Are you using the cFE cheat on walls anywhere near those octagonal roofs?

Roof sections generally depend on 2 points, a starting point that tells the roof where to start AND anchors their height, and an ending point that tells the roof where to end.  After establishing a roof section, you can change any wall height around it except that starting point.  If you change that starting point height, when you re-enter the lot the roof height will have changed.  The roof height will not change immediately, it will change after a save and re-enter.

I'm just starting to play with OFB, but those octagonal roofs follow different rules.  If any wall in their area is higher, it will make them change to the new height.  And "their area" seems to be square, not octagonal.  I assume (but have not checked) that if the octagonal roof is built on it's own level there is no problem.  Otherwise, all the walls near the octagonal roof all have to be the same height.

Once again, the roof changing height never happens immediately, it happens after a save and re-enter.

If you're not using the cFE cheat, I have no idea.

Edited for spelling.  My motto is: never proofread until after you submit.

Thanks for the point, Pegasys. And for the further info MissDoh.

I guess if I'm going to send a Sim dowtown to interact with non-controllables, I'll pick a non-restaurant destination.  It is kind of interesting, though, if Sims now start with such low motives, why do they hang out all day at the one business I have?  Can't hardly get rid of them there.  Oh well.

I saw a hack by Squinge that sped things up, but not one that reduced advertising for the podium.

I'm wondering if the game adjusted the number of people on community lots up because of the new rig, and that is what is overwhelming the restaurant.  Does the game allow different numbers of people on community lots based on hardware?

I'm a little slow getting OFB up, I held off for the patch then decided I needed a new rig for Oblivion and I just started playing OFB over the weekend.  I searched the forum and didn't turn up anything.

On community lots, all people seem to do is eat.  They are stacked up at the podium waiting to be seated, it takes the waiter forever to get to them, and the waiter has no spare time to clean up after the patrons.  As soon as they are done eating, they queue back up to be seated again.  I'm running the Eat More Talk Less hack, but nothing else I know of that should affect eating.

It's hard to interact with other Sims this way, I have to keep my controllable close and try to catch them between one meal and the next.  Anybody else seeing this?

Maybe I'm too hard on my Sims, I like to see how early in their teen days I can max them all out.  Best so far: 5 days as a teen.  And that's after I encourage all their attributes (except playful, I hate playful Sims) to 10.

I do have to admit my children and teens don't have a lot of time for fun...

Some of my lots have aging on, others have aging off.  Makes for some odd situations (like the female teen in my trailer park that has woohooed with 3 generations of teens trying to get out of that trailer park), but some Sims I like to keep around and others I like to age and die.

My default play speed is 2.  I use 1 as slow motion.

Thanks for reminding me.  I married Benjamin "The Snout" Long into my legacy family and never did breed that nose out.  6 generations looked like aardvarks.  Only Sim I ever hated, and you had to remind me of his existence.

I'm gonna start a new neighborhood and kill him again.

Well, if the purpose is to watch them starve and die, surely I've gone about it wrong.  But the ISBI challenge involves running one Sim all the time.  For this challenge you get 3 hours per day (I didn't use 3 hours in a week). The Freewill /Hostel challenge ends after 5 real hours.  Now I don't know how many Sim hours that will entail, I spent most of that week with the speed cranked up.   

But I wasn't intending on doing any challenge, just an evaluation of how well Sims get along on their own.  And they've gotten along real well left to their own devices.

OK, I had played with leaving Sims alone on free will long ago, and I didn't remember having the types of problems people say they have.  So I built a house and I put 6 Sims in it.  One of each aspiration and one stat maxed, the rest of the stats fairly balanced.  Since there are only 5 stats available I had to duplicate one, I duplicated neatness.  I put no thought into which aspirations should have which stat maxed, nor did I put any thought into turn ons/off.  I just chunked it together fast.

I put the 6 Sims in the house, I take control of one Sim on Thursday to pay the bills (both Tuesday and Thursday bills), and I order groceries at that time.  I will allow myself to call a repairman once on either Sundays and/or Thursdays.  Other than that, nothing.

After one Sim week, all Sims are alive and doing fine on needs.  They don't take care of their wants, but I only have one in red aspiration (first time I'd had a Sim panhandling on the street).  It was a little ugly after the shower broke on Friday, it took multiple Sims mopping up almost all the time to keep up with the puddle until I called a repairman on Sunday.  And I find that if a Sim is interrupted preparing a meal, it takes a couple of days before anyone decides to clean it up.  No roaches yet, I'll let them live with roaches if they show up.

But all in all, they wave their arms at me every now and again, and then they just go off and take care of the problem.  They're basically doing fine. 

