Thanks!  I've been eagerly awaiting this one!  One of my favorite hacks you make!

Wow!  Those are some pretty ugly sims!

Maybe I don't have much creativity, but I would never even think of making sims like that.  I wouldn't even know where to start!

Count me as another person who loved Unleashed.

It was my favorite expansion for TS1, followed closely by Makin' Magic, and then probably Superstar.

I think part of the reason I'm not so into NL is because I couldn't have cared less about Hot Date.

But I do like the vampires and the cars in NL, anyway!

Oooohhh!  A travel aspiration would rock!

IRL, I would definitely have the travel aspiration.  I've traveled all over the world and it is my passion IRL, so I would totally love to see it in the game.

Unfortunately, TS Vacation was NOT my idea of 'travel'.  That EP was okay for portrayal of a typical American family vacation, perhaps - camping, the beach or the ski lodge (okay...so they are missing Disney   ).  But to me, those are vacations - not really travel.  For the EP "Vacation", it was aptly named.  But IMO, if they did a travel aspiration it would have to involve things other than camping and going to the beach.

People who *aspire* to travel IRL are generally not satisfied with going to the same destination all the time.

If they could do it, I'd love it.  But I'm not sure they can do a travel aspiration in the sense I'd like to see it and think it wasn't lame.

^  Yep.  I have often suggested that a cool EP would be Sims in Space.  As you might imagine from my username, that idea totally appeals to me.

But most times I suggest it, the suggestion doesn't go over very well with other players.

I still think it's a great idea though!

^Yep.  I am not installing ANY house where there are sims that have been played.  I am very insistant that any sims I install cannot even have met the paperboy!  For exactly that reason.

I also insist that they do not have any memories except the standard "starter" memories of marrying thier spouse before gameplay started, etc

^  Yeah, if you got all of those TS1 EPs, 3 months is not nearly enough time to have explored everything, really, let alone gotten bored with stuff!

Don't get me wrong, I liked HD and I like NL...but I do look forward to the completely new stuff the most.

Yep.


Yeah, I have a vanilla install of my game that I build houses in if I want to offer them for download.  The only downloads I have in the vanilla game are some walls & floors.

I'm gonna keep doing it that way - especially now!



Yeah, I usually use the Clean Package Installer to install everything, so I can see what I'm getting.  I used that first for these houses.  I got the houses but not the families, so someone told me to use the Maxis installer because the families come over using that.  So I used the Maxis installer.  Still no luck.

It sounds like this is an unrelated problem though...so I'll just keep trying, I guess.  Or not install those houses.

I'm sorta interested in the new EP.

But then, I'm always up for something completely different.  I like NL okay, but it doesn't feel very imaginative to me.  I mean, it's basically Hot Date for TS2.

^  Thanks!

Just as an aside, I have a couple of houses that I downloaded (actually, traded in a BBS hood on another board) that just will not install on my computer.  I install the family using the Maxis installer, but even then, the house will install but the family just doesn't.  These are 'clean' houses - families that have not been played and all Maxis content except for maybe some walls & floors and some clothing.

Could it be that these houses have terrain paint, and that is what caused the errors to occur when I try to install?  They don't crash my game so it doesn't sound like a related problem, but I'm baffled as to why this is happening and am investigating all possibilities.

I got:

9 Neat
6 Outgoing
4 Active
8 Playful
7 Nice

I agree with everything but the Neat score.  I think it scored that way because I am very precise about my job and very organized about the way I do it (I have to be - I'm a CPA and an auditor IRL).  And I answered questions related to organizational skills accordingly.  However, I would not say I'm overly neat in terms of housework.  My house is clean, but I'm not obsessive about it, that's for sure!  If I had to score myself, I'd give myself a 6 in Neat.  7 on a good day!

This is the first I'm reading about the terrain paint issue, and I'm really glad I saw this as I had no idea of the problems.

My plan now is to use no further terrain paints - EVER- when I build a house.

As for the houses I already have in my game that have terrain paints on them:  there is one I built myself, and there are a few others that I downloaded that I know have terrain paints.

Is it safe to continue playing these houses?  I'll make a note not to package them and offer them for download (only the one is mine to offer in any event)...but I can play them without a problem, correct?

I want to make sure I understand correctly:  I can play them or bulldoze them.  I just can't package them.

And I assume that in future, I should not download any house that I suspect might have a terrain paint on the lot, right?

Thanks alot!

