:omg: *screams in surprise sim style*

All I wanted was a little hack to stop the annoying endless whipping out of assignments from the sims' little pixelated behind (is the a** word allowed here?) during parties and having to shoo them away from it. I had no real expectations about it getting made - awesome if it does, just as cool if it doesn't - and now here it is, and you went and gave me more. You've thought of everything! Like, yeah, I had a sim invite a guest(s) over just so they can do assignments while the hosts are busy catching up with other guests because I wanted to see assignment litter .

I will test this out as soon as I can. Thank you so much .

wow! it's super! :]

It means there will be no nonplayabel students doing ass-ment autonomously?
Hmm
For what?
It will look boring in the dorm...

Wow. You sure are living up to your loqacious reputation, lol.

But thnx. This'll be helpful. Half the time my own sims has no place to do assignments b/c all the surfaces have been taken by dormies' useless assignments.

Hi Ailias :wave:

(Btw, I love your stuff!)

I know I write a lot, so maybe you didn't read all of what I wrote, but it will still allow non playable students to do assignments, but only when it "makes sense" to do them. The original request was to prevent students from doing them during a party, because at a party, shouldn't you be... partying? :P

But if there is no party, then YA dormies should still do assignments. However, I restricted this to ONLY the YA dormies that live on the current Dorm Lot. I did this because I wanted to reduce the clutter/assignment litter left by sims. In other words, any visiting YAs (that live somewhere else but you have invited over or greeted "off the street") will not be able to do assignments at all. I originally did that because you may not ever invite these sims back, and because of that, they will just leave their assignments at your dorm forever.

However, I think it has been noted that the patch takes care of this in a way that is similar to Pescado's noassignmentlitter, and basically makes any assignments by visitors magically disintegrate. :shrug: Can't say exactly for sure, but I think I did notice this happen once in my game (and I do not have the noassignmentlitter hack in my game).

Yet, as a caution, I do warn that if you play a dorm through several generations, then you will end up with the scenario as you describe. This is because the YA dormies will eventually have filled up their GPA meters, and since they don't progress to new semesters, their meters will NEVER get reset unless you:

A) made them playable/selectable somehow (by having them Move-In or some hack like the InSimenator or one of the various teleporters)

B) reset their grade meters with some hack (like TwoJeffs College Adjuster or the InSimenator)

So when it gets to that point, and it eventually will, what you do is up to you. It's a catch 22 between being more realistic for your current dorm (and cutting down on the litter) and being less realistic in later generations (and more "boring" as you say, because now dormies won't do any assignments unless you reset their meters).

So this is further incentive to either make those dormies playable and have them "in sync" with the rest of your sims, or just kill them off. :devil: Up to you!




I like to be as thorough as possible, so for those more cautionary people who take all the time to read things carefully, I will hopefully have answered any and all of their questions in advance.

Plus, I do like to "hear" the sound of my own er... keyboard. :comp:

Ste

Fantastic, syberspunk. Thankyou!

You rawk!! Thanks so much for doing this. :P

Ok, I added a tiny, minor update as per ZephyrZodiac's request over at MATY.

This should work, but I need more testing. I haven't had an issue yet. Please report back if it does not work as expected. Thanks!

Ste

Thank you for fixing one of the major issues I have long had with University.
Nothing annoyed me more than seeing a sim pull out their Anthropology home work for no good reason during a party or get together.

Fixed a minor bug concerning Error: Missing neighbor for data access.

Sometimes a sim, while doing homework, will pop up an error, especially if running in debug mode. I am not sure if the error silently fails if you debug mode is not on. That may be the case why I did not catch this bug earlier.

Simply redownload the file and allow it to overwrite the previous version. And as always, please report any problems you may encounter while using this mod. Hopefully this fix works with no further errors.

Ste

Fantastic! Can't wait to try it out!

I've noticed a minor issue with this after finally reinstalling everything and visiting Uni. As with any new EP, sims tend to get reset, especially those that were saved off lot. In my game, I had several dormies who were away at class, and upon return, they were reset back on the lot. I thought nothing of this, but later on, I started to get a pile up of returning dormies near the mailbox.

