More Awesome Than You!

God damn, I wish those @#$%! sims would stop playing razzle obsessively with the $%^&#! animals.

Ugh, every new expansion seems to introduce some new behavior they become compulsive over.

Awww, I don't have pets yet!

What's razzle? Is it like RPS for animals?  ;)

*inquiring minds want to know!

It's some stupid game they play with the dogs. Not sure if they do it with cats since I don't have any yet.

It looks more like they are teasing the dog though. And it seems to last until you cancel it or at least I've not had enough patience so far to wait for them to get done naturally if they do.  :P

With cats and puppies, they are obsessive over the finger wiggle or tossing it.  ::)

If I tossed my cat like that, I doubt I'd have much of a face left.

So, tossing the cat is like tossing a toddler in the air?

Who in their right mind would do that with a real cat?  ???

Stupid Maxis EA!  ::)

add nopetharrassment to the list.  "leave the friggen thing alone, geez. " ::)

There is lots of potential with this expansion though. Once all the mods, etc. get straightened out, I'm sure we will be seeing some creative stuff. Gift giving seems possible now as you can give a pet as a gift, and I wonder if the scold interaction can be applied to sims to discourage behavior (jumping on beds).

Really? All I have seen is sell pet to, you can give it away? I set a falcon free hoping it would go hang out in the trees as some of the tree coding once suggested (something about bird noises in trees or something I dont really recall all the details now)...no such luck, Don waved bye bye at the cage and the disappeared. pfft that was no fun.

OMGZ, I want petz!!11!!  :P

Seriously though, I *am* a bit peeved that this is the only expansion I've had to wait more than three days or so to get after official U.S. release.

We in Oz can't get it till the 26th of this month and I really don't know why there is such a delay this time around?!

On a good note though, (hopefully) most of the bugs will be ironed out by the time I buy it and install.

What's worse is that they completely ignore their infant's needs to go and bother fido. It is getting rather tiresome.

I haven't noticed eccessive razzling yet but what really annoys me is that they constantly play with the bird autonomously which is annoying enough and then leave the cage door open  >:(

razzle is driving me nuts and my copy of pets just arrived today from EA. on the bright side however  I have not experienced a single bug yet  :o pets is working perfectly my carpool s including those for the dogs have arrived correctly and brought rover home at the appointed time properly.I am stunned that the major errors are missing this time around for me

They're supposed to ignore the baby needs. That's what No Baby Harassment is abot.

Well that's gotta be the dumbest statement ever made.  Don't you know saying things like that is the #1 cause of nuclear disastor??

Oh, I had a bird for about 1 Sim day today. OMFG, that was annoying.  No more birds for my Sims, they can buy the cage, if they insist, but it will remain unstocked until there's some kind of hack.

By this point in the other EPs, there were  huge glaringly obvious bugs.  This time around, if you can manage to get it installed, there doesn't seem to be anything game-stopping. I haven't even heard of too many minor bugs- the ones talked about here on MATY were by people who left in some hacks, and it seems like the bugs vanished when they removed them.  It's like some kind of miracle!

I do believe that maybe they did really hire those play testers!

but wouldn't the hypothetical playtesters notice those annoyances?  ???

What may be annoying to one person isn't necessarily annoying to another.  Also, I've often wondered if playing style has some effect as Sims actions/reactions I've read about here have never happened in my game.

I picked up EP4 and installed it last night; installation went quite smoothly and I've had no glitches during the short time I had to explore before bedtime.  I did notice that the load time is longer, even with two gigs of RAM, with and without the downloads folder in.

I sent Mikey Bisgrove off to buy some clothing in Pleasanview where he met a black cat (who was destroying a chair) and instantly developed a -10 relationship because he scolded it.  Guess he's not a cat person...

Anyway, it looks like fun and I plan to waste away the entire weekend playing instead of doing responsible things.

I haven't even had loading time issues.  Not that I've installed my downloads again or anything, but the first load was amazingly fast.  The only slow down I got was loading the first family with pets, but even the second time around that was zippy.

I had a bird that flew away when the cage was left unlocked.  I couldn't find it anywhere, figured I'd never see it again.  A few hours later it reappeared back in the cage.  Maybe it was hungry?  I'd like to see a "no autonomous unlocking of cages" hack, to eliminate this sort of thing.

