But obsessive compulsive is fun! </sarcasm>

Neat freak sims were already obsessive compulsive. This is just icing on the cake. The way they eat, for example: "Cut food into roughly microscopic pieces, put one piece into mouth without allowing it to touch anything but the end of the fork, chew exactly 30 times, floss, repeat." Don't remember who I'm quoting that from, but it's an excellent one, and it's someone on here.

No need for a reinstall. The originally objects.package is on the second CD.

Strickly speaking, entropy (using website terminology, but the general principle applies to everything) is not a measure of popularity, although it may be affected by it. It is definitely not inversely proportional (proportionate?) to the size and popularity of a website. If anything, entropy increases when a website gets more hits. Entropy is a measure of the "messiness" of a system, or in this case, the disorganization of a website. When people on this site speak of a forum deteriorating, they are referring to an increase in the average stupidity of posts and of an increase in the stupid posts to non-stupid posts ratio, and thus how much dross must be waded through to get to interesting stuff. By this measure, the entropy of MTS2 is definitely increasing, because even leaving aside the layout (which I personally dislike since I dislike excessive subcategorization, primarily because a system of categorization and subcategorization that makes perfect sense to one person's way of thinking may be obtuse and inane to another persons way of thinking, and this increases dramatically with the amount of subcategorization) there are more and more non-useful non-interesting posts for every useful and interesting post. Most requests fall under the "non-useful, non-interesting" category, since the people doing the requesting often ask for things that are technically nonfeasible or don't provide enough details to actually implement their ideas. Also, a person looking for hacks does not want to have to look through requests; that's something that for the most part only modders with some time on their hands are going to be looking through.

Generally speaking, the more users you have in a forum, the more entropy you have in that forum. The larger your system, the harder it is to organize said system.

Hmm. If the business of Nvidia cards is indicative of a trend, I may be off the hook, no matter how nifty looking a concept EA's future offerings are. I won't be able to play them, since I'm not buying new hardware for a game. Not *quite* that crazy.

On a somewhat related note: Death to all corporations! CHALLENGE EA!

And assist Google's plot for world domination. Mass open betas, the incorporation of the consumer into the design and testing, and -- behold! -- software that works! I pray for the Google operating system (Googlix). Perhaps it is time to start praying for a Google game company. At the very least, someone should check them out as a model for how to run the public relations end of a software company.

And I'm very, very glad that RTS's aren't my niche, so I'm not unduly tempted to purchase this product.

Yes. Yes indeed. And there are a few things which it is unclear whether they are a bug or a feature--like the "no second parent for alien spawn" thing, which is annoying for persons like myself who have circumvented the "all alien spawn are related" problem by rather more creative means, and would like to be able to see which alien spawn are half siblings and which are not siblings at all. Although that hack is interfering with some really rather weird stuff at the moment, but . . .

Oi.

Loading times for NL are really rather phenomenal. The mere fact that they no longer have to load up the neighborhood screen, (huzzah!) combined with the breaking up of loading into what it's actually loading (neighborhood, then family/lot) cuts down on the annoyance enough to more than make up for the "new EP" weirdness/aggravation.

Zombie Pescado, mark II?

It's probably supposed to happen consistently, but since it's triggered by an in game event it's prone to the same weirdness as the memory related LTWs.

Plus, with multiple patches, and the average user who visits the Sims2 website, you'll get people trying to install all of them, or screaming about which one they should pick, or something equally daft.

Yes, ladies and gents, National Novel Writing Month is approaching. Officially, it stretches from November 1st to November 30th.

What is NaNoWriMo, you ask? Simple. 30 days, 50,000 words. And massive amounts of caffiene.

This is, as you can see, completely insane, which is why I might just have to do it.

Oh, and my name anagrams to "A tenable ninja tenet." Nifty.

I had a sim get a burglar as a blind date. Probably applies to cops as well.

That's a Pescado provided feature. Should be Nightlife enabled fairly soon.

Whenever a sim steals someone's newspaper, I think: "Hey! That's MY free subscription!"

