If it were that simple I wouldn't have commented; I'm fairly good at using third-party uninstallers to make sure everything is removed. I chalked it up to am AM being temperamental.

I can't help your issue, but I did have one similar; had to reinstall twice, with no other system differences, for AM to finally 'take' properly. Never quite figured out why.

Is there any way to adjust the rate in which uncontrolled Sims hook up with each other? I extended my Sims life a bit, but its Search For A Mate is stymied by the fact that everyone, it seems, already has a partner.

Yes, they would. Forum searches (regardless of the specific forum software used) are inherently hit and miss affairs. For example, I did a few searches just now, and in each one of them, the first page of results for each search was dominated by posts chastising another user for not using the search to find it.


As I've said before, I found the directions to be woefully unclear. Subjectively, Awesomemod is not difficult to install and maintain. Objectively, many people continue to have difficulty installing ahd maintaining Awesomemod. Wouldn't the only proper option be to deal with the objective nature of the situation, rather than a subjective, biased opinion?

The preamble to the How-To-Install-The-Framework thread states that there have been "many" people that have had trouble installing the framework; I simply suggested a method of reducing that problem. Do you have a problem with things being easy for people to do? Do you enjoy having to answer the same questions over and over again, because your opinion of Awesomemod's install difficulty level is not reflected in the amount of oft-repeated questions?


I did not intend to lecture, nor did I have any belief that my comments would spawn a forum-based version of Brightest Day. Someone commented that they were annoyed that newer posters were directly asking not to be savaged, and I pointed out that this assumption does not come out of thin air.


Thus why newer posters regularly post along the lines of "please don't yell at me". Full circle.

This is profoundly off-topic, but this sort of thing is going to happen as long as newer members get the impression that most of the responses to asking a question is going to be met with hostility, and that any problems along the line are solely based on the person in question being a blathering idiot. Posts from users acting like Grammar Red Lanterns doesn't help that perception.

Fundamentally, Awesomemod (compared to other drastic-game-changers) is significantly easier to screw up when installing, even for users that understand their systems. Granted, part of this is how unstable Sims 3 can be. Forum searches are always spotty at best, and how-to threads (I'm looking at you, How-To-Install-The-Framework Thread) are difficult to parse.

Random suggestion, has Pescado thought at all about an Awesomemod installer, complete with framework that installs everything to wherever it is supposed to be?

Is there a feature (or, barring that, an Awesome-compatible mod) that allows users to see if a person is a Young Adult or Adult? It's slightly annoying to woo a person and find that your Sim is ~10 days to Adult and your potential love interest is ~5 days to Elder.

As I understand it, making a household Sacred means story progression ignore them. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong on that.

If I disable Sims 2 style aging, will Sacred households age with everyone else, or does the Sacred status prevent aging as well as story progression? Or are the two things entirely seperate?

Fair enough, that worked

I do have a small question, indirectly, about how vacations are treated, story-progression wise. If I have a family of Person A and B, and Person A goes on a Vacation, should I disable Story Progression while Person A is away so that Person B doesn't do anything in that time?

Yeah, it turns out that I mentally equated the config file with the actual AM package.

Of course, now I have other problems. The loading bar doesn't load at all, and the thread on installing the Framework is as clear as mud.

'Copy the d3dx9_31.dll file into the Game>Bin folder of both the above directories'? Copy from where? After extracting the framework files into the directories in step 1, d3dx9_31.dll is already in the Game>Bin Folder. Same thing with Resource.cfg; that thread says to copy in files that, because of extracting framework files, already exist.

And that thread doesn't mention if I need to repeat this process for the HELS folder as well, and/or if I have to copy all my mod packages into each folder either...

So, I'm trying Awesomemod, and I'm not quite sure how to see if its working or not, because I'm fairly sure I set Awesomemod to show relationships as Numbers, but they aren't showing up like that. I have the framework installed, another Awesome-made mod that I know works... so I'm not entirely sure wtf I'm doing wrong.

I'm not usually much of a person that has a lot of game-altering CC (I go more for functional items), but I was wondering if there was a hack that, instead of you choosing the custom picture, simply selected one and started painting it.

I still like the Family Aspiration as a primary for at least one of the Sims in my families, if only for thematic reasons.

Wow, gotta say I'm surprised about how this turned out

I suspect after this last expansion pack I'll keep my Sims going and not start over each time. I just hate having Sims that exist that didn't "grow up" without the features added to an expansion pack.

I'm just curious, really...

At what points, if any, do you decide to just wipe your neighborhoods back to their un-altered states (be it back to the shipped state, or whatever 'clean' template, whatever) and start again?

I never intend to, but I always start over when I get my hands on a new expansion. I think about going back to the Sims I created previously, but by then I've lost most of my (for lack of a better term) emotional connection to those characters. So I start over with a new expansion, play until I get bored, and abandon the game until the new expansion comes out... and wipe those characters out.

What about you? When do you just want to restart?

I tend towards a save-before-everything-major style of play, so there's no risk of someone accidentally getting pregnant in my games. Same reason why they never start fires, burn their meal, get robbed, fail a chance card, etc.

So I basically get the whole first-born thing, but I'm not sure: I don't have to do anything special for the first kid born in a family?

Also, I've heard that, instead of the Lot Debugger, you can just hit the random button in CAS a few dozen times? Or am I completely false?

Another breeding-related question: are all aliens related, given that they all share the same parent? I remember some discussion about it, but couldnt find a definate answer...

