Mod The Sims - Si'Down with your drink

*Updated 29th November 2009*
Enhancement - see section below

There are various different drinks that a Sim can partake of when thirsty. Generally a Sim will sit down to drink their favourite tipple if there is a chair in the same room, but if not will stand around sipping away. This is different from the behaviour with food where they will quite happily take food from the kitchen to the room next door where the dining table is, to sit down and eat it properly. Given that I generally house my hot liquid producing appliances in a kitchen and have chairs in a dining room right next door this would annoy me. I'd find myself muttering at my computer screen "Si'down will you!"

Also, I'd quite like to direct different drinks to use different types of chairs. For example, hot chocolate, or a big coffee mug really should be enjoyed in the comfort of an arm chair; or fitness drinks should avoid bar stools.

So this mod changes the way all the various drinks provided in the Sims 2 game work, hopefully meaning in general, less Sims standing around drinking when there are perfectly good chairs that could be used!

Download
You should download the core package and choose one of the two tuning packages as well. Inside the .rars the tuning packages have the same name so you cannot accidentally have both tuning packages in your download folder. You must have one of them though!

The gory details
So each different drink type will cause the Sim drinking it to look for a chair within the prefered list first, e.g. comfy chairs for coffee. If none of those are found then some other chair types are looked for as a second best. Chair types not looked for either as "prefered" or "other" are never used for that drink (and I have listed them in the column entitled "disallowed" to make it obvious exactly what is going on). Chairs can be looked for either in the same room only or in any room ("Any" means if the drinks machine is inside, then any room inside, and if the drinks machine is outside, then stay outside). If no chairs are found matching the criteria, then each is defined to either make the Sim sit on the floor or stand around.

There are two different sets of tuning behaviour for you to choose from. Download your prefered version. Tuning A is the original version that does have some types of chairs disallowed. Tuning B is a second requested version that allows all chair types.

A note on Lounge Chairs
Lounge Chairs were deliberately disabled by Maxis for sitting on with drinks. I have separated the changes to re-enable this from this mod (see here). If/when it is fixed and uploaded, it will work for this mod and other purposes too. For now though, Lounge Chairs won't be used for drinking purposes.

I like the idea but I want slightly different chairs used for some drinks
Of course getting the drinks using the chairs that everyone wants is probably impossible. Hopefully the behaviours listed in the table above will suit a lot of people and if you want something a little different and you have a little SimPE^wiki skills - not much needed - then you can mod this mod!

How to mod this mod!
The configuration is done by means of a BCON^wiki, so it will be very easy for someone with very few SimPE^wiki skills to update the behaviour of a particular drink to their exact needs, by editing which chair types are looked for etc.

Open up the package using SimPE^wiki
In the resource tree on the left, find the Behaviour Constant (BCON) section and select it. This will show all the BCON^wiki resources in the right hand pane.
Find the drink you want to change the behaviour of. They are all named (by and large) in the same way as the table above. Note that if you want to change the "Vending machine Soda" you have to find and edit four drinks, "Lemon-Lime Soda", "Orange Soda", "Cola", and "Rootbeer". Also note that there isn't a separately configurable mug for "Hot Chocolate" so it will always do whatever "Coffee Cup" does.
Now edit the BCON to change the chairs used, as indicated in this picture. The values that you will use to identify each chair type are shown in the table in the bottom left on this picture.
ALWAYS remember to ensure the "count" field reflects the number of chair entries.
DO NOT move any of the lines!
If you want the text alongside the number you change to reflect your chair (so you can remember what you changed next time you look at it) you should also find the Behaviour Constant Labels (TRCN) sub-section in the Resource Tree and edit the appropriate TRCN^wiki of the same name.

This mod as provided, always treats these four chair types equally (hence the shorthand in the first table using the word "Comfy".

Chair - Living
Chair - Lounge
Chair - Recliner
Sofa

If you are modding this mod, you may wish to have drinks that use some of these in preference and you may (as I did initially) wonder what is a "Chair - Lounge"? In the Buy Mode catalog, there is a section for recliners, but not everything in there is a recliner. The trick is, if it is fixed in reclining position, it is a "Chair - Lounge", but if it can recline from an upright sitting position it is a "Chair - Recliner". So now you know.

Testing
This has been tested using the AnyGameStarted with many different EP combinations. However, even though I have done extension testing myself, I am marking this mod as Testers Required for a little while since there are so many combinations of drinks and seats. In my testing I have found and fixed a number of issues, all of which resulted in the Sim in question sitting on the floor instead of a perfectly valid chair. So in general it seems the problems that result are not harmful. So if you choose to download this and test it out in your game, and see something you didn't expect, please provide the following details.

Is this a global hack?
In making this mod, I have introduced some globals. Since these globals are new rather than updates to existing globals, this hack should only have an untoward impact on your game if the numbers I chose to identify these globals have also been picked by another modder also making a brand new global. The details are below should you suspect you have a clash.

I currently know of one hack that this mod conflicts with and that is TwoJeff's Chinese & Coffee Sit Down Fix which is perhaps not a surprise now that I know of it since it does the same job for the base game drinks (except bar drinks). Of course there is always the possibility of others. For the benefit of other modders, the details are below.

Cheers
Mog

Update History
29Nov2009

Provided two choices for tuning this mod, the original one and one that doesn't disallow any chair types. Choose only one to use.
Fixed animations for Fruit Punch for Teenagers and Children to match Adults

Additional Credits:
Quaxi for SimPE^wiki
Numenor for the AnyGameStarter.
Thanks to raynuss, aubreylaraine and jeffallenroberts for all the info about TwoJeff's clashing mod.

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Files Need help with downloading or installing content? Click here!

sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930-TUNING-B.rar \| Tuning package - See table B Download Uploaded: 29th Nov 2009, 958 Bytes. 5,928 downloads.
sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930-TUNING-A.rar \| Tuning package - See table A Download Uploaded: 29th Nov 2009, 980 Bytes. 4,669 downloads.
sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930.rar \| Core package - Changes to all the game drinks to sit on more appropriate chairs Download Uploaded: 24th Nov 2009, 4.2 KB. 12,911 downloads.
For a detailed look at individual files, see the Information tab.

Also Thanked - Users who thanked this download also thanked:

sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930-TUNING-B.rar \| Tuning package - See table B Download Uploaded: 29th Nov 2009, 958 Bytes. 5,928 downloads.
sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930-TUNING-A.rar \| Tuning package - See table A Download Uploaded: 29th Nov 2009, 980 Bytes. 4,669 downloads.
sit-down-with-your-drink-Mog-20090930.rar \| Core package - Changes to all the game drinks to sit on more appropriate chairs Download Uploaded: 24th Nov 2009, 4.2 KB. 12,911 downloads.
For a detailed look at individual files, see the Information tab.

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Si'Down with your drink