Two technical questions regarding sims' age and the Science Center

Turjan · August 2019

1. Is there a way to turn YA's back into teens, and if so, without breaking the game?

2. I already knew I had to remove the hedge in front of the Sunset Valley science center, because sims constantly get stuck in there, but it seems to be bugged on a more basic level, at least if you use it with the school module of the NRAAS Career mod. Can anyone suggest a replacement for the Sunset Valley science center that definitely works with the school assignment?

igazor · August 2019

1 - The only way to do this entirely safely is to create a new sim who is a teen but is based on a CAS saved sim made out of the YA one. That's of course not the same thing as aging a sim down, it will be an entirely new sim who looks like the original but with no accumulated skills or experiences and no relationships to anyone else in the game until such relationships are established in other ways. But the game really doesn't like it when sims are aged down below the YA stage, all kinds of glitches can arise if you force this to happen through CAS for example on an existing older sim.

2 - Maybe I've just been really fortunate all this time, though I haven't played in SV for many years, but I've never had any trouble with any of the science centers I've placed and gone on to use for the location of a custom private school by way of the Careers School mod. Even science center rabbithole rugs placed in the basement of an overly simple shack looking structure have worked out fine, provided proper access is given to the rabbithole rug and there is enough space around it for sims to get in and out as required.

If you don't want to go through the steps of designing your own, perhaps try just about any of the pre-made structures from other worlds as available through Build/Buy?

Keiomestre · August 2019

1- You can activate testingcheatsenabled true, then shift click on your sim and choose Edit in CAS. From there you can age down your sim. After that, remember to disable the testing cheats (testingcheatsenabled false).

I did that once to age down to teen one human turned imaginary friend who had aged-up to adult before his “owner”. I had no problems in that save and he aged-up again normally, had kids, jobs, no problem. Except that he had a random boarding school diploma already, but I was able to enroll him in the school again by sending him there, though he didn’t get a second high school diploma later.

To avoid problems, just make sure your YA is not employed in a job that teens can’t have and is not pregnant. And backup your save as problems may happen as igazor said.

Turjan · August 2019

Thank you, Igazor and Keiomestre.

1. I take it I could try and age down the sim, but it's risky. As I'm talking about several sims, I should probably drop the thought.

2, The original SV science center has always had issues for me. When two sims arrive at exactly the same time - for example with the same carpool vehicle, one of them gets placed in that hedge. The only possibility to solve that is a full reset of the sim. If it's one going to school, his homework will be gone then. Deleting the hedge was an easy solution though.

As far as I have seen on the NRAAS board, I'm not the only one with the issues with the SV science center and the NRAAS careers mod. I followed the suggested approach to try the last test version of the mod, which made the situation slightly better. The automatic push of students still fails (if I do a manual one before the automatic one kicks in, that one fails too), but I can at least do a manual push after the automatic one gets canceled at 9:30 am (this didn't work without the test version). That worked for me, but it doesn't work for the townie students the mod sends there; they will fail school because they will never be able to get there.

I guess I have to look up the commands that show me the science centers of other worlds. Those seem not to be visible by default.

igazor · August 2019

Turjan wrote: »

I guess I have to look up the commands that show me the science centers of other worlds. Those seem not to be visible by default.

The EA rabbithole buildings that are available for us to place in any world are in Build/Buy, when invoked through Edit Town, under Community Objects. Are they not showing up there alongside of the rest of them? Technically we don't have to be in Edit Town, we can get into Build/Buy on community lots with testingcheatsenabled true and a shift-click on the ground, but for some reason when entire buildings are involved it always seems more natural (to me) to use the Edit Town route. Plus the actively played household won't be charged that way for any landscaping or other items one might want to add to the lot after the new building is placed.

Turjan · August 2019

Thanks again! I will try and see whether I get this right.

Turjan · August 2019

Okay, after the new Windows 10 update got fixed with another update, Sims3 starts again.

