More Awesome Than You!

Yes, Maxis took something that wasn't really broken and fucked it up worse. Hooray.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/terror/yellow.gif)
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/zip.gif) orchardtreefix.zip (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/bv/hacks/orchardtreefix.zip)

Fucked up Orchard Tree Fix for TS2BV p0
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado)

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

Special Thanks To:
Hobbsee the Scrawny Pencil Neck
Fat, Hairy-Bellied Ness
Rohina the Ugly Butted

INSTRUCTIONS:
Place in your MYDOCU~1\EAGAME~1\THESIM~1\DOWNLO~1 directory.

BUGS FIXED:
Orchard trees no longer fucked up. Should now properly Tend/Spray Many again.
Because Maxis fucked with it for no good reason and broke it.

COMPATIBILITY:
This hack is fully compatible with all FFS hacks. For TS2BV p0.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

Oh for crying out loud not again.  How the hell can you break an item that shouldn't even be touched by the expansion?  Man their such idiots.

Well, this was apparently a valiant attempt to prevent a reinit from clearing out the tree states. They just neglected to notice that Node 0x11 was killing the Init altogether. I've made mistakes like that before (never released a mistake like that, but I have made them).

The "fix" is still a coding WTF, though. I mean, doesn't this code walk on a part of the stack you should never touch?  ???

This sort of coding makes me want to puke. It's a WTF no matter how you look at it.

However, Dizzy, you have no doubt heard of such things as Quality Control..........But have they?

QA is great if you have the tools that assure you of a quality delivery. Here's a good example:

In the same amount of time I spent fixing one little bug that I later deemed a moot issue in simantics, I wrote and debugged an entire suite of gender-preference functions in Lua. 10 hours to debug one line of code vs. 10 hours to debug 100 lines of code. You do the math.

Maybe EAxis should do the maths.

The problem is not their choice of LUA or SimAntics, but the fact that they create their Simantics as unnecessarily mutilated spaghetti. If they had followed some kind of STRUCTURE in their programming, they wouldn't have these problems.

Case of (a) too many cooks and (b) the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.....?

...or c) securing one's job by creating bazillions of lines of uncommented spaghetti code.

...or d) as happened at one of my old jobs, getting a copy of code where all the comments were in Sanskrit.

I suspect a bunch of inexperienced programmers who have never been taught structured programming are using a graphical development system, sort of like someone tried to turn software development into a computer game.  Even if they knew and used proper structured techniques, the end result from the graphical environment may end up looking like spaghetti code, even if it's sorted properly in the BHAV editor.

This graphical development system is, of course, Will Wright's baby, and has as much chance of being scrapped as the Pope has of converting to Buddhism.

Hook

That's the problem with visual programming. (Not that I've done Sims-like stuff, but I've done web and random other game making utilities). It pastes in your elements as you put them in, but with no regard for the greater whole. So you get a shitload of extra useless crap that clogs stuff and produces unexpected/desirable results. And it's becoming clearer with every EP that they don't do any more testing than to load the game on 20 different system types and say "Yup, it runs. Put a check on it."

The graphical development system is *not* Will Wright's idea. He stole that from hardware designers who need this kind of flow-charting in order to make sense of hardware states. Hardware, however, is HUGELY different from software. What works for designing hardware will not work for designing software. It's two totally different environments.

I didn't mean to imply that he invented the idea, just that the system was his baby.  I can imagine how much a graphical development system would help hardware designers; I used to draw the schematic and logic diagrams for documentation for a living.

I've seen a good graphical system for object oriented design called Rational Rose, which has probably been merged with something else since then.  Some things just lend themselves to graphical methods.

But flow charts?  Structured programming made flow charts obsolete back in the mid 70's for any procedural language that had the proper structures built in.  You could even force assembly language into structures.  Apparently the development system used at Maxis is nothing more than a system to allow programming by flow chart.

Hook

It's the "Rational Analyst Suite" now, with a whole lot more tools.  Oh, and it's owned by IBM now, too.

One thing I've noticed in BV is a marked change in "style".  The code has gone from borked to cluster-fucked.  One only has to unravel the entrails of that code abortion that is Hammock WooHoo to find evidence of this.  My suspicion is that most of the core developers/designers have moved over to Sims 3 (I think this process began with Pets and is now in full swing with BV).  The junior boy league with L's on their forehead have rushed in to fill the vacuum.  I suspect from this point forward, the expansion chaos will only worsen.  :-\

Ah, you probably have that correct, Jase.  I knew something was up when I noticed the gigantic memory leak problems I was getting after installing Pets long ago.  I'd forgotten about Sims 3 coming out in '09, so yes, giving this to the Peewee League to code explains a few things.

I used to buy every damn thing EAxis put out for this game, but fuck it.  I'd much rather take my chances with a cracked copy than spend $40 on a buggy piece of shit destined to put me in a straight-jacket trying to decipher it.  And hell, it's not just this game.  NBA Live '07 for the 360 came borked right out of the box.  Game play was fine...until you tried to challenge someone online.  No, screw that notion because all you received were connection time-out errors.  And a fix?  Well, no.  EA decided to fix it for the PS3 version, but 360 owners were left without.  No patch, nothing.  Basically, a big "Thank you for forking over $60; now piss off."

And the infinite blue loop problem?  Bad Nvidia drivers, shoddy game engine, or both?  You decide.  I fixed that problem by installing an ATI card.  Bah, you see my love for this company.

In any case, thanks Pescado for this.

the peeweesalso explains 'Hobbies'.

IS anyone beisdes me worried about Spore quality? and the possiblity/probability of it coming with Securom?

Heh. Spore will be a bloated nightmare. Just you watch.

Is it ever coming out?  I seem to recall multiple delays and push-backs with it's release date.

Ha, I still can't wait to see how they deal with custom content considering I've heard all sorts of shit about that.

 Does this stop the jump bug for children with gold badges that drops the macro launch to do the gardening from theire queues?