Redesigning Sims 4 Waiters for Dine Out Reloaded V2

• Dine Out Reloaded V2 is COMING SOON
• Fix stuck meals - Waiters need second chances to deliver meals.
• Meal delivery can go to any waiter!
• Plates don't go on guests' tables! Let's make them smarter!
• Waiters should get restroom breaks.
• Fixing inappropriate behavior like children drawing.
• Making waiters drop meals less often

Waiters are one of the most problematic parts of Sims 4 Dine Out, perhaps more so than guests. Their logic runs the entire restaurant more so than any other NPC. To make Dine Out better, I've had to change a lot of their functions.

One of the biggest issues players will see are stuck orders. The one little coffee cup above will break an order if Sims are seated there. If an object is blocking the waiter from delivering an order, it will stay at the chef station. As a player visiting a restaurant, you'll see your order sitting there but no Sim will ever deliver it. This thing only has a total 3 slots, so if a couple orders get backed up and you're running the restaurant, your capacity to earn money is now crippled.

Dine Out offered waiters no second chances to get a meal that is stuck like this. The super elegant solution I came up with is to tell the waiter to just go pick up the thing that's blocking them. How very innovative.

This one change helped restaurants feel less generic and hopeless. But there are a lot of other problems to tackle.

Waiters are really dumb in how they're designed. Each meal is assigned to a waiter, and the other waiter can not ever go get a meal that is set for another. This means we have to wait on the assigned one to get done with whatever they're doing, in order to get the meal into the hands of a guest.

To fix this, I let any waiter take any meal. Again, this change felt really nice, fluid, and more realistic. Sure, you might normally have the same waiter but humans are intelligent and Sims have the IQ of a grub worm.

Making these improvements felt really, really good, but the victory felt hollow because ever since I began working on Dine Out Reloaded, waiters were horrible about collecting plates. They'd sit them on your table.

The reason this happens is really simple. If a waiter is cleaning up, the clean up interaction can be interrupted by anything... but very forcefully by the "take order" and "deliver meal" modes waiters have. So they'll drop the plate where ever they are! This can be on the ground or right on top of a diner's meal. Maybe even where a future meal will go, making a stuck meal.

The solution to this required me to dig into the python and change how Sims put things down, but only for waiters. This was a little challenge for me, but the solution was awesome. Instead of putting the item down, they'll take it to the wait station THEN go take the order. Like all the other solutions here, it was obvious but a little challenging. I learned a lot from this process.

It's actually a super powerful change. Sims don't care where they put things down, and might walk across the lot to a random spot. By telling the waiter to put them not just in a wait station, but also finding the CLOSEST wait station, we jack up efficiency a great deal. Another thing is, the plates are dealt with, and you don't have to go pick them up again. It helps so much that I think it might be in the top 5 improvements I've ever made.

Another thing that can be interrupted by anything is going to the bathroom. So our waiters will not actually tend to meals once their bladder need is too low, preventing "accidents" in front of guests. The way the game's set up, waiters have another kind of accident - dropped plates. This isn't fun or quirky in any way at this point for most of us, it's repetitive and aggravating. So I chopped the rate with which waiters will drop meals in restaurants to be almost non-existent unless it's a player restaurant.

Dine Out Reloaded has some bugs, in that some Sims will still react to celebrities (more rarely) and children will still draw on the ground. Ravasheen gave me some lovely advice on a really strong means of disabling this behavior once and for all, and I think I got it. I believe children will no longer make messes. Some Sims also make terrible waiters, so I've filtered them out. Like Knox here, who loves trash more than his job.

You can see that even with the improvements in Dine Out Reloaded v1, I needed to do a good bit more work to make Dine Out feel like it SHOULD feel. It's still Sims 4, there are still bugs from time to time, but it feels much better to play. I hope you feel the same way when you give it a try.

This new release is coming very soon to Early Access Patrons, and the public version of Gameplay Overhaul will get Dine Out Reloaded v1 along with some bug fixes and performance improvements. All my new, super innovative solutions like "put the drink where it belongs", "deliver the late order", and "cover for your coworker while they pee" will go into the new version in Early Access very soon.