More Awesome Than You!

I might have been the only one that was lead to believe this.

In the producers video, they made it look like you could spend 2 days at Mountain place, a few days at Far East and then head off to Tiki island.

However I cannot find a option to do this. I booked my sims on a Vacation and chose "Decide when I get there". If you check out of the hotel you can get the option "Try different lodgings" but it only brings up hotels for the area (so if you started in Far East then you have to stay there).

According to sheeple at the BBS you cannot split destinations.  Did anyone else think that you could after watching that video? Or maybe I was just expecting too much :(

You know MaxisEA is full of liars. This doesn't  come as a surprise to me. I thought the same thing actually. There are several things about the game I'm disappointed in.  But it's par for the course when dealing with EAxis.

No, I saw that too. Lame. They said you could do it all "round the world" stylee. How else can students have a proper gap year?

I predict that if you posted this on the main BBS people would be all, "You should be grateful for what you have, bleeeeat!!"

I was trying to do this just now and was disappointed to find it was not possible.  I was also a bit annoyed at the lots, having a lack of things to do.  Although I think it will be better when I have created my own vacation hood, I've never been a fan of EAxis made hoods/lots.

I am quite bemused by the jewellery for sale too.  Especially as I've figured out you can just put it on for free when changing appearance!

I thought there were only a few special ones you could just buy at the vacation spots, everything else was available in CAS...and hence the mirror.

As for the location thing, color me unsurprised.

I might be wrong because I haven't checked this out, but in the Far East i could buy little japanese fan earrings, I assumed that was the jewellry for that location.

I haven't bought/arr'ed BV yet but yeah.. I definitely got the impression, not only from the "walkthrough" with the Bland Twins but previous fansite video files, Sims chat, etc that you WERE able to skip to a new destination in another "area" for "round the world" style traveling.

I also assumed you'd be able to go multiple places, but once I installed and saw that there were three neighborhoods instead of one I dropped that idea. I never watched any of the previews, so it wasn't a particularly entrenched idea in my case...

I wasn't expecting very much out of this, as Vacation was never really one of my favorites and I'm not a big fan of dragging my sims around places. Jewelry's nice, the new attraction likes/dislikes are nice. Everything else, we'll see.

What I am disappointed over, though, is that (at least by the guide book) Bigfoot can't be interacted with romantically. I wanted a bigfoot/zombie/alien love triangle, dammit!

Oh, surely there'll be a hack to let you smooch with Bigfoot, unless the animations look too ridiculous. ;)

I'm really looking forward to putting this in my game ones all the kinks are worked out and the annoyances stomped, actually. I'm lukewarm on the vacation concept itself, but it's got a bunch of features that I just plain WANTED, and some of them are core-level changes, plus it's full of interactable objects that I think sound really neat and can't wait to play with. Most of the things that seem likely to irritate me even when working as expected are specific to the vacation minigame, and some of those should be fixable.

Of course, it's the Hobbies EP I'm really looking forward to -- first one that just the concept has really made me want to see it, even though I know from experience that every EP will have something that I want. Stupid having to wait 6 months. :P

I can't remember if it was the walk through or something else, but I seem to remember it being mentioned that the sims had to return home before heading to the next 'exotic locale'. It'd be nice if they could destination hop, but meh... It's not a deal breaker for me.

Has anyone tried walking between lots yet? I've heard of a problem, but I don't know if the person is running hack-free.

Why did you think ANYTHING from watching the video? The video was OBVIOUSLY fake. What possible worth could fake video about a previously nonexistent item possibly have? Silly Stupidlilley.

Didn't I warn you about that video?
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/fake.jpg)

I have only played (very short) vacation lot.  The one, sorry can't remember the name, but it was the tropical locale.  While digging for shells on the beach, I dug up shell earrings.  Well, and 2 crabs.  Some of the jewelry you can only purchase on the vacation lots.

I'm far from hack-free (although I have updated my director's cut hacks). I'm having the walking issue. The community lot loads, but your sims are all stuck on "Arrive" and don't appear. If you exit to the 'hood, then enter the hotel lot again, you get the same. Only solution was enabling "boolProp dormspecifictoolsdisabled false", buying the lot debugger, then choosing "Retrieve missing sim". Thank goodness that still works, or I would have lost my testing family the first day!

Other annoyances:
1. Yay, another stupid family in the sim bin of every stinking 'hood.
2. The majority of vacation townies must come from the 'hood templates, not be generated from face templates/Live.package. My tour guide is using a custom template from the set I currently have loaded in, but that's it. Everyone else has stupid Maxis faces and stupid Maxis names. I have again been visited by the Curse of Goopy. I believe I'll have to try to find a new death method, and he shall be my lab rat.
3. The Maxis accessories (with the exception of a couple of bracelets, a pair of earrings, and one necklace) are ugly flat crap. The first person to make default replacements gets a kiss. Or I could try it...retexturing is the only thing I don't suck at. Oh, and the discoverable glass necklace? The string sinks into the sim's collarbone.
4. Hotel food is extremely unsatisfying. This is even more annoying due to the fact that you can Try for a Baby on vacation, meaning you have a pregnant sim eating foods about as filling as a half bag of chips. Sim-grilled hotdogs seem fine. Haven't tried the special food bars yet...that's where I ran into the walking issue.
5. The reverse of the queue-dropping issue. I had a sim autonomously go and take a shower, but I decided I wanted them to eat first. I queued eating. Normally then the sim-initiated action would drop. It didn't. 15 minutes later he was still in the shower and near starving (see: crappy unsatisfying hotel food).
6. Maxis must have employed Buntah. The expensive bungalows in Tikitiki? Ick. Nasty. Not even hotel chain nasty.
7. Ok, can every last local please not harrass my sims to do the hang loose sign? Please? This is yet another reason why Goopy must die.
In other news, I am having none of this community lot timing issue everyone else is. Time passes normally. I don't use the community time hack, either.

Can't say I was really expecting such anyways so I'm not disappointed...however I also did not watch all the videos/read all the interviews that came out prior to this EP.

What are they btw? Spoiler me.

Well, we've heard from someone else who isn't having the problem. So it may be a hack conflict. My game is on its way home now, so I'll see if I can trace it once I get it installed.

Yeah, I'll do a binary search tomorrow as well. I just want to play through this vacation first.

My default replacments have been working ok

I can also confirm that my sims have walked to multiple destinations without problem. I am testing without hacks, so my main frustration is when I click sims to macro something and remember that I can't.

Ahhh, that's another issue I'm having. With the exception of Tattoos, none of the new turn ons/offs actually tell you what they are. Point at the red hair icon, you see a 'Red hair' text bubble pop up. Point to 'tattoos,' you see the text bubble. Point at any of the other ones and . . . nothing.

That is so annoying not to have your favorite hacks,  I haven't encountered any problems so far(besides not having my hacks and the fact that you tend to get double charged)  Cassandra and Don got married and went on a honeymoon in the tropics.  They walked between lots flawlessly.  It worked well cause I was stupid and let Cassie get prego on the honeymoon.  They would go on an outing and when Cassie got too tired they would walk back and Don would go off lot  to a place by himself( he learned how to fire dance).  I really love this EP so far--it will be nicer when the hacks are updated.

Really? Huh. Mine are popping up titles. There's one for each skill...like "charismatic" "creative" "good cook". There's one for "unemployed" and some career-advanced one for level 6+. One for jewelry. One for plantsims, zombies, servos, werewolves. Those are all I can remember at the moment.

Default replacements in general (skins, eyes, eyebrows) are working. Default replacement CAS templates are working on NPC's, but not vacation townies because they seem to be from the vacation 'hood templates (kind of makes sense, how else would you have families with the same last name?).

I'm so annoyed.  This thing has been loading for like 40 minutes.   And it's been creating "exotic destinations" for like another 10.  Before I installed this EP it still took a shit ton of time to load b/c my enormous amount of CC...like 15 minutes...but me thinks 40 minutes is just ridiculous.  Guess it is time to prune the CC again and if that doesn't help then my computer has decided BV is the devil.

I'm far from hack-free (although I have updated my director's cut hacks). I'm having the walking issue. The community lot loads, but your sims are all stuck on "Arrive" and don't appear. If you exit to the 'hood, then enter the hotel lot again, you get the same. Only solution was enabling "boolProp dormspecifictoolsdisabled false", buying the lot debugger, then choosing "Retrieve missing sim". Thank goodness that still works, or I would have lost my testing family the first day![/quote]
Does this issue occur even with the removal of "antiwatchout"? That hack was heavily influenced by a lot of BV-related code and hasn't been field tested yet.

I tested with only JM's Bon Voyage Director's Cut (and CC that shouldn't throw errors like replacement face templates, makeup, hair, floor tiles etc.) in debug mode and I have had no errors since JM's update. I am having some things drop from the queue, however. Walking to other lots works fine, I am seeing the tooltips for all additional turn ons/offs. Load times are not unreasonable even though my computer is just barely over minimum specs.

*sigh*

I had my family on vacation, and decided I was tired of hotel life, and saved and exited to build a vacation house. When I was done, I couldn't get back into the hotel lot to play them because the game was stuck in build mode. I tried exiting to the main hood and coming back, but no go. I tried entering through their main house, but no.  I tried going to another hood and coming back, but they are apparently lost. It was just the throwaway Eaxis Traveler family, but still.

Hm, I had a sim family saved at a hotel. When I went to play their house in the main neighbourhood it said "the x family are staying at blah blah hotel, do you want to play that lot" and worked fine.  Which is of course no help to you  :'(

*head desk* Can't blame Eaxis for that one.  Pure User Error.  :-[ I think maybe I shouldn't be allowed to have aliases in my userstartup, except for the 2 that I use all the time. Apparently, accidentally turning a hotel into a dorm while your Sims are vacationing there is a VBT- who'd have guessed?  ::) Inge's teleporter Bush to the rescue.

And I have the gall to talk about stupid sheeple. Baaaaaaaa!

This is really minor but I've noticed CAS thumbnails are generating differently. The ones made with BV are brighter and choppier than earlier ones. I found a preview screenshot that showed the same thing so it can't be any of my custom content (I took it all out and forced it to regenerate thumbnails anyway--same result). It doesn't look so bad in Body Shop because that was always pretty dark but in-game they're kind of ugly. Why would this have been changed?

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g14/ClaraP_photos/CASthumbnails.jpg (http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g14/ClaraP_photos/CASthumbnails.jpg)

A lot of people complained about how dark Body Shop is.  I figure the brightening is Eaxis's half-assed way of "fixing" that issue.

I've downloaded some of hacks in the Director's Cut, though I can't say if "antiwatchout" is among their numbers, and I have had no issues walking between lots.

I did have a glitch with booking a honeymoon.  Brandi and Jeremy were engaged before I installed Bon Voyage and had the wants to be married locked.  Brandi called to arrange a honeymoon, and there was a pop-up saying they would need someone to watch the house, which is strange because they have one cat and no kids.  I agreed to the nanny and the next pop-up said that the wedding would trigger the vacation pick-up.

I decided to have them have a date to get them into platinum and then they got married at the original wedding arch.  It generated the special events movie, and they have the memories of having gotten married, but it didn't fulfill their wants to get married.  Then the nanny arrived and said "This lot has no children, I'm getting out of here" or something equally obnoxious and the vacation taxi never came.

I ended up cancelling the honeymoon and just booking a regular vacation at Three Lakes (and this time the nanny came and stayed).  So far, they're enjoying themselves and I'm having a good time playing.  My main issues so far:

1.  The hotel lots, while mostly quite nice, are also huuuuuge and tedious to navigate.  Brandi and Jem stayed at the cabins and it was almost comical how random the routing was.  Elsewhere, the surrounding mountains cause the camera to shoot up when you move it around the lot. Lag wasn't bad, even with the neighborhood decorations and neighbors visible, until it started to snow.  The beds/plumbing at the cabin and the showers at the campground are cheap, so sleeping and bathing takes an annoyingly long time to fill needs.  There are also no mirrors to be found anywhere. 
2.  Learning a gesture is frustrating, because you have to have the local approach you with it, and they don't like to wait until you finish another action (even a cancelled action).  It is hilarious to watch them try it when they still suck at it.
3.  They dug about 30 holes and found two worthwhile things- both maps to the secret locations for the other two vacation destinations.
4.  Skill points gained from positive chance cards don't get applied.  This can be fixed by an updated skilling on community lots hack, but it's still a bunch of bullshit.
5.  The locals are generated like crazy.  I saw four or five that were on about every lot along with a few new faces, but then I had this happen:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v150/Spikus/snapshot_93e9d3e5_33eb420c.jpg)
Four new sims, same outfit type, same last name.  This worries me. 
6.  The Unsavory Charlatan isn't playable.  I knew this before, but now that I've seen him in his top hat and monocle, twirling his evil little mustache and cackling to himself, I want to marry him into a legacy at some point. 

And that's why the first time you load it you move your downloads folder elsewhere. :)

I did do that the first two times I loaded it. I played around in CAS and visited my Seasons test lot before restarting the game with CC (default replacement skins and eyes and a few BV DC hacks) in the game and then enabled.  I think my honeymoon glitch was a result of the want being locked before BV was installed and, with the inevitable reset, it went a bit wonky.  I don't know what the deal is with the local spawning, though. 

Oops -- sorry, I was actually replying to an earlier message, and the quote got borked. :) I fixed it.

No problem.  I've been on other boards this morning and almost all of the people complaining about problems still have their old hacks in and they seem really resistant to removing them, choosing to kvetch about Eaxis instead, which confuses what is and is not actually a bug. 

I know I have that one. I rarely play with cars on lots, but the drama involved with parking and getting out annoys me to no end. That'll be my first one to remove, and since no lot is currently playing with a car, no skin off my back.
You have to have a nanny if there are any children/babies/toddlers/pets being left behind. Yup, Rover can't fend for himself for a couple days. Wish you could just plop an automatic feeder down like I do when I have to leave for the weekend. (Plopping down a full food bowl with enough food for the weekend is bad idea when you have an itty bitty piggy. Mikko, the 8lb crazy, will sit there and eat the entire bowl in an hour. Then he and Soren starve for the rest of the time. Mikko can trip the automatic feeder and get more food, but he doesn't do it enough to run out.) Of course it didn't work. It's Eaxis.

Uneven terrain is a major annoyance in picture-taking, and few of the island lots were flat. My camera hack didn't seem to want to work, either. Again. Will beat into submission. My first order of business after testing the three 'hoods is making my own lots, and a realistic hotel one will be first on the docket.
Mine dug all of five holes. One proved that you should always Call Before You Dig^tm. Two yielded rocks. One the map for the pervy witch doctor. The last gave a rooster statue.
I may not have been credited for a $350 chance card either. I didn't notice an addition, but then I wasn't paying complete attention.
Far as I can figure, those are families who would also take hotel rooms. I had one similar in the bungalows. Several more families showed up on community lots.
There's always sim surgery.

I wants me an unemployed, tattooed, zombie man. yeaaaaaaaaaah baby. XD

I'm loving how sims can overheat and explode from jumping on a bed, yet their body temperature won't rise a bit when they are in the sauna  ::)

Then again, it's probably an American (or Swedish) sauna, which rarely heats above 37 C anyways  :P

Regarding the missing skill points/money due to vacation chance cards: I notice that they don't get applied until after the tour is over. Are you all paying attention to the requisite areas when the 'returning from tour' option appears on the screen? I've never had this problem.

Interesting...

Even if you're staying in a vacation home, you can visit and check in to hotels, you just can't save/exit from them. So you can leave the pregnant Sim at the vacation house, and take everyone else to a hotel for the remainder of the trip, without having to deal with keeping her out of the red. I just left my pregnant Sim asleep on the couch, while the dad and daughter checked into the new hotel I just built to test it out.  :D

well the most irritating thing for me is that, now my hood is full of townies that wear stupid cloth that none of self respecting sims will wear :P
eaven than that thare are some bugs, like the pages of the book, when they turn the page, it will come back "her self" (lol)

i've a totally custom hood but now i'm filled, again, of townies, and pets.. (mea culpa, i've didn't remove the files form the BV directory)
btw i didn't want a town filled of sims wearings trees and leaves, or kimono (what's if they made italian sims ?.. with a pizza on the head ?) :-\


So i realy wish in some Awesome hack that fix all Maxis EA stupid things...
(wear stupid cloth just on BV hoods, for example)  ;D

I found that the body skill point reward didn't come through, and a few of my friends had the same issue, but other points came through. Body point was a reward for parasailing.

..I picked up my preorder today. I love how they're pointing out bugs in the friggan manual now: "note: due to the extensive insulation of a sauna, relocating one can have hidden costs. The wall of a sauna will need refinishing (new paint or paper) once it has been moved." rofl.

An amusing anecdote: after picking it up, we went to lunch at the chinese place in the mall, and after eating and skimming the manual, I opened my fortune cookie: "you will go on a vacation soon". Again, rofl.

What I thought was funny is that sims sitting alone in a sauna gain social points  talking to themselves.

Amazon probably won't ship mine until next week, when I will be back in grad school mode and too busy to mess about with it. Meh.

My Dumb Question: Regarding Turn-Ons, do pre-existing Sims get to add or change theirs in any way now that there are more to choose from? If so, how? I'll be annoyed either way, as it will mean a lot of tweaking! LOL

My Second Dumb Question: I noticed that jfade is already being awesome and offering suggestions for dealing with accessories stuck under Glasses prior to BV. Are any players having problems with mis-catted non-Glasses items being slotted with Glasses? Any blue vamp teeth? And flashing blue accessories? How's layering working?

My Third Dumb Question: I'm seeing that a lot of people are alreayd having problems with Walk To Lot. Is there a restriction on what lots you can walk to? Is it only within-same-hood lots (which would make sense)? Is there a certain distance limit? Do they have to be able to see the lot they are walking to (my assumption is yes, they do)? I'm trying to figure out if it is a click option, requiring the Sims to be able to see the lot in question first (and for the player to adjust how far the Sim can see in the video options menu?), or is it a different kind of menu option, say, when they reach the edge of their own lot (and thus spawn a 'where are you going?' pie menu)?

My Fourth Dumb Question: Will new added want slots compete in any way with hacks that allow non-Uni Sims to get more want slots? Also, how long do they last? Are more want locks and fear slots also possible?

My Fifth not-so-Dumb Question: In terms of stability, I understand that Seasons was pretty decent. How is BV holding up? I'm seeing lots of complaints about lagging, but am not sure who has what other EPs / RAM / etc.

Also, while we're chatting about BV:

What (in your opinion) did EAxis get right?

What (in your opinion) did EAxis fuck up royally?

(In your opinion) is this as useless an EP as Sims 1's VAC EP (which I loathed)?

Its a cute expansion but i still think Seasons has been the best so far.
Your preexisting sims can change their wants via one of the reward thingys anyways.  You have to change their aspiration as well, but you can just change it back.

I have a question also.

Ive seen people talking about the tattoos, the only tats ive found was on one of the fire dancers.  Is there a tattoo skin now? Or is it a accessory?

The easiest way to change turn-ons is still going to be the potion (unless someone's made a mod that just lets you change the things without bothering with the potion), but they're not handing out a new batch as far as I know. That's what buyable versions are for.

Existing Sim's wants didn't change.  I guess you have to use that potion.  Didn't Nightlife dump one of those in every sim's inventory?  I wonder if re-installing that would do it again.


Works just like the taxi interface. You click on yourself, click "walk to lot." Brings up a dialog asking you who is going.  Click that, your sim walks to the edge of the lot and you load the community lot. You can go to any community lot in the hood, downtown, ofb suburb, etc.  Its exactly like the taxi except you don't wait for the taxi. In other words, the taxi is now obsolete as far as I can tell.


Mine is working fine, which is surprising because my computer is getting old. Every EP, P4 2.2ghz, 1 gb ram. Haven't experienced this lagging issue.

It does what it is supposed to do, you can go on vacation.

Time issue (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9519.0.html)  Sometimes I wonder if they even test  their games.

Depends how you play. If you didn't really use community lots previously, I imagine you wouldn't use vacations.

You can also use the Renu-u-Orb to change a sim's turn ons/offs without having to change their aspiration -- at least, it's worked that way for me.

Yeah, that works. I'm just thinking about the least time-consuming way to change a whole bunch of Sims attractions.  I know Nightlife stuck that potion into every Sim's inventory when you installed it. I'm wondering if re-installing Nightlife would do it again without breaking the game.

I had the honeymoon problem too. Sims were engaged in Uni, before BV was installed. Playable sim moved home with her parents. Invited fiance over and had him move into the house. She then booked the vacation. Immediately afterwards, she invited the wedding guests and had the wedding party. The wedding went fine and was even a roof raiser. When it was over, though, the bride and groom stood there for a moment while all the guests left. Suddenly, I had another party timer up in the corner of the screen. It had started the timing for the party over again. They had the wedding memories, though. I don't know about wants being fulfilled or not, since neither had the want locked.

I ended up canceling the honeymoon and booking a normal vacation. That worked fine.

Oh, and I also had the problem where the speed of the game jumps to x3 when entering a community lot.


In answer to this question... Ultimately I think it's going to depend on a person's playstyle. People who never use community lots are probably going to find this one to be a waste of money. While Nightlife added a whole bunch to the game in addition to the downtown area, BonVoyage's extras are more peripheral. The big fun is actually going on a vacation and exploring the various community lots. If that's not your thing, than it probably is a waste of time.

I do think I like Bon Voyage better than I liked Vacation. I poked at Vacation a bit when I had sims1 installed and I really wasn't impressed with it. Bon Voyage seems more robust and better thought out. I like the different flavors of vacation destinations. Some of the new interactions are nice, as well as some of the social objects. I thought the MahJong table was cute.

I think, in a way, Bon Voyage will be a bit like OFB. To get the most out of it, you actually have to use its features. There's a lot too it, but if someone doesn't like disrupting their sims routine, they'll never really get much out of it. For me, OFB was useless until I finally decided to try fulfilling that annoying 5 Businesses want. Now I know how much is really in it. Bon Voyage will probably be the same for most people. 

Can the sims gain skills from any of the new objects? Are there any new ways of earning money?

Oh no, my simmies are on their second day at the beach and I assumed they could move on to one of the other areas in a day or two. Stuck at the beach for seven days - sucky.

Well, you don't have to stay the whole 7 days. You can leave early if you want.

Can you set the climates at the destinations the same way you do the neighborhoods/subhoods?  I had heard the Prima guide said you couldn't, but that thing is wrong a lot.

Yes, you can adjust the Seasons like in a normal 'hood. I did it, even.

True.

I enjoyed Sims 1 Vacation possibly the most of the EPs so I'm enjoying exploring BV. I wish they'd made a fairground though. And ski slopes.

actually the guide says you can.

Well, that's good, I didn't want my snow on my beach.  Even though it might be kinda funny.