Now, the house is designed for this purpose as follows:  Large rooms, open plan, 3 toilets in separate rooms, 3 showers.  Plenty of beds.  4 large refrigerators (so I only have to order food once a week), 2 stoves, plenty of counters.  And (this is important) the trash compactor is very close to the front door (you do not want to have a Sim taking out the trash interrupted).  But most of the size and furnishings are simply due to the number of Sims, it isn't all that special.  I can see no reason my legacy house wouldn't work (I'd have to order food more often, and the trash thing might be an issue).

I could see children dying since no one has "Served" a meal, they make individual portions.  But given that adult Sims have the necessary facilities, I can't see a Sim dying due to being left alone.  What's up?

Yep, not very common, but they pretty much kill a lot.  It's not the undeletable part, it's the things that go along with it.

Although, if you had Sims you hated, and if you could make this occur on purpose, you could move them into the Twilight Zone and make their life hell...

I'm a great proponent of playing what you get and all, but that kid scares me and I'm fearless.

Dang, what do you do with your townies?  Some of those YAs at Uni are so ugly I keep hoping someone comes up with a Paper Bag object to put over their heads (although I see over at MTS2 they now have surgical masks, there's a step in the right direction).  And one of my Sim families has a maid that if she got down on her hands and knees you couldn't tell if she was coming or going.  I got a couple of fairly ugly Sims too, but I just consider that to be a mark of character.

Come on, you gotta play the game.  What joy is there in forcing everything to be exactly like you want it?

I'd play her.

Well dip me in sh**.  That Stuck Object Remover deletes the undeletable stairs.

There were some remaining problems, I described them over at MikeInside's site,  but since no one here seems to have an immediate issue I won't bother typing it all out here.

But kudos to Pescado for writing that thing, and to tunaisafish for the suggestion of using it on this problem.

I don't know.  I've never had this problem personally. But I suspect it exists before the Sims ever get there, it just gets real noticable then.  And I'm pretty sure buggy objects aren't involved, because I stripped that house of Mike's.  I also worked a lot on it with no Sim in it.


There were a variety of problems on a variety of staircases in his house.  But I don't recall any landings serving 2 stairs being involved, only straight up and down stairs (there were 'spiral' stairs, but I don't remember them being affected).  But you've already reported it happened on yours. 

The delete thing is interesting, Mike's house is a mass of stairways (kind of like "stairways as art"), and there was likely a lot of stairway adds and deletes going on during build.  I know I've deleted stairways in multiple stairway homes, and I've never had a problem; but I wouldn't rule anything out.

Just for interest, some of the problems (and some of these manifested themselves on modular stairs that I added to the house)
- Inability to delete, but money added back (as you mentioned)
- Inability to even select to delete
- Select one set for delete, a different set actually gets deleted (but rebuilds normally, go figure)
- Sims won't use steps at all
- Sims "teleport" at the top of steps (And on some, but not all, if you told the Sims to go to the top of one set of steps, they'd take off for a completely different set and teleport to where you told them to go originally.  Go figure.)

Well, I can dive back into that house tonight.  I'm loathe to, it's weird working with it; Twilight Zone stuff.  But I'm pretty sure if you're still having the problem...

The slowdown issue is separate from the problem tunaisafish described.  Object stairways may experience a similar slowdown for all I know.  And it took a whole bunch of modular stairway sections (about 500) before I started noticing any lag. That's 125 sets of steps between a first and second floor.  125 objects stairs may be as bad.

So, don't blame the modular stairs; they'll add to the lag, but they'd only be a small part of the problem on a large lot.

Ah, hardware gurus.  Back when I was young I was used to keep up, now I've realized that between the time you order and receive your system becomes outdated.

I've come to just rely on Dell, never had a problem. But I'd never heard of Alienware, so I just went out to configure a couple of comparable systems, a Dell and an Alienware.  Substantial cost difference.  What's the skinny on this Alienware outfit?  They skimping on the bus or anything?

I've seen that before, places putting together fast processors and loads of memory on weak chipsets.  Never satisfies...

BTW, ATI all the way.  Loved them since I got my first PSA ATI 2D card with a whopping 1M of VRAM.  An unheard of extravagance.  Running a 9700 now.

I don't know of any left, I did some searching and if there is anything it's deep in the archives somewhere (I was pointed to MikeInside's site from MTS2).  This has been an issue since before I bought TS2, and I wasn't too slow getting it.  Mike said that this happened to him before the cFE cheat was known.  Mike was kind enough to let me download one monster house of his where this happened.  I tore that house down in various size sections and rebuilt it.  I rebuilt sections of it on another lot. I could never get rid of it on his lot, and I could never replicate it on another lot.  Like everyone before me, I gave it up. 

