A sim leaves home at 6pm to spend a little down time at a community lot for the evening, but on arrival, it's 8.30pm already! Plus the time wasted while the screen is black and unplayable, but sims can be heard doing things.
Is there any way to alter the "travel time" to a comm lot? I think 20-30 minutes would be plenty, it's only down the road!

This keeps happening to me the more I visit a community lot. It's kinda irritating trying to guess who fell out of love with who, huh?

Do you have any mods that change how many Sims visit the lot such as Piqiwi's More Townie Sims Visit Community Lots ? I switched over to Simler90's Visitor More Populated mod and have noticed a difference but then again, I haven't played on community lots enough times with that mod for a definite answer... Worth a try though.

Possibilities:
1) Potentially a conflict that HCDU doesn't pick up.
2) Large lot with lots of fountains/shrubs/trees
3) Our games hate us

When I leave home at 6 pm I arrive at 6 pm on the community lot, when I leave the community lot at 8;30 pm to go home I arrive just after I left at 6;01 pm.
This is normal game behavior.

You have something in your game that is screwing this up.
A mod or some conflict is doing this to you.

I have the Piqi mod, v2, so I've been fiddling with numbers. I cannot get the Simler one to work at all (I do have the other one they say is needed too, and the intprop line in my startup) so don't know why it wont work.
I guess it just takes a while to generate sims, but i have quite a good machine (should be! just upgraded it). I've changed piqiwi's mod to only allow 10 sims, one at a time, and there is still about a 50 game-minute delay before I can see anything.
Could it be a graphics card issue I wonder? that's the only thing I didn't upgrade.

Try changing intProp to uintProp with the desired number of visiting Sims. This is how mine looks in my startup file and the mod works fine. I also have the habit of making any visitor/community lot mods load after Visitor Controller, whether that helps at all or not I have no clue but if you have the Visitor Controller, worth a try if you want.



I have a pretty decent PC with a GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card & I still never had much luck with Piqiwi's mod personally.. It functioned properly but the delay was a pain. The game runs smooth like butter when loading to a community lot without that mod in. I have Simler90's mod in and it still runs smooth like butter. Probably not helping much - sorry.. I will try my best of finding solutions for you Unless of course someone comes to your rescue before me! :D

I have taken out Piqiwi's mod and put in Simler's (you mean the VisitorMorePopulationMod, yes?). Apparently it needs the VisitorSecretSociety mod too, which I put in although I never play SS. I have reshuffled mods a bit: I have a main mods folder with some subfolders, including one for Pescado mods first, then I put twoJeff's visitor controller in a folder next, then a couple of other subfolders, then in the main mod folder after that are all my other mods.I do have several community lot mods which will load after VisitorController as that is in a subfolder.
I just ran it a couple of times, and now there are 4 other sims visiting a community lot along with my sim. That's better than the one who came alone before I fiddled with load order. I have put uint....50 in my userstartup, but no way did anything like that turn up!
I don't know if time of day or the amount of attractive objects on the lot affects number of visitors? I just made a quick lot with lots of video games on it, but still only 4 people came, and if one left, one more would come.
I would like a lot more visitors than that!
Also the load time was about 30 game minutes which is fine. It's just the number of sims which is not!
(I have a GTX960 graphics card at the moment)

Ok It is something to do with the amount of attractive stuff on the lot. I have a House of Fun (all kinds of fun...) which is proving to bring in a few more Sims. 9 so far. And "butter smooth" loading too.

And yet the kids' playground has had just one other visitor all day...??

ETA

I'm unable to establish what is attracting sims. In the playground there are several "community sort" items. THe mod has a line about x number of items to attract 1 sim (set to 4). So if i multiply the number of items it should attract that many more sims. I filled the lot with round-abouts and no more sims came. I changed the value to 1, but it did not affect the number of visitors. I really need a playground full of children for my game, but it just doesn't seem possible.

How does Simler's mod affect your lots? How many sims do you get? Maybe it's not possible to get many visitors on a small lot, without P's mod.

EFTA

You are right about the trees. Grow them and they will come. I have a lot (2x3 so quite small) with a forest on it and so far 12 sims came. I guess all my lots will need lots of trees. I'll test flowers and shrubs.
Anything else do you think? Something generic to all lots.

After further non-exhaustive testing, these are my results.