Making it snow at the beach sounds like the kind of evil plot that Blue Lazor would do. Definitely a must-have.

Climates for vacation hoods work the same as for other hoods. As in, you can choose which seasons and their order.  Weather (lol) or not they are actually applied, I dunno. Haven't played enough.

Note that you have to remember to go into the vacation hood and set the seasons. Easy to forget since there are no playable sims there and the only other reason to go there is to build stuff.

Edit: Something I just noticed, by default Three Lakes has seasons set to fall-fall-winter-winter. Surprising, I would have thought all the defaults would be winter-spring-summer-fall.  Something I wouldn't have checked normally and could cause potential confusion.

I should really make my antisocial mad scientist Sim again and send him off to the beach with the weather machine.  And I had "my" in that post one too many times.  My snow!  My beach!  I never remember to set climates downtown, then I wonder why my dates are ridiculously easy instead of criminally easy.

No, the dumb Maxoids said that the vacation hoods would default to something suitable for their climate. The beach one is summer-summer-summer-summer.  Or at least it was before I tweaked it.  ;)

Yeah I was just pointing it out. I like spring/summer/fall/winter defaults so I haven't clicked on that seasons button since I installed it.  I kinda forgot it was there :)  I just wanted to point it out if you are in the same boat. I can just see the "halp its always winter!" threads in a couple of weeks.

Whatever you do, don't take a friend on vacation with you and stay at a hotel with a restaurant. All they do is hang around there and eat even though they are not hungry.   ::) 

I discovered one interesting thing that has nothing to do with taking a trip. In my newly-generated Pleasantview, I visited the Dreamer house and all the bills that have been missing for several expansions are back!  :D

Not to sound like a dirty perv, but I find the new WooHoo options disappointing. At least with the pre-BV ones, the action was somewhat believable. As funny as it looks, the hammock WooHoo is just stupid (the joining sim just jumps on and jumps off), but the sauna one is the worst. The room fills up with steam and when it clears, the sims are in exactly the same position they were before the steam! It would have been better if they'd had them cuddle up either before or after, rather than just sitting there.

Does anyone know yet how the seasons work in BV? I mean, if they are set to fall, fall, winter, winter in Three Lakes, how do you ever make it into winter? In the main hood, the seasons change by lot in the set order, but sims normally only stay for 7 days on holiday, so winter wouldn't be reached. Or do the seasons carry on after your sims left, for the next ones?

My biggest annoyance so far was when I tried to make some sims woohoo in their hotel room before they went to sleep. As soon as they were relaxing, one of them would turn on the TV. But with the TV on, they can't go to sleep afterwards. So I made them turn it off, for which they got out of bed (they can turn it on while relaxing just fine). By the time I had them relax again, the other sim would have turned on the TV... meh. I guess that always happened, but I don't normally put TVs in the bedroom.

And are sims supposed to be able to use other sims' hotel rooms? After my sims checked in, the other doors had red signs on them and were occupied by other guests. One room was blanked out like in uni and you couldn't enter it, but my sims could use the other rooms fine. I found one sleeping in another guest's hotel bed...

When my sims visited Three Lakes the main hood was at the end of its second season (Fall).  When they arrived at Three Lakes, it was also at the end of its second season (Fall) and it transitioned to Winter while they were there (which annoyed me, because I usually don't play winter due to snow lag/general uselessness).  So I'm thinking that the season at the vacation lot lines up with whatever point in the cycle they were on when they left the main hood.  It's possible that I am completely wrong.  I haven't paid close attention during their second trip.

Brandi and Jem (my Bon Voyage test couple) returned home from Three Lakes without incident and then rolled up wants to go to Takemizu Village.  I'd say that the objects there are less entertaining (though prettier) than those at Three Lakes and there is a definite need for a "no autonomous tai chi" hack.  However, their visit to the secret lot there was one of my favourite game playing experiences ever.  It's so peaceful, no music, no townies/tourist swarming.  The way that they depict The Legend is probably the neatest effect I've seen in this game. Tt was quite unexpected.

Only answering the ones I know:
Can't speak for layering. I haven't touched the tattoos and such. No blue flashy. No vamps to reference, so not sure. All my custom accessories are with glasses, which makes sense in a round-a-bout manner since they wouldn't have known to put them in bin #08. This doesn't bother me and isn't worth the effort of changing, IMHO. Non-hack CC issues: Obviously, since CEP isn't updated you can't edit the new objects beyond Eaxis intended bounds. Makes sense. But they borked public toilet recolors again.

My walking issues were caused by TJ's Visitor Controller. Removing it fixed it. Walking has no distance restrictions and is slightly faster. I also was able to have a 3rd-trimester pregnant woman walk to a community lot from downtown. Whether this was intended or a bug, I like it.

They shouldn't conflict. I can tell you that a Uni graduate will get the additional temporary slots, as will an updated pre-Uni (via lot debugger). The wants last for approximately 24 hours. There are no additional lock benefits. After going on vacation, you get points to spend on each sim (I got 2 the first time) on benefits. there are eight benefits, I believe. Unfortunately I didn't write them down. One is the want slots, one is for maxed work performance, one is for skill building faster, one is for romantic ability, one is to make your sim less able to be furious, one decreases the fun and comfort degradation (great for pregnant sims).

I really suspect the game is dialing home. Really. I personally don't get much lag at all. But I also told my firewall to block it. I also have 2 gigs RAM, a middling video card that has 512 MB capability (Radeon x600), and a 3.0 Ghz processor.

I really like the benefits. I like the cute moments...I had a pop-up of a son saying that the vacation was worth every penny while he was dancing on his father's toes by a bonfire on the beach at night right after taking a family picture. Walking to lots...great, realistic, especially with downtown-dwellers. I'm currently testing houseguests, but I think it's a cute concept to have kids who have moved out of the house come stay for a bit, or friends from a different subhood.

What didn't they?  ;D Piano's broken again. Haven't tried the fish tank, but I suspect the maid will be obsessed with it as always before. I've had some oddness with the concierge not returning to his desk after bringing over room service. Room service seems to be less filling (like it was prepared by someone with no cooking skill points) but the destination food and sim-grilled food is still the same. There's no special interactions for the hot springs. As far as I can tell, there are no added secrets to impressing the headmaster. I had a sim give him a massage: no dice. Not being able to bring toddlers or pets with you = fail. Treasure maps are diggable at home. Also, you can redig in the same hole unlimited times (or until you burst a pipe) and get loot. Where are my additional careers?

No, it is better than that. No scary pedophiles. Nude levitating sleeping witch doctor (so far only seems to be a little nudist in my game) is funny, not disturbing. The benefits are great and give you an actual reason to go. You aren't stuck on one lot as with Sims1 Vacation.  Did I mention no scary pedophiles?

Tattoos as a turn on? Has Maxis finally implemented Tattoos properly then?

Well I think homebuilders will greatly appreciate the beach lots too, because they make seaside homes so much more realistic.

No doubt.  Do we finally get thatched roofs?  I always wanted to build a thatched roof cottage for my country-or-outback style sims.  Tired of having slate or tile as the only available options.

Yes, there are thatched roofs.

Not only are there thatched roofs, but metal roofs as well. Also some nice new windows, doors, and (finally) a fireplace with a mantle.  I'm not particularly fond of the fireplace stonework but that can be recolored.

How did you get your firewall to block it?  The lag isn't terrible, but it isn't normal either.  I would just cut off the modem, except that the SO is usually playing WoW while I'm on Sims, and if this computer isn't connected, ain't no computer connected.  And I would like to see if it's the game calling out to the mothership that is causing some of the lag.

I disabled the launcher and I haven't had the game make any attempts to access the internet. However, if you want to use a firewall to prevent the game from accessing the net it is quite simple. I use  Zone Alarm (http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list_za.jsp;jsessionid=GhQWSwQJOmCsjlb4XjKg6z2FkLGE12dqj6gdt1P5leVMC0Bebt75!-82891113!-1062696904!7551!7552!NONE?dc=12bms&ctry=US&lang=en). Whenever a program tries to get online I get a little pop up that details which program is trying to use the internet and I can select "accept" or "deny". There is also a box to tick so that it will remember the selection and not ask you again (so I don't get a pop up every time my browser tries to use the internet). Zone Alarm has a very simple, user friendly interface. If you've managed to figure out how to get online you shouldn't have any problem figuring out how to use Zone Alarm, IMO.

firewall settings can be found center (for XP or Vista) by going to your control panel > security center > firewall settings.

EDIT: try adding the exception then uncheck it to block

Windows Firewall won't work. There's no exception for it on my computer, and it's still connecting. And there's no way with their firewall to specifically block a program- only unblock it.  ::)

How do I access all the jewelery stuff? I've tried makeover and Change app, but the jewelery button is greyed out in both.

Windows Firewall is icky. I have an expired copy of McAffee* Firewall and it does the same as ZoneAlarm. The first time I told it "just this once". The second I told it "no". No clunky crappy ads from the launcher. Which is good...but I still need a functioning no-cd fix to circumvent EALink because I get sick of it loading. The one I found errors out and says that I need DirectX. I have it, dumbass.

Has anyone who hasn't blocked it checked to see if it's pinging?


*long story...it's not illegal, McAffee says my rights to it for free expire after six months of use...even though I'd been using it for over a year before I got the "subscription expired" message. McAffee will only say that it's expired and yes they show me with Comcast but no it's not a lifetime (or as long as I have Comcast) license. Comcast says that yes, it is a life-of-cable internet service license and to call McAffee to fix. But they disagree, so I'm stuck in a loop. As it's only the AntiVirus component that doesn't work and that didn't catch or fix any issues I've ever had, I really couldn't care any more. Firewall still works.

Does the Sim actually own any jewelry? You have to buy it before you can add it.

Nope, any specific lots where they sell that stuff?

What about the tattoo thing anyways, I read earlier that someone had Tattoos as a turn off option, howeverI can't see it in CAS

Re bypassing the laucher--is the simple fix of making the shortcut point to the sims2ep6.exe file not working??

That method of bypassing the launcher worked perfectly for me. I just keep my firewall running anyway because I like to be able to control which programs have access to the internet. You might be surprised by how many of your programs are regularly phoning home. Windows itself is probably the worst offender. But if you don't want to have any privacy you can keep on using windows firewall.

OMG, that sounds like my husband on a real vacation!  The first thing he grabs in a hotel room is the TV remote!

I haven't blocked it simply because I'm on dialup and never connect when I'm playing.  But something is going on behind the scenes because at odd times my game will hang for a few moments, then return to normal.  This happened last night when I was on a small lot housing three Sims and it should not have happened but for EP6. 

Will check my ZA log, but not sure if an attempt to connect would show up. 

Is there some way to peek at the EAxis spy code to confirm or deny? 

Okay, that does it.  I'll be buying this one.

It hailed at the beach last night, my sims were all running around covering their heads and going 'ow, ow, ow' and for a moment, thinking it was merely raining, I wondered if EAxis had programmed a new sucky weather reaction.

Is it just me or is weather in hyperdrive on vacation (I haven't actually played any "normal" lots so it may be there, too)? Normally, I see rain and thunderstorms very sporadically and they don't last too long when they do happen. However, all the sims I've sent on vacation have suffered through monsoon rainstorms and the longest thunderstorms I've seen in both Takemizu and Twikkii (spring and summer, respectively) almost every day of their vacations. I've also heard a few reports of hail which is normally quite rare. Now, I don't really mind since the sims don't really care for the most part but I'm just wondering if some game designer is reenacting a vacation-called-on-account-of-weather incident. Or perhaps it's just sadorandomness rearing its ugly head.

We should probably consider ourselves lucky that there aren't any air travel delays programmed into the game based on weather. :P

Back to the lag 'sigh'.....I added another gig of ram so now I have 2gig on a P4 3.2ghz 7600 GS video card with 256 ram. Well above spec's I think but I'm still getting up to 5 seconds of lag. That's in a vanilla game, I moved the TS2 folder to desktop and let the game make a new one just to be sure. My game computer is not on the internet and so the launcher at the start just has the play option, no mention of get updates or anything else.
As I only had one sim to follow on the Twikki Hotel lot I had a good chance to see what else was going on. Every time the lag happened some fool was starting a water balloon fight. Coincidence? Possibly, but I'm on the look out for a hack that blasts this behaviour just to check.

Yes, I should have said it was hail, this is the first time I have ever seen hail so I hadn't seen that behaviour before.

I'd forgotten all about the launcher until the first time I started the game and Lavasoft Firewall asked me if I wanted to let it access the internet. Hell, no, never, no-way, uh-uh.

But I haven't played yet. I only loaded the game last night to turn CC on (I've removed the confirmed incompatible CC, updated where possible, and will wait and see what falls over in a screaming heap - I am not a sheeple I am play testing - I keep telling myself that in an effort to create a feeling of self-worth). In any case I'll report back to see what kind of lag increase I do or do not get on Vacation lots.

As a random aside that someone might find useful, the control pets cheats appear to allow you to control invited 'visitor' sims when on vacation.  I have those cheats in my userstartup file, and when playing without hacks, I had the Calientes invite Don Lothario on a vacation.  I could control his every move, and I think it's because of the pet cheats.

Maybe it's the launcher that causes most of the lag - denying access to the internet doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't *try* to phone home during the whole play session.

I redirected the shortcut to the sims2ep6.exe right after installation, and I've just been playing BV for approx. 5 hours without any noticable (sp.?) lag. I have to add, though, that there's no other application (firewall etc.) running in the background, either, because the game is installed on a computer with no connection to the internet. This might also make a difference.

@ dusty: Hm... that's interesting... *makesnote*

I redirected immediately too, and wasn't getting any lag until I started playing in a custom hotel. I built it with too many rooms, I don't know what I was thinking. Did I learn nothing from Uni?  ::) It also has the Pirate Ship, and the only even slight lag I'm getting on any other lot is the one with the ship. I'm about to move them to a new hotel, demolish, and start over.

Just wanting to clarify one thing.. although I think I already know the answer.

BV give us an ugly new Maxis family. Neat. I'll can them. BUT..... the locals are ugly maxis ones, and not spawned from custom name/face templates?

I'm thinking I'll wait awhile for this one... until the wrinkles are ironed out and whatnot. Vacation never did it for me, and I doubt I'll be too into this one.

Update: I bypassed the launcher right away. Even so I didn't actually play with the internet hooked up on this computer until today. Zone Alarm got an alert within 2 minues of loading the game. I didn't play for very long, I just tested a few things and exited. I only got one alert, but that might be because I played for less than 30 minutes.
Also, 80 new character files were added to the test hood when I added one vacation destination (even with all of Pes' norespawn/antiredundancy/notownieregen etc type hacks). Guess I won't be playing my main hoods until Pes puts a notouristregen hack out. My primary hood has 100 character files, I am not prepared to almost double the population for a damn vacation spot.

I've checked my ZA(pro) log and while EP6 was not listed in any of my controls, EP5 was - now zapped.  Dumped the launcher for the exe shortcut but haven't played yet.

Also received the Prima Guide and found some interesting tidbits.  Book in advance and you can save $$$ on airfare.  A party of four leaving immediately will cost $2k.  Book six days in advance and it drops to $1,200.

The guide claims that Sims can now walk to any lot they could drive (or cab) to.  But they can't walk from home to, i.e. downtown or Bluewater.  Does that mean they can drive downtown then walk between clubs?   Where did we park the car, babe?

Apparently there is now a reversible community lot death option where you can exit the death lot without saving.  Your previously dead Sim will be found at home, happy and healthy.  I guess this applies only to the last controllable Sim on the lot.  Which makes no sense. 

If you're going to bring a Bigfoot home, keep him happy.  He might make a good employee with 10 points in all skills and all the badges in gold.  But cats hate him and he has a hygiene issue.

The Unsavory Charlatan apparently has a travel pass and can appear at any community lot anywhere.  He's in love with Mrs. Crumplebottom and will attempt to hit on her.  :o

No, it means that once you get to the subhood, you can walk to other lots. Then, the only way to get back to your home is to take a cab. Your car no longer exists, and the lot you first drove to now crashes on load.

Just guessing.

Thanks I am going to try this, do you use the free one or the "free" one that you get if you sign up for one of their offers?

I am so disappointed by the lag I am getting.    And I have never had any troubles.  I seriously think it is the game trying to phone home b/c they'll be times when it seems to be up to speed and then like everything almost freezes.    And I'm bummed that it appears that bypassing the launcher doesn't work. 

From what little I have actually got to play.. the lots for the vacation hoods seemed really crowded with objects which could be something else causing some of my lag.  I really never play with so much stuff community lots but then again, I've been known to cram my residential lots insanely full and haven't had problems, so I really don't wish to blame all this lag on my computer yet.

I noticed this also.  It seems as though the weather is much worse. I have almost constant hail on Twikki. 

I have had another interesting "feature."  Apparently, once you book a  honeymoon, you get it with every marriage.  After the traumatic death of his first wife, my sim remarried and immediately went off on the same Twikki honeymoon to the same hotel as he had with his first wife (I purposely hadn't booked one since the child was about to grow up the next night and I figured I would just take a vacation then).  Next thing you know he'll be trying to get his new bride to wear his dead wife's clothing.

I've had less lag since redirecting the game to bypass the launcher, so thanks for that tip.

Just in case someone wants to look: I think the 'phonehome' is a rundll32.exe-  -if you look at your taskmanage.

I booted up with the launcher (by mistake --my first try at changing the shortcut pointer failed for some reason) and saw that pop up on my taskmanager. Then I switched the shortcut (again and then applied this time and then saved and then checked it) to the EP6.exe and no rundll popped up. Those suffering the lag, might want to take a quick look at their taskmanager.

Well so much for that bright idea. I put BUY in all my hotel rooms. Works fine as long as witch is with a family on holiday and all the rooms are occupied by my playables, but as soon as she visits an hotel on her own, the BUY controller spazzes out* and spams the place with, 'you cannot use this if you haven't checked into the room' messages. It won't stop, even after the action to use the bathroom or BUY is cancelled.

So anyway, bathrooms aside, I decided to make witch a couple of nice young men to play with. She couldn't ring and invite them on holiday. So they bought a holiday home and went there. She can't ring them except to talk, she can't invite them over or on a date. (She can have dates but only with the locals). If she goes to a community lot it's chocka full with fugly Maxis sims, no sign of visiting spunks.

DISSATISFIED!

ETA: *Actually it won't be the BUY controller's problem, it'll be the townies occupying the rooms and making them unavailable. I'll try APO - maybe if I ban witch from all rooms except the one she chooses, the BUY will recognise this.

I played BV for the first time last night and used the launcher.  I noticed periodic lagginess; there was a tremendous lag when my first sim got a sun tan and the game regenerated her portrait.

I'll try bypassing the launcher, but for me lagginess is normal after installing a new EP.  I just figured the game was spawning new townies or something.

rundll32.exe is typically a windows required process and is not likely to be the process you think is attempting to "phone home" from in the game.  It's literally a program that reads DLL files and places the libraries contained in them into memory so the computer can use them. 

Now, some viruses disguise themselves as rundll32, so make sure your defs are up to date anyway.

Concerning the lag...I installed ZoneAlarm and also decided to bypass the launcher.  Apparently for me bypassing it did little anyways...by the time the game got to the loading screen it had attempted to contact the internet at least six times.  If not bypassing the launcher makes it do so even more...I hate to think...lawdy.

And guess what...my game loaded SO MUCH FASTER.  Gee, now I wonder why it loaded so slow before hmpph :-\

Does anyone know offhand if I can simply delete the launcher from the game files, or will that cause a BFBVFS?

First annoyance, then more data on the lag issue (not that I have much lag).
Annoyance: A houseguest doesn't appear on your UI control. Ok, no biggie. But the kid who invited the teen girl he met on vacation has the most awesome room ever (a virtual forest) and he and his guest were "camping" in his tent bed and talking. He left the tent. There is no way to prompt the girl to get out of the tent. Clicking on it only gives the option "Get In". It's been three hours, and she's sitting there in the dark tent by herself like a doofus. I found the only way to get her out was to pull out some leftovers and do "Call to Dinner...Guests".

Lag: Just an observation. I was playing with my firewall settings. I noticed that the Sims 2, each EP, Bodyshop, Homecrafter, and a couple Sims-related sub programs were set to always allow (no entry for EP6...just the launcher, which I'd blocked before and the game worked). Well, there's no reason that anything but EALink needed the 'net, right? So I blocked 'em all. Game wouldn't load. I just got a never-ending black screen. Putting all back to allow fixed it.

Now why would it not work unless one of the EPs or the basegame is trying to dial home and it's getting pissed at my firewall blocking it?

Control your vacation friends with the pet cheats. Friends are pets you know....

The entire problem is that she's not on the UI. Otherwise I could use the petcheat. From what I'm reading, friends you take on vacation show up in the pet spot on the UI. Houseguests aren't.

I'm using the actually free one. I don't have money to burn spending 65 bucks at the gap to get a "free" firewall.


Strange, mine isn't throwing a fit about being blocked.

Another note: Since I added most of my 1 gig of CC the lag has increased, but it's not too bad. Another thing to help with the lag is to go into your processes and set TS2ep6.exe to high priority. Don't do this for a ton of different programs or you might crash your computer, but one or two (depending on your RAM and how much RAM each program you set to high uses) at a time is safe. With 512 MB of RAM I only set TS2 to high priority.

So can anyone tell me how many access attempts they normally get with this EP trying to access the net?  B/c umm...I have been playing for like an hour and a half...NOTHING else running that should be trying to connect.  And I have nearly 400 attempts.  You've got to be kidding me if this is all coming from the game.  Insanity.  But of course since it is blocked, my game seems to be running now at normal speed.  And at a home lot, it is almost running flawlessly like it does with almost no CC.

Right now, I can't say if I am thrilled or not with my purchase of this EP.  The whole "The Sims phone home" thing seriously has put a huge damper on the game for me. 

Of course I was expecting with this EP as well that there would be a lot of waiting while lots load, but it is a tad more annoying than I expected.  But I do enjoy all the things there are for sims to do, so that's a plus.

 I really adore the beach lots.  Hell that was almost worth the 30 bucks for me.  I have long been improvising in creating beach lots and now I don't have too. 

Sorry if this has been asked before, but....how exactly do you bypass the launcher?  I won't have the game for a couple more days and I would really like to not have to bother with the launcher from the beginning.

Karen: you just create a shortcut to the EP6.exe, and launch the game from there.

Well, that's easy enough  :)  Thanks for the quick reply!

In my game, they can? When I click on a sim and choose "Walk to..." I get the same neighborhood/lot choices like when I call a cab or go by car.

skandelouslala-
Something about that doesn't sound right. Please check and see if your computer is attempting to do this connection even when not playing sims. (sitting idle might work)
400+ attempts at connection is more like viral activity, not unheard of with half assed attempts by companies to "phone home" but still , the shear amount is worrying.

