You don't install the dbc files, they are what the launcher does when it installs your sims3packs. It takes a bunch of them and puts them large archives which are the dbcs. Think of it as sort of a zip file with a bunch of other files in it.

If you got the doll then it is almost certainly inside one of your dbcs. As I noted above, you will have to run the launcher and scroll through the list of installed files until you get to the doll, then delete it through the launcher.

Were there any residents in that house at the time by chance? I had a similar situation where there were two residents (on different floors than the fire) freaking out even after I put the fire out completely. The scenario would not end until I went up to both and convinced them to run. Then it ended.

With Ambitions/the latest patch EA now officially supports mods.

http://www.thesims3.com/community/news.html?selMonth=4&selYear=2010


However, I don't think anyone expects the average Exchange user to be particularly well informed about the installation and usage of mods and/or custom content created with tools other than those provided by EA.

As Sigmund noted, the DCbackup is just a backup. Definitely delete the damned thing from there if it's in there however the original is shoved in one of the dbc files so you will also need to delete the doll itself (not the item it came from) from the launcher too.

That can be somewhat of a pain in the ass if you have a long list of installed objects and sets to scroll through in the launcher, but it's the best way I know to get it out of the .dbc file.

I suppose you could also open all your dbc files individually with s3pe and scan through them for this doll's entry then remove it that way but I don't recommend it as s3pe is mainly a modder tool and not terribly user friendly.

He never said it would prevent crashes.


All it does is automatically restart the game if it does crash at the load screen so you don't have to.

Also, there are a lot of causes of crashes and yours may or may not be the well known load screen crashes that everyone just has to live with and keep re-trying until the game loads.

If, for example, this is your first time using mods and in particular awesomemod then there is a specific process for setting things up that varies depending on which version (expansion pack and patches) of the game you are running. You also need to make sure to run the version of awesomemod that's appropriate to your game version.

Search around here or Mod the Sims for more information regarding setting up your game to use mods correctly.

No.

You asked this already in the thread you made in The Horror, The Horror!.

It's not the problem of this tool or anyone at this forum, it's the problem of the shitacular TSR Workshop. Take your crying emoticon to TSR and tell someone who cares (or is paid to pretend they care).

If they can't fix problems with their own damned tool then take it as a lesson and don't get TSR shit.

Pescado disabled it with Awesomemod. He probably will have no interest in releasing a separate mod that just disables that message and nothing else. He also may or may not discuss what he did to disable it. Such are the ways of Pescado.

It may require a core mod and if that is the case it's rather silly to waste a core mod on such a minor, if irksome, issue.

Well yeah but I am wondering if Pescado's anti-registration measures in the recent versions of awesomemod have inadvertently changed something that might cause this.

If you yank out awesomemod do you still get the red boxes?

*Edit to say it also would not at all surprise me if EA bungled up their own registration process.

Has anyone tested trying to invent the career bundle objects without this mod but with the newest Awesomemod that removes the need for registration? I'm curious if it actually does work or if people are getting the red cubes since someone in the Awesomemod test thread reported getting them recently.

@Pescado: What did you change exactly? It was found earlier in this thread that not only did the <ProductRegistrationRequired>, <SKU_Registered> and <SKU> tags need to be yanked out, but the <EPVersion> of the objects needed to be change to base game. For some unknown reason that was the only way it would work and the objects would be created correctly and show in game.

If your changes don't trick the game into thinking these career bundle inventions are base game objects, unless you otherwise fixed whatever weird EAxian entanglement that was causing such behavior, then I suspect this package may still be needed to get the inventions to show.

I've been getting weirdness like this too lately. Some sims3packs won't install even after decrapify and it's also saying that certain sims3packs which have long since been installed are not. Of course if I try to install them again then it tells me they are already installed. 

I don't see how it could be awesomemod involved but something changed with the launcher recently and it got, well, crappier.


Now that does sound like it may be related to the 'registration' process. Do by chance have the Ultimate Career Pack? It has been known to cause this unless you had the registration fix mod. It's supposedly been fixed in a recent update to the test version of Awesomemod so you don't need that other mod, but I don't think it's been extensively tested.

True, but Mod the Sims is Care Bear land so you'd probably want to be vague and dance around it or else just pm it.

