Yeowch then. That's a lot of playing hours. What files do you want to get rid of, exactly? Townies, or playable sims? It's probably not a good idea to mess with files that are linked genetically to living sims, however distant, and your average neighborhood has "only" around 150 to 200 townies and NPCs. So unless for some reason you have massive numbers of NPCs, you don't have a lot of options unless you have a LOT of sims that you created but now never play. If they're all organically integrated into your neighborhood, you're better off doing frequent backups and keeping an eye out for problems.

Maximum stable population with all fixes, pre-NL, is around 1200 according to JMP and TJ. According to MaxoidTom, NL upped the number of sims/iterations that the system could handle, so you may very well be safe. But if there's any dead wood in the neighborhood, i.e., townies you don't want or need (and with that many sims, that's probably all of them) or sims unconnected relationship-wise to any sims you want to keep, it might be worth trimming it.

Ye hairy pixelated gods. No. Just no. MTV? Doesn't that stand for, I don't know, MUSIC television? Not "random annoying crap television?" Someone should start that channel. RACTV. "Rack TV." Nice ring to it, and the innuendo in the name suggests some possible content.

I'm *under* 22 and I don't watch MTV, and if I'd seen or heard about the sims being featured on it before I got the game, I would never even have considered buying it.

Although it would be neat to do, just to give entertaining answers to those questions.

1. Through tactile contact with my keyboard and mouse.

2. JMPescado makes hacks for it. Also, I can buy fire.

3. I make men pregnant.

4. It involves physical objects that I can move around, and not enough fire.

Yeah. Checking my trusty French/English dictionary, "se plier" shares most of the meanings of "to bend," the literal and the metaphorical. (To bend to one's will and so on.) It also is synonymous to fold as in "to fold clothes" and also "to pack baggage."

Heh. I know just enough French to abuse myself.

At the risk of asking a stupid question, where is Crammyboy's nudist hack? Doesn't seem to be on MTS2, all I could find in that vein is the discontinued no blur hack.

Power Idle isn't terribly effective without large amounts of available caffeine. Then it's brilliant. And it's not supposed to do anything useful; there are other macros for that, and if you didn't have to manually activate them there would be even less "game" in the game.

The corrupted memory/conversation bubble you get when Mrs. Crumplebottom is vampirified is actually distinct from the corrupted death memory bubble. objects.package corruption bubble looks like all the blue "need failure!" complaint symbols squished togethor, and the corrupted death memory looks like all the conversation symbols squished togethor. Also, the objects.package corruption has other effects: Grim becomes a mobile clipboard and scythe running through animations and sliding across the floor, the memory images go poof, and other weirdness.

This sounds like a job for . . .the Phone hack! Just stick your sim on the phone with the burglar, and they won't stop until they get hungry or max out the relationship.

Or we can wait for the new version of "less whiny" which will hopefully include decreasing over time/interruptable/reduced anger animations.

The "you're dumping me for someone else" is the message you get when a sim asks someone on a date when they're already on a date. First date ends badly and you get that message.

I once had a sim get upset over a punch cup. He was the "Adolphus Simmler" sim posted on MTS2 and I set him up with 4 toddlers and a couple of kids for the adoption pool. Got him abducted, which made the social worker come, and then once he was pregnant I killed him. Cleaned up the lot and moved a knowledge sim in, and next thing I know I have a pregnant Adolphus very angry about his punch cup.

Are all of those files from actual sims? Because it's rather hard to get that many without using junk files, like from moving sims (or ghosts) from one neighborhood or another, or from downloading lots with sims from the exchange.

The trouble you're going to have, even if those characters are all actual sims, townies, and ghosts (or ghosts you've deleted their tombstones) is that when you delete them you also have to go through every not going to be deleted character file and nuke all reference to them. This can be tedious, especially when you've got that many character files.

Killing them won't get rid of their character file, which is what causes the problem. Neither will deleting them from the sim bin. It is not necessarily bad to delete them in SimPE, only to do it incompletely.

Sticking to memory triggered type stuff ought to be (theoretically) possible. And I do like the abduction idea; wouldn't be terribly specific in my game ;-D seeing as almost all my teens are knowledge and about half of them get abducted at some point . . .

