Weirdly enough, it seems that everybody around me chose to celebrate this day with a contest in apalling news - and it worked everytime. But this, added to 30 years of smoking... My poor heart.

I had that happen before BV with the Bluewater Village template, with the "dirt" terrain as well; I didn't try the other terrain types. On every attempt it came clustered with one kind of trees, not as fun as the palm trees though.

...Duh. I'll "fix" it back and learn where the option is .

Loving the CS stuff, totally in line with what I'm currently working on

Just one thing to report: the toilet bush was nowhere to be found in my game, and I saw in SimPE that it doesn't have a category.  I put it under outside/plumbing/toilet and now it works fine.

Oops, I didn't intend to save my first post, I realised while typing that I didn't play long enough to be sure - sorry for that.

So I sent 2 sims to the huge beach hotel in Twikki Island, and let the game play for about half an hour: the regular CPU usage is between 43 and 51 %. I'd say it's not just you, except that I seem to get lag only when the sims start playing kickball and the CPU usage climbs to 54 %; I guess other events on the lot will easily trigger that though.
I also tried disabling the shaders, it makes no significant difference.

My specs:
Windows XP home
Intel Core Duo E6750 2.66 Gzh
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS
2 GB RAM

About your second problem, it looks a lot like what happened on my old system. Regular lots would play normally, with just a little lag sometimes (I didn't try playing for hours though); but beach lots were playable for about 10-20 minutes, then lag, then freeze and stuck sound. In my case though, the blue screen followed and the whole system locked up. The task manager (than I had to start before the problem occured or it wouldn't even launch) indicated a CPU usage of 100 %.
That seemed a clear case of Nvidia card compatibility (geforce 6600) and insufficient RAM (1 GB), and disabling the shaders fixed the issue until I got a new computer.
...And no, I didn't buy a new computer just for the shaders!

I'm sorry if I didn't explain well, technical stuff and English aren't very easy for me and I would rather have let Wes tell you more.
You can use the tool to change the facial expressions, but it's not convenient for completely new face animations - at this point nothing is.  I believe that what Wes referred to is that we were able to do cut-and-paste jobs with different animations, taking the face data from one to recompile with another. Or when I played with the morph values to understand how they worked, it allowed me to paste that in different test animations instead of retyping them all.
If you just want to set the expressions to neutral, Pescado is right, you can just set all the values to 0, either in raw view in SimPE or in the anmdat file - now I think it would be faster in the anmdat file: just keep the first keyframe with the values reset to 0, delete all the others - maybe unlinking the whole face anmdat would work too, but in this case the sim might get stuck with the last expression performed before the neutralized one.
Or would a behaviour approach like Pescado suggested be conceivable for this instead? I'm totally out of my depth when it comes to coding.

Inge, I'm afraid that you'll be disappointed: the face animations use morphs (I'd swear this is mentioned somewhere in the notes), and while you can edit the face blends in the appropriate anmdat file, Milkshape can't read them nor would it be possible for Wes to make it do so. You see how morphs are handled by the Animesh plugin, with dummy meshes to represent the morph's vertex locations? This works fine with the 3 fitness states, but you can see why it wouldn't with 27 face blends (if I remember well).
Also, with the body morphs we don't edit the "change fitness" anims, we just indicate the vertices's target location that the animations will use...
And right, Milkshape can work with vertex animations (moving the vertices without the use of joints), but I guess that designing a tool that would allow to do so in reference to the morphs would be a crazy coding work, if even doable.
Simpose allows to use the face blends, but the developer assigned arbitrary morphs that don't really represent what is possible in game so the expressions are limited, and he didn't include the eyes and teeth blends - so it's not possible to use Simpose for even a rough preview, by entering similar values. I googled the extensions of the files generated by Simpose a while ago when I realised that the developer wasn't working on it anymore, in the hope of finding that some kind of conversion would be possible (for somebody else  ), and came up with industrial robot software >_<

Now, I've been working on a similar thing for the CAS face animations which are an old pet peeve of mine; I could do this in the anmdat file, but in this case I find it easier to change the blend values directly in SimPE, in the raw view tab - a little less hard on the eyes.
In this case, it's more a matter of finding acceptable values between the neutral face (0 for every blend) and the exxagerated expressions, so the lack of preview isn't a serious issue; it just takes a few loads and reloads of CAS to check where I'm going. Anyway, if I was able to change the main pose's expressions to my liking, I still didn't locate the animation files for the random face overlays or the close view.

The text files are more useful if you want to replace a face animation with an existing one: you'd disassemble both animations, and either paste the wanted face blends in the original anmdat, or link to them in the anmctl file, making sure that the timecodes match and editing them if necessary.
In fact this disassembler and compiler are really neat, they already saved me remaking a whole "get down" animation for the spiral stairs for which I had forgotten to add the sound effects on export, and stupidly overwrote the ms3d file. I just had to disassemble an EAxis stairs animation, make the number and timecodes of the sound events match mine, then link to these in the anmctl file of my own disassembled anim.

Weird, Andis shouldn't expect .5gd files, I don't even think it can do anything with them . It works perfectly fine here with .5an anyway.

Dizzy: I wish I knew...

I've been trying to find a good explanation, that one works nicely 
Also, almost all in-game animations use IK for the arms and legs, wether there's an interaction or not. From an animator's point of view, it would be much easier to grab a hand or a foot and put it exactly where you want it with the skeleton following instead of rotating each bone of the limb in turn, ending up fiddling with 0.001 degree rotations to get more or less what you need.