That's a more likely explanation than smart milk, I think. Especially if they cloned assignments off of homework. Don't know quite what the explanation for the skilling is, but perhaps something related to commskilling?

You know, the hack called "clothingtool"? Looks like the stack of folded clothes that sims purchase? You can snarf outfits that have unique GUIDs, i.e., NPC uniforms.

This has been my experience as well. We should pester the Maxoids to add in a "current sub neighborhood only" version of "deleteallcharacters." It's the least they can do to help with the 0x85 mess.

Microstatics? WTF? Things that are very small, and don't move? Or do you mean "microtastics," as in, a mod that makes it easier to micromanage your sims? Because Pescado makes "Macrotastics," which is nothing like either of those, and does not give a "suicide" menu option, to my knowledge. Are you confusing this with the InSIMinator, perhaps ?

To fix this, buy a radio, turn it on, then fence it off so the sims can't get to it. Voila. No more sleeping for you!

Yep. I also find that free will screws with the "Eat" macrotastic. Anytime I play a game where I actually want to get anything done, I nix free will.

Spore looks so cool . . . wow. Can't wait. From the information I have currently, the genetics are basically completely user controlled. With each "generation" (i.e., new creature) you get to adjust what it looks like and buy new functional bits. It's not really a genetics simulation so much as an ecosystem/evolution tool. And, hey, it's Will Wright's project, and so far things have only started sucking once he's left. (Sims 1 didn't suck until the later expansions bugified it, and he wasn't involved with it at that point.) Well, except TSO . . . but that's a different problem.

B&W2 looks kinda nifty. Don't really know if I'll get it, as I too heard *bad* things about the original game's performance, bugginess, and management. And I prefer a nice, shiny software toy over an actual game any day.

Exactly. Or a desperate Family sim with no morals.

So . . . you have to have it shipped to multiple obscure countries to throw off anyone trying to use your mail to find you?

Or do you want to make sure that EA can't find you?

Sanmonroe, where do you come up with these insights? Your posts equal mine for sheer verbiosity--but it's actually interesting, rather than being random ramblings. A most impressive feat.

Any of those three options would be better than the current EA policy. The third does definitely sound the niftyest. I have heard of a company (off the top of my head, I think it's the half-life team. Valve? Not sure.) that actually invited a modding team to their headquarters to basically give them access to their development tools for the sequel to the game that the modders had made a bunch of stuff for. (Some Half Life mods, and those of similiar games, are basically seperate games that use the same graphics.) Roughly equivalent to Maxis saying to FFS "Hey, you've made a lot of awesome stuff for our game, how about we show you how to use Edith?"

Just because you don't notice anything, that doesn't mean that there isn't a code conflict. It may be running over something that will eventually cause weird and seemingly unrelated behavior. Or not. Depends on how and why the code in question was changed. Generally, though, if Boris says the code is different, you should take that hack out and come up with a "creative" way to deal with the nannies.

Heh heh heh.

Haven't heard of that happening in the game. Didn't even know it was possible. (Although apparently Dr. Vu lobbied hard to include polygamy in the game, based on "his own personal experience." This was for a while a running joke as the explanation for anything weird in the game. "Dr. Vu's experience." I keep meaning to ask him, in a chat, about whether that was the inspiration for how alien abductions are handled . . . heh.)

Anyway, on polyandry (one woman with multiple husbands), it is or was practiced in Tibet, parts of India, Nepal, and other countries in that general region, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry. It's generally an economically motivated arrangement, sociallogically speaking. In fraternal polyandry, two brothers can marry the same women which means they don't have to divide their estate, and in a culture where at least some of the men are gone at any given time it helps to create a more stable household. That said, it's unusual, because there are fairly specific sociological conditions needed for it to be advantageous, whereas the more common form of polygamy (polygyny, multiple wives) has the fairly self evident and universal benefit of allowing a man (with enough means) to greatly increase the number of children he can have.

Enough sociology. It would be interesting to see if this effect is reproducible, since it would be nice in some situations to be able to have sims get married to more than one other sim at the same time.