More Awesome Than You!

only my adult sims are aging. elder, teen, and child sims are stuck. i am not getting any errors either. and everyday, every adult sim on the lot gets the birthday message regardless of how many days they have until the next transition. i am not using any aging hacks or cheats, i feel they defeat the purpose of the game.

Unless you have aging set to off, you do have some mod which impacts aging, or a mod conflict that causes this somehow.

Run the HCDU, and if this doesn't show anything, do a binary search.

If the HCDU doesn't find your problem (Hack Conflict Detection Utility from Paladin's Placewww.simwardrobe.com (http://www.simwardrobe.com)) I would suggest removing all your mods and seeing whether the problem is solved by doing that.

took out my downloads folder. tried multiple lots, different age catagories. checked my userstartup. turned off aging, then turned it back on again. nobody ages. not even adults now.

Wierd.  Have you tried deleting groups.cache in your game folder?  If you've tried that and it hasn't helped, I'd suggest you move everything out and uninstall, reinstall your latest EP.  And when you've done that, be sure to make your objects.package file read only.

i obviously borked something big time so i am just going to un/reinstall. hopefully i won't have this trouble again. thanks for trying to help. i appreciate it.

You're welcome.  I know what it's like, been there, got the t-shirt etc!  Was there ever such a frustrating game?  I know Sims 1 had issues, but it was never like this....

But I'd definitely check all my downloads for a duplicate that might have snuck in, also check in SimPE - there's an option for checking your neighborhood.package, I think, also checks for duplicate guids and other things that could be a problem.  And if you haven't ever done so, check in the neighbourhood view in SimPE for such nasties as dangling SWAFs and the like. 

Just so you know, if you have one or two borked files you don't need to do a complete reinstall.  You can grab clean objects.package files from the compressed archive in the CD. I've never had a problem with the neighborhoodmanager.package, but I bet there's a clean copy of that on the CD too.

i ended up grabbing my backup sims2 folder and trying again. one freakin' folder at a time. i figured out two things.
1. sims only age once a day. you can't set the clock back to 5 and get good results, you have to advance it to the next day.
2. inteen and i mix like oil and water. i guess my ya won't have "accidents" and have to drop out, never to fulfill their lifelong dreams. i just don't see how it impacted aging, or lack thereof i should say. oh well.

Try Two Jeffs Autonomous Casual Romance instead - it's never caused any problems that I've ever heard of.

that i grabbed up in the first stages of testing. it's one of the few things i couldn't play without. it's just that all my sims are exactly the same because i can't bring myself to intentionally holding them back from college or the top of the career ladder or the perfect mate. i was just using it for the spice of not knowing who was going to knock who up. then i was going to stick them together, for better or worse. my young adult are sluts, i wanted some of them to pay for it.  ;D

Mine are sluts too!  And the knowledge sims are worse than Romance......much worse!  And some adult family sims are unbelievable!  I have one male (based on Slashmaster's Sylvia from MTS2) called Claire Walker.  He lives with a Romance sim called Hari, and they had a baby.  As soon as the baby was born, Claire makes a booty call to a female family sim (who is engaged to another family sim) and you can guess what happens.  So Hari gets angry (I don't like that the ACR makes all Romance Sims not jealous) and they fight, so then, after Claire beats Hari up (and he's the one with the body skill points) he's on the phone again, this time to a female romance sim.  Guess I shouldn't have made Claire bi-sexual.....So, anyway, Hari then tries it on with this other friend, who he has a 100/100 relationship with, and can't get any further than relaxing on the bed and chatting!

in uni i have it set to brothel and turn off the asperation restrictions. installed a photo booth, hot tub, and a few double beds. (i do that in my retirement homes too.) and all the sims are bi to boot. there is more woohoo on these lots than there is eating and sleeping combined. i always thought it was very odd that dormies came to the marriage bed virgins, or only having woohooed with playables long since dead from old age.

I've never used the brothel setting - doesn't seem to make much difference!

