More Awesome Than You!

Am I crazy, or are there no skill books in the library in Twinbrook?

I guess those two things aren't mutually exclusive.  I swear I clicked on every friggin' bookcase and couldn't find any, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

I do not see any trees in neighbourhood view. Zooming out I cannot see them, when zoomed in close to the lot I can see them, and before I installed ambitions I could see the trees in neighbourhood view. I've had problems with Riverview before with no trees in neighbourhood view, but this persists with the new town and also Sunset Valley.

Rad, check your graphics setting in Options. It may have changed the settings you had before you installed the new expansion.

Whenever you install a new EP, SP, or patch, the game resets to the default settings.  You'll also need to change your lifespan options too, if you were playing at anything other than the default.

My graphics settings appear to be on low even though they arent.

Also, the house I moved into has a FOUNDATION HEIGHT FLOOR on top of the first floor, and it deletes using the sledgehammer, leaving holes (walled holes). Like a deck/foundation. But there's no tool to build something like this for myself! D:

Copied over my options from my saved directory, and it's no longer borked.

It somehow saw fit to set all my options to default (minimum). I had it optimized for my PC for a balance between quality/performance before

I got my options to fix after closing and reloading, but it wont let me turn off data whatevering. Which is scary.

The grass in Twinbrook is so..ugly...that I didn't think my graphics settings were fixed until I placed the default grass to compare.

CAS has no music. Now that's changed from my last game session pre-ambitions.

On the contrary, I was enjoying the CAS music, there's some cute new general town/cas/etc music in this one.

Did anyone notice the logo on the load screen is ridiculously off center? <_< This is pretty Borked to me. I'll be updating my Sims 3 Load Screen mod to work with this for sure.

I can CAST floor edges...but not cielings. :\

I meant that after the original music in CAS when it loads/runs, there is no music. No loop, or shuffle, or play. Just stops.

I'm seeing a Grill-A-Thon marker constantly, not sure if this is intentional but it is a bit annoying. The house icon does it too. I am hoping this can be modded away because I am already aggrivated by it.

All the windows on every lot are blue tinged outside looking in and clear inside looking out. What the hell?

Tilt hte camera up. If it goes away, that's the sky reflecting onto them.

It's not the sky.

I think my launcher is borked. I can't install or uninstall content.

Well, the windows are significantly more reflective now (people complained that they didnt seem to have glass panes), so I think it is the sky. :p

Still nothing borked for me apart from what I listed. I really wish I could figure out the damn mini-foundation thingy used on, like, every house. It's clearly made with a special tool but no such tool exists!

FYI, I registered my game earlier and was able to download and install the free stuff from the store just fine. I also have all the new traits (can't remember where, but some people were reporting that the new traits were missing for them). I haven't checked out the reward items yet, so can't comment on those. My sliders also work fine and I'm currently testing out some other CC. No problems yet, although ironically EA did what most other world creators have done - used the most official-looking library bookshelves - which sadly have no skill books in them whatsoever. I wish I knew how to hack that and make all books available for all bookshelves, because it's ridiculous.

Yeah, sorry if I came off cold, I realize now that the windows are now a lot more reflective. But my first instinct was that blue window effect way back from sims 2! Other than that, nothing is borked for me either. I wanna how they did that foundation, too.

If you look when inside the windows reflect the indoors much more. I also notice the lighting and shadows are VASTLY improved (in a subtle way, if that makes sense). In particular an easel I was placing for an architect job produced a shadow on the wall when two tiles away from it, which I dont recall seeing before.

Has anyone shared the free registration stuff yet?

I don't have Ambitions yet, but I just patched. Have been enjoying the world editor tool, playing around with lot placement and moving trees or deleting them. I have been unable to grab the big oak trees, no matter what angle I try to get to them. Those are the ones I wanted to delete in some areas, cause they clip the houses.

I wonder if those of you that have Ambitions are experiencing the same problem? I wanted to know if this is just a patch thing.

Yeah, the indoor lighting actually is a lot better!

The laundry thing. I'm not sure what's going on but my Sim (pre-made, Sergeant is the last name I believe) never wears the same clothing twice anymore now that I've initiated the laundry system. Basically, every time your Sim changes clothes whether from showering or switching to work out, they drop a pile of clothing on the ground near them. Clicking on the laundry gives you the Clean Up option but if you don't then click on the Washing Machine and choose Do Laundry, the Sim will just drop the laundry in a pile again. OR you can just click on the Washer and choose Do Laundry and your Sim will go around the house collecting piles of clothing. Takes 45 Sim minutes for a wash cycle, not sure how long for drying, and a green light on the front of each machine tells you when it's done. Also, they get Wants to wash clothes and positive moodlets for fresh clothing.

BUT, back to the clothing, I was wondering if Sims wear ugly tattered clothing because you didn't have them do their laundry. It's bullshit but, I've been doing nothing but laundry since I started and my one Sim keeps wearing different clothing. Once it was a jumpsuit, then the career clothing for Culinary (even though she is a cop). Her husband does not have this problem.

Like usual, EA overdid something that players might have actually enjoyed otherwise. They are CLUELESS.

Hopefully someone will create a mod for this. Dropping the clothes on the floor once every 3-4 days ought to do it. To make it realistic, though, it should vary dependiing on the number of sims in the household. Currently I am playing a two-sim household and they are doing laundry twice a freaking day.

To CAST ceilings paint them with floor tiles first.

Small issue: my Investigator Sim was doing a Stakeout at the Library. A message came up saying he found some information and should write a report and give it to the police. Since he was already at the Library and could use a computer, I clicked the building to go inside (it was still acting as a rabbit hole) but I didn't get the option to Visit the Library. I had to have him walk off lot to the supermarket, then clicked on the Library and I finally had the option to Visit and the Library interior became visible.

I have borked romantic socials.

"Marc thinks Selphie is being flirty."

Then it IMMEDIATELY jumps to "thinks Selphie is okay."

:(

I keep getting freezes in buy mode, but only under the 'misc' category of decor. Game will freeze, blackout, and then need to be Xed out with the task manager. Have tried deleting a lot (And I mean TONS. Like over half of what I had) of my clutter to see if that fixes anything. So far it hasn't.

Confirmed that the library in Twinbrook does not have any skill books.

I thought EA said Laundry would be OPTIONAL only if you bought the washer and dryer. Seems like they want to make it mandatory. Previews even said it'd be optional, and they'd just get a positive moodlet from doing it. EA doesn't know how to code a fucking thing properly. Breaks every damn thing they can think of that works a specific way in a preview.

I heard that it's the laundry basket that makes it optional. Delete them all if you have them.

I have no laundry issues.

Cannot confirm at all if it is a glitch but Renovation clients keep saying "I cannot live in this squalor!" claiming I have to at least "give them enough to live with".

Spending all their budget? Nothing. As little as possible? Nothing. Adding extra junk they don't ask for? Nothing. I don't know what I am supposed to do.

Started up my game for the first time, and my family was corrupted.

Great job, EAxis!

Do they have all the basics needed to survive? Have you covered all the walls, and floors?

Game goes completely silent after some time, like all options are on mute. System sound is normal, no mods. Anyone else experiences this?

I have, yes. It's happened before this EP too, but it seems more common now. The sound will occasionally come back, but it won't last for long before it goes silent again.

My saves wont load, not sure what's up with that. I made a new game last night and played for a few hours without any problems. I can't load that game today, it just gets stuck at 99% and sits there playing music and cycling tips, waited 15 minutes while watching TV and it still didn't load. Started a new game on a tiny empty town and saved without building anything, then tried to load that and it took like 3 minutes  to get to 99% then got stuck again (normally a small empty town loads for me in like 2 seconds). No mods installed, and I already tried deleting the caches, so I'm assuming it's a bug and not my fault.

One other thing I noticed is one of my sims kept falling through the floor when working at the sculpting station. I had to move it to ground level to make that stop.


It is totally optional. I didn't buy any laundry related items and I have not seen any of the laundry related features other than the constant want to buy a laundry machine. Which is actually sort of annoying in itself, canceling that want every day only to have it pop up again later.

Edit: I found out what was causing my saves to stop loading. When I installed the EP I moved the mod framework over as usual, the resources.cfg and the mods folder, but I forgot to place d3dx9_31.dll in the EP2 bin folder. My custom content still worked but when I noticed that file was missing I moved it over last night before going to bed. It turns out placing d3dx9_31.dll in the EP2 bin folder is what caused my games to stop loading, I deleted that just now and everything is back to normal. Not sure what's up with that.

Is anyone having problem clicking on other sims? When i do it, nothing happens. Is there anything that i can do to solve the problem.

They seem to have absolutely trashed the camera. It's zoomed further in now, which just looks horrible and makes it impossible to get a good look at anything. I can't even look at a small lot in its entirety now.

Also, is it just me or are parts of the UI and some of the lighting really dark now?

have you removed ALL mods and tried playing?  Have you also tried a vanilla game?  May be a conflict with an out of date mod.

thanks so much. No i haven't taken all my mods out but i will try that now thanks again!!!!

Yep, I have experienced this too. But, it was not until I added my new Mods folder setup with all my Mods in AND after seeing that pop up showing me which Script Mods I had installed. I'm not certain if that screen is just recognizing that those are script mods and is notifying me or if it's saying that those particular script mods are conflicting with core game files.

Probably the former.  TS2 did the same thing.  If a script mod conflicts, the game actually has a popup now that tells you a mod is out of date.  I had one mod that conflicts with Ambitions, Jonha's hack to remove the limit on the number of CAS sliders, and I got a popup whenever I tried to run the game.  The popup disappeared after I took that one mod out.

I haven't experimented with the new Mods folder yet.  I hate to change anything that works as is, you know?

I've added the new Mods folder although I haven't added any custom furniture or hairstyles to my actual Sims yet; I chose a pre-made in the new town. But I do know it's working because my Mods were at least showing that they were broken (game recognizes the new setup). Hacks are really what's screwed. I fixed my problem with not being able to click on other Sims, by just removing the hacks that I have even though they didn't interfere with the core files (no in-game messages of conflicts). Once I removed the hacks, the one new save I have would not open. I forget the message but you can only click a check mark which takes you back to the main menu. So, I cleared my caches, removed only my hacks and kept my other CC (Clothing, Cars, Genetics) and restarted the game. I can open that save and click on Sims. BUT, their relationships with other people are all gone; they only know each other and their bosses.

EDIT: Sorry, all relationships have gone capput, not just friends but husband and wife are now strangers.

I don't think I'll be playing anymore for the time being. I know it's still pretty early to tell but, I wonder if it's just game modifying behavior that conflicts, like Twallan's mods, Book of Knowledge, gardening mods and such because everything else works. What hope do we have that AM will eventually work?

Sometimes when I talk to the cashier at the consignment shop it doesn't bring up the buy menu.  It doesn't matter if I select buy when talking to her or if I select buy on the cash register itself.

Only thing I've really noticed so far.

Edit:  I've missed a few opportunities as the fire fighter because I didn't get notified that there was a fire.  I'm not sure if that is the game being borked or if it is because I am unobservant though.

Hm, all these problems make me a little wary to install the game. Still, there are many people who claim to have no issues at all. I've already set up my game to install Ambitions once my torrent finally finishes. I've moved my entire Mods folder to my desktop so the game is 100% vanilla. I don't use custom music, so there's no need to remove it.

I do hope that solves any problems for when I do install Ambitions. I often find that a lot of problems with installing new patches or expansions could have easily been avoided by removing the entire Mods folder, first, and running the game vanilla before putting the Mods folder back in.

I ran my game vanilla for the first 4 Sim days just to see if there were any outright conflicts. And for the most part, there weren't any. As soon as I added hack type mods that change game behaviour, the problems started. EA tampering with hack type mods? Looks like it.

I wouldn't put it past EA to pull a dirty stunt like that. They don't seem to realize that tampering with mods is only hurting them, as the majority of players wouldn't purchase the game if they couldn't use custom content or hacks, myself included. They don't seem to understand the concept of getting more bees with honey than with vinegar.

Please. Ambitions is an expansion pack. It changes game behaviors, so of course your hacks aren't going to work if they change game behavior too. It wasn't done maliciously but it was necessary if the expansion is going to do more than add clothes and furniture. Just wait for your hacks to be updated.

Pst...this is a bit of a secret, but EXPANSION PACKS VIOLENTLY ALTER CORE FILES WHICH TELL TEH GAME HOW TO RUN.

Meaning modified versions of these files aren't going to work.

EA is not a vampire swooping down on you to rape you and turn you into a werewolf obessed with buying stuff from the store.

Also, my romantic socials issue is a mod problem, apparently. Odd since I don't...have any mods installed.

Not having skilling books in the Library is strange but easily fixed.  I just added them with more seating.  It works fine, just an inconvenience.  My Consignment shop doesn't have an NPC to man it.  I haven't tryed to fix it.  Maybe if the register is deleted and replaced (if that is possible yet?). 

What Claeric said.  I know a few months ago is a very, very long time to some, but you might recall the same thing happens every time a new installment (or sometimes even just a patch) comes out.  Most core mods will tell you they are only compatible with certain game versions.  This is not flavor text, it is valuable information for the well-being of your game.

Also, be aware that removing mods yet playing a previously modded save can also result in a BFBVFS.  If you must play the expansion without waiting for mod updates, yank your mod folder and start a new game/hood.

So the foundations on top of secondary floors that they used in pretty much EVERY building?

The lack of the tool for it is not "borked". It's a cheat!

PlaceFriezes on/off lets you place foundations on top of any other floor except foundations.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dXDaAA8f17k/TAaK7_AjcPI/AAAAAAAABfM/sqbXW77Ckf0/s400/Screenshot-41.jpg)

Oooh!  I'm totally going to go crazy with that cheat.  I miss my sunken living rooms and raised dining rooms I used to make for TS2.  The sunken living room workaround for TS3 was unwieldy at best, plus it required ginormous windows.

My mistake, as long as the cieling is high enough, they can go onto foundations as well. :D

I wish I was a good enough builder to create sunken/raised rooms. Maybe this cheat will give me the opportunity to practice building some more.

Is it a cheat that comes with the patch or the update you think?
Are there any other new cheats that you have come across in your musings?

Nope, but I only found the Friezes one from typing "help".

There's one that is "remove floor cutout" but I have no idea what that is or if it's new.

Sim Bots love to jump into the pool.  Then they short circuit.  But don't worry, once they recover they jump back into the pool.  yay!

(My sim bot is athletic, so I don't know if non-athletic sim bots do the same thing.)

On the plus side, my inventor sim was able to reprogram my Sim Bot when he was on the fritz which allowed me to select the Sim Bot's traits.

I hope it allows cookie cutter stencil type cutouts for customized inlayed flooring, that would be goodness.
@Simius: Check your robot for masochist or deeply depressed traits and keep him away from the microwave.

I'm sure nobody will agree with me, but I always thought that maybe Servos/Simbots were supposed to be programmed to be just like sims, and so part of their charm is that they unknowingly attempt to take baths and go swimming even when it will fry them.

Not an error, just a potentially annoying quirk.

That's kind of true.  On a side note my Sim Bot originally had the Hydrophobic trait.  Which I got rid of when I reprogrammed him.  So I guess it is kind of my fault now that I think about it.

I wonder if all new Sim Bots have that trait or if it was just pure luck.

One thing I noticed while playing Ambitions, and I have to assume that it's a bug, is that any gems collected when using your Personal Drilling Device do not count towards your Gems Collected count. Also, when creating tunnels with the Drilling Device I made a tunnel to a Junkyard, named it and accidentally set off a detonator too close to the hole, causing it to become a salvage item. You can salvage it, causing it to disappear and it then goes into your family inventory but can neither be sold or placed on the ground. The location/name still shows up in the menu of tunnel travel locations, but I have yet to try it and see what happens.

I have this exact same issue, have you found the cause of it? Does this happen to every single sim you play or just select ones?

Oddly, I removed all my mods and placed them one by one. The issue never resurfaced.

Ok, I'll just try reloading and then try this: http://nene.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=405243 (sounds like a similar issue) before messing with the 5 teeny mods I have in use.

I moved my mods to the new location in MyDocuments and reloaded. That seems to have fixed it. WTF?

When starting a new game I no longer have the option to select an existing household on the map. I can only create new sims or move in a family. Not that I really care as I always make new sims to play, but it is just an odd thing for them to remove.

Just to inform you that this is not necessarily due to the new patch or Ambitions, because I have frequently had this jumping back to "okay", too, and I am neither patched nor Ambitioned yet. Reloading the save usually fixes this for me.

It does come up.  Try going into edit town first, then back, it will probably appear.  At least it did for me.

It happened in the basic game already. The option appeared when entering edit town or saving and loading the save.

It worked as usual for me; you may have a borked installation or a conflicting mod.
My game has been remarkably well behaved and has only baulked at one piece - or set, of CC that causes my game to freeze if I click to view the relevant category in Buy Mode.

After noticing everything went all haywire, such as the romantic socials everyone was mentioning, I just removed AM and tried several different solutions. So now I just reinstalled my game, along with Ambitions. It works beautifully during gameplay (the bright green color is back! yay!)but..

Does anyone have the problem where if they put all of their CC in the documents path the load for the neighborhood takes considerably LONG (takes 7 minutes to load my family)?? Did anyone come across that? And if anyone knows if something is wrong can they help me (and no, AM isn't in my CC batch yet).

It takes longer to load the game. It used to take y whole game 20 seconds to start, now it takes around 2 minutes with my cc in the EA sanctioned mods folder.

I'm here to ask whether "buydebug" was part of AM or the regular game? I can't remember, but I recall people with unmodded games talking about it.

It appears that since the patch it is impossible to route to any digsite. Queuing up the 'excavate' command justs results in the route failure routine.

I actually have not put my CC in the EA sanctioned Mods folder, but moved it and the other necessary files to the corresponding places in the Ambitions folder.  So far everything seems to work.  Game loading is longer, especially if I've cleared my caches, but I was expecting that to a degree.  I also expect that the time will come with a future EP or patch when we will be forced to move our CC to the EA sanctioned location.

It is part of the regular game -- I may be one of those people with unmodded story modes whom you remember talking about it.  I am scared to use it too much, though, for fear of causing a BFBVFS.

Yes, I'm a dumbass. I forgot to put "on" after "buydebug". AM's config file has me spoiled.

I think, perhaps, the mods folder in the documents is more efficient, at the cost of a longer neighborhood load time.

My game has felt WORLDS faster (not to mention worlds prettier, but that's just because the patch violently enhanced the lighting), and I am thinking it has to do with the documents mods folder and the longer neighborhood loading time. I think the game is loading the neighborhood for the most part, instead of just your house.

