary of custom careers because they aren't maintainance free.  Any new EP can wreck a custom career and it's just another thing to update when you add an EP.  shrugs - my solution works for me and suits the way I play.  I only have one custom career in my game and that was by accident.  I downloaded a "cook pizza"option with lots of kinds of pizza only to discover it was a career!

[jsalemi]

Yea, but these two are so basic that they're essentially EP-agnostic.  They have only 1 level, 1 work hour a day (that the sim doesn't actually work) and an icon.  Nothing in there to really break in a new EP.

[notveryawesome]

You say you use the custom career with all your business owners... are any of the others Plantsims? Does the custom career claim to be compatible with Seasons? I'm suspecting there is some sort of code conflict between the custom career and the Plantsim. If giving him the car solves it, go for that option - otherwise put him into a different career path (one of the standard ones that comes with the game).

You could try asking one of our awesome modders for help, but you know what Pescado will say about the custom career! ("It's the work of the Non-Awesome!"). See if you can find a standard career with the same bug, then he'll fix it .

I'm assuming the career is compatible with Seasons, as Seasons is listed as one of the EPs that the hack's creator uses/used at the time of creation, but if it's not compatible, that would certainly explain why it wouldn't work with plantsims. None of my other business owners are plantsims, and none of them seem to have problems with carpools, etc when they have the Business Owner job. I really think that plantsims are just buggy. They behave strangely on their own lots, as well as those of other sims. For example, their motives get screwed up when they are hired as employees by other sims. I've never tried this, personally, but I've read others' accounts of the problem. In my own experience, it seems that every lot a plantsim lives on eventually becomes corrupted, as do the plantsims themselves (e.g. the plantsims' pie menus get messed up and they can no longer 'Give Gift' etc), and the only way to solve the problem is by moving the plantsim(s) to another lot and bulldozing the first one. I'm going to try having the bugged sim quit his job and re-acquire it, just to see if the problems occur the second time around. If they do, I'll have to just get him a normal job or leave him listed as unemployed, even though he runs a home business.

@cwykes: Many hacks that are listed as careers aren't actually careers. For example, some of the controllers for Monique's hacked computers are listed as careers, though they are clearly not careers. I don't really know how to explain why this is, however, so I'll leave that to those more Awesome than I.

[cwykes]

So the tools we are using to look at things put the label "career" on things that have "career-type" attributes even though they aren't actually careers.  That's techie enough for me - a user version of techie....