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Title: Holy...crap! Post by: Dark Trepie on 2005 September 27, 01:37:10 I think I need glasses. Because I'm sure I'm not reading this right...
(http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y110/chipmc/kaching.jpg) The last time I checked, the Singles girls had only managed to scrape up about $8,000 before I stopped playing their lot. And Ajay only had around $500 after his latest shopping spree. So where in the high holy heck did the $2.3 Million come from? The Loners just got incredibly boring to play... Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: CapN Tokyo on 2005 September 27, 01:47:42 Hmm, that happened to me once.
But hey, who's complaining? Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Ancient Sim on 2005 September 27, 01:54:54 I had something similar to this once, I posted about it a while back. I had Martin Ruben move Jane Stacks back into their house on campus once she'd graduated and they had twins there. Jane worked while Martin continued to study. He graduated, bought a house and moved her and the twins in. She didn't just bring the toddlers with her, she also brought just under 6 million simoleans. They now live in an absolutely huge rambling mansion that is so big I can't find any of them and they still have just under 5 million left. I haven't decided what to do with it yet, I may make them 'benefactors' who send money orders out to downtrodden Sims. Only trouble is, I don't have any downtrodden Sims.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Motoki on 2005 September 27, 02:51:43 I just had this happen to me too. I got about 700,000 in my case. My sim was a college graduate who moved back in with her parents. Her fiancee was still in college so I invited him over but couldn't have her marry him or move him in. I think used the sim modder (the baby thingy you get with the testingcheatsenabled) and aged him to an elder than back to an adult (he wouldn't age straight to an adult because a young adult is technically an adult I guess or subset of an adult). Then I was able to have her marry him and when she did he brought a boatload of money with him. I never knew college students carried that kind of cash lol.
But yeah, the house has gotten a lot more boring now. :P Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Diala on 2005 September 27, 03:01:55 Here's a challenge: spend all that money on stuff (items, housing...) for that lot without giving it out via money orders. See how much stuff you can cram into there!
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: nothingbutsims on 2005 September 27, 03:05:45 I had the same experience too, Trepie, with a couple million.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: gali on 2005 September 27, 04:25:23 It happens when you teleport some sim from the family bin, but he is one of a group (like the Singles) - and propose him/her to move in. It's a glitch I think, but I like it!
It happened to me with the Curious brothers, which had only 49,000$, moved to the family bin. I created a female for Pascal, teleported him from the family bin, and proposed the move in. He brought with him more than 2 million $. Then I created a female for Lazlo, moved him in, and he brought 5 million $ (!!). As I used the motherlode before moving the brothers from their house, Vidcund remained in the family bin with 1 million $ - and when I moved him in, this was the only sum he brought. ...Nice glitch...:). Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Oddysey on 2005 September 27, 04:32:14 *twitch*
That's a very specific number. What in the name of all that is binary could be the mechanism of that glitch? Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dizzy on 2005 September 27, 07:08:41 *twitch* That's a very specific number. What in the name of all that is binary could be the mechanism of that glitch? Hehe. You asked: Code: ### Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Gus Smedstad on 2005 September 27, 12:32:58 That's what Sims 2 code looks like? Ye gods, it's spagetti! I haven't seen anything that bad since I stopped using BASIC 23 years ago. I started to do a trace, and I was astonished to see -
On line 0x1, the code jumps to line 0x19. It's impossible for control to flow from line 0x18 to 0x19, since the preceeding line is a jump to 0x3B. Ergo, there's no conceivable reason why the code at 0x19 wasn't located immediate after line 0x1. Line 0x1B then jumps to line 0x2, where this segment should have appeared in the first place. Line 0x4 jumps to 0x48. Again, it's impossible from control to flow from 0x47 to 0x48, because both paths are a jump to 0x28. Line 0x48 jumps back to line 0x5, so we've got a one line digression for no apparent reason. It's difficult for me to imagine a compiler writing code this bad. It has all the earmarks of code that has been patched by hand. I.e., as originally written line 0x4 jumped to 0x5, then the programmer realized he needed another instruction in there, so instead of inserting it and changing the line numbers, he changed the jump, added the code, and then jumped back. That's horrible. - Gus Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dizzy on 2005 September 27, 12:56:31 Hehe. This is just disaSim2 output. This isn't what Maxoids look at. They have the pleasure :P of looking at Edith code (which, from what I've heard, looks more like a flow-chart than any sensible scripting language).