I have no dormies at all in this neighbourhood, and the only townies are CAS sims, and gradually they move into the game.  It just sort of fits the storyline - it's my "Urban Jungle" game, and the townies are obviously homeless and living in cardboard boxes, so even Cyclonesue's Container Park is a step up!  But although all my lots have the ACR thingy on them, none of my married Romance sims has ever tried making a booty call - they may prowl a bit around the neighbourhood, but they are basically more faithful than family sims.  A certain family sim who, as I said, is engaged, is likely to find herself suddenly unengaged if she's not careful!  And as for Claire and Hari, they are still furious with each other.....

anger and cheating. all the best marriages are built on that foundation.

Well, in that case - but so far Claire has shown no signs of wanting joined union with Hari!  And Hari is just completely obsessed with the baby!

I tend to just delete the NeighborhoodManager.package on occasion. Clean slate and all that. Usually, same time as I wipe out the groups.cache and any BodyShop burps.

and that regenerates upon startup too?

I imagine it's like so much of the stuff in the game folders - like the thumbnails.packages too.

Good to know, Strangel. What are the benefits of deleting it regularly? Does it tend to get corrupted like objects.package etc. does?

Objects.package shouldn't get corrupted if you make it read only as soon as you've installed or patched.  However, the groups.cache, neighbourhood manager, thumbnails.packages etc., are meant to change as your game grows, so there is always a chance of corruption.  The thumbnails packages will not always lose the thumbnails of objects that you have removed from your game, and can be much larger than necessary, too.

Basically, what ZZ said.

Neighborhoodmanager, thumbnails, groups.cache, etc should be wiped periodically. From what I've gathered they CAN become corrupted quite easily since they are not intended for "read only" and are essentially overwritten every time you delete a hair/makeup/clothing/etc file or make any alterations to the houses, lots or neighborhoods. The game regenerates them the next time you boot up the Sims and yeah it lags for a bit while it's making them but I find my houses often run faster after the old files have been burninated.

Having said this, I'm entirely unAwesome, so your best bet is to back up my statements with a quick search for "neighborhood manager", etc. First time I deleted them, I was afraid of impending kerplosions, so I moved them all out to desktop and booted up the game.

All thumbnail packages? I found about 10-12 different packages.

The ones that are in your game folders in the Thumbnails folder - there should be five.



I did that too, just in case.  The groups.cache and neighbourhood manager should regenerate when you open your game, but the thumbnails only regenerate the Maxis stuff straight away, other stuff is re-entered in the file as you use your build/buy menus and CAS etc., so you get some lag as each page in the menu opens.  But if you move stuff in and out of your downloads frequently it's definitely worth doing, each file can easily be twice the size it needs to be.

D'oh me! I forgot I searched on both my sims 2 folders, the vanilla and the modded. So there would be 10 then. So it's safe to remove all of those? I've been running this install for a while, so it's probably about time I did that then.

Once I started playing the Veronaville hood, and one of the preset families had the same problem you described. To be honest, I believe I had installed Inge's age duration hack.

That was the first time I played that family's lot, and I think not even the adults could age, even though the birthday message popped up everyday as well.

Anyway, I ended up evicting that family, moved them to another lot, and that problem disappeared. So, it's probably caused by a fawlty lot, rather than an installed hack.

Do not delete the ones in your install folder. Only delete the ones in Documents.

Yes, but if I were you I'd do one at a time, and I shouldn't think you need to bother about CANHO Objects unless you download stuff that belongs in that category.  I say one at a time as otherwise every time you go into Build/Buy etc., it takes so long to load stuff and generate the new thumbnails that you go frantic! 

If you use SimWardrobe's Sims2Cat, this would be a good time to make all your downloads objects folders writeable so you can generate thumbnails to replace all those pink question marks. 