Although I should note that sometimes it loads relatively fast and sometimes it takes minutes at a time.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I did not have to wait for CC icons to load at all. Like, on a brand new install, there was no need to wait for my CC thumbnails OR game content icons to load. They were all there immediately, and the objects popped up as soon as I clicked on them. THis tells me there's some loading/efficiency changes going on. There was no need to rebuilt an object cache in-game, it was already there.

After a few hours of playing (no mods, no cc, in a completely virgin hood), I've run into a pretty bad bug -- the game seems to think my sim is his roommate's firetruck.  I first noticed because the game was slowing to a crawl and eventually not responding at all and I had to ctrl-alt-del to get out of it.  I have a save from just before it would slow down, so I was looking around to see if I could find what caused it, and low and behold the firetruck was halfway in the doorway of the stadium, where my sim was watching a game.  I sent him home, and suddenly he was out in the middle of a field disappearing and reappearing into a hillside, and the truck ended up in the living room.  I tried resetting the sim and putting the firetruck into the fireman's inventory, but the sim remains in the middle of the living room, although he performs actions, such as cleaning the toilet, on invisible objects in front of him (and meanwhile in the bathroom, the toilet did get clean).  I'm going to try to start it again and delete the firetruck and see if that helps (and grab some screenshots this time!) -- I guess my fireman sim just won't be able to work from home!

Claeric- I have noticed that too. The amount of time it takes for my CC to actualy show up in the game is VERY LITTLE to none and  gameplay is fast and wonderful. Its very quick and looks beautiful in game- but shoud I be waiting 7 minutes to play my neighborhood? I think that is just a ridiculous amount of time.

Lo and behold FFS.

Meaning
An exclamation, on drawing others attention to something. Used especially to to announce things that are considered startling or important. The phrase is often written with an exclamation mark.

Origin
The word 'lo' as used in this phrase is a shortening of 'look'. So, lo and behold! has the meaning of look! - behold!. Lo in this and its other meaning, which is more akin to O!, has been in use since the first Millennium and appears in the epic poem Beowulf.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lo-and-behold.html

What is this horseshit?  Back in my day we had the "well hell, might as well make myself a sandwich...eternal damnation!  Out of mayonnaise.  Best run to the store and- MARY SUE!  Is that you?  Haven't seen you in ages!  Sure, I'd love to get a cocktail and catch up.  Who is that scrumptious boy at the end of the bar?  I should probably chat him up and what's that?  Bar close?  After hours party at my place where- hey look, the game is rereREticulating its splines, we're halfway there!" load times of TS2.  AND WE LIKED IT!

Get off mah lawn, damn kids.

Yeah, having to wait 7 minutes to have no loading unless going out of town is not a big deal. Better than 7 minutes to have to load CAS, load a house, load a community lot, load the house again, load the neighborhood, load a lot to edit it, load the neighborhood, load the house, load the lot to test it, load the house again, and save and quit.

LOL...my TS2 start time was around an hour and a half at one point. I used to start up the game before we sat down for dinner, clear the table, select my hood, put my daughter to bed, and after all that wait just a few more minutes for it to load. Ha! I can deal with 2 minutes.

long load times and long save times are why I keep a knitting or crochet project handy... or get up, do a chore or two, then come back and play...

I'm actually really surprised at how fast this new load on W7 is running. Of course, I have almost no CC...

My gosh, what kind of setting did you build in there?

I never had slow downs in Sims 2, but I remember sims 1 loading for 7 minutes on a very old computer. Now it takes well over 10 minutes to load a WA location with vanilla + awesomemod on a computer I bought in 2006:S Other loads are only a bit shorter. I'm scared to think what Ambitions might make it.

(on the upside my apartment is a lot cleaner since I installed the game and I've read a couple of books while waiting for it to load or save)

I don't know if this is a bug or a "feature" but there isn't a way to become a Tattoo Artist. All other "Professions" are available, but not that one. Though I suspect they just didn't bother to make it work, I thought I'd mention it in case it could be fixed.

It has done this for me from the Base game on, so forever.

Tattoo artist is not a profession and as far as I know nobody can actually link to anything that ever claimed it was. It is not a skill, either (though the xml lists information for "failure" and what levels can lead to it, I think)

EA.com (http://www.ea.com/news/the-sims-3-ambitions-launches-this-week)

Insidemacgames.com (http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=18930)

There's plenty of misinformation out there, if that's the case. Many of the reviewers I checked out seemed to think it was a career as well.

Yeah, "tattoo artist" isn't one of the new professions.  You can just get tattoos now by visiting a salon.

So far, I'm really impressed with "Ambitions".  They addressed the borked lighting and pathing, the new jobs can be either micromanaged or free-willed, and Twinbrook is just fookin' gorgeous.

Doubt it.

Hur, I remember The Sims 1 taking aeons to load back in the day. Then the game would crash.

You kids have it so easy.
Granted, this was on a DOS-era clunker, so it's a miracle it worked at all I suppose.

I remember that the hard drive would carry on grinding long after the lot had loaded, causing anything that wasn't static to stutter like mad. Vacation was the worst with this, because the coding actually clashed with Windoze 98's keyboard drivers so I had a combination of constant HDD grinding, on-screen stuttering and random commands from the keyboard all at the same time.

I've been contemplating using the new Mods folder, but I hate to mess with a system that still works for me.  Do you have to do anything special with the existing framework and resource file, or can you just move them into the new mod folder and not worry about it?  Can you still have subfolders?

Yes, I can confirm that subfolders still work just fine.
At MTS they put up a guide to doing the EA Mods folder shenanigans, and it's very simple to follow.
You can find it here (http://www.modthesims.info/announcement.php?f=551&announcementid=144), if you didn't know about it already.

The resource file is a bit different. All you do is put a mods folder in, put resource.cfg in that, and put a "Packages" folder in with it.

Bam.

Thanks.  I hadn't been looking at the MTS forums lately; just the downloads to see if the slider hack had been updated yet.  I'll give it a whirl.

Ambitions: What's fixed.

Doors on walls bisecting an exterior wall? You bet your ass there's no longer a giant hole leading to the outside. They stay up now. Huzzah.

I'm so happy with the lighting and pathing fixes that I could give the game a wet, sloppy kiss.  I had my Sim on auto-follow while he was driving home late at night, and the lighting effects looked awesome.  It looked like driving through a small town after dark IRL.

I've seen people say the lighting fixes with lots dont work for them, but I see them working pretty well. You can see the seam of the lot edge, which is lame, but lots spread onto the road and world just fine, and it's awesome. Plus the shadows, daytime outdoor shadows, are no longer pixelated horrific messes and instead are smooth and beautiful. <3 I may be mistaken but I think there's also periods of the day where the lighting indoors changes direction (from windows) instead of staying in the same place all day.

I originally left my mods in the base game, and stretched the framework into AM, everything was fine, I eventually moved it all into the EA sanctioned folder, after working out how to get it working, and I haven't seen any noticeable change in loading time.  At this time I only have CC and a couple of mods, like no censor blur and replacement skins, but will be adding the other game mods slowly to see what works and what doesn't, as at least one kills the social interactions.

I don't have the framework in my folder, and am just using the new mods folder. All my mods work that I have in now. It's replacement skins, some fixes, all the store content, the awesome fixes for them, ruleof6, and new names.

My sim died. I don't know if it's because of that, but I can't move in another household. I click the checkmark and it goes grey and nothing happens. I have to go to edit town and try again, but it won't work. It doesnt work if I choose a household either.

When I load a household, the sim's panels and thumbnails don't show up.  I can see wishes, the leftmost control panel, and buy and build mode.  I can click on very few objects, but not sims.  I can't zoom in or out.  When I go to edit town and switch active households, I lose all abilities except spinning with the mouse, and I can't go back into the household because the icons don't show on the map.  This is without awesomeMod.  I have Twallan's supercomputer and relativity; the CAS sliders, and a few minor mods, all of which worked before.  I can't figure out what's wrong here.

The "framework" is no longer required because the game is looking into the mods folder on it's own. You might need a resources.cfg to use subfolders inside the mod folder, I haven't tested that. AFAIK d3dx9_31.dll is no longer needed anywhere either, that file was only used to trick the client into looking at modified dlls IIRC. I've already made and tested a core mod using the new mods folder and that worked fine without a d3dx9_31.dll placed anywhere. So it looks at and loads anything in the mods folder, even if it does add a couple new annoying popups.

All of that of course only pertains to the new mod folder in documents. You still need the framework and d3dx9_31.dll to use mods the old way.

Seems to happen at random. I had this problem when I switched from different 2 households.

I took the plunge and moved my CC to the EA-sanctioned location, with the requisite changes to other files of course.  Everything seems to work so far, not that I have much -- twallan's SuperComputer, Buzzler's mirror, a few of Anach's mods, my skintone blends, and a couple other things that don't come readily to mind.  I have noticed only three other issues:  (1)  Some pretty severe lags reminiscent of the 1:00 a.m. lag from way back when (I think this has been mentioned before), (2) a visual oddity when they're playing that outdoor game with the batons and pawns such that I can't usually see the batons going through the air (it may be like this anyway, but if not, the culprit is likely to be my base-game no-censor mod, which counter to Anach's advice I left in), and (3) a really strange issue in the kitchen.  I had installed two dishwashers in the kitchen, and had made my handy Sim upgrade both to unbreakable.  I have used this setup before in a crowded house, and it works well at mealtimes.  But suddenly my Sims couldn't use the microwave.  They'd pull the frozen dinner out of the fridge, walk up to the microwave, stand there indefinitely like they do when waiting for a toilet that's currently in use, and stomp when I cancelled the interaction.  Once I'd replaced one dishwasher with a sink, the problem went away.  I haven't tried to reproduce this with my mods removed, but I suspect that this is true game behavior, though I have no proof.

But otherwise, the only thing I don't like about the mods being in the new location is that it seems the game will nag me every time about the presence of core mods.  (I know there are core mods.  I put them there.)  I am hoping for a crappy XML tweak, from either here or elsewhere, that will stomp this nagging behavior.

Get rid of any old mosaic killing mods and get the new one in Pudding Factory. The old ones will also render ghosts and certain fires invisible.

The issue I'm having is in the Architectural Design Profession. On the 3rd day of work no more pop ups telling me there is a job to do, don't know if that is a bug or a feature. Also When completing remodels, when finished sometimes it doesn't complete, and the person starts yelling at you for being in their house and fires you then throws you out. You can't click on them or their house to tell them you are done. This just happened 3 times in a row for me on my broke ass Sim. Reminds me of the borked tombs.

I am having problems with the launcher ever since updating to the latest patches & installing AMB. The career bundle & latest store items all say they have installed successfully but are marked as not installed. I have used the latest decrap & s3rc twice to try & install the items & still get the same results.

You just are bad at life.

No jobs? You're supposed to FIND jobs.

Can't finish the job AFTER WORK HOURS? Come back DURING WORK HOURS.

Adding 2 + 2? It's FOUR

Same thing happened to me. Not that it's a big deal, I've been extracting the packages from the packs and making my own merged files instead.

Thanks for the tip :) Looks like i'll be doing the same.

Firefighting seems borked during large house fires when there are people to be saved - I had 2 people who apparently needed to be convinced, one which was a toddler and I couldn't select her to do it, and if you can't see anyone on the lot to convince to run and instead just put out the fires, the entire exercise fails and you get a bad grade at that emergency, because the game thinks you skipped it.

The issue of move household seizing up and not allowing move-out or move-in is not specific to the Ambitions EP.  This has occurred in one of my households prior to WA (base TS3 game only).  I am not sure what causes this, but it is not likely caused by something directly related to Ambitions. 

To get rid of the problem, I simply zorched the entire hood and started over.  You may wish to try a less "drastic" solution, of course, but I bet my method is faster.

I had a large house fire, and didn't have any issues other than not being able to see the so called window fires, as noted above it may be the no mosaic mod I have.  My main problem, was after breaking down the doors and telling them to run, they just stayed put, but the game registered it as a save.

When I put my .packages in my documents/user/thesims3 on the launching of my game it informs me that some objects couldnt be loaded (as the package for ultra lounge kitchen/bath and others sims store)

My sim bought a cake from a kid in the park who had set up a stand. There was no option to eat the cake, and I couldn't take it out of his inventory and put it in the fridge or any place else. The only option was to "clean up," which of course gave my sim a negative moodlet for wasting food. I seem to recall having the exact same problem with the TS2 OFB bakery (minus the moodlet, of course,) in the beginning, so I was more nostalgically amused than annoyed, really.

On another note, one of the things that has annoyed me most about TS3 from the start was what would happen if I directed my sim to perform a social action with another sim: When the social was done, the two sims would stand there like idiots shuffling their feet and whistling at the sky for the next sim hour. Now, since I installed AMB, I'm having a difficult time getting anything romantic going with a pair of sims. I tell my sim to flirt with the other sim, and he does so, and immediately as soon as the flirt is done, she retaliates with some gossip or a funny face, which of course sends them back to "Fred thinks Ethel is okay." So they never get past "flirty." Oh well. If I have to cheat them into relationships, that's still better than all that time they were wasting before, kicking dirt and examining clouds.

Other than those two things, and one CTD that I'm pretty sure I caused by doing something stupid, I'm finding that the entire game is greatly improved for me by the addition of AMB.

Yeah, I'm enjoying it so far and the bugs aren't too bad. 

Have you tried to queue up a bunch of romantic interactions in a row?  I imagine that should prevent his target from doing the silly face interrupting him.  Then again, maybe not.

I'm getting the "Food tastes like fridge" (or whatever the English version may call it) moodlet even when using the most expensive fridge. I've never seen this before installing Ambitions/the newest patch.

I'm guessing this is a target at my post.


First off... NO WAY! are you freaking kidding me? Duh your suppose to go out and look for jobs, I was stating, if you had read, that in the morning when the game tells you there is a job, it happened the first 3 days and skipped the 4th. My statement was if that was suppose to happen or if it was a bug? And now I think that is a bug because the 5th day the pop-ups for jobs was back in the morning.


 WOW are you serious you can't turn in a job after hours?!?!?! Now if that WAS my problem you MIGHT had solved it.... To bad it wasn't, thanks for your mindless blather, again. The jobs that couldn't be completed happened the whole day. My statement that it just happened 3 times in a row should have gave you that clue. Learn to read.

Naples, there is really no need to be a smartass. You just make yourself look dumb.

Here are my findings on the Design profession:

-You have to continually skill at painting and use the drafting table to research architectural design. If you aren't advancing in that stuff, chances are, you ran out of jobs for that level.
-If you can't turn in a job because they're yelling at you, it is probably because there aren't enough beds and dining chairs in the house. I had that happen to me a dozen times and then I finally realized that there were more sims living in the house than there were beds. So be mindful of how many sims live there. After I started adding beds, I started getting great reviews.
-Also, don't save during this process or you lose the entire job. That might also be why you can't tell them you're done.

Autofollow on high speed is randomly stopped mid-trip. I've only seen it doing this after loading ambitions. It is the only thing I've noticed wrong so far. I've chalked up my issue with poltergeists sometimes being a pain to locate up to my lack of observance skills.

On a positive note, the launcher is now loading store CC properly. For a few months there I couldn't even get freebies directly from their site much less shared copies here and now it all seems to be working great.

Edited to add:
After playing for two days, the first without CC, I've realized most store items "successfully" added through the launcher were false positives. Shutting the launcher down and restarting it shows it as unloaded and sometimes clones the files on the list for some reason. It occurs almost always with sets, including the freebies. I was so excited to finally see a few sets in my game again and it turns out its still broken.

I have also noticed the social issue jumping around. Have sims always interrupted all the actions of others they converse with? I've never noticed it happening as often as its occurring now.

Has anyone noticed that you seem to get a HELL of  alot more wishes now? Instead of maybe one or two a day I'm rolling up to 20. It's not BORKED, but that we can only save 4 at a time is feeling pretty broken :p

You know, when I saw those promotional videos over at Simprograms from the fan events where the autofollow kept on cutting out, I just assumed that this was down to whoever was in charge being an idiot and randomly clicking everywhere. This is actually a glitch? How the fuck did EA miss that?

Don't know if that's a bug or they just didn't care enough, but I just got a request for Teenage Sanctuary from Thornton Wolff. I even checked if they suddenly adopted a teenager, but nope, just him and his wife.

Dirty laundry piles seem to build up in non-active households; even houses with no laundry equipment at all. In the houses that do have equipment, they never seem to use any of it. I'm guessing this is EAxis' clevar way of forcing other sims to visit the Laundromat lot, but still...

I'm only really bothered because it's giving my Profession sims negative moodlets, and makes it very difficult to swipe loot, as sims seem to go for the dirty laundry piles most of the time.

Your "Neat" sims will do the laundry without being prompted, as will any maids you hire.  I actually do recommend using the laundry options in the game, because they give you two longlasting moodlet buffs, from having clean clothes and fresh sheets on the bed.  Also, eco-friendly sims will get a moodlet buff from using the clothesline.

The Sim descriptions. Major borkage. I guess they fired the writers:

"Cherish grew up dreaming to be a a [sic] good wife and mother, but nothing more. During a hard time in her husband's career she took up teaching to pay the mortgage, and she ended up loving it. Will she be able to balance her new love of teaching, and be able to be the mother she's always dreamt of?"

Despite what you may think, developers are still human.

I've come across a few major typos in the pop up notices as well.  I didn't think to write them down at the time, but one of them was about receiving "The key to ."  Come to find out, it was the key to the city.  Human or not, EA should be able to afford an editor to check such things.

I've had some major lag issues, getting worse after adding package files. I am going to see if mods are problems.


Also, has anyone had an issue where the camera rotation and zoom is painfully slow? the camera moves fine with sidescrolling but whenever I rotate or zoom in and out it takes forever to get anywhere. I dont know if its just my game or a common problem.

Not major, but annoying: When traveling to the past my Sim was given a new wardrobe and hairstyle. It is set as everyday 1 and I'm having a bitch of a time just deleting it.

More major and very annoying: Gems mined do not count towards the unique gem count, so I haven't unlocked the heart shape cut. I need that cut for the Servo. I don't want to travel just to get one or two more gem types, but I may have to since I can't find any other gems in Twinbrook.

That's a reference, it is supposed to say "The Key to [town name]".

Either the reference text that tells it what to reference was broken, or your town didnt have a name.

The game doesn't seem noticably faster to me, but that may be because it was already pretty fast.

However, loading 'hoods is like three times slower.

