Well, I never really intended for this to be a request thread.  I suppose what I really wanted to know is if it was even technically feasible (and maybe it is, if I can learn to work with tokens).  If there's an affirmative, or at least not "that's completely impossible", I was thinking of tinkering around with the idea myself.  I know better than to request things of anybody else.

I guess basically I want to have some balanced aspiration mechanic that lies between short-term things like "make new friends" and the LTWs.  Something with a longer-lasting effect, but without making them perma-plat.

Influence is pretty useless right now, but once in a while I make a guest clean or cook, if my sims need extra time for skilling or some other reason.  I don't care so much if it's inefficient since it's free labor.

Well, sure, I never argues against that.  The point is that, if you're a Fortune sim, for example, who just got fired, a nice date may provide a temporary lift.  But at the end of the day, in their eyes, their life should still suck.  After all, they still need a job. (A family sim who'd been divorced, on the other hand, would obviously get a more permanent boost, and romance sims go without saying.)

This is an idea that came to me quite a while ago, and I've been thinking it over.  The basic idea is that, for some situations the aspiration meter just doesn't make sense (e.g.  Sim is in aspiration failure, but one date puts him back in platinum) . Since adding the lifetime relationship bar in TS1 seemed to help, why wouldn't it work for aspirations?  My thought is that the "Lifetime" meter would be used for most of the calculations, mood boost, etc. that the current one is used for now, and the "daily" aspiration meter would pull the lifetime one up or down with time, just like relationships work.  Things like power wants and power fears would affect the lifetime meter directly, so that, for example, a Fortune sim who got fired wouldn't just forget all his troubles by getting a new car or something.  Mainly, power wants and fears seem relatively useless to me right now since you can achieve the same effect by spamming smaller wants/fears.  Obviously this is far beyond the realm of any mod, but I wish they'd put something like this in for TS3.  Wishful thinking, I know...

Hmm... Well, if the sims don't pay income tax, why should they pay propety tax>   Seriously, though, the thought just never occurred to me.  It wouldn't be too hard to put in, I suppose, but I think it can wait until tomorrow.

Well, fortunately I get a whole week off of school for thanksgiving, so for a while at least I'll have some time for modding.  I just finished a beta version of a mod that will calculate bills solely on water/power usage.  (It never made sense to me that I had to keep paying for my stuff over and over, anyway )  I call this a beta because I haven't done enough testing to decide whether the bills are too much or not enough.  Also, some of the objects were still coded to calculate utility costs, and some weren't -- I haven't looked through all the objects yet.  It's trivial to add or adjust, but it involves editing the BHAVs which is usually bad for compatibility, so I haven't done any yet.  I also changed the mailbox so it's calculate bills function doesn't require debug mode -- if anyone would like to use that to test certain objects and see whether they affect the bills, I would appreciate it.  And, of course, all comments and questions are welcome.

Yeah, I know, I'm edging the line on the cardinal necromancy rule, but since it's my thread, hopefully I'm okay... right? In any case, I'm posting to explain why I've been gone.  In short, stupid Real Life rearing its ugly head again.  In particular, I have annoying college application stuff to deal with, so I'll be busy for the next couple of weeks.  That being said, I revived this thread because I plan to get back into modding after things cool down over here.  Just updating so that, you know, people realize I'm not dead or anything.

I suppose I wasn't very clear on the grandkid scenario.  It wasn't something to help with family ties; rather, it was (or appeared to be) a scenario you would have to go through in order to have a grandchild.  I didn't see anything for having a regular kid.  So I figured if parents could have kids normally, and their kids had kids normally (as they do now) a scenario wouldn't make much sense. Besides, what if they somehow went through the grandkid scenario before having regular kids (cheat, boolprop, glitch, whatever)?  I probably could fix the family ties if I only knew where/how they were calculated.

Risky Integrated Woohoo: Talk about a tall order! The thing is, most of those can be done either manually or through other hacks.  A is easy to set up ahead of time, I believe Inge's shrub takes care of C, and InSIM or something similar can handle D.  B can be done in-game (sort of) if the resident sim is female.  So I guess what you're looking for, mainly, is to be able to have a kid without marriage/move in if the resident is male.  I have no clue WHAT I would do about that.  If I think of something, I'll get back to you.

Seems like my great ideas have already been done. It looks like both mods mainly invoke the built-in BHAVs that I've already noticed.  Ah well.  I can still have the task of tying the scenario/power outage with an actual thunderstorm, which neither mod has done.  That'd still be cool... right? At least if they're using Eaxis BHAVs, that holds some promise for the amount of functionality that was left in.  Funny thing, too, in the same group as the power outage scenario are also shells of scrapped engagement and grandchild scenarios.  The engagement one has sort of made a comeback with the NL dates, but I'm not sure WHAT they were thinking about the grandchild one.

Well, pbox, I'm in that exact situation myself, as I mentioned above (having Seasons, but not Pets).  I haven't tested the new version on my own system yet, but I will soon.  I'll respond soon with results.