I'm not exactly sure how or why this happens, but I beleive the problem has to do with certain object ids getting mixed up. This may or may not happen in your game. In my game, I had a couple of food bowls that were laid out by the cafeteria worker, but the only options I had were to Clean Up or Resume Cooking. If I tried to Resume Cooking, the action just fell out of queue. I figured it was just a weird quirk probably due to adding OFB, but then it turned out that, when I turned on debug mode, the pile up of dormies were generating stack object errors. They were all trying to do their college assignments, but the object ids got fubared somehow, and instead they were trying to use the food bowls. Maybe somehow the object ids got mixed up, at least that's my guess. *shrugs*

Anyways, the solution was somewhat simple enough. I turned on the moveobjects cheat and I deleted all the existing unfinished college assignments on the lot. The dormies carried on as normal. After saving, exiting, and returning. The dormies were once again able to do college assignments like before. So far, I haven't had any other problems. If you run in debug mode, I don't think choosing Cancel or Delete will work. Choosing Reset definitely does not work, as the sim only tries to attempt to do the college assignment again. Cancel will probably only cancel that interaction for now, but if the sim tries to do their college assignment, you will get the same error (it will look like a 'jump bug' or like your sim is frozen or 'jumping' in place). Choosing Delete will probably just delete the sim in question, and not the college assignment (because it is the sim throwing the exception, not the college assignment itself, from trying to use the assignment but it is using an erroneous object id).

Unfortunately, this means that you have to be diligent in hunting down all the college assignments and nuking them manually. :P

Sorry for the inconvenience, but it shouldn't be that difficult to deal with.

Ste

Wow, this is exactly what I needed. I was getting really annoyed, especially when I realized that the assignments never seemed to stop! But this makes it so much nicer to deal with.

Btw, as a general comment, your hack descriptions are by far the most readable, organized and helpful of perhaps any mod descriptions I've seen.. I truly do appreciate all the effort you put into your hacks, including their design, testing, packaging and readmes. Thanks again.

It turns out the errors I experienced are actually bugs in this hack (my fault, not Maxis). This was one of my first hacks that I made, when I was still figuring things out. There are certain lines that I have not used properly. A fix is currently being tested...

I'm not sure why the error seems to go away. The bug(s) is specifically related to not finding the correct object stack ID. I think this may be brought on by installing EPs or patches, but I can't be sure. The problem is that, whenever a dormie does NOT have a proper Major, this hack should cause your sims to 'jump' or possibly 'freeze' in place.

Now I'm not sure what causes a sim to lose their major. Up until I installed OFB, I didn't seem to have this problem. I (and presumably other uses who have downloaded and are using this hack) might have just been lucky that all my dormies had valid majors assigned to them. Now... I don't know why, after installing OFB, I came accross a couple of dormies who had blank majors. I recall this being a problem before, with other hacks like the college adjuster and lot debugger, which were all fixed after making sure that majors were set to some default.

In anycase, I think I have that part fixed for my hack as well. However, I am currently testing this, and I have noticed a drastic reduction in doing college assignments. This may be due to a couple of things:

a) I am finally seeing the long term affects of dormies who have constantly been building up their semester meters, and thus once those are full, they will no longer do college assignments (which is supposed to be a feature of this hack)

b) I am testing another hack for allowing autonmous use of computers for certain situations, including dorms, since I want my dormies to "act" more lifelike and allow them to Play SSX. I got tired of seeing them all cranky, with low fun, especially in dorms where I hadn't managed to rake in enough loot to purchase stuff. Since computers are already present, why not let them use it as well? Only now... I think the fun advertisement may be such a huge draw that they will prefer to play computer over doing assignments... I'm trying to tweak this now.

I will release the quick fix now (so far, I have not experienced any 'jump' or 'freeze' bugs yet... *crosses fingers*). I hope that everyone who has downloaded this hack, will download the new version and test it out and report back any problems.

Ste

Yet another bug. This one was actually preventing dormies from autonomously doing assignments due to erroneous retrieval of max grade points. I've tested this and it should be fixed now.

I noticed this after I managed to clean up the code and figure out how to properly set the opcode operands for the RTBN call. However... I set one of the bits incorrectly, and as a result, it was returning garbage when trying to check the maximum grade points possible. So, essentially it was preventing dormies from doing assignments completely, even in a brand new dorm.

This should be fixed now. Please redownload, override, and test. Thanks.

Ste


PS. Sorry for all the constant updates. This was one of my first mods, and I was still pretty new to modding. I still pretty much am. It's a constant learning process, but at least I'm learning from my mistakes. :P

I wholeheartedly agree! :salute:

*eeek...reviving an old thread...necromancy is bad, I know!* But I have a good reason - I just discovered this mod today...I don't play Uni very often and I just sent a few Sims to college today and soon realized how very annoying it is to have everyone doing their assignments during a party and when they visit. Thanks so much for this! I really love your hacks...you put a lot of thought into them and I trust your mods completely!

Now all I need is a mod to take care of research. I just had to go through all my college community lots and take away all the bookcases. I also had one residential lot where it only took 2 minutes and *every single* Sim I invited over was sitting around researching. Let me know if you get around to making one that covers research, too. Thanks so much! *huggles my Syberspunk downloads folder*

Old thread, I know, but I was looking for just such a mod. I'd had enough of dormies whipping out assignments when their grade meter is full and they're on the verge of passing out and/or starving to death!