If, like me, you get fed up when you use it of seeing all those diag. doors and windows with the question mark, you can generate thumbnails for them by using the edit button and, where the diag is shown with no Build Type or Sub Type, you need to check the correct boxes, and then save.  After those thumbnails have generated and show up in Sims2Cat, you can then return the Build Type to nothing, save it, and then you will only get the one thumbnail showing in the game menu.  Unfortunately, it doesn't always work for curtains.  In order to generate the diagonal thumbnail in Sims2Cat, you do actually have to use the window or door on a diagonal, and that seems to do the trick!

nope, not a lot. it happened on 8 lots and just on the adults, which is why i thought i was weird. didn't have any errors and the hdcu didn't give me anything useful which is why i came here. i should have started going through my downloads folder though because it was inteen. dug through the rtfm for it, turns out it was junk townies.

Is there such a thing as an UN-faulty lot in Veronaville?

@Strangel, thanks for the info! I should have said groups.cache rather than objects.package for more clarity, but I just couldn't think of the name right then. Probably the result of never getting enough sleep. I always run with my objects.package set to read only. I learned very early on that the game doesn't like when you delete objects.package, and had to find it on the CD to make my game run. I never made that mistake again (trying to run the game with no objects.package file).

@Witch, the thumbnails packages are something that I know a bit about. I have deleted these files with no problem, other than a bit of lag when reentering the game. If you'd like another alternative that will only impact the CAS thumbnails package I've seen something called bodyshop mechanic on MTS2 I belive. It brags of a refresh thumbnails option. And of course there is the debugmode bodyshop option if you're just looking to refresh a few of them because you've modified something since it was generated (control and right click). But as I understand it the second two methods will NOT delete the old thumbnails.package. Of course I could be wrong about that part, but the methods are valid.

@Aubrey, are you certain that you're using the correct version of inteen? I've been running it since around the seasons release with no problems. There are some non kitten killer friendly FFS hacks, but Jordi has made compadable versions which you can find in Jordi's Chop Shop on the inteen site. This may make me unpopular on MATY but I love the kitten killer, I think it adds a lot of interesting new situations to the game, and works wonderfully with ACR creating a much less predictable game. Using it, however, does require a bit of extra effort in the hack conflict department of course, but even as a hack novice I've been able to manage with no problems (yet!). I don't keep up on the kitten killer support forum because the old site's support forum was too full of idiots who didn't RTFM, so I am not up to date on the issues that people have been having recently. Is the aging thing happening in a lot of games or is it more like a bizarre fluke that only effects certain configurations? Have you done a search at inteen for more information on this problem?

ACR is enough hard work for me!  As it is, in a previous (now demised) Veronaville, Moth (nee Bottom) Summerdream came home from school and did her homework.  Puck had previously brought their friend Benedick Monty home from school, then gone off to work, leaving Benedick at a loose end.  Moth finished her homework, grew up and marched Benedick off to her mother's bedroom for woohoo!  I was somewhat stunned by this, most of my YA's take quite a bit of pushing even to get the LB's....

strangel- most definately am using the latest version. i think i downloaded it 10 times trying to make up my mind if i really wanted it. then deleting it because i didn't know what i was doing. then changing my mind. then the freakin' aging problem. trying again. it was junk townies. i found it in the middle of a list burried at the bottom of the rtfm.  the rtfm is so involved and complicated i just missed it until i knew exactly what i was looking for. the way it usually happens.

Life's too short for rtfm's like that!

Ah, thanks for the information. Now I see why I've never had the problems that you're describing, I never play with the Maxis hoods. It probably doesn't hurt that I use clean templates and all of JM's hacks that control townie/NPC/etc spawning. But yeah, it sounds like fixing the junk townie problem in your hood could be a potentially huge task. Not really worth the effort. You could always try Jenflower's woohooteens, as I understand it hers is a much less invasive mod, but it doesn't allow teen pregnancy.

If you use ACR, I have a feeling that woohooteens is a no no.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/cats/kitten_died.jpg)

I'm a cat-lover too, and I've NEVER, EVER used the kitten-killer - and my teens are pretty promiscuous when they get the chance.......