BBB over at InSim says theres a conflict with sound cards causing the lag. ?

Can anyone 'walk to lot' using the click on a lot function? I don't get that option...

Uhg, here's some dissatisfaction... the stupid tourists. Why does Eaxis insist on mucking up my game with two "Goopys." I bet I'll go through my whole life without ever meeting a single person named Goopy, let alone running into two of the suckers on vacation. And, of course, they're both fugly. I'm all for meeting new and exciting people on vacation but I want to make them myself so they don't pollute my neighborhood with their ugliness and clashing clothes - at least the locals (while sometimes needing renaming) have a "uniform" so they aren't susceptible to poor fashion choices. Please say a notouristregen is in the works and if Inge happens to be floating around a "make me a tourist" update to her teleporter wouldn't be half bad either. I don't ask for much... baaaaaaaa.

I think all the tourists and locals are ugly. I was hoping to have one of my single sims to have a whirlwind romance with a local while on vacation. I have one sim that was making the gagging noises whenever he meets a local or a tourist.

Another thing thats getting on my ever last nerve is that Sims are always wanting to build a sandcastle. They do it on their own, and when I need them to do something else and I cancel the sandcastle action, it takes forever for it to drop out of their queue.

And another thing, One of my sims ordered food in the dining room of his hotel. When the food arrived, one of the damn tourists stole it out from under his nose and ate it.  This has happened more than once. And don't even get me started on the bellhop that insisted on hanging out in my Sim's hotel room. He was just standing there. urg.

You're right, sloppyhousewife; that paragraph was awkwardly written in the guide.  I believe they meant you can't walk to college towns or vacations (duh, for the latter) from your base hood, downtown or a shopping district.

BV is now starting to piss me off.  Close to $900 a night for a hotel room and the housekeeper never shows up?  Or an empty dining room and the Sim who is starving is told the dining room is full?   I swear EAxis must award a bonus to the programmer who can create the biggest annoyance.  And that damn Sea Chantey!  If my Sims do it one more time, they're getting fed to the cowplant!

MutantBunny, you have to click either your Sim, the phone booth, or a pedestrian sign to get the walk-to option.

The heavy duty lag I've had is gone now.  Don't know if that is because I dumped the launcher or not.   EP6 may go the way of the launcher if it keeps pissing me off.

Scotty: Always keep your hotel room locked, otherwise the tourists flock in.

I had one hotel where the maid never came. But then I was never at the hotel when time came to trigger him/her, instead I was off on other lots.

I'm quite pissed that they don't generate from CAS templates/modified Live.package. My Goopy's days are numbered. And, the only halfway decent teen was a Renee. She became fast friends with the eldest boy of my test family and I was intending on setting them up...until my version of Hook's Random Stuff turned him into a fat Romance sim with a thing for mechanically-inclined zombies. Now she can't stand him, but he still wants to diddle her.

Yeah, I did unlock it once by accident. And everyone was hanging out in my Sim's room. I make sure it's locked now. But the stolen food happened in the dining room. And the bellhop for some reason is just standing in the hotel room, it's like he's at his desk, I've even seen him answer the phone by picking it up from nowhere. He just stands there. I know it isnt a hack, because I always get rid of all hacks before installing a new EP.

And the waiter likes to make my Sim's bed. The maid is completely useless IMHO. At least the waiter does something.

I've just been testing with the Traveller family at Twikii Island.  Have had no problems - in response to issues of dissatisfaction suggesting that the piano is broken again, my Sims using the grand piano in a Pleasantview lot had no problems (creativity and fun running as usual).  Have not found a piano yet on Twikkii, so that test is still pending.

Apropo to nothing, I did find where the secret lots are in each of the three vacation hoods. I play with Gunmod's Camera Mods, and if you zoom all the way out on the hood, you see a tiny road not connected to anything in some far-off corner of the hood.  Each has one, so I'm guessing that's the location of the secret lot, though you can't actually see the lot itself.

LOL! Yeah, the waiter at the hotel my sims were staying at spent the entire day running back and forth cleaning the hotel up, picking up plates from hotel rooms, emptying the trash cans. I thought that it was kind of weird. Very motivated! The maids are making the beds though. Especially at inappropriate times, like when my sims are trying to sleep in the bed. She'll walk up to the bed with sleeping sim in it and just stand there making confused faces for awhile, then she'll go away. The first time I noticed it she was looming over a sleeping sim child and my first thought was "Oh god, pedophile maid? Stupid EAxis!"

Well, now I'm getting annoyed.

First, if I tell a sim to 'walk to lot' and then switch sims before the popup shows to choose which lot to go to, the currently selected sim tries to leave instead of the sim who I originally told to leave. And since I tend to switch sims every two seconds, I never know who's going where.

Second, the fire dance takes WAY too long to learn. I can't find anything that tells me what skills, if any, make it go faster, but I had a sim who was a little bit under halfway for hunger and tiredness when he started, and I had to cancel the fire dance instructing at halfway because he was about to pass out and/or starve.

Third, I had an old lady sim who was all green in her needs except for about 1/3 down for hygiene, told her to learn to fire dance, and she did ONE TWIRL before quitting to go take a shower. *strangling motions*

Well I've had no more attempts since last night when I quit playing...leading me to believe it has been the game.  I could still be wrong...I don't know much about all this stuff but just the process of deduction...it is only happening when I play the game...leads me to believe it is the game..I dunno though, just my uneducated guess.

To the fire dancing rant...I was not very amused by how long it took either.  Especially for my first vacation taking elders.  I figured they needed something to spend their fortune on so they were the first to go on vacation.  My elder sim whom I had learn, was more or less ready to pass out when she got back to the hotel but had managed to learn. 

I don't mind how expensive everything is...b/c I want my sims to find a way to spend their money.  Hence the beach lots, I love even more b/c they are pretty pricey for lots. 

Does anybody know what happens to vacation homes own by sims once the sim dies?  I'm wondering if another sims inherits them or if they just revert back to "for sale"

I've not been too bothered by the fire dancing - it hasn't seemed to take very long at all for my sim (Maxis traveller sim, no skills).

What's frustrating me is the few vacation memories that I can't seem to get - the album and discovering the treasure - it's just not happening!

Yeah, you pretty much have to start out with all needs at full, so you have a long time at your disposal to learn it.  I tried it with an adult female just after breakfast, and she managed to learn the dance just as her bladder need hit yellow.  I did have to use the testingcheatsenabled ability to pull the bars back up to get her to finish learning all in one go.  Obviously this is not the ideal solution for those who don't like to play with debug mode on.

Do you really need to learn the fire dance all the way from the fire dancer? I had an elder sim who started learning and then quit after a while because of his needs. After he was back home in the main hood, he had the want to "learn to fire dance". I was a bit surprised, because there are no firde dancers, but it said to just click on the sim and choose "fire dance". Which worked, and he started practicing. I don't know though whether he'll get any better, because there was no learning bar anymore (I think), but I thought it might worked like other hidden skills.

I've noticed with learning the dances that you can learn about the skill (as in it appears in the Traveller's Accomplishments section) but when the want appears in your Wants panel, you have to actually master it (as in, pay the fire dancer to teach you the entire thing).

It's not that the fun or creativity isn't rising. It's obscenely quiet. I turned all my sound settings back to max to make sure, and I zoomed in right on the sim playing...could barely hear it. This has happened to me after almost every EP, and whenever they patch and mention fixing the piano bug, it gets fixed. I assumed that was all the bug was. This was the upright, too. Haven't tried the grand yet.

And yay! Another bug. Playing a single sim camping in Three Lakes. She ordered flapjacks for her morning breakfast. Last I checked, flapjacks don't come in a bowl, aren't eaten with chopsticks, and don't look kind of like ramen noodles. Gah! At least she's having a rip-roaring time...keeps commenting on how much she loves it there.

Kind of wish they added some way to cook fish on the grill. Camping + fishing =/= grilled fishy.

I hit one maybe-bug.  One of my sims wanted to buy jewelry, so I sent her off to the store (I had already added a jewelry counter thing to it).  She goes, she buys, she leaves the register, but the want doesn't get filled.  ARGH!

The vacation home passes to 1) the member of the owner's household with the highest lifetime relationship to the owner; 2) the owner's closest married or blood relative; 3) the owner's closest friend; 4) back to the community.

Encountered one major glitch tonight: my Sims had to check out but some dude was glued to the floor in front of the hotel desk.  No way to move him and this went on for 12 Sim hours.  Finally exited without saving, then went back in and checked out the couple immediately. 

I finally got so fed up with the food issues in the game, I added grills, small refrigerators, and trashcans to all the bungalows and cabins.  If your Sim has fish in his/her inventory, it will show up on the grilling menu.

Ness, if by album you mean the photo album, I think your Sim has to order prints and the album off his home computer.  Charge is $45 and it is supposed to be delivered to the Sims home.    Haven't tried it yet...

It works; I've done it multiple times. I haven't actually gotten the deliveryperson to hand the album over yet (they've just placed it on the ground), but I suspect this is due to poor lot design on my part.

I've had camping sims cook fish they've caught on the grill.  Once the sim had fish in his inventory, the option to cook bass with squash came up on the grill, instead of just hot dogs.

Thanks for the album tip, off to try now.  Should just leave me with the find buried treasure memory as the only one to unlock.

OK, I give in, how does one trigger the damn ninja. I've only seen him on two lots and because I answered the question wrong both times, he's vanished. Does he come back again during the same holiday? Does he appear on a different lot? I can't find my damn ninja. HALP!

The ninja is a frustrating little character.  He does reappear, but won't reappear on the same lot until you've been somewhere else.  I found the zen gardens to be one of the best places to get him to appear.

As for the questions he asks...  ARRGGHH!!

I had the know self/know enemy one twice, and both answers were wrong.  I got the wisdom/courage one wrong repeatedly.  I'm not sure if there's a random correct answer each time, or whether there are some questions that have no correct answer and only some questions that have a correct answer.  Make sense?

Treasure's easy. You don't even need to go on vacation for that. Click on Macro -> Dig For Stuff. Right now, you have to be on ground floor for this to work, or an existing hole must be present. This will get a fix soon. It doesn't really take THAT long, but it *IS* random...on the other hand, it's also fire and forget now, heh. :P

Cheers for that Ness, I've found him twice on the Lucky Shrine lot and once somewhere else, don't think it was the Zen Garden though. Damn, so the answers may vary? I figured I had a bank of at least two correct answers, after getting it wrong twice.

I did discover the dig for stuff macro - and was disappointed when I discovered that you can't dig with snow on the ground!

Witch, I got it once with selecting ninja on the which comes first - the ninja or the sword question, and I got a correct answer again on another question, but I can't for the life of me remember what the question was, let alone remember which answer!

When I was seeking him out, I'd have my vacationers constantly walk between the shrine and the zen gardens lots...  walk to lot, answer question, lose ninja, walk to new lot... rinse and repeat.

Wait, is this ninja like the genie from TS1? the one who loved to be sadistic and ask "fire or water", and if you answer the former he sets your house on fire, but if you answer the latter he floods it?

He doesn't actually do anything if you get the wrong answer - he just calls you stupid and vanishes.  If you get the right answer, he teaches you to teleport. 

Pescado, did you see my thread about bigfoot and his problem with BUY?

The problem I have with that wretched ninja is catching the little fucker! He seems to teleport in and stays only for about three seconds before he's gone again, so if my Sim is at the other end of the lot, there'll be no chance of catching him. I've seem him about ten times and only caught him twice. The first time he asked me which came first: the ninja or the sword (I said sword and got it right), but the second time was with an elder Sim who runs slower than some Sims shuffle and he asked me if it's better to know yourself or your enemy. I said self and he disagreed. Bastard!  >:(

Oh, and Witch, this may just be superstition, but I just ask the tour guide What's Cool Here, and as soon as he mentions the ninja, I immediately go to another lot and within a very short period of time, he appears. It's catching the guy that I haven't gotten the hang of yet. Maybe this will work for you.

Still no confirmation on the eggplant juice? I seem to recall a patch EA released that said it would ensure that skills earned from drinking it would be properly credited and I'm thinking Bon Voyage may have broken that fix.

As for the maids: they're lazy slobs in my game. On Twikki Island, they cleared a plate after it's been there for over 2 days, the bed wasn't made ever. This was when I played w/o any hacks. In Far East, they didn't even clear the plate (now with DC installed). Haven't checked Three Lakes so far, because I try to avoid Yeti area as long as possible.

Fire Dance: I think it's quite realistic that it takes a little to learn it, I actually wouldn't like to learn it faster. But maybe that's just me.


I had the want fulfilled when buying jewelry, but that was on vacation. Did you add the counter to a store in your normal neighborhood?

Unless they've changed something with BV, you'll need a surface to prepare your fish before it goes on the grill. No suitable surface = no option available to cook it.

Ness, yeah, I've been going back and forth to the most open lots for the ninja. I've not seen him at night at all. I'll try DJ's suggestion of asking the tour guide. I got a wrong answer on the ninja or the sword - and I answered ninja too.

I have to make my sim stand in the middle of the lot and procrastinate - if she's doing Tai Chi or something the animation doesn't break in time to catch him.

Ok, that's leading me to think it's a random crapshoot as to whether your answer will be correct or not.  Bugger!

And with my bass and squash - I don't recall any preparation going on with a bench before hand, but I can double check later.

My Sim booked a vacation for Sunday on a Monday. On Wednesday, she spun up the want "go on a far east vacation". I locked it. It never got fulfilled, not when she went on the vacation, not when she came back. Should this want be "book far east vacation" instead, or is it just broken?

Hotel maids don't touch dishes, from what I've seen. "Luckily" the dishwasher in the hotel my Sims stayed in was readily accessible. It's a feature!

One of my Sims learned to teleport by answering "courage", the other one failed to learn because she answered "courage". I would guess it's completely random, which is annoying.

Awesome!  Assuming it works properly..that will work very well for some storylines I have going for some of my sims for having places back in their "homelands" being transferred to their children upon death.

Maids:  They come in and watch my sims sleep..talk about creepy!

Fish: I never needed a counter top or anything to prepare the ones caught..or so I thought.  Could have been my imagination.

This issue is addressed in the War Room. Death to all Nesses.

I've given up on ninjas for the time being, my sims are now in the mountains and no, they didn't need a surface to prepare their blackened catfish.

Off to the war room now, see if ninja logic makes sense.

I forgot to mention that I catch ninjas by heading straight to the spot where they spawn when the lot loads.  Sometimes you don't get much time before the zap off somewhere else, or away completely, so if you're close and waiting it works better.
/me follows Witch to the war room

I catch ninjas by waiting 'till he teleports somewhere accesible, and then pausing the game. My sim then queues up a lot of "learn to teleport" interactions with him, and now has plenty of time to saunter of to the ninja to pick the wrong answer  :P

I noticed this too, and it's really annoying.  I sent my Sims on a 3 day vacation and by the end of it there were roaches all over the hotel lot, from the dirty plates.  Naturally my Sims all came home with the flu.  Once the roaches appeared, I discovered there is no way to call an exterminator from a vacation lot.  Very frustrating!

Nothing wrong with your lot design, Denimjo.  The album is supposed to be left at your door.  No signature required.   ;)

I've had the roaches problem - you either need to change accomodations regularly or make sure you're there long enough for the maid to get things cleaned up.  At some stage you're going to have to be there long enough for the cleaning to happen, because the mess is saved from one vacation to the next - disappointing!

I'm most miffed that bigfoot isn't breedable, either.  He appears to be intending to be entirely asexual.  Although you can make him pregnant with the tombstone of L&D (no pregnant body morph).  Doesn't create hairy kids, either :(

If you didn't already have a sim-Husband, that idea would have been for you, NESS. It may still be in the cards. After you buy a Lythdan. You can go to the Far East and buy the Lythdan that her parents sold in Thailand.

Yea, it was a regular store.  The jewelry selling thing appears in the Misc catalog, and can be put on any comm lot.  Though it would make EAxian sense if it only really works in a vacation hood.  :P


Nope; I had a sim roll the same want and I had him book it for the following Saturday, and the want didn't get filled.  Sounds like that one is borked too.

You know, I realize that people are down on the Prima guides here, but while they may not always be correct because of the design document issue, they do a pretty good job of explaining how things were INTENDED to work. A lot of the questions people have had in this thread and others have been covered in the guide -- like how the ninja answers are random like chance cards, or how hotels are supposed to work in non-vacation hoods. Lots of otherwise clueful people have spent a lot of time trying to figure out "how the hell does this work?" instead of "does this work the way they say it does?" when the latter would probably have been simpler.

My sim came back from vacation and I picked the extra want slot for him.  I had 2 wants locked for him and when the extra slot disappeared the locks did too and everything rerolled.  It was most annoying because he got married on vacation and one was have a baby and the wife was expecting.

Has anyone else noticed that Sims aren't getting their mid-shift perk up? Explanation: Sim A would previously go to work and along about half to 3/4 way of her shift her bladder and hunger would become almost full. Now there is no rise at all. Not playing with any hacks. Unsure if any previously played with hacks or mods were the reason she would get the rise before.

Can anyone tell me if you've gotten the same thing?

Maybe it's a cook-point thing. She only had one at that point. Digging for treasure could completely break any money-related challenges. I had one sim (going after all vacation memories) dig for a good six hours. She got the treasure box, 4 rocks, 5 bones, all three maps, and a bunch of random decorative crap.

I'm almost wondering if my flapjack problem was related to the fact that, at the time, all she had in inventory was a cell phone and the map to the asian destination. After she had dug up all three maps, she ordered flapjacks again and they were the proper food.

The extra want slot is good for only 48 hours.

I had a jewelry stand in Amelia's Closet in Bluewater.  My sim rolled the want when he entered the lot (I figured because there was a jewelry stand there...but who knows ;) ) and buying a watch fulfilled the want.  By the way it is CEP that makes the new toilet stall recolors not show up.  I took it out (after reading some posts in this thread and realizing I had only green toilet stalls) and all the recolors where there.  Also running a hack-free game I have had no problems with walking to any community lot and returning back home.  Just some random observations from my game. XD 

Dream

yes I know but it rerolled ALL slots even locked ones.

A day's worth of macro-digging yields somewhere between 3-5K worth of stuff on average. Digging is a bit overly safe, due to the lack of Power Lines to dig up. The digging frenzy would probably cool off if I added the ability to find a power line in addition to the water main.

That would be so awesome!

That would be very, very fun. Maybe my current playable is just overly lucky. She's found four treasure boxes in a week, digging maybe 2 hours a day average.

Some of us don't own Prima Guides. Some of us believe manuals ought to come with the software. I've never bought a Prima Guide for any sim game or EP.

Has anyone else experienced the album killing his/her stories? I've read about it once, but didn't (want to) believe it: either after ordering or after viewing the photo album (I think it's the latter), all pictures of your storytelling had been kicked back into the picture pool and the text is gone  >:(. Stories of families played since BV but without an album are untouched (talking about pre-BV families of course).

2. My sim froze right after getting the "Stay on the Log and win" memento (Three Lakes). He won, the kid he was playing with left, he stopped moving. I left the lot and placed the FFS debugger just in case, then tried again: Now, every time I wanted to join someone else on the log, the action dropped out of the queue immediately. No problems with rolling the log alone, though. Known issue or unfortunate coincidence?

3. And please, please, please someone make a "no autonomous Tai Chi" hack, and "no autonomous sea chanty" would be very, very nice, too.

Edited for clarification.
Edited for replacing wrong word.

Seconded.

That bloody sea shanty - or 'chanty' as EAxis have decided to call it - is viral. My sim autonomously taught it to a local in the Far East, he's taught it to at least 3 other locals, so now I have a bunch of sims in kimonos singing sea shanties on the commlots all the time. (Shows you how long I've been hunting the damn ninja).

Tai chi is irritating but at least it's quiet.

Whoever it was that realised stopping the game from dialling home reduces loading times is a genius! When I started the game without cc in place it took as long as it did for Seasons to load with cc in place. When I put the cc back it was taking 40 minutes to load BV and another 10 minutes to load a neighbourhood and 5 minutes to load each lot. Now by simply removing the internet cable from the wall before playing the loading time is actually less than it was before I installed BV! Since I was about ready to uninstall BV/buy a new computer/scream/kick the cat this is a huge relief.

Now my only dissatisfaction is that hotel lots run so slowly. I used to be able to have parties on home lots with 8 sims living there and 15 guests barely any lag at all. Now in hotel lots when there are my 2 playable sims plus 12-15 tourist sims present the game crawls. Even at the fastest speed it still runs at an extremely laggy version of the slowest speed (as in one sim minute passes every 3 seconds) I sent my sims to sleep, turned the speed up and went to make lunch. When I returned my sims were still asleep.  >:( Not impressed at all. I ended up building a hotel with just two rooms to limit the number of tourist sims and that plays just fine. All normal community lots at holiday destinations also run fine.

Anyhow I think the time has come to upgrade something on my computer. The graphics card (a RADEON 9600 with only 256MB RAM) is looking the most likely candidate, but if anyone knows otherwise I would be happy to hear your advice (I have 1GB RAM, should I look at increasing that?) My computer knowledge is somewhat limited and my brother doesn't play the sims so isn't really best placed to give advice. His solution is "buy a new computer, yours is rubbish" which isn't exactly helpful. :-\

Thirded.

I've got mountain men doing tai chi and singing sea shanties.  I've got islanders doing tai chi and slap dancing.  I've got sims in kimonos singing sea shanties and doing the hula.  Not to mention the fact that none of the locals are using the right greeting any more!  Mountain men are wanting to hang loose, sims in kimonos are chest pounding...  argh!

Surely there must be some way to keep each greeting, dance, thing isolated to the appropriate vacation area?

That's what I would like to have as a mod. I don't care if my playable autonomously chants or use the greetings, or dance.... But I don't want the islander to do tai chi, and the far east peaople to slap dance and so on.... If nothing gets done to stop that stupid behaviour, the sims will only need to go to one destination to learn all of the gesture, dances etc...

Ah, yes - the greeting. I'd like to see chest pounding towards a far east local "rewarded" with a severe relationship drop. Same for any other inappropriate greeting combos, of course, but this example seems especially rude to me.

A "locals are immune to foreign habits" hack would really be great. I wouldn't mind my sims autonomously trying to do idiot interactions, though, because behaving like idiots is just what tourists do. If it only wasn't that fucking obsessive!

my stupid questions:

- No aging on vacation? So pregnancys are just stuck?
- Are beaches in normal neighbourhoods now swimable?

- Yes and yes
- You need a beach lot (new lot type) for this, but yes.