Or if they'd fallen off the roof . . .   

You can also do something similiar with Pescado's Authorized Personel Only, if you make the fence share at least on wall tile with something else--build it off the side of the house, for example. I'm pretty sure the game counts a fenced in area as a room for those purposes.

Solution: buyable fire.

Do a search for it on MTS2, it shows up in a collection of other "weird" stuff. Put up walls around the hot tub, then put buyable fire on every square the hot tub touches. No more hot tub.

I ain't buying it! All my sims will be godless communists!

Seriously. Christmas depresses me. It's all about stuff. This is basically everything I dislike about Christmas. And I'm not even Christian, I'm Unitarian Universalist, although my family celebrates Christmas as a basically secular holiday. (Which it is, at least in the modern US.)

Now, if this "mini pack" was something actually nifty, like science fiction or some such (perhaps more aliens for abductions? it's a simple code change, and there are new skins in the Holiday thing) then I might be interested. But only if it was less than $10. $20 will buy a sourcebook for Dungeons and Dragons, worth way more than some idiot faux EP.

Ah. 'thar be the problem. If the attraction token was based off memories and similiar types of tokens, the programmers may have neglected to make sure it couldn't be passed along. Probably want to document this and send it into Maxis, as I doubt it's an intended game behavior.

*cough* William Bennett, anyone?

The problem with the facial system is that faces that are really different from the standard are likely to look pretty bad, either because they're just scary looking (a la Goopy) or because they deform in bizarre ways (a la some of those exact celebrity replicas).

Has anyone else had problems with this hack? It's caused a weird issue in my game--pregnant sims give birth halfway. The game generates a baby, it shows up on the bar on the side of the screen, and then the game spits out an "Undefined transition" error and suddenly I have an pregnant looking sim who can still get pregnant with the tombstone of L&D and a baby who cannot be found, nomatter what I do. I suspect this has something to do with the "does the baby have an alien parent?" routine, if this is, as I suspect, the culprit of the "no alien parent shows in family" issue. But these are basically just blind speculations.

Anyone had similiar problems? And what's the best way to go about pinpointing the source of this difficulty?

Yeah. Definitely need alien and zombie.

My main neighborhood is a custom one called Ariya, with about 36 playable sims in 9 base neighborhood houses and 2 uni houses. I also have a variety of goofing off type neighborhoods where I experiment with various things. Haven't messed with the game made families, since I'm paranoid.

I keep all the information I need about sims in their character files. For example, I keep all my families in sync, timewise, by noting in the household description how many days (marked off at 6 o'clock, sim time) I played with them. In Ariya, I've been playing the whole neighborhood (and keeping track) for nearly 37 sim days, although many of the households split off from the original four sometime after I started recording. I keep track of that by recording the day when the household split, then any subsequent days that have been played. For example, 25+11 means that when I split off that household, it was day 25, and I've played 11 days since then.

Hey, it's pretty impressive that MTS2 is still functioning at all, considering the probably traffic load.

Random suggestion for the eyes: if it's possible, perhaps make it a transparent red overlay? So you get a bit of a bloodshot look to the eyes, but doesn't replace any nice custom eyes we may have (I have all the maxis defaults replaced, for example) but does make them slightly vampiric. Give the alien eyes a red twinge, too, but they're still obviously aliens.

I have a handful of pre-Nightlife starter houses, in both furnished and unfurnished flavors. Not great, but I've played them, and they get the job done for a CAS nuclear family.

One thing that I've been wondering about, concerning poker. Is there any skill involved? Or is the winner of a given round determined randomly? There doesn't seem to be a "hidden skill," based on my adventures in debug mode. Both of the other two hidden skill objects (radio and pool table) have a way to examine the effects of different levels of skill, but the poker table has nothing along those lines. Is it affected by normal skill? Because if it's not, and poker is entirely random, it's not a very good simulation of poker. There are people who can make a living as professional poker players, because it's not completely random.

A most excellent hack, Hook. (A most excellent Hook hack?) Testing will commence as soon as I finish today's rounds on MATY. A good solution to the problem. Things were getting a bit stale in one of my neighborhoods since Uni sims usually hit perma plat within a week of being out of school.