Karen

not really since this is the first time I have ever gotten an ep or shopping pack that wasnt full of bugs from Maxis/EA. shocking is the word for it especially after reading the problems everyone else is having with Pets.and by the way saying the game is "bug free" FOR ME ISN'T LIKELY TO CAUSE  NUCLEAR DISASTER

Yeah. If a visitor comes on the lot you can click on them and give the pet to them. I think it is under the "Propose" menu, but I'm not sure, I was just clicking away making sure everything was working okay when I saw the option.

Yes, it's under the Propose menu. I gave a Pet (cat or dog only, I think) away like that. It will ask if you're sure, and then the pet leaves the household.

Oh, and as for annoyances- it's that whole bug vs. feature thing.  Besides, when you're working for a company, probably considered a dream job by the ones who got it- are you really going to want to tell the designers that part of the actual GAME sucks? Okay, we would, but then they wouldn't hire most of us. LOL I'm just glad to have a game where things work like they are supposed to, annoying or not.

BUT I don't use No Baby Harassment. I never have a problem with them taking care of their children...even if it results in a visit from the social worker...but now, they don't even realize they have a child. All they want to do is razzle the damn dog!

Well dogs never do get tired of games like that do they!  So that sounds real to me.  annoying.... but real.

Yes, but I get tired of playing them with them. The sims don't seem to. :P

Only problem I've had with the vanilla game (no hacks) is the horrible lag the game gets when someone gets promoted. Mouse freezes, game freezes, no sound for about a minute and a half and then I get the stupid, "You got promoted!" popup.

Actually, my sim dog was about to pass out from exhaustion and piss himself, but all the family members kept bothering him to play razzle.

IRL, my boxer is pooped within 10 minutes, my jack russell would take about 2 hours...eventually, they prefer sleep.

Thing is, sim actions are pretty deterministic: they always choose the highest-advertised action. So one action will always turn into an obsessive-compulsive one, because it will have the highest default ads and therefore always be chosen. Sim-autonomy is stupid.

This is how you should have said it.

Glad I'm not the only one. Everything else is running ever so smoothly in spite of my not so high-end computer. But everytime it happens I always think the game froze and is ready to reboot...

Oh, and the razzle obsession is bloody annoying and will continue to be so until someone makes a hack to stop the insanity. What bothers me the most, though, are all those damn visitors who immediately after entering the lot walks up to the dogs and start pestering them...

I constantly find myself screaming: "Bite them already!"

At the screen. I'm stupid that way.

I think it has something to do with the code to unlock the stupid collars and fur colors : so far I only noticed the lag when pets got promoted. I hope it stops once all the stupid things wil be unlocked.
Pioupiou

Want all the unlock codes?

http://www.sims2wiki.info/Pets_Unlock_Codes

Thanks but I'm too lazy to type the darn things.... I've tried, typed 3 and gave up.
Pioupiou

Eh, give us a few days and we'll have the Accessory.cache cracked so you can unlock everything.

pioupiou: If you run the game in window mode cut and paste works.

Good to know, thanks.
Pioupiou.

Aha, that's probably it! It never hit me that it happened when pets got promoted only, but when I think about it, so, yeah...

Think we will get an update of the Teleporter shrub to make a pet a stray?

Sure, once I have Pets installed. Tell me, can you teleport in Pets with the current version (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2757.0)? Are Pets even selectable like Sims are?

//Edit: seems like you /can/ select Pets. Try the test version in the teleporter thread.

Just got home from work and booted up, Jordi; emailed myself all the codes from my office (thanks for posting them, guys) and if I manage to unlock anything, will send on the cache file.

Actually Jordi, I need your e-mail.  When zipped, it goes down to 1 MB.

Lil: jordik at gmail dot com

Thanks!

No problem Jordi.

So, the theory is that by distributing the CACHE file, anyone will be able to use it if placed in the Sims 2 folder?

Seems like it.

Interesting… the only difference between your cache (in which you unlocked stuff) and the vanilla one is that yours has seven new entries. The 715 existing ones are not changed in any way (and include facial hair, glasses, collars, and fur patterns—presumably all existing content is listed here already, as well as the non-locked Pets stuff).

This means that as stuff is unlocked, it is added to the Accessory.cache… and a quick way to unlock all does not really exist without further hacking the code. It might be faster to just get a completed cache file from someone else.

