Two technical questions regarding sims' age and the Science Center

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

It took me long enough :lol: , 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.