Game set-up: uintProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 50 in startup cheat; Simler's mod, changed to 1 object:1 sim; 2x3 community lot, empty except for x trees; time of day from 2pm onwards (didn't save games but time crept forwards between trials); used Breadfruit tree as it is my favourite. (Note, all "arrival times" are "butter smooth".)

1 tree: 4 sims
2 trees: 6 sims
3 trees: 8 sims
4 trees: 11 sims
5 trees: 12 sims
20 trees: 16 sims

Can't see a linear relationship but there is a trend towards more trees:more sims.
Works with rose bushes too, so any plant I would think?

I need to clone a tree into a very small object that I can hide, so I can have multiples of them, invisibly, on the lot, to attract sims. That is waaaay beyond me.
But at least I have a better understanding about how to populate a community lot.
Hope this has been of some help to someone.

@Fyren5, a single word "tree" from you seems to have solved my issue!

Just to add, I have a community time mod (Chris Hatch's) which makes time flow properly. I was talking about if you leave at x o'clock, there is a huge delay and by the time the lot is playable, over 2 hours have passed while the game generates sims. If I stay y amount of hours, then I return at x+y o'clock which is all good, it was that huge arrival delay that was a problem. Plus the number of sims. Both solved now. By trees, and a Simler mod. Who'd a thunk it?!

It is a bit weird that the more trees on the lot, the more visitors that show up. I might need to test this too because I'm pretty sure I get at least 10-12 Sims even on a lot with barely any trees/shrubs. I'll edit my post when I get in-game to run my tests - this shall be interesting.

Yes I'd be very interested in your results!

Sorry for the late response, I tend to forget a lot of stuff. So in a fresh neighborhood, loading is fine and the time is fine. Sims arrive slowly and it's a mix of 8-12 Sims. I checked in an older neighborhood and the time skipped 2 hours and the needs of my Sims decreased whilst still loading the lot. All sounds were playing with Sims in the background. Very interesting..... Both lots were the same. I play Uberhoods so my hoods are always big, so that may be a contributor to my lag (or not, who knows). I'll keep trying different lots etc and will edit with any new findings.

Thanks for getting back to me! Yes sometimes I can get quickly and smoothly into a lot, and sometimes I can hear them all playing up behind the loading screen??!! Annoying.

What small object would you want the tree to look like?

One way you might be able to do is is to just rename one of the trees to a different model, something small already in the game. I wrote a tute for that and it is pretty easy. I haven't tried it but I think it would work. I can test if you like. https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=5489511

@Sunrader - I will give this a go, thanks, and let you know how fast I fail... !

So I really can't do what I'm aiming for. My idea was to have a very small item (even just a random little cube I could hide anywhere) that would attract more sims, like the trees do, but be able to be put (hidden) on any lot. It should not attract sims to the object itself, just make them come to the lot.
I can't do that, because I have no modding skills/experience at all.

Which tree do you know works this way? I think some people would say you could make the trees invisible, but, personally, I hate invisible objects on my lots, so which tree? I will see if a small object works in its place.

I've only tested the breadfruit tree as that is my favourite. So that one I guess?! I also dislike invisible objects in general, it's mental clutter even if not visual! That's why I was thinking a small cube - simple - and I can find it again if I need to. This is very kind of you, thank you!

You're going to hate this fun fact, then: the game runs entirely on invisible objects. There are tons of them on every lot. If you force an error on something and generate an error log, one of the things in the error log is a list of every single object on the lot. All the objects that have a room of -1, and some of them that don't, are invisible objects that make things work in the background.

Yeah, but I meant the kind I have to find when I want to move them. Like OMSPs - I've modded out almost all of the OMSPs I was using just for this reason. Or objects that use an invisible texture to get rid of something instead of just modding the mesh. :P



Cool! Will see what I can come up with.

I had the same problem. Sims needed 1-1.5h to arrive on any community, downtown etc. lot. Totally screwing up the use of Community Time.
It took me a while to figure it out. Simler90 mods finally helped.
I got her above mentioned "Visit Lot Mod". To avaoid problems with it, I needed to remove the following files from my mod folder: CJ-KidCollectionFix.package, ZChildren_on_community_lots.package and
pqw_morecommvisitor_15_nobusiness.package.

This alone did not fix it, but I also got Simler90s CarDriveLeaveFix.package and LotTransitionOFBMotivesFix from her "Lot Transition and Vehicle Mods " https://modthesims.info/d/633035/lo...hicle-mods.html and Voilá! It now takes roughly 10 min to arrive. Community Time here I come!