Oh, I'm in total agreement about the evilness of phoning home - I just wanted to make it clear that skipping the launcher doesn't have any effect on phone-home behavior, since there seemed to be a message implying that there was.

I wasn't doing it to avoid phone-homeage, since I have a legit copy - simply because the launcher is a huge, unnecessary mess and I don't want to see it.

Weird. I've been playing it this way since 1.4 with no issues at all. The only time I ever had lockups at launch was from the launcher itself, which is why I wanted to do a bypass. For me at least, the game starts up exactly like it does when you click the play button in the launcher - you just don't see the launcher first.

Mine's a storebought copy, so it's certainly possible there's something with the cracked version that doesn't work if you bypass the launcher.

I was envious of this "why do you use the launcher?" stuff as a mac user, so I stumbled around in the directories until I found what controls how cedega/crossover starts up. It turns out to be really easy to change!

• find the executable itself - probably in /(your hard drive)/Applications/The Sims 3.
  
• Right click on it, and select "show package contents".
  
• Open the "contents" directory if it isn't already.
  
• You will see a file named info.plist. Open that by dragging it onto textedit. Don't move it out of that directory! You might want to take a backup first.
  
• Scroll down to the line after this one:
  <key>CedegaGameName</key>
  
• Change the last part to read TS3.exe instead of S3Launcher.exe. Be careful not to disturb any of the rest of the file or mess with line endings. It's XML and an extra return shouldn't matter ... but you never know.
  
• Save and quit textedit.
  

That's it - you will now launch directly into the game instead of going through the launcher. Note that this means you will not see the launcher again AT ALL unless you change the file back. But this is not a loss.

Some building designs seem to put sims into roach motel mode. On the main lot I've been playing a while (3rd generation of a legacy thingie), the house has a raised porch at the front door (by extending the foundation 3 squares and putting stairs at the end), and if more than 4 or so sims visit for a party, they spend most of the time "no-after-you"ing each other until they have to pee, and leave.

I think it has something to do with that little pause they do before going through a door or at both ends of stairways - their "wait for this idiot to go by" time is huge, and they deadlock at the drop of a hat.

Someone with some good knowledge in queuing theory needs to visit that code with a large axe, and possibly explosives.

If they're actual MP3s, it's impossible for them to have DRM attached. If they're some other format (WMP, WMA, AAC) then they won't play ingame.

For itunes stuff, you can remove the drm fairly easily with JHYMM (JHYMM will also convert to MP3 if you want). Do not do this to steal music. For your own use, there's nothing wrong with it. You bought it, it's your music to play on your computer however you want.
 

Indeed. Beating up the kids on the short bus gets *really* old after a while. PV

We have a winner! This is exactly why I posted. Not only 95% requests, but 95% subliterate requests.

And the new layout smells like ass.

Don't go by my post count - I've been here since MATY opened. As the old joke goes, up until now, the food's been fine.  I don't post much.

Some of this sounds like what happens when a baby falls asleep on the floor - you can't do much at all until the baby wakes up - it won't even start crying about the soiled diaper until it wakes up. One time when this happened, I put a radio in the room and turned it on, and even then the baby wouldn't stay awake long enough for someone to pick it up and cribify it - they would just stand there looking worried (literally - that's what the activity box said).  I eventually gave up and let the kid sleep in its own filth until it finally woke up and screamed its head off a LONG time later. Energy recovery is really slow when sleeping on the floor (1 vs. 12 for a crib or cradle).

Some of the other stuff is weird though - if you can force an error on the baby, try that. Worst case, delete it with move objects on, and exit and reenter the lot.

I've also had odd baby things happen to bathrooms with the TP installed - if you don't queue up something that gets the parent out of the room immediately, they will very often drop the baby on the floor and bolt. Subsequent attempts to rescue the baby sometimes result in activities that look like a bomb disposal - all that's needed to make that effect more obvious would be to have the sim take out a stick and poke the baby on the floor before running out of the room like a nut. My suggestion would be to turn off all TP effects (auto-toileting and the bum's rush) if a baby is within the TPs sphere of influence.

What in hades happened to MTS2? I visited there for the first time in weeks (I gave the sims a break for a while), and it's like everyone has been fitted with stupomitron helmets. Scary.

Two things make pregnancy a snap:

1) "Mommy's little helper", a/k/a the mysterious energizer.

2) Meditating for as much of the pregnancy as you can get away with. This is especially true if you're permaplat - just sitting there gathering dust is a good plan if you don't have anyone else to take care of.