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Gus Smedstad on 2005 September 27, 13:19:07 So what you're saying is that it is compiler output, but it's a compiler with a bizarre code generator. I've written scripting language compilers, and there's just no good reason to be generating branches like that.
- Gus Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dmchess on 2005 September 27, 13:41:21 So what you're saying is that it is compiler output, but it's a compiler with a bizarre code generator. I've written scripting language compilers, and there's just no good reason to be generating branches like that. - Gus Yeah, everyone always has to write their own language, repeating 99% of the mistakes of the last thousand people that did it, and inventing three new mistakes. ;D Whoever wrote the virtual machine language must have been a big SNOBOL fan... :F(END) Just imagine if behaviors were written in Perl! DC Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Hook on 2005 September 27, 16:31:20 Well Gus, now you know why some of the scripting in the game is buggy, huh? :D
Apparently the scripting system is graphics oriented. You create scripts by dragging blocks around a flowchart. And every block has a true and false output. The entire development system is guaranteed to generate spaghetti code. It's like the development system was designed to play as if it were a computer game. Now, there are some types of development that lend themselves well to this graphical treatment. Object oriented design, for example. But these scripts are procedural and need to have a procedural language. And some seasoned programmers writing them. For what it's worth, viewing these same lines of code in SimPE is much better. At least there you have the flow lines created for you by SimPE. Hook Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Oddysey on 2005 September 27, 21:34:56 This is one of the reasons that the stuff added to TS2, not present in TS1, is generally not terribly reliable. The game engine really isn't designed to handle anything tied into the motive system. Everything else is sort of stuck on, so you have procedural scripts being written and executed in an environment designed for Object Oriented code.
Object orientation is a good way to handle motives; each sim keeps track of what it's mood is, and the objects tell it what to do. Not so good for wants, at least the way they're implemented, as on/off switches triggered by events. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: jase on 2005 September 27, 22:08:29 That's what Sims 2 code looks like? Ye gods, it's spagetti! I haven't seen anything that bad since I stopped using BASIC 23 years ago. I started to do a trace, and I was astonished to see - Maxis behaviors are implemented as "trees" - binary trees. There are THOUSANDS of trees in the game. To represent them all in memory at once would likely take terabytes of RAM. The nodes of the trees are balanced and optimized by a tool that Maxis uses interally - which undoubtably produces this "balanced tree" output to avoid redundant data/code reads, minimize cache misses, and having to reparse the behavior data again and again. A good optimizing C++ pentium-optimizing compiler would give your code the same kind of treatment. What you see is actually "intelligent" tree balancing and branch predicition for performance. I can assure you the output isn't arbitrary.On line 0x1, the code jumps to line 0x19. It's impossible for control to flow from line 0x18 to 0x19, since the preceeding line is a jump to 0x3B. Ergo, there's no conceivable reason why the code at 0x19 wasn't located immediate after line 0x1. Line 0x1B then jumps to line 0x2, where this segment should have appeared in the first place. Line 0x4 jumps to 0x48. Again, it's impossible from control to flow from 0x47 to 0x48, because both paths are a jump to 0x28. Line 0x48 jumps back to line 0x5, so we've got a one line digression for no apparent reason. It's difficult for me to imagine a compiler writing code this bad. It has all the earmarks of code that has been patched by hand. I.e., as originally written line 0x4 jumped to 0x5, then the programmer realized he needed another instruction in there, so instead of inserting it and changing the line numbers, he changed the jump, added the code, and then jumped back. That's horrible. - Gus J Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dizzy on 2005 September 27, 23:26:37 What you see is actually "intelligent" tree balancing and branch predicition for performance. I can assure you the output isn't arbitrary. Well, the output may be "balanced" and "branch predicted" (for whatever that's worth :P), but the composition of the code is very much arbitrary. This is betrayed by the many instances (especially in the base game) of unused code, the massive blocks of duplicated code, and the weird, seemingly-random transitions from one iteration to another. No compiler I've ever seen produces output like that. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Hook on 2005 September 27, 23:40:02 Consider the case of toddlers playing in toilets.