This is an extremely tiny thing that I've always thought would be fixed, but never did:

When two people (let's say, Person A and Person B) are talking, this is the order of the little popups:

Person A: I like toys!
Person A gets a -{} icon over his head
Person B: Sorry, I don't like toys.

I always figured it it would be like this:

Person A: I like toys!
Person B: I dont like toys.
Person A gets a -{} icon over his head

Another one that I'm not sure if they fixed/changed was every Alien Sim was related to a single Alien, thus making everyone related.

Most of my families have a lot of things in common, based on how I play:

1- People tend to be of the lighter skin tones (I don't like the last two darkest skin tones in The Sims 2...)

2- A higher-than average amount of blondes and redheads (because, well, I like blondes and redheads, and given their recessive-trait nature, I feel I need more of them to continually pump into the system, Nwabudike Morgan style)

3- I usually have some form of goal for Sims I create, so I usually use the college-adjuster to select a lifetime want I want for them. Sometimes I'll go with what the game randomly assigns them.

4- Sims usually go permaplat, then find a lover (usually a townie that doesnt look butt-ugly) and have a kid or two.

5- All kids go to university, asap. Some people here don't like the baby stage, but my Stage of Annoyance is the teen stage. You're trying to keep their mood high to get good grades, but school + job tends to drag them down really easy, and the whole Headmaster thing just irritates me.

6- Quasi-generational: when every family that is going to have kids to send to university do, I play university until everyone graduates (or close to it), then play the home lots again to age the parents a bit, then move them back into the home lots or have them start their own houses.

I've been seeing this crop up in my game too, and I've done some googling and found a few other cases. There are two strange things about it:

- It didn't happen before I put my only custom content (Twojeff's college adjuster) in the folder
- It'll freeze exactly like you experience, and have to kill the stalled program about 2 or 3 times and then it'll load.
- Ever since it first happened, I no longer get the Intro Video besides the EA one.*

By my experience, this doesn't feel like a copy protection issue. It's like the game just stops loading once it's being loaded.


* I think I might have figured it out, or something similar. Ever since this error, I've not gotten the intro video. Now, it always took my computer a couple minutes after I cancel out of that video to get to the next loading screen. Maybe, because of this error, the "freezing" is actually loading the game in the background, and just not using the HD at all? It's a stretch, but it does seem like more than a coincidence.

It should be said that I know the debug cheats don't cause problems; I was just noticing it as a commonality between the two situations.


While I appreciate the warning - really, I do - but I've learned to take any predictions on errors in Sims 2 with a giant-ass brick of salt. I've played Sims 2 since it came out, and this is the first error I've encountered. I know this sounds really arrogant and whiny, and I'm damned sorry for it, but there's no completely tactful way of saying that I don't trust most of the doomsaying when it comes to Sims 2 errors.


I've lurked here for quite a long time; I'm aware of the hacks. I use a few of them, but most of them (for me) fix non-issues and/or things I don't want changed (I'm a bit more of a purist than most people here).

Besides, in any game that lets you change anything, the likelihood that something will go pear shaped becomes 1 when there's enough player-created modifications.

(I'll stop there, since this would inevitably get into a discussion about that, and I'm too damned tired to.)

I thought that as well, but I've restarted a few times since this started happening. As I was going to bed last night, I realized both situations had something in common - I had used the debug cheats. With the Critturs, I had used them to spawn a pet-training debug item to un-train them from Eat Only Human Food, and with the next situation, I was going to change a pet's abnormally-low needs.

Because my brother has used the debug cheats to no ill effect with BV, how possible is it that a Muiltple-PT hack, combined with the debug cheats, caused something like this to happen? I realize it's a completely off-the-wall guess, but I'm trying to figure out the situation in common...

Here's the deal:

I'm playing on a new neighborhood, and I eventually decide to pawn of the Critturs to an elderly sim to train. I load that lot one day to find that not only are the Critturs back to in the family bin, but the elderly sim has no memories of knowing the Critturs. I attribute this to the Critturs themselves, and delete them and the family bin.

I'm playing the Rammawhatevers as well, but get bored of them and delete them too. I reload the game later to find that they still exist on my neighborhood. So I delete them again, and all is well.

However, I just had an odd experience, and I'll explain it in an ordered list since that's the best way to do it:

- I play Guy for a while, saving before I'm done with a vacation.
- I play Guy for a while after that, saving regularly as I do.
- Eventually, Guy falls in love with another person (Girl), and Guy moves in with Girl. I save the combined Guy+Guy family.
- Turns out, one of Girl's cats is in one of those "My Fun and Scratch bars are red and I'm not going to do anything to actually correct that" mood, so I decide I'm going to reload and debug his stats up. I do it, save, and go to the neighborhood.
- As I'm going to reload, I notice Guy's lot has the "Someone Is At Vacation" plumbbob over his house. Turns out, Guy's lot has been reverted to the very first point I listed here. I tell him to go home, and he goes home to his now-completely-unfurnished old house.

Now, I realize that I can just pull him out of the lot and merge him into his fiancee's house, but I'm curious if anyone has experienced this kind of issue. No recent hacks with the exception of a Multiple Pollination Tech mod (which I don't quite know why I added, tbh). I suspect that it might have something to do with it - I've never had an issue like this - but it's certainly possible its either a BV issue or a mod issue. Or, perhaps, I'm wrong and this has nothing to do with either.

So, has anyone else experienced this?