Please help! I've read many tutorials and the posts in this forum until I'm blurry eyed!

I am trying to make it so custom, and Maxis-cloned, floor tv's can be "elevated" by putting them on coffee tables. I have changed the strength of the coffee table, I have reduced the weight of the tv, I have changed the "allowed height" parameter, and I have enabled the intersection with objects in the BHAV. The closest I can come to accomplishing what I want is having the tv "intersect" with the left side of the coffee table, but it is still on the floor rather than at the coffee table height.

At this point, I don't know if it's an issue with the coffee table or an issue with the tv. Any and all help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Hi oldman!

Have you checked that the placement flags for the tv (normally in the Init BHAV) are set to allow placement on coffee tables? You definitely don't want "allow object intersection", that setting is for objects which can live on the same tile without one sitting on top of the other.

Echo

I do have the placement flag set ("low tables" ?), but I will remove the object intersection flag and try again. Thank you for responding...and btw, I appreciate your work!

Hmm... That sounds like the right one, yes. Which TV is it you're trying to change? Is it a one tile TV, or a multi-tile TV? Only single tiled objects can be placed on surfaces.

It is a 2-tile tv, and I thought that might have something to do with it - trying to place a 2-tile object over 2 individual slots. But isn't that what we're doing when we place it on the floor??

I have also seen some expressions in the BHAV where you define the "category", as well as some terms in the CRES like tvexpensive, tvmoderate, tvwall, tvfloor. Could any of that be used to fool/force the coffee table to accept it?

Could I clone the coffee table and make 1 big slot to accept the tv?

There is an engine level limitation in the game that objects with multiple OBJDs cannot be snapped into any other objects. Since floors are not objects and do not actually have slots (which is why you can turn off snap-to-grid and have objects in all sorts of positions on the floor) you *can* put multi-OBJD objects there. The problem is that the actual "main" OBJD in multi-OBJD objects doesn't exist in world. It has its "out-of-world" flag set, which means that it has no physical presence in the game environment, it just exists to hold all the other OBJDs together. You can't have an object that doesn't exist in the world snap into a slot. It just can't work.

There are a few work arounds.
The first is to just adjust the mesh so that it is essentially hanging in mid air, but at the height of the table you want to put it on. Such an object will *only* look good if it is on that surface though, which I gather is not what you're after.

A slightly more complicated way is to make the multi-tile OBJD have only one tile, and to hell with the footprint. You'd want to merge the existing OBJD and OBJf files into one of each. The footprint won't match the television any more though, and there won't be anything stopping the player from having the un-footprinted part intersecting something else or hanging over the edge of a table.

The best way to solve this one is to use the same technique that the cars/car platforms did in OFB. You merge all the OBJDs and OBJfs into one of each, but then adjust the footprint in the CRES so that it's actually got multiple tiles (but still only the one OBJD). That will do what you want, but (a) I think it requires OFB or later to work, and (b) it's not something I've ever done myself so I can't really walk you through it. Take a look at the car objects and their CRES files though, that should point you in the right direction.

Thank you for your reply and detailed explanation. It seems that it's getting into more than I'm ready for though, so I think I'll just live with it as it is for now.

Go ahead and mark this thread as closed, or abandoned, or whatever is appropriate.

Thanks again!