I've never even seen a Prima Guide for sale before  :-\

I'd also like to see a no Tai Chi hack. I'm not sure what annyos me the most - the whoosh whoosh of the sims changing outfits (particularly when there's  few sims on the lot. Ugh that noise), or that the sims take forever to stop.

I certainly don't believe everyone needs to BUY them -- I do, because I prefer to have the information on paper, but if the prevailing attitude here weren't that the guides are worthless, then more people might have the information to share, or be inclined to link to said information offsite. BV seems to be particularly non-intuitive (at least, I've never noticed so much confusion over how things work, period, by people here before, only on other sites where the average clue level is much lower), and the guide therefore particularly useful.

The beach lots are not terribly hard to place, just hard to make usable. All are 5 deep. If building a new terrain, you want your streets 1-2 squares from the water (in SimCity4). 1 1/2 really is best to get a good beach and buildable land. You also want the area close to sea level. Try to keep your beaches as true to N-S and E-W as possible, as the game will make the shore straight regardless of how the coast actually runs. My 'hood looks a little borked at the moment due to that.

I think this might work for making Tourist families - they're not like Townies, they are complete families in the 7FEn range.  Just make a CAS family then edit them in SimPE to give them a family number 7FE(something) - making sure to get rid of the sims already at that family number.  There seem to be 4 sims in each tourist family, I am not sure if that is a requirment :)

I've been building a hotel lot in a custom BV hood, and while playtesting it, I discovered that the "buy" option has been disable on clothing racks when they are placed on lodging/hotel lots.  The "buy" option is there when they are placed on community lots, just not on lodging/hotel lots.  I loaded up the 3 hoods that came with BV and looked at all the pre-built hotels that came with BV, and i've noticed that none of them have clothing racks on the hotel lots.  I think for some reason EA has decided to disable the "buy" option only for lodging/hotel lots.

Because who would ever in their right mind want to put a shop in a hotel?  I have not found a hotel restaurant yet, although I have not had sims stay at all resorts or hotels yet either.  There are tables and chairs that look like dining rooms, but no fridges in the kitchens and no option to have or serve a meal, no waiters etc.  Perhaps I need to try a few more hotels.  Room service works fine. 

I haven't had much time to play it yet, but I thought I'd throw in my list of complaints as well ;)

Ordering pictures is annoying so far.  You have to do each print or album separately, and they're delivered separately as well.  Maybe there's something I'm missing?

The beach lots are huge!  I sure hope somebody can make us up some smaller sizes, like a 1x5, or 2x5, I suppose if they have to be 5 deep.  I was hoping to build some cute little beach-front private bungalows, or something.

So far, it's looking like all the tourist "families" are blood related.  I'm wondering if there are any "families" of singles?  What fun is spring break for my college kids if the only tourists are married people and teenagers?  I guess the locals are single though, right? 


Do you think this would work with groupings of college students as well? 


I've noticed the load times take forever too.  I managed to fold four loads of laundry last night while waiting for loading screens :)  So is disconnecting the only way to prevent the dialing home?  I often like to pop on and off of the internet while Simming, so I hope there's another way.

Looking into disabling some of this.

According to the code, this isn't supposed to happen already. The locals ALREADY are locked out from autonomously initiating strange greetings, although your sims aren't. But they're stupid tourists.

Death to all Nesses.

As far as I can tell, the tourist family members aren't married. I kept zooming in on hands, and no rings. Haven't tried marrying one yet.

My tourists are also starting to merge behaviors. Lilly taught Ricky or whatever (husband at the time...he's been dumped, anyways) the chest pound. He then was running up to lots of locals and tourists doing it. And guess what I then saw? A local, practicing the chest pound on a tourist. Grr.

Yes, ordering pics is annoying. However. You can theoretically take pics of anything and replace the images with anything else...other in-game shots (I find the picture-taking window placement restrictive) or artwork. Just like with Pets and the custom paintings.

Wow. I removed it, just BV. Figured I'd wait for the patch and wait for more updated/tested hacks.

Not only did it delete my neighborhoods, it deleted everything. My entire EA Games folder!  Thankfully I had it all backed up, but it seemed a little extreme.

Yes I can't see why not.

This is normal. I believe it actually warns of this. The reason this happens is because if you uninstall an expansion, the previous expansion wil not be able to read the new datafiles and will barf. Thus, the uninstaller removes them to allow the game to regenerate them. You would have had to reload backups anyway, from pre-BV.

It said something like "Saved games from this expansion won't work anymore."  It didn't warn me that it would delete all my custom content, projects folder, .sc4 terrain, etc.

This is why you backup everything in the My Documents/EA Games folder before adding an expansion. Everything. You've just learned the hard way. Been there, done that. T-shirt sucks.

The Twikkii Beach Hotel has a restaurant, as do the other "$$$$" hotels at the other vacationlands.  But the menus are the same-old, same-old.  You have to travel to the food stands for local fare.

As someone else rec'd to in this thread already, ZoneAlarm, I gave it a try and am extremely happy with it.  As soon as it tried to phone home that mf'er got denied permanantly. :D

My sim tried to Bow to a Hula girl and got a relationship drop which I thought was good.  But not being deterred she went off and tried bowing to more hula girls and tourists.  Gah

The one thing that has really annoyed me (although its easily fixed) is that none of the hotels I've stayed in have MIRRORS.  So when my sim digs up a shell necklace he can't put it on straight away

I just saw a BV stupidity.  Sims check into a hotel (in the asia place) and order room service.  I had them get a serving plate, because there was more than one person. Waiter brings it and plops it on the table, which has seating for two. One sim grabs a plate and sits in the other chair.  The next sim grabs a plate, and instead of sitting in the other chair or in the love seat in the next room, walks ALL the way to the dining room at the other end of the hall, and sits at a table there to eat!

Sim seating behavior has always been stupid. I've given up on having a patio table or breakfast nook, because then I invariably get Sims sitting all over the place. I can see this getting even worse with hotels.

I am seconding all of this right now!  Oh, the ugliness!!!  Somebody please make it stop!

I've always wished there could be seating assignments, or at least plate-plop assignments. As it is, there is no reason to have outdoor furniture for BBQing in the summertime or anything. And who wants to take X table away so they'll use table Y? I ask you.

The serving of room service annoys me as well. And with buy mode controls being disabled, there's no way to pick up the serving tray and just move it someplace else. I wondered if there were another table available, if the bell hop would put it there instead of at the seating table. I haven't tried this yet, but I do wonder if it might help.

I'm not sure I like restaurants in the hotels either. I'm not sure if this is normal restaurant behavior or not, but I sent a family of four on vacation (newleyweds and her parents). I had one of the sims go to the restaurant and ask to get seated. No one else in his family could join him, meaning they all had to ask to be seated and were seated at separate tables. That sucks. Is there something I'm missing here about how to get a family that's not an outing to sit together in a restaurant?

I'm wondering if it's worth it to try and put a banquet table in a hotel. I might try taking out the kitchen and podium in one of the fancy hotels and replacing it with a buffet table and see if that helps at all.

There is actually a hack at simlogical, that helps you to organize where sims eat there breakfasts or diners exactly.
My sims now eat breakfast outside on patio, and dinner at dining room.

But you have to configure it for every table, so I don't see how this is useful for hotels, though very helpfull at home :)

First evening I've had time to sit and play with BV installed.

So far, I'm noticing a couple odd things - I no longer get the 'tend many' 'spray many' 'harvest many' options with the orchard trees...have to click each one individually - a real pain on large orchard lots.

And I've had NO weather. Zip. not a raindrop.

Very few 'non-awesome' hacks installed (or are we now calling TwoJeff's hacks non-awesome?)...

There's an awful lot of queue dropping, too...

In any case, I've not had the guts to play a Maxis made hotel yet... I'm never thrilled with the way they build things.

HOLEEE man, blackcat. Thanks. It pays to be the squeaky wheel sometimes.

Also, can you differentiate between visitors and customers, vs. family?

This is normal. In order to be seated as a group, you need to form up into an outing group. It is really less hassle to simply cook up a few platters of MREs via "Make Many", and use Macro-Eat to dispense them, anywhere, anytime, as needed.

I built a hotel restaurant, and it wasn't working, either.  ??? But I deleted that lot, because it had wayyy to many rooms for other Sims and my game crawled.

I tried placing counters- right by the DOOR even, in hotel rooms. The bellhop still dropped it onto the table. Grr

No, it's per room :)

WRT the teleporter, I don't think it makes sense to use it for making tourists.  There are 16 possible tourist families - and I would think you'd prefer to make the families as cohesive groups and change the number of the whole family number in SimPE.   Also some tourists will be drawn from your playable sims and townies it said in the guide I htink.   The three new larger families are the locals for that area, and I am not sure you can put normal sims into those and still have them work - like you can't make a new maid through the game.   Though I am not sure about that it could  be worth a try.   You'd probably have to kit them up in local garb first though.

Really?  Wow.  It's been raining practically nonstop in my Takemizu Village.  I keep thinking that they'll never make a go of it as a tourist destination if it rains all the time.

boolprop dormSpecificToolsDisabled false

Reennables buy mode, at least temporarily, whenevr it is normally disabled, such as when playing a dorm, community lot, or hotel, during a fire, burglary, or social worker visit.

If the lot allows you to use  the eyedropper on ce the above  cheat is entered, you can get into Build Mode by using the eyedropper tool o a build mode object, such as a door.


My own dissattisfactions include:

"Assign...Be Masseusse" doesn't seem to work.

THere doesn't seem to be a way to force a Sim you don't control to leave a tent, short of Force Error. In a test business lot, I  put a  tent down, and one of the employees entered it. Even though I dismissed all the employees soon afterwards, she remained in the tent until I force Errored her out.


Possibly the new norandomcrushes has fixed this,, but I was a bit stunned to realize that the tent option  "Chat With [Sim]" was a Romantic Interaction,.

Strangely, the Food Stands gnerate an NPC when placed on an owned business, which make  a vague amount osf snse as you couldn't get a  Sim or Employee in there otherwise.

Some more annoyances:

Sims have now started dropping certain skill-building user-directed actions autonomously. I tell them to paint, they do for a bit then suddenly decide that because their bladder motive is halfway down they're going to stop and start chatting to their family member who is supposed to be skilling charisma on the bathroom mirror but who has also stopped. This never used to happen, if you instructed them to skill build they used to carry on until they were ready to drop (or wet themselves, whichever). I've noticed that logic building actions don't have this problem.

Room service doesn't work for me. I ordered it, waited and waited and nothing materialised.

Everyone think rain is the most fasinating thing ever again. Grrr >:(

The not eating together in restaurants is annoying, but I can see why they set it up like that because you don't want one hungry sim forcing all your non-hungry sims into eating because they only eat as a group.

Also one last problem. Yesterday I sent two sims on a honeymoon, when they left their house (which had other sims living in it) I expected it to save the home lot. If it did the game gave no indication that this is what it was doing. The sims then arrived at the hotel and checked in. At this point I had to go out so I saved and went to quit. When I pressed quit a dialogue box came up, and assuming it was the standard "Are you sure?" box I automatically went to hit yes. Unfortunately it was just as I hit yes that I realised the box actually said "Are you sure you want to quit from here? If you...." That's all I got before the box vanished. So was the box telling me that the original home lot hadn't been saved and that I needed to finish the vacation and head back home in order for everything to be saved? I really hope not, but I guess I'll find out later when I play.

Why is it that the witch doctor's hut (secret location) doesn't save its state from one visit to the next?  So every time you go there with a new family, you have to waste time fixing/replacing all the broken crap in his house yet again.  At least with the other vacation lots, changes you make during gameplay are saved.

That is normal : it is a community lot so changes are not saved, and your next sims to go can fix everything so that the witch doctor wants to give them the voodoo doll. Only hotels save changes in my gameplay experience, not ordinary vacation community lot.
The 2 other secret lot will behave the same as the witch doctor one, again so that different sims can go and grab the reward....

Hmm....I guess I'll have to try again.  I couldn't get the witch doctor to do anything at all, even after all the broken stuff was repaired.  All he wants to do is sleep.  Do you initiate the interaction, or does the witch doctor come to your Sim to offer the voodoo doll?

The witch doctor offers it to the sim. In my case, it took so long to repair all the appliances (my sim had 0, repeat: 0 mechanic skill points ;D) plus replenishing my sim's needs after being shocked several times, that the witch doctor was awake again when I had finally finished the various tasks :D

My sims don't seem to have any other vacation wants than to go on vacation and go to Far East. I have all three vacation 'hoods in my regular 'hoods, but my sims only want to go to Far East. Is it just my game or/and can it be fixed somehow? (I think all my hacks are awesome at the moment.) Also it would be nice if my sims didn't have wants to go on tour and other stuff that are only available in vacations, when they're home. ::)

The Witch Doctor's hut is in the mountain hood? I thought it was in the Island hood?

And the Witch Doctor's Hut doesn't retain its state because if it did, only one person would EVER be able to do that scenario. Everyone else would find a witch doctor not in need of aid, and thus not be given anything.

My sim still didn't get anything.   :-\  Maybe he forgot why she was there, as she had no mechanical points when she started, so it took a long time to fix all the stuff.

No - I got the voodoo doll just fine under these circumstances:

She could interact with the Witch Doctor after everything was fixed, but he didn't ever give her anything, nor could I find any way to ask him.  I also checked her inventory just to be sure, but no Mr. Mickles.  I'm sure it's just glitched -- maybe just for that one visit, but I'm not in a hurry to try it again unless I take a sim with high mechanical points.

Sorry, my mistake.  That's what I get for playing too much yesterday, I think  :)

And I do understand your point about the lot having to be in that state so that future visitors can play the scenario....it's just that I haven't been able to get the scenario to actually *work* yet.  Also, I hate those crappy looking cheap appliances, and always have the urge to replace them with better ones the minute I get on the lot.

Karen

Greetings, I am very new here and quite unawsome, but may have some insight.  I had this Issue with the witch doctor on several occasions until I realized my sim must speak to the good doctor before repairing anything.  I have to do it this way to get it to work:

1: speak to doctor "offer help" I believe. (it's the only option)
2: repair all things
3: mop up the water
4: get a snack

And then the good doctor will come see my sim.

If this does not help or is impertinent, I do apologize.

Mitchellcjs

Aha!  So it's another "headmaster" type interaction where if you don't initiate the proper interaction, it has no effect (similar to "offer tour of house").  Obviously I need to play while more awake so I can actually notice and comprehend interaction menus.

Well, sort of, except that there IS only one interaction ("offer help") at the beginning, so it's gotta be the proper one ;).

Just offer help and *never* interact with the witch doctor again - he's supposed to address you! At least that's how it worked for me. Just like the local greetings, you will never learn them if you always interrupt the locals while trying to chat or whatnot.

He just takes his sweet-ass time. I've gone there twice. Offer help, go repair stuff and clean while he sleeps in the nude on his hammock. By the time I'm done with that, he's back to the house. I fix meal. Sit sims down, eat until full. Stand around for a good three hours before he suddenly realizes that everything's good and gives the doll.

Had a bad hotel charging issue I forgot to mention earlier. My sim was in one hotel and checked out at around 10 am. Then went to a new cheaper hotel in the beach vacation area. She checked in to one room (approx $400) at around 10:30. I immediately (before 11) got two messages that as she had stayed past check-in, her room bill would be charged ~$400. Then, at 11am, same message again. (Note: I was on the hotel lot the whole time). Meanwhile, her hubby cheated on her, they pummeled each other, she dumped him, and he left. She cancelled out the one room and reserved a smaller room (approx $300). I double-checked the old room before leaving the lot to go walking and it was available for rent. Went to another lot, came back. Both rooms were now showing as reserved by her, and I had no option to cancel the reservation on either room. So, basically, one day of stay at this $$-level hotel ended up costing her over $2000. And yes, it really was on the bill. Not false messages.

Yea, I'm definitely going to do that from now on -- no sims got on vacation without food in their inventories!  I had another hassle with the same sims in the restaurant -- last day, they go to breakfast.  I didn't make them a group, so they're seated separately (she was showering when he went to the restaurant).  She gets seated at a table where an empty plate is.  Server never clears the plate, and when the server comes with the order, she keeps doing the 'I can't do anything' dance because she won't put the new plate on top of the existing one, and can't remove the existing one because her hands are full.  Did it until she ended up dropping the plate on my sim.  Server goes away to get a new plate, so I canceled the dine interaction and sent the sim out of the dining room.

Unfortunately, every time I sent her back to the podium to be seated, she just walked past it and sat in the exact same chair.  Since they were going home that day, and her hunger wasn't in the danger point, I just had them leave when the husband finished eatiing.

When I got to Bigfoot's lot, a popup told me that Bigfoot would have a challenge for me.  Well, I talked with Bigfoot and fished with him, helped him rake leaves, lit his fire and sat around it and roasted marshmallows on it, turned on his boom box and danced with him, and stood around and waited for him to initiate something.

Whenever my sim stands around, all she wants to do is tai chi.  I guess there are worse things she could be doing, but she's obsessed, poor thing.  And it makes her unavailable for other interactions.

The only unusual option I got around Bigfoot was the option to invite him to move in.  Is this the thing that Bigfoot wanted help with, or is there something else?  I feel like I've done everything it's possible to do on that lot.

I agree with everyone who's pleading for a no-autonomous-tai-chi hack.  They like it better than sex.  Or food.  Or anything, really.

Bigfoot wants your sim to slap dance with him.  Once done, you have the ability to move him in with your family.

I've got the opposite problem with Tai Chi- I played the game  (with all updated BV awesome hacks) and on no lot did anyone do Tai Chi. Removed the hacks. No difference. If you turn on a stereo, they smustle. GAH! Now, I'm a patient person, but this is testing my limits. I started to notice this after about 3 hours of play in the Far East. I thought, hmmm, maybe it's just a fluke. I have now played the hood, with and without hacks, for over 18 hours and have not once spotted anyone doing Tai Chi. I also went to another neighborhood and created the destinations. Tried it with a clean vacation hood...no Tai Chi. I am ashamed to admit it, but I actually searched the BBS to find out what is going on with the dance. Others seem to have the same problem, while some have nothing but Tai Chi. Someone suggested going to the secret lot..that's where they learned the movement (from the old man). Went there numerous times. No Tai Chi. Oh well.

Here's a few bugs/glitches I've encountered (tried with awesome hacks and without):
Triple speed to most lots. The old NL bug is back (I think it was NL). I have to catch the speed bar right away or the sims are doing something silly.
Teens have very few vacation wants. Cuts across aspirations. They want to go to college, ask>date, sneak out (WTF?) and learn a new massage..huh? They can't learn massage.
The constant weather queue stompage is back.
Tour guides have gone missing at all hotels (hacks, and no hacks)
Massage therapist gone missing at a hotel.
Sims are back to talking and eating. Damn near starving to death..since the food on vacation is not filling. (No eat crap installed, and uninstalled) I mean really, 5 hours to eat a hot dog?
Sims who have gone on all the tours do not get the token fulfilled.
The first map dug has never been for the hood the sim is in. Typically it's the last map they find.
Fortune sims have wants to paint a masterpiece and sell novel. No easel or computer available in hood. In seven days, my fortune sim only wanted 1 massage and 3 tours. That's it. Very few vacation wants.
And, everyone wants to be the DJ. There is no DJ booth in the hoods.
Nobuskers does not work in vacationland. Sims and hotel guests perform constantly.
Expensive hotel in Twikki has shrubs that ,left untended, spawn weeds.
Quite a few times I have ordered a group meal, I have to..the food won't satisfy, and the bellman only brings a single.
I had a permaplat adult male lose status at the hidden burrow. It never came back.

These are only the ones that I haven't seen listed above.

They were right. You have to do the old man's task. Then your Sim will learn Tai Chi and never want to do anything else. It's not like the greetings.

I haven't encountered any other of the bugs you listed.

The Lot Debugger can fix the loss of permaplat status.


What is the old man's task?  I sent a couple there, and the were there for hours with no hints. I had the wife serve tea -- nothing.  I had the husband rake the zen garden -- nothing (though I did have to break him out of it to leave because his hunger was getting dangerously low).  All the old man did was walk around the lot moping up rain puddles, since it rained most of the time my sims were there.

Humm my sim learned Tai-Chi and did not need to go to a secret lot, it did not even had the map to it then.

I think after I correctly answer the ninja question is when I started to saw sim doing Tai-Chi though.  Either that or it started after I learned the "bow" gesture.

You're supposed to learn the legend of the dragon. Took forever for me. Had to actually go fishing with the old man for a while before he decided to share it.  ::)

I have a couple of more issues with BV.  There are no other guests in the hotels, and the only visitors were from the main hood who came and rang the doorbell.   ???  But no one could be invited over, even though my sims had the consistent want for it. 

The only exception to having no other guests was the camping lot.  There were many guests there, but I only saw one other tent get used once for several days.  Camping is free, but no check-in desk means no maid.  My sims were exhausted if they grilled, because they had to clean up the huge mess of dirty plates all over the lot from other guests who helped themselves to the food.

From what I could tell, there was no way to fulfill the want my sim had to firedance on vacation once she learned it.  Any lot that had a mat, also had a firedancer who you could only watch or wait to watch.

Walking lot to lot causes me to lose my sim (the lot plays on, but my sim doesn't show up) until I type in boolprop dormSpecificToolsDisabled false to buy the lot debugger.  When I retrieve the missing sim, the sim is sent back to the home base, which means I have to go load the hotel again.

Ah, I noticed the fish pond way in the back of the lot, but it was getting late and my sims had to leave.  Next time I'll have them head straight for it.


Sounds like you maybe have an older version of TwoJeffs' Visitor Controller laying around?

The Wise Old Man is the keeper of the Dragon Legend.  To properly greet him, your Sim should have perfected the bow.  A half-assed bow won't do.  If the greeting Sim does an expert bow, then the old guy will become very social.  Serving tea at his tea table also builds the relationship and supposedly doing Tai Chi with him will get you the Legend even faster.  Don't know about the latter as the Tai Chi teachers must be out drinking sake with the Ninja when my Sims show up.

When i first met the Wise Old Man, my Sim was not able to bow. I used the Voodoo doll and he told the legend.

The 2nd Sim of mine who met him was bowing but not perfect. They had tea and did Tai Chi, then he told the legend.

To learn Tai Chi, I don't think I ever bowed. I had my Sim serve tea, then rake the Zen garden, then meditate in the Zen garden, then fish with the old guy, then give him a fish (remembering the saying "give a man a fish"). Somewhere in there I also had her play with the pile of leaves he'd raked (it seemed Zen). Then he started to do Tai Chi and I joined him, which is how my Sim learned Tai Chi. I hadn't seen anyone else do Tai Chi until I went to his lot.

I remember getting special sounds for serving tea, meditating in the Zen garden, and doing Tai Chi with the old man.