Or someone could make a custom hack that does whatever is unlocking stuff in:

# Group = 0x7F8F4EB6, Instance = 0x203F
# Title = Sub - Level Change

EDIT: Here you go:

This unlocks all the pet codes if you enable debug mode and select "Neighborhood/Make me know everyone". (This is also my 2nd successful Lua mod.)  ;D

How this works (shouldn't be too difficult to add):

Okay then.

Since I already have an accessory.cache, I won't need to bash my head in pre-pets simPE with dizzy's.

Then you should encourage "hostily towards stranger".  Not sure if they will bite though.

I like that aspect of the game, that you can have well behaved friendly dogs, or junkyard, destructive dogs, or anything in the middle.

I know what you mean, it is pet abuse and I already did a thread on it,  hinting for a no harrass the pets mod when JM gets his EP. 

 It is worse than the way they harrassed the poor little babies.   >:(

Its also worse than babies due to the fact that sims have no desire to actually care for their pets in a meaningful way. I have yet to see a pet owner auton feed their pet, wash it, or take it for a walk - none of the basic care needs, plus they will harass it beyond its ability i.e. bladder and energy in red. Its almost as if they see the pet as an object to gain fun with and nothing more...

And the cat pans never need cleaning. I wish they made ones like that irl. :)

They do feed autonomously when the pet "asks" for food. Mine have done it several times and I'm glad or all my pets would be dead. The only one they don't feed autonomously is the wormrat, which did die.

At least the womrats get the little bubble over them showing they are hungry. Do birds? I didn't notice. And the fish definitely don't. Always a fine line between under and over feeding the fish. :P

One of my sims walked right over the new bowl and started filling it up. I don't know if the pet asked her to or not.

The bird does get thought bubbles about hunger.

Is the wormrat's bowl ever actually full? Everytime I click on the cage it suggests I add food, even if I just did.

The animations for playing with the wormrat are pretty cute, though. So far only Sandy Bruty has a wormrat and she has never gone to play with it autonomously - she can't leave the bird alone, though.

How is the bird opening the door? I put it in its own room so if she left the cage open when I wasn't looking then at least he wouldn't get out... but the door keeps opening everytime he gets near it.

I think with the womrat and the bird they always let you fill the food because like the fish it's possible to overfeed them and they can gorge themselves to death. I killed a bird that way. Oops. :O

With the pet bowl, I noticed sometimes I get the "clean" option and sometimes I don't. Does it make a difference at all? All it seems to do is dump the food out, I've never seen it get rotten or stinky (I guess it's hard food) and I've also never seen pets refuse the food in the bowl.

Oh and about the womrats, I noticed if you put them in the same room a sim sleeps in it wakes them up which is kind of dumb. :P I can understand birds, but when I was a kid I had hamsters in my bedroom and they never made so much noise that it woke me up. Heck, even the birds generally shut up if you put a cover over their cage for a night.

Try Christianlov's hack at MTS2 that keeps birds from flying if the cage door is unlocked.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=198075

Christianlov also has a hack to keep cages clean and always stocked with food. 
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=198073

Now if somebody would only do the same for pet bowls, we'd be all set  :)

Karen

Did anyone ever make a hack for the fishtanks so they don't need to bed fed and cleaned all the time?

Also, does the maid clean the bird and womrat cages? I hadn't paid attention.

Assuming they're trained to eat pet food, that is :)  Have you played those obnoxious Crittur dogs yet?  They'll starve to death right in the same room with a bowl of pet food because they've been trained to eat Sim food.

Karen

Nope, I haven't played those dogs yet. How annoying lol. Not like I haven't had dogs like that irl though. Not sure I would want to eat the stuff in that pet food anyway. It's loaded with ground up animal carcasses and even ash. :P

My sim cats always sleep on the human beds but I don't mind. IRL I had cats that would do that growing up and we just let them, they pretty much went all over the place, sofa, bed, whatever they wanted. Don't try to get them up either or they would get made and hiss and swat at you lol.

I've seen the maid clean the birdcage.

I also had a wormrat cage in the kids bedroom, but I never noticed him waking up. Too bad the poor thing only lasted 3 sim days so I guess I'll never know. lol That thing was the most annoying thing to care for!

The bowls get green stink lines eventually, but pets still eat out of them anyway. I don't know if that makes them sick.

I only clean them when they are empty. It's the bowls that get gross, not the food itself. Although maybe the food does too after a long enough time, I don't know.

I never knew you could overfeed the fish. I've always fed them once a day.