The typos are the least of the problems. Two 'a's seems pretty minor compared with the winding, phrasal-verb-heavy sentences. Every fricking Sim seems 'to wish to continue the discovery of knowledge'. This game had no editor.

I think the firefighting profession might need some fixing.  I don't know if it's just bad luck but since becoming fire chief there's earthquakes almost everyday.  It wouldn't be bad except for the fact that it divides your weekly pay into the three disasters that happen.  At the end of it all your sim is ready to drop dead.  Then the next day there's yet another earthquake.

I've also noticed the fire engine and fire alarm need excessive maintenance as they seem to continue to decay even when your sim isn't at the fire station.  So by monday the fire alarm and fire engine are usually down to 30% if not lower.

My sim salvaged a world globe (forgot the name of it) at a junkyard, instead of going into the family inventory like all other salvaged items it went into her personal inventory and got stuck there. I could not drag it out of her inventory or interact with it in anyway. So don't salvage any of those,.

^ I noticed the same thing Sanati. Can't wait for awesome to be working again so I can use the nuke command on it.

Heh, I had it in my mind that exactly this would happen. Although I've personally yet to experience even one, I'm glad to know typical EAxian odds are still apparently afoot. I was getting worried.

This is definitely very annoying. Especially if you start working from home. Then you get annoying messages about poorly maintained equipment, even when you can't really use the fire department fire engine anymore (because the sim always prefers to use their own personal fire engine).

Also, the new pop-up system doesn't work too well. Apart from being stupid and sucky, it seems to bring back messages that have already been dismissed whenever a new notification pops up.

One of my cars got stuck in my family inventory. It was put there instead of the personal one. I cant sell it or anything.

Yeah i knew the same sort of thing might happen.  I haven't had another earthquake for over a week now after earthquakes nearly every single day.  I'd really like to know the actual odds of it happening because i'm not really convinced it was just awful luck.


The maintenance is sort of odd.  I think all fire alarms might be connected so you repair one you repair them all.  Fire engines however i think each have their own status.


As far as i can tell it's the fact that the new system doesn't delete messages unless you click the X box or if it does it takes its time.  They seem to disappear and stay there until you hit the X box later.  Personally i prefer the new system since it's not such a massive clutter.  Although it can get a bit annoying sometimes.

Well, Ea didn't fix stuck taxis. I have one stuck in front of the Twinbrook courthouse. ::)

Hmm Miss Candy Floss was an excellent fire-fighter; she managed to put fires out within the expected time. But her new man Jaxom!  He turned up at the fire, sat himself down and started watching TV!

Made him put it out, switched back to Candy (she had changed jobs to a designer) who is excelling in this profession too.   Switched back to Jaxom to find him watching TV again, 10 hours on and the fire seems out but the house owner is still having a hissy outside. 

Made him clean up, left him to it went back to Candy, who had completed her job.  She staggered home to get a feed to find Jaxom already there playing computer games and the small house fire sticky is still up! Can't find a way to get rid of it, and he won't go back to the house to finish the job even though the fire is out and after cleaning up.  Owner is still jumping up and down outside...   Didn't look like there was anyone to rescue, the little list that pops up just said a small house fire to clean up, to be done in three hours.

So lazy sim or? His trait are Brave, Great kisser (not that this would help unless he kisses the homeowner hehe), daredevil, perfectionist and family oriented

Haven't noticed that yet.  I always go to high when my firefighter responds to an emergency, and it follows them all the way, so far.

A miner my family invented eventually was no longer able to be selected to drill, or to do.. anything with, and had to be sold via buy mode.

I just found a small graphical glitch while detonating the Landgraab's backyard. Detonating objects near a pool may cause the sim to escape into the pool and stand on the water with his/her hands over his/her ears. After the flailing of arms everything seemingly returns to normal and the sim starts swimming again. This seems to be damn near ignorable, but with this being EA and all who knows what this could break.

My firefighter sim was hanging out the fire station after hours and within about an hour, every single sim got stuck standing next to the beds wanting to go to sleep.  The action could be canceled, but just hung there.  None of them could even pass out or die because they were still stuck in that animation.  Game froze and refused to quit.

Gonna go ahead and confirm that "Cannot live in this squalor" when renovating is a relatively major glitch.

I have successfully fixed it ONE time. All I did was add a bed and some lights (home had no bed and was dark) and add some walls where there were none. I have since tried to find/fix any and all missing walls in other lots where it happens, but it still happens.

I dunno if this is borked or what the deal is... But I've had my sims camping out at the cemetery to talk to some of the ghosts.  The ghosts spawn but then head directly to the road and leave and I can't talk to them.  I'm not sure if they end up going to a community lot to hang out or what, but they disappear once they make it to the road so I can't track them IF they are actually going elsewhere.

Minor Eco-Freak annoyance: "Go Here With..." infant results in positive carpooling moodlet.  Holding infant and "Go Here..." results in negative Riding Alone moodlet.  Often manage both in the same trip- I like to think that in the second instance maybe the baby flags down its own cab?  Constant low-grade positive moodlets aside, Eco Freaks are so hard to please from a starting lot.

My starting sim family has an eco-friendly member, and she's been very easy to please from the start.  I made a house for a family of four, furnished it, and still had enough left over for a recycle bin.  After a day or so with two adults working, I was able to buy a washing machine, a clothes hamper, and a clothesline.  My eco-friendly sim gets positive moodlets from recycling the newspaper, taking a quick shower, carpooling to work every morning, and drying clothes on the clothesline.  This is in addition to the laundry moodlets.  My eco sim has been pretty much in constant elated status.

My eco friendly sim has been sad because her room mates all got locked in an underground basement with no exits and then died either in horrible fires or from starvation. 

Actually, even with those -50 mood buffs she has still been happy since she has a bike and does some gardening and dries her clothes on the clothesline.  They seem rather easy to keep pleased.

I've also been having problems with the ghosts at the graveyard. They will spawn, the creepy music starts playing, and then they disappear again before I can approach them. It happens every single time.

"Lovely Daisies +50 mood
A friend has passed on. But at least their body was recycled and will enhance the earth!"

Took my Twinbrook sims to Egypt to collect some gems so I could get the damn pink diamonds cut into heart shapes and finally build a Simbot. None of my sims could dig at the dig sites, they kept getting route fail thought balloons.

This happened to me yesterday in a brand new neighborhood. I quit the game, restarted it, started another new neighbourhood...same thing happened again. I've never come across this before Ambitions and there are quite a few posts on the official board complaining about this.

Got a fireman to the top of his career track and got a fire alarm and firetruck to his inventory so he could work from home. The next day he got married and drove the firetruck to his wedding party (lol) and then went on a honeymoon to France. When they returned I realized the firetruck was gone. Not at home, not at the park where they got married and not in either inventory nor in the family inventory. Pisses me off because there's no way I can figure to get it back.

     I  just started playing Ambitions yesterday.  I started a new game in Twinbrook and noticed that there are no map tags.  I did make sure that the filter was properly set. 

     I am running a totally vanilla game right now.  The map tags were working in the other two towns after I patched the game.  This started after I installed Ambitions and started playing the new town.

On ghost hunting missions where you have to detect and then evict ghosts, I've noticed that the majority of ghosts are in "starving" status when they appear and head straight for the fridge to start preparing a meal.

I love the new community lots, but I can't stand their automatic placements!

When you start a new game in Sunset Valley it automatically adds a fire station, a store, a salon and a junkyard. It would be even better if the lots were placed facing the right way! It's so annoying having to move them around and edit the floor tiles!

Also, why is there no pre-made laundromat?

The social "dance with" only raises the social motive for the sim who initiates it. I don't remember if that was an old bug or not.


Purple ghosts always go straight for the fridge, same with base game if you were haunted by one. They died of starvation, so it makes sense that as a ghost they head straight for food. I have noticed most of the ghosts were purple or white, so maybe that itself is the bug. I only ever saw a single yellow ghost as a ghost hunter, and zero blue, red or gray ghosts. I got bored of the profession around rank 6 though, so maybe you see different ghosts at higher ranks.

I've definitely seen yellow ghosts raiding the fridge.

Makeover stations apparently reset a sim's age. My sim was a couple days from being an Adult, used the makeover station in Twinbrook, and now he's back to "20 days before Adult". :/

Well IIRC the way it works is a ghost spawns with the same motives it had when it died, every time. Purple ghosts starved to death so they spawn starving. Yellow ghosts died of electrocution, and when a sim is electrocuted all their motives plummet right(?), so there's a good chance they will spawn hungry as well.

It's definitely a flaw, but I don't think it's a bug, and it's been like that since the base game.

After my family moved into their new house, the wife and daughter seem to want to run everywhere. There's nothing going on that constitutes the need to run. Though if I click "Go Here" and select the tone to "Walk" they walk.

my game seems to crash when I save/quit when in full screen mode. Can't open task manager, alt-tab, windows-tab, anything. I have to restart.

My one Sim runs everywhere too.

I have a couple. She is an architect and he is a fireman. I played her 2 days to have her do design jobs and he got dinged at work each day for not going to the fire. Does EA think I can play 2 Sims at once? I think the fire scenarios should come up only when we are playing that sim. When not, he should be at the station exercising, whatever.

I should not have to play him at work every day his whole career and have her sit on her fanny at home and wait for him to retire to start her career.

So far, the AI has worked admirably when it comes to the professions.  You shouldn't have to micromanage both sims.

In my case, the AI works for her at home when playing him at work, but not for him at work if playing her at home.

I totally agree. We should not have to micromanage both sims. Unfortunately, if I am playing her he does not go to the fires on his own. The AI in the game will not manage him at work well enough when I do not play him.

My sim had a fire that could not be extinguished. It was just one tile of flames. There was no option to extinguish it, and he wouldn't autonomously extinguish it either. Tried nuking it, but the fire apparently still existed even though there wasn't a single flame on the lot. Walking away didn't help either; the phantom fire just kept raging as the entire town gathered to panic outside the doomed house.

ok, it's not exiting in full screen...

Going from Full Screen -> Anything else = Crash. The music keeps playing, but I cant do anything and the screen is black. So closing the game while in full screen? Crash. Going windowed? Crash. :\ This happen to anyone else?

I'm afraid not.  I haven't had any CTD's with Ambitions.  I'm running a minimum of hacks, though.  Most of my CC consists of catalog items.  The only script mods I have are Jonha's mod to remove the limit on the number of sliders and Treeag's mod to store all harvestables with a single slick.

Hmm, one of my sims had her age reset. Not really sure what triggered it, but I suspect the tattoo chair. The revenge of the Dresser bug?

Well. Don't change households during an awards ceremony.

"Why isn't anyone at the fire station? This is boring."

And then I notice...

(http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/5586/screenshot98i.jpg)

This is every single young adult - elder sim in town. Endlessly clapping and throwing confetti. Forever.

There's a trait that makes sims run everywhere, I think it's clumsy.

None of them have that trait. My daughter is doing it now too. But not the husband. Maybe it's just female sims?

Is the sim athletic? They tend to run by default, I noticed.

Nope, it's kind of handy if I have their motives set to static and I just let 'em run free, they get places faster lol. Actually, my daughter is Athletic, but the wife is not. So it can't be that.

Since installing Ambitions my game has been crashing about five minutes into game play. It goes straight to desk top without any warning. I've updated all Mods or deleted them, deleted cache files, and am currently using 3booter.  Googling seems to show that its all Vista or Windows 7 fault, however, mine didn't start until the new EP so I thought it would be something at least to mention.

I don't know if this is a conflict with a mod or major borkage but:

I can't play a certain family, even if I move them into another house. I'll try to play the household and the game will zoom out and there are no icons, only the neighborhood overview and I can't do anything except click the x in the corner and quit.

Also:

Sometimes when I want to go to another household, the checkmark will go gray when I click it and I'm forced to click the back button. This will effect every single household and I'm forced to reload the entire game. And it takes forever to load.

Regarding the running, I have the same thing. I checked the traits and there is nothing there to cause her to run IMO. She runs all the time, but her husband does not. As soon as the toddler son ages I will see what he does. Also, she is PG and should have a girl, so will watch her.

There seems to be a bug in action regarding certain professions and the inventory and the family inventory, causing items to get permanently stuck and unusable.
We are so far two players who are in the Architectural Design career, that have gotten stuff stuck in our family inventories.
We have even recreated our sims and started a new vanilla hood to make sure it isn't a cc conflict, but the bug keeps reappering.

As far as we've been able to determine, it happens when our sims perform a renovation as our profession. When the game automaticly goes into buy/build mode, all stuff in our regulare inventory gets transferred to the family inventory under buy mode. Once the renovation is over, the stuff gets transferred back to the regulare inventory, and this is were the bug happens. Some things get stuck in the family inventory, and becomes unusable. You cannot highlight it, or move it, and all attmepts to reset it like playing a few days, or have your sims do different things, like taking a vacation, will not unstick it.

There's alo another player in the (I think) Inventor profession, who was going through the junk at the junkyard and found a "globe sculpture". It went into her personal inventory and not into the family inventory and there it became stuck the same way as the items did for us in the family inventory.

Anyway, Leigh and I am at our witts end, and we have tried "everything", at least everything we can think of, so now we have to turn to the community with this and hopefully someone can make a fix for it.

Edit to add: I don't know if this is a valid observation or not, because we don't have all that much data to go on yet, but it seems like more "regulare" inventory items don't get stuck, instead it's things like laptops, scooters, bikes, electric guitars and things that aren't the more common inventory items.

Speaking of which, there appears to be no possible way of removing Portfolios when no longer needed. My sim quit the Archetectural Design career within minutes, but is stuck with that portfolio for the rest of eternity.

stuck family inventory can be remedied by moving the sim out and back in.

Actually no, it can't, not in this case at least.
This bug uses super-glue.

My computer might be the issue there. I have to run the game at minimum graphics and while the view will occasionally follow my sim all the way to the location, it seems like it would much rather abandon the idea halfway through.

I only had one sim do that, and it was in base game, he had the clumsy trait so I assumed it was that (as in it's not a good idea to run around in a house and he would probably run into things). If that's not it then I'm pretty sure it's a hidden attribute. After playing a lot I noticed some sims behave differently even on levels not linked to traits. For example some sims without the Neat trait will still be obsessive about cleaning and washing while others will never ever clean up even without the Slob trait. The running most be something like that, though more rare.

I have the retail CD version of TS3, WA, and now Ambitions. Prior to AMB, it took WA about 45 seconds to load and another 45 seconds to load the saved games. Since AMB I've been slowly adding back some of my mods and hacks that have been updated. I played several hours yesterday with only occasional glitches; took about a minute to load AMB and another minute - minute and a half to load the save.

I added a couple more mods today - Desecrate's gun mod, a fountain I didn't think I had, the Reflections mirror, and Twallan's No CD, since others have reported that it works. Unfortunable it didn't work for me. I experienced a lot of lagging; not to the point of being unplayable, but darn annoying. It also took about 4 minuted for the saved game to load (yes, I realize that's a LOT shorter than the good old days but I'm comparing and contrasting here); I took out all the other CC/Mods that I put in today EXCEPT the No CD package, and still had lagging. I took out No CD and the lagging stopped. I put back the other mods I added today except No CD and it was still OK. So now I'm wondering if EA has made it more difficult to bypass the CD check. Is anyone else having this trouble with the No CD package from Twallan, or whatever you're using? I just tried to ask about his file on his site but I have to wait on registration approval.

ETA: I forgot to mention that with the No CD hack in, I never received the EA mod warning screen. After I took it out, it was there.

I've noticed in my game some new objects don't work. As in, when I direct my sim to use them the action is either ignored, or they randomly teleport away from the object. The main suspects are the trampoline, inventing workbench and the sculpturing station.

Anyone else have/had this problem? It's a real bitch when I want to do something new in my game.

After the maid hung the clothes on the line she had water dripping off her for at least an hour.

It happened to my house wife.  She had the soaked moodlett… Cheap washer.

That happened to my sim once - and she does laundry a LOT. I assumed getting the "soaked" moodlet is supposed to be a periodic consequence of doing laundry. Happens to me all the time in RL...NOT. I think they just wanted to recycle the soaked moodlet from WA.

@simsandwhich, I have had no trouble interacting with objects. Could it be a mod/CC conflict?

ETA: I know people have reported being unable to interact with ghosts but I have not seen any AT ALL. Nada. I have not yet tried the ghostbuster career but I didn't think this prevented ghosts from spawning at the graveyard. I assume there are some that come with the neighborhood, so I have no idea what's going on. I'll just keeping checking to see if they show up eventually.

I have been playing a vanilla game since Ambitions came out; no AM, no Mods folder (Yah, it sucks. I miss AM).  When I went to switch back to my firefighter after playing my ghostbuster, my firefighter could not complete any mission.  If the mission pop up said to rescue 2 sims and put out a fire, after completing both objectives neither would receive a check mark and the music would not stop.  I switched back to the ghostbuster, and had the same problem; I'd capture the spirits, have them in my inventory, but the pop-up would not show that I had caught them, and the music would not stop. 

I started a brand new game to test around, and the same thing happened.  Everything would be fine and dandy until I switched households and then came back.  I'm thinking that nothing short of a patch will fix this, as I'm playing with no mods, but thought I would post on the off chance that I might have done something wrong, and someone knows how I can fix this.

This could be me remembering wrong, but is it not a feature of AM to encourage running whenever possible? Pescado has always been of the persuasion that running is the master race.

I can't seem to find it in the rtfm, but my Sims seem to run often, and I'm running basegame. In any case, it seems more of a feature than a bug. Who wants slow sims?

Just get a mini-image and mount it with DAEMON/PowerISO. Works flawlessly.

I am also having the issue where the option gets lost to switch households.  I did not have this problem prior to Ambitions unlike others have mentioned.

Also, there is an issue with at least the firefighter career that has been noted by others on the EA forum as well.

My initial, CAS-created firefighter played perfectly fine.  When switching households to an in-game char that became a FF, the new FF could not complete his 1st emergency.  He put out the fires, but this was not acknowledged.
The alarms in the fire station continued to sound and repeated attempts to "respond to emergency" fell out of queue.

I've tried quitting his job and accepting a new FF position, returning to the main menu/restarting the game, going into edit town and deleting/replacing the alarms. After replacing the alarms, he was able to respond to the emergency which is now followed immediately by a CTD; both after editing and after restarting.  I'm rather concerned about that.  

While I currently have an assbuttload of CC still in my original Sims 3 folder, the only mod I have at this time is the updated censor.

