I've just remembered that I have a mod that enables Sims to go for a spin in their cars and stay away as long as you want them to.   I use it mainly for Romance Sims (for obvious reasons), but it could just as easily be used for this purpose.  In fact, I think that's what I intended using it for and I completely forgot I had it!

It's one of Squinge's (had to go through about 10 pages to find it!) and you can find it here: http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=8887

This has been asked for quite a few times before on various forums.  I would have thought it was possible, after all they spend time away from the lot when they're at work, but I'm not a modder so I don't know about the technical ins & outs of it.  In one of the questionnaires I did on the main site they were asking whether players wanted time to pass on community lots, so maybe Maxis are planning something.  There is already a mod that allows time to pass while a Sim is on a community lot, I think it's Squinge's, although that's not quite the same thing. 

I would like a mod like this, too.  The only drawback with it would be if your Sim spends days on end at a business.  I tend to do that with mine as I prefer to get someone to manager in one go so I don't have to go there again, because it's so boring.  Ideally, it would work for leisure trips but not business, otherwise I think it would be too problematic.  There would also be the problem of fitting trips out around working hours, unless they could go to work from the community lot (which would add even more realism, esp. if at that point the game returned to their residential lot automatically).

I think maybe this is all too sophisticated for TS2, but I'm hoping they bring in things like this in TS3.  We definitely need more realism in the game.

Ancient had to go to Google to find out what a goomba was ...

Oh, sometimes it doesn't load for me either.  I often get messages saying the search facility is disabled because of heavy server traffic, too.  And of course the downloads are unbelievably slow.

I've just noticed that this isn't working for me, but that's probably because I didn't have the Grow-Up Townies compatible version installed (don't think it existed when I downloaded) so I will have to try again with that one.  The first final I had, the Sim had the same problem of coming back with it still in progress, but the second one was OK.  It may be because in the first case, the Sim actually graduated, maybe the game couldn't cope with that.

In actual fact, though, I may be better off without this mod.  My SS lot funds are more or less wiped-out now due to resurrections and I have no idea how to get anymore apart from cheating.  I suppose Maxis never expected more than 3 dormies to need resurrecting, but they probably didn't expect nouniprotect, either. 

What I ended-up doing was making my playable ones selectable whenever I saw them on community lots or when they wandered onto residential lots and getting them to change their clothes.  I have a mod to do it now, but at that time I was using boolProp to do it.  That always worked and they stayed in normal clothes the rest of the time they were there.  Occasionally the llama mascot would wear his llama outfit at home, but I just put that down to him having strange sexual perversions and let him get on with it most of the time.

I just updated this to try out the new dormie menu.  I use the normal version and I noticed that the College menu only shows-up if the Sim has a best friends relationship with the dormie, which seems a bit strange!  Obviously if a Sim has only just moved to Uni, chances are he won't know many or any of the dormies and I wouldn't want to wait until he became best friends with them all, but I'd rather stick to the best friends version. 

Can the College menu appear on ALL versions?  It doesn't seem to have any relevance as far as being best friends is concerned and I'd like to be able to set-up all the dormies with majors, but with this version I can't as a lot of them aren't best friends with anyone, let alone my playables.  Otherwise, it seems to be working fine and with this version I am able to ask townie kids to grow-up.

It's because of that stupid selling a business thing that I've stopped running them.  It drove me totally crazy.  Can there not be a fix for this?  It's very badly needed.

Well, mine are catching it from each other.  One household member recovers, then immediately recatches it from another who hasn't recovered.  Sometimes they get better at work/school, then catch it again as soon as they get home.  It all seems totally pointless when it never gets any worse.  I certainly don't treat mine any differently and they rarely stay off work - no point when they're always told "You don't sound ill" and lose a day's vacation (which I immediately give them back via Insim because they were ill, damnit!).

In my first Pleasantview she ended-up with the headmaster, Vince Walter, but that was before lightning bolts.  She was never interested in anyone else, all she wanted to do was veg-out and watch TV.  In my second, she married Hegelian, although she did have 3 bolts for John Burb and also for Darren Dreamer, as I recall.  I did very briefly play Pleasantview with all the pre-mades as teens and brought Skip back, but he and Brandi had no bolts at all, although they were platonic best friends.  She was more interested in Don Lothario than she was in Skip.