My sims took forever to learn Tai Chi.  I finally put Merola's mirror on a lot and grabbed a local and had them start.  Then everyone joined in.  My daughter's sims learned in less than 2 hours into their vacation with no problem.  She went to all the grocery lots and put stereos on  them and then when she goes to them everyone is dancing or doing tai chi

I had my sim bow, serve tea, and talk to the old man for a bit. Then he told her the legend. I am one of the people who hasn't seen anyone doing tai chi yet. I also haven't seen anyone doing the hula when my sims visited Twiiki Island. I haven't been to the mountain location yet.

I don't think you need a mat. Have you tried clicking on your Sim and choose entertain (hmm, not playing in English, so not sure that's the right word for it. But, you know, the one where you also do rapping for money?). There should be a fire dance option there, and he'll just do it anywhere.

After posting (above), I went back and played for hours and hours. No Tai Chi. I went to the old mans lot 4 times (all my sims have gotten the scroll..that's not the problem) I had them rake, meditate, fish for days on end and he never did Tai Chi. He just fished for days. Grrrr. I tried the debugger on the sim who lost his plat...no joy. I don't know what the hell happened. He was socializing with Big Foot and *bam* into the low gold. I'll have to try the debugger again.

Oh, and another thing ...at one of the hotels I had a bunch of Seniors break out into spontaneous pillow fights in the lobby ( no beds in sight), and I have noroadpillows installed.  This is driving me batty. lol   I keep going back to the game hoping it will fix itself, but it never does. My sims have got all the momentos except Tai Chi , moved Big Foot in (I don't want to deal with that right now), and seen all the sites ... which I don't think is possible (as I reported above).

Next up: buying a vacation home. I just refurbed a few homes to make them ready. I'll report back if there's any wonkiness on home based lots. *crosses fingers*

I'm not really 'unhappy' with the EP. I just wish I didn't have these problems. Who knows, it might be user error! But, like I said before, I tried running the game hack free and in a clean new hood and the problems persisted.

Thank you for the suggestion.  I did still have VC and took it now.  Nothing has changed so far, but maybe if I move to a different hotel it will work.  I'll give it a try.


Oh, that makes sense.  Thank you.   :D

I cheated for the dragon legend. I spawned him off the mailbox at home. He hung around the house for 4 days, generally playing chess. The sim that learned the legend was his most frequent chess partner. Good thing is he has no regular "sim" needs, and after he taught the lesson he poofed like a ninja.

It seems to me, one must be of a reasonable relationship with him to get him to tell you the story. This is just a guess.

The Wise Old man's only purpose is to teach the Dragon Legend. He does not specifically teach Tai Chi, you can learn this from any Asian vacation local or any sim that knows it. The Old Man *MIGHT* do it, but there's no specific reason why he will or should, so he is not your main source. Besides, the Old Man is an Emailer and has no bathroom!

Yeah, I had tunnel vision and didn't realize this, so I had Lilly recount the Dragon Legend back to him. Not realizing that the twins were in bladder failure over by the lake.

For people with lag : I have found a cause of horrible lag in my game :
I was on one of the ruins lot in Twikki Island, everything was running smoothly and suddenly my game started to crawl more slowly than I've ever had. I started looking around, trying to find an explanation, as it was perfectly working 5 seconds ago. Then I noticed some (3) sims (tourists and locals) standing around the hot water thing (big hot tub with rocks). They were standing still, not moving, so I found it odd. I made them selectable and they were all attempting to interact with someone in the hot water thing. As soon as I cancelled their action, the game started to play at normal speed again. I already had this once in a home lot (pets or seasons I don't remember clearly), with a maid attempting to do something (don't remember now) and failing for whatever reason. She kept trying, and the game crawled slowly, until I made her selectable and cancel the action.
I thought it was worth mentionning for people who have a big lag.

The requirement to unlock the dragon legend appears to be that you must get to decent friends with him. Autosoc handles this job nicely.

Fortunately, after he tells you, he poofs and disappears from your friends panel.

My sims did not know how to properly do tai chi...bow...or anything...but I had them following the old man around..serving him tea, raking the garden, & gave him a bow and he told the legend.  While he was telling it only one of my sims were really listening.  The rest were running around pissing themselves but they all learned it anyways.

From what I've seen, simply getting STR to 50 with one sim is enough to trigger the legend being given to all sims on the lot.  Nothing fancy, just simple socialising.

The first time it happened for me, I had one sim madly doing everything she could on the lot trying to figure out what to do.  One of my neglected sims simply sat and drank tea with him and hit 50STR really quickly.

No fancy bowing or tai chi needed at all.

Yeah, don't think the tea, there's kinda no-bathroom. :P

That kind of makes me wonder where he got the tea itself from.  :o

I didn't even look to see if he had been removed from my friends panel after the poofing. I was just grateful that I didn't have to remove him from the lot via other methods.

Now, can we figure out how to get the fire dancer to work on home lots? I don't care if he sticks around or not, Just long enough to teach the dance. I have horrid load screen times, going to community lots breaks up my "play". I have a hard enough time remembering what the heck I am doing between 4 or more households, add a community or vacation to that and I am insane. (I skip college.)

My sim didn't have to do the slap dance with Bigfoot, I used the voodoo doll on Bigfoot and the 'friends' option, then I just asked him to move in and he accepted.

If only I'd known you had to make friends with the Old Man, it would have saved a lot of time. 

I thought the goal was to find a way to reach the Fruit Bowl on the next level up so I had my Traveller family run around trying to get the Ninja to teach them Teleporting, with that trick up their sleeve they returned to the Old Mans place and the guy teleported up to the Fruit Bowl and viewed it, of course nothing happened, so I thought "Hey!  Perhaps you're supposed to get on the roof!"   :D  I click an area on the roof and select the 'teleport here' option but my Sim vanished, ooh err! Just as I realised he had ended up somewhere near the road he started doing Tai-chi, at which point the Old Man walked up to him and started to tell the Dragon story.

I felt a bit silly then   ;D

Heh, no kidding. I was thinking in a normal game goal-oriented fashion. I wish it were a puzzle instead of a boring friendship requirement.

What are you talking about? It was OBVIOUS you had to make friends with the old man, and learning the bowing thing helps a fair deal. It's much harder without it, as you can see from Stupidlilley and Vtardrancher annoying the old man before learning the bowing thing. Are you people all just stupid?

Has anyone tried to make enemies with the old man? Perhaps he'll teach you the "alternate, uncut DVD version" of the Dragon Legend.  ;D

Obvious to simple minded folk maybe, but to my uber-smart mind the idea of just making friends with him seemed far too simple.  Apparently I don't just think outside the box, I'm in a completely different box altogether!  My first week or so in EQII saw me falling through the world, I blame it on the Tomb Raider games luring me with secret hidey places, my husband will tell you - I'm obsessed with Secrets "ooh look! Is that a secret ledge leading to a secret tunnel with a secret climby to a secret..." well you get the idea, TR3 was my absolute favourite but they don't make them like they used to  :( 

Apparently ::). For some reason I thought EAxis had been creative and put adventure/puzzle elements into the game. Which... yeah, that was pretty dumb, thinking EAxis would get inventive with gameplay like that.

I think they used up all their inventive gameplay initiative on the rumored 'putting souvenirs on the shelf in a certain order does something neat' aspect that I have yet to figure out.

I can't figure that out either. I thought putting on all the stuff from one vacation hood might do something, but nothing so far. Maybe I'm missing an item or maybe that's just not a solution at all. Has anyone tried putting all 6 souvenirs (2 from each hood) on the shelves?

I noticed a lot of people mentioning the triple speed when going to community lots on vacation and also the fact that food on vacation lots is unsatisfying and that sims talk excessively again whilst eating. I don't have any of these problems in my game, which seems a bit weird if everyone else is. Vacation food is as satisfying as a sim with decent cooking skill cooking for themselves at home and the community lots only triple speed until the game actually makes my sim walk onto the lot, then the speed automatically goes back to the slowest setting. Is anyone else's game doing this?

I recall reading something about shelves on the BBS last night, I'm pretty sure there was a list of ways to do it and their effects.

The triple speed thing sometimes happens in my game, sometimes it slows down when they arrive, other times it just keeps on going, and still other times it's at a normal pace.

For the souvenirs shelf : browing the BBS (yes I know, I'm crazy) I've found some useful information from a prima guide thread :

5 Far East souvenirs: Sims gain faster skill building : seems to work like that in my game, seems to add to automn boost and thinking cap

5 Mountain souvenirs: Non-romantic socials are more effective : seems to work in my game, my sims went to best friend faster than ever

5 Island souvenirs: Romantic socials are more effective : seems to work in my game, but I'm not sure, as the sims I tested it with where already in love

5 Seashells: Sims gain slower bladder decay : as far as I can tell in my game it increases the bladder decay !!!

5 Voodoo dolls: Sims may hallucinate they are being attacked by bees : I didn't try it for the moment

ETA : concerning the triple speed thing : I have it on some vacation community lots and not on some others, not depending on the family I send there, and as far as I can tell, this problem is always on the same lots. I should start to write it down to be sure...

Same here.  I was thinking, "Oh, good, something more than just yak-yak-yak."  But no.  Yak away.

Apparently the want to sunbathe isn't satisfied by sunbathing :(  I just saw this with two different Sims on a beach lot.

My dissatisfactions so far:

*longer load times, but these are only to be expected.
*general whininess and whinging (no hacks in my game yet)
*actions dropping out of queues
*hail and snow on a tropical island, which forced the sims indoors, combined with (pre-made) hotels that have no indoor fun objects other than TV. although it is very funny as the sims shriek when the hail hits them on the head. again, what is not funny is the "go here" action drops out of the queue so that they STAY outside shrieking and holding their heads.
*hotel room door options do not work properly. i used "do not disturb" but this did not stop other members of the family from coming in to watch TV (rather than using the TV in their own suite)

That's strange, I get the want fulfilled, right after the sims are done with sunbathing (no matter if the sunbath is ended autonomously or cancelled by me). Are you sure that they didn't just roll the want again? My sims tend to do that a lot.


Never saw *that* on Twikki Island. It rains a lot, but in all the (in-game) weeks I've spent there so far I've never experienced hail or snow. Maybe I'm just very lucky or you are exceptionally unlucky ;).

My main dissatisfaction comes a lot from the lack of stuff for kids to do. I was kinda hoping they'd be able to dig up the yard to look for buried treasure. I mean, what kid didn't do that? Also, a lot of the stuff is not kid interactable, like the sauna, the zen garden... why can't a kid rake the gravel? wtf? I was SHOCKED that kids could use the tea table.  ::)

I wish some of the community lots were smaller, and that the load time between lots was faster. I've only been to Takemizu and Twikki Island so far, and have not nearly done everything available at those locations. I've been taking the shortest vacations, but still.

Is it just me, or does hunger decay at a faster rate while on vacation? And food just isn't as filling. I didn't buy Lobster Thermador to have it only fill 1/4 of their hunger bar. WTF? Fix it, Pes. *whines*

Yeah, the food thing is a major gripe for me too. Sims have to eat 5 or 6 times a day. I've taken to putting grills on all the lots.

The 'do not disturb' sign only keeps the maid out. You have to use the 'lock' interactions to keep out other sims.

I played a vacation home for a few hours last night with a mother and her daughter (child). After a few sim days (need more testing) the child only spun up one vacation want. The rest were to make friends, gain a skill point and get A+ report card. Mother had the same problem. They have a beach lot, and no beach wants came up. You might as well keep the sims at home. Also, I greated the welcome wagon, and they bathed and showered on the lot. Oh, and the move-in wonkiness happened there also: the perma plat mother lost her status and the plat child went to low green upon arriving at the home.

I guess my biggest gripe is the disappearing tour guides on the hotel lots. Not one hotel has a guide. Initially, the hotels had guides, but after some time, the tour guides have disappeared (happened with awesomeness installed and also in clean hack-free hoods). The major problem with this, for me, is that my sims have to travel to a community lot to go on a tour. And, as some of you have found out, tours can be deadly. I almost lost 2 sims with hunger and energy needs bottomed out. They were returned to the community lot, which, of course, had no beds.  I should note that I haven't installed the 'new' critical fix for NPC's from the big guy. I intend on doing that today.

What causes the transition to warp-speed at community lots?  Has happened at every lot at the Far East destination and is getting annoying. 

I don't know, it's driving me batty. I took to hitting 0 as soon as I saw the blue load screen switch off just in case. It happened at all locations for me, about 1/3 of the lots.

I've had issues with the slap dance and hula dance memories/vacation "badges" not sticking. I think, however, that it might be an effect of the lot debugger's "clear trash" option. I did that after the first two vacations to get rid of the memories of meeting so many random people. I didn't clear trash after they came back from their third vacation to the Far East and tai chi stuck. So now I have to take Lilly back to the beach and mountains to get those memories again. Has anyone seen if anything special happens when they get all vacation badges?

Another issue...I took sims home early from a vacation as Lilly had gotten all the area-related badges and I didn't see any reason to stay longer. Cut off a day of a 4-day vacation. They arrived home and got their benefits. Then, maybe half a sim hour later, the airport shuttle showed up again and everyone cued to go on vacation. I cancelled it out, but didn't catch one of the twins (Logan) before he got in. Anyways. Snuck in and grabbed him from the van. Forced an error on him and the van. Used the debugger to clear sim schedulers. Thought it was fixed, as everyone went about their business. At the turn of the hour, suddenly I'm loading the hotel lot they had been at and there's Logan getting out of the van. He had no option to call and end the vacation, check in/out, or any room-related options. I gave him a cell phone and had him call to end the vacation. No jump bug, no errors thrown, but no van came. Finally, I went back to the home lot and there he was. He's acting normal, but I suspect (couldn't check, because it was well past my bedtime) that the hotel lot is now dead.

It does indeed do this. There was a reference in Motive-decay-setting to the a "Seashell collection", which increases bladder decay. If you want your sims to piss themselves, apparently this is the collection for the job. A sign of Maxis's sadistic ongoing peeing obsession.

This is not a new thing: All restaurant and other conjured food behaves in such a manner. Since these foods do not undergo the cooking process, they receive no added FPV s a result of the normal cooking process, so they suck. Vacation food is pretty ineffective, which I guess is a good thing, since sims can eat it without exploding! For actual hunger satisfaction, bring your own inventoried food and Macro-Eat it. Even those bowls of mac and cheese you pilfered from the college dorm are better, at least they actually went through the cooking process and have added FPV!

Well the whole "not going through the cooking process" thing really pisses me off anyway.  After all, the kiosks that sell local food on vacation comm lots appear to have some NPC doing some cooking, same as the comm lots in Uni.  If that NPC is not cooking, what the hell is he supposed to be doing?  Just serving pre-made chow, I suppose.  Answer is to barbecue your own food for filling up, I guess, if you don't carry meals in your inventory.

Am I the only one who has been unable to successfully complete a vacation?  Every time I send sims on vacation, something goes horribly wrong!

1st time, another adult in the household showed up as a non-playable hotel guest, but then started acting oddly. Then when my playable sims returned from an outing, the adult is suddenly playable - and every last one of her bars is red red red.  No more vacation...hadn't monkeyed with the lot at that point so had no way to get her motives up fast enough to prevent her death.

Then I had a couple go on vacation with another couple from another household - these guests are like pets - you can't control their actions, but you can see their grayed out queue... The controllable female and the non-controllable female got stuck in the sauna (is there a problem with the sauna?) and the non-controllable male was stuck at the grand piano (playing for tips) - he wasn't even playing - he was just stuck motionless.  So the only sim I could actually control at that point was the male from the inviting couple - so the vacation ended right then and there.

I am afraid to try it again. What more can go wrong?

My Sims' inventories are not accessible when on vacation, which is too bad as most of them have at least one box of pizza stashed away.    Or is there some hack to allow this?

Inventories in vacation hoods are somewhat selective - it appears to me that things you put in inventory from your main hood (i.e. re-nu-you flasks, cell phones, etc.) are not accessible from the inventory itself (although you can still use the cellphone).  Rocks and things you pick up that can be used "decoratively" in your main hood are not accessible for use in vacation hoods, although jewellery that you find while treasure hunting can be accessed by using the mirror.  Maps to secret locations in other holiday areas (i.e. you go to Twikii and find a map to bigfoot's place) are not accessible until you get to the proper holiday area.  Not sure why you couldn't carry food though.

They do carry food.  Lots of it.  But aren't allowed to pull it out and eat it.  Except for grilling fish (I've added lots of grills)

According to JMP, Macro/Eat will pull the food out on vacation lots.

As far as I can tell, nothing special happens when you get all the vacation memories filled.  Nothing at all.

Tell me it isn't true!  :o

1) Dolpins controlthissim hack seems to be in conflict with the testingcheatsenabled. Anyone else have this?

2) Using the Sims2Ep6.exe and watching my internet usage EP appears to still phone homel. Is there a way to stop this short of disconnecting the modem?

Firewall. Just don't allow the program to connect.

*sigh* I supoose you're right...my ZoneAlarm doesn't liking my VIsta 64 so I guess it's back to the torrent locker......

No problems with it here. And I think you're saying that you're seeing errors with the testing cheats enabled, and you think they're being caused by dolphin's hack.  Best bet is to post the error log that gets generated (the error message tells you its name and where to find it), and post it in a new thread in the "You broke it" forum.

I can't get the testingcheat to enable at all--in a vac hood, simply won't--but it works fine without the hack in.The hack itselfvworks fine. So--you're is working ok?

Yup.  I play with testingcheats enabled all the time.

Hack's fine, cheat's fine, operator is not fine....

Afraid I can't do that.  :(  Surely someone else has done it and can confirm?  Anyone?

Well, maybe it's something subtle that we can't actually see happening. Things like extending one's life or making one more popular with the locas or some crap like that.

I forgot to mention the issue of child wants in my previous moan. Children persistently roll wants for A+ report cards whilst on vacation.

Regarding the lack of activities available for children, I have not yet tried to edit the existing hotel lots but plan to put some indoor recreation items such as Mah-Jongg tables and bookshelves in the hotel foyers. In addition, I will make sure that all children have handheld games in their inventories before leaving on vacation.

I hate the lack of child related activities as well. I thought this would be the perfect expansion pack for them to introduce more child centered activities since that's what family holidays are usually all about. I know there's the pirate ship and the sandcastle building but that's only on Twikkii Island. I was hoping to see adventure playgrounds and treehouses (and digging, why can't they do that?) and other exciting things in the mountain location. I can live with the village location being more centered on adult sims, it seems a more calm and grown-up destination. Maybe I was just expecting too much :(

Stomped by wfsanity now.

Pure maxian laziness. My impression just from reading this thread, they seem to have dropped the ball with this EP in a lot of ways. Plus more obvious bugs than ever before, like the bugginess of the other vacationers, the food, the maid, the less-than-intuitive menus, etc. Did they even playtest it at ALL this time?

But seriously. Not bothering to make the child actions really takes the cake. They just didn't want to do the extra animations.

I'm beginning to agree with what someone posted earlier -- they don't seem to have integrated it very well with Seasons.  So far, there's been a raging thunderstorm come up on every community lot my sims visited, both on the island and on the asian vacation lots (haven't been to the mountains yet). Hmm, maybe TOO much like RL.  Though they did get one thing right -- one of my sims was swimming when it started to thunder, and she no sooner got out of the water than she got struck by lightning. :)  Of course, she didn't get a memory of being shocked, though she did get the 'had an accident' memory when she didn't make it to the bathroom on time.


Other silliness I've noticed: the paperboy comes every day to an owned vacation house.  Ok, not that bad, but the mail person also shows up, though he/she doesn't actually do anything (that I've seen so far, anyway).  And if you're on a beach lot, you can dig for treasure everywhere but on the actual beach -- you can only 'comb for seashells' on the beach.

OK, but if you were a pirate burying your treasure, would you bury it right on the beach where the tide might come in and wash it away, fill the thing with water, and potentially soak your secret maps, or would you bury it a bit further inland?

With the weather problems reported, I'm generally glad that I'm running without seasons - smug bastard that I am, I rejoice that my sims get all good weather for their sunny beach vacations.  That almost compensates for the fact that (without NL) restaurants in my hotels don't work as anything but seating areas.

Odd, I've had one hail storm and a couple rain showers, but nothing unusual.

I recall reading in the guide that the weather you will experience at your vacation spot is tied in to the existing weather in your hood, and that should be taken into account when planning a vacation.  Damned if I can recall the precise language, though, as my guide is at home and I'm here at work.    Something about seasonal quadrants..

Will quote the precise language when I get home, if someone doesn't beat me to it.

That would be interesting if true, since all the lots in my test hood are either in late autumn or early winter.  So if it would snow on the home lot, it translates as rain on the beach lot.  Makes a weird sort-of EAxian sense, I suppose.

I have the guide right here, and it is the seasonal quadrants that are matched.  I.e. if you are in quadrant 3 at home, and it's fall, then your vacation site will also be in quadrant 3.  That would be summer for Twikkii Island (summer, summer, summer, summer), fall for Takemizu Village (spring, spring, fall, fall) and winter for Three Lakes (fall, fall, winter, winter).

Since I typed it before checking in, here's the precise quote (with error) from the Guide:

"If you have Sims 2 Seasons installed, you may want to consider the current season at your Sim's vacation destination.

"When Sims travel, the destination is in the same seasonal quadrant (1-4) as their home lot.  If, therefore, a Sim's home lot is in the third season of its cycle, any vacation destination your Sims visit will also be in its third quadrant.

"This matters because of seasonal effects and weather.  Because each season can influence a Sim's relationships, needs, and skills, it pays to visit a destination in a season that'll affect your Sims is [sic] some advantageous way.  For example, if a budding romantic couple is going away to solidify their relationship, they should travel somewhere during the destination's spring season, because romantic socials and relationships are boosted.

"As for the weather, this strategic effect isn't as huge, but your Sims might not want to visit the islands during the rainy seasons (spring/fall).

"You can, of course, change any vacation destination's seasonal progression in the Neighborhood view.""

People have posted about their playable sims motives decaying on vacation with no visible effect. I am having problems however with the guests.

I am playing a family of 4 (2 elder males, 1 elder female and 1 servo) who have taken 2 guests (1 servo and one adult male werewolf) along on vacation. They have a vacation house but also stay at some of the resorts so that they can get the appropriate vacation memories.

The servo guest remained behind at a community lot after everyone else had walked home. His energy was low, and it just got lower until it bottomed out. Nothing happened, and I had no more playables on the lot. I had to use maxmotives to get his motives up, then he too walked home.

Also, when I checked them all into a hotel for a night the servo guest did not seem to be able to recharge, nor did he autonomously sleep or nap. He repeatedly tried recharging for a second and then stopped. At least the werewolf guest looked after himself autonomously, ate food when room service was delivered and took baths and so on.