I think I've worked through this after about 7 more CTD(all access violations reading the same address).  I do not advise playing more than 1 fireman at a time for now.  I had to make the 2nd FF quit completely, go back to original family and wait for the 1am change, fight fire, switch chars to the wife while preventing him from returning after 1am that day and then everything seemed fine.  I also had him collect his service award in case that had something to do with it. Also, deleted script and composition caches somewhere in the middle of that mess.  It's weird.

During last nights gaming session my sim also started running everywhere. It's most annoying.
She even started running to the city hall when I directed her to go there, even though she was across town and had the scooter in her inventory.

She runs from the fridge to the counter, and from the counter to the stove, though they're only 1 tile apart. It's silly actually, and like I said, most annoying cause it makes it impossible to take good pictures unless she's standing absolutely still.

Edit to add: I don't have AM so that's not the cause. It must be a game bug.

I have the running sims as well and occasionally they will slide across the floor as if it is ice. Nothing seems to stop the running  unless you move them out of the house and back in again but they eventually start up again. >:(

The running/ice sliding bug has affected the Goth males in my game. Just the males. Weird. Also, the ghosts on the Goth lot are acting different since Ambitions. Everytime a ghost enters a bedroom now while the sims are sleeping it wakes them up. Never had this problem before Ambitions.

Is there a reason why my Sim in the Firefighting career has no coworkers at all? Every time my Sim has gone to work there it has been deserted.

EDIT: Scratch that: Nothing at all is happening. No coworkers, no emergencies, nothing.

Well, Ambitions finally arrived in the post this morning, but I've not really had much time to play it yet, except to create a new sim and stick her in one of those shacks in Twinbrook. However, one thing I have noticed is that no matter how full my sim's energy bar is, all she wants to do is go to bed. I have to keep canceling the action out of the queue, but the game immediately queues it up again. Off-lot, she behaves as normal, but the moment I send her back home, she heads straight for bed. This can't be right, surely?

I'm only running Twallan's SuperComputer, Opportunity Control and Relativity at this stage (no AM yet). I'll try it again later with all these mods removed.

EDIT: Gah, I'm an idiot. I'd sent her to the Science lab to join the ghost hunting career, and the hours are evenings and overnights. The game's doing what it usually does and forcing the sim's sleeping pattern to reflect this.

New borkage I've seen:

- While on vacation I had one sim call long distance to build friendships. She has made 6 best friends at home, and 3 on vacation. The charisma tab shows 3 best friends.

- I have 5 simbots in one family. The first few did not cause any reaction, but the newest 2 keep causing an "ew, a simbot!" reaction, even from other simbots. This is problematic as they keep dropping their queues when the see each other.

After my sim got a want to travel, I sent her to Egypt. When I attempted to make her buy falafel, the option did not show up. The only foods available were a few standard base game foods, such as autumn salad. I'm playing without hacks and started a new town. I've never come across this problem before, so I'm assuming it is a bug that was introduced in either the patch or Ambitions.

Going to see a concert at the stadium lasts only a few sim minutes rather than a couple hours.  The option is still there when the sim comes out so you can keep going in if you desire.  It does give you the concert moodlet so I guess those needing a fun boost in seconds will be pleased.

I noticed today that I can no longer click on a sim's picture in order to call them-- I have to use the cellphone and "call sim" interaction. Pretty annoying.

That's weird. I can still do that with Ambitions.

Is it just me or are the professions borked?
I got to level 3 on Ghostbuster and Firefighter (may have been level 4) and it doesn't count what I do. I'll catch all three spirits and it will say 0/3. I'll get rid of a small house fire and it won't count.
I only have Supercomputer, Sliders, and the Skintone Enabler installed. They are all updated for Ambitions, so I'm thinking this must be a game bug.

Nope.  I got all the way to level 10 on Ghost Hunter, and lots of people have posted that they've made it all the way through the Firefighter profession.  It's probably your CC.  Even updated mods can be buggy sometimes, or conflict with other CC.  The only sure way to check is to try removing all your CC and running a dummy town to see if you're having the same problems.

Hmm. Possibly AM-related, then. I haven't had the chance to test without it yet since RL has been keeping me busy. Thanks for the heads up.

I had no problem clicking on thumbnails in the relationship panel to "chat" or "invite over" with AM installed.
Gotta be something else going on.

I don't see how it could be, I don't have any other hacks in the game. Could a bad installation be the culprit? (I'm guessing. I have no idea how that could affect it.)

Lots of my sims seem to insist on waking up just minutes after going to bed to do some mundane task. Then they don't go back to bed and I miss it, so they lose hours of sleep D:<

I don't have any mods in right now and my game does this.  It doesn't have anything to do with what level you are at, it happens when you switch to another household and then go back to them.  I've seen some complaints about it at the sims forum.  I couldn't tell you why it is happening.

What you say makes me think game bork.

I ran a test hood to see if it would fix the problem. It was a copy of the Twinbrook hood I've been playing.
I took the entire Mods folder out and played, and the game worked fine. I put the folder back in and got the same results. I tried different things with the game while the Mods folder was in to make sure it wasn't a fluke, like switch to different households during my ghostbuster's work time and also play another household and switch to my ghostbuster right before he had to go to work, and it still worked fine.

Not sure if 'resetting' the Mods folder had anything to do with it. Hmm.

I had the samr problem with most places when I deleted some furniture to make room for other stuff. But it only happens if you delete
furniture such as toilets, beds, showers etc, without replacing them. Also, once you get to level 5 of the profession, people start to like
the work you are doing.

Ran into a glitch with my sculptor sim - he would start making some sculptures in ice/stone, and there would be a red, flashing cube instead of the sculpture. As if the model itself is somehow missing... ???
weapons of choice - NRAAS super computer/story progression/no cd hack, slider hack, non default skintone hack, unlocked WA items, registered items hack. Wow, now that I wrote it all here, sems quite a lot, actually (even though they are all latest versions). Well, off to testing I go. Yay. Not.

About the running bug. I started playing last night again, but now the running bug have infected my whole hood.
No one is standing still. If I direct my sims to a community lot she runs there, then lots of townies come running into the lot, only to turn around and leave running again.
The streets are filled with running sims, and when I do home decorations as a part of my job, the clients run around to do the checkups and then promptly run away.

Gawd it is frustrating.

I finally had enough and created a new hood, with a new incarnation of the same sim. Got her a regulare non-profession job so I could play on high speed, and after 5 days she also started running out of the blue.
After that I gave up, and rebooted the game and started building instead.
To me, this is as much of a game stopping bug as the jump bug was in TS2.

The AI is more frustrating than usual. From the moment my sim arrives at a lot, it will queue up a "read book" or "watch TV" action (assuming there are books/TVs on that lot), even when on the job. If I cancel these actions, it will immediately queue them up again, in some cases refusing to recognise the cancellation at all.

The annoying thing is, when I have my sim zapping ghosts or talking to an NPC, they will immediately break off these actions to watch TV or read a book in their inventory. Setting Free Will to 'low' fixes it, but then the sim stands around, doing fuck all, so it's not really a fix.

Also, like others have said, the consignment interaction stops working after a few sim days. The option to buy comes up, and both sims (mine and NPC) will go through the motions, but instead of an inventory window popping up, my sim will head over to a bookshelf to read a bloody book!

Also, like others have pointed out: This running around shit is getting annoying, although it has only afflicted NPCs in my game so far.

I have a few basic mods in place but none, I think, that would do what happened in my game.

I'm currently playing a Fire Chief(made Sim, worked her up) with an adopted daughter who is now a YA. Daughter got an opportunity to go to France to ask someone about the "french puzzler" for a guy I want her to marry so I sent her. She stole her Mom's personal firetruck and left it in France. In fact the whole process of leaving to go to WA land was off - she drove the firetruck somewhere in Twinbrook and then was walking up a front walk when the WA loading screen showed up. Once she got there and I told her to go find out about the puzzle she pulled the firetruck out to drive there, walked into the wrong place and then pulled a scooter out which she drove to the parked firetruck and talked to the lady. When I sent her home she left the firetruck behind - her Mom no longer has a personal firetruck.

Bork - but very funny.

Darn irresponsible kids.

A stupid work around for that would be to buy her a bike and set it as her preferred vehicle.  That way you only lose the bike.

Maybe putting it in her inventory would make it so she doesn't leave it out when in far off lands so she'll actually take it home with her.  But who knows.

Is Stylist borked for anyone else? 'Cause no matter what I do, my clients ALWAYS hate their makeover.

The AI continues to piss me off. The game will force my sim to go to bed at a given time no matter how well-rested they are, and cancelling the action does nothing - the game simply queues it up again. The kitchen burned down because the game insisted on my sim going to bed whilst her food was cooking in the oven, and no amount of action canceling would stop this.

Likewise, sending my sim over to the laundromat to do her washing usually results in the AI kicking in and ordering her to stare at a plant or brush her teeth instead of what I had ordered her to do. It really feels like I am merely surplus to requirements and the game's playing out as the developers wish it to.

Also, sticking with the laundromat for a moment - nice idea putting a shop sign up on the second floor (presumably with move objects on), except my sim insists on going upstairs to stare at it and then bitches about route failure, again and again and again... Same goes for statues placed in unreachable places that a sim simply must stare at - repeatedly, or ghosts appearing in the main park after a routine scan, in unreachable places. Brilliant.

In fact, why the hell has nothing been done about seating allocations and the like. Why do all sims insist on swarming over to the same seat that is clearly occupied? Why is it so difficult to program in a bloody ownership token system, so that sims stop footstomping and bitching every five seconds for fuck's sake!

Oh, and why after three days of playing do my garden lights stop casting light beyond the edges of the lot?

------------

EDIT: So, I decided to put the Paranormal career to rest and register my sim as a self-employed Inventor. Almost immediately, the AI backs away from aggressively forcing my sim to do things against my wishes and behaves more in the way it did pre-Ambitions. Looking back at it, it seems that EA may have gone for a Supreme Commander-type approach to the new hands-on jobs, aggressively keeping my sim's motives up so that she was in good shape to carry out her job when she was on the clock. Unfortunately, the AI stays in high gear even when she's not, so it's constantly ordering her about for no good reason.

One skill required for the Paranormal career is Logic, and I noticed that every time she was on a lot with a chessboard, she'd immediately head straight for it. Since I switched careers, my sim no longer has a fetish for playing chess.

Circus horrors! So my ghost busting sim was on the job at the Greenwood house when the following occured:

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/th_Screenshot-4-1.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/Screenshot-4-1.jpg)  (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/th_Screenshot-5-1.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/Screenshot-5-1.jpg)  (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/th_Screenshot-6-1.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/Screenshot-4-1.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/th_Screenshot-7-1.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/Screenshot-7-1.jpg)

The conversation was apparently about the gun he was using. When she wasn't chatting, she appeared as a normal child.

This does not help me, as I have nothing in my mods folder to reset…   When you switched to another house hold did you switch to a firefighter and go on an emergency or to another ghost buster and do a mission; or was it just a household of rabbit hole workers?  Just curious if you would have the same results if you switched to another household like that. 

Playing in Riverview, the dialogue for the Consignment Store (the Buy/Consign menu) no longer appears at the store. Tried replacing the menu, switching families, and replacing the whole lot, but it seems absolutely borked.

Not for me. I have played a stylist up to level 4 or so, and all but maybe one makeover was liked by the client. The one that didn't like it was one that I solicited without having a specific job for it, when the stylist was still at level 1. All the contracted jobs ("New Baby, New Look," for example) have gone well.

However, I hate the way it queues up the "Take Photo" interaction immediately after the job completes. With my lagtastic game and its choppy camera movement, I can never get a good shot - it's usually just a tiny picture of the client's back. Maybe it's not technically borked, but it's damned annoying. I keep forgetting to try it with a WA camera in the stylist's inventory.

You need to get the latest version of the registered items hack.

:facepalm:


Thank you.

 ;D

I managed to get this working again in my game after choosing "Cancel consignments". It seems that there's a glitch that kicks in when the deadline for items offered up for sale is reached and instead of the game returning the items to you, it begins to count negative days instead, breaking the dialogue in the process. I had a few items listed with "-4" days remaining. Clearing these fixed the glitch and allowed me to list items again.

Stylist is borked for me. Every time I try to do a job, nothing gets checked off, the customer hates it, and it says I didn't do the requested makeover.

Hmmm. Thanks for the tip. Noobish question, but where's the option for that?

One of my Stylist's shots in her portfolio is of her client walking through the door of the women's restroom.

I haven't tried to change households again lately, so I haven't experienced this myself yet, but someone at MTS said they cleared their caches and it then they were able to complete the interrupted assignments. Probably just a fluke, but it wouldn't hurt to try it.

It should be on the Consignment Register when the Consignment Store NPC's there. If it isn't, you might have to reset the lot to get it to show up.

Anyone else getting the issue where they can't go to school?  NO MODS.  I know about the AM issue turning the school to a park. 

This the school shows up with options, you can select em but sims get to the front door and can't go in the building.  Had to age up my kid manually to avoid issues where she couldn't go to class.

My Investigator has been a pain to play: if I want him to actually do something with the case he has received I have to watch him. If I take my camera away he will abandon what he was supposed to do for any other task. Conversely my Ghost Hunter, Stylist and Architect will get on with the task at hand.

I think it has to do with playing tag. I just had two sims play tag and both of them are on perma run now. TBH I like it.

Ditto. Also - it grays out when switching between households (sometimes), and deFinder reported the same issue. Mods aside - AMB borkage?

Note to self - test choppers. It would seem that families who have one get their funds reset to 0 after restarting the game. Must test it.

Ah. That's just the thing. The register doesn't produce the store interface at all. I can click it and select buy, but the consignments aren't ever listed. Tired reseting the lot, the sim, replacing it with a whole store, etc.

Edit Bug only seems to affect the family in play, the store still functions if I switch families. Sounds like others are encountering similar things: http://www.carls-sims-3-forum.com/index.php/topic,1165.0.html

Ghost Containers seem to stop glowing every so often. Fixed by simply grasping them with the hand of god, but still annoying.

Edit: Auto-replacing of damaged objects in town affects your home. Fire damaged objects will eventually replace themselves automatically at no cost! Not cool!

That must be it! I recall it happening when my daughter was in the Child stage, and she played tag with the wife...glad to know where it comes from. I guess I'll just have to be a fun Nazi when it comes to those things now.

Yet another: When catching ghosts, you get convenient popups saying what type they are. But these dont show up when exorcising poltergeists, which still gives you ghosts.

I didn't notice them replacing themselves over time, however, if you call up the repairman for something else, all burned/salvaged objects will suddenly be like new. In my case, this was a good thing, as a meteor strike borked both my mailbox and garden, making them impossible to interact with. :-\

It may or may not have given me extra funds as well, or those could be from an opportunity I'd cashed in along the same time, wasn't paying all that much attention to household funds at the time. ("How am I gonna pay my damn bills now?" was more on my mind.)

I hate bb code.  :-[

Apparently the repairman visiting resets the house. I dont know if it resets upgrades, but burned things get fixed from his presence.

Exactly my issue!!

Any fixes yet?

I had the same thing, except mine was from my sim detonating a car near her house, it ended up hitting a few things on her own lot.  I received mail later, and in it was $100,000 for my sim, least it got her out of her junkyard home!

Hmm... I bet good money on that he has the absent-minded trait. Those sims you have to keep your eyes on or they forget where they are and what they're doing.
That's a feature, not a bug. :)

Nope, it's a bug, my investigator does it as well. In fact, this babysitting thing has been around since WA adventures. The "talk to someone to do this opportunity" interaction loves to queue drop.

It's not so much "queue dropping" as it is that you need to have the sim selected for it to work. The moment you unselect the sim it cancels, instantly, and 100% of the time from what I could tell. You don't need to have the camera on them though, just select them and click the button and then watch your house or whatever, 95% of the time they will complete it, the other 5% it might drop because their route was blocked by another sim or something. It's just the steps that require you to talk to other sims that work like that. They can do the other stuff on their own.

Somehow my single sim has a secret life in France. She got married had a kid, who is now a teenager and gained a couple hundred thousand dollars all on a level 0 visa with a man who doesn't even show up in her relationship bar. I was looking for a boyfriend for her when I was prompted to break up with Francois. Look in my family tree and low and behold she has this whole other life.

Isn't that a, you know, WA question?

I just loved the way it changed the subject title in a special act of speshulsnowflaekedness to deliberately draw all attention upon itself. How cute.

Never happened before I installed Ambitions. Plus it's not a question, just a comment about something new and weird in the game.

Ah, I remembered a BIG one!

Without constrainfloorelevation turned off, that is to say with nothing at all altered, I am experiencing non-flat walls.

Sometimes when building (only on one house, so far), I will get a wall that is just plain not level with the rest. As a result, the rest of the walls on that side of it are lower than those on the left. I end up with places above the walls where floor tiles cannot be placed, rooves cannot be placed, etc.

Similarly, go check out the consignment store in Twinbrook. You'll note that towards the center of the front, there's a dip in the wall. Going up all 3 floors, there's a dip. You can see it on the fence at the top, easily.

This is pretty disruptive to building and can be very hard to fix (properly, at least. Turning off CFE and flattening works fine, but can cause issues.).

I have an issue, my sim, any sim, can not use the sculptor station or inventing station. Can't even click on the sculptor station. And the inventing station they can go to but when I click dabble, nothing happens. They have scrap. Also I do not have the class at the science lab. please help.

Have you taken out all of your mods?  Without any extra info I'd guess one of them is conflicting for some reason.

Speaking of contrainfloorelevation... It annoys me that you can't attach a garage to a house with a foundation without tricking the system.  I mean, I've got it figured out now but I shouldn't have to do it.  Plus the trick leaves one wall that slopes down to the foundation which is just ugly.

And I know the lot designers for ambitions know their system sucks because one of the house has an attached garage... but it is only a garage on 3 sides with foundations under all the walls of the garage and lacking a a garage door.  Why?  Because they designed it so you couldn't have 4 sided garages attached to a house with a foundation. 

I'm only patched to the latest, no Ambitions. Dig sites aren't unusable. Gives a route fail thought balloon when I click on them. Happens if AM is installed or not.

Thats what I'm thinking is the problem. I have the skills mod. Thanks for the info.

None of my Sims have that trait. I have also used Twallan's Super Computer to check for hidden traits but he has none other than the five I gave him: perceptive, genius, eccentric, charismatic and virtuoso. He will get on with any other task I set him but give him a case and he will immediately go daft. It seems the Investigator AI has been royally stuffed.

Yeah, I can look into quashing that.

Out of nowhere today some of my accessories failed to show up on sims like daluved1's long nails and all of Tamo's earrings. Strangely all accessories for feet (socks, nails) showed up fine.