Not meant to be a back rub, just a silly pic!

Maybe, maybe not.  I only have one maid in my custom neighbourhood.  She's a playable Sim and has been the neighbourhood maid since she started as a new CAS adult.  She's an elder now and cleans more or less every house in the neighbourhood.  She currently has 'flu and is spreading it to everyone who hasn't already got it.  This has been going on for a while (it's some time since I played her lot) but nobody seems to be suffering unduly.  It all started with Gvaudoin Tricou's family, as I recall.  There were 8 people living there until recently and they all had it - Nylissit even died of old age while suffering from it.  They've had it for ages but they don't seem to get any worse, they just keep recovering and catching it again over & over.  Her eldest set of twins are due to start Uni very shortly, so maybe they'll infect the campus, although that's happened before and not come to anything either.

It was definitely easier to die of the 'flu before NL - I had several die of it with that glitch they eventually fixed, where they'd die on their own lot if they recovered on another.  Apart from my bride under the wedding arch, it's the only way mine ever did die of the 'flu.

I get the weird backrub a lot, too.  How about this one, this is JM's eldest daughter growing up:

Hmmm ... maybe it's the game's way of saying "Think you can get out of the delivery charge by going to a community lot in a FREE taxi?  Well you can't, 'cos we're slapping on a surcharge instead.  Ha-ha, stick that in your fridge and freeze it".

Maybe things would spread more if NPC's weren't immune.  I have a feeling that if you remove their immunity in SimPE, the game puts it back, but I'm not sure.  I particularly don't see why the nannies should be immune, it would serve them all right to be hacking all over the place at the same time as peeing their pants.

I have to ask this.  How come all your Sims have their own surname with their forename, then the name "Man" at the end?  It's been puzzling me for ages!!! 

Have you by any chance imported any Sims from other hoods and brought character files with them of Sims they met there?  I would probably just delete them myself.

The only adults who will autonomously hang-out are those who've been to Uni.  All mine do as I have a mod in that enables it.  I don't really see anything wrong with adults sitting on the floor - I sometimes watch TV that way, although I usually lean against the settee. 

Looks a very well-equipped house for such a small lot and I have downloaded it.  Have to say it was a sheer pleasure to do so after all the stuff I had to wait ages to download from MTS2 earlier.  It was taking forever to just start the downloads and I managed to download this one in about 5 seconds, which is pretty good going for 1.61MB.  Who hosts your site?  I might just take a look at their prices ...

My custom hood is on Day 40 now and I know I should abandon it.  I did what you say not to do - created the main neighbourhood and the subhoods (all custom, no Maxis ones), then simply went out and deleted all the character files (without bothering with deleteallcharacters).  I forgot all about SWAFS and DNA and it wasn't long before the problems started.  ALL my toddlers had strange wants (if they had any at all) and I had to spend ages deleting SWAFS and stuff.

What is weirdest though is that certain Sims keep getting strange relationships with people they don't even know.  It seems to be certain Sims in particular, although there is no pattern to them.  One is a CAS made adult male, another is my first CAS made YA, one is the second child born in the game, and several are townies/dormies.  The first two, for instance, apparently knew every single Professor in the game and had various relationships with them (the toddler, for instance, was married to one of them).  The in-born girl has gone one step further insofar as she apparently has a relationship with more or less every single Sim in the neighbourhood. The first YA created has basically the same problem.

I also had NPC's who were married to each other, parents of each other, etc.  There was no notice taken of gender or age - for instance, the papergirl was apparently the mother of one of the elder male cooks, who in turn was the father of a male elder Professor (making the papergirl the Professor's grandmother!).   Three of the NPC's also appeared to know more or less everyone in the neighbourhood, namely a gardener, mail delivery person and a fireman. No matter how many times I delete these relationships, they just keep coming back.  The 'known' box is never ticked, incidentally, but the relationship bars always show varying numbers.  It doesn't help that whenever a Sim is merely in the presence of another Sim, it produces a relationship between them in SimPE.  I would much rather that only happened when they actually met the Sim and the 'known' box was ticked, but that's another issue.