30 days is more than enough time to make a family, anyways. My current sim for the Ghetto Superstar challenge is pregnant with #11 at the moment. Sure, I had two sets of non-cheesecake twins (and my trips/quad hack is tweaked to give me odds lower than Maxis) and one psuedo-set due to my first run in with the multiple delivery bug...but discounting those three extras from twindom that'd still be eight kids without elixir. Why start earlier? There's too much teen pregnancy in this world, I don't want my sims having it as well.

I'll go along with that...and teens are pretty good with babies and toddlers, so why mess all that up by having them too tired to go to school, hogging the bathroom and spending the rest of their waking hours eating?

I use woohooteens and can confirm that it allows teen woohoo, but not teen pregnancy.  I don't see the point in teen pregnancy myself - waste of teen time.

I had no end of problems with InTeen, and ended up deleting it - not sure what it was incompatible with, but I thought I would rather live without InTeen than the awesome mods.  Essentially the biological clock would not allow abort, and would cause a jump when any sims tried to woohoo with the bioclock running. 

Not sure about woohooteens' compatibility with ACR as I don't play with ACR.  On the other hand, given the choice, if I wanted to run ACR and it was incompatible with woohooteens, my sims would just have to wait for YA stage for woohoo before I'd load InTeen again.  woohooteens does not, in itself, allow for adult wants for teens, so they do not roll wants for woohoo (or making out, for that matter).  Perhaps I should qualify that by saying, "at least not in my game".  I have romance teens who do not seem to want anything more than a "first kiss" (although they have a fear of going steady), and after that they want to go to college and gain a skill point.  You'd think they'd want to snog with a few other teens if their LTW is to Woohoo 20.

I did have a problem with a moved in townie not aging once she became playable.  Meadow Thayer stayed a teen for quite some time, but was the only playable with stuck aging (I never turn aging off).  I fixed it with Insim simply by adding a couple of days (temporal or aging adjuster), essentially "kick starting" the aging meter.  No problem after that.

ACR allows teens to woohoo.

I've never had a problem with Meadow not aging, she's one of the few Maxis sims I never mind having in my game.

From the ACR FAQ:


I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't know that it was compatible.  :)
ACR does allow for teen woohoo but only if the adjuster is on the lot, and as I understand it they can only use casual woohoo. I was playing with the kitten killer before I had ACR, so I am honestly a bit fuzzy on this part, but I believe that if you want to direct your teens to have a regular, non-casuaul woohoo you need to have inteen or woohooteens installed. ACR does not allow for casual woohoo in certain places (such as the car) so as I understand it your teens will be unable to woohoo in the car (which I think is a classic teenage sex location) without woohooteens/inteen.

I personally liked Meadow and Tosha - I have a clone of Tosha and a clone of Meadow's daughter from a previous hood in my current game.  Frankly, I liked Meadow a lot more once I got her out of the pink leotards and into something more stylish (if I have any idea what stylish is anyway).

I should emphasize that the stuck aging thing was likely not directly caused by Meadow herself, but likely more the result of the "Propose Move In" action, and some random glitchyness therein.  Anyhow, once I forced her from 15 days to Adult to 13 days to adult, she started aging normally.  Not sure what caused the bug to begin with.

I've always seemed to have problems with those "moveinall" type mods, so now I just use the move in option of Inge's transporterplus.  On one occasion, I moved Lilith in with her grandparents using moveinall, and they became richer to the tune of over a million simoleons!

i would never use it for my teens, no fail birth control flavor pak. i got it mainly to see what the big deal was about, but will keep it until i upgrade my hard drive then ask myself if it really was what i was looking for. i may keep it for the same reason i use harder grades, harder jobs, deadlier disease among others. to make things harder for me. i use the acr, couldn't play without it. that and the downloadable crystal ball are how i pick life partners. wow, i don't sound defensive at all do i?
unfortunately i am a perfectionist. i can't control my own so i control theirs so much so that it becomes boring and predictable. take it out of my hands and it relieves my anal ocd tendencies and i'm having fun.

anyway, i don't believe for a second that it kills kittens. proof? 13 fuzzy black walking allergens roam my halls, popping out from behind doors to hang from a pant/bare leg. chasing the dogs. climbing the wall of the fireplace. bringing in birds and mice to scare/captivate the children.

eta- invisigoth- it was the original maxis families that had junk townie syndrome. i made all my own townies this time around.