This game is not Change Household-friendly at all.  I've had multiple freezes and several crashes just from trying to do that.


*EDIT*  The Changing Household issue may be directly connected to the CC not being in the Documents/Mods folder.  So far, so good anyway.

The only way I can successfully change households is to "Edit Town" without using the popup save feature.  If I manually save BEFORE going to Town Edit mode, it seems to work.  Using the "Save First" from the popup seems to freeze my game.

I'd guess this is a WA bork, but either way ambitions didn't fix it.  I created a tomb with a heart shaped pink diamond, palladium and 100 scrap at the end for creating sim bots.  I was testing it out and after completing my run I tried to make a sim bot but wasn't able to.  It just told me I don't have the required materials.   First of all, yes I do.  Second of all, tell me what you think I am missing you stupid program.

My guess is the heart shaped pink diamond got borked somehow when I put it in the treasure chest.  But who knows.

I'll try to find an uncut pink diamond again and see if I can put it in the treasure chest, take it out when exploring the tomb, and see if I can cut that and use it to make a sim bot.

Oh, whoops, I need 10 life fruit.  Never mind, I'm the idiot.

Do you have the 10 pieces of life fruit? You need that to give the simbots "life."

lol.  I figured that out seconds before your post.  Thanks though, I was getting rather frustrated.

My game also seems to be experiencing the bald custom hair thing a lot more frequently now in addition to my accessories not appearing on sims and my inability to change households.

Did clicking on the Town Hall use to give you the option to change the name of your sim?

I can't remember if this was an actual feature or one I just made up, but it's not available now ..

You must have some kind of mod conflict; name change is still available in my game.

Ahh, never mind I've got it now. Just had to wait 'till 9AM.
Odd, I thought there would have been a faded out option for it or something.

Ah well, at least it's an actual feature and I'm not just going crazy.

The Mac bald head issue now seems to be linked to certain accessories that are in package form not showing on sims.
Great faulty Ambitions took the hair bug and made it worse  :'(

Looks like AMB borked the Gold Digger lifetime wish.  I got bored and decided to make an evil gold digger.  

First attempt I had her marry a rich sim, then got him drowned in the pool. When he came back as a ghost, he was listed as "Fiancee", and the wish couldn't be completed.
I tried again in a new game, and this time married an older rich sim and waited it out to let him die of old age, in case "murder" didnt count.  Same thing.. They had been married for at least 4 ingame weeks and the marriage was still annulled upon his death.

I even tried bringing him back via the Science lab, and still nadda.  They're forever listed as Fiancee, with a partner of "none" when hovering over, and no option to get married again.

I have no CC except for hair and clothing, so looks like EA borked it.  
I should also note that when they die, they no longer show up in the family tree either...

Update:
I was finally able to complete the lifetime wish by breaking up with the ghost (from the science lab), patching up the relationship, starting the romance over from scratch, then sending him back into the netherworld.

Is this an Ambitions bork?
 ???
My sim happily seeded sprogs throughout the town and now if I check the family tree, I can look into the extended families because of this.

Three of the women he's managed to fertilise, have had other children before or after with another man.  All of a sudden children in these families have started karking it!

A notice popped up, that one child had died trying to fix something and they shouldn't have been messing with something like that.  Two others have died and they were only toddlers.

Also Morgana Wolf (I think that's her name) she's had one child, now a teen.   Could see she was preggers again, but no baby has appeared. I'm sure if I went into play her family I would find another toddler or child has died.

I've never had this happen before while playing Sims 3, thought it rather strange.  Anyone else happened upon this?

I finally got Ambitions to load, so I picked a household at random to play in the new town. It was the Bayless family. Anyway, the first thing I did was check out their traits, relationships, etc. and I noticed some odd things. None of them know anyone, not even each other. And none of them have anyone attached to their family trees. I figure this was supposed to be a family with a mom, dad, teen daughter and child son. Is this broken for anyone else? I switched to another family, and their family tree was ok, so I'm not sure what happened.

I had the same problem as Shortyboo.
The first game I played, all the family links were okay. Then that save got corrupted so I started over with the same family (the Jones-Smith-Brown whatever) and they weren't related any more. They had lot all friends outside of the household.
I investigated, and some families in this save are borked this way, while others work just fine (the Rackets are correctly related).
What puzzles me really is that it worked in the first round and not the second.

Yes, the ties and relationships are all correct in the first Twinbrook save I have, but every other Twinbrook hood I have started since that feature sims with no links to anyone. Not even families fresh out of CAS seem to know anyone in their own household.

I haven't had this happen, but you could check to make sure you have a bed for the toddlers to use as soon as they become children.  The game might be killing them off because the house does not have enough beds to accommodate the size of the family. 

Not sure if this one is a bork or my confusion, but I could swear the upgraded Banshee Banisher is suppoesd to be able to remove multiple ghosts/spirits at one, but I can't figure any scenario where it will work- ghosts right next to each other, ghosts in front of each other, nothing.

Also, the spirit finder thingy you get at level 10 will spawn spirits INSIDE homes, which is just a huge burden and seems redundant (isn't stopping spirits in homes the point of the jobs, and catching them on the map the point of the device?).

Cars also seem to function magically now which I don't like:

1 car.

Sim A: Drives car to theater. While in theater...
Sim B: Drives to consignment store, magically summoning the car from Sim A's parking spot at the theater. While at the store, Sim A leaves the theater.
Sim A: Drives home. Magically summons the car from consignment store parking lot.
Sim B: Drives home. Magically summons the car from home.

>:\

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this issue, then. Is there any way to fix their relationships and make them related again?

You have that confused with the harvester.  The harvester is a collecting device that you invent at level 4 of the inventor skill.  It will pick up multiple collectables at a time.   

No, I am not confused. THe game tells you that it can pick up multiple spirits in one swoop (one "fell" swoop, I think was the exact wording). I have never encountered the harvester apart from unlocking it for purchase.

Yes, the upgrade is definitely meant to suck up multiple ghosts at once, but I too have yet to be able to do this.

A similar issue just happened in my game too. I've been playing Ambitions and Twinbrooks for some days  (w/o mods) and all the relationships from the premade families were normal (family ties, friendships, enemies....). There were bugs and strange things but not that!
Here I just put the last version of Awesomemod in proper place for test sake, and the sims of the households I loaded knew absolutely nobody. For instance, the Curious family is not a family anymore, they are just acquaintances to each other and their relationship panel is completely empty. Weird.

I removed AM, cleared caches, loaded game and everything seemed to be fine again in Twinbrook. So I made a save of the Curious, exited, put back AM and tried again. My finds :
1. In that save (made w/o AM) the relationships stay normal for the Curious and various other households I checked.
2. If I create a new game, again the relationships are borked (inexistant).
3. I checked in Sun Valley and Riverview and everything seems to be normal there.

Although I'm not 100% sure it's AM related, I'll post in the test thread if it can be of any use. For me, the bug seems to appear only with the mod. But since this happens only in Twinbrook too, that might very well be EAxian weirdness.

For the ones who encounter this bug, do you have Awesomemod installed (and/or other mods )?
Can you eproduce it in other towns?

Sh*** I was so happy to have AM back after a few days of pure EAxianity  ::)
Anyway, to fix it, the Super Computer of Twallan is pretty good for the job and AFAIK is already updated.

I use Twallan's Super Computer. It seems to stick.

My first sim (base-game, obviously) was an 'alien' that I used to pollinate the women of the town (really, just a green sim with a weird face) - I had older-sibling sims randomly up and die before their time and such all the time, even one family where he pollinated a woman with twins with just disappearing entirely - they apparently moved out, but the twins were still in his family tree, perpetual toddlers, even as younger siblings reached YA stage. That was pre-AwesomeMod. AwesomeMod quashed all that crap for me, haven't had another problem since.

I know AwesomeMod is not technically ambitions compatible yet, and definitely not advised for a game with 6s or 12s because of the school thing, so my advice would be to play another neighbourhood and/or wait until it is ready.

I tried a Stylist for the first time last night, and got customer approval each time.  I think the key is to ONLY change what the customer is requesting, especially in the case of accessories.  I only touch accessories if the customer is specifically wanting new ones.  If the customer wants a new Everyday outfit, for example, don't touch the hair, makeup, or accessories.

On the other hand, you might be doing this already and just have a conflict somewhere.  Heh.

My sim's icon switched back and forth between normal and this for a few hours.

(http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/503/watff.png)

And it appears that Window + Reflection only reflects to the edge of the lot...except for the distant terrain.

(http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/9329/screenshot195r.jpg)

I can verify that I have also seen this nonsense with cars. LAME.

As for the Stylist career, I have changed/added several accessories before and still recieved a positive rating. There have been a few times where I accidently clicked on the check before I was finished and I got a negative review each time, but it's been a mixture. Earlier tonight the job asked for one accessory and I selected two and still got a positive review. I get some positive ones, but my sim is at level 9 and I'm getting a lot of negative reviews along with '(sim) did a good job, maybe client is too picky' messages. I take that to mean that I added all elements required for the job; maybe it just gets more difficult to please the higher you go. Otherwise I have to wonder if it is somewhat random as to what kind of rating you get.

As for other news, it doesn't seem to affect adults but my toddlers ages are getting reset with the "plan outfit" (on the dresser) command. One step forward, two steps back.

I don't have the option to become self-employed. Is there some trick to it or is it borked?

You should be able to 'register' as self-employed at the City Hall. Are you missing the option?

You need to have one point of skill in the profession in question... ie one point of gardening to become a gardener. You might also need to wait for daylight hours, if the city hall is closed, but I'm not sure on that point. Otherwise, no, not much of a trick to it.

Ahh, so that's the trick. I didn't think of skill points. I was going for a stay-at-home mom and thought she wouldn't get all the wants for a career if she were registered as self-employed. Oh, well.

Money made from selling items through the consignment store don't count toward the inventor self-employment career earnings. Not sure if this is a bug, but it would be logical for it to count.

It seems that moving lots around with the new tool will erase the address of any moved lots. Bit ridiculous how there is no simple way to add/edit a lot address.

I'm playing with a few updated mods but no AM yet. I started a new game and choose the Curious family since they had a kid (so I can test the school) and a toddler (to test the age thing with the dresser). The first couple of days, the school bus did not arrive but I could send Bunny Curious to school and it seems to be working fine - school bus is also now coming to pick her up.

The first time I sent Notzso Curious (the toddler) to the dresser, it subtracted one day from his age. A few sim days later I sent him to the dress again, and it subtracted two days from his age. Another few sim days after that I sent him to the dresser and it added 3 sim days to his age. Curious and curiouser. :P

I'm going to test this some more in some other families and report back.

ETA: Oh for pity sakes. I just restarted this game, and now the toddler's age has been completely reset. I guess I'm going to have to remove all my mods again to see if this is being caused by one of them. Is anyone else seeing borked ages on toddlers?

ETA2: Took my Mods folder completely out and started a new vanilla game with the Curious clan. School bus has never arrived and I have to click on 'go to school'. Sent toddler to the dresser multiple times, and restarted the game once. There doesn't seem to be a particular pattern; here are the results:
Dresser #1: Added two days to the toddlers age, from 11 to 13.
Dresser #2: (next day) No days added
Dresser #3: Added one day, 11 to 12
Game restart: No change
Dresser #4: Added 3 days, from 11 to 14
Dresser #5: Added two days, from 13 to 15

 

Did they mess with the "Get to know" social at some point?

Mind you I completely skipped over World Adventures when it first came out and haven't played this game for nearly a year until recently, but I remember that social used to allow your sim to learn traits of another sim. Now no matter how many times I use it I don't seem to learn any traits.

Its been borked for a while, WA did it I think.

It's pretty much completely anti-borked if you have the uh...the trait that makes you learn traits faster. Whenever my interior designer would talk to a sim about a job, they'd immediately learn every trait they had. THis was only after I had cheated and added the trait onto her, before it would take hours.

Without the Perceptive LTR it's pretty near impossible to discover others' traits nowadays.

Yeah, it used to be quite easy to discover them all. But now, even related sims (such as spouses) never seem to find out all of the other sim's traits in their lifetimes anymore. It's gone from one extreme to the other.

A very strange and related issue: in Twin Peaks (something like that, whatever it's called), relationships don't seem to get "set" at all until you select the family. I've been playing several games with the Curious family and each time I start up a game with them, they all have the 'new friend' moodlet. And the only sim in the family that seems to know everyone else's traits is the toddler, Notzo Curious. Every other family member has no knowledge of anyone else's traits.

On the game I've been playing until my experiments with the Curious', even with the Observant perk the game would only reveal one trait instead of 3. Some players were reporting that the other two traits were listed separately instead of all in the same announcement, but when I scrolled through the announcements I still only saw one trait.

The pop-up may only mention one trait, but if you look at the sim's info in your relationship panel, you can see more of them.

@IgnorantBliss: I'll check that out, thanks.

In other possible borkedness news, I also had trouble getting the baby sitter to show up and had to call her 3 times in one morning. I suppose this could be because she is a teen and is supposed to be in school, and technically not a bug. I hate the way EA has done the babysitter but I suppose they think that makes things more challlenging or something. Does anyone know if that mod that changed the babysitters to older sims/nannies still works in AMB?

I forgot to mention that I also finally got the Tag Running Bug. Bunny Curious played tag with one of her friends and now she runs everywhere. I'm going to get the whole family playing tag in my latest test game just to watch the ensuing, run-don't-walk fun.

If you or anyone finds one let me know. The old one I have didn't work and I need my nannies dammit. :-p

I think the Nannies I did have got switched over to homeless or something. They are still in the town but aren't functioning as 'babysitter npcs' anymore.

I had an issue with the babysitter as well, my sim went off to work and it forced me to call a babysitter for the kid, and the babysitter never showed up, or so I thought. It spawned her inside a fenced-off area full of plants and she was never able to actually get inside to deal with the baby.

Since installing Ambitions/new patch, I haven't been able to have my Sim excavate anything. They complain of a routing failure, even if they're standing right next to it.

They'll excavate dig sites on lots, but the ones on open land are fucked.

I got the tag/mandatory running bug with WA + latest patch (no mods and only some store CC.) Someone on the EA BBS suggested a work-around that did work for me with a family in Sunset Valley: go to Edit Town mode, evict the family to the clipboard (I opted for selling the furniture, which left the house furnished), select them as the active family and move them right back in to their house. This preserved the time of day and the motives they had before eviction, but they lost all their wishes and they would have lost any open opportunities if they'd had any.

I also have the problem with routing problems to WA excavations; I read a thread that suggested using buydebug mode or something like that to place dig site spawners on flat areas (problem seems to happen on irregular terrain off community lots) but I didn't feel like studying up on how to do all that fancy stuff.

I called a babysitter before 8 AM on a weekday and soon got the message that he had to be somewhere else, but both parents escaped before he could ditch and he stayed until one of them returned.

All the window reflections in my game are of the same generic, mostly green suburban landscape, at least in Sunset Valley, which looks paricularly dumb when viewing the Wolfe's oceanside aerie.

If your town has two salons, your Stylist gets 2 jobs per day, one for each Salon. For now, I am not personally considering this borked, as one job a day is really, really stupid.

Wants are borked all over for my game. In a brand new hood to check things out my sim, Odd, keeps rolling wants to have his wife (who is living with him) move in, or to visit her house (which is his house), or to call her when she's standing right in front of him. He's also rolling wants to do things he just did or is currently doing (Go fishing, while he's fishing, cook a meal right after he's cooked a meal, etc.).

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/rnkis/call.jpg)

I had a sim roll a want to move in with his wife (he lived with her also) prior to AMB or the recent patch, so this is not new.  I have also rolled the want to cook a meal right after having cooked it.  In fact, it wouldn't be a normal sim day for me if that didn't happen!

Ahh, so that explains why my sim seemed to be skipping the excavations sites I directed her to. I didn't see exactly what happened because usually I'm elsewhere looking for new places to explore for the sim and just have a long queue of actions lined up in the background.

All the careers are a bit slow to get going. I had my sim keep skill books in her inventory and used all the down time to skill up and/or befriend co-workers and customers. After the first few levels, they'll be offered more jobs per day. My level 8 stylists routinely gets at least 3 job offers per day, and I only have the one salon in Twinbrook.

After level 3 I think it was, they can walk around town and offer makeovers to fugly sims, too. They don't receive any extra simoleans for it, but it counts toward experience and helps them advance to the next level.

I rolled up an Architectural Designer last night and gave it a whirl.  Just like with the Stylist, all of my customers were happy with my work on every assignment.  My only real complaints about AD (other than the tediousness of the tasks) are how long it takes to finish.  You have to wait for the client to show up, look it over, and then give you their approval before the task can finally be over.  Ideally, all of that could be handled with a popup.

I also kind of hate how the customers are happy with whatever the hell you give them no matter what, but taste is subjective and certainly something the game will never be able to account for. :-/

I agree it's dumb to do one assignment a day and sit around for the rest of the 8 or so hours, so I just do other non assigned 'projects'. It doesn't advance me but I usually have wants to fill anyway. Also if you had a drafting table in your place of business you can practice your skill on that with sketches.

This is good, though, because it makes it more realistic and gives you something to do all day. Two jobs a day can take up the entire work time, and if you dont finish before the day is over, you come by and finish the next day. I like that part.

I'm not really looking for the sort of realism where a game I'm playing is as tedious as working a real-life job.  What's next, following a Business sim to work and doing paperwork all day?

Well look at this way, a Stylist does 1 job per day (per Salon lot in the neighborhood) that is takes less that 1 Sim hour, then nothing happens for the rest of the and worst is the Sim just stands there, at least the Firehouse have fridges, beds so you can even live there for a bit and you can build skills as it as the only thing you can do in the Salon is socializing with the other 2 NPCs.

Stylist is slow AND boring with about zero challenge (new shoes you say?), at least your Sim is working from home as a Interior Decorator.

This is why i put a fridge and a drafting table in my neighborhood salon =)

When editing a sim's clothing, I seem to have sleepwear (full body) and swimwear (lower body) in my everyday category for some reason. This does NOT happen in the Styling salon, and as far as I know it does not happen in CAS (haven't made a new sim in a while), it only happens when editing a sim in CAS by some manner (in my case, the supercomputer).

Which clothes?  EA or CC?  Male?  Female?

Default base game stuff. Dunno about female since my towns are sausage fests.

What about the trampolin? Shouldn't that thing give sims fitness points?

It's supposed to, but it doesn't.

Are you playing an extended lifespan, as those ages for a toddler seem quite long.  If you are, maybe that is what is causing the problem?

