I'm glad to see so many interesting replies. 

No, I haven't, care to point me in the right direction? 

You're right, I've only read about it and looked at some of the documentation, but from everything I read I got the distinct impression that it's fiddly. Plus, the whole notion of autonomous romance bothers me, as the control freak that I am.

While eating breakfast this morning, I was thinking about TS2 and, more specifically, the way relationships work in it. Then an idea hit me. As we all know, in the unmodded game, all romantic relationships are a slow steady climb to 100-70 followed by the Sims in question falling in love. It's not particularly realistic, especially not for Romance sims, because there are no one night stands or casual relationships. I realise that there are mods like ACR to improve on this, but to be honest, I think they're too complex for their own good.

Anyway, the idea I came up with is: Each Sim would have an "Arousal" meter. Basically, most of the romantic interactions, like flirting, kissing, slow dancing and the romantic hugs would gradually fill the meter. (the speed at which they fill up for both parties would be determined by their mutual chemistry, so they'd both fill up at the same speed) Then, if time passes and no further interaction takes place to keep filling the bar, it would gradually empty again.

Anyway, once the bar is full, both Sims would accept higher-level interactions, like Make Out and Woohoo, (even if their relationship was only 80-20, for example) that normally wouldn't be accessible till 100-70.

I realise that this idea isn't perfect, but it's simple and functional and I haven't been able to poke any significant holes in it yet. But that's why I'm posting it here. Fire away. 

Do you happen to know where I could find it? Renaming 200 files, one-by-one, gets old quickly. 

That would be ridiculously expensive. 

You have to go into wholesale mode to buy cars on business lots. (A caryard was the first business I opened when I got OFB and I had no idea how they worked  ) But I didn't use the turntables, I just used move_objects to place them in the yard, worked like a treat. So I assume you could do that - set up a caryard, get a rich friend to go there and buy a car, and then give it as a gift to Jennifer Burb.

It sure is a good way of making money, anyway. The lucky owner of 'Garrett's Used Cars' has made $70,000 from the business to date, mostly from dazzling gullible townies into buying terribly overpriced sportscars.  And he's been managing it on his own for most of that time, because he has only one employee, his girlfriend, and she's been on maternity leave half of the time.

I'd just work on getting her promoted a few times, along with John (does he have a job?) and maybe even Lucy when she becomes a teenager.

Of course, if you have no scruples against cheating occaisionally you could always help them along. The LuckySims New Car Allowance™. 


Care to post a link? I've never heard of or seen a TS2 Yaris anywhere. Surely if it was official material they would have posted it on the exchange to show it off... 

Excellent, I'll look into that.

Hey, thanks. The dark computer screens really annoy me.

No worries, the recommendations are more than enough. Thanks! 

I guess I need a mad scientist who can genetically modify them to be extra vicious. 

About the colds, I guess I'll just have to send them out to stomp on roaches more often. 

I've searched for and read existing posts about these topics, and absorbed a bit of information that way, but I'd still like to pick your brains myself, so here goes.

Just recently I've become very interested in the weird side of TS2. Vampires, aliens, crazy old coots with weather controlling devices on the roof... and I decided to try one of the weird, rare deaths out on one of my sims, death by flies. I read that death by flies occurs when the house is insanely messy, so I got to work. The lucky candidate, one Leo Jankowski, has no neat personality points, so it was relatively easy to coerce him to make a complete mess of his house and leave it that way. I figured this would do the trick.


But apparently not, I had him stand around in that room for days and no gruesome death by a thousand insects occured. So I thought: "maybe it only happens outdoors?" ...



NOPE. It seems that no matter what I try, no vicious swarm of flies appears to devour him. So I'm wondering, is it even possible for a sim to die this way without using InSim to do it?

While I'm at it I thought I'd also ask about the SimSanto Biotech Station reward object, I had a sim who has full logic skill use it and I found that despite the fact he had full logic skill, sometimes medicine wouldn't turn out. He'd make it, then stand in front of the station complaining and shrugging. In those instances he could only dispose of the medicine, he could'nt sell it. Then I had him make a virus, and so far every attempt he's made has seemingly ended in failure because the only option that ever appears when he's finished is "dispose". He can't sell it, and he can't use it to infect himself or anyone else. (like I'd hoped  ) So what's the point? Is it bugged, is it meant to (not) work like this?

Finally, I don't know if this is only my imagination or not, but in more recent versions of TS2 (after patches and EPs), sickness seems to have become a real rarity. In the base game I remember Sims would, more often than not, get food poisoning from eating spoiled food and they would also get colds occaisionally while at work or school. Now, I've seen sims eat spoiled food with no apparent effect and I don't even remember the last time a Sim came home from school/work with a cold or a flu. Call me cruel if you like but I'd like to see more sickness as it seems to be very rare.

- are you more into building lots, decorating lots, creating sims, or playing families?
Probably an equal measure of all four. I love building houses but I also love running and manipulating sim's lives. Sometimes I spend a lot of time in all the different households, running their lives, other times I just build and end up with empty houses scattered around the neighborhood with no one living in them.

- lots: do you play highly decorated, with walls up/cutaway, with a focus on 'whoever has the most toys wins"? Or do you play barely decorated, walls down, with a focus on interractions/spawning?
Um, a bit of both.

- is genetics your thing? Do you like watching spawns, and spawns of spawns for how they turn out? Or do you barely get through one generation before you're off to the next family?
Not really, I go from one household to the next very quickly so none of the family trees are very long yet, one or two generations at the most. I've never done a legacy.

