More Awesome Than You!

Ok, call me slow, dumb, stupid, whatever you want but after more than a year of play I just found out tonight that by double-clicking on a sim house it loads it!  I wasted so much time in the past to clic on the house and clic on the arrow to load it... geee I really feel stupid because I did not knew this... Doh!

I never ever even thought of trying that and actually found out by accident tonight.

How many of you were aware of this? (so I will feel even dumbier  :P)

Any other shortcut like that you are aware please share with me.  Doh! Doh! Doh!

Edited to add a few doh's!

I didn't find that out 'til last week, and it was also by accident. It wasn't a house I wanted to load...I guess I'm every bit as stupid as you.

Well Miss Doh (approprate nicname you have there don't you?)  ;)

You can count me in as one of the dummies that didn't realise the double clicking trick also.

Besides I like to take the long way around and enjoy the scenery, so there  :P

Lol, yes a well place Doh! was indeed needed in my introduction post. (I am a huge Simpsons fan so this is why I have this nick in case you wonder)!

Well I kind of feel relieved that I am not the only slow person here....  :P

Well, I'm always double clicking on stuff and I feel frustrated when it doesn't work. ;)  Did you know you can double click on the icons in the neighborhood selection screen as well?  It works if you do it fast enough, if you don't, the intro screen will still pop up.  Then you might as well just go ahead and click the play arrow.  Of course, I get into a habit of doing this, and then when I wanted to go to a college town instead, I kick myself because then I have to wait for the neighborhood to load first when I could have skipped that. 

You can double click on a sim's icon in the family panel to center the screen on him/her if they are on the lot.  I get frustrated though because there is a bug that occurs sometimes when the sim is on a different story, and the camera will go to that spot but you still have change stories to the one he/she is actually on.  Right clicking a spot on the floor will also center the camera on that spot.  Right clicking a sim will select him/her.

Rainbow thanks for your tips.  I knew about the centering of the Sims and other things like that but was not aware that the double-clicking would work in neighborhood selection too thanks to you my game will load faster now  ;D

I really miss the right clic on a Sim icon in friendship menu when your Sim is on a community lot to locate it, this was such a nice feature added in Sims 1 "Hot date" I wonder how come it is not in Sims 2 yet.

I also have the same problem of shifting floors when I double-clic on a Sim icon, I am not sure yet but I think it is ok when I play at speed 1 but not when the speed is higher than that.

I do too.  In fact, I keep trying to click on it subconsciously in hopes that maybe it will somehow start working!

I didn't know about that either.  My daughter showed me last week that hitting the space bar also stops the neighborhood flyby movie. That I was glad to know.

If you think you're stupid for not knowing that then I know some braindead simmers!
My poor sister had not a clue how to create her own neighborhood till 2 weeks ago.
My upstairs neighbor just came to realize that TheGoths aren't the only Sims fron the origional game in S2.
my co worker just discovered she can have sims "grow up" the day before their birthday with out having to get a cake.
My Brother inlaw was recently had those "weird fancy grave stones" explained to him by a 12 yearold.
And my mother inlaw just found out how to use elixer of life to keep her sims alive longer rather than end up sending them to a premature grave.

I didn't know that MissDoh! ;D

Thanks-this is great *giggles*

I don't know if it's common knowledge but you can get rid of the flyby's altogether by adding this line to your userStartup.cheat

# Value found in a debug file
boolprop CameraNeighborhoodFlythroughEnabled false

There were other values in the debug file that I could not find menu items for but that was the only one that looked interesting to me.

If you like that, you may also like getting rid of the startup movies too.
Someone here pointed out this site below. Thanks to whoever that was :)
http://www.sims2techguide.net/index.php

Now, if there was only a way to automatically load a neighbourhood at game startup?

I didn't know it either.

Me too, me too! Especially on really big community or downtown lots. I hate it that I can see that a friend is on the lot but I have to zoom way out to find him or her. And I do that automatic right-click first, even though I know that it doesn't work.

Same here, I keep on clicking, maybe I too subconsciously hope that it magically fixed itself. I miss that feature, it was nice to zoom right in on a sim-friend present on the community lots.