Back at the house, both the servo and the werewolf turned into idiots, who just stood there and did nothing while their motives decayed. They did not respond when sims tried to talk to them. I used moveobjects to move the werewolf (who was standing giggling to himself and getting hungrier and hungrier) out of the bathroom so the other sims could use it, then he seemed fine after that.

Small non-immersion type gripe. Non-playables do not autonomously swim in the ocean. I've played my ticket-beach lot for three sim weeks. Not one visitor has swum. They sift the sand, they build oodles of castles, dance, do tai chi (thanks to one of the twins teaching a frequent customer), hang out in the hottub, romance, fight, pass out and die from heat stroke...no swimming.

I haven't had any problems with the hotels yet, though they do lag because of all the sims on them.  Now granted I haven't taken a big family to a hotel yet, but this is what happened when I ordered roomservice.  The bellhop placed the tray on the edge of the table and both sims could eat at the table next to the tray.  I haven't had any problems with the hotel maids either. 

Things I have noticed running a hack-free game.  Not only is the "Primp" option gone, but the "Lick Clean" option now shows up for all my sims regardless of how neat they are.  Neater sims that wouldn't have the option before can't lick their plates clean though.  Also when putting jewelry on a sim in CAS, when I wanted to remove earrings the sim wouldn't get updated so I had to finish the sim and then bring her back into CAS to see if the jewelry had actually been removed or not. 

Dream

Edited because I had a hack I didn't realize I had. I really need to stop posting in the middle of the night.

However, this is still relevant:

Also, has anyone else noticed the fruit punch keg advertising a lot more? I've had a keg in my Sims' Greek house for 4 generations, and I've never had problems with it before. Tonight, everyone obsessed over it so much that I had to move it to the shed of items no one may use along with the bubble blower and remote control car.

Grr. Some furnishings in premade hotels are not available in buy mode. I thought I might use the eyedropper function to duplicate some things, but that does not work. I have not yet tried going in via the neighborhood view though.

Try picking up the item in buy mode then pressing shift while placing it. Hopefully it will duplicate the item.

There is a lot wrong with the gameplay. Sims get hit by Lightning Strikes to often when dig for Treasure, or medidate at the Zengarden, or walk on the Lot. To mutch Rain, Hailstorms and Lightnig Strikes  in Takemitzu Village.
Vacationguests could not sleep in Beds or nap on Couches. As mentioned before they could not swim in the Ocean.
Pet Cheats work on Vacationguests !? What have they programmed ?
Hotels with a Restaurant dont get a Cook on the  Restaurant Stove.

Non-awesome or outdated hack perhaps? My cook shows up alright (in the Flaming Dragon Hotel, that is - not been in another hotel with restaurant so far)

Hmmm. Only nonawesome is plausible, Awesome are most recent. Thx sloppyhousewife.

The level of co-ordination required to do this may be too much for me, but I will try, thanks.

Re not being able to sleep in hotels, I noticed that sometimes the action to ''check in'' drops from the queue, and then the sims cannot sleep in the beds until I queue the check in again.

How many spaces are in front of the stove? If there are not enough spaces the chef will not spawn because he does not have room to. The food still showed fine but there was not a visual cook "cooking" it. The cooks do not actually cook in the game, the food is merely spawned. For another report of an invisible chef go to this thread:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9276.0.html

The lack of dancing is bothering me. Only one of my sims have been able to learn any of the local dances- the Traveller daughter, and that was by luck. They keep spinning up wants to learn the dances, but none of the locals will dance with them, or do tai chi. I can barely even get them to do the gestures! No one has fully mastered a gesture yet.

The lack of kid actions is also annoying. It was okay on the island, because Tina (the Travellers are my test family) could swim, and comb for shells, etc. But in the mountains, she's got nothing to do. It just seems lazy- they had so much potential, but no.

I am uncertain how this differs from real life.

When I was a kid, I loved camping and hated going to the beach. There's so much to do when camping. However, it's mostly exploration and imagination, which unfortunately EAxis didn't encode in any meaningful way.

I have decided not to let my sims travel to vacation community lots together as all they do is interact with each other! Trying to leave them to do autonoumous stuff so the locals will teach them gestures isn't working. I am wondering if it is ACR, but although the ACR plant isn't on-lot (I haven't spawned one) they are still doing ACR actions, even woohooing on the park bench with sims being shocked at their nakedness!

I am sick of it always pissing it down with rain too.

You're right, for learning it seems better to take just one sim on vacation. I changed the Eastern place to mostly summer I think, just to stop the eternal rain.

Is that what English holidays are like Emma? :P

Yes it is witch. I need a holiday in the sun, dammit! :D

Even the Twikki place rains (and hails!) a lot too. That place is supposed to be eternal summer! Stupid game. Pescado would love it though, no sun in my game. :P

Has anyone else adopted Big Foot? I have, and he's not difficult to play at all. In fact, he's a better parent to the tots then their biological parents. The problem is that he's acting more like a servo than a playable sim. He is constantly cooking meals, even when his hunger bar is full. I have 'have a leftover' installed, but he doesn't get the left-overs. He cooks constantly. Is this normal game play?

(all awesomeness is updated as well as the few 'almost' awesome mods)

the ACR adjuster is only needed on-lot for teens and elders to do ACR actions, adults don't need it.

Not so much a source of dissatisfaction, but more a bit of bemusement, but I've noticed that if I have one sim family on holiday, and then go back to the main hood and play another family, the sims on holiday seem to walk past.  This seems odd, considering that the game implies that sims need to fly away some distance to get to the holiday hood, but it's probably completely in keeping with EA's 'logic'.

Sounds like possibly a hack/mod conflict to me.

They want ones with degrees and playtesting experience and only want to pay them $10/hour in Redwood City. The average bored housewife or poor college student in the Bay Area would make more working at WALMART than playtesting for Eaxis. I think this is reflected in the quality of the work.  ;)

I only tried one restaurant, and couldn't get a cook either. I haven't tried again since updating my hacks, though.

ETA: I almost forgot. I'm also having problems with Bigfoot. First it was a BYU problem, then it was walking to lots. If I had him initialize it, he'd leave, but the rest of the family would drop it from their queue. If someone else initialized it, they'd leave, but he'd get stuck at home.  I got tired of having to force off-world errors to bring them back, so Bigfoot got left out of future excursions, and when they returned home, he had to move out.  :D

Are you using the Beta version of ACR? I've noticed that, since it, my sims can't keep their hands off each other for a moment. I actually had to turn ACR autonomy down so that Stella (the live-in of Kennedy--one of the twins of the first Queen's Cove settler) wouldn't starve herself to death during her pregnancy for wanting to make out with her boyfriend. Not that this is a bad thing in general, but it would definitely get in the way on vacation.

I have moved in Bigfoot, but he only stayed for around 5 minutes. I moved him off into his own home in a forest by the mountain range. He, in his ninja garb, is the all-knowing sim of Queen's Cove, in the tradition of the All Knowing Mime^tm, he is the All Knowing Ninja^tm. Or something, I haven't decided on his official title. He visits the public beach lot and the convenience store quite a bit and has never been a problem, unlike a few of the other beachgoers (Stella especially, there's four sims she attacks on sight now).

The tread is dead. I post here.
Found a fix for invisble Chefs in Hotel Restaurants in Vacation Hoods. I have sendt a Sim to the Hotels. Made him check in and forced an error on the stove. After do this a Chef appeared and worked in the kitchen without probs. I had only to save the Lot after that. No more invisible Chefs seen. Maybe the stoves got broken in the Template Hood.

Ahh! That explains that then!


Yes, I am. Good idea for turning it down, I might do that on Vacation lots. :)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v135/2flower/MATY/nekkid_bigfoot.jpg)

Something about this picture not look right to you?  I just started playing with a Bigfoot I moved into a TSR challenge house, and sent him to the shower.  He got shooed out of the shower by a sim that needed to throw up, and I noticed that his fur/body mesh are not showerproof.  I do have default replacement skins, so that could be the cause.  I just wondered if anyone else has had this issue.  He changes back into his fur/mesh when he gets out of the shower.  It's stupid if he was made this way.

I burninated my test hood with the adopted bigfoot - I don't recall his skin not being showerproof at all, but I do recall that BUY refused to ever see him as clean.

Concerning the triple speed problem upon arrival on community lots : visiting the affected community lots in build mode and saving seems to fix it in my game.

You're joking? That's nearly £5 and I'd happily playtest for that amount of money (not forever obviously, but as a temporary summer job or something back when I was a student). I'd only make an extra 35p an hour working at some crappy supermarket and that's only because I'm over 22 and therefore qualify for the £5.35 per hour minimum wage, no doubt when I was under 22 I would have been paid much less. Happily I now get paid a lot more than the minimum wage so I don't need to worry about it anymore.

I didn't get the triple speed problem on community lots until suddenly everytime I visited one the community lot populator started throwing up errors. Once I'd managed to get rid of the error messages by turning off debug mode the game would flip to triple speed. This happened all the time until I found out which hack needed updating to stop the errors.

EDITED because I can't spell sometimes.

Hmmm, I'm seeing the opposite -- I went to all the comm lots in build mode to add things like the BUY controllers, and now every time my sims visit a lot it's in triple speed.

Maybe my Bigfoot is a hoaxer.  He's just a regular guy in a bigfoot suit.  ::)  It's probably the default replacement skin.

Well. I have the no-censor hack and my Bigfoot goes nude in the shower. It's feasible that if he's interrupted, he could walk around without his fur, just like sims in the shower who are interrupted by a birth will race around in the nude. The Bigfoot body fur is just clothing, and is changeable if you have Squinge's PregandServoAppearanceChange for Seasons. That's how mine is a Ninja. With that, hair and body is changeable. Face is not, as it seems to be some sort of special mask that can't be removed.

I have been playing Sims since the very beginning. I've always had all eps and all stuff packs. Not all are really wonderful, but I've never had any serious complaints ... until BV. Today I will remove BV and redo everything. I'm sick of the extended load times (which is VERY painful since I have almost 50,000 downloads to load!) and things crashing (like the BV Mansion, which I didn't even make or change - I haven't even seen it inside yet). And no, I'm not using any mods that were not fixed for BV. I found that out the hard way (never had an issue before) with the newspapers falling all over my lots. lol

I'm going to stick with Seasons until it gets (officially) patched properly and more mods are updated. To me, mods are a requirement. The stupid things these sims do (or don't do) drive me absolutely batty. Like constantly waking up the toddlers! Arggg.

I have the same problem. Also, whenever I edit my Sims in CAS, my game slows to a crawl if I try to fix their makeup/glasses/jewelry (basically, anything under the '4' category). The earrings are non-removable once you've created the sim, which is just stupid. *Shakes fist at EAxis*

That's part of your problem: 50,000 downloads.  Haven't you heard of jfade's compressorizer?  http://www.djssims.com/index.php?category=21

Hmm, think I might feel like playing the sims tomorrow, better start booting it up.  :D

Okay, inpinkclover wins the award for the most downloads...

I can't even imagine playing with that many in game...I hated the wait times when I got just over 10,000 files, so I purged and have since managed to keep it to around 6,000 - much more manageable and load times aren't atrocious.

Anyhoo, back on topic...

EAxis has announced they are working to correct THREE bugs... that's it. Three. Thread's over at official BBS. 

I know it's only a game and world peace (or whirled peas for those who prefer) is not hanging by a thread waiting for fixes to the BV bugs, but honestly.

And, I have been reluctant to inform, but my neighborhood died...and not from the NPC regeneration thing, either.  Semi-self-induced when I attempted to locate a malfunctioning hack.

And lastly - has anyone else noticed that we are back to all talk and no eat again?  And yes, I have the NoEatCrap latest version installed.

Uh, no.  Compression will not improve their situation at all, if anything it'll make it even slower.  Decompression might but the gains would be negligible.  The best way to improve those load times (sans upgrading) would be to get rid of any unused downloads or move them somewhere where the game won't find them.  If you're only loading stuff that you're going to use then you're not going to spend time grabbing stuff you're not going to use.

Actually no. There was a chap here who claimed 16 gig. personally I thought he was a few gig short of a terabyte. tebibyte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte).

I hate to possibly agree with Paperbladder  :P but compressing the downloads may not be the solution- the manual even says that it makes some people's load longer (I don't know how it couldn't) I decided to give it a look-see, and it more than doubled my load time. Of course, I only have 5500 downloads, but still.

50K downloads is more than a little excessive. I don't think you can really blame BV for that long load time..  ::)

Somehow I doubt EA is going to fix the problem with the eggplant juice. >:(

I have 21.8GB.  Longest load time for me is around 20 minutes (I go elsewhere while it loads, so it's no big deal).  Of course, I have a nice fast finely-tuned-and-taken-care-of PC.  I love being a comp geek.  ;D

My 5500 downloads is about 1.5 GB. It loads in 3 minutes from clicking the icon to inside the lot.  (I love my Raptor!!!) :D Compressed, it was 5 minutes just to get to the choose a neighborhood screen. Where I promptly shut the game down, deleted the downloads folder and replaced it with the backup. If it took 20 minutes to load my game, I wouldn't!

I keep my DL folder to just under one gig; have about the same load time as you do (and the Raptor).  Played tonight and noticed that my RAM dropped to 822MB (I run with two gig) in BV.  It's a RAM eater. 

Twenty minutes to load?  That's ridiculous.  My rig is three years old and I'd walk away from any game that took ten minutes to load, let alone 20. 

On a positive note, over the past couple of days I've been building a rental house and played it for the first time tonight (after converting the zoning to hotel).  The maid was super attentive, making beds, taking out the trash, cleaning toilets, etc., and best of all, only one NPC showed up.  She had a hissy fit because she could not gain entry to the house and the fencing kept her off the beach.  So she left.  This is the first vacation lodging that was actually enjoyable to play. 

Not ridiculous to me, certainly.  Hey, I can fix dinner, clean, or whatever else while letting it load.  Besides, my loading time is not as bad as those with older systems who try to play with 10+ Gigs of downloads.  Their loading time is around an hour or more.

My game takes 15-20 minutes to load too, and I've only got about 3Gb of downloads. It doesn't make too much of a difference whether I have custom content in game or not - it takes the same amount of time either way. It's annoying, but not that bad. I just open it up, and while it's loading I continue to look around on the internet for a bit or have that toilet break that I've been too lazy to get up and have. A lot of times I get so caught up in what I'm doing on the net, I forget I had the game loading  :D

Is anyone else having problems getting their sims to play SSX3?  They will play it autonomously, but whenever I direct them to do it, it drops out of their queue.  I tried replacing the computer (lost $1000 due to depreciation, grr) and still the same problem.

And no, I don't have any hacks related to computer usage.

I wish, they are all over that computer >.<

Gah. This isn't worthy of a separate topic, so I'm tacking it on here. Has anyone been able to get "familyFunds" working since BV? I can't seem to do it. With family name, without family name. With capitalization, without capitalization. In lot view, in 'hood view. I finally had to go into SimPE to edit the family funds down $8,000 for a private school fee (I prefer one huge payment, it hurts more).

If you've got it working, what exact format are you using? It seems much more picky. I used to just use it in-lot and type "familyFunds -35000". Worked. Now, nada.

The family funds cheat is working fine for me post BV. The format is the same as it has always been, familyfunds familyname amount, or if the name has a space enclose it in quotation marks, familyfunds "family name" amount. The only difference I have noticed is that it works in-lot as well as from the neighborhood screen.

I've been using familyfunds lately and agree - working fine in both neighborhood screen and in lots.

I still have crammyboys computer madness fix installed and last night I directed a sim to ply ssx and it dropped out of queue... but they will play the computer games autonomously.

Does that old hack need updating?

I am also using Crammyboys no computer madness fix and I am having no problem directing sims to play ssx3. I did have to take out my CC computers though (too lazy to update them).

Well, then. Either it's some weird user error or I have a hack conflict. Strange for it to conflict with a cheat, though. Hopefully I can get it working before Lilly endows the 'hood's school.

No, not really -- after all, look at the problem with the DMA teleport thing causing weird responses from the Tour Guides in the vacation hoods.

I've had trouble getting it to work too-but it was on a dorm lot. I bought them a mirror and wanted to replace the cost as it was my unawesomeness that made me forget to get them one before moving them in. Didn't work in either lot or neighbourhood. I haven't tried it in a regular hood, but I admit it isn't a cheat I use often anyway. So I'm not that bothered if it has stopped working for me :D

Ever since BV any sims that is directed to a double bed will automatically sleep on the right side of the bed.  You can not make them sleep on the left side until a sims is sleeping on the right.  It's not a big deal, but it bugs me that the first to bed must take the right side unless the sims go to bed at the same time.  Is anyone else noticing this problem?

TwoJeff's Smart Beds or Pescado's bedsidefix fix this.

But no, you aren't hallucinating.

Thanks Zazazu, I'll download the bedsidefix.

The wedding party plus honeymoon scenario is not working properly. Someone posted about it on a sims2 community on livejournal recently, and I had the exact same experience.

My engaged sim planned a honeymoon and then threw a wedding party. The party went fine, the sims got married and the dialogue came up that they had had a great party. Instead of the limo arriving however, the party started all over again. I nuked the stuck party with the Lot Debugger, but still no limo.

On clicking on the sim and the vacation menu, the sim had the option to cancel the vacation but I initially did not do this, to see whether the vacation scenario would start but it did not. Eventually I had the sim re-book the vacation and a dialogue appeared to say that this would cancel the previously planned vacation, which of course was fine by me.

Maybe a hack conflict?  The scenario worked fine for me, though I've only seen it once.  If I recall correctly, they get picked up by the airport shuttle, not the limo, after the party is over.

I've noticed the community lot wedding then honeyhoom does not give the holidaymakers the vacation benefits when they return home. Works fine when they have a wedding party at home, then go on honeymoon though.

I had some honeymoons work ok, and the last one did not work : after the pop up with the score for the party, I had an error (attached). Cancelling did not work so I had to hit delete, and the party start all over like tngrspacecadet. I deleted the party controller using the FFS debugger and no shuttle...
I am not awesome at all, but I think the problem may be pets as it was the first family with pets where I tried a honeymoon (the working one before were in families without critters).

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Did you leave anyone behind to look after pets/younger sims or did you hire the nanny?

The parents of the groom (one elder and one adult) and the sisters of the groom (2 teens) would have stayed at home with the 2 dogs (former stray wolves). I cancelled the non-working honeymoon and had the bride book a vacation "for now", and it worked without problem.

about BV things that i didn't like it .. there are the way to order the photo.
my ultra-poor sims can't order photos 'casue the haven't a pc :P
i wonder why maxis didn't mede "order photos" via phone too  :-\

Ordering photos via the phone wouldn't make sense.  How do they get the images to the printer?   Though they could have photo printing services in the shops, that they could visit.

What printer?  When you order photos, a delivery person shows up an hour later with them and leaves the book at your door.

well they could made a photo shop or a community shop to print photo :P
btw i didn't like to have a computer in home 'cause the "play-maniac sims"will play with pc all the time  ::)

Does the game generate yet another NPC for that?

IIRC, it's the usual grocery delivery person.

yep it's the usual delivery man/woman

about dissatisfaction, i think also that the changing cloth (in / out cloth) shouldn't be autonomous, many time you go out just for few secs. (paying taxes or taking the paper, and this thing that they change cloth, every minutes they go out or going back in home, is very annoying

ummm... but it's about seasons, sorry for th OffTopic XD

I haven't seen a no auto change clothes hack, but there are several hacks that suppress the spin animation, e.g. Dizzy's version in the Peasantry or Monique's at MTS2. I have the latter and it works fine.

Don't know -- I haven't checked if it uses a new NPC, or just uses one of the grocery delivery folks to deliver the pictures.  The delivery person has a different truck, though.

Really? I thought it was the same truck, but I have to admit that I didn't look too close.

Same truck type, different graphics on the side.

Is there more than one family with the same surname? When that happens, the family who was created first, or who appeared in the Family Bin first, will receive the funds, no matter what. So if, for example, you have some elderly parents named Smith, and also their moved-out spawn of the same name, the elder Smiths will receive the funds, even though you are playing the younger Smiths' lot.

@seapup: The familyFunds cheat has always worked in both the neighbourhood and lot views AFAIK. This is not new.

Edited for stupid punctuation.

ETA:


I'm having the opposite problem. My sims NEVER auto-change into outerwear. I'm currently investigating my hacks for potential conflicts, but the HCDU showed nothing, and I have no outerwear-related hacks that I know of.

No. There were only two lots at the time, and the one was Keith, the other was Young. I don't know what I was doing. I got it to work the other night.

EDIT: Now I know what was up. I tried the cheat the second time on my self-sim to give her the endowment from Lilly's will for the 'hood's school...$48,000. Family name is Abubu, and it worked. I went into the founder's lot (family name Keith) last night and the first thing I tried was familyfund'ing -$48,000. Nope. Sorry. No effect. Whatever, I'll fix it in SimPe. I entered SimPe today to make the change, and I have three households listing Keith as the last name. One is the main family of strays, the other is a family of just two strays. But it's that small stray family that is now at -38587 due to my repeated efforts. Oops. Needless to say, the family is now going by Burnett, since Lilly's second husband had that last name and I certainly can't name the house Young (like her son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids still in the house) as her son living out of the house with his family has the same name. Gah!

Mine don't either.

Emma and Notveryawesome, do you have nounneededcoats (Pascado) ? From what I understand from the code, it only make sims change into their outerwear if the temperature is below -70 (not that often in my game).

Yes, I do. Thing is though, my sims go downtown or whatever and all the townies are in their outerwear but my sim isn't. I thought 'No Unneeded Coats' would be constant throughout the game not just for the current playable.

From what I understand, nounneededcoats change the behaviour of sims going through a door or a gate. It has nothing to do with the arrival of sims on a lot through a portal. It seems (in my game) that sims arriving that way (on a community lot or a home lot) will always wear outerwear in winter, regardless of the temperature. As the temperature on a community lot rapidly tends to zero, with nounneededcoats the townies will probably not change to everyday upon entreing the shop, because the temperature also needs to be below -70 for sims to change back to casual.
I'm not sure that's clear, my english is not cooperating right now.

I had never tried the familyfunds cheat from in-lot before, because I stupidly believed the EAxis readme :

"familyfunds NAME XXXX
Assigns money value to a family from the neighborhood level."

Stupid EAxis readme.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Yes, there was an adult family member to stay behind.

I have all EPs and only awesomehacks  :P

I expect that this is something that will be patched.

Thanks for the explanation, pioupiou. I've removed nounneededcoats, because I really don't care if my vampires wear coats unnecessarily. Besides, isn't it in a supernatural being's best interest to sort of blend in with the crowds? ;)

I had a weird glitch last night. A YA on vacation at Twikki Island autonomously queued up "gesture-hang loose" 3 or 4 times in a row. But the picture on the action icon was a pink bottle, and the animation and sound effect was drinking love potion. He did not even have love potion in his inventory as far as I know.

