Did you try removing the cache files?

It happens more for CAS sims, more for alien-born or artificially spawned same sex sims, and more if you adopt also. Sort of like the game knows there is a child there, but isn't too sure who it is. My born-in-game sims do that also sometimes though. The toddlers will roll wants for their mom and if she doesn't fill them wants for their dad and if he doesn't, then just wants for *someone*. And the father that ended up with 5 kids, 3 teens at once would usually want the eldest or the last one that aged to go to college, but sometimes it was like he was saying, 'God would some of you kids just get out of the house already, any one, I don't care which.'

As it happens to born-in-game sims too, I wouldn't worry about it.

Oh yeah, I've not got any children that are perma-plat. Would it work to age her up (does it work for teens? I don't have any teens that are perma-plat either, but if not, age her all the way to adult), take away the perma-plat with the debugger and age her back down again? Actually the only perma-plat sim I have is an elder and his is a mistake too. One of his daughters graduated from college twice :p and gave him the 'graduate 3 children' LTW. I took it away again. I don't much like perma-plat sims.

I dunno about the body skilling thing. It's kind of odd because prior to patching all skills maxed out if a sim learned physiology and post-patching only body does. That's why I thought it was by-design. So the patch obviously did *something* but not the same thing in my game it seems to have done in Pescado's. I know I'm completely patched. I reinstalled awhile back and I always install the EP, patch, install EP and patch, etc. Boring dance, but I don't trust the game to do everything in those patches from just patching at the end.

Ah well I get that also then and just thought it was as intended. I've just not let my sims learn it, but maybe I should try with a new sim (not a holdover) and see how it differs.

Doesn't the Lot Debugger remove plat status?


PS:  I think the patch fix for physiology just made it quit making *all* the skill gains too fast (if you'd learned physiology, every skill gain happened at that level). It still makes body gain fast, and that's what was intended. (I believe.)

They still have to pay someone to think. That's been too heavy a price for them all along.

The arrow keys or page up/page down won't work?

*has a scrolly wheel and will be happy to use it, is just curious*

They'll tell you what their favorite color is in the "get to know" conversation and they will cook and eat their favorite food more if it's available and they know how. There's also a wish to 'cook *soandso's* favorite food. I haven't noticed anything at all with music, but I pay little attention to the stereos and probably not much to the music conversation.

And the car pool is still happy to wait a full hour for you. When the 'go to work' thing comes up, click it off and click on the car to add it to the end of the queue. Don't cancel the action out unless there's only 15 min or less to time for work and even then if you miss it, you just go to work auto because it's in your queue and your sim and the game doesn't even notice.

That's to make sure the $60 game runs well when one wastes $9.99 on the Iphone version.

Carrigon's been making some hacks. I suspect they're also of the XML tuning hacks variety but I know nothing of coding or what not. I also haven't used any of them and have no idea how well they work or anything.

http://www.sims2workshop.com/viewforum.php?f=170

You need to queue up enough that your neat sim isn't doing the chores before the wish comes up or leave leftovers from the day before or whatever management strategy works for you because they definitely roll wishes to make the bed and clean the dishes (and the sink and the toilet and whatever) and get buffs for them. They also refuse to use dirty toilets (and I'd assume tubs and the like) so if you let all the toilets available get dirty, a neatnik will have an accident rather than go. Which is almost funny.

I believe fertilizing made my plants grow faster. I had 3 newly planted grapevines and a low level gardener (just got fertilizing). Fertilized the first with an excellent (or whatever the equivalent is for fish) fish, the 2nd with an okay fish, and didn't fertilize the 3rd at all. The first one turned up a harvest quickly, middle one just a day later and the last one it was several days before there was anything to harvest.

Interestingly enough, the game had no issue at all letting me drop a family on an empty lot, motherlode them and then move them to a better house. We didn't bother to buy beds, so there certainly weren't enough on the lot for all the sims. A 2nd family dropped on the same lot (which is now listed as a 'house' even though there's nothing on it) responded similarly. So I guess Asylum wouldn't be an issue if you start with a family of created sims rather than move-ins. (Reloaded version, btw).

I had to put the cheapest chess set actually outside to place the chairs. I found that annoying as I regularly put the outdoor one inside in sims2. When I edited a community lot and added 2 more so there were actually enough available for a chess tourney to have several sims play before time runs out, one chair in each of the new sets failed to work properly. Dumb game.