I don't particularly feel a need for teen pregnancy either (no-fail birth control) but now that inteen basically makes every aspect of teen life more realistic, I've decided to give it a try. It's.. alright, though it's confusing to get used to the changes.

I am also a perfectionist, and I was finding that most of my sims were ending up in the same "happy families" rut.  Now I use Hook's Configurable Dice Rolling Program (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8253.0.html) to introduce an element of randomness in my game.  You can put whatever options you want in there, and the thread lists quite a few different ideas that people use. 

A couple of examples:  I use it when I make townies in CAS, randomising which face they get, hair colour, if they have makeup/facial hair/glasses, their personality, aspiration, turn-ons & -offs. etc.  I also have the question "Is today a good sim-day to die", which I roll every day for each of my sims that are teen and older (odds dependent on the sim's age group), to introduce random death in my game since I'm tired of all my sims dying of old age.

I don't think I've ever had a sim die of old age - I either get bored with a hood before that happens, or my computer fries them all by the thousand!

I tend to get bored or annoyed with toddlers and kids running about bogarting things around the house.  I always buy the dollhouse and EZbakeoven (or whatever it's called) and let them auto-play on that.  However, they do a lot of skilling at the bookshelf, in the pool, etc. so I don't end up with a lot of house fires, electrocutions, etc.  I also play with noeatcrap installed (so no food poisoning)  Consequently, it gets to the point in my hoods where the only way they die is by old age, unless I kill them myself in a fit of 'divine' "you're too ugly to live" wrath.

Next time one of my sims gets the flu, I'll send it out to work out or something until it turns fatal.

I have one game with an unresurrectable Lilith (Angela kicked the urn!) and another with a similarly handicapped Angela - Lilith kicked the tombstone!  But they are the only sims who regularly meet the GR in my game, mostly Angela, but on the occasion when Lilith died, she died in her sleep and by the time I realised it was too late.........

I didn't think that was possible -- I though sims had to be awake to die.

In an asylum challenge I played once, one of the inmates had a low hunger bar and also failure in energy.  She collapsed in the dining room.  The same thing happened to another inmate at the same time in a bedroom where my playable was sleeping.  I was watching the bedroom, not the dining room.  Grim showed up in the bedroom for the one, and she did wake up so she could properly die of starvation, but the playable did a successful plead for loved one interaction and she lived.  However, upon checking the dining room, there was only an urn left, so I don't know what happened there.  I suspect the sim woke up when Grim arrived and then was ushered out due to starvation.  I suspect that sims probably wake up just long enough to meet Grim and die, but do not actually die while asleep.  Bit of an academic point though.

Well, my game was fast forwarding at the time (Lilith was living alone in a small house  - can't remember why, or how, as she was still a teen) and it didn't stop fast-forwarding until after she's popped her clogs - but she had every single need in the red.........

that is exactly why i started keeping a die by my moniter. upon birth i write their destinies in my little sims book. i roll to see if they can do major things, like get married or bear offspring. and minor stupid things that i wouldn't normally have them do, like wear face paint. i thought about rolling for college but then changed my mind. i wanted them all to sleep around a lot get a good education.

I just leave everything to chance - I have several adult Family sims who haven't even met a sim they want to woohoo with, let alone get married to - but they did come into the game with a ready-made family, so maybe that's why, even though they occasionally roll the baby want, they aren't that bothered, they're more interested in floristry!