Not true. Some features (such as movable motive bars) only work if you do that, but if you type the code right, most of the features take effect immediately. I have an item in my startup file specifically to turn testingcheats (and a few others, like move objects) on and off without typing the whole dang thing. Since you seem to be having problems turning them on and off, here's some lines to cut and paste into your userstartup.cheat file:


alias m+ "moveObjects on" "Enables the ability to move normally unmovable objects" ""
alias m- "moveObjects off" "Disables the ability to move normally unmovable objects" ""

alias s- "boolProp snapObjectsToGrid false" "Lets you move objects off the grid" ""
alias s+ "boolProp snapObjectsToGrid true" "Makes objects snap to the grid" ""

alias f+ "boolprop constrainFloorElevation false" "Enables the ability to change terrain under buildings" ""
alias f- "boolprop constrainFloorElevation true" "Disables the ability to change terrain under buildings" ""

alias t+ "boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true" "Enables a lot of hidden features" ""
alias t- "boolprop testingCheatsEnabled false" "Disables a lot of hidden features" ""

alias l+ "boolprop dormspecifictoolsdisabled false" "Allow all building tools in dorms" ""
alias l- "boolprop dormspecifictoolsdisabled true" "Disables some dorm building tools (default)" ""

alias r+ "boolProp allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation true" "Allow 45 degree rotation" ""
alias r- "boolProp allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation false" "Disallow 45 degree rotation" ""

It was the 'three days in a good mood' part that I was disagreeing with. I have never seen a sim more than skip one day without a promotion if they went to work in anything like decent shape. Of course, it's so dang easy to do that that maybe I just haven't sent sims to work in only a good mood very much. A full night's sleep, filling their stomachs, and a little of the sport of kings, and no trash on the lawn, and they're going to be promotion bound every day.

I consider this one of the most unbalanced things in the game, especially for graduates. "earning" a career reward is stupid when you've been to uni - all you have to do is accept the job, snag the reward, then get another job until you run out. You don't even need to ever walk out your door. The last sim I played, within a week of leaving uni they had reached the top of four careers, earned $50,000, and had every single career reward. You call that challenging?

It would be a nice hack to make the career rewards available only after a certain number of days on the job, so at least they mean *something*.

Horse puckey, and horse puckey. You can get promoted every day you go to work (uni graduate or not), and even if you're platinum, on some days you won't get promoted. It's mostly a matter of having the requirements, not being in a sucky mood, and a little negative adjustment so it isn't an entirely sure thing.

Who wants their sims to sit in the same crappy career every dang day? It's the job of every college-graduating sim to visit each career offered so that you can immediately snag all of the rewards (five per day), and then constantly jump in and out of the highest-paying one for just one womdingous promotion. If you can't earn $50,000 in your first week out of school, you need to go begging for benes on the BBS.

There's a tiny amount of challenge if you start play with an adult made in CAS. But the balance of the game is completely crapped-up for any sim who makes it through college. EA has made the money cheats pointless, because the game ITSELF is a money cheat.

If you're seeing debug breakpoints, it's because you have the testing cheat turned on. You should play with that turned off most of the time, so that such problems as yours mainfest themselves as jump bugs or missing objects, as god intended. Some interactions are so full of breaks as to be completely unusable when testing cheats is turned on.

Disappearing portals have been an annoyance since there was just the Sims, with no expansion packs. The solution given on that MTS2 thread is the usual one - put the portals back with hacked catalog items.

You stick family members up your nose?

This sounds like a gag from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" (from before it started to stink) where they invented a jet-engine powered toilet. I couldn't find a screencap, but it looks exactly how you would think from that description.

Ding! That was exactly the situation that led to the aborted birthday I was talking about. Immediately after the party stopped, the baby dumped. This made me laugh out loud, but I didn't connect it to the cake breaking. This makes sense - the cake got stuck in use so you couldn't queue up another birthday party. Coolness.

This one thing happened to me,  just one time (and not recently). I have experienced a few other cake bugs though, such as "cake misfires" where the ceremony stops in the middle with no growing up, leaving the only option on the cake to "clean up". I've also experienced immortal cakes that never go bad (one sat on a seldom used table for an entire life stage before I noticed it, still waiting to be eaten from). I think these are all symptoms of the usual 'stuck in-use flag' class of problems. What EA/maxis content isn't buggy in this game?

Speaking of bugs, I ran into a doozy involving Bathroom Uses You. I got into an unpleastant situation where the only shower was busted. A kid I was torturing training up on the obstacle course ran into the bathroom in extreme stink mode, and ZAP - it was a line of hammer&sickles all the way across the screen and beyond. I had to replace the shower, and then delete about 40 queued actions before things became sane again. I keep hoping that the TP shows up on the firing range so that I could report it.  I haven't been able to reproduce it though, which is of course every programmer's least favorite sentence.

This is a great idea! I find it really irritating that, should you WANT to leave your dear departed relative's tombstones in a place of honor, you face constant harrassment. There's no way you can keep urns in the house unless you like mopping up pee. And the damn stereo keeps getting turned on. Woo, scary.

Ghosts should be limited to situations where actual disruption happens - say if you move their stone around, dig in the area, move-ins of strangers, stuff like that. On the other hand, ghosts should make life totally miserable for the enemies they had in life. It gives you some incentive to patch up those relationships before grandma dies, or you ain't getting any sleep no more.

How about a makeover of the haunting code as the next big thing?

P.S. What's this about mausoleums? I've tried putting the tombstones in a seperate building or fencing them off, but it doesn't seem to stop the differently corporeal from floating all over the place anyway.