I looked at the Build/Buy options, and do I get this right that you refer to putting a new building shell onto the existing lot? Is the actual function of the building (science lab plus whatever school function NRAAS career adds) tied to the building shell? I always thought it was the lot itself. Sorry if that sounds stupid, but I haven't really done anything with community lots in this game yet, except a few cosmetic changes.

igazor · August 2019

When a community lot contains one or more rabbitholes, the purpose of the lot becomes driven by the rabbithole(s) that are on it and not so much by the community lot type. The usual choices for a school or career building lot would be Visitors Allowed (if you don't mind sims hanging around who are not there strictly to use the rabbithole, perhaps your school has a playground off to the side for example) and No Visitors Allowed (if you want sims to use the rabbithole and then leave after their business inside whether it be working, going to school, or something else has concluded). All of the other community lot types are really for open lots.

So, in the end, it doesn't really matter if you re-use the existing lot that a science center is on, replace it (if Edit Town lets you), or use a different lot entirely.

Turjan · August 2019

Ah, thanks again! I actually remembered now that the SV town center contains one lot with three functional buildings on it, one of them functioning as school with the mod in question. All of the options other than the science center work correctly in my game.

There's still much I don't know about this game. Sometimes it surprises me with having a lot on a lot and a building on it (three bulldozing steps). Maybe, that's where the beautiful vista function is tied to.

Karritz · August 2019

In one of my wilder experiments I had a heap of instant babies and quickly aged them up to Young Adult - then used something (I don't recall what now) to age them back down to toddlers so they could learn some skills. It was an interesting mess. Lots of really broken sims resulted but I did, after a lot of time and effort, manage to get them appear to be function as toddlers. Then I abandoned the game and have no idea where to find the save now.

These days, whenever I'm slightly tempted to age a sim down below Young Adult, I have a little shudder as I recall the previous mess I had and decide I don't really need to do that just now.

Turjan · August 2019

Heh, that sounds "exciting"! Thanks for sharing.

igazor · August 2019

I've never really understood the game forum mentality that lends itself to "I did this once and it worked for me" or "This is what happens in my game so it must be the same for everyone else" somehow leaping to the conclusion that doing whatever thing it was will be fine in everyone's games. This is not always the case.

Deformed sims whose limbs and heads do not fit their body is one mess that can be created, although mostly (if the sim can still get around) those issues are cosmetic. I've had somewhat deformed sims before, caused by my impatience to age them up, not down, when they for whatever reason became age stuck and even with the full array of mods at my fingertips I couldn't find any reason for it. They've grown out of it. In fact one sim whose toddler to child transition borked like that, again affecting only the way they appeared on screen and only when performing certain animations, is now stunningly beautiful. Well, I'm biased because they are a third or fourth generation descendant of my long running legacy's founder meaning the very first sim I ever created, and it shows. But I would date...er, no. I would be proud to be their great uncle. Or something like that.

Of more concern, to me anyway, is the potential for data corruption and broken sims that can affect ongoing gameplay and the functioning of worlds generally. That's where I fall back on talking about the experiences of so many thousands of players we have helped with such issues at NRaas and elsewhere.

Turjan · August 2019

Yes, in case it wasn't clear: I won't try to make any sim younger than YA. My game is flaky enough already.

I just moved the Sims3 installation to my SSD, and Origin changed the folder structure (integrated Late Night and HELS into the Sims3 folder). Let's see what this does.

Now I have to find a way to move the Sims3 directory in E:\Documents\Electronic Arts\ to the SSD and find out how you create a working Symlink to the new directory without screwing up the syntax. Wish me luck.

igazor · August 2019

It's generally much easier and less prone to failure to have Windows redirect the entire Documents library from one volume to another than it is to use symlinks. As far as the game is concerned, the user game folder is still in Documents no matter which drive Documents really resides on. Unless...is there a reason that the remainder of your Documents folder must remain behind on the non-SSD drive?