I'll pass along the sum total of my knowledge.  The practical limit on stairways is your computer horsepower.  I had well over 1000 modular stairway sections on a lot (various heights from minimum to 4 story climbs) and that Sim just barely moved on 3x speed.  They could properly negotiate all stairs (albeit very slowly), and all stair behaved normally.  This does, however, seem to be limited to modular stairways.  On Mike's house there were places (next to some messed up stairs) that modular stairways could not be installed but object stairs could, and the object stairs worked fine.  My original suspicion was that the game was confused as to which level was where (it does that on other things when you get to bending a lot of stuff around), but I releveled all levels in the problem areas without any change.  I tore down as much of the house as I could (obviously the problem stairs and their landings remained) and releveled a mostly empty lot and got no change.  This problem has occurred to several people, and I suppose that means on various hardware configurations.  In summary, I know that this is limited to modular stairways, is not a result of too many stairways, does not appear to be connected to leveling issues, and is not related to hardware.  What causes it is beyond me, however.

Shame too, that was a magnificent house Mike built.

Now there's a nasty problem.  You probably can't delete some of those steps, either.  If you figure out what caused that, or how to fix it, give a shout.  I haven't been stumped by much in the way of building, but this is one.  And there be a lot of other people interested (I know MikeInside has a house inflicted with this).

On that "couldn't put next to a wall" thing...

I moved a Sim from downtown to the regular neighborhood and thought "hey, I'll just put all this stuff I want to keep into her inventory and move away!"  I put virtually everything she owned in her inventory.  And you can definitely add pianos to that list, and I know there were other things as well (but I don't remember her coffin being among them...)  I'll scout around the lot tonight and see if I can't get a list put together.

Update: Messed up: piano and light fixtures (they could be placed on walls, but do not disappear with walls down).  Worked OK: chairs, loveseat, 1x1 tables, stove, refrigerator, bookcases, desk, toilet and shower.  She had no bed, and I didn't wake her up to check the coffin since that has been reported.

I expect this is true, because how in the world are they supposed to anticipate everything that we might imagine to build?  It will be another tool for the toolbox (hopefully).  I'm looking forward to those octogon and conical roofs; I want to build attached towers that aren't too much taller than the house and there is just no clean way to bend floors for those.  No overhang looks terrible, a full tile of overhang is too much, angled walls on the towers run into all kinds of problems...

I don't quite count as computer illiterate; but the more I'm around them the less messing around I want to do.  I'll not be using SimPE.  From the responses, however, it looks like the problems will be confined at least to the neighborhood.

My plan will be to play these Sims until problems show up (or I get utterly bored with them).  Then I'll delete the neighborhood and start a new one.

All my beloved houses were built on a 2nd XP user account with no custom content, and packaged from there.  So they're safe.  Except for that one... but I've got some improvements I wanted to make to it anyway.

I haven't gotten that impression.  I'm the one pushing this, and I wanted to be clear that I'm not arguing in favor of this; I'm simply trying to understand it.

To date, I've had none of this.  I looked through a memory last night of a Sim raised in the previous neighborhood, then packaged and moved.  Everything looked OK (as was said here that it would).  Aside from the mother memories of walking/talking/potty training, the only people referenced were townies that came home from school with them.  And oddly enough, when this neighborhood was created I got all new townies (don't know how that happened).  Maybe not having new copies of the old townies is helping.

But this has been real informative, and I appreciate the discussion. I'll give this up after one more question:  If I begin to see weird errors, will deleting (or killing) the moved Sims and bulldozing their lots fix this?  Or should I consider this neighborhood hosed and nuke the whole thing?  Or should I nuke it all and reinstall the game?

Oddly enough, none of the above options disturb me.  I mostly like building; as for the Sims, after I raise them, train them, develop a nice story behind them, I ignore them.  I derive no joy from maintaining Sims, only from developing them.

Ah, a philisophical question  If an error does not occur during gameplay, is there an error?

I'm sticking with this only for learning possibilites (mine and others).  I'm not trying to argue that this is a good thing to do.

First, everyone lost their friends on the move.  Made sense to me, move to a new neighborhood, don't know anyone.  So they aren't gossiping about anyone from the previous neighborhood.  Second, I've been playing the new neighborhood for about 3 months now with no errors I've seen (although I am learning of a few here to look for). 

The Sims moved were about half CAS created and about half born and raised in the old neighborhood.

I will have to actually look at somebody's memories though (I never do that during gameplay).