Agreed, thanks pioupiou. I'm taking mine out too ;D

Yep, sure have heard of it ... and I use it.  I played BV *first* without *any* downloads, and I was not impressed. There are a few things I miss, but I think I'll wait for a patch, then wait to see what you all say about the patch. Then maybe I'll try it again.  :D

I don't have 50k downloads on purpose! lol  There are some absolutely gorgeous items out there. I like realism in my game so I go thru a lot of items finding just the right thing (can't always tell by the pictures how good an item looks in game).  Takes time to weed thru all the files to get rid of what you don't want and/or need.  I'm down to 35k files now, hoping to eventually get it down to 20 or so.  We'll see!  hehe


So the general consensus is NOT to use the compressorizor, eh?  Hmmm, when I researched it, all I found was good stuff about it.  I'll do a search here, see if it's been talked about before (I didn't know about MATY until just recently).  Man, when my drive crashed I lost my backups (because I'm an idiot and never got around to putting another copy on my storage drive) so I don't have the uncompressed versions anymore.  This is going to be a LONG day.

I've seen someone with this problem on livejournal. In their case it started when they directed the sim to book a vacation, then it started to crop up with other actions, picking up the son, playing with the cat, eating, so forth so on.
They narrowed it down to a conflict between syberspunk's apologise and renuyu orb ltw fix.

Oh dear. I have neither of those. Maybe I will be able to get an error log, if it persists.

I tend to run with debug mode on at all times, and BV seems to have more of the weird things that happen without actually causing an official error.  You may not get a log, if it's one of those glitches.

That would have been me. I only had that problem with those two hacks, and haven't had it again since taking them out. I'll be interested to see if you can recreate it/what's causing it in your game tngrspacecadet.

ETA: my LJ post (http://community.livejournal.com/thesims2/4409094.html). My sim did have a potion in his inventory, but only one. He ended up taking three or four in a row at one point.

Is anyone getting Climate Controller errors during rain? It's happening without hacks. Doesn't seem to be breaking anything and it's only once per storm, but it's annoying.

I haven't had any rain yet but I will keep an eye out to see if it happens, then it will just be one more odd error in my game.  :-\

I will try playing with debug mode on and see what happens.  :P

I'll try running with scissors to see what happens.  :P

Hey, one of my sims cut off his hand that way!  :-X

Oh. I finally found a way to get the tourists to swim at my public beach:
(http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z301/kariminger/snapshot_13ef2fa2_1416e682.jpg)
Yup, drown someone. Now, there are repercussions. Iyana was so upset that I'd killed her mother (my most beautiful sim  :'() that she went and screwed her step-grandpa. Ew.

LMAO - that's just priceless  :D

Wow how?

Because I'm tired of seeing the beaches empty with no people other than my sims.

Empty?  I wish mine were empty, instead of all the stupid tourists starting and not finishing sand castles until there's hardly any room for my sims to walk...

Sounds like you have empty templates with no townie regen installed. Do you? My beach lots are swarming with vacation townies ::)

On residentials? Yeah, you don't generally get people trespassing. This is a public beach lot...a residential with a ticket-taker, hot tub, water wiggle, beach chairs, and boom box.

That works, eh, on a residential lot?  I would have guessed that it would be more something to do with a comm lot, but now I appear to be wrong.  Res lot with ticket taker - is this "OFB required?"  That would explain why I don't "get it", so to speak.

Yes, the ticket taker is an OFB thing, as are home businesses.

Thought as much.  Heigh ho.

OFB is much fun. I didn't fully appreciate it until I started using Business Runs You (directing sales socials manually sucks). OFB is, at heart, what my current 'hood is about. That and giving townies heatstroke, apparently.

Talking about heatstroke, what's with the permanent surnburn? Ugh. I have one sim who seems to have turned into a lobster.

My tans and sunburn don't seem to be permanent.  Although, I have only had one of each, but they seem to disappear in time - seems like quite a long time, but it does go.

I was quite surprised to see my first sun tan sim..especially since I use custom default skins among other custom skins.  But my sim turned darker in the summer.  I did not have him layiing out in the sun though or anything so is it just something that happens in the summer season?

I'm still annoyed by the fact that most of my water surrounded terrains do not make suitable terrains for my beach lots.  There is always massive hilliness or steep slopes involved.

My sunburn is permanent also :(

You have to reburn them to get them back to normal.  THANKS EA.

My sunburns aren't permanent, but they do take a few days to slough off. The 'hood is Summer-Fall-Spring-Summer. So if there's an especially hot day in the middle of the first Summer, it might be until the first day of Fall before I see it gone. The first double-Summer was especially hot. I'd have a sim call a buddy and most of the people listed were bright red. I also have a townie (Peter Sims...why did I forget the Seasons empty template?) who is permanently sooty-faced due to getting hit by lightning during the wet season. Once I get a beauty shop going, I'll fix it. In the meantime, he's kept around for pointing and laughing at.

Heatstrokes, however, are permanent. During that same double-Summer, I lost two townies to it. Dumb idiots were hanging in the hottub on a super-hot day.

I took my sims on vacation (staying at a custom hotel) and their "guests" can not sleep or relax on a single bed. I can only get them to relax on a double bed. My household sims have no problem but how are the guests supposed to go to sleep? I tried the control pets cheat and can direct them to do other things but not sleep in the bed???
Please tell me I'm doing something wrong and not that this is the way it was programmed.   ???

I'm really starting to believe EA/Maxis, whoever, purposefully leaves things out of their EP's because they know some modder will make a hack for it. Less work for them.

All my sunburns aren't permanent, just some of them. I had one kid who got burnt his first day as a child and was well into his teens before I managed to reburn him so he changed back.  :P

Alas, that IS the way it was programmed. Guests don't need sleep, because the game periodically recharges their motives.  I took a guest on vacation once, and swore I'd never do it again -- it's just too borked as it's programmed.

I think there's a 'guests sleep in beds' hack floating around somewhere, but for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it right now. If I remember I'll modify this post.

If you're playing with the testing cheats on, you can slide down their energy, and they will find a bed to sleep in.

I've had guests with energy almost in the red, and they didn't sleep, and then suddenly their energy jumped back up to about 1/2 way.

Arggh..(shakes head)...
I thought I noticed something funny with their energy motive going up a little but I thought it was just my eyes.
So I have to "cheat" in order to make the game do something that is common sense, what else is new.  ::)

That's so odd. I definitely did it that way. I accidentally took a townie on vacation with the family one trip, and he was annoying me.  But that family was pretty borked. Maybe I just got lucky with it being borked in a good way.

Hmm, interesting. They probably built that cheat in for the same reason the dormie Uni protect "cheat" is there: Because the AI is so braindead stupid that if it isn't there, sims will just pee on themselves and pass out in their own urine otherwise.

Probably. The guest did 'react' to the BUY I had in the various bathrooms, so her bladder never got critical, but she wouldn't sleep.  In fact, she did get in the red while her and her boyfriend were on a comm lot, and popped up a message to the effect that she was exhausted, and was heading home.  But she never did leave the lot, and when they got back to the hotel together, her energy went back up a few minutes after they arrived. They even woohooed in the bed under ACR control, and he fell asleep, and she got up and wandered to the beach, where she stayed all night.

i wondered what was up with that.  i tell my sims to walk off the lot, and then the action drops out of their queue.  also, is anyone else having as much trouble with the wants slots as i am?  i don't see any seasons wants at all since i installed bonvoyage, and after the sims get done going thought all the vacation wants, the slots stay empty.

Walking between lots is working perfectly in my game.

You have one or more (probably more) incompatible or old version hacks in your game that are causing these problems. Make sure you update all your hacks to BV versions. If that doesn't work, take them all out and put them back in a binary search to see which one is causing the problem.

IIRC, it was TJ's visitor controller that was the number one culprit of that (walk to lot) problem. He's since updated it.

thanks.  i was trying to figure out which behavior mod could possibly be causing the conflict, and i forgot i had a visitor transporter installed. 
i ran sw's conflict detector but it didn't come up with anything.

*off to get the new hack*

i just installed the ep today so i'm still fixing up the borks. :P

Once again, I place the blame squarely on tight pants.

 But I like tight pants.


On men, anyway.

 :P

I read through the ENTIRE thread, which was quite a task.

And I was wondering if most of everyone's dissatisfaction was taken care of by some of Pescado's fixes.

I know the too many character files is taken care of. And I think I saw a fix for banning the locals getting their greetings contaminated by stupid tourists trying to teach geishas to chest pound.

Also, I had this thought about how long the fire dance takes to learn in comparsion to the other local dances:

The reason it probably takes longer to learn the fire dance could be the fact that Tiki island has no Autumn? Mayhaps the reason you seem to learn the slap dance and tai chi faster is that you're there in a season that gives a boost to learning these things.

Also, can you take thinking caps on vacation and speed up the learning process that way?

Thinking caps only appear to affect core skills learning.  I've never seen them make a difference when learning the 'hidden skills'.

Nah.  I don't have Seasons, and all my sims live in perpetual blissful weather, and the fire dance just takes a long time to learn.  I think EAxis felt that this would reflect a steeper learning curve.  By comparison, the slap dance takes less time to learn than the pounding chest gesture.

A lot of the earlier dissatisfaction was fixed by Awesome hacks, especially the interaction related stuff.  Some glitches are just "part of the fun" so to speak.  Lag is inconsistent and seems to have a number of possible causes (secuROM issues, computer specs, graphics card issues, unknown, etc.).

It makes sense that it would take longer, I was wondering if the Seasons bonuses were affecting some people's view of it.

For glitches are just "part of the fun" so to speak.
 
I would prefer a fix for seating on a Toilet overridden for pee in your Pants after struck by lightnig. I hate EAxis Peeobsession period.
And the only side of my sims Books flipping retour visible is not funny eighter. (an very old bug recreated)
Not to mention the Bellhop not able to enter the check in table (boot) whatever its called after serving a meal. Because of stupid Vacation townie behavior.
The very first impression i got from BV was a westwallshadow visible attached on the new campingchair. Because somone at EA dont know how to proper name the damn shadows. Same for the hoteldresser. But i found it later.

i yanked out all my hacks last night, including "antiwatchout"  which i hadn't remembered was in there because it doesn't work, then reloaded the game.  everything worked perfectly.

then i put a few back in that shouldn't have affected the wants slots or the walking function, and simmies can still walk to other lots, but the want slots are borkened again.   not sure which behaviors are affected, although the lotdebugger fixes them temporarily. 
slogging on...   :-\

Has there been a fix for booking honeymoons?

What I want to know is if anyone will be able to enable the misc. jewelry slot for teens. I was all giddy about the new jewelry options only to find that my rebellious teens will not be able to pierce their faces. I don't see the point in re-categorizing most of my jewelry because a good deal of it can be used on teens. Or am I completely missing something? If i try to use the wardrobe wrangler to mark it for teens-adults or elders and the misc jewelry option, will that enable the misc jewelry option for teens in game? Some how I doubt it, but I couldn't be sure, the last time I attempted this my game crashed and I had to replace the files I'd changed.

Well, my elder Sims are going to file complaints against EAxis with the AARP for age discrimination!   ::)

I had sent a wealthy, semi-retired couple to Takemizu Village for a few days.  When they went shopping in preparation for the tea ceremony, low and behold, no kimonos are available for the oldsters!  Not only do kimonos authenticate the ceremony and make for great photo ops, but they are perfect camouflage for those sagging bellies and boobies.

Come to think of it, none of the vacation clothing is available to elders.  Discrimination!!

I hadn't noticed that, but yea, that's really lame.  Especially since in RL (and in my game), it's the retired elders who usually do most of the traveling.

Well, you can get some kimonos at MTS2 for elders but I am unsure about whether they need the last happy holiday pack or not. I have these so I had not noticed the game didn't come with them but you shouldn't have to resort to custom to finish off what EA left out.

All About Style did some nice elder clothing for BV: http://www.all-about-style.com/senior_feca7.html (http://www.all-about-style.com/senior_feca7.html) and http://www.all-about-style.com/senior_maca3.html (http://www.all-about-style.com/senior_maca3.html).

i've got a mod that makes all the adult clothes available to all adults, eg. young, elder and "regular" ones, but being me i haven't checked it out since i installed bv.  i'm pretty sure i got it at mts2... :P

Sounds like Motoki's Clothing equality mod here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,1243.0.html). I'm not sure if it has to be updated for BV for the kimonos to show up for elders, though.

Moonlitmaiden (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/moonlitmaiden) has recategorised some adult clothing for elders, including the kimonos and mountainwear.

Moonlitmaiden's stuff aren't hacks for the games files, they are "recolors" make available to the elders.  I'd prefer something like Motoki's work.

I installed Bon Voyage last week and downloaded the No Cd. I never ran the game without using it. At first everything was great, but perhaps after two days of playing it I got bombarded with a bunch of lag a choppy play. I can't even use the fast modes, they do nothing but run slower then the original speed. It drives me so nuts I have to shut down the game and do something else. Whats really frustrating is, it worked at first. I'm probably going to have to remove BV. I don't know what else to do. I looked through this thread and someone mentioned messing with your firewalls, but, I shouldnt have SecuRom so I shouldnt have a need to mess with firewalls right? I also fiddled with graphics and I've kept my downloads to a minimum. Anyone have helpful suggestions?

Well, so would I really :D But these will do for now until someone hopefully updates Motoki's work :)

you say that like it's a bad thing.  aside from the added filesize, they look okay.

Just for someone's (anyone's) eddification, I've managed to locate the files that were borking my game: "anitwatchout", which was already a known problem for Sims walking off the lots, and "teen_woohoo" which was screwing up the want slots.  I should be used to the Eaxis of Eavil policing my morals, by now, but it still irritates me a bit..

Anyway, hope this helps.


 :-*

It has been established in its thread here that there is no problem with antiwatchout and BV; there's another hack causing the walk off lots problem.  And  woohoo_teens has been updated for BV over on the inteen site.  I suggest you do research before blaming the wrong hacks or your own stupidity for not updating them.


Carry on...

trevanac, you should not have Securom if you've used the no-cd key from the beginning but only if you installed on an administrator account on your pc. If it was on another user without admin access to files then SecuRom installed with the game.
Try checking your firewall logs and see if Sims2ep6.exe has been trying to access the net, making sure that you do not have auto-login enabled in game before you panic about it. Double check your processor and graphics card as well. The lag may be a pc problem. Especially if it plays fine for several minutes to an hour before the lag starts up. It may not be securom, it may be that your computer needs basic maintenance, that there's too much custom, or that it's your hardware. Or, it could be securom, it's up to you to track it down before you point fingers.

I had a problem with getincarfix, or similar name.  I didn't have it in the folder with the rest of Pescado's hacks, so didn't know to take it out when it wasn't part of the new director's cut.

With this hack in, one Sim could walk to another lot without problems, but if there were 2 Sims no one could leave by walking.  After removing this hack, walking to other lots worked fine.

Hook

Morriganrant

I did all I could to ensure I was not installing SecuRom. I'm fairly certain I don't have it. I don't think the problem is SecuRom anyway. I did install it with the no cd, on the main user so I'm definately not pointing at SecuRom. Its why I said, I don't think it could be a firewall problem, Right? .. I was asking.  To, be sure. I will check my specs. Its a new laptop and I had bought it to meet the latest requirement of the sim games. I was more wondering more if it is a bug that they mentioned on the latest patch. I really hesitate to figure out how to install said patch since others have recommended on this site not to.  So, that's why I posted. I'm dissatisfied with my choppy play! and wondering if someone thought the patch would fix it. Thanks anyway.

I had choppy play with vanilla BV, then I firewalled it and the pause-lag I had been experiencing in the neighborhood view stopped. Now my lag is caused by BV not playing as nicely with the amount of custom content that Seasons seemed to have no problem with. Does it have a common connection? Certain lots and not others, size, beach, location that kind of thing. With or without custom.

Isn't this hack necessary then? I still have it installed and the 'walk to lot' action for 1 or more sims works for me....

what a sweetheart you are.  i just got the ep a couple of days ago.  the woohoo teens is not inteen, fyi.  the antiwatchout was not working in my game before bv, if my sims were able to walk off the lots after i took it out, that tells me that it was a problem.
and you're not bowing low enough to use "namaste" as a signature. 

and i was making a comment about the elder clothes, not asking for your opinion.  opinions are like assholes, you know, everyone has them, and some are nastier than others.

namaste yourself.

love,

The BV version of Jenflower's Woohoo Teens (http://box156.bluehost.com/~aestudi1/forums/inteenimater/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=427) is to be found at the Inteen site.  So you are right, it is not Inteen.  But I think you'd better go back and read what Jsalemi said.  He didn't claim that Woohoo Teens is Inteen, he stated that there is an update at the Inteen site - and he's right.

I had a problem with my sims not arriving when I used the "walk to" feature.  The problem hack was TwoJeff's Visitor Controller (I was still using the old paintings version).  I upgraded to the new version - also found at the Inteen site, but you'll need to register there to get it as it's beta - and the problem was solved.  Others have found the paintings version of the VC caused the same problem in their game.  Check you aren't using the wrong version of the Visitor Controller.

Old version. Get BV version, do not use pre-BV versions in BV. This problem does not exist in my game, so it's purely your refusal to update for new expansions.

Appreciate the link, Emma.  The kimonos will do quite nicely for my old Simmies. 

FYI, we are well aware that woohoo teens is not Inteen.  Additionally, quite a number, if not most of us HAVE had BV installed more than a few days and have hashed through a lot of hack issues since then.  I removed a hack once which seemed to solve one problem, only to find that this was only because it conflicted with a completely different hack.  There are a number of false positives in this regard, especially if some of your hacks are not up to date, and you appear to have found one.

You have received good advice.  Try not to self-identify as pokeable.

Seriously, just because it worked before a NEW EP came out, doesn't mean it doesn't need updated.

You learn very quickly to update your hacks before mentioning you have a problem. More often than not, someone else has already reported the problem and it's been fixed. By stating it AGAIN, in the same thread the issue was first reported, kinda shows that you didn't update your hacks like you are SUPPOSED to when a new EP comes out.

When I use to have too much custom content, the larger lots would play choppy, but the smaller ones would run fine. I can see a bit of choppiness in the most smallest of lots now and my bigger lots that worked fine are nearly impossible for me to have patience with. I don't have alot of Custom Content anymore.  I guess why I'm confused is because BV ran fine for 2 or 3 days and I played for hours and hours. THen suddenly the hotels wouldn't work without all the choppiness so i kept moving my family to a smaller ones. When I had Dell build this thing I specifically gave them the system requirements for BV because I knew it was coming out. Video cards, everything, I made sure they built me what I needed. This just sucks.

Eh, well, system requirements lie. Some people have reported that their loading times and such are actually shorter with BV, some report longer, mine were so long to begin with I can't tell the differance.
It may be that your computer really can not handle it, even if the box says it should. Did you get above the requirements or the minimum?
Have you installed anti redundancy? If you have not, then do so, and then learn how to remove extra characters from the game files. There's plenty of info in the war room.
Have you used the compressorizer program? If not, I recommend that too. It can compress your downloads folder to a much smaller size in some cases. http://www.djssims.com/index.php?category=21

I have all of the updated DC (as of two days ago) and I also have the issue of other patrons stealing my food from under my nose in a hotel restaurant. The server came and put the plate down, and before my sim's water glass could disappear, some other vacationer came over and took the plate. Bastard. *Edit - I still have to pay for each plate too, no matter how many times this happens. I'm hoping this is a bug and not a feature. The price of my total dinner after feeding three of these sorry, fraggle rockin mooches was ridiculous.*

I have only managed to be able to capture the ninja by making my sim's wife meditate. If you go to the Zen Garden and meditate the ninja appears the first time you do it every single time. I couldn't catch him, so I went back to the vacation home, then walked back to the lot, rinse, repeat. Finally I had her meditate, made my other sim active immediately, and as soon as he appeared I clicked learn to teleport for my guy and it worked fine. I have yet to figure out how the hell to catch him if my sim is alone. Bastard.

What does the pickpocket look like? I've played all the lots for two rl days and have yet to see him.

Finally, my sim has all the vaca memories and nothing special has happened to him either. Not that I'm aware of anyway. And no, I don't have the prima guide either. Could barely afford the expansion as is. I would appreciate the suggestion of someone linking to the information that was made earlier.

Off to pirate some boo-tay.

Well, given that 2 out of 3 vacation destinations are, apparently, inaccessible by car, it stands to reason that making vacation destinations driveable by car was not high on the list of things to do.

He looks like Snidely Whiplash. Take anti-redundancy out, wait until you see him, put it back in again.

There doesn't appear to be any reward for getting all the vacation memories. I guess it's just something to do.

So has someone figured out how to make custom locals/tourists so that they're not butt ugly? I remember seeing someone complaining that they were not spawning off of the replacement templates people were using.

A little bit of both. My husband actually looked at the requirements and talked to dell asked them if he was getting enough. I guess it wasn't enough. Not for BV anyway. I have a huge monitor so the only way I could make everything look good was to mess with the "smooth edges" and adjusting it back to "less" helped a bit, but it still can't handle the provided vacation hotel lots. I'm so crushed my pc can't handle it. What would help with choppy play? Upgrading RAM? The video card?

and btw, I do have the anti redundancy hack :)

1) Make sure you disable background running processes as instructed in the "optimizing performance" section of the EA booklet that comes with BV.  Disable your virus software as well, if you can.
2) Disconnect your computer from the internet - run offline.  Some lag has been reportedly caused by the game or secuROM trying to phone the mother ship.
3) Check graphics settings - set shadows to medium (this will likely make little or no difference in appearance of the game, but will hopefully release some system resources).
4) Launch your game from the Sims2EP6.exe file, not the launcher.

If you don't do some/all of the above already, I would try them before dropping money on more RAM or a new vid card, especially since you have already got a computer that has a card with the right specs (according to EA anyway).

And as others here have pointed out, you're still practicing stupidity.  If you notice, I gave you the proper advice on where to find the latest woohoo_teens (unlike you, I DO bother to read what's being said), and pointed out (as did the person who wrote the hack) that antiwatchout was not a problem. 

No, the problem continued to be yours because you're too fucking stupid to do your homework before opening your mouth. If you want nice, you're at the wrong site -- here we poke stupid people with sharp, pointy sticks until they get less stupid or leave.

Try this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9684.0.html).  You may also want to use Argon's empty BV templates (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg264144.html#msg264144).

Thanks Kyna, I found that thread right after I posted that. Of course.

I just wonder why the stupid locals aren't using replacement templates like they should be.

They're also not using names from Jordi's live mod, which is in my game.