Lawd, when I was a kid, my hamster ran on his wheel all night, and it was just obnoxious. Thunk, thunk, thunk, squeak.

Supposedly finicky dogs won't eat from stinky bowls.

The cat pan does need to be cleaned after three sims days. I picked up a mod last night that will prevent the fish from dying, regardless of food or cleaning...which is good, because I have no idea how to keep them buggers alive in the sims...or real life.

3 days? I have 4 sim cats in one of my houses with kittens on the way. If that were rl that pan would be disgusting after one day. :p

heh well this was a test with just one sim cat :P Because at first I also thought that it didnt get dirty, I was pleased as punch when it did because the cats are already so maintenace free it didnt make sense.

We need a daily cat pan hack.  ;D

It's kind of silly that if you toilet train your cats, the toilet bowl needs to be cleaned far more often that the catpan.

Since they made the catpans require such infrequent care, it's actually a disadvantage to toilet train cats. :p

The people at Maxis EA must never have had a cat. If you leave their pan uncleaned for several days in a row, they'll find it unpalatable to go in and find other places to go.  :o

Christianlov did do one for the pet bowls  ;)  always clean and full  ;D

I know! The pet bed does eventually get stinky, though, which seems oddly inconsistent.

Hmm, well if the pet bed gets stinky then what's the advantage to having them sleep in it as opposed to a human bed? I guess there is none other than it looks like you have a nice obediant and orderly pet.  :P

I wouldn't say it's a disadvantage. The maid will handle the terlet naturally anyway. Everyone has one of those, right?

Macrotastics will soon support an increase range of pet-related maintenance as part of Power Idle, starting with food bowl refilling and cleaning.

Well, that didn't take long!  Two more hacks available at MTS2:  An auto-filling food bowl by Christianlov (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=197501) and a water bowl that pets can drink from, by wintermuteai1 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=198233)

If you have the auto-filling pet bowl installed, it will also automatically refill the water bowl.  And no need to clean either of them!  I have these in my game and they seem to be working fine so far.

Karen

Beau Broke missed the schoolbus playing Razzle with a stray

PITA.  I haven't had a chance to get a puppy or kitten.  I swear, Brandi Broke is the most high maintenance preggo sim I've ever had.

C

???  Playing in a vanilla game, I've had the litter box get dirty and need to be cleaned. I had two cats in the house and it seemed like every other sim day the box needed to be cleaned. The animation is kinda funny when they are cleaning it out.

I want pet beds to support kitten piles. I also think it would be awesome if toddlers could sleep in the pet beds.  :D

Or eat from the pet bowls.  ;D

I dont quite understand why they didnt make more than one slot on the pet beds, I mean those things are huge in comparison to the pets, and realistically pets do tend to sleep together for warmth, especially youngsters

They do, if they get hungry enough.  I've seen them do it.

I only have one house with a pet (a dog), but things have been far less annoying than usual, and, without SimPE :(, I'v had to actually skill up the family members from scratch. Aside from the dog being significantly smarter and more self-sufficient than than the humans, I'm glad that the Sims would rather play 'razzle' or fetch than  kicky bag or rock, paper, scissors on occasion! The dog at least, will get tired of the repettion and go do something constructive, whereas the Sims generally need to be directed.

I just noticed this today. The sims won't wake up until their energy bar is about 1/4 full or somewhere around there, though. This womrat was spinning in his wheel all night and the sims were oblivious until their meters filled a bit.

(http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y62/Brynne14/CuppaJoe/womrat.jpg)

I bought a pregnant hamster once. I did not know it at the time, though. She had 11 offspring, and 10 were males, many of which had to be separated because of aggression. The female and the mother lived together okay for a while but they one day they decided they wanted to kill each other, too, so had to be separated. At one time we had about  8 cages of constant activity/creaky wheel spinning until I was able to pawn those guys off on the teachers at school and neighborhood kids. I could hear them even though they were kept in another room, so I can definitely relate to the not-sleeping thing! :P

We had one hamster once when I was growing up that had 15 babies in one litter.  :o

My first hamster was pregnant, err...well actually the first escaped the box when we went in to the grocer and lodged itself up under the dash and died but thats a whole 'nother adventure....ok so the second hamster was pregnant. It had babies about three days later which I had never seen up close and personal before, and I was convinced my hamster was falling apart! Sadly the mother hamster was a cannibal and proceeded to behead all but two of her babies over the course of the next few weeks. My mother told me she would stop when they got hair and this was just natural selection, imagine my dismay when a furry little head rolled out one day from where the mother was hiding, obviously doing in yet another of her offspring. I eventually separated her from the remaining two, since it was pretty clear at that point this hamster was not willing to share its cage with any others. needless to say I was pretty happy when she escaped her cage a few months later and ate rat poisoning...oops.   ;)

That's just...bizarre.

