Hello!
So I built a very nice venue where the DJ booth is a bit elevated from the dance floor. I soon realized that the majority of the sims agro around the DJ to dance and watch, on the stage that is. See here.



Not very "legit" if I might say. Some sims use the dance floor adequately from time to time.

There are actually no mod addressing the behavior so far. And it might not be an easy task to do, if at all. There is also no way to lock a door to everyone except staff specifically in the base game nor in a mod.

I read online that some guy minimized the problem by adding fences around the DJ booth. It would be great, for some rave style kind of club but it doesn't fit the style of my venue. Here is an example of the minimized area so the DJ can access his booth while minimizing the available area for sims to dance on. It would be basically zero thus forcing them to dance elsewhere, on the dace floor itself. Better than nothing. But it is visually horrible.



Now, some invisible fences models would be incredibly useful here! Prohibiting sims to go somewhere without destroying an area visually. I know it would be some kind of a hack, a dirty fix in other words. But the possibilities would be endless here and in other scenarios. Is someone on MTS able and willing to create such a mod? I have zero know-how to such a thing.

Have a good one!

OoOOOoOOooh, invisible walls would be good for adding privacy to bathrooms without making them look like an awkward labyrinth.

While requests are technically not allowed on this website, I would like to see this thread stay open so we could discuss the hypothetical possibilities of such a mod! What clever things can we think of to do with invisible walls?

What about just making the stage as a foundation and cutting it away for the dance floor. There could be a back door for the dj to go in and providing there wasn't any reason for the other sims to be on the foundation level, like things for them to do, they should remain on the lower area.

Hmmm, there's bound to be a broadcaster XML for dancing and listening to DJ. Then the min and max distances can be set. There's probably no minimum distance set, (as like many broadcasters) but a minimum can be modded into broadcasters. I will certainly take a look, as this DJ crowding annoys me, too.

And just a quick hint, if the long footprint of the DJ booth is making contact with any dance floor objects, then if a sim decides to bust some moves and shoo all off the dance floor, that will include the DJ! Maxis ingenuity at its finest.

Update: I've just taken a look, and for watching and dancing to DJ there is no broadcaster, but on the interaction XMLs themselves there are the set distances, and guess what, the minimum for watching is zero, meaning they can all just crowd right on top of the booth. (Which they do!) I will tweak this and test in my game for a bit. If all works well, check my signature (and I'll comfirm here, too.) that the crowds now back off when watching DJ.

Not quite an invisible wall or fence, but I do believe walls and fences are quite hard to do in TS4. (Not that I've ever tried.)

Kind of ironic, considering if you google "invisible walls" all that comes up for TS4 is the glitch where walls would become invisible... *sigh*

Update: Okay, tried tweaks at my Sixam Night Club, and where my sim is standing is as close as they like to get now for watching DJ. No more cramming sardines right up close, right in the booth with DJ. The Community Lot Police have come and bellow through megaphones, "CITIZEN, STEP AWAY FROM THE DJ!" And the citizens do.

I think what is happening with the elevated booth is that the Sims are trying to stand on the same level as the booth itself. They probably can't interact with it while on a different level as everything in the sims 4 is made of "rooms." The split level counts as a separate "room" and they are unable to knowledge that it exists until they move to the same "room." That's what it looks like at least. Even if there were some kind of invisible wall it would just prevent sims from interacting with the booth entirely. ∴ I doubt Coolspear's fix is going to help OP's particular problem, though it is useful on it's own.

I thought uniquely in TS4 a split level using foundation like this is *not* considered a seperate floor for the purposes of object-person broadcasting/interaction? It's not a suggestion I'd have made for TS3 and below.

Thank you guys for your answers. By reading them I realized 2 things.

The fact that even with elevated fences, people just stack on top of each other.... Here is a wonderful snapshot.

Notice that all of them look like they were probably "Watching" the DJ, not dancing. Important to consider.

Then onto the split level versus the AI of the sims and their ability to register something is going on around them. In my inital post I realized that I had the "Fence for Window Shopping" on the edge of the stage for aesthetic purposes. As soon as I removed them and reloaded, this happened:

Much better!

Now, I'm no expert but they clearly register that there's a DJ playing up there.

So by increasing the interaction radius for the "Dance" and "Watch" interaction specifically like @coolspear1 proposed, it would theoretically be feasible, right?

The broadcasting works fine, it's the interaction that I thought might be the issue. It was my initial thought that the DJ booth would be able to broadcast across the split-level, but in order to perform any interactions with it they would need to be on the same level, (probably for the sake of animations? EA is like that, hence teens at adult height.) So the DJ booth would basically call all the sims around to gather on the platform with itself.

Here is some progress in my quest to make a functional on-stage event venue! Forget the invisible wall, I've played around with the tuning of the global watch and dance interactions on DJ booths without altering the objects themselves. I edited stuff like reducing the max distance radius and increasing the min distance radius of the interaction itslef. I've also reduced the angle at which they can interact with the booth.

Screenshot :


Now, I've only tested this stuff in my venue so far. Which mean, it may looks strange in Maxis' default ones. More details to come. In a case where these edits conflict with something else, I may end up cloning the objects and creating a whole new set of tuning. The booth shall be called something like, %Booth_Name% (On-Stage).

The whole issue with multi-level broadcasting does not seem to intervene with my edits so far.

The whole 'Watching DJ' interaction is thorn in my side in general, lol... I have personally tried fiddling with XML tuning to see if I could create a non-autonomous mod where Sims do not watch the DJ automatically - they just go in and dance. It annoys the heck out of me to have every Sim in 'da club' gain a DJ skill because they were watching MixMaster Flex do his thing. I gave up with the fiddling a couple months ago when real life got in the way - may have to go back and try again...

Will be keeping an eye on this thread though

This is exactly what I tried to do at first! Since I had 30 minutes of tutorial worth of experience with TS4 mod creation, I was not able to figure that one out lol.

That skill gain is annoying so if we were able to remove the watch automation that would be awesome! :D

I would LOVE to hear if someone has a shareable solution!! Tried to make a DJ booth and there's like 20 sims ion top of DJ :p

I have been using Scumbumbo's SCAM mod to disable the autonomy of watching the DJ entirely - and last time I played, it worked rather well. The sims just dance now - they don't watch the DJ at all, unless I direct my active, playable sims to do so. It doesn't bother me at all about the other unplayable/townie sims not watching the DJ - they're just background filler. Here's a link to the mod if you'd like to check it out yourself - http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=602837

I just came here after multiple months of inactivity and landed on this mod right on the first page. Haha.

http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=613216

This thread evolved to something more than just invisible wall, as we've seen, they are not the solution here. But still, Bakie's mod sure might be useful for some other situation.

Just wanted to share it with you in case you missed it!