As for a new shiny, currently I'm looking at the remnants of code dealing with the scrapped power outage scenario.  I have no idea how much of it is salvageable/currently hooked up, but it appears that there were functions that took energy/water use into account when calculating bills, functions to turn on/off the power, and something that runs a function tied to objects when this state changes.  I'm currently investigating to see how this can all mesh together.  I was probably one of many (well, at least several ) people who hoped this power outage scenario would return with the Seasons expansion.  Exactly what I can accomplish remains to be seen.

Yikes! That trading mod seems more than a little out of my league. Ask me again in a few months, maybe I'll have changed my mind. Seriously though, if I were to look at that now it'd be a recipe for banging my head into the wall from frustration. The one part I probably could do is nuke the give gift animation... that shouldn't be too hard. I'll think about it.  As for the dying pets problem, try this version.  I haven't tested it in game (because I don't own pets ) but I think it should work. As a result, this was taken from Seasons, so you should own that EP unless somebody wants to test it and prove otherwise.

Hmm... I have all EPs except Pets and BV, and no SPs at all.  Whether I can fix this depends on whether the Seasons file also checks for pets or not.  Either way, I'm pretty sure I know what I did wrong.  I pulled that BHAV from the base game, for what I foolishly considered "compatibility reasons". It's getting late here, but hopefully I'll have a fix for you tomorrow.  Surely I'm not the only modder to make a foolish mistake... right? I'm kind of new to this still, in case you couldn't tell.

Darn, I was hoping to cut the decay in half too.  The reasoning would then be that it takes twice as many points to become platinum, the platinum also lasts twice as long.  I just get annoyed when they fulfill some large Want when their meter is maxed because it doesn't keep them in platinum mood any longer.  Doesn't matter if the Fortune Sim was already in platinum when he married a rich sim or something equally lofty, he still only has platinum mood for 8-odd hours.  That means that, when already platinum, small wants are better than large ones, and in a perfect world they wouldn't be.  Ah... ignore me, I seem to have rambled on...

Alright, I'm reasonably sure this is a stupid, non-awesome question, but I figured that I'd ask anyway.  What I'd like to do is essentially make the aspiration meter caps twice as high.  I've searched on google and in these forums and haven't found much.  All I've come across that's reasonably promising is in this thread: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,481.msg17475.html#msg17475

I tried editing wantTuning.package, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.  I know I should assume that if it were possible it would have been done already, but, well, it's worth a shot, right?

Hmm... that's a very good question.  I really don't know, but I can say that in my testing with a crap lot containing only a pool, the visiting sims acted like they couldn't leave fast enough. I'm pretty sure their free will prevents them from drowning unless you have a ladderless pool... But if you're setting up community lots like that, then you're just asking for it.   If I wanted to torture a sim on a community lot, I'd send them to any old community lot and turn their free will off.  That's the easiest way.  If I wanted to kill a particular sim as fast as possible, however, that's where Paladin's assault rifle comes in.

Also, while there are people who take requests for houses or comm. lots, I am not one of them.  I consider my building skills sub-par on a good day.  I still build houses frequently, because I find it more annoying to edit a house someone else made than it is to start from scratch, but they definitely value function over form.  They almost all share the same architectural style/price range, anyway: "Modern-type-thing" and "Whatever it takes to move my sims in", respectively.  I'm just throwing this out now, lest I turn down such a request in the future and be skewered with pitchforks.

I always try to keep my school schedule in mind when I'm doing stuff like this, and I really wanted to put something else out yesterday because I'll probably be too busy to do anything the rest of the week.  You were just fortunate enough to be the first to ask.

Well, if all your sims are employing each other, then money only gets added to the system when townies buy your stuff, right? Or do you even let townies go shopping? Either way, 90% being poor sounds a lot like real life to me. Besides, if you really wanted them to be rich, you wouldn't be wanting to nuke double-payments and inheritances.

Well, it took a lot of digging and trying random things, but here it is. I'm a pretty slow player, but inheritance is only for death by Old Age, right? If not... then this isn't quite complete.  Eaxis uses "Inheritance Tokens" or whatnot.  My eyes glazed over trying to decipher the code that set those up, so I just ripped out the call for setting them up entirely.  A nice benefit of this is that the inheritance messages don't show up at all, but of course there may be a couple loose ends somewhere I didn't notice.  Please let me know if something blows up.

Sorry, I guess I didn't make myself clear.  What I meant was that, if after disabling inheritances you wanted to give some money away anyway, you could use the money order for that.  I wasn't at all suggesting you "undo" the inheritances -- that's why I made the hack, after all.

Wow, I think my head would explode trying to keep track of all of that.  I've only recently made it a habit to sync my lots time-wise. I do know what you mean about it being too easy.  I have to actually make a concerted effort to put my sims in aspiration failure, while getting them platinum is a matter of habit.