VERY bizarre, nectere.

I don't think I could handle that.

* Lil Brudder gets the jeeblies

Well, my pregnant hamster was supposed to be the "secret" replacement for the class pet we were watching over the summer. Jay and Jamie went out of town, and Koker, a BOY hamster, kicked the bucket. Of course. So, I bought a dead ringer (no pun intended) for him, figuring the class wouldn't notice the lack of...male hamster parts.

Mr.Koker got really fat...and I had some 'splainin' to do.

Same here. The cage was in a child's room and I noticed he kept tossing and turning while his energy bar went up and down. He didn't wake up though. I was hoping he wasn't sick due to him playing with the womrat but I figured the thing was just making little noises that kept him up.
And why do they throw themselves against the plastic sides and slide down? My womrat keeps doing it, it is so funny.

He wants OUT!  ;D

Only thing you can do with them is drop a plate of food, let them eat most of it, then scold them.  That will give them a non-zero chance of eating from the bowl, so you can Praise them.

Also, if the Praise option is there, you can Give Love->Treat, which is Praise plus food.

They do this in the game also. When the catpan got full in one of my houses, a cat peed on the floor, even though it was fully trained to use the litterbox. I'm pretty sure it was fewer than 3 sim days that the pan got dirty, too. After the kitten in the household grew up, it seemed that the litterbox needed cleaning once per day, at least.

My aunt and uncle were looking after my pet budgie while I was away. It got out, dog got it and it died. Not only did they get the wrong sex for the *replacement* they got the wrong colour. I was only little at the time but they had a heck of a time convincing me that it was new food they'd bought that made it change colour. :'(

Oh my...why do our pets always die when we go on holiday? And why, when we were children, did our parents choose the most unsuitable people to watch them?

In case someone hasn't responded already: http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=12844

Beats me, I reckon they could have at least dug up the body to get an approximate match - at least that would be what I would have done  ::)

All I can figure is that I was having inexplicably phenominal luck with Pets (before taking a hiatus to prevent a fireball.) A gave one sim a birdcage and the saltwater aquarium. The fish were still alive after a week of once-a-day feedings. And the bird - he adores that bird. It's still alive, too, he's taught it to talk, I tell him to leave the cage open, and the bird flies around the house, but always goes back to its cage. Even with the door left open, it prefers to stay in there 90% of the time. It never enters the bedroom while he's sleeping. The cage only needs cleaned every third day or so, and the maid will do it, but I have the sim take care of it, himself. He doesn't harass the bird on his own, but I do direct him to play with it a couple times a day. That bird is an eating machine, though. $20 a day for bird food, on average. Good thing his owner is a sim I permit myself to motherlode when necessary.

"Razzle" pisses me off because the name misses the point. It's "(w)rassle", a basterdized version of "to wrestle", not half of "razzle dazzle", which is "to bullshit" or "to annoy with excessive school spirit". Although, definition B may have a basis, after all.

One Sim kid managed to overfeed a bird to death... I was somewhat annoyed, but the family can afford another 400 simolean bird.

Or you can make teaching them "Come Here" your first priority, so you can call them to the pet bowl so they can eat ;) I never found out how to feed them Sim food ???

I think you have to have a sim put a plate of food on the floor -- then the pet will eat it.  Or don't give them a food bowl, and leave food on the counter. Maybe that way all but the smallest dogs finds it. ;)

Umm, Brynne, I have to ask. Where did you find that bedding in that picture you posed?  ;D

Avenida Sims

Ah, I see. Those dogs were a pain though; after re-installing I deleted all trace of extras in the Sim Bin, Critturs and all. Nice dogs, apart from Sarah growling at her boyfriend sometimes... :-\ After all that, I'd sooner know what I'm getting this time round. Hope Eafs the wolf comes back though, he's cute :D Friendly too, I wanna adopt him :)

Thank you :)

Considering that razzling the dog essentially involves bugging it, I'd say definition B applies just fine.