Date Posted: 2nd Oct 2026 at 3:41 PM
Views: 75
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I really am excited and grateful! I didn't expect such an enthusiastic reaction to my mod, and how many other players love the idea.
So, I feel motivated like ever to work on it even more: not just to fix conflicts and/or accomodate slight variations, but also to expand its possibilities.
I think that a good way to start is to explain what's going on in the code, in detail, for regular players that might be interested, but can't or don't want to examine the code itself.
Every marker is a mini-community lot populator, a controller stripped of all the extra stuff we don't need for this project, and modified to accomodate the events and behaviours we want.
The original Community Lot Populator (CLP) is still there, like in every other Community lot, but it's kept silent, paused, while the modded controller works in its place. If you delete the modded controller (the marker) from the lot, it will resume its regular work as community population controller like before.
So, the lot won't control an owned business, won't deal with walkbys, won't generate new townies, downtownies, etc. if there aren't enough in the hood; it won't deal with vacation parties, downtown special townies (Divas, Slobs, Grand Vampires), college sims and NPCs.
It will still work allowing sales and services, just not owned business. They will work like regular community lots before Open for Business expansion, to be clear.
The original controller (CLP) sifts through the population of the whole neighborhood and will pick a random number of playables, townies abd strays according to the neighborhood type they're on (downtownies in Downtown, vacation sims in Vacation hoods, College sims in College hoods), provided they don't exceed the population cap, which in turn is determined by the hour of the day and a few other details.
The Sims At Work controller, on the other hand, still sifts through the whole population; however, after the basic, obvious, checks (sims is not dead, sim is not the Grim Reaper or another problematic NPC, etc.) it pretty much checks only for the sim's job. That's by design: so if you have, say, an Island Local getting a job, they will then show up on their workplace. If you end up with your Police precinct officers all learning the hula on the job, you know what happened. 
Now that all the sims in the hood with the same career are stored in a list in the given array, the system will then place them on the lot, one by one, randomly placed following the predetermined Maxis rules about being close to an object that's typically part of a community lot: clothing booth, chair, grill, and so on.
[NOTE: I was thinking of modifying this according to the workplace: for example, on a Music lot setting the target objects as pianos, or band instruments, etc. Not sure it will make much of a difference, though]
All the sims will be dressed up for the job, initialized with all their motives at 2/3 of the bar (+50 in numbers). Their motives will decay normally, but every 30 sim-minutes they will be refreshed: if their motives are slipping below half of the motive bar (0 in numbers), they will be returned to 0; if their motives were already higher than 0, they will stay where they are.
TO DO: I could not manage to get them "already greeted", to avoid the classic annoyance of all coworkers greeting each other before doing anything else. I'm working on it, but if anyone already knows the trick on how to do that, I'm all ears!
Don't harass or molest the coworkers, dammit!
All the fighting and romantic socials are forcibly forbidden to sims on the job.
This has been done by setting a "Guardian BHAV" for their specific pie menu entries: the entry (e.g. Slap) won't be available to a sim if there's one of the markers present on the lot.
This works only for unselectable sims (which means the sim you're using at the moment can do whatever they want) and what's blocked is the base action; the victim's reaction (e.g. Be Slapped) and that of the witnesses (e.g. Watch Fight) are not blocked.
This also means that your sim can go beat up an enemy sim to a pulp at their workplace and not be massacred in return. Well, that's not nice, is it? Perhaps I should set up some sort of mitigation or deterrent. Or, well, just let you guys do it if you want, why not? :P
Witches: I don't mind too much when a witch arrives and beautifies or uglifies the lot. Not a big deal, am I right? Now imagine 3 good witches and 3 evil witches on the same community lot at the same time, where one casts the spell, triggering the opposite others to cast the counterspell, which then triggers the opposite others to cast the counterspell again, which... you get the idea.
That's why I made the special override, where if a witch is on a Paranormal lot, they won't cast the bloody spell, no matter what.
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