When playing my Architectural Designer, I've had 2 out of about 6 jobs not go well.  One was displeased that the shower I placed was inaccessible (whoops) and the other noticed when my sim sat down to watch television and was told: "If you have time to do that, I might just take some of your pay away. "  Or something to that degree, anyway. I thought that was pretty cool. Also, I had a third job, where the customer thought it was "OK" but wasn't that impressed.  So all in all, I'm finding that realistic and cool.  I'm also quite comfortable with the job-a-day factor.  What annoys me is how a female designer gets time off for pregnancy/maternity leave.  Take the baby with I say!

That all said, I'm having better luck with the crashes thanks to A: Moving the CC into the documents folder and B: I got the 4GB patch from here: http://www.ntcore.com/ which I believe has helped some. However, I still had a crash while playing 2 sims that were visiting a neighbor lot.  

I played all night and it was relatively bug free. I only came across one kind of big thing. I was playing a fire fighter and after the second fire he responded to, he came back to the station, but once he got out of the fire truck, it disappeared. So now I guess he has to either run or take a taxi to the fires? I also noticed that there were no other sims at the fire department at all. I'm playing Twinbrook, so I thought they'd have other sims set as fire fighters, but I guess not. My guy was alone the whole time he was there.

Something is wrong with your game as the game generates Firefighters and Stylists to populate the Firehouse and the Salon with them.

It's just as well they aren't generating. You wouldn't really want the game populated by vanilla pudding at the moment anyway. Wait until I finish working out the anti-vanilla-pudding feature.

Check the city hall. The first time I played a firefighter I didn't get the missing truck, but I had no partners- because every single sim in town was stuck in a neverending awards ceremony at the city hall.

Yeah, I borked my game by changing active familiies while, unbeknownst to me, a ceremony was going on at the City Hall.  When it started up under the new family, the rest of the town was empty, because everyone was at City Hall, cheering like twits and undergoing critical motive failure.

AM is blocking the creation of the co-workers for some reason.  I have had the disappearing fire truck also, not sure what started it.  I think, if you click on the ringing alarm and select respond, the game will generate a fire truck.  I tend to bild fire stations with multiple vehicle, and when one goes missing, just edit the lot and add another one.

As Pescado says, he is working on it.

Well, I guess that's possible since I was switching around families. Are the awards ceremonies just random, or does something specific trigger them? I played an inventor and a sculptor in one house for most of last night and while both got a medal to hang on the wall that they had to pick up from city hall, I never really noticed any actual awards ceremony. I know there weren't any sims at Town Hall that I could see. But there were lots of sims at parks and walking around town. I'm not really sure why no fire fighters were there, though because the stylist career was spawning other sims to work there. I had a sim join and there were like 2 or 3 other sims working, with one being a tattoo artist.

You get a ceremony for level 10 of a profession, I think. The mayor comes out and gives you a medal around your neck(that you dont actually see, it's just an animation...) and a special present, the key to the city. Sims stand around with balloons tossing confetti.

And it calls ANY AVAILABLE SIMS, so if you swap houses during one and it breaks, eventually the entire town is standing at city hall cheering.

Huh. Well, I have a sculptor at level 10, but she didn't get an award ceremony. Will I get a message or something saying the award ceremony is happening?

What happened with me, I reached Level 10 of the Ghost Hunter profession.  I continued playing that Sim for a while, and noticed another family I had placed in the town was getting assfucked by Story Progression, so I changed active families to fix their issues.  When I switched back, my original Sim was in the middle of the award ceremony he should have gotten while I was playing him.  He was reaching critical motive failure, and the ceremony wouldn't end.  I dropped it from his queue and sent him home to recover, but the rest of the town stayed in front of City Hall, cheering.  From that point on, people stopped going home altogether.  When they got off from work or school, they'd head straight to City Hall.  I could no longer complete Ghost Hunting assignments, because no one was home to be saved from ghosts.

I had exactly the same thing happen with my level 10 ghost hunter after switching to a different household. I reset all the sims outside the town hall but they all slowly gather again after being reset.

If anything, at least it's an interesting glitch...the way it calls everyone it can, constantly and forever, is pretty interesting. I am pretty sure the game will spawn new NPCs to make up for any summoned by the ceremony, meaning if you let it keep going eventually there will be a hundred maids standing in that crowd, too. I know that my glitch lasted 3 or 4 days before I noticed it, but the maid came every day, and I did notice it was a different one each time.

It's sloppy coding and bad quality control. There is nothing remotely interesting in paying over $40CND for an EP only to find all sorts of bugs that should have been dealt with. Why are you always loving on EA anyway?

Man, all I said was that the glitch is interesting. The town behavior from it is interesting and it's funny to look at, the town desolate except for everyone mindlessly chanting in one area, plus the way it manages sims.

If it weren't for it breaking, it would be hard to tell that it's a function that calls any available sim, constantly pulsing- which to me is pretty interesting, because copying that behavior could make for some interesting mods, like one that summons all children when not in school to a certain lot, or one that turns sims with a certain trait into a functioning cult that goes and worships at a designated time, stuff like that.

I did not say "gosh golly gee willikers I sure wish EA would come and fuck me hard in the ass while I experience this glitch and cum all over the keyboard", its just interesting behavior to screw around with, and behavior we probably wouldn't have noticed without the glitch. Not justifying it, not praising it, just thinking it's interesting.

Quoted for future nefarious purposes.

I kind of fixed my award ceremony glitch. I backed up my saves then experimented a bit. If the sim getting the award dies and you then reset the other sims gathered they don't return to zerg the town hall. Killing one sim to save the neighbourhood was the only solution that's worked for me so far.

If you just let them keep going, after a while they get huge needs decay and as soon as an active sim enters the town hall lot all the gathered sims start to die of starvation. At one point poor grimmy had 17 dead bodies piled up to deal with and more dieing as he collected them.

For the force kill of the award sim and reset of all sims at once I used the NRaas Super Computer mod found here http://ts3.tscexchange.com/index.php?board=105.0

I'm sure there must be a better fix out there though so I'll keep trying other things.

Resetting the lot and the sims doesn't do a thing, they still come to the city hall in my experience. Only thing to do was pick up and re-place city hall to reset it entirely.

I was hoping they'd die.  What is the point of having a giant creepy cult meeting if nobody drinks the kool-aid? 

Routine human sacrifices to prevent a zergpocalypse?

I like it!  ;D

I'm thinking I may have to force this glitch and drop a meteor in the middle of the crowd.

Hell of a lot more fun of a way to reset a town than DestroyAllHumans. Maybe not as much as Discoinferno, though.

I had such high hopes for this. Triggering a meteor in the middle of the crowd makes it drop anywhere around the crowd. After thirteen meteor drops in Sunset Valley I managed to kill one sim and that was because he ran under the meteor to get away from it (still haven't figured that one out). I really wanted an army of orange ghosts; one just doesn't cut it.

Don't worry, there will be a "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" command soon enough.

It was kind of creepy seeing all the sims still cheering away and throwing confetti onto the tombstone of the sacrificed sim before I reset all sims.

And thanks Claeric for the pick up and replace the city hall idea. At least I know there is a way to do it and not kill sims when/if I get tired of the carnage. Mwahahahaha!

I think Ambitions broke my sims career histories!

Here's a short overview of what is going on....

First, I have Ambitions installed. Now, when I load my pre-Ambition saved games all my sims career histories are blank. For instance I have a sim I've been playing since last summer and he had many level ten careers in his history. They are all gone. I checked many sims in the town and all their career histories are also gone. I tried several pre-Ambition saved games and all of them are the same. The career histories are gone.

Now it gets a little complex. I had some pre-Ambition families in the library folder which had long career histories and when I put them in a new post-Ambitions town, all their career histories are intact.

Most of my pre-Ambitions saved towns were played with both awesome mod and story progression mod. I tried loading the pre-Ambition saved towns with and without those hacks and their career histories are still gone.

Since I cannot test any pre-Ambition saved games that were built without those hacks, I am wondering if someone who has any pre-Ambition saved towns, who also has Ambitions installed, who has sims with career histories and who built towns without those hacks can check and see if their sims still have their career histories or are they gone also?

I wonder if this is happening with all pre-Ambition saved towns or is it only happening with pre saved towns that used core mods.

The reason i want to know if its mod related is maybe the creators can fix that problem if its caused by their mods or perhaps they can fix it regardless of what the cause is. And if it is not mod related but Ambitions related, then perhaps EA can be made aware and will fix it in a patch.

I suspect it's the loss of all pre-Ambitions career history, because careers were massively changed.

I am assuming this is an ambitions problem, but basements are fucked and building them is complete bullshit. I am getting constant "Ground level too high to build stairs on basement" errors or "cannot level ground" errors or "Cannot place stairs inside foundation" errors, even when ther ground is completely flat and surrounded by emptiness, or the ground is already completely level, or the stairs are NOT being built inside a freaking foundation.

(http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/258/stairs.png)
(http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/51/stairs2.png)

Yes. I get this damn error when I try to build a basement next to a foundation even if I build away from it. It will only go away if I build two squares away from the foundation. I don't get it. ::)

It's not a big issue if you can actually manage to get the stairs to work, but it really makes building in a good looking way impossible. Basement stairs next to a foundation looks nice, but basement stairs in the middle of the yard looks idiotic.

Thanks to Friezes I can build a nice mausoleum-type "shed" to put the stairs in (foundation with two friezes on top, fence with a gate at the front, looks pretty nice), but even then, stairs themselves are broken and always have been- they can't "intersect other objects" even when the other objects aren't intersected or intersectable- like windows. What in the world made them think it would be a good idea for windows and stairs to somehow be incompatbile?

You can bypass the window/stairs conflict with "moveobjects".  The same cheat will let you overlap the door footprint when you place them, so you can have a door right by the end space of stairs.

I've always had problems with stairs.  Also if you try building them at the same spot but on a different floor than certain objects, it doesn't work.

So, it's an AMB problem. I thought I just didn't know what I was doing!  ::) Which is also a possibility but at least I'm not the only one.

I was playing a fireman today in Twinbrook and got a call to put out a large house fire at one of the houses by the water with those one-square foundation supports. Had my sim put out fires and rescue folks, and when I got to the end I realized that there was a remaining fire *inside* the foundation.

The sim couldn't route to the fire to extinguish it (queue-dropped), and deleting it in debug mode did not register in the progress box, presumably because it was the last bit of fire on the lot. I also couldn't delete the square of foundation- maybe because of the fire, maybe because the flooring above it was covered in ash from fires that had already been extinguished.

I didn't want to get a failing score, so I just quit without saving. Pure EA bork: fire should not be permitted to spawn in or spread to unroutable areas.

I haven't even had a chance to see most of this borkedness (trying to enjoy this game for the third time now... see if it sucks any less) because of the epic fucking lag that's come with this EP. I could play basegame and WA without much issue, but this EP killed it.

What lag?

Besides longer loading time in the neighborhood  loading screen, the game seems to handle better streaming that leads to less "lag" but its still going to have streaming problems moving the camera from a location to another using the map menu (that already happened before).

Longer loading times is not lag and they will always go up as EP and SP get released are there are more files and date for it to search and load, this is hardly new as it also happened in TS1 and TS2, expect it was worst in TS2 due to "leaving lot-loading" that make playing outside the home lot a "staring at the loading screen for 10 minutes" event and TS1 was not that much better.

Most people seem to be experiencing significantly improved performance. Since they said they could play Base and WA "Without much issue", I think it's safe to assume their graphics card and computer aren't the best, and now that the requirements bumped up a bit, they're starting to feel it.

My specs could be better so that's most likely it. I guess I'd half-hoped it was EP-related or some factor of poor optimization that I could fix easier than upgrading my computer. Bah. Guess I shouldn't play with graphics and general eye-candy settings all the way up anymore.

I seem to be having a problem with purchasing real estate. From what I've read, I understand that you should be able to buy most of the non-residential lots as long as you have enough money. My sim who has 50,000 simoleans of cash still doesn't get the purchase option with most of them. The option is there only for some fishing spots and a beach. How expensive exactly are the junk yards and laundromat, are they really over 50,000?

Use the phone to Check Real Estate. You can view a list of them and sort by price. Even the smallest most undecorated lot is usually around 20k.

OK, I'll have to give that a try. Won't have access to my game for a couple of days but will try as soon as possible, I want to start building an empire that owns most of the town.

Real Estate is a great money-sink, as far as I can tell it isn't broken in any way, either. Which is pretty impressive for EA considering it allows you to, without cheating, edit community lots using your sim's own money, and it has a goal system for upgrading the lot to earn more from it weekly.

Real estate doesn't really function as a money SINK because if you invest in it, you get more money OUT of it, which eventually just compounds the problem. Money sinks are where there's some completely unprofitable, largely uneconomical tchotchky that you just have to have, like 110K cars. There's little you can get out of one of those that you can't get at a more reasonable cost, but they are COOL. The fact that they *ARE* actually better justifies buying them at all, but the ludicrous price tag means that they're not really an economical way to spend that money. In contrast with other things, which have such blatant insuperiority that you should NEVER buy them, even at their lower cost, and should instead simply make do with nothing if the real thing isn't affordable, because you should ACCEPT NO KEWIAN-BASED SUBSTITUTES.

Well, when you invest in a lot, you don't really get that much money from it. plus the intent is for you to build it up. Depending on how you play it could be an enormous money sink, because your goal could be to massively beautify the whole town single-handedly spending your own money, or something.

Though yeah, for the most part, money doesnt go anywhere. Which is why mods to make bills much more expensive are pretty much necessary to keep you playing, otherwise you just start to drown in money with nothing to spend it on and no reason to keep playing.

They aren't money sinks. You gradually accumulate a profit from them over time. It's doubtful any property purchase will ever pay itself off but I believe you can sell them at the purchasing price. In the end, you still gain any profits they accumulated (in the thousands). That being said, there are much better ways to spend money. I think you could use property as a sort of savings account if you wanted (with large investments).

Doesn't really help. If bills become crippling, you simply take up bill-evasive gameplay. For instance, the empty lot gathers no bills. Additionally, this replaces it with "grind" gameplay in which many simdays are basically deadspace as you grind for more money to do anything with, without actually truly increasing the challenge level, as each day is no more difficult than before, just more repetitive. Plus if you can't afford to upgrade in the first place, you can't actually get increased bills. Ultimately, sims gameplay must move away from money. In real life, extra money can be spent on worthy money-sink goals like World Domination, but none of these things exist in the Sims.

I've also been experiencing the basement stair placement problem. One house wouldn't let me place the stairs at all, despite absolutely nothing being around that section of the house (I took out a massive chunk of foundation). The game only lets me place the stairs in the middle of the lawn, away from the house.

Basement stairplacement can be a bit tricky: First, NONFLAT lots severely screw up, well, everything. Second, if you're trying to build a basement on a house with an existing foundation, hollow out the foundation and make the first level of "basement" in oldschool TS2 style.

I've seen a similar issue with Ghost Hunting. While attempting to capture a ghost, it repositioned itself on the second floor porch of a house. The problem was there was no door leading out onto the porch, so the ghost hunter sim did its route failure foot stamp.
 
Well, if the game's going to cheat, so will I. Teleported outside to capture it.

Anyone else that's experiencing the EAxian quirk where the job tracker for Firefighters or Ghostbus- er, Ghost HUNTERS aren't showing up (I don't know if other jobs make use of the tracker), I figured out today that you can get it to show by pressing the "Show/Hide Job Tracker" button in the lower-left corner of your sim's Career tab. You may have to press it twice. Once to turn it "off", since the game thinks it's on, and the second time to really turn it on.

I don't have Ambitions (or WA or HELS either, for that matter), but the latest patch broke the career histories. This has been mentioned on the EA site for the last week, so EA should be aware of it. Whether they will fix it in a patch is another matter.

As I play with AM installed, I can't personally test your theory. I can say that others on the EA forum claimed they played with a straight EA game. So, it looks as if EA broke it all on their own.

On that same note, my jack of all trades not only lost her career history; but after making it to level 5 in yet another job, her lifetime want icon does not reflect 1 of 4 completed even though this latest job is now registering in her career history.

I've had serious trouble with the world editor. Removing lots causes them to no longer be plaçable, even in the exact spot upon which they used to be placed; Rarely can other lots be put there, either. This was near the beach, so the ground was not entirely flat, but it was not exactly steep, either. The error was always "can't be placed on other lots", although if it was too large it did object to being in the water.

This was in the Fuzzy Pumpkin's neighbourhood (Dragon Cay), so it may be something to do with the way it's structured. (I guess technically this is a problem with the patch and not Ambitions, though, since I'm running basegame until this torrent finishes.)

I had similar problems in Twinbrook.  The tool is very touchy.  If there are any trees or other world objects within 2 squares of the lot being placed, it freaks out.  I have learned not to remove a lot unless I'm darn sure I want it gone, because there might not be any turning back.  CAW allows you to place lots with only 1 square as a buffer.  This tool seems to require more. 

Edit World is kinda a simpler version of the tool. CAW is editing the world before the game even has access to it- you can place lots in water, over roads, etc. THey won't work properly, but you can do it. The game knows these won't work properly, so you can't place stuff as "creatively" as in CAW- so lots are much touchier with being placed near roads (though they do snap to the road if they are a proper size/the road is straight enough), and cannot always consider surrounding area "placeable" even when it would be in CAW.  Not so much a bug as it's just a simpler tool with limitations.

I just wish it wouldn't erase the address when simply moving a particular lot. The tool is pretty much useless to me, if it's going to start auto-destructing the lots when used. God knows what other crap it's doing.

I had this issue, and when I checked the upper level, there were some squares missing from inside the walls, at the top of the walls, once I placed some tiles and covered the area and removed the tiles, the stairs could be placed.  I also got the same error when trying to place stairs below a frieze.  I removed the frieze, placed the stairs and replaced the frieze.

I've never heard this issue reported before, but all sims in my game who have sculpting skill sucks light from sculptures that they made..

(http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/9525/bork1.jpg)

(http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/9931/bork2.jpg)

(http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/640/bork3.jpg)

I'm not sure what cause this, and I only have Store items and the latest Awesomemod

Here's something I find strange. Look at the value of the furnishings with the bookcase in family inventory:
(http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f65/ciane/wobookcase.jpg)

Now note the value when the bookcase comes out of the inventory:
(http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f65/ciane/wbookcase.jpg)

Notice if I remove all the books, that the value of the furnishings now includes the cost of the bookcase. The total furnishings cost is slightly more than that shown in the first picture for the same items.
(http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f65/ciane/wbooks.jpg)

That's some weird bookkeeping!