I didn't have a Diva, Mr Big, or Slobs until about Day 30, when it finally dawned on me that the game had never spawned any, so I had to create those myself with the tree.  Instantly, several of my Sims appeared to know them, even though they'd only just been created and not appeared anywhere (I left the game as soon as they'd been created to check).  None of these Sims were on the lot they were spawned on and several weren't even in the main neighbourhood, they were YA's. 

Anyway, I don't know if the way I created the neighbourhood caused all this to happen, but it's downright weird and I have no idea why it is continuing to happen.  The neighbourhood plays normally and obviously these relationships don't show-up in the game, nor do they show in Family Relations, but they're in the relationship sections.  The most puzzling thing is why the ticks keep coming back in "Married" and so on when I keep deleting them and why it keeps respawning the relationships.  The only way to get rid of them for good is to go through the character files and remove them, which is an absolute pain in the butt because SimPE forces you off the Relations list into the SimPool each time you delete one and you have to keep going back to find your place again to delete the next (that will only make sense to anyone who's done it!).  Deleting the relationships in Sim Relationships doesn't work, even if you delete both, they just come back.

BTW, what are all these Family Unknowns, are they something that's leftover from the beginning?  I haven't got rid of any families and I have about 11 or 12 of them.  One new one appeared only yesterday and I didn't delete any families or change any, although I did create two new ones.  I am wary of deleting them because I don't know what they are - does anyone know if it's safe to do so?

I may start a new neighbourhood when the forthcoming furry expansion that doesn't actually exist comes out, but that would be a problem insofar as I wouldn't want the usual crappy P'view townies, but I might want the new furry families and obviously this method wouldn't work then, so is there another way around that?

Smart Lights has also been updated: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=188024

(taken from original thread on THIS site! - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5493.0.html

Were they there before?  Usually when toddlers don't have them it's because they've taken the place of a previously deleted character.  I had loads of toddlers with either no Wants or very strange ones after deleting all characters in my custom hood.  Took me ages to sort it all out.  Try deleting the toddler's SWAF file in SimPE and see if it regenerates, although I'd wait first to see if they re-roll after he/she has been to sleep and you can also try re-rolling them manually with either InSim or via boolProp.

There are quite a few threads discussing this if you search for them.

Hmmm ... am I the only one sitting here feeling really sorry for this poor Sim woman?  As for eating flowers, I've never seen that before.  In fact, I've never seen flowers grow autonomously, are you sure they weren't weeds?  Not that I've ever seen a Sim eat weeds, either. 

Anyway, as JM said, ghosts come and go.  The angrier they are, the more likely they are to appear.  As for the cowplant ghosts, the dead Sims are probably still in their original households, they never seem to go to Default automatically.  Try summoning them with a teleporter, letting them stand until the game tells you they died on another lot, then save.  That should put them into the Default house and then they are more likely to appear.  Not guaranteed, but it should help.  Try bringing back the poor woman mentioned above in the same way, just to make sure she's still all in one piece.

There's definitely a no SSX3 hack, I think it's Squinge's.  I don't have it because mine hardly ever play it and most of them never do.  In fact, now I come to think of it I think Monique's computers have something that stops autonomous play.  The only time I see it is when I've forgotten to replace the normal ones, I think.  Yes, try Monique's pc's, there's oodles of good stuff on those.

I was using Monique's Landlord & Tenant mod for this exact purpose.  It's a bit tricky insofar as it's meant to be used to pay rent, not mortgages, but I just made a note of how much they'd paid and when they'd reached the total I transferred ownership to them (which meant I had to familyfund them the money as they'd already paid it and then delete it from the original owner, who had already received it).  I stopped using it in the end because the mod wasn't working properly, it kept reverting to weekly payments instead of daily and I got terribly confused about who had paid what & when.

I would say probably the best way would be to remove their 20K via familyfunds (or however much of it you want to remove) and then use Inge's mortgage shrubs, which will enable you to move them into a house that costs more than they have as long as it's set-up in advance.  I think it would be great if the game reflected real life more and there was a choice of buying or renting houses, but Maxis couldn't possibly be that sophisticated.

Nah, he's wailing instead.