In theory, installing the Store items is just a matter of getting them decrapified and installed via the launcher, though I'm not sure which Mac programs would do that, or else converting them to package or getting an archive of them already in package form, making sure the framework and directories are setup correctly and then placing the packages there.


The hair did install for me, but I admittedly I haven't checked in game yet.

Also, it's not hard to convert a sims3pack to package yourself. The program I use is Delphy's Sims3pack Multi Installer. It's very easy to use and quickly converts a one or multiple sims3pack files into package files.

I would endeavor to help but I am afraid I am utterly clueless in any and all things Mac.

The only thing I can suggest is to try this and then if that doesn't work perhaps query its creator in the comments since he seems to have some idea about getting custom content to work with Macs.

You can't just run a DOS command that requires switches in Windows by clicking on it. I could go into detail, but if you are not familiar with using DOS then you're probably better off using The Compressorizer GUI. Put it in the same directory as these files but when it asks if you want to overwrite the current S3RC say no as the files from here are newer than the ones JFade is distributing.

Alternately, you can drop the small attached file in the same directory as your s3rc, rename it from s3rcbatch.txt to s3rcbatch.cmd and run it by double clicking on it. If you do that, make sure the sims3pack files you want to clean are in the same directory as s3rc when you run the s3rcbatch.cmd. Depending upon the file size, you may also need to wait a bit. When it is done cleaning it will tell you to press any key to exit.

If you can't understand the latter method or can't get it to work just use the JFade Compressorizer tool.

I just said above they weren't EA. It's fan made content from users at blackypanther.de. Apparently they made it exclusively for the magazine so it's not on their site.

As for that older German mag stuff from last year (ie Hippie Romantik, Nautic, Furter, Appleton, etc) it's all recolors of clothes, packaged sims and packaged lots with families on them. Essentially it's nothing new so people stopped including it with the store update packages. However if you really must have it, it's on MistyK's 4Share directory: http://www.4shared.com/dir/17306228/15ed3d2d/TS3.html

It's the German Sims 3 Magazine July.zip file. She also has similar packages for the August, October/November, and December issues, but again there's not any original new content in it.

Basically everything that comes out of the Sims 3 German mag is either a recolor, prepackaged sim or lot and/or fan created content. To my knowledge, no original, new EA content has come out of the German Sims magazine, but there has occasionally been some on actual official German website for the game.

I think he is talking about the more recent items reported today by Simsprograms that shipped on DVD with theJune/July 2010 issue of the German Sims magazine.

However, I did some digging of my own and according to someone on a thread at simforum.de, those items are all user created content and none of it is official EA content except for the previously released Eco pack that came with the Toyota/Renault.

Agreed that it's dumb to get a promotion outside of work from reading a book at home or doing a couple of laps around the block.

I've kind of got mixed feelings about being able to gain xp from doing your actual job (ie styling, putting out fires, catching ghosts etc) outside of work hours, but it doesn't seem like you get xp for doing anything that is not a set 'mission' anyway.


The guide did give those same times in minutes and the letter grades the equate to. It then went on to make the vague statment that:


Of course they didn't bother to state what those multipliers are.    It wouldn't at all surprise me if they were wrong since Prima frequently is.

It also claimed that the times and grade for a small house fire, building disaster, gnome invasion, science facility rescue, warehouse rescue and hospital rescue (basically everything but a large house fire) were all the same

A=180 minutes
B=240 minutes
C=320 minutes
D=400 minutes

That seems dumb to me since a small house fire is way easier than some of those rescue/disaster/invasion scenarios. Seems like that is easily tunable via an XML mod though.

I feel like the amount of experience you get for skilling in the new professions, and fire fighting in particular, should be greatly reduced and perhaps it should be required that you at least do some of all 3 metrics to advance to the next level.

I also think the emphasis should be placed on the main task with the assignments for each profession. So for fire fighting, so the bulk of experience given shifted to putting out fires.

More should be given to more difficult fires and based on your grade (time spent) putting out the fire. The Prima Guide claims it does this, but it's vague about the exact xp amounts, multipliers and formulas and don't trust EAxis to make it reasonable.

Skilling to me should primarily have an indirect benefit in that athletics helps you run faster, break down doors quicker and tinkering helps you upgrade and maintain the truck, alarm, and extinguisher so they work better. The amount of experience given for skilling should be minimal and in no way should be able to advance solely through skilling. So someone who works out all day or tinkers around with shit all the time but never put out a single fire is qualified to be fire chief? Uh, no.