The difference is that sims2 doesn't get in my way (much) while I do that and sims3 does.

It's obvious, though, that I didn't make myself clear in the previous post. I'm talking about telling myself stories and using the sandbox/toy for myself. I'm not talking about blogging and I'm not talking about machinima. In both of those, all that would count was what I was showing the audience as it's the audience's suspension of disbelief that counts. So what the game says/does matters not a bit if you're using it as a stage. I'm talking about becoming attached to the characters, giving/finding their personalities and playing a game that I play for myself, and what counts there is my *own* response. I've been playing for a couple of weeks now and have run the sims through the first generation and well into the 2nd. At this point in sims2, I was hooked on my sims. Not for me for this game.

Actually it does. It's part of the "wall of text" mentioned in the post I quoted and drags on the concept. The daredevil trait is very poorly done. If I imagine that I'm going to make a sim/character that likes danger - jumps out of airplanes, rides on motorcycles and takes chances in life - it not only adds nothing to the characterization to have almost every single thing he touches be listed as "extreme," it actually pulls away from imaging a serious character of that nature (breaks the wall, makes it difficult to suspend disbelief) and takes him into the absurd. The occasional extreme game of chess might be reasonable, but not for (almost) every item (extreme sleep, extreme shower, etc.) and every single time you do that action.

As a contrast, the neurotic trait is a lot of fun and adds to that characterization. Randomly a neurotic sim comes up with desires to "wash his hands 3 times" or "check the sink" etc. It's easy to put your own interpretation into those. He has his first kiss and wants to brush his teeth 3 times. Maybe he's afraid of germs, any germs, and can only really have a relationship with a girl that doesn't cause that reaction, or maybe he's paranoid about how well he kisses and scared to death the girl doesn't like him. He wants to brush his teeth and try again. Or maybe he washes his hands all the time because Lady Macbeth's blood has appeared. It's random, different enough to offer lots of options and not so absurd that it's hard to explain in some reasonable (for being neurotic) fashion. The only "advantage" to extreme is that it happens often enough that you'd probably get used to seeing it and tune it out at some point. That's not much of an advantage.

Story Progression isn't the only issue. All the stuff you're talking about - traits and missions at jobs and bosses/coworkers are *game play* things. It's a good part of how the game convinces you to move along its pre-destined line to "finish" the game. It imposes upon you little missions and opportunities *whether they make any sense within your story or not.* The problem isn't that the game is too barebones - it's that it's not barebones *enough*. The gameplay parts get boring really quickly, for me. Honestly, I've seen almost all of them in sims2. A lot of it is just recycled with another name/description. (I was quite disappointed to find that a fascinating sounding LTW was really nothing more than level 9 in the science career.) But it imposes the game's story upon me, rather than offering me a spot to make my own.

(Skips all the stuff about Legacies and machinima.)

Well, I guess we play very differently. (The 'toy' analogy is Pescado's and I'd accuse him of many things but not leet/12ness I don't know if you don't characterize your sims, don't mind if the game changes your characterizations, find it easier than I do to suspend disbelief and to characterize within the game's limitations, prefer gameplay (or building or something else) or what, but I'm talking about MY experience of the game, and what makes no sense to me is that you seem to be claiming that can't be my experience.

I tend to play about the same way I used to play table-top dnd a long time ago. I have (or the GM gives me) a base idea of the world and I come up with a character concept intended to fit within that world. Without the EPs and CC, there are certain characters I can't make. That's fine. I'm a cooperative player and don't fight the party or insist my world view trumps the GMs (or at least if I make a cowboy, I know I'm playing him in a world where everyone has a cell phone.) So I've come up with several character concepts that should fit in the TS3 world (modern, maybe slightly post-modern, town-y/cityscape or something, slightly nutso, a world with ghosts and Goths as NPCs). The thing is, my characters still don't fit. Even if I'm giving them traits off the list and expected careers within the game, the characters break. I've got one more idea to try that's pretty much perfect for this world and if that still doesn't work, I'll just give up and go back to TS2. I'm kind of surprising myself by trying this hard to like this game anyway. And there is a lot about it I do like. And maybe I'm underestimating JM and he can fix more than I'm crediting. Or if the first EP really is business and is like OFB maybe that will help as it opened up so many options in TS2. I'm not sure, but of course TS2 is always there for me.