Sorry about using a "...for Dummies" link, but they do provide some very good illustrations.
https://www.dummies.com/computers/operating-systems/windows-10/how-to-change-the-location-of-user-folders-in-windows-10

Turjan · August 2019

Yes, there is a good reason. The Documents folder is 290 GB and the free space on the SSD is 233 GB.

Anyway, I didn't really notice any great speed effect from the whole procedure. I guess reducing the number of files would be a better approach.

By the way, I didn't really want to change the topic, but I have some crash issues with the game, and my test whether the replacement of the Science building fixes the school issue still could not be finished. I've put the workers back, but I still have to enroll some kids.

igazor · August 2019

In case this hasn't been discussed elsewhere, running the game and the user game folder off of an SSD will stand to speed up startups/saves, foreign world travel transitions, CAS, Build/Buy and Pattern catalog building, and caching. The game doesn't really run any differently besides those things as most everything else is loaded into RAM and there is nothing faster than RAM access.

And sorry, I misunderstood. If you are running your operating system off of this SSD, it does need plenty of free space for itself and the game to manuever. Hopefully you still have at least 35 GB (more would be safer) of free space on it after the symlinking? For some reason I thought you had added an additional larger (more than 256 GB) SSD over and above what you already had and were just now populating it with things for it to do.

Turjan · August 2019

The operating system is on C:, which is an SSD with currently only 23 GB free, which may be a problem. The documents folder is on a 1.81 TB standard disk, and I moved the game to a 931 GB SSD with now 203 GB free. I still had 21 GB of physical RAM and 56 GB of page file memory free when the game crashed.

Although the numbers look good, I know that my system runs better if I have more space directly on the C: drive. Let's see whether I find anything to nuke.

Edit: There's also the point that Windows pushed one of its larger updates this morning. These usually take a few days of updates for me to sort themselves out. Furthermore, the backup it produced ate 15.5 GB on my system drive.

Turjan · August 2019

By the way, I'm still working on this. I had some serious case of Groundhog Day, but that fateful Wednesday lies finally in the past.

I use the recommended Version of the NRAAS career mod (88a), which according to some post by TreyNutz fixes the issue, but as I said, in my case it fixes it only partially, and not at all for the townies. He also mentioned that the issue affected only some science centers but not others, unfortunately without specifying which ones, and that means I have to go through them one by one, until I, maybe, find one that works.

The reason why I'm harping on this is the routing issues the problem causes. Alternatively, is there a method to selectively kill the school function for the science center?

igazor · August 2019

There's two ways to do that. One is to not allow StoryProgression to automatically place inactive sims into the specialty schools and make that a manual, the player gets to decide in each case process so the rabbitholes you don't want acting as schools do not get any students (this is actually how I play my worlds).
NRaas > SP > General Options > Options: Careers > Options: School > Auto Assign School > False

The other way is to open the Careers School add-on module up in S3PE and deactivate or remove the science center school data. The module is really just an XML tuning file for the Careers mod. Otherwise wherever you have a science center, and you can have more than one per world, you will potentially have a school.

But I would vote for finding science centers that behave themselves better, given the choices. I still claim that, by chance, none of the science centers I use for schools in any of my worlds have this issue. Two of them are even combo rabbithole buildings with hospitals. Combo rabbitholes used to cause all kinds of issues for us, but thankfully those all got fixed with Overwatch years ago. In heavily populated worlds though with lots of sims using the science center/hospital for various things, that does make for a very busy rabbithole building.

Turjan · August 2019

Thanks, Igazor. I will do point one anyway, as this will get rid of those daily "John Doe has to go to school now" messages that keep repeating for the same people.

Other than that, it looks like it's time for more testing *sigh*

Plus, find out why some beds now randomly start becoming inaccessible.

Turjan · October 2019

It took me long enough

, but I finally found a science center that works. I'm not sure why I went through that ordeal, but all science centers that are retextures of the original SV ones don't work in my game, either. The Wolfson combination center (from Appaloosa Plains I think) works with the mod.

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Two technical questions regarding sims' age and the Science Center

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