The Prima guide, obviously working from the design documents and not the playable game, has said that toddlers only play in toilets when in a bad mood. Uh huh. Twojeffs said there was actually a test for the toddler's moods in the code, but the results were ignored, resulting in the toddler playing in the toilet no matter what their mood. This isn't something that got optimized away, but an error in the script creation... and from what I can determine one that would be easy to make given the way the script development system works, and one that would have been damn difficult to miss if the scripting system used a proper procedural text language. Hook Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Kristalrose on 2005 September 27, 23:49:38 Well, since I know nothing about coding and trees and generating and whatnot, I'll leave all that alone.
I did have the move in "Magic bonus" happen to me, twice. Both times I had moved in a YA so they could transition and marry my sim. Is this what happened to you, also? Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: vecki on 2005 September 28, 03:04:50 I had it happen the first time I experimented with moving Bella in with the Goth family, nearly 5 million simoleons. Of course the next time I went into the lot I got the standard 'Bella has died on another lot' yada yada yada and shortly after reinstalled. But she is now resurrected courtesy of nightlife and planning to set herself up with a fabulous bachelorette pad.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Zeljka on 2005 September 28, 08:44:49 It happened to me when I moved a teen and ended up with several of his siblings as well. I used 'Remove from Family' (InSiminator) and went back to their parents' lot to get the other kids back. The children were ok, but the teen girl would have brought back several million, so I left her wandering as a townie.
I later moved her in with teen Ivy Copur who I'd impregnated with alien twins. They were best friends anyway and I wanted her money to go to a family I didn't really care about (cheating with) Now that I've discovered the perfect solution -Inge's teleporter plus, which doesn't add money or a memory, it's too late, her parents are Romance and Family and have a house full of kids, no room at the Inn. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: DrBeast on 2005 September 28, 08:49:36 I wonder, does this occur even with the no20Khandouts hack?
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Karen on 2005 September 28, 11:18:29 This happened to me a month or two after the original game came out, long before any hacks were available. Don Lothario moved in with one of my game-born Sims. They each had about $60K, and they ended up with $3.3 million. I have managed to spread the wealth around pretty evenly (the "no 20K handout" helps with that). If it's a bug, I'd just as soon not see it fixed :D
Karen Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: jase on 2005 September 29, 09:13:26 A patch for this problem (if you, in fact, see it as a problem at all) is available here:
http://www.insimenator.net/viewtopic.php?p=23744 Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: gali on 2005 September 29, 12:18:52 Are you crazy??...:). To fix the most pleasant glitch of the game?...:).
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: RainbowTigress on 2005 September 29, 12:50:17 Are you crazy??...:). To fix the most pleasant glitch of the game?...:). Well, you don't have to install the fix if you don't want to. :)Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dizzy on 2005 September 29, 12:58:34 Interesting fix. I wonder if the Maxoids have seen this.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: jase on 2005 September 29, 14:08:45 The GSC call that Maxis uses to extract a % of the assets from a remote lot fails if the remote lot is not in the same neighboorhood as the active lot. There's no way to directly see if the call succeeded or failed here either. Unfortunately, Maxis never initializes the temporaries (Temp 3 & 4) to anything prior to making this call (T[3,4] holds the move-in $). Thus, if the call fails silently (as it will if you move part of a household across a neighborhood boundary), you are left with whatever junk values happen to be loafing around inside Temp 3 & 4. And that is where the mega-million jackpot comes from.