I can't link there from my workplace, but you'll find the Animesh plug-in and related threads in R&D at MTS2, in the animations sub-forum

Ok, my bad - I wanted to keep a good definition without using huge textures so it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I should have made the mesh differently so the pole could be tiled on a smaller part of the texture... Not sure it would have looked good though. This must have been a pain for you! Once again, well done.

(I wanted to reply earlier but had the kind of computer crash that makes you check you bank account and start check lists for programs and stuff - was a little wobbly when it finally worked again >_<)

Well done, I kept hoping that somebody would try a wrought iron recolour and these look very good
You're mentioning mapping issues though, and I'm specially anal with uv-maps... I'll have to take a look and figure out what I messed up.

Yes, works fine in case you don't need a real door. Well it seems that the issue doesn't bother many people, I'm probably seeing it bigger than it is because I had to find a solution for closed stairwells.

I don't think that's the same issue - in this  case, the doors just stayed open but the sims went through just fine. When trying to remove the doors, I got the "can't delete object in use" message.

JM Pescado,
I'm hoping to get some support and convince you to release this fix...

Probably most of you noticed that issue with doors getting stuck in use when placed next to stairs tiles or other objects; not being a real player I didn't until recently, when working on my spiral stairs. So as a workaround I butchered the footprint, but JM Pescado mentioned that he made a fix for that (of course he did!) - except that Fat Gwilly People didn't ask for it yet

Well the issue is "solved" on my side, if not satisfyingly, but I shouldn't be the only one to think that this fix would be really useful?

Just to let you know - the issue was confirmed by several other people.
I still didn't find a perfect workaround - okay, I'm not a real modder, but the chances there is one really don't look too good.
Well there are other things to play with... *sigh*

Thank you for replying and trying to help anyway

Thanks a bunch

Yes, the metallic looking skintones are what I mean - no problem until Pets and Seasons, and now the effect is lost on the face when importing the finished sim in game.
It looks ok in CAS, wrong in family CAS and in game. It's also wrong on sims that displayed properly before I installed these EPs.
What I found is that the SimSkin type of material is applied to the face in the character file, when the envcube (the additional texture used for the reflections) needs the SimStandardMaterial to work (but then how did it work before? The settings surely weren't changed in already exixting sims?). Changing this is not a big deal, but it looks like it messes with the layering - for the eyes in particular, but I think the same will happen with makeup - so I'm stuck.

I'm aware that Pets changed things with the materials and the layering, and I can't think of a workaround; and yes, I'd be interested to know it somebody who has Pets and Seasons happens to have one of these skintones working properly in game, in which case the issue could be with my video card.

Since I installed Pets and Seasons - both on the same day, but I guess Pets is responsible for this - the face of skintones using an envcube has lost it's reflectivity and the colour is weird.
I was able to fix that only by changing the material definition in the character files to SimStandardMaterial; doing this in the file of saved sims doesn't seem to have any effect, the material definition still reverts to SimSkin in the character file when putting the sim in game.
I could still live with that, but I'd need to share a sim using a reflective skintone and not all users will want or be able to edit the character file; the biggest issue though is that when you do that, the sim will use the eyes of the skintone instead of any custom ones.

Um, was this clear, and would anybody have any idea about how to fix that? I mean, in the best of cases keep the face's reflectivity without any SimPE editing by the end user, or else find settings to make custom eyes that would apply over it?

Snowstorm made a tutorial about custom thumbnails for accessories http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=194145, I don't think it was mentioned  - now I wish all accessory creators knew about it, and well, I still have to update my own stuff >_<

Else I agree that a standard for binning would be nice; in theory, I don't see why I would use more than one pair of glasses or such even given the possibility, but when creating a sim and trying on stuff I often end up losing time going back to remove an unwanted item. Now good luck with making it a general practice... For now I'm rather surprised that there isn't more conflicts with stuff simply using the original bin codes. But if there is a standard, and if I make more accessories, I'll happily use it.

Oh, about horns - people like to combine different kinds that don't work too bad together, like big horns in the middle with smaller ones on the sides (but I think i saw 3 pairs once).

I did notice a serious slowing down at the moment the leaves started falling on a 3x2 lot with 7 regular trees and almost no custom content, 2 sims and a cat - noticeable and sudden enough that I thought "oh, that's the falling leaves"; on the other side, no issue at all on a 5x5 lot chock full of CC with 4 sims and a servo, and 2 orchard trees... I mean it doesn't seem to lag more than usual.

You can alway delete the character files in SimPE (compare with the CAS from the global lots to make sure what can be deleted), but I'm not sure how effective the cleaning is since SimPE doesn't read all the files... Anyway I never had issues when doing that. Now you should probably use a copy of the lot and keep the original in game;  when I tried the welcomers arrived at once on the lot, probably best to not mess with their memories.

Now if cleaning the characters this way is safe, an automatic search-and-destroy would be great; I'm still wondering if I missed something since the only controller I found is the scenario controller.

Oopsie, forgot to fence the lot!! I guess strays wandering in CAS won't be fun for long either >_<

Thank you for the quick reply

I finally had a sim die or at last fall frozen and stay that way, and the game crash on exit.  Not familiar with the lot debugger (merely used "force error" until now), I followed your explanations the best I could, but the only controller I found was the scenario controller - by that time the welcomers were all over the lot and the resulting file wasn't precisely clean...
I finally managed to fix my arches issue in OFB only, and the resulting CAS works fine for now. But custom CAS are going to be tricky it seems...
Thanks again!