Gee The Sims 2 is really a family thing where you live  ;)

Seeing all your responses I am glad I posted about it, guess I am not a stupid girl after all.

I even shown Inge something!  :o Weepiiii *jumping up and down*  ;D  I am pretty sure Pescado knows about it but would he admit he was not aware of this  ;)

Spent flipping ages trying to work out what stories you were on about.  Then I realised you meant STOREYS, as in floors/levels.  Do you tell stories about stories, then?  Would you write a book entitled "The Story of the First Story"?  Now don't tell me that ain't confusing, because it is.  However, "The Story of the First Storey", now that not only makes more sense, it also looks a lot better.  Anyone going to argue this one?!  How about the ghost of Noah Webster?  I'd take him on any time.  I just hope the ghost of Shakespeare has found him and dealt with him.

Heh, I think that's just one of those differences between UK and US English. I've always spelled it 'story' but I can see where you're coming from on the confusion...

Want it to be even more confusing... I look in an English/French Canadian dictionnary and both storey and strory mention it is related to buildings floors.  Lol...  Seems in Canada we cannot decide which to use...

Nope, never found it confusing at all.   ;D

I am always double clicking as well and have learned lots of odd shortcuts as well.I also learned today that when sims arrive from the family bin  to their new house or Vacant lot they arrive by Taxi.............amazing the features you see  just by getting a new video card LOL ;D

Guess what I just found out!  I've always been miffed that you can't queue up calls with a cellphone like you can with a regular phone.  Well, by pure accident I discovered that if a sim owns two cellphones, you can queue up another call while he's already talking.  Genius!

That's a fun side effect of the way cellphones work. When a sim uses a cellphone, the phone is briefly removed from his inventory while "in use". This has interesting side effects, among which include all of the side effects of thinking he no longer has a cellphone: Inability to queue more cellphone, and the reappearance of "Buy Cellphone" in the unmodified game.

Interesting information.  I'll have to try that one.  I have several sims that have only cell-phones.

Yup, there are 19 simmers total in the family
My 5 kids and myself
My sister and her hubby
my mother in law
my dad
and a bunch of nieces and nephews

And even sicker most of my IRL friends play so my poor lover bug has no excape from people talking about  this "stupid game".
Poor guy.

I also found out you could center a sim with the right click on their icon just a week ago! I was pleasantly shocked  :o

However, I just saw something while I was killing off a household of sims. I was disappointed after I created them in CAS and saw that in the shower and when they're naked, their bodies are totally invisible. So I created them again and didn't want to decorate the awesome house again, and I decided to kill them off. After the last sim died, I got a message saying I was successful in killing all my sims and clearing out my house. It also said that "this is a simulation game and you're supposed to help keep your sims alive!" (duh) And it said "We aren't implying you meant to kill all of your sims, even if you did, we wouldn't blame you (or something) and you can quit without saving and try again" Continuing : "If you decide not to quit without saving, your now empty house shouldn't go to waste and you should probably move some new sims in :D I hit printscreen but then as I was deleting the urns, I pressed it again, so I'm sorry not to be able to show you :D

Now I sit with a lump in my throught, totally guilty, thinking, I'm caught.

 I try to exit to the neighborhood and I see I have the no selectable icons back. I can't select the neighborhood icon, the save icon or the exit icon, but I can click the build/buy modes. The bug is back. Is there a fix, I have all EP's and is there any way to get to the neighborhood without quitting the whole game from task manager and restarting?

You can use JMP FFS lotdebugger.  Place it on the lot (it is in the miscellanous section under miscellanous) and select the option "reenable controls".  It should fix that.  Here is a direct link for that mod:  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=72.0

Happy holidays!

Yes, but how many of those people come to More Awesome Than You, and how many are losers who have wasted their lives sniffing subway seats?

Thank you MissDoh! I never thought I would need the lot debugger before, and I saw that my efforts of creating teen sims and sending them off to college and graduating them totally with twojeffs' college adjuster was so unneccessary, now I can upgrade my sims and have a solution for upcoming bugs :D

Happy Holidays to you  ;)

BTW, blubug, I, like Maxis, would never presume to judge you for killing off an entire family because you didn't want to redecorate  ;D .... I'll just mention that, should you find yourself in a similar situation again, death is not the only answer!