(This is with AM date stamp 6:46 a.m. on the 20th.)

While I thought that moving the CC into the documents folder fixed the "choose household" bork, it did not.  The family continues to gray out and I have to restart the game.  I've tried going into CAS, back to main menu and switching towns.

Also, my fireman continues to be borked as before, I was crashing while running a 2nd fireman char whom I had quit his profession.  Now, my main fireman simply cannot complete his emergencies and nothing checks as complete while I'm trying to do so.  

I've had a lot of time to play this weekend as my internet went out and I didn't experience much more than that, EXCEPT for a sim who vanished - possibly dead from one of the failed fires - and now no one in the family can access their family tree or have any remembrance of him.

I have to say, I have no idea how people enjoy this game without a mod like AwesomeMod anymore as I spent most of my time switching households just to keep my sims trim, not to mention the laundry - the fucking laundry!!!  Does Robotic Hand of God take care of laundry?  I'm sorry if I'm missing info - I'm three days behind in everything.  The fact that the Awesome is officially out now made my day!

With and without AM, I just had Sim accept a job in the Architectural Design career.  This caused the price of all items in the Buy Mode to decrease 30-50%.  None of the other new careers did this. Any ideas?

That's not a bug. In the architect career you use buy mode to decorate people's houses thus the prices of the items drop to "wholesale" price.

Nobody's mentioned the phenomenon I'm seeing, so I'm thinking it may be a case of 'that's a personal problem, soldier'.

Any sim I'm not actively playing is drawn inexorably to join a 24/7 gathering outside city hall. They're collapsing with exhaustion, peeing all over the place, and the odd one or two are dying. Every now and then sims pick themselves up and head off home, but they always come back. I've a small amount of cc but the only mod I use is awesomemod.

This has been mentioned extensively in this thread.   They are gathering for a ceremony in which a hero is awarded the key to the city.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,18646.msg539785.html#msg539785

Unless I'm experiencing search fail, I think I found a new one.  I had a sim build a simbot.  I then moved the simbot out into his own house and made him the active household.  Now my game freezes at exactly 1:59PM on Saturday and Sunday (sim date/time).  Birds still fly, trees still sway, bugs, butterflies, and moths still move, his plumbob still bobs up and down, I can still hear background sounds, but the clock doesn't advance, I can't move around, and sims are all frozen.  I've let it sit 15-minutes like that, it doesn't fix itself.  I end up having to End Task.  To get around this, I have to switch to another house to let the clock advance past 2:00PM, then I can switch back.  This doesn't happen Monday-Friday.  I can reproduce it pretty consistently and it seems to happen every sim weekend.  Anyone else have a similarly borked simbot?

I wasn't playing with AM, so I know that's not it.  No CC other than decrapified store stuff, breast sliders, a few custom sliders, and Nraas NoCD.

I had a freeze like that which occurred at 5:59am.  Taking out my packaged store content allowed the game to progress, I put it back in afterwards and I've not had a freeze like it since.  The household has a simbot but I can't remember if he joined before or after.

Here is a strange one.  I never noticed this before Ambitions.  Maybe someone else has, but this is a first for me.  The ghosts in my graveyard are driving around in NPC Motor Pool cars at night.  They are hopping out of their graves, walking to the road, snapping their fingers for a car, getting in and going for joy rides while the town sleeps.  I guess I should send my ghost buster after them.

That one has been around since base game.  Someone once posted pics of it here.

A borkage I've noticed is that meteor strikes break the mailbox.  I had a meteor land in my sim's front yard and the mailbox on that lot can no longer be checked manually.  It can be checked by AM's sell/refine macro, so if one of the sims in the household hits level 10 in a skill, I send a sim out to collect some gems & rocks until they have something worth cutting or smelting.  Then I run the sell/refine macro to collect the mail from the borked mailbox.

I would just move my Sims to a new house.  Then I'd bulldoze the house and set it back down again.  If it is a house that came with the town rather than downloaded one, you can package up a fresh one by opening a new town.  I save all of the houses I make to the bin before moving any Sims in.  If you are worried about paintings and stuff the family has accumulated, it can all be put in the family inventory.  After the new house is set, you can move right back in.  This does not take in account the depreciation of the old house but it is an option.

This is EAxian, but I will look into killing it with fire so that inappropriate unhealthy sims don't show up and die there.

By the time the meteor strike happened the garden had every plant in perfect condition, a pond stocked with deathfish, and the house had been extensively refurbished/redecorated/recoloured.  I'm not in the habit of moving a family out, lotbinning the lot, and then moving the family back in after improvements, so I didn't have a copy of the house after the modifications.  Rather than lose all that and then having to redo it just because the mailbox lost its menu from the meteor strike, it is easier to spend a few minutes using AM's collect rock macro and then use AM's sell/refine macro to get the mail.

It's not a major problem for me.  Thanks to AM's billpaying feature, my sims don't check the mailbox very often.  I usually only send them to collect the mail when they hit level 10 in a skill, or in the case of this particular household (my robot-making household), when a pink diamond has been sent for cutting.

Fortunately I save every sim night.  Now that I know that meteors kill mailboxes, the next time it happens I can just go back to the last save and lose less than a simday of play.  It's just this one lot that is borken.

A while ago I recall someone (can't remember who) posting a mod that unlocked the WA mailboxes for use in regular games, and they could be used to replace the current ones, without affecting the game.  If you can find it, you might be able to just replace the mailbox with a new one.

Have you checked to see if it is possible to get a new mailbox from the buydebug catalogue?

There isn't a mailbox in buydebug, but yes you can get one from, TSR.
http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/details/category/sims3-objects-furnishing-decor-miscellaneous/title/buyable-mailbox/id/983362/

AhhitBURNs! Better, unTSR mailboxes by Claeric. WA and Base: http://fuzzylogicdishwasher.blogspot.com/2010/04/unlocked-wa-mailbox-and-regular-mailbox.html

Here are a couple of my current Ambitions clusterfuck experiences, for what they're worth. Don't know how widespread they are, but I know I'm not the only one with CTDs.

1. Aforementioned CTDs. There are a couple of things I've singled out to trigger it, namely getting married during a party at a venue, and someone in the neighbourhood ageing up. It seems to choose the Adult age stage most often. I've found one workaround- Go through every house to find who has 0 days until their next age-up, use 'editsim', and if the game CTDs when I select the next stage up for them, it seems to be that sim with the problem- reload, age them to teen instead, save, editsim, choose correct age. It's a giant pain in the nuts but it's stopped my CTDs for the most part.

EDIT 3: CTD on age-up seems to occur only on the ones that have tattooes. Yes, I feel like an idiot for not noticing this link before, of course baby-teen can't have those...

2. Firefighter jobs are borked. My level 10 firefighter can put out all the fire on a lot and free everyone and it still gives him an F. Ditto all his following jobs thereafter. I had to have him quit and restart at the bottom of the ladder.

3. Occasionally something goes profoundly wacky with cars. My teenage daughter got fused to her fathers' fire engine, creating the delightful effect of a wiggling truck crammed into the front of her house.


EDIT: New error; get a tattoo = CTD. A late discovery for me. Pleh, tattooes are trashy anyway.

EDIT 2: Fresh bork- 32 thousand dollar Fireman retirement pension. Wow. I gotta get me some of that IRL...

I have a weird solution for you. I have not tried this with a mailbox, but I have done it with a trashcan, and the results should be the same. Use debugging cheats to make your mailbox an ice sculpture. It will eventually melt, (that is, if none of your sims have that ice sculptor challenge completed, not sure what happens otherwise), and then you can clean up the ice glob, and level the area where the mailbox was. Eventually (as happened with my trash can) another mailbox will appear. This might fix your problem. At least try it, (backing up saves of course) to see if it helps.

Well, I have a weird issue with Fly Bayless. He's the Bayless ghost. I resurrected him and every time I tried to edit his appearance, mirror, dresser, Twaalan's computer, big fiery CTD. I think he's just plain borked, because even resetsim and fixall did nothing for him. So warning all, until that gets fixed, don't try fixing him!

Edit - I have discovered that Juan Darer is also borked in the same way. Just sending him to the mirror is enough to CTD. This is reminding me very much of the Plant Sims in Sims2 and how messed up they were before the patch for Seasons came out. :P

Edit 2 - I am not sure what the problem is. Several times today I have CTD when I have tried to edit a Sim, this has been in several Twinbrook families and in new games. Plus, a previously fine Ghostbuster in Sunset Valley now suddenly has no jobs every night when before he had two to three a night. The only thing I changed there was getting the new AM, so I don't know if its a cumulative error or if something has just gone horribly wrong, but it is very frustrating. I had him quite and restart the career and that doesn't seem to have fixed it.

Once more into the breach dear friends, once more...

There's an issue with Spawners that I don't think anyone has mentioned; if so I apologize in advance for being blind. In case it hasn't been mentioned or someone hasn't seen it, I took some screen shots to show everyone what we're dealing with here. The spawners can be manually deleted or you can bulldoze the lot twice but then you may have to place a new lot where the old one was located. AFAIK, this just started with the latest patch but maybe someone else can verify that. I first heard about this problem from amjoie at Custom Sims 3.

I copied the Bayless Junkyard from Twinbrook to the bin and placed in on a lot in either Sunset Valley or the custom world called Fort Sim (I don't remember which). Here is a screenshot showing the lot and all the spawners that come with it.

(http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/8365/baylessjunkyardwithspaw.jpg)


Here is Bayless Junkyard again, but I rotated the lot 3 times to get the entrance where I wanted it; notice how the spawners have multiplied.

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3632/baylessjunkyard.jpg)


Here is the supposedly empty lot after the junkyard was bulldozed.

(http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4412/bulldozedjunkyard.jpg)


Here is a shot of a new residential lot placed on same site, showing junkyard spawner in front center of pic:

(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/8427/newlotwithjunkyardspawn.jpg)


And here is a shot from the basement level of the new lot:

(http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/5609/newlotbasementlevel.jpg)

Edited to correct grammatical error.

When first editing Twinbrook, I did note that there seemed to be some strangeness going on with spawners. On several of the "empty" lots there were actually fishing spawners. Each time I loaded back into the lot there would be a different amount or they would be in different locations on the lots. I did not know then that the issue is to the extent that it is. Also unsure if this is only an issue with Twinbrook lots or if it's something new to spawners through out the whole game.

Another bork for me: Lost Map Tags.
Attempting to research this is yielding little information about whether it's an Ambitions introduction or if it actually started with WA. It does, however, seem to be triggered by visiting a WA vacation land.
LSS: Sent my sim to China, came back. Now that sim, and only that sim, no longer has map tags viewable on the town map.

Edit World broke spawners, the game is now treating them as world objects (Maybe you were initially supposed to be able to add/remove them, like with trees?) instead of lot objects, so every time they get placed, they stay there, even if a lot is bulldozed. It's not unique to twinbrook, no.

Spawners treated as world objects is an intentional feature of the game added many patches ago. People were bulldozing lots tht had spawners on them, causing the spawners to be irrevocably lost. The EAxian solution at the time was to make spawners sticky like so. This solution now creates side effects because spawners are no longer irreplaceable and have become quite common and visible.

Did Edit Town also break Terrain Paints in China and France? Because since the latest patch some are missing.

Yes, such as the Beautiful Vista spawners. I remember that. I didn't recall seeing them multiplying to this extent before now, though, and it's something that I plan to watch since a kazillion spawners on a lot could potentially cause issues.

What is up with those plain white spawners that say, 'this object cannot be deleted'? What function, if any, do they serve?

The latest patch did, not edit town specifically. I have found out how it broke and a couple of different solutions. There are drawbacks with both, so I wanted to wait and see if EA addresses it in a new patch that is bound to come soon.

At least some of those are stuff like butterflies. I was able to move one around with moveobjects, and it showed that it was a butterfly, but I don't recall if I deleted it or had a sim come to collect it.

I think he's talking about the stair routers that some people have in custom houses. Those show up as plain white boxes that you cannot delete without "MoveObjects on"

Nope, not talking about the stairs. These look like spawners but they have no markings on them like most other spawners, and they cannot be deleted.

ETA: I even checked to see if they could be nuked with AM, but it wasn't available. I'll look for one and try 'moveobjects on' to see what else I might be able to find out.

They are routing boxes for stairs. Why they show up on some lots and not others is beyond me but that is what they are, as was said.

Chances of EA fixing it properly: 0
Chances of your fix working, although it has drawbacks: 1

Just to be clear, I am referring to lots that have no stairs at all, no stairs located any where near them even. But this all makes sense when you consider that they can't be deleted when connected with stairs, either, you have to just delete the stairs and then undo the action. Wow, that is just beyond bizarre that they would appear on lots with no stairs. It's pretty difficult to do, but EA managed to surprise me with their ineptitude.

I got a CTD when trying to change Marigold Racket's clothes. I clicked on the dresser and chose "plan outfit" like normal and everything seemed ok at first. I was able to pick her everyday outfit, but when I clicked on the formal tab, I got a CTD. I had just saved before sending her to the dresser, so I loaded the game back up and tried again, but this time instead of clicking on the formal tab, I chose sleepwear. I got an immediate CTD. Tried a third time, just choosing her everyday outfit, but when I clicked on the checkmark button, again it crashed. It doesn't seem to be any bad cc since I had just given Milly Pidgin a makeover in CAS and it was fine. So I'm guessing that Marigold Racket is just messed up. Does anyone else have this problem with her or any of the other pre-made sims?

Oh yes. I get the CTD issue with Amy Bull all the bloody time. I fixed her CTD problem by removing her tattoos, however I now have CTDs whenever she gives a makeover. Handy that, no?

Also get CTD when any sim has a tattoo wish selected & when I mouse over the tattooing station at the salon. Fun for ALL the family there!

Many of the new wishes are totally broken because they do not fulfill. My self-employed photographer (very tedious job btw) had those wishes of selling photographs with a total worth of a certain amount. I sold them via the consignment store and I sold them from the inventory. While the job progress bar registered both of these sale methods the wish panel still said 0/1000.
The same with the harvester. The wish said to collect 5 pieces of crap in one go. I blew up the wole junkyard yielding hundreds of pieces of crap, but the wish said that I had collected none. It worked perefectly, however, when the wish was related to harvesting vegetables and fruit with the harvester.

Btw, has anyone else played a self-employed photographer? Is it normal that they get only one meagre award (the key), while my inventor sim receives one bloddy medal after another?

Edit: Another thing I have noticed is that not everything that's been blown up will be restored after the detonation. In my case it was the toilet at Juan's. Damn, I so wanted to have a triumphant pee after sucking in all those cockroaches with the harvester instead of the scrap.

I ended up just using the Super Computer to kill off Marigold Racket, so problem solved. Well, sort of.

Last night when I was playing, I sent my sim to the consignment shop since I hadn't been there before, but there was no cashier and no other customers. I had her wait there for a full day (using maxmotives to keep her alive) and no one ever showed up. I just installed Windows again recently after replacing my hard drive, so this install is new as of 6/29 and I've only played twice. And both of those times were just to quickly makeover one of the families before quitting. Is there a way to force the game to generate a cashier?

I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing the issue, but my Firefighter and Ghost-Hunter job completions don't always register. It seems to be a 50/50 chance of the job working at all. Very annoying. I might have the same issue with the Stylist, because even though he changes what the client requested he change I often get the 'failed to give what the client wanted' notice. I've only had one 'bad makeover' and his Creativity skill is around 8 while his job level is about the same mark, so I'd expect him to be starting to have some success by now.... nonetheless suck-job after suck-job gets the guy promoted.

Have you tried deleting the cash register and adding a new one?

The wish said to collect 5 pieces of crap in one go. I blew up the wole junkyard yielding hundreds of pieces of crap, but the wish said that I had collected none.

That's because you didn't collect them at once. 5 in one go means 5 from one single interaction- like digging through a pile. I thought it was a problem at first, too (assuming for a second that 5 at once meant 5 in a short time, one visit to the junk yard), but it means "5 from one attempt at collecting scrap".

So, you mean that I will have to find a small pile and when it says "5 pieces" when I hover the mouse over it that's the one to pick up? Uh, what a hassle for 500 points, as most of the piles I found contained more than 5 pieces. But thank you for confirming what I almost suspected would be the case.

Um, no. You have to dig through a pile of scrap.

Um, no. You have to collect five pieces using the harvester. This means blow up the pile, stand in the middle of a bunch of pieces, and use the harvester - if it grabs five pieces from around you in one go, you get the wish.

Don't make me get that flashy fucking banner.

I seem to have issues with the harvester and fulfilling wishes. It will randomly not count things that are collected (Example: Harvest 5 plants at once. In this situation the sim stood in the center of 7 plants ready for harvest, harvested from all seven, but counter said 3/5). At first I thought maybe shoddy EAxian logic with basic big inventions "failing" but I've also experienced it with master inventions. I tested the above situation repeatedly and got different results every time.

My level 10 inventor/sculptor just made this monstrosity out of wood. It looks like no wood I've ever seen. Trying to pick it up in buy mode gave a mouse-over title of "Missing Object 1x......."

(http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8262/screenshot48a.jpg) (http://img208.imageshack.us/i/screenshot48a.jpg/)

Out of curiosity, does it appear OVER anything in front of it? As in, is it always right in front of you when on screen, going through objects, sims, walls, plants, land itself?

I've gotten that three times now, I think, all in various sculpted forms (like stone, ice and wood).  I just let her continue and then sell it.  The only thing it seems to go through is the block of material itself - it's not a graphical error.

Isn't it a function of having awesome and not having the Ultimate Career Bundle?

Ghosts! It has been mentioned here and in various other places that they don't stay in the graveyard or any other lot where their gravestones or urns are. But that's not all. While I spent many nights trying to befriend a ghost I observed several things:
1. Not only do they come out heading for the nearest possible exit in order to jump into a car and leave for good but when you try to stop them from doing that by running over and greeting them, the greet interaction stays in my sim's queue until it is very close to that ghost and then just vanishes. Sometimes the thumbnail in the action queue will have that red cross signalling the cancellation but most of the times it's just gone. In the past this meant that the intended action was to be replaced by the "A Ghost!" action but now there is no such thing. The sim may go through the animation (disgusted or cheering) but this does not show in the action queue as such.
2. So now, sim and ghost stand there staring at each other and my sim tries to greet again. At that moment when I click on the ghost the ghost will most of the times be reset and gone. Once I also had it happen that not only the ghost was reset but also my sim was immediately teleported home. The sim itself was not reset, however, as its motives and wishes panel remained intact, it just got teleported back home.
3. So, I became fed up and went shopping for urns in the mausoleum and placed one on my home lot. This ghost does not leave the lot but causes actions to drop whenever it appears, and again these actions are not dropped and replaced by the "A Ghost!" action, they will just cancel and my sim will either stand around or do the jig of being disgusted.