No, I am not working on that yet, mainly because I don't know a thing about tokens yet, or, indeed, most hacking concepts that aren't immediately obvious.   As for No Inheritances... That depends on how hard it'll be to hack in.  I'll look at it.  I'd never really considered it an annoyance, but thinking about it now, most sims have too much money anyway and you can always use Money Orders to spread it around.

Well, B suggested I claim a thread in Peasantry, and I do seem to be getting sucked in to hacking this game (but then, anyone who hangs around MATY long enough would!) so here are the two hacks I've already made.

EmployeeNoDoubleDip prevents playable sims who are employed at a business from heading to work when you play their lot.  This was a quick fix to try to reduce sims getting paid twice or more due to playing different lots.  A more substantial one, perhaps with tokens, may eventually be forthcoming. NoCommProtect was made under the same general premise as Pescaso's nouniprotect -- that is, a holy quest to eliminate invincible sims. Sims will pass out (and therefore drown) on community lots now, as well as starve to death.  Kids still cannot starve to death, but that's standard Eaxian behavior so I've left it alone.

I'm sort of learning how to hack these things together as I go along, so don't hesitate to yell at me if something blows up.  I will take requests, if I feel like it -- both of these were born from somebody else's complaining.  A little boredom never hurts, either.

Lucky for you guys, it's Friday night and I'm bored. This is a quick hack job, so please let me know if something needs fixing.  In the motive failure functions for Energy and Hunger, as well as another separate function, I simply changed the comm. lot checks to go to the right place whether they return true or false.  In my quick testing, sims could pass out, starve to death, and drown in the pool as a result of energy failure.  I don't know if Servos could recharge on Comm. Lots before, but... well... they can now. Kids can pass out, but still can't starve (I think that's standard Eaxian behavior).  However, the Social Worker will not show up on Comm. Lots, apparently.  I haven't tested Vampires, but I imagine they'd die from sunlight before passing out or starving to death. (Okay, so I was too lazy to attach a Downtown to my test hood. Sue me.)  Most importantly, I don't have BV yet and probably won't get it for quite a while, so I'll need somebody to test and see if this works on vacation lots and beaches.

Really?  This sounds like the makings of a very Awesome hack.  What kinds of wants, exactly?  Probably my favorite Want that goes unfulfilled is "See the ghost of [Living Sim]".  But now that I have a family with a Cowplant, this may change. I wonder, is there a Want for "Feed [sim] to Cowplant"?  If so, I haven't seen it.

I guess I didn't use the right words to explain what bugged me and what didn't.  It's not actually the wants themselves that bug me too much.  It's not like they're hard to fulfill, anyway.  What bugs me is that they're not specific.  The wants I'd like to see would be "Flirt with $spouse" or "Kiss $spouse" instead of just "flirt" or "kiss".  The male frequently wants to kiss his wife before he goes to work, for example, and I don't mind that.  Bah, I don't know.  It's more of a role-playing thing than a real annoyance.  I'll just deal with it. 

I'm sure most of you have already noticed this, but I'm generally a very slow player.  Today was one of those simming marathon days.  I have a married couple, both of which are wealth aspiration and have graduated from Uni.  Things were going along as usual until I noticed that 3-4 of the want slots for each sim were clogged with generic "flirt"/"be flirted with"/"go on date"/"kiss"/etc. wants.  This perplexed me, until I realized that it was now spring.    Is there any way this can be toned-down?  Preferably it'd be possible to filter by aspiration.  For all means leave it alone for Romance, and Pleasure would only be adjusted a little, I'd think.  But for wealth sims, these wants should be somewhat fleeting, and should be almost non-existent for Knowledge sims or very Shy sims.  I'm not asking for much, and I know want trees are a very tricky thing to adjust.  But it is possible, right?    These wants seem to only filter in when they wake up -- after fulfilling a couple, the normal Wealth wants start to come back.

Well, yes, I do like Ste's idea, and obviously it'd be preferred.  The problem is that I know that'd involve tokens of some sort, and I'm just not awesome enough to hack together something like that.  My homemade solution works fine for me right now, as I try to keep my lots somewhat in sync and I don't have many businesses to begin with.

I spent some time digging through the code for hiring employees.  I'm rather unaccustomed to SimPE, and therefore not very awesome, but I did manage to hack together something preliminary.  The stock "Employee" career is stored just like any other.  The best I could do with the meager skills I have is set the career for both teen and adult/elder so that you work 0 days of the week. That eliminates double-dipping, but unfortunately doesn't let your sim get a second job.  I don't know how I'd go about doing that.  The game relies on that career being there to properly transfer employees from one business to another, among other things, and having one sim employed to several businesses sounds like a VBT.

I just want to thank you Sara, for figuring this process out and especially for putting a file up for download!   I've only been lurking here a few days, but I've already picked up many great tips and Awesome hacks.  I tend to consider myself "above-average" when it comes to computers, but I still find SimPE very confusing.  By downloading your 'hood as a base and following your directions, I was able to add Riverblossom as a Shopping District.  It certainly saves some space on the Neighborhood selection screen.  Thanks again!