However, I discovered that when you move the entire household, everything works as you would expect. And the reason for that is because a different GSC call is used in this case: the combine household assets GSC call. It does behave as you would expect across neighborhood boundaries...so by using this call instead in the partial-move in case and doing a little rejiggering of the numbers we get the result that we ultimately need (albeit what some may not necessarily want - lol). Sort of a round-about backdoor calculation that yields the same value. J Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: witch on 2005 September 29, 20:17:13 Are you crazy??...:). To fix the most pleasant glitch of the game?...:). Well, you don't have to install the fix if you don't want to. :)Pleasant glitch?!? My sims have to work for their money! There has to be some challenge in the game. Excess money gets banked with my banker sim. Thankfully I've not had one of those ginormous donations. I've installed the fix. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Karen on 2005 September 29, 20:40:17 The GSC call that Maxis uses to extract a % of the assets from a remote lot fails if the remote lot is not in the same neighboorhood as the active lot. There's no way to directly see if the call succeeded or failed here either. Unfortunately, Maxis never initializes the temporaries (Temp 3 & 4) to anything prior to making this call (T[3,4] holds the move-in $). Thus, if the call fails silently (as it will if you move part of a household across a neighborhood boundary), you are left with whatever junk values happen to be loafing around inside Temp 3 & 4. And that is where the mega-million jackpot comes from. Interesting....That may explain why it happened to me. I moved Juliette from Veronaville into Pleasantview. (This was way before anybody mentioned that cross-neighborhood moves were a Very Bad Thing.) She got married, had 3 kids, and died of old age. When her youngest daugher Nicole was an elder, still living in the same house that she grew up in (i.e. the house that had been moved from Veronaville), she had a fling with Don Lothario. They fell in love, he moved in with her, and the "lottery bug" brought in $3.3 million. This was a full 3 generations after the original cross-neighborhood move. I had a bunch of Sims in that family grow up and move out without problems, but I believe it was the first time anybody had moved *into* that house. So it definitely doesn't have to happen immediately. Karen Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: jase on 2005 September 29, 21:32:48 It probably happened to you on both occassions. Whether you really "notice" this bug or not depends on what junk data happens to be lying around at the time of move. There are 2 values that represent how much money your sims have. The first is the # of simoleans x 10,000. The second is the remainder (some value between 0 and 9,999). If the first value is zero, nothing will seem all that amiss. But if even a modest sized value appears in the first figure, you'll see some fairly extraordinary amounts. In theory, your sim could end up with something just south of 164 million simoleans. That's quite a jackpot :)
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Dark Trepie on 2005 September 29, 23:44:58 I had the Singles living in Downtown. And Ajay there is obviously living in Strangetown. So I guess that's technically a cross neighborhood move.
I think I'll download that patch. Having a giant fortune like that isn't fun unless you made it yourself by working. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: dizzy on 2005 September 29, 23:56:07 Okay, so Downtown -> Normal hood can cause the GSC glitch as well? I wonder if this glitch occurs between subneighborhoods in Uni.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: jase on 2005 September 30, 03:16:58 Yes and yes. In fact I first encountered the bug back in University when I was implementing support for university families for the InTeenimater. University and Downtown can be considered "neighborhoods within neighborhoods" and partial-houshold move-in's between them (and/or the primary neighborhood) subjects you to this bug.
Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Zeljka on 2005 October 03, 03:21:23 Actually, mine happened using the add to household feature of the InSiminator, original game only.
I like my Sims to earn their money too, so I moved her in with the townie who had a home and then used the Teleporter Shrub to put her back in her parents' home (without the money) when there was room. Perhaps it's an InSiminator glitch? I don't recall it happening when I moved townies in the normal way. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Motoki on 2005 October 03, 03:31:10 Perhaps it's an InSiminator glitch? I don't recall it happening when I moved townies in the normal way. It's definitely not exclusive to the Insimenator, but the one common thing here among the reports seems to be that most people are saying they used some sort of cheat or otherwise played around with the files to move in a sim that you're normally not supposed to be able to move in, at least not in the way they were moved in. Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Zeljka on 2005 October 03, 17:45:35 I think you're on to something there,
I've moved in the occasional townie/NPC for various Challenges and have only had the windfall when snatching them in a 'cheating' way. I just use PE to get rid of the extra money, or have them donate it to the 'Jean Pool' in each neighbourhood (who is simply there for the purpose of creating a pretty adoption pool and doesn't matter) I suppose messing with parts of the game not meant to be messed with can affect the distribution of the townies' apparent endless wealth. (think of the money you'd save by being homeless and filling your hunger, social and other needs in others' homes) Title: Re: Holy...crap! Post by: Swiftgold on 2005 October 06, 01:51:30 This just happened to me last night. I had four adults and a child living in a house, and then I had one of the adults take the child and move out - I was going to have it be two of the adults and didn't click right. Ooops, well, I figured I'd have them ask her to move in after they moved.
So I moved them into the House of Fallen Trees downtown, because he was a new vampire and I didn't feel like messing with creating a basement or anything. Teleported over the other adult and had him ask her to move in - she brought something like 6,000,000 simoleons. She was born in-game, not a townie, and all they had had at their old house was something like 200,000 at the most :P So it was only "cross-neighborhood" in this case if you count the fact it was going from the main neighborhood to its attached downtown. Well, now they have a fortune to go with the vampire house and the vampire in the basement. *snerk* |