This, exactly. I don't think the game works at all for storyteller types. Ok, I can't do 20s or Wild West or something because there's no custom content yet. That's no big deal. But I also can't do a modern character without the game messing up the personalities (and yeah, taking an "extreme" shower doesn't make someone a daredevil and I'm sick of "extreme" games of chess <eyeroll> after about 2 seconds.) No matter how 'base' the base TS2 game was, I could still make MY characters. I can't do that in TS3. I can only make game pieces who want to learn to cook because they happened to make dinner or pick up shiny things because there's one laying around. I admit I've never been big on the "humor" element anyway. Any of the jokes tend to get old really quickly. But I'm even disappointed with the gardening. It feels unrealistic and I don't want to grow cheese and eggs. :p Bah. I don't think modding can make this game into something I enjoy. It's broke at the base of it. Pescado can probably mod it so his characters have the right wishes, but like TS2, I bet he can't give that to rest of us. For TS2 the non-immersion parts were ignorable so I could have that anyway. For TS3, not so much.

*nod* Thanks. I actually suspected that was the answer, but thought I'd ask before I gave up altogether. A new computer is in the works down the road a bit and as we do actually have good ones that will run the game, it's not that big a deal, but my husband and I skipped kindergarten and 'doesn't play well with others' belongs on our report card. I was hoping not to have to share just to play around with it.

Thanks! It was worth a shot. Especially as it appears the problem is with "shaders model 2" which is the same thing you can change in the graphics rules text file in TS2 but maybe TS3 is more dependent on it. But not a big deal, hubby will just have to share

Yeah, it is. So is the computer and the computer itself would have to be upgraded to upgrade to a better video card. It's not worth that. That doesn't answer the question though. Can I trick the dinosaur into running the game or is it impossible?

It's an ATI Raedon 9250 video card.

Stupid question 5,006: My poor dying computer says it can't run the game because it doesn't support Shader Model 2 (runs fine on my husband's computer, of course). Is there any way I can trick my computer into starting it anyway, by editing the graphic rules file as was done for TS2, or would that just break the game even if I got it to load?

I would like to run it (even at all low settings) on this computer for a bit. Buying a new one (or upgrading the video card and it can't take a new card anyway as it needs more upgrades than that) isn't an option right now and isn't really necessary anyway as there are 2 other machines in the house that will run the game. I'd just like to know if it was possible.

My computer has issues, and it crashes. When it crashes the sims to the desktop, or spontaneously reboots altogether, it often corrupts files it shouldn't be able to touch - the sims program files. I've done my best to lock them down (which is nothing like Pescado's best), making every file and every folder read-only and something else Pescado recommended in a similar thread at some point and it has helped, but obviously not completely fixed the issue as I now have program files corrupt in a new way.

It used to be mostly clothing files and I'd just go to the disk of the appropriate EP (uni often) and pull the textures out and replace them. At the moment, my game is missing text from menu items, most noticeably the word "more" on the button. The button works fine, I can click on it without an issue and I get another screen of options just as I should, but the actual word "more" does not appear. Also none of the text from the save menus exists at all. If I choose to go back to the neighborhood from a house, the text that should say something like "save first" or "just go the hood" etc. is all missing. Also the Seasons pop ups that say how many days are left in a season won't pop up. The ones that say how many days a sim has left in the age group work fine, however, so I suspect it might be data in Seasons that's corrupt, but I don't know for sure. There's some other text missing as well. It's not really a problem as I know enough about what those menus say to play anyway, but it's annoying and besides it's broken.

I really don't want to reinstall, however, especially as it's still playable as is. I've done normal things - removed all downloads to make sure there wasn't something weird in there causing it, checked for hack conflicts, checked other hoods to make sure it wasn't just the one, etc. Can I replace the files that should have that text from the disks? Can anyone tell me what to look for to find out what I need to replace? I don't even know where to start with that one.

Spelling is important, and grammar is important but spelling and grammar... ?

PS:  "That is" is not an interrupter in this sentence:

If you put another cash register on the same lot, you'll get another cashier.

Also try reinstalling the color enabler package.