Known bork -- been discussed extensively in the AL Borkedness thread a few down from here.

Um, no, just no. Maxis dorms come with mailboxes, and dorms get bills.  Not sure what Maxis dorm's you've ever played, but if your dormies don't pay their bills, they get things repossed.

Yea, The Horatio (innocuous name for a deadly killer ) kinda ended up looking like alligators on two legs -- not sure if I did that intentionally, but there you go.

I'm redownloading now, in case I got a corrupted copy the first time -- the torrents are running much faster, so it shouldn't take me a week to get it this time.

Yea, I just saw that ATI has new drivers up, so I'm downloading them now.  My bunch was in early Civ stage when it crashed Friday night, but when I went back in to play them last night, they were back in the middle of Tribal.  And I *know* I saved when they completed tribal before going to Civ, and then saved again right after their first city formed, but the game completely ignored those saves.  So I just said the hell with it, and deleted their planet (that'll show 'em ).  Did get a pic of the tribal leader floating in space first, though.



FYI, there's an article in today's Washington Post about the controversy and user reactions over EAxis' DRM. He mentioned that someone has already made a creature called "Ea's DRM Policy" that has its head stuck firmly up its ass.  You can find it quite easily over on the Spore site, and in case it disappears, here's the .png for your viewing and game-adding-to pleasure:

Depends on when you acquired Uni -- after a while, the patched version does become the release version once the old CDs are sold out and EAxis makes new ones.
 

Yes, because you'll be activating a legitimate serial number if you buy it.

No, because they're still in testing, and if you don't know what they do you shouldn't be using them.

I don't know if I got a bad copy, but I've had nothing but problems -- graphic glitches, random crashes, even had my tribal leader constantly lock up and not be able to even feed himself.  Once I couldn't find him, and when I clicked on his avatar he was floating in space above the planet.

That said, I'm not so much impressed with Sprore.  I was never a fan of SimCities, and while I used to play Age of Empires, I'm over that phase .  I may give Spore just enough of a try to see if the space stage really does salvage it, but so far, I'm more likely to just delete it from my disk...

Bork; discussed in the AL bork thread in 'Oops! You Broke It!' -- fix there, so I won't repeat it.

Umm, simple reading here will indicate that using the no-cd.exe means just that, and also means you don't get SecuROM on your system. This is not news. 

Correct on both counts (AFAIK).

Actually, I have both the 'arch' and the 'archfix' package.  Guess I can dump the 'arch' one then.

1) take out non-awesome stuff
2) make sure all awesome stuff is updated for AL
3) try game and see if problem remains.
4) if yes, remove everything
5) if no, start putting back other stuff 1/2 at a time, play game, see if problem exists -- repeat as needed, until you track down the problem child.

Yea, doorjamfix works nice for the lights, but I've just discovered that if there's something else by the doors (i.e., the ductwork from AL), then the doors stay permanently open as well.

I don't think you can permanently set them in userstartup.cheat; you can, however, alias them so it's easy to turn them on and off as needed.  Here's how I have it:

#------------------------------------------------------------------
# New Cheat Aliases - AL
#------------------------------------------------------------------

alias ab  "boolProp aptBaseLotSpecificToolsDisabled false" "apartment build on" "apartment build on"
alias ab- "boolProp aptBaseLotSpecificToolsDisabled true" "apartment build off" "apartment build off"

alias ax  "boolProp aptSubLotSpecificToolsDisabled false" "apt external build on" "apt external build on"
alias ax- "boolProp aptSubLotSpecificToolsDisabled true" "apt external build off" "apt external build off"
#------------------------------------------------------------------

Ah, thanks Emma!  I had it in the wrong place -- now I can put it in its proper place and not worry about it.

Yaaaaa! Come home to find my download finally done!  Now I can find out what the hell this game is all about.

Risking the scary man to ask -- Argon, I found a hack in my downloads called 'argon arch'.  I have no idea what it is, where I got it, or if it's even needed anymore.  What is it?

I've never seen anyone bang pots and pans -- is it an autonomous thing, or can they be directed to do it?

Unknown -- I don't think anyone has run it through hackdiff to find out.  Baring a definitive statement one way or the other, it's better to be safe and not use it in AL.

No, that's normal -- the bowl empties as the parrot eats, and it costs more to refill.  The bug is that even though the parrot is eating, its hunger isn't getting filled properly, so after a period of time it dies of starvation even though it's eating. TJ has never obsoleted his fix for that, so I'd have to say that bug is still there.

I suspect the satellite was 'encouraged' to fall.

Actually, I believe TwoJeffs said over in his forum that the parrot code was used for the toy dogs.  You need to get his 'Caged Pet Fixes' hack to keep the toy dog from starving to death even though it's constantly eating (the same bug the parrots still have).

Also not a bork -- additional family members get an extra 5k each in AL when you create a family in CAS.

That's exactly what happened to me, and why I first got a no-cd.exe. Took a bit to get SecurROM off my system, but I learned my lesson. In my case, it was a 2-year old mid-line Dell machine.