CoriBoom Pre Beta - Opera House Fix Testing for ModPacc Zero

[CorinaMarie 29,910]

We'd like to gather some data on Opera House usage so this is a call for peeps who do have @toroca's Opera House Fix installed and plopped in a city tile.

The EQ boost affects Sims age 40 and up at varying effectiveness levels. The highest boost is to Sims 80+ years old. What we want to determine is the likely maximum usage based on population. To do this we'd like y'all to post the number of patrons and the city population either as text or showing in a pic.

Here's mine:

From that I can calculate: 717 / 25,788 = ~0.0278 and then using the total capacity as set in the fix: 25,000 / 0.0278 = 899,281. It's at this point or higher in population that we could expect the horrid bug to reappear. But, this is only one data point so we'd like to gather more samples.

If it turns out about 900k pop is where it could go goofy again, then we feel there are two options:

1. Increase the Opera House capacity to 150,000 (and then increase the cost proportionally).
2. Delete the City Exclusion Group property so more than one could be plopped if needed.

Note: The best cities for these tests are ones where the population has been stable for a long, long time so there are a lot of older SimFolks living there.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,115]

The Haunted Opera comes back to life yet again. 

Do you remember my first encounter with this piece of shrimp? It happened in a relatively small city with 215000 simtizens. Most of them were in the 51-60 demographic.

I believe a limit of 150000 patrons is fairly good for cities like this and bigger cities as well. It will be enough to save many a town. Just my two euro-cents.

[madhatter106 3,931]

(singing) "He's here!  The Phaannnntom of the Oooopera House bug!"
I am very curious as to the outcome of all this, as it would be nice to get the house de-bugged.
Personally, my cities never get to a population or threshold where it's even offered to me.
Still, it would be nice if my wealthy, culture snob Sim patrons got a chance to dust off their tuxedos, snag the great aunt's Harry Winston earrings and necklace, and attend the gala opening of the season's production of Turandot.  Even if they are going to nod off during the aria in the second act, having had one too many glasses of chardonnay during the prior intermission.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Just thinking outside the box a little bit... what if, instead of fiddling with the capacity, we tried modding the Opera House as a museum by changing it's occupant groups? If we did that, I believe (??) the Opera House would share patrons with other museums. That would mean mayors could increase the patronage capacity and relieve pressure on the Opera House by plopping additional museums, rather than additional Opera Houses.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,115]

9 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

Just thinking outside the box a little bit... what if, instead of fiddling with the capacity, we tried modding the Opera House as a museum by changing it's occupant groups?

It looks like Opera, it is named after Opera but maaaaan, it's not an Opera! 

I like this proposal. But if we choose to go down this path, then Major Art Museum might be a better starting point as far as variables / values go.

After all, it's a large museum, so it's the closest thing to what you suggest.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

On 21/08/2021 at 9:15 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Delete the City Exclusion Group property so more than one could be plopped if needed.

Would this allow the use of multiple different opera house lots? Thinking something like the Performing Arts centre from sc3k as a kind of 'local branch' of the opera house.

[CorinaMarie 29,910]

15 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

If we did that, I believe (??) the Opera House would share patrons with other museums.

I believe that is correct and is easy enough to test. My initial reaction is I'd rather not because I feel whenever possible we should squash bugs only rather than adjust the underlying game mechanics. Both option 1 and 2 I've suggested would solve the problem without needing to switch categories.

 

5 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

But if we choose to go down this path, then Major Art Museum might be a better starting point as far as variables / values go.

In what way? Do you mean change the EQ boost table to match the Major Art Museum? If so, that's not necessary as the School EQ Boost and the School Effectiveness vs. Average Age are separate properties within the Opera House itself. BT's proposal would simply be to share the patrons so if the Opera House gets overwhelmed, plopping more regular Museums would alleviate the overage problem. However, I don't care for the idea as that would then shuffle those extra patrons to using the Museum's boosts instead of the Opera House.

 

5 hours ago, Whte_rbt said:

Would this allow the use of multiple different opera house lots?

Yep. That's exactly what option 2 would do. If the first Opera House gets overwhelmed then plopping another would share the patrons and they'd all get Opera House boosts.

Option 1 of increasing the capacity to 150k patrons stays more true to the original Maxis intention and pushes the bug off until around 5.4 million pop in a city tile. (Ofc, option 2 means there's no population limit at all because one could plop as many Opera Houses as needed.) Or back to option 2 again, setting the patrons to 200k puts the bug limit at around 7.2 million pop in a city tile.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

11 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

It looks like Opera, it is named after Opera but maaaaan, it's not an Opera! 

I like this proposal. But if we choose to go down this path, then Major Art Museum might be a better starting point as far as variables / values go.

After all, it's a large museum, so it's the closest thing to what you suggest.

Actually, modeling it after the Major Art Museum is exactly what I had in mind.

Edit: Throwing the rest of this post in a spoiler tag, since I don't want to drag this thread off-topic from the testing that Cori & CB are conducting.

Spoiler

The Opera House has its own occupant group, which is what I believe causes the Opera House bug. There's only one building with the "Opera" occupant group in the game, and you can only plop one of that building in your city, which means there's no way to add new "Opera" capacity. (Cori's suggestion of allowing multiple Opera Houses would, of course, fix this.)

The Major Art Museum doesn't have it's own occupant group. It's just another "museum," albeit with its own unique stats. That's essentially what I'm suggesting for the Opera House -- not to modify any of its unique characteristics, just to switch the "Opera House" Occupant Group over to the "Museum" Occupant Group, so that it's drawing from and contributing to the same pool of patrons as the Major Art Museum and other museums.

Unless there's some unique characteristic to the "Opera House" occupant group that I'm missing, the game mechanics for the Opera House would remain the same. It would just be categorized as a different type of education building and draw from a different pool of patrons. Essentially, it would mean treating the "museum" occupant group as something closer to "cultural center" -- which is how a lot of custom content already treats that occupant group.

The two main reasons I suggest trying this out are: (A) If we fix the problem by allowing multiple Opera Houses to be plopped, users will still need to know about the Opera House bug in order to avoid and/or fix the problem -- as Rickety Cricket has shown us, that's not necessarily common knowledge; (B) I feel like most players would prefer plopping a variety of museums as opposed to plopping multiple Opera Houses in a single city.

(That said, I don't use the Opera House myself, and it's a minor issue if we're talking about cities with millions of citizens, so I don't think it's a big deal.)

 

P.S. For reference, here's the Occupant Groups property for the Opera House in Reader:

And here's the Occupant Groups property for the Major Art Museum:

 

[Cyclone Boom 17,032]

@BartonThinks

Your idea sparked our imagination and we implemented it, but in a slightly different way.

See our new topic here...