Also shifting the advancement to primarily the assignment creates a bit of an element out of the players control as they have to wait for them so the advancement is naturally slowed a bit.

Unless you can be crafty and say, have your sim or another commit arson. Does this work and get recognized as an emergency in the firehouse? I hadn't tried it yet.

You don't need the alarm clock to function. By default it's built into the game that your sim will automatically sleep until 1 hour before the carpool arrives for work or until they are fully rested, whichever is earlier.

If it defaults to fully rested and for some reason you want them to waste time when their sleep bar is full and keep sleeping until they need to go to work you can just pull the bar on the sleep action over to the right and then they will sleep until 1 hour before work.

To get a TS1/2 style alarm clock you'd actually have to re-write the sleep action to remove functionality, then add functionality to the decorative alarm clock. That's a lot of trouble to go to for a feature that already exists in the game in a simpler implementation (ie less clicks and objects to mess with).

Since this is turning into a bitch session, on a semi-related note, I don't get why 80% of custom content is one two types:

Porcelain pale, shiny, moist anime dolls with big stiff hair wearing clothing that is both surreal and slutty, as if Salvador Dali goes burlesque.

or

Ultra-mod, Laugh In, Austin Powers, Ikea plasticy furniture.

I always think these things have been over done and every single possible item you could think of, and many you never would imagine, have been done on these themes and there's nothing left to do, yet they always seem to crank out more.

Every item that Peggy, Rose, Newsea etc crank out I always get deja vu and think I have seen it before and then I realize I haven't and that they just made 16 other items in the past that look just like it.

Their fixation with putting big, poofy, slutty, ultra feminine hairs on men and toddlers also greatly disturbs me.

In my experience playing the Firefighter career fairly extensively I would say it could definitely use some tuning. I'm far more lenient than you in terms of forcing my sims to really work their asses off to advance but the rate of advancement is too quick even for me.

My Firefighter guy is already up to level 8 after a few days and it's mostly just from increasing skills, mainly athletic which he does all day at the firehouse since he has nothing better to do. He doesn't even know his coworkers and only put out a few fires.

The experience bar is measured by 3 metrics, skills, coworkers and putting out fires. You only need to increase one to advance. That's all well and good except you can apparently make fire chief buy simply working out all day and putting out the occasional fire. Also, unlike the job performance meters in the rabbit holes, your experience meter (as far as I know) can not go down and decrease.

The rabbit holes are actually more of a challenge than these careers. Especially firefighter because you have things easily available to replenish every need in short time. I feel like there needs to be some counterbalance to that.

The stylist and architect don't have as many other activities available on their default lots as the firefighter. You can easily add them though and really you should, at very least a drafting table and fridge. Otherwise with the dumb 1 assignment a day EAxis gives you sit around twiddling your thumbs all day.

What? You mean you don't enjoy toddlers with big hair that look like hookers and female hair adapted for men that makes them look like two bit drag queens with a bad wig? 

Twallan's Woohooer has risky woohoo.

So that yanks it out of the game install itself. Nice.

If they put any of those crap tags on an object inside the package will it cause an error or just get ignored?

I had a similar situation with a large fire rated difficult. I put it out but the game did not recognize it was out and the sims were still acting like the house is on fire.

I found that once I broke down doors and convinced all remaining sims inside the house to run (there's an interaction for that) then the game registered the fire as being out.

I also noticed I didn't get the little popup window that gives you your time spent on the mission and current grade.

I wasn't sure if these issues were AM related or EAxian as I haven't yet reproduced the scenario in yanking awesomemod out, but it seems perhaps the latter.

Presumably EAxis figured you should direct the sims to leave first then put out the fire. In my case they were nowhere near the first floor kitchen fire though. One was on the 3rd floor and the other the basement. It made little sense to me to go all that way and break down doors when I could just put the fire out, but the scenario would not end until I did so.

That is EAxian in nature, though perhaps AM can fix it at some point. Otherwise we are stuck hoping EA notices and fixes it in some future patch.

It's only the ones out in open areas that fail though. The ones on lots like actual dig sites and such still seem to work.