No-Visitor stairs/floors?

I have a second floor, but I want it to be private to only the family. is there an object that prohibits visitors to enter the second floor, or some stairs that will prohibit visitors from using it?

HI!
You could try the appartements hacks at Simlogical!

Rosemary :0)

the stairs there require me to actually have an apartment, since it needs the apartment controller for it to function. or else my game might crash...

I suppose you could clone a set of stairs and use a menu editor to flag it as not being visitor-enabled. Another option would be to use one of SimLogical's new-style 4-key doors to control access to the stairway or to the second floor. You can use an override so that all family members can use it without having to be given keys. If you want, you can give a key to service NPCs such as the maid and gardener (they'll be under "Give Key to Default..."), or use another override to admit all NPCs.

yes, i think i'll just do that, and maybe even release it here! are there any tutorials on how to hack things to make it not visitor enabled?

Or you could do like I did. I have a "landing" room on the ground floor that the stairs are located in. This room has a privacy door on it. Only family can get in, and have access to the stairs. Course since i have non-magical sims in my neighborhood this room is where my main family keeps all their magical stuff at.

I tried the menu editor from blueprint, and by default the visitor enabled box is unchecked, so I don't know what to do with that.

what I've done for the mean time is to put private doors on all rooms in the second floor. your solution, riz, might lower the happiness of my sims in the layout of their homes...

but if there are some hacked doors for dowload, I wonder if it's a possibility to hack stairs from being used by visitors too.

In general, setting an object or interaction as visitor-enabled is a simple thing. If you open an objects IFF file in IFF Pencil 2 and look at the TTAB resource, each entry will have a set of checkboxes. Most of them control whether or not various types of Sim can use that interaction. There's one for visitors, one for children, one for adults, one for cats, and one for dogs. (Some menu editors, such as the Blueprint Menu Editor, won't show the boxes for cats and dogs because they were never updated for Unleashed.) In general, visitors can't use interactions that don't have the "Available to visitors" box checked, but there are exceptions. After looking at some stairs in IFF Pencil, they seem to be one of the exceptions. Stairs have a "Use" interaction, but that only seems to be related to telling Sims to go upstairs or downstairs. While it's not checked as "Available to visitors", visitors are obviously able to use stairs to get from place to place.

From what I can see, stairs seem to function similarly to doors. There are family-only doors, so family-only stairs should be possible. However, visitors would still know what was on the second floor and might still want to use those items.

do you guys know of any sites with tutorials on how to hack into stuff like this? or a community where I can request a hack like this?

For tutorials, a good place to start would be the Workshop section at http://www.woobsha.com .

The stairs there require me to actually have an apartment, since it needs the apartment controller for it to function. or else my game might crash...

If you have Makin' Magic installed you should not crash. The bug that causes crashes was fixed at that point (which made it REALLY hard to track down!)

But even if you don't have MM installed there's nothing to worry about. You only need to have the apartment controller installed in your game. You do not need to set any apartments up or put the controller on any other lots. You do, of course, have to use the controller on this lot (and set it up) otherwise the stairs will just act like regular stairs.

(The bug is not specific to the Apartment Hack by the way. There's a line of code that's pretty common called 'Set to Next Object' that we use to let one object find out if another one is on the lot. This bug makes the game crash if that second object is not *installed* in the game at all. If it's installed but not on the lot then the game wont crash. weeeirdness!)

I tried the menu editor from blueprint, and by default the visitor enabled box is unchecked, so I don't know what to do with that.

Oh, that IS interesting! That would have been my first suggestion too. Now that I re-think on it, though, it does make sense that the Interaction menu is not being used to control who walks through. Stairs (and doors and even pool objects) are "portal objects" and work a little differently than normal ones do. Normally we click on an object to use it. For a door or stair we click where we want to go and the Sim figures out how to use the portal object on their own in a different way (the portal function tree)

I don't have a tutorial written up on hacking portal objects but I'll add one to the Workshop section for you