"We" is my wife and me.  She does most of the design for the bodies and the houses.  I do most of the playing.

We had a neverending (or beginning) party go on in our neighborhood.  Our low-rank celebrity Sim got invited to a party at a celeb's house. In the map, the celeb's house showed the party icon overhead. When we sent our Sim out to the party, the house was dark and had no available interactions. Finally, we sent her home. We noticed that the celeb who invited her had lost her icon in the relationship panel; the name and relationship existed, but there was no headshot in the icon and no interactions were available on it.

We quit without saving and tried again. Our Sim got the invitation again. We saw the hostess's icon was still blank, so we didn't both sending our Sim out to the party. The house continued to show the party icon in the map even days later.

In Edit Town, the house showed itself as still occupied, but the owners seemed to be in limbo. We evicted them from the house and dumped them in an empty lot. The unoccupied house continued to show the party icon.  We deleted the house down to the empty lot which continued to show the party.  Finally, we deleted the lot itself which disappeared the party icon. We've never been invited to another party, though, so I suspect that one's still going, somewhere Out There.

Ok, just did a test with the latest 'n' greatest.

It's still refusing to let a Sim move to an empty lot.  The same "must have fridge and bed" warning icon blocked me.

However, Kick Out seems to be working fine now.  The departing Sim took half the household money, jogged to the edge of the lot, and vanished.

I'm curious, though.  Since I know there were no lots - even empty one - he could afford, where did he go?

My version of AwesomeMod has a mod date of 8/5 0726.  If that predates the fix, then I guess disregard my post.

I just downloaded a new copy which says 8/8 0432.  I'll install it and see what happens.  I don't have the exact scenario anymore, but I can probably cobble together something equivalent.

I've been having the hangs as well.  I've been doing some experimenting, and I think I know what's going on.

I pick Move off the departing Sims' phone and the regular Move Out dialog appears.  If I select Empty Lot, it lets me pick a lot, but then the dialog has a big exclamation point icon that forbids the move because the target lot has no bed and fridge.  Apparently, despite the move-to-empty-lot button, it won't allow you to move to an empty lot.  There are no houses that the departing Sim can afford.

When I pick Kick Out, the game confirms what the new active family will be (the ones who didn't leave) and then hangs with the "Processing" dialog.

If I drop a fridge and a bed on an empty lot, the move out dialog thinks it's a house. If I move her out to that house, everything works.

If I raise the family's funds until the departing Sim has enough cash to afford a house, Kick Out works fine.

Bottom line seems to be Kick Out hangs if there are no viable destinations, and with empty lots unacceptable, low funds means no destinations.

I do not have Indie Stone installed... just AwesomeMod and a few custom hairs and clothes.

Hey, thanks for building the Mac installer... it's a big help.

However, it's got one big problem... it doesn't sniff around for the app or allow me to specify where it is.  In order to keep my Applications folder under control, I group my apps in subfolders.  In this case, the game is actually installed in Applications/Games instead of just Applications.  Your installer created a folder named Applications/The Sims 3, put a busted "app" in there, and then installed the package contents normally under that.

It wasn't all that hard to open the real package in parallel with yours and copy the structure across.  It would be cool, though, if you could enhance it to autofind or at least permit manual picking of the root directory.

Thanks again!

BUY I know although I don't have it installed.  What's BRY?

I'll have to check that out, thanks!

You'd think they'd vary the rules between residential and community lots for that sort of thing.  Of course, you'd think they'd do a lot of stuff they don't.

I know I've seen Sims visiting a residential lot hop in their hosts' showers once or twice. It's definitely not the norm, though.

I've tried doing a bunch of searches, but if this has been addressed I can't find it. So, here goes.

I've been trying to build a health club.  I'm thinking about having my Athletic Sim buy it and run it as a post-retirement business, but it's just a regular community lot for now. I put in a pool, some exercise machines, etc.

