RTBN problems - CT - Dress for work

[Inge Jones]

I am trying to get my prison staff controller to dress the officers at the start of their shift.  It pushes a menu option (on the controller) which they are entering ok, it seems to be finding their job object ok, and it then fails politely on the last line only telling me it hit an error return, which simply means the RTBN call failed for some unknown reason.   Any ideas?  I have attached the BHAV listing.

Failing that, is there a way to directly reference the BCON values stored on a specified object type?

[jase439]

I may be mistaken but I think the call tag is "CT - Dress for Work".  RTBN is case-sensitive.  There's no way that I know of to externally reference a BCON defined on another object.  How I wish it were so.

[Inge Jones]

I was just on my way back - lol - to edit my message to say the very same thing.  I don't know if I'm just getting "past it" or what, but I knew capitalisation would be important, and I checked once, I checked twice.  It all seemed to match.  Checked thrice - and all of a sudden I spotted the difference :0   I was never much good at playing Snap either...

EDIT: Well, I got that working ok.  What is proving more difficult is getting my staff controller to RTBN stuff from the job when it is running its own loop.  The sim could run the getting dressed tree and look up its clothes on the BCONs of the job.   But when I want my controller to look up for instance the end hours using RTBN "CT - Get End Hour", it's complaining about invalid BCONs.  I think this means it's still trying to find them on the staff controller.  I have tried running this with all three values in whose stack to run in....

[jase439]

...But when I want my controller to look up for instance the end hours using RTBN "CT - Get End Hour", it's complaining about invalid BCONs.  I think this means it's still trying to find them on the staff controller.  I have tried running this with all three values in whose stack to run in....

Yeah, I experienced a similar problem with InTeen in which an RTBN call could be invoked from different contexts and ended up having to replicate the BCONs I needed to reference in each context.  I wanted to have them in one location since the values were the same, but alas.

[Inge Jones]

Ah thanks, that's saved me a lot of time!   I already had my controller working perfectly well generating staff at their start times etc based on settings on the controller, and was only trying out the RTBN stuff because I was hoping to store all the BCON data on the job object only and use it from there.   If I'm not going to be able to do that anyway, I might as well go back to the old (less professional seeming) way!

It'll reduce player choice, because I was hoping to allow them to make their own prison officer careers giving them staff with different uniforms etc on different prison sites, but still it's better than nothing.

[jase439]

Why not extend the global BCON table (something in the 0x150 range or some such thing)?  You should be able to reference your BCONs there?

[Inge Jones]

I am not exactly sure what you mean, but I have a feeling that would still mean the user can't easily change the way the prison officers dress and show up for work simply by creating a new career to work with the staff controller.   If it's always going to be something that needs editing manually then it might just as well be stored on the controller - that way I just "Add" the BCONS to it after editing in the Career Editor.

[syberspunk]

I think what jase means is, create a new BCON with an unused global. I took hise suggestion and did that with my update for the Risky Woohoo stuff. It took me a while to figure out how to get a higher value, and the highest value I was able to manage was 0x17E (so, please don't use that one, lol!)

Pretty much, just find an unused global and er... use it. With the obvious caveat that if Maxis chooses to use it later on, you're kinda screwed and have to use a different one or... figure out something else I suppose. I was hoping to try and use 0xFFF or one below that, but I couldn't figure out how to reference a Const that high. I haven't figured out the "logic" behind how the constants are referred to via the hex values.

DF was the highest that I could get. It seems to me that the globals are within 40-5A (100-134) and C0-DF(140-17E). To be honest, I haven't delved deeply enough to figure out how these are translated (40 hex = 64 dec => 64 hex = 100 dec?) in a logical way. And there ARE BCONs for the values between 134 and 140 (the global BCON list goes up to 150 for Group ID 7FD46CD0). But I'm too lazy to really think about it.

I was reluctant to use a global BCON since I know it has the potential of conflicting with future EPs, but I wanted one file that users could edit on their own, and I didn't want to have to include the semiglobal/local BCON for each separate interaction. It just bloats the mod and confuses your average user. Too many options just gets to confusing and people will start editing the wrong things and complaining about why it doesn't work.

I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope that global value doesn't get used any time soon.

Ste