Dine Out Reloaded V4.097 (23.09.2024)  

Dine Out Reloaded is a thank you to the Patrons who allowed me to spend an entire month on this project. I use the financial security to make cool stuff happen! Consider supporting my projects and Download Dine Out Reloaded v3.0 Here!

New Owner Abilities

In normal Dine Out, owners really do not have enough to do. It's mostly clicking to encourage employees, managing their pay rates, and clicking a couple of socials on the Diners. This needed fixing, and I achieved it.

Restaurant Owners and their family members have four new abilities:

• Show to Table - Click Sims standing about the host station, and you can seat them. No host required.
• Take Order - Click Sims who have been checked in, and you can take their orders.
• Cook Orders - Click Cook Orders on the Chef Station and your Sim will cook the orders until they run out.
• Deliver Food - You can also click the food platter to Deliver Food. My script knows which guests' table it belongs to.

All of these interactions rely on your Sim's skills, just like the Host, Waiter, and Chef. Waiters do well with Charisma, as do Hosts. Chefs benefit from both Gourmet Cooking and Mixology. You only get a little XP from creating a meal, so practice outside work hours to unlock high quality food that will surely please your guests!

These were hard to accomplish, and represent the bulk of the work the last few weeks of Dine Out Reloaded development.

New Restaurant Options

Shift-click the ground with testingcheats on to access restaurant options.

I wanted players to be able to customize the feel for their restaurant. How formal is it? You may not want Hosts Seat Guests. This will stop Hosts walking Sim to their seats, and instead tell them a table to go to on their own. You might even skip the host and use the new Guests Seat Themselves option, which will skip the arrival stage completely. Sims will come in and walk right up to an available table.

Running a restaurant all by yourself can be tough, so I wanted to give options that will help Sims 4 players to customize the experience a bit further. You can decide if waiters are responsible for delivering meals and taking orders. Disabling either of these will put it on your Sim or their family members to do these actions. This can give you more time to cook or seat guests, or schmooze with customers to get those 5 star reviews.

If you want to hire a chef later, but do not want the first to come in you can use Player Counts as Chef. This will let your Sim be one of the two chefs. Helpful for a very busy restaurant!

Sims eat way, way too fast. EA took changes to this too far and made Sims eat faster in all instances, killing family meals where Sims are done in two bites. With the Sims Eat Politely option, Diners will stick around twice as long as normal to finish their meals. This can help Sims have time to converse and drink in between killing their entrees.

What's New in V2.5

Why Sims Don't Show Up to Work

You may be surprised to learn this, but Dine Out will let you hire waiters who do not qualify to actually be waiters. Same applies to hosts and chefs. The fix for this was to make sure all the criteria that are required for a Sim to show up at work are included in the hiring menu. It's literally why some players never saw the Sims they hired show up, and a point of frustration for many. I fixed it with the help of testers.

Meal Delivery

Despite my best efforts, there were still cases in Dine Out Reloaded 2 that caused meals to sometimes fail delivery. It turns out this is by design. Bad design, not some obscure bug. The reasons took time to find but were spelled out plainly. Waiters failing an interaction for any reason could disappear a meal, forever dooming it to be stuck. Worse, Sims could not order again.

I've cleaned up about 5 major causes of Sims meals failing delivery and it feels much, much more reliable. Near or at 100% reliability.

Before this fix and in normal Dine Out, players could end up behind several NPC meals when they first visit a restaurant, so I made a change. The player is prioritized by Waiters when it comes to having their order taken. This is to simulate that the other Sims already had their order taken. 

Bribe The Host

What is more, Sims can choose to bribe the Host for $100 (by clicking the host or table) and the Chef will then cook their meal first. You can be doubly prioritized, and make the most of a restaurant visit without it taking 8-10 hours.

Bad Behaviors

While DO Reloaded 2 did a decent job of stopping bad behaviors, more potentially strange interactions have come out since I made it. Sims had a very out-of-place habit of sitting on the floor cross-legged while waiting for a table and sometimes after being seated would still obsess over celebrities. Both of these activities are prohibited in restaurants along with several others. 

Waiter Logic

This is my best take on waiters in Sims 4. They operate smoothly and will rescue tables that have food or drink on them, going into cleaning mode if a table is blocked. 

For now Waiters will no longer drop platters. It's a very bug-prone feature that honestly feels repetitive and frustrating for players, particularly when visiting a restaurant. I've eliminated it until I can stabilize it. Even then, I will only be re-enabling it on lots owned by the player so as to add a reason to train waiters.

Menu Shenanigans

You may be surprised to learn this, but the game is actually kind of smart in how it chooses foods for Sims. But to a fault. It is entirely possible a player can make a menu for their business which offers Sims 0 valid choices. EA has seemingly forgotten to put tags on newer foods that came with various packs, and no Sims can ever choose them. This could result in a Waiter bringing out the order only it was completely invisible. What happened? No food was chosen. I fixed this so that SOMETHING will always be chosen.

Instructions:  Unzip to your Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods folder. Ensure Script Mods are turned on in Game Options > Other. If you have trouble with the download or the mod working, attempt using save as on the files as some browsers treat ts4script files incorrectly. 

CONFLICTS:

DO Reloaded is known to conflict with:

• No Empty Venues when Arriving by Weerbesu
• NPCC - NPC Controller Mod by Paulson

v3.03 Update

• Fixed a bug that could cause waiters to stop working.
• Also fixed a bug that could prevent players from taking orders in restaurants that have waiters.
• Improved waiter response time on dishes. When 2 or more tables are dirty and there's nothing else that needs done, they'll go in for the clean using the new Smart Dish Collection System.

V3.02 Update:

• Fixed a bug when playing as chef that froze needs.
• Fixed a bug where diners could aggressively unseat each other while playing with Guests Seat Themselves.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a fairly harmless but annoying LastException when shutting down restaurants.
• Fixed a bug with uniforms when playing as chef.
• These fixes are for 3.1 but are being pushed to this build so that current early access players and future free players do not have to wait for fixes.