It all works pretty well except none of the visiting Sims will use the showers.  They work out until they go into Hygiene failure and then sprint off the lot.  I've tried calling them off the equipment before they hit failure, and they just wander around stinking.  I started out with the communal shower set up from University.  Then, in case they didn't like that, I put in separate rooms with the top end shower stall.  Nothing.

I know the showers work because a playable will use them when told to do so.  I can't recall if a playable ever used them autonomously.

I'm running on the OFB engine with NL and Uni installed.

Anybody know why the filthy little things won't hit the showers?

The romance mod seems to be both stable and working, so I'll give that a big thumbs up. Thanks for getting a working copy posted.

Of course, my next attempt was ACR, and that's crashing with exactly the same stack trace. I guess you guys are patching some of the same areas. I suppose I should accept the inevitable and upgrade to one of the newer expansions.

Can anyone say whether it's more annoying to ignore wants to open a business vs wants to buy a pet?

No crash after a few minutes of play!  I'll let you know how a more extended play session goes, but I'm pretty optimistic.  I take it you ripped out all the post-NL code or something?

If I wanted to switch off NL to get away from the bugs, does it matter which EP I go with? University is the only one where the extra games features really appeal.  Since it came out before NL, though, wouldn't that mean I should use the NL version of the app? I guess I could install Pets and just not buy anyone a dog.

Thanks tons for working on this!

Same old, same old I'm afraid. The game lived long enough for the characters to start to move (posture changes and the like) and then bombed.

I'm happy to keep playing guinea pig if you've got ideas you'd like to test. If there's no hope, though, I don't want you wasting more of your weekend on this.

No joy on Marhis' suggestions, I'm afraid. What I did:

Turned off optimized rendering
While in the neighborhood screen, I selected 'mute' on each audio option
Ejected the NL DVD
Went into Strangetown Smith lot and paused immediately.

The selected characters wants all reset. I looked around a bit and all seemed reasonable.
When I unpaused, the characters wants reset again (which seemed mildly odd0
Then it crashed with the same stack trace as the previous times

I tried the new version, and I'm afraid all was much the same. A quick skim of the crash log looked functionally identical, so I won't waste space posting it.

I haven't tried Marhis' suggestions yet... I'll do that next. (Except for disabling Quicktime since I have no idea how to go about doing such a thing.)

My wife wanted me to mention that she dug up a copy of a base-game-only version somewhere and tried it. She said that it did NOT crash the system. However, things went all wonky in other ways. Two characters stood in place jerking and resetting repeatedly. She told them to sit down at a chess table, and they sat there talking normally. Whenever she told them to actually play chess, though, they pulled out the pieces, started to play, and then glitched back to wherever they were standing before she told them to play. Several other behaviors were weird, too. We can post more details of this version's oddities, but I won't take up more space unless you think it would be helpful.

I haven't noticed anything specific, and I haven't issued any instructions manually when it crashes. Based on the function names in the stack trace, I'd guess one of the characters was trying to select an autonomous action (cTSPerson::TryFindBestAction, etc).

Can you suggest anything I should try in order to narrow the problem down?  Or is the answer that I'm SOL without adding a newer EP?

I'm running the Mac version, and the only EP I have installed is Nightlife. If it matters, I'm on an Intel-based Mac Pro.

I downloaded the latest version of the romance mod listed in the hack index, and I made sure to get the one from the NL folder. When I install it, though, Bad Things happen. Basically, within seconds of starting the clock in a lot, the game crashes out to the desktop.

Everything seems ok until I enter a lot. Even in a lot so long as I keep the game paused, things seem stable. Once I unpause the game, though, it will die within seconds. I've tried putting it in debug mode, but I don't get an error dialog or any interesting log files. This happens in several different lots including ones in my neighborhood and one in Strangetown.

I have emptied my Downloads folder other than the romance mod, and the same thing happens.

I have attached the OS collected crash log which shows an EXC_BAD_ACCESS exception coming out of thread 0. It also has stack traces for all the threads. I don't know if this will be any help or not, but I figured throwing it in couldn't hurt.

I desperately want this mod, so I'm hoping someone has an idea how to let me use it. Thanks in advance!