Yup. It could only be removed by Nuking.

No idea what the Ultimate Career Bundle is, so it's not something I have.

Ultimate Career Bundle was/is a 'free' addon for Ambitions (basically your pat on the head for registering). Awesome fools the game into thinking that it is registered and it believes it can make the extra statues and inventions that came with the bundle so it tries and fails and we get ugly red box.

What Madame Mim said.

This (http://store.thesims3.com/setsProductDetails.html?productId=OFB-SIM3%3A21267) is the Ultimate Career Bundle.

(http://i46.tinypic.com/1688jly.jpg)

See also here (http://www.mediafire.com/?izyejmtjjdq) or here (http://www.4shared.com/get/_4bNMagf/The_Ultimate_Career_Bundle.html) for the Sims3pack.

It's basically EA's reward for buying and registering Ambitions. Among the items included in the pack are two additional sculptable items and two additional inventable items.

Ambitions itself contained references to it that checked for registration. Pescado yanked those checks out of Awesomemod several versions back. It's possible in doing so it inadvertently opened up the possibility of creating those items even if you don't have the required resources.

Any chance the inventables & sculptables are available separately for those who don't want the crap bloated hair and other files in their game? Otherwise, I'm just going to live with the occasional red boxes and sell them when they come up.

Never mind, I'll separate them myself.

My level 10 education sim appears to have a great lecture aura. Whenever she's in the room all other sims get an "intrigued by great lecture" moodlet with no icon. This wouldn't be so bad but it prevents her from doing any non friendly interactions. eg she'll be joking with somebody but it won't let her advance past being amusing because the great lecture keeps flicking back to "x thinks x is okay"

I don't know if this is an ambitions bork or something related to awesomemod. I'm not using any other mods except for the photography fix.

I'm not familiar with this career, so does she have any moodlet indicating that she's lecturing? If you have AM, try Ctrl-Click to get rid of the moodlet and see if that works. If not, maybe resetsim will fix it.

Education is a new career that came with Ambitions. Oddly, unlike all the other careers that came with Ambitions, this one is not playable. Instead it's an old style career that runs via a rabbithole.

She doesn't have a moodlet. Resetsim and fixall do not fix it and neither does quitting the job. She does have a friendly interaction "give great lecture" which disappears when she quits work. I presume the moodlet the other sims have is supposed to be associated with this and something is making it fire all the time.

I have just noticed a new borkeness. A sim I was playing had a wish to buy something for $100 and another wish to purchase a new painting worth at least $250. Went into buy mode to buy a painting, chose one and fiddled around with placing it on a wall and then changed my mind and left buy mode. Both wishes were fulfilled even though I never purchased the painting. ::)

Route fail! It's everywhere. Sending my sim off to a community lot, route fail. I have to actually walk them through one step at a time, clicking down the street until they get close enough to their destination.

Next biggest problem was a recent house of mine, I had two sets of stairs, from basement to ground, then from ground to foundation. My sims would go up the basement stairs, but wouldnt go anywhere else, I'd tell them to "use foundation stairs" and they would go *down* the foundation stairs and wind up somewhere in the basement! when I moved the foundation stairs, they got stuck next time they came up to ground level and couldn't move anywhere. I was also unable to replace those again later after using move objects to place the sims elsewhere.

(http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg173/kawaiimiyo/Screenshot-8-1.jpg) (http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg173/kawaiimiyo/Screenshot-10-1.jpg)

It's probably Gretchen's remains blocking the stairs in the basement.  Have you tried quick lime?

 :-X Why no, I haven't!

Both your route failure problems are extremely common symptoms of "doing shit you shouldn't disease", likely caused by using moveobjects to take sims and move them around to different levels of the house, making them totally unaware of what is on what level and what isn't, including themselves.

I'll accept that for the last problem with the basement stairs... but not the first one. Since when is sending them to a community lot something I shouldn't do? MoveObjects played no part in that,

New patch out later today.

Major fixes (based on issues that have been noted a lot here)

Sketches your Sims create using the Drafting Table are now valued properly based on your Sim's Painting Skill Level and related Profession Level

Fixed issue that prevented players from Changing Active Household while in Edit Town mode

Optimized memory usage when deleting lots via Edit Town mode

Optimized memory usage for complex Sim homes created with Buy Mode

The "Intrigued by Great Lecture" moodlet now has an icon

Create-a-World will now work properly once The Sims 3 Ambitions is installed

Sims will no longer cheer at City Hall forever when switching active households after a celebration

Fixed an issue that caused Sims to have broken or inappropriate hair styles after aging up

Inventions sold at the consignment store will now count towards a Self-Employed Inventor Sim's promotion

The update has arrived. What a list of borked crap that they are fixing...notice that the list does not specifically include a fix for the inability to dig at foreign digsites - but says it fixes some invention that in some way may be related, so wonder if that's it?  Don't know. Won't be installing the patch until Pescado has an update for AM for it.

It's about time!  I've been having CAW withdrawals something fierce.  Normally I'd wait until AM updates as well, but I think I'll just remove AM for a bit and get right to adding Ambitions lots to my world.
First the champagne!

Warning Goddess. Persons have said that CAW still fails to function properly.

Yes, I'm glad I thought to read the forum before doing anything… Well the Champagne is already open; might as well get drunk! 

The patch = "It's a trap!"

I'll take it the lights are still borked then? What little EA bothered to do with getting some lights (a couple of lamp posts in this case) to cast light beyond lot boundaries (though not up multiple floors) didn't appear to work for long in my game.

Maybe EA can bring a patch out that I can actually update my game with.     Instead of getting error invalid file found every time I try and update with this new patch. :-\

Maybe you should stop messing with those NoCD cracks that replace the game files or at least remember to back the originals up before you overwrite them.

This.  ARRing games isn't for the feeble of mind.  But maybe if Freckles writes to EA and explains to them how their current patching system makes it SO HARD to pirate their games, they'll ship her files she can use.

Did I mention anything about having a pirate copy of the game in my post?   But please feel free to assume that I do. ::) (FYI. I bought the games and had the expansion packs bought for me for Christmas and my Birthday.)

I was trying to help another forum member,who was asking if anyone knew were they could find a no CD hack.

... maybe... gamecopyworld.com???

If you noobtards would care to SEARCH MOAR you would know that there are ways to get rid of the CD check without those crappy gamecopyworld file replacement cracks.

Instead you and your 'friends' will run off and grab those, then not bother to back up the damned original files you overwrite and whine and bitch again the next time a patch comes out and you get invalid file found.

Oh and Freckles, do you always refer to your 'friends' in first person?

Just use awesome mod, the only thing I use the laucher for is updating, only because I'm lazy. Steam launches the game for me, also lets me talk to my friends without alt-tabbing. All hail Motoki the Conqueror, owner of the internets.

Dunno if it's because of the latest patch or if it was always this way, but the fire engine goes slower than the Sloppy Jalopy when responding to fires.

It always runs slow before you upgrade it.

Same here. I just knew I should check here first before allowing EA to totally bork my game. I'll wait for that update until I see here that its safe to install it.

It is safe now.  If you have CAW you will have to uninstall it.  EA has released a new CAW, or fixed CAW depending on how you look at it.  Install the new version and it will work fine.  When you first turn it on you will notice huge rendering differences, and when you first go to edit in game everything will appear black for a while.  Don't let these things worry you though, it works fine. 

As for how the patch and AM are doing together…  They seem to be playing nicely together, a few hiccups but nothing major or upsetting.  I'd say it is now safe to patch.

Thank you for the info Goddess. Since the all clear has been sounded I'll go ahead on with the patch. I've also just d/l'ed a crap-ton of new CC but I'll wait to make sure this is running smoothly before I start the tedious job of installing it all.

I can't upgrade the Firetruck Horsepower, and I am not getting any firehouse coworkers. It's a lonely, slow work day. :(

Welcome to realism.  You need a few mechanical skill points to upgrade.  You should have brought a book to work.

On my firetruck, I get the option to upgrade to Horsepower 4 only on Sims who don't have enough Mechanical skill to select it- ones that do have the skill don't get the option show at all. So my truck's eternal horsepower 3'd. Bugger.

A book on Mechanical, perhaps.

It says "Handiness skill is require to blahblahblah". My sim has 3, and I remember a sim with only one doing it before. Maybe they just upped the requirement.

Still no coworkers, though.

I imagine higher levels require higher skills to upgrade, so you must increase your mechanical skills more.

I noticed that every time I run the game, the Career Bundle does not appear in the installed content... I installed it again and works, but when i close and run again the game launcher it appears again as a new download and does not show up in the installed content... I already have decrapyfied.... why does that happens?

Hasn't been uploaded once on this save, though.

I have been noticing the launcher seems to have Alzheimer's lately with regard to whether it has installed certain files. If you try to install them, it says they are already installed (well duh) but it seems to forget it installed them every time you restart the launcher.

As long as the content is showing up in the game it's not really a problem and I just ignore it.


re: Upgrading the fire truck

You also have Alzheimer's. It requires 5 handiness to upgrade the fire truck and always has.

See here:

http://www.simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Sims_3_Professions#Fire_truck

My personal experience confirms this as well

You can (and should) however maintain the fire truck regularly. This is different than upgrading it though.


It's Awesomemod. It won't generate coworkers unless you choose to socialize with coworkers, which of course you can't do without coworkers and since it's not a rabbithole you don't have work modes to select that option.

It's been mentioned numerous times. Maybe Pescado will fix it at some point. So far he seems not especially concerned about doing so. :P

If it bugs you that badly, start a new game without AM installed and have someone become a firefighter. The game will spawn firefighter friends for you and then you can save, quit, put AM back in and start playing again with the co-workers already in place. Works like a charm.

I did. Well actually I loaded the existing awesomemod save without awesomemod, let it generate coworkers, then saved and reloaded it with awesomemod again. I know you aren't supposed to do that but nothing exploded and I've been running it for a few weeks now since then.

:|

That was totally informative and certainly not a complete waste of space. No wonder you're such a stellar member of the community.

Congrats you too just wasted space.

Anyway, after the latest patch did anyone else's speed ratings for their cars turn into some weird formula instead of just saying the speed?

New feature of awesomemod. Nothing to do with the patch.

Thanks, is there a way of putting it back to the way it was?

So, I just came back from vacation in Champs Les Sims and I have to report further things and borkages apart from broken excavation sites:

1. Consigned goods (inventions, produce etc.) are still being processed while on vacation, i.e. at 5 p.m. I got the nice message that the consignment store was happy to announce the successful sale of three of my marvellous inventions for a total amount of ONE Simoleon (0+0+1). Fine, at home they had a total worth of granting me a promotion in the inventing career, but now, in France, this would buy me nothing but a cockroach if such a thing were available and for sale there.

2. My Sims constantly roll wishes to call some of their vacation acquaintances. But the wish only shows that Sim's face and the text "call". The text string for the name is missing.

3. Explorers who stay in the base camp with you now have the little house icon next to their thumbnails, marking them as visitors of your house. I don't know what that's supposed to mean or what the consequences might be. I noticed it too late to test whether I could now also treat them like guests. The only thing I did notice, however, that they constantly used my bed. Very nice for a romantic vacation when you go upstairs to find some chick from Egypt in bed with your lover. At least this was a lesson to not to clear the dishes after dinner when you're on holidays.

I'm going to assume this might have to do with either the "UseHigherPrecisionTime" or "BetterBBObjectInfo" Settings. If you don't like them, you can use the Awesome config tool and disable them there.

In the past few days I've noticed when I quit without save it is taking quite a long time for the game to quit.  I timed it this afternoon at 3:49.  I'm wondering if anyone else is having the same experience?

I'm running the game with a more than adequate PC.  I use only AM, 3booter and fps limiter.

Thanks, I'll try that.

Ok... but I don't see the new hairstyles that come with the Set in the CAS anyway... red cubes have not appeared again... but I don't know... There is nothing that proves the set is installed... my launcher doesn't say that it's already installed... It just install it and install it all the times I close and open again the launcher...

I remember reading about people having trouble finding all of the poltergeists in the ghost hunter career.  Today I was playing and was having a heck of a time finding the last of 3.  I slowly scanned the lot, noticing that the woooo sounds got louder in a particular corner, but nothing was wobbling.  So I started clicking on every object I saw and found that a large hay stack needed exercising.  The stack was too large to see the wispy animations and for whatever reason it did not lift off the ground as other objects do.  I hope this helps anyone having similar problems finding the last poltergeist to exercise.  Just find where the sound seems loudest and click on every object in sight.

That new diner rabbithole that looks like a derelict coach is not recognized as a diner when trying to take a photograph of it.

But Twinbrook is doomed anyway. Took a photo in the graveyard while a friend tried to greet a ghost and it registered as TWO ghosts.

Has anyone been able to photograph the Shower in a Can and have it register properly under the Travel photo collection? That's the only thing missing for me in that collection, but no matter how much I fiddle with the camera and zooming, positioning, etc., all I can get to come up is object (still life)

Or if you stop controlling your Sims, they will randomly fetch the ghosts themselves. I know that the ambitious trait has a different influence on the firefighter and ghost hunter careers, I think it's due to the fact that those are the only 2 jobs with "mini-games" incorporated. Where you have to "solve the problem" yourself.

Most firefighting actions will be done autonomously, same for ghost hunting. Sims will exorcise and capture spirits autonomously, but they won't capture/plead with actual ghosts. Firefighters will attend to fires, but they won't break down doors or convince sims to leave.

Speaking of, is there an actual purpose to pleading with a ghost to go to the afterlife? It takes an eternity and there doesn't seem to be a single bonus from doing it.

First of all, talking to them might be a quicker way after you've completed all the Charisma challenges as the banisher can fail and then you get slapped and have to start again.

Secondly, other players use that opportunity to woohoo those ghosts before they send them back to the afterlife. This might feel a tiny bit more satisfactory than just sucking everything in with your gun.

Thirdly, when it's finally time for your own Sim to go to the afterlife, it's probably better to have at least some friends over there instead of only a cartload full of angry victims.

You know its an action shot, right?

If this have been asked before, please re-direct me, I didn't find anything about...

I have a ghost hunter sim... He is in level 7... Yesterday I was playing... evertything ok... Today I played and when I was doing my missions I noticed the game wasn't counting the spirits I was catching... I completed the 3 angry ghosts, the three windows describing the ghosts appeared, but the mission "was never completed"... I tried the other two missions of that day... the same problem... I went to bed and at the next day... THE SAME THING...

Can somebody HELP ME?!

Interesting, never saw it that way. I just assumed the ghost friends would be lost forever...

I am automating the search-and-destroy functionalities in Supreme Commander, so...don't worry...too much.

I can't find that in the config... Going to try the settings.

UseHigherPrecisionTime -- the last option under "Interface & Control Features - General".

BetterBBPObjectInfo--the last option under "Build/Buy/Edit Mode".

If you REALLY prefer meaningless, bullshit stats, I suppose you COULD turn it off. Can't imagine WHY, though. These numbers are clearly more accurate, as you can see the acceleration and top speed of the car at a glance. The conclusions may surprise you...

I was surprised when I noticed that a expensive bed is, actually, as good as many cheaps... disappointing but really useful. You should keep it activated.

Is checking a box suddenly too much work or something?

Yes, it's.

What did the English language ever do to you?

I guess it's not new, but I fell over another count resetting problem today - "cook 5 dishes perfectly"  The 3/5 at home became 0/5 in Egypt.  The fish count however was fine - my still has still caught 30/50 red herrings

I'm having a weird bug where I am unable to remove any accessories. For example, if I were to give a sim glasses, and later go to the dressor, there wouldn't be an option for not wearing glasses, only to change to other glasses.
Wow, that was barely coherent.

Have you tried clicking the equipped accessory to unequip it?

Borked or not, I don't know, but now that EA has remodeled the deed system, ownership of rabbit holes or venues will not be retained if you transfer your family into a new neighbourhood, even if it's the same but newer town. Neither will you get the money back during export. I couldn't test whether it is the same with vacation homes, because my old neighbourhood went kaputt before I had the chance to buy one, but at least now I know that you should sell everything before you move out unless you intend to play a credit crunch scenario.

The ownership system is horribly bugged, anyway: You can end up with two famblies owning the same lot, resulting in a logical inconsistency over who the owner is, a generally screwed-up thing. AwesomeMod fixes this part. For obvious reasons, trying to transfer ownership between neighborhood moves can't work, because you could import two famblies that both claim to "own" the lot.

Ever since the patch I've had sims walking on water instead of swimming and standing up in the tattooist's chair - basically the two things that so-called patch was supposed to fixed, but actually introduced into my game instead.

Today my sim got into a pool, then he walked over the water, and from above the water, he used his banshee banisher. He removed a spirit, an invisible one.

Is this free verse?

from the deepest of my FAT HEAD.

My Sims also seem to think that they are the Messiah, makes me tempted to call the "Rapture" at times. Never had this behavior before the patch, either. This seems to happen mostly when they are conversing with each other in the pool, much like the same bug from Sims2.

I haven't seen this posted yet so here I go:

The game isn't showing the correct number of cases solved for my Investigator Sim.  Just this morning, it showed 18/35 cases solved, which was correct at the time.  I fired up the game again this afternoon, this time choosing a completely different family to play for a while and give her a break.  When I switched back to the Investigator family, the number of cases solved was 0/35.  What has caused this?  Was it because I switched to another family and then back to the original one?  The game is showing the correct job level (10), but I haven't been able to figure out what the goddamn hell is going on.

FYI:  I have no mods whatsoever, or any custom content, including Store stuff so it's not a conflict.  Can this be fixed?

EDIT:  I just tried Google.  Absolutely nothing!

Whenever you switch active families, all the current wants and wishes and whatnot of the current family are reset.  The game tells you this when you go to change families, and asks you if this is okay.  You then have to click the "YA THIS IS OKAY I WANT YOU TO RESET EVERYTHING" button before it'll change active families.

Fuck!  I was hoping it was another EAsshole problem.  Oh well.  I just didn't want to have to start over after all that time I spent getting even that far.  Damn!

That's the one thing I really hate about TS3:  the way it penalizes you for trying to play more than one family.

I have a vague idea what may be causing this. It's related to the way TS3 stores wants, yes. I'm going to guess it DOESN'T happen if you switch back and forth while another want is locked.