So, I mentioned this in the thread about the From Monday To Sunday (real days of week) calendar that I was working on my own calendar idea and that it has variable days off depending on your career and job tier. After some trial and error, I got the actual carpool suppression to work (for adults, I haven't implemented the children's logic yet). ...There's just one issue.

- If there is a single adult in the house with a job (say, Mortimer Goth right after starting the Goth house for the first time), this works completely correctly. His carpool never comes.
- If there are two adults in the house with carpools that come at different times (say, Mortimer gets promoted to a lab assistant and Bella gets a job in Entertainment), this works correctly. One's carpool never comes, even if the other's does.
- If there are two adults in the house with carpools that come at the same time (say, Mortimer is a test subject and Bella is an extra, and both their carpools arrive at 8am), this doesn't quite work right. (At least not when their days off don't line up. I haven't been able to test when they do but assume it would work correctly.) If the carpool comes for one Sim, the Sim who has the day off will also have the "go to work" interaction pushed into their queue and will go to work if it isn't canceled. (I haven't looked closely/checked yet to see if canceling the interaction after the carpool pushes it affects job performance for the day or triggers a "missed work" warning.)

So, I suppose my question is this: Is there a way to either prevent the "go to work" interaction from ever entering queue or to at least automatically remove it after the fact so the player doesn't have to manually remember to do it? I've been trying to wrap my mind around what to do on my own but haven't figured out a solution.

I assume the issue is because the game wants them to share the car pool.

Without hacking all the cars in the game, you could try making a "helper object" that monitors the sim that is supposed to be off to suppress going to work by interrupting the action in the queue with another action (of course that other action only needs to be idle for one minute to interrupt the action) of higher priority. I don't exactly recall what priority going to work has, but I'm pretty sure it can be interrupted by things like the fire.

If I were designing this I would probably have the main object spawn the helper/monitor on the day the sim is supposed to be off. Have an attribute hold the object ID or nID of the sim, another that is set to the time the sim goes to work -1 hour. It will begin monitoring the sim at that time and continue until carpool time +2 just to be safe to account of any weirdness. Then it can delete itself at that time so they don't pile up out of world.

I would probably have it monitor for a specific distance to the car portal object (to avoid checking for each vehicle's GUID individually) then push an interaction on them to interrupt them. Maybe it could have them go look at the mailbox, or just route them to a random object back inside the house or something. It could create a slightly silly tug-of-war if the sim keeps trying to go to work, but it would keep them home and prevent false-positives if the sim didn't automatically queue going to work.

Yeah, the issue is that (under normal circumstances without the calendar there) it sends one car to share, and the check tree in CarGlobals for the "go to work" interaction passes since a) their last day at work is not equal to today (the calendar currently sets it to -1) and b) it's their job's carpool time (and then the car pushes the interaction upon arriving as long as their overall mood is in the green).

Gonna think about/try this or something like it, because at least it's better than the idea I was putting off trying of just making them truly miserable right before the carpool comes...

Another option might be to make them temporarily unemployed for an hour, but that might be weirder. Either way I think you'll need an object to babysit them.

Playing around with some of this, it actually looks like temporary unemployment could be the simplest way to handle this (at the very least I think it'll prevent the carpool from even asking them so they don't need to be directly stopped from going to work in a more hands-on way), though I think from how it looks that the carpool only tries to push the "go to work" interaction one single time so they may only need to be unemployed for about 20 minutes (some safe lead time to be sure the unemployment runs prior to carpool arrival and just a little time after it arrives to avoid the go-to-work push) rather than a whole hour.

Granted, I haven't yet tried this "in action" (I just tested storing relevant data in some attributes for later retrieval and then making them unemployed, but I hadn't yet given Bella a job that matched Mortimer's schedule yet) so for all I know when I test this with an actual "collision" it'll do something I don't expect. (Plus I ran out of time to look at it this afternoon so I also haven't put together anything to give them their job back... so it's just an automatic job losing machine right now. )

EDIT: Tried it in action (with added BHAV to add the job back on)--it works swimmingly! If it's after :45 in the hour before the carpool shows (i.e. 15 minutes or less until their carpool) and it's their day off, I record the job type and set it to 0, then if it's anytime between :05 and :30 in any hour and their job is 0, I give their job back. If they take the same carpool and they both have work, they both go, and if they don't both have work, they (the non-workers) don't go. The carpool does stick around until the end of the hour still, it looks like, at least in the single test I tried (I THINK this was because Bella got her job back before Mortimer got to the car, so the leaving check for the car returned false because Bella "needed" to go to work), but at worst that's a minor annoyance, and at best you could maybe say it's a feature (still allowing the Sim to "pick up a shift" on their day off).

I would just recommend you also store and restore job performance and level. I think those are reset any time a sim's career changes.

In my tests I worried about that but found the level was getting kept (I specifically made sure at least one of them was in level 2 of the career just for that reason--forgot to double check the performance, though)... but I was definitely considering storing it whether it's in danger or not (especially since I don't know why it didn't clear and what could make it potentially clear). Better to store too much than not enough!