^  Yeah...although I have UNI and NL, I have the 'no townie regeneration' hack in my game, and I believe I have one for dormies too, unless that was one of the ones that conflicted with NL (can't remember and I'm not at home).  I thought I had one related to the secret society members too, so that they wouldn't regenerate - can't remember.

What I'm *really* glad I never did was attach two universities to the same 'hood.  That would in all probability be a disaster waiting to happen.

^  Wow!  So if you don't delete the townies, you probably end up with about 400 game-generated sims before you even start?

So that gives you about 400 +/- sims to play with, including dead sims, etc.

Further, if you kill off some townies/dormies in-game (rather than deleting them before you start), they auto regenerate unless you have the hack to not regenerate them, right?  And these auto-regenerated townies/dormies do not replace the killed off townies/dormies files - they create *new* character files which count toward the total of about 800.

Correct?

Okay...all of that makes sense and is quite informative.

Now, I see here in this thread that errors are likely to set in at around 800 sims in a hood, +/- a few.  My experience with the hood that started getting glitchy bears that out.  Actually, that hood started getting glitchy at about 500 sims (including townies and UNI-generated sims).  I started having nannies who would never leave, a billion handymen or gardeners showing up on the lot all at once, social workers who would never show up with adopted-over-the-phone children, portal problems (I installed crammyboy's hack and almost half my lots had portal problems show up), house slowdowns to the point I had to move the families in and out of houses, occasional crashes, and game freezes.  In short, it wasn't pretty.

It was a hood I had worked very hard on (a Bottom-up hood), and so on this install, I am trying very hard to avoid losing a hood that way.

I have all the critical fixes installed, but I still want to be really careful.  So if the 800 mark is kind of a benchmark for the beginning of overcrowding, how many sims can I myself add to a hood (whether new sims or sims born in this hood), assuming they are all 'clean' (ie, free of memories of sims from other hoods, etc)? If I create a hood from scratch and attach a university and a downtown area, how many game-generated sims does that give me, before I even add my first playable sim?

Thanks!

And thanks everyone for this thread.  It is one of the more informative ones I've read in the last year.
 

^  Thanks alot!  That is about what I thought, but I wanted to reverify it.

I remembered reading here that moving sims between hoods is not a good plan if you can avoid it - sounds like this is still true...although you *can* make it work without messing up your game if you are willing to do all the work to get rid of all the dummy sims and memories that get dragged over.

Now, just to clarify: do these dummy sims end up as character files themselves?  Or are they just components of your original sims character file?

Thanks!

I have been keeping track of this thread for some time because one of my hoods (before I reinstalled for NL) was getting buggy.  I installed all the fixes as they came out, but I think that the one hood was just too far gone before the fixes came out.

That hood is gone now in my new install.  However, I did package some of the families before I reinstalled, and now have them off in a folder on my desktop. Originally, I was planning on installing them into a new hood.

However, soon after I packaged those houses and families, I thought I read somewhere around here that it was a bad thing to transfer played sims out of one hood into another, because they would carry with them a bunch of memories and friends that would create garbage in the new hood.

I also thought I read somewhere that it was a really bad idea to move Bella Goth out of Strangetown and in with the Goth family in Pleasantview.

Is this all still true?

Thanks for any assistance.

Thanks so much, Hacking God!

Another save, no doubt.

Well, I ordered the Holiday pack in the end.  Not because I actually care about anything in it ('specially after I heard that the fireworks only singe rather than kill)....but because there will no doubt be creators out there who will use the Christmas objects to clone new stuff off of...and I don't wanna hassle with reading the fine print when I download in future.

That being said...I have to say that I coulda received more sim-bang for my sim-buck elsewhere.

This thread is good timing for me.

I have downloaded the patch, but have been afraid to install it because my game is running pretty well without it.

Now granted, I have tons of mods/hacks.  I prolly have about every hack that J.M. and TwoJeffs have ever made (that are still compatible with NL, anyway) cus I can't STAND annoying sim behavior...and I don't want my hoods to blow up due to bugs.

But I do worry about what I'm NOT fixing by not installing the patch.

You guys almost have me talked into it though, with this thread.

Wow!  This neighborhood idea sounds really interesting!

I think it's tough staying interested in the game at times.  I'd love to participate in anything that would liven things up.

How cute!

Love this one too!

No more grocery delivery guys going into the fenced backyard to ring the bell on the basement sliding glass door for no apparent reason!

Great!

Another exceedingly annoying sim behavior bites the dust!  Woohoo!

This is very good news!

I love the portal fix - it probably saved one of my hoods.