Inge has a lovely "stay things shrub" available on Simlogical. 

http://simlogical.com/

Look under dowloads > misc hacks

You can set your house so that everything stays put when you move a family out. 

(I virtually never kill Sims, myself, just my thing.  In TS1, I wanted the rich old people's house (what were their names), and I wanted it as is.  I must have had too much wine to drink one night and decided to kill them off for the house so I could move one of my families in.  I mean, all the other kids were blithely killing their Sims, right?  Killed them both in the pool.  It was horrible.   :P  And then, because I had Unleashed, it turned out I had to kill their cats too!.  Took days for them to die.  I am honestly still upset by the event, years later!  :'(  )

Do appreciate your sharing the very funny Maxis message! 

Oh, I remember TS1, killing the poor animals.  That to me was far more upsetting than killing off the Sims.  I didn't care a whit about that, but waiting for the animals to die was gutwrenching, to say the least.

haha! dear diary, today i learnt lots of stuffs i didn't know before. i have to thank them all.

Well this must be my week, never knew that while a Sim repairs a trash compactor and it get electrocuted fire could catch in the compactor!

It must be the week for that to happen.  Happened to one of my sims this week when he tried to fix the trash compacter - electrocution plus fire.  He'd only gotten married that day, too.  Fortunately his wife was able to plead with the grim reaper and save his life.

Mind you if the wife had been pregnant already I probably wouldn't have bothered trying to save him, simply because I rarely get electrocution deaths, nearly all of my sims end up dying of old age.

Isn't the trash compactor bugged so that your sim gets electrocuted every time he tries to repair it? Either that or I've just had a really bad run of luck with trash compactors all game -- even my repairmen can't fix them!

my repairman gets zapped often too fixing trash compactors haha. maybe they're just stupid

I have found that my mechanics (8+) sims can repair the evil trash compactor, as long as they're not tired.  Which makes total sense to me. 

I'm not  a sadist or anything, but the knowledge sims want to be saved from death so often, I have to try killing them. I had a broken trash compactor once and I didn't want to cheat too bad, so I just moved a water puddle from the broken sink, I tried 8 times before giving up and cheating. Seems like those sims are super sims. Never even a fire with low-no cooking skills! I just hate the knowledge aspiration, the only good part is the max all skills lifetime want :D

And I just found out sim parents can take their kids to school by car- I really should pay enough to have my toddlers grow up into kids before coming up with a new family or house idea. Seems my life is just a large mess of unfinished projects. Better get the macrotastics  and concentrate.  ;)

Usually if their fun and energy level are low when they try to repair something there is a bigger chance they get electrocuted.  My Sims got electrocuted more often while trying to repair the tv than anything else in the house.

My Sims tend to get electrocuted with the computer, but that is probably because they all have computers, and rarely, if ever, have TV's.  The trash compactor gets replaced when it breaks, and I never let them try to fix it.

I haven't had the trash compactor catch fire, but just a couple of weeks ago one of my sims decided to autonomously repair her computer and got electrocuted and the computer caught fire.  Managed to get one of her teens to call the fire dept. and put everything out.

I don't seem to get many electrocutions any more.  Maybe they're just too high in mechanical skills.  Usually, if they get a little shock, they quit trying.  I have to keep making them repair over and over, but they usually get it fixed without getting zapped.

How do you get rid of the electrical charges that surround the sim when they've been electrocuted, but not enough to die?  It has been several sim days, and she still has them.

1. Take a shower
2. Use the dresser to change their clothes
3. Use the mirror to change their appearance

One of these three has always worked for me. YMMV

Thanks, simmiecal.  This is in my daughter's game, she has tried the shower and dresser, but I can almost guarantee she hasn't tried the mirror.  I'll let her know when she gets home from work, and she will be a happy camper!

You need to use the mirror to change appearance but for it to work you must select a "full face" make-up.  Once you put it, just remove it and then save.

She tried both mirror options, and neither one worked.  Then she asked how to delete her like we did in Sims 1, so I told her how and that removed the charges.  She says thanks for the help.