I suspect their characters are like the PV/ST/VV townies, in that they already exist in the neighbourhood template rather than being created, clothed and named when the game requires them.  This would be why they aren't drawing from replacement face templates.  I assume EA did it this way so that the tourists would have same last names as the other characters in the same tourist family.

I wonder if there is a way to make a custom template for them then. I wouldn't mind have another default replacement around for that.

Like how Madam Mim made the Medieval townies. If someone made a template for the tourists and locals and shared it. T'would be nice.

You said this and I got this picture in my head that cracked me the hell up. I thought, "Surely not!" I thought wrong. Took out anti-redundancy and waited. I knew who he was at first sight. That's amusing. And thanks for the help!

It would. And then the tourist families could actually be families.

Since I don't know how to do this, but I want it, I volunteer for testing. =p

The only problem I see with this is that, if you take antiredundancy out, you start spawning tour guides again (unless you installed the patch, presumeably).  I know I have a charlatan in my game who has shown up once even with antiredundancy loaded.

As long as you don't visit the vacation areas after removing the hack (i.e., wait for the charletan on a regular community lot), you won't get any more tour guides. Even if you did wait for him on a vacation community lot, you'd only have one unless you went to more than one lot.

I dunno what the deal is with anti-redundancy and the pickpocket - not being awesome and such... only know if you aren't getting them and take it out, one wil show up. Perhaps one needed to spawn before you put the hack in the game or maybe the game needs one for each vacation area and one for community lots (as the vacation ones are actual part of the 'local' group with the proper clothes and all) or something. Not sure.

But taking it out long enough to get one and putting it back in doesn't look like it'll blow up a game. Just make sure to put the hack back in.

The only problem I see with this is that, if you take antiredundancy out, you start spawning tour guides again (unless you installed the patch, presumeably).  I know I have a charlatan in my game who has shown up once even with antiredundancy loaded.
[/quote]

I thought of this beforehand so I didn't visit the vaca lots. I hung around the little pet store for awhile and he showed up fairly quickly. I (in all my non-awesomeness, late to read the threads thouroughly) actually have the patch installed, but don't automatically trust that it will fix what it says it does. I immediately went home, quit the game, and put anti-redundancy back in JIC. But thanks though.

They do


They are.

If you have the right version of SimPE you can just move sims you prefer into those families and move the others into family 0 with the other dead people.

Members of vacation families aren't flagged as related to each other in SimPE, and they barely know each other. For example, teenage Connor Dawn has a 6 daily relationship with the woman who should be his mother, Caryl Dawn, and they are flagged as "known" to each other but nothing else.

Further, moving all the families around like that would be enough of a pain in the ass that making a whole new replacement template would probably be very little more work, with a much greater payoff. Anyone have links to a good tutorial?

Edited stupid post because I == idiot.  :-X

1. Why are tourists so ugly?
2. I cannot see the moment when people ask each other to play pirates all the time and get their relationships worse.
3. how Maxis could code a stereo so sims dance hula, slap in silence? I turn off the stereo, I delete it - but sims keep dancing like crazy idiots.

Hey, Ailias, a tip. Before you CARRY ON POSTING, have a look at the time stamp of the threads. It's now MARCH. This thread stopped discussion in OCTOBER. Generally, don't post in a thread older than three months.

*jemjie waits for the pointy sticks to come out*

I think it's generally preferred for people to post in an already existing thread than to start a new one, so I think this is fine.

1. Because unless you use default replacement facial templates, they're generated from the Maxis-provided templates. Hence, ugly.
2. ... what? If I understand what you're saying, simply X out of the action or else look for a No Autonomous mod for the pirate game.
3. Try canceling the action.

Haven't read the FAQ, have you.  :P

Nah, just going by the more visible 'OMG! We've already HAD a thread about that in the long past!' histrionics I've seen here. Necromancy seems to be considered less evil than making a 'useless' thread that would likely have gotten directed to this one anyways.

Every forum seems to feel differently about it. Some hate new threads and would rather you post in something over a year old than start a new one. Others, the reverse. Meh.

Yeah, me myself prefer bringing the old thread back up to starting a new thread of the exact same topic. I never get the reason why 'necromancy' is bad. (Anyway, this is the only forum that use the term necromancy :()

I'd rather they'd be just one thread for a topic, but after it has "died" it should only be brought back to life with new info, not "thanks, this is great" or "I agree lol!".

But that's me. I'm sure some get right pissed if the same thread is constantly being brought up.

Um if that's the case, then not only I don't think they should bring back the thread, but they better not posting that useless message at all :P

No it's not.  I've seen it used on other forums.

I was really referring to the fact that this person had posted in three other old threads too, wanted to stop it before it carried on going - especially as the new posts were not adding any information.

Kyna's right.

Some forums don't have nearly 6,000 members and are less irritated by deja vu, some forums are tiny and to get what traffic they can, but most large forums do not want to see re-runs all the time. If they don't use the term "necromancy" they have other terms for not digging up ancient or non-current discussions.

When necromancy is committed here, 99% of the time it is a sure sign that the poster has not read the FAQ and is not lurking MOAR.

jemjie is also right: if a user can't be arsed to educate themselves about the culture of a new forum, they are not likely to stick around and contribute to that forum in any meaningful or interesting way.

N00bz: READ THE FAQ. Don't poke dead, mouldering threads.

Yeah, I know that bigger forums tend to disallow old threads being brought up again. I was just referring to the term 'necromancy'. I never encountered that term at any other forum I went. Last time I checked, 'necromancy' means talking with the dead or something like that...

It also means raising the dead and many other practices.

Literally, it means divination by means of the dead (séance, ouija board,) but S&S stories of the '20s and '30s turned it into "raising the dead". There's also a little side-trip where some people thought the word was derived from the Latin word for "black", thus spawning the term "The Black Arts" or "Dark Arts", which pretty much covers anything unwholesome, especially magic that uses parts of dead people (like the hand of glory.)

But if anyone these days has heard the word, they think of the S&S definition, usually. And that's what's used on loads of forums. I'll admit I haven't seen it on the Sims BBS, which might be a better indication of how many people have heard the term... but all the boards I usually frequent not only talk about thread necromancy, but usually respond to it with a Mr. Mackay-like "Necromancy is bad, m'kay?"

Weird... I'm a member of various boards (none of them is a Sims board, this is the only Sims-related board I go) and I never heard that term being used :(

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=necromancy

second definition.

If you have more to say on an old topic, it makes sense to continue the old thread for two reasons:-
1.  All the info about the topic stays in one place rather than being spread all over the board
2.  Anyone who was interested in the subject first time round has tools to see there's something new there - "notify" (if it works) and "show new replies to your posts".

People who see the necromancy warning and still post without a good reason are just annoying.  If you want to get draconian, can you fix it so that people with less than X posts, physically CAN'T re-open a closed thread? 

Well, an old thread doesn't necessarily means closed. I believe nobody can reopen a closed thread except admins and mods.

My favorite classical-mancy is "Chronomancy", the art of divining the future by waiting to see what happens.

I'm awesome at that, plus I have 20/20 hindsight.

I just use the "new" button that pops up whenever there's a new post in the thread. If it drops off the front page, then it is dead to me.

I still think you can't expect people to read the FAQ. If you want people to care, then make it shorter and not an actual joke. If it isn't something that would be obvious to a stranger or someone new to the game, then we have no business expecting people to know it. Also with the lurking: pointless. People are either going to say retarded things, or they won't, and no amount of lurking will make someone less annoying.   

The only point in lurking before posting is to try and "fit in." Fitting in is for tools. Baaaah!

I thought the point was *not* to have an easy-to-find, easy-to-understand FAQ, so that you can point-and-laugh?

Bollocks. It's sheer politeness. If I walk off the street into someone's home, I don't change the topic of conversation, pinch the best TV chair or attempt to dictate the social conventions of the place. I watch - do these people drink tea or beer? Do they like rugby or litterature^TM? Is that atmosphere casual or formal? Is swearing OK or not?

We have a series of ads here for Sky, a television provider. The ads show a couple of socially moronic guys, without Sky, trying to fit in with various random strangers so they can watch TV. One example I remember, is they've walked into a cosa nostra house and ruffled the Don's toupee. Many of the first time posters remind me of these two blokes.

Well, your example actually supports the first part of Ellatrue's point, which was that lurking first helps a person fit in.  If the person in question wants something from the group, obviously it's going to help if they fit in.  Whatever you may think about the value of fitting in, it is the prerogative of any group to refuse aid to those who won't fit in.  Simple.

Ruffling feathers has a social value all its own, but it's frankly moronic to expect that to be a practical way of getting a bunch of people to help you solve a problem.

I see your point, though I contend I'm coming from a slightly different slant. It's not about what people can do for me but merely a common courtesy I would extend to any place where I don't set the mores. It is not so much about changing oneself to fit in, but more about sussing out if the place is a good fit. Having said that, I also don't go to any place that is alien to my own mores.

I agree with you, and obviously I follow the same practice.  However, I don't assume that everyone who shows up here wants or expects to join in socially.  I think there are many ways to go about that, and causing a stir may serve your cause.  Maybe it depends on personality; for example, spunky types who can give as good as they get might win some respect even if they flout the rules at first.  Fitting in isn't the only way of joining in, if you get my meaning?

I just chose to limit my contribution to the case that came to mind, where a show of courtesy is undoubtedly useful.  I think MATY extracts a notably high price for not fitting in, but I still think it's within the prerogative of this group to do so.  Personally, I like it.  It keeps the noise down.  ;D

I'm still agreeing with you, this may be a MATY first.  ;D

Yes, there are exceptions, B, Assmitten, Lorelei, Zazazu and many more have bounced into the place and made themselves known. Some MATYans like this, some don't.

I also like that MATY has high standards, it does keep the noise down and that can only be good from my point of view.

But Lorelei...er, I mean, "I"...used the age-old technique of LURK MOAR before posting.  :P

ETA: I also read the goddamned FAQ. Kids these days, no manners. :)


I wouldn't call this draconian, I'd consider it an option the owner of the forum could adopt to encourage n00bz to LURK MOAR, READ THE FAQ, and not commit necromancy. All of which, when not done, annoy long-time posters.

These are not new concepts. I've been online almost since I could reach a keyboard to type. That's roughly twenty years. These rules have been around since the beginning.

Translations:

1. Hang around and get used to the culture of a particular site / board / newsgroup / forum / mailing list before wasting bandwidth by irritating people who were there first.
2. If there are helpful "house rules" or guidelines or posting tips, read them. Someone wrote them because these were issues that irritated people who were there first, or which were deemed helpful to new people.
3. Old topic is old. Old topic may even be so old that everyone is completely pissed off when they have their time wasted by a request to rehash it all over again. If you are new, the first action you should take on a new site / forum / BBS / whatever should NOT be to revive an old thread, horn in on a fight, claim to be an expert, demand anything (freebies, help, WCIF, n00dz, torrents, HALP!, friendship) from people who were there before you.

See also an ancient thread about how this is like behaving like a small child running into a cocktail party (where everyone is peacefully discussing adult topics) and waving a filthy frog around and shouting that everyone should drop what they are doing to look at it. "See Mah FROGGIE!" behavior will get n00bz smacked. Believe it or not. as much as MATY likes MOAR FIGHT!, we tend to prefer juicy new fight to sporking hordes of clueless froggie-wavers.

The only quibble here re: necromancy is that it is sometimes difficult to determine which threads are OK to necromance (e.g., hack and mod threads) and which are not (opinion threads, old fight, old chit-chat). The angry lich guy message could potentially be restricted to areas that always hate necromancy, and a different "are you absolutely sure you want to contribute to this old thread and that there are no other more current or more relevant threads on this topic?" message for threads where necromancy is discouraged but not completely forbidden.

I'd welcome an admin decision to restrict n00bz to lurking for several hours, and then only posting in certain areas for a while. I'd even welcome a quiz that requires knowledge that can only be gained by reading the entire FAQ, with this quiz being a gateway between a horde of n00bz and the old guard.

You didn't lurk LONG though, did you?  :P

For which I am truly grateful, incidentally.

I joined April 3, 2007 at 8:55. I posted April 3, 2007 at 9:01. I still somehow managed not to make too much of an ass out of myself, at least for the first couple of days. I'm also pretty sure I didn't read the FAQ for a good week.

Shockingly, having some level of common courtesy gets you far in life. That's really what the FAQ is...a general guide to terms and how not to look like an annoying tween.

Date Registered:  2005 July 24, 18:16:49
First post on: 2005 July 30, 07:24:12

Wow, I waited a whole 6 days before posting :D FYI, I haven't ever read the FAQ.

You do realise that saying that will no doubt lead to a "Death to EMMA" style comment, right?
'Cause it seemed obvious to me.  ;)

Been there, done that, still here to tell the tale. ;D

Come to think of it, anything you say would lead to that result, so it doesn't matter  :P
(And I read the FAQ! And I also lurked quite a bit, both before and after registering! My lurk-gotten knowledge of this forum, let me show you it  8) )

(Also, this is the most smilies I've ever used in one post. I really need a life.)

The FAQs used to have FAQS in the title. It's title was changed in an attempt to get the wandering noobz to pay attention to it. This has not worked, but it hasn't seemed to make a differance one way or the other, they didn't take a look when it was labeled FAQs either. A Noob who is not going to read the stickies, is just not going to read the stickies, regardless of what the title is.

So I've read...

I have to say that it worked on me. I was sitting there thinking "WTF? I have to know." so I clicked.

Eh, read before taking the plunge and registering, read the FAQ first, joined, then read all active and inactive threads dating back 3-4 months. This didn't take too long, but I read fast. Seems like some fora aren't viewable until you register, IIRC. Looks like I took another 11-12 hours to read forums available after registration.

Also, followed a link to a specific thread for a mod, and had no idea there was a homepage for months, as I immediately set up a locked tab for "unread posts". :)


ETA: A T. My stupid T key is fucking up.

Yeah, I know made-up animals can't be accessed while unregistered (I was confused, once, when Firefox failed to automagically log me in as usual.)

Also RetardoLand.

I was forwarded here from TSR for something or other. I want to say comm-skilling, or it could have been abortbedmaking. Then clicked the handy-dandy "Have you destroyed a paysite today?". Funny how TSR led me to downloading their booty.

I got here from SimLogical.
There's a link to here, for the visitor controller, and another link to the right place, at the Kitten-Killing site, which were a mere one paragraph away from each other.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure the broken link is still there.

I think I wound up here in search of hacks that had disappeared from MTS2.  I picked up my hacks and left, but came back a few times for updates, and eventually became interested enough to register so I could post.

That's pretty much how I wound up here, too, BastDawn. I never even knew, until recently, about the fake homepage, because the links from MTS2 led directly to the 'real' index page. :D

I'd rather people just be themselves, and either they'll do well here, or they won't. If they are retards, they'll get a beating for it.

The house example is a terrible one. A house is a private space, and you need an invitation to be there, so entering a house without being invited is incredibly rude in the first place. A website is a public space, like a park. Is it appropriate to set restrictions on who can use a public park, aside from expecting general politeness and minimum standards of behavior? Expecting people to lurk before posting and brush up on MATY jokes, acronyms, and the general forum culture to the extent you are talking about is like trying to limit access in a public park to your own, private, exclusive party. And personally, I am irritated at how we've gone from poking at actual trolls and actual morons who wouldn't bother with a search, for example, to poking at noobs in general for any excuse at all. It's unreasonable to expect someone to know if a similar joke was posted over 2 years ago in retardoland (the forum warrior thread). You can't expect everyone on the site to have an equal knowledge of the game. If someone JUST BOUGHT TS2, has never been to the BBS, and asks about Bella or other premade characters, is it fair to give them hell for it? No. A reasonable response would be to gently point out that such topics are not much liked here, FYI, instead of just ripping them to shreds. Someone would have had to lurk for over 2 years to know something like the Bella thing, since it's been so long since anyone posted a Bella thread.

Lurking is not necessary for politeness. Being polite is not hard. Lurking is necessary if you want to follow the crowd. "Fitting in" is not necessary to get along, unless the people you are trying to fit in with are being a bunch of close-minded fucktards. And if we want the FAQ to be taken seriously, we have to change it so it isn't a joke. You can't have it both ways. People will pick up the culture over time, if they like the site enough to stick around. In my opinion it's rude to require a certain level of conformity to participate in a public forum that is still fundamentally about the actual game itself, and not about our little forum culture.

Well, if someone just bought TS2, then they're just starting to play the game. By playing the game, you're naturally gonna find out about the Bella thing or the Nervous Subject thing. I mean, it takes a month or two of playing before you realize that there are some things about the game that really suck or absolutely annoy the hell out of you. Most folks don't start immediately downloading hacks the day after purchasing the base game. There is a natural evolution of steps one takes of trying to make the game better. Ususally, the first step is getting on that sorry-ass EA site and doing posts/searches on the BBS. Then you find out about MTS2 and lurk around there for a bit. MTS2 is probably the best jumping off point for some of the more fancier stuff like inSIM and inTEEN. So I guess my point is that yes, folks should know all about the premade characters. They should play and explore their game before going on a "more advanced" site and asking dumbass questions that everyone knew the answer to 4 years ago.

And if they don't, they should be prepared for this sort of response (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6928.0.html).

If you're not a MATY member at all, why would you want a made-up animal? Made-Up Animals are thus available only to members, and since there's no reason you would want a made-up animal otherwise, the section is not advertised to nonmembers. Everything of USE is available to everyone.

How does someone like that even *GET* here? And MATY isn't like a public park. It's more like a biker bar. Technically, it's a public venue, but it's not exactly advertised and there are clearly regulars with expected norms of behavior. If you show up as a stranger at a biker bar, then proceed to annoy the regulars, you're asking for a beating.

Google. And I think a lot of people these days go to forums and start downloading stuff for the game pretty quick.

A person playing the game would probably know who the premade characters ARE, for example. That doesn't mean they understand how the game was developed. They might want to "re-unite" the Goths, but have no fucking clue how much that pisses people off at MATY. So they ask what a normal person would consider a reasonable question, and get eaten for breakfast. This is only an example.

I don't think lurking in a situation like that would actually help. People here just need to get their heads out of their asses. If nothing else, at least be honest: the problem often isn't lack of lurking or whatever. It's just that something they posted pissed you off, for whatever reason, and it's stupid to try and justify it as something else entirely.

Does the post pass a "reasonable person" test? Is the post polite? Is the question something a reasonable person, new to the site, might ask? Did they search first? Otherwise, get over yourself. Basic etiquette is one thing. Having an in-depth understanding of this forum's "special culture" is ridiculous to expect of people.

 Lurking is pointless, n00b! Just do a search before asking a question, and be polite. No one can reasonably expect anything else, and this place would be boring as hell if everyone went out of their way to "fit in."

A biker bar?!? I didn't realize leather chaps were worn here....

I can't even remember how I found this site, or MTS2, or any other site/board I joined. I think it's because most of the times I stumbled across awesome sites from Google :P

What exactly do you Google that gets you HERE? The only things you can Google that would get you here are obscure in-jokes and the site name itself. We don't exactly show up at RANDOM.

If someone just got The Sims 2, hasn't been on the forums, but heard through word of mouth (in the real world, *GASP!*) that "someone made this thing that turns your sims game into a zombie apocalypse" or something similar, they might find the site (googling "sims 2 zombie apocalypse" brings up MATY at number six.) There might also be a couple searches that would bring up MATY as a false positive, or bring up a site that links to MATY.

Now, me, I came here through a different route. I haven't done any real hacking because I'm not good at it yet, but I've been interested in Sims hacking since the previous version. I forget exactly what I searched for, but I was looking for BHAV info.

Ellatrue, you really need to give it up.  Even if you insist that this is a public park, JMP is the groundskeeper if you will.  He plants and grows the trees, which is why people come here in the first place.  He is MEAN.  And he likes it that way.  That's inevitably going to make people feel free to be equally mean.

I feel safe in pointing out the obvious: his example trumps anyone else's.

It isn't about being mean or not so much as trying to impose rules on anarchy, and I'd like to see a healthy perspective about the site and a bit of honesty. Belonging to the site does not make you "more awesome," and our inside jokes are not so amazing that we should expect everyone to know them and learn them. If you want to poke someone, don't try and justify it with something unreasonable. Just admit that you felt like being a dick to a newcomer for fun.

I just think telling someone to LURK MOAR is fucking retarded. THEY don't need to lurk more--YOU need to get over yourself. If the person is a retard, no amount of lurking will help. If they aren't, then you are just trying to enforce a kind of conformity.

If you are going to use google as a way they got here to ask their stupid question, couldn't we defend the other side by saying that they could have used that same search engine to actually find the answer to how to reunite the Goths without actually having someone give them the info on a spoon?

JMs using the biker bar as an example makes a lot of sense. Bikers are a fun group of people, if you are their type of person or are at least not objectionable enough to get the shit beaten out of you. Sure you can go in a biker bar and order a drink, but if you get on their nerves, obviously do not belong there or are just an ass, at worst you may be killed on accident\purpose, at best you will be stared at in an intimidating manner until you leave.

I lurked until I decided that this place wasn't objectionable to who I am. Why go barging into a place without knowing just a little about where you are going? Why stick around when you decide that it's not your kind of place?

If I recall, I found MATY via Google.  I was having some sort of problem (I think it was fugly townies and what to do about them) and did a search on a number of keywords.  This got me to a post somewhere which referred to the Base game overpopulation problem.  That post used the expression BFBVFS.  I googled that and got to MATY.  (Supports the "in joke" hypothesis, I suppose)

Within a day or two of finding MATY, I had the director's cut loaded.  I didn't actually post on MATY until about a month after reading the FAQ.

The biker bar analogy seems apt.

I forgot how I found this.. I know I found it a long time ago. I didn't feel the desire to log in till whenever the heck it was. I have always enjoyed the biker bar mentality here. It felt down right homey.

Course my distinct desire not to get involved warring with my desire to blather on for no apparent reason often shows in my posts. That is when I post.

I think I followed a link from MST2 to here. It might've been a link from the FOJ's signature, because I remember him from there before I came here.

Welcome to MATY!

(http://www.cyclerides.com/rides/bikenights/billet/flameboothsgroup.jpg)

O hai, n00bz! MATY loves answering the same questions over and over again for people who won't use the Search feature!

Wait...HU SED DAT?!!

(http://www.artismax.net/artwork/biker%20bar%20at%20Eagle's%20nest.jpg)

MATY's Original Biker Bar-B-Q and Saloon--two wheels good, four wheels bad.

Saddle up! (If you can read the back of my shirt, the bitch fell off, etcetera.)

I came here for Theo's hair binning SimPE plug-in.

And, for the record, I waited a whole hour before I first posted. :D However, doing a lot of lurking is my style. So I made up for that.

I lurked for awhile too... I think. Then I came out of the woodwork to BAH at Pescado for No Playable Shoppers. =p