- do you build lots of hoods, or have you been playing one or two hoods forever?
Lots of hoods. Along with Pleasantview, it's sub-hoods (Bluewater Village and Downtown) and Strangetown, I have a few custom neighborhoods.

Southport, which uses the "sample" terrain template and is a fairly well established coastal town. (I started this neighborhood a year ago, at least)

Portsmouth, which uses a terrain I designed in SC4, is an industrial district I'm still working on (it's still kind of empty) but there's low-income housing, a few abandoned warehouses and offices, a pawn shop, and a used car yard. And I've got plans in the works for a shipyard, among other things. I used neighborhood decorations like cooling towers and a monorail to add to the industrial atmosphere and the 'hood is built on the 'dirt' terrain which looks the part. My idea is some of the abandoned warehouses could be converted into shops by enterprising sims, so I guess you consider it a sort of urban renewal project.

Evandale, based on the "Driftwood" terrain template. The name is just a placeholder until I think of something better and this is basically just the empty spot where I've been building houses and there are only a few families living there now, but I'm planning to move some more in soon.

- in terms of what your sims do: are you into relationships and interractions, or are you more into how they skill and climb the corporate ladders?
A bit of both.

- do you play lots of community lots, or are your sims homebodies?
They mostly stay at home but they occaisionally go out to dinner or hang out at the local pool, stuff like that.

- city/country/suburban?
All of the above.

- do you do themes? (aliens, medieval, Victorian)
Not really... Well, I do sometimes build castles and I built a space station of sorts once.

- do you play with pets?
Sometimes, yes.

- do you do the vamp/werewolf/alien/zombie thing, or are you more a 'real person' player?
Most of my sims are just sims, but I get a kick out of the supernatural stuff occaisionally and I often play aliens in Strangetown.

- hacks: do you like to make life simpler or harder? insim? inteen?
I use InSim a fair bit.

- custom content: lots or a little? what do you have the most of?
A fair bit of furniture and a few custom cars, but mostly hacks.

- and finally, if you share your creations...what do you create?
I occaisionally share lots I create. Once I built a massive castle and that was well-received, I might build another one sometime soon, because I have a lot more tools to do it with now.

I didn't really know what I was doing at first, but I looked around in SimPE and found the Smith lot in "Res\Userdata\Neighborhoods\N002\N002_Neighborhood.package", extracted it, imported it to 'my' Strangetown and started the game. And it worked! The house is now showing up and working properly. Problem solved.

Thanks for the help, this site sure does live up to it's reputation. 

*sigh*

Ah well, the Smith family will just have to continue living in limbo. I guess I can live with that.

Thanks anyway, everyone, for your help. Much appreciated. 

No I haven't, I'll try that now. 

Yeah, I thought of that but that's not what's causing the problem because as I said I replaced the neighbourhoods with the backup before I installed the EPs.

EDIT:
I found the Smith's house. N002_Lot10. But when I copied it to 'Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N002\Lots' and entered the game, it still wasn't there. I also tried putting it in the Lot Catalogue with no success, it didn't appear there either. I'm positive it's the right one, I checked it in SimPE.

No, it definitely wasn't there in the base game. I'm certain of that. But you're probably right it didn't come with Seasons. Because until very recently I had only played the base game, then bought four expansions all in one go, so I'm still a bit fuzzy on exactly what each one added. 

I noticed that shortly after I installed Seasons, so I'm fairly sure that feature was added in it.

There's also an option for Sims to "Play Marco Polo" with other Sims in the pool, although I haven't tried that out yet.

Hm, I'm no guru on the subject, but...

I had just the base game installed for about a year, which I'd patched to the latest version, later I got four expansions in one go. Nightlife, Open For Business, Pets and Seasons. And I just installed them one by one without patching any of them as I went along. And it all seems to work perfectly. So I'd recommend installing the base game, patching that, then installing the rest without patching any of them, but only because that's what I did and it worked.

Sorry if that's no help, but I'm not entirely sure what it is you're asking.

Sorry for the long title, but however I worded it, I couldn't get it to be any shorter without becoming incoherent. 

Okay, I have a problem, but first a little background. I'm a compulsive restarter. That is, if I'm not happy with the way I've done things, I'll load from the last savegame, restore a clean backup, etc, and do it all over again. I actually complete entire levels in adventure games like Tomb Raider then start again because I felt I did it too clumisily.

So some time ago, playing The Sims 2 base game, I found I wasn't happy with the way anything was going in the three default neighbourhoods, so I preserved the empty houses I wanted to keep and deleted the neighbourhoods, restoring them with a backup I'd made just after I'd installed the game. (I just zipped "C:\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods" up and stored it) It seemed to work perfectly, but I lost interest in TS2 shortly thereafter. Recently I bought a bunch of expansions and I've gotten back into the game in a big way, and I just noticed: In both Pleasantview and Strangetown, there is one default lot missing. In Pleasantview's case, it's a community lot, the boutique, I can do without that.

In Strangetown, however, it's the Smith house that's missing. That, I can't do without. The strange thing is the Sims who are supposed to live there, Pollination Tech #9, Jenny, and their kids, appear on community lots, visit people who've just moved in, and can be invited over by people who know them, so they are there, but their lot isn't. I'm not sure how it works but looking through the game's CD's in the past I've seen two single lot files seperated from all the others, is it possible these are the missing lots? If so, that makes no sense whatsoever to me. So I thought I'd ask for help here, since this site appears to be full of geniuses. 

Thanks for your time.