Customer Selector v2: Hobbsee STILL has a scrawny pencil neck!
jsalemi:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2007 April 04, 04:41:05
Hmm. That'd be interesting, considering that the code used to derive customer numbers is standalone. But we will look into it. Is it possble that your set of restrictions is such that there are ONLY two customers in the game that qualify?
Well, the only restrictions I normally put on it are to eliminate poor, playables (which I think is a default) and zombies. But deleting the existing controller and putting a new one on the lot without changing anything still causes the problem.
I first noticed it with the sim that owns the Inner Child shop two days ago; it's level 10, but only 2 customers at a time were showing up. I tried a couple of things, even putting the Paladin customer adjuster on the lot (it showed 2 customers as the max setting), and setting it to 10 customers, and that didn't work. It was only after I deleted the customer selector that the number of customers started rising, but then it was time to close the store. So I chalked it up to maybe the selector getting borked in the reset. But then it happened again last night with two different businesses owned by a different sim. This time, I replaced the selector right away, leaving it at the default settings, and there were still only 2 customers at a time (one business is L5, the other L8). I deleted the selector on one lot, and put it in the owner's inventory on the other, and in both cases the number of customers jumped up to normal levels.
Edit: One more test confirmed this problem. Different sim, different business (Amelia's Closet) -- it was level 4, and with this on the lot, only 2 customers showed up. Put it in the owner's inventory, and another customer showed up right away. Business reached level 5, and 4 customers appeared. Put it back on the lot, and 2 customers left the lot, still holding their shopping bag (never paid, as far as I can tell). Deleted it, and right back up to 4 customers. So something weird is going on.
The only other new hack I've added recently was dizzy's process autonomy hack, and I took it out for this session, so that's not what's causing this issue.
J. M. Pescado:
Continued investigation remains unable to reproduce your results. As you can clearly see from this scene at Brynne II Silly's business, "Honest Otto's Used Johns", there are clearly more than 2 customers. Not sure why you're getting only two customers. Are you running any anti-visitor-cap hacks or cheats?
jsalemi:
Only other hack/object I have that affects number of visitors to a business is Paladin's customer controller, but it's not a global hack, and has to be on the lot to have any effect, AFAIK. And it's not present on these (or any other lots) right now. I'll remove it, and see if that changes things, but I'm stumped on this one too. I ran a hack conflict scan, and nothing showed up as affecting the same things as the customer selector, so it's not an obvious conflict. And the fact that it started only after the Seasons patch is what really puzzles me.
I'll keep playing with it and see if I can find a cause.
Added: ok, this is just weird. I took out every hack I had related to a business other than ones from here, and I still have the same problem. I'm going to have to go deeper and see what's causing this.
Solved, I think: So I sent a sim to an unowned community lot, and after a bit noticed that there were only 2 visitors on the lot the whole time he was there. Which is strange, because my community lots are usually pretty full. So when I thought about it a bit, I realized that I also put a new video card in this machine around the same time that I installed the Seasons patch, and I remembered that when it started up, all my graphics settings were reset to the lowest settings. That clued me in -- I got a Visontek X1300 XGE, and Maxis in their usual idiocy sees all ATI X1300 class cards a low end. So a quick check of my config log, and I found that the game was forcing maxNumOfVisitingSims to 2, thinking the card can't handle more. I'm still not sure why taking the customer selector off an owned lot let the number of visitors go up, but I've added intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 8 to my userstartup.cheat file. I'm done for the night, but I'll check it out next time I play and see if that fixes the problem.
Stupid Maxis....
kuronue:
then how did you get four without the customer selector?
jsalemi:
Quote from: kuronue on 2007 April 10, 23:56:22
then how did you get four without the customer selector?
I have no idea. But that's the only thing I can think of that would affect the number of sims showing up on a community lot. I'm testing out raising the maxNumofVisitingSims right now on a comm lot -- if that doesn't work, then I'm really stumped.
Edit: It worked, and I think I have it sorted out (Pescado can correct me if I'm wrong :) ). Because running a business with only 2 customers at a time doesn't make a whole lot of profit, I'm guessing that OFB bypassed the usual visiting sim generator in the game and ran its own routines to determine how many visitors to send to an owned business, based on the business level. This mod supersedes the OFB visitor generator, and maybe invokes the game's standard generator to filter the visitors according to its settings. So the visitor limit kicks in when this is on the lot. When it's removed, the OFB visitor generator takes over again, and ignores the usual visitor limit, so more customers showed up.
In any case, setting the max number of visitors higher seems to have solved the issue I was having so far. I only have a level 1 business in the hood I'm currently playing (it's a fairly new custom hood), but 3 customers showed up right away. And it was nice seeing 8 sims on an unowned comm lot again. So maybe I'll bump the max visitors to 10 so I can have a full compliment next time I play my level 10 businesses again with the customer selector active. My computer can handle it -- it did before, and in spite of what Maxis thinks, this is a better video card than my old one.
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