Serving Food

[striker]

Hey JM,

I was browsing MTS2 and saw the following hack:
http://forums.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=70736

This is something that I haven't liked since Sims2 came out.  How often do you have only 1 sim and 6 sims in a house.  I would dare to say that most of us average 2-4 sims to a household.

Does it work as advertised, does it conflict with any FFS hack, and are you planning on making something better than this?

[J. M. Pescado]

Dunno. I'm pretty sure it'll bugger the Macrotastic Eat logic, though, since it will derail the already existing logic there that picks between have/serve.

[striker]

k, i wont put it in.  Is there anyway to incorporate it into the macrotastic/eat function?

[Ancient Sim]

I use this hack and overall it works very well.  When I go to a SS lot for instance, instead of 6 meals being served (meaning only 5 of the 8 SS members can eat), it serves 9 meals.  It's a bit iffy sometimes in that they will sometimes serve meals for sleeping Sims with more than half their hunger bar filled (which isn't supposed to happen), but the values can be tweaked in SimPE.  It certainly solves the problem of hungry kids not getting fed.  Also, the fridge locks for an hour once the cooking Sim has started, so it stops other Sims trying to cook at the same time  The only drawback with this is that if the action is cancelled, the fridge is still locked (you can solve that by buying another one and snacks/desserts are still available).  In the main, I'm very pleased with it and would find it very difficult to cope without it now, it's totally transformed the game in terms of meal-making.  It doesn't work in dorm lots, incidentally, probably because it hasn't been coded to do so.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes, well, I don't see why you care whether the SS members eat or not, really....I mean, they're visitors. They'll leave and come back before they can starve to death anyway. Screw them. Get yer own.

As for incorporating it into Macrotastic Eat, it already is: Macro-Eat will automatically serve food if the number of hungry-value people is >= 4, where kids count as 1.5. This is considered to be the break-even point (serve meals cost 4x, so it is a loss to serve below 4). A current project is the ability to serve a single food, but to auto-abort the process before the sim actually attempts to eat it, so that it can be given to a child, rather than wasting tons of food "Serving". This isn't really important, however, as a child lasts only one week, and of that week, you'll only need to worry about it on weekends because there is free food on weekdays at school, meaning you will pretty much never need to feed a child on a weekday.

[Ancient Sim]

Yes, well, I don't see why you care whether the SS members eat or not, really....I mean, they're visitors. They'll leave and come back before they can starve to death anyway. Screw them. Get yer own.

Er ... so my Sim can sit down at the table and have a nice social chat with his new-found friends???

Didn't realise Macrotastics did this, actually.  Does it allow for hungry visitors, or is that a silly question?

[J. M. Pescado]

If there are visitors present, a dish will be dispensed, but they are not included in the computation for whether it is cost effective to dish visitors, as feeding visitors specifically is effectively a waste of food resources. If nobody was going to eat the extra food anyway, I don't care who does, but I do not waste food specifically on visitors. Increasing relationships while eating mostly just slows down the eating anyway. Didn't your mother tell you not to talk with your mouth full?

[Ancient Sim]

Increasing relationships while eating mostly just slows down the eating anyway. Didn't your mother tell you not to talk with your mouth full?

Well ye-e-e-e-e-s, but I have 0 in Neatness.  Anyway, this is my Sims I am talking about, not me.  I hate eating with other people, I also have 0 in Outgoing.  In fact, I have 0 in most things.  When I made my Sim me I had to doctor it after, it kept telling me I had loads of unused personality points.

[Marvin Kosh]

A current project is the ability to serve a single food, but to auto-abort the process before the sim actually attempts to eat it, so that it can be given to a child, rather than wasting tons of food "Serving".

This would be pretty cool.  I like to have one fairly good cook on a lot who can whip up some good nosh in the kitchen, the other Sims don't get to touch the fridge (at least not very often).  Now, this means more time spent cooking, and more opportunities for food to be burnt, but I find that it cuts down on food waste quite a bit, and my Sims don't leave their plates unfinished so often.  Also, the cook in question obviously gets better at cooking than if they had served a 6-batch.

[gali]

I prefer the option of "have meal" to stay.

The reason for it is - when my sims get up in the morning, each one of them has a wish for another breakfast. I am very glad if the two of them want to eat the same food, but somehow both of them want to "learn how to cook x", and for this purpose, I need the "have meal" option.

If I have 2 sims - it's a waste of food to "serve" always; if I have more than 2 sims (3-4) - always I have 1 "have meal" vs 3 "serve meal", or 2 "serve meal".

[ZephyrZodiac]

I find most kids survive fairly well on snacks!