The most-likely-to-be-helpful thing an error message tells you is the location of the log it generated.  Take a look at the log (this can be done even while still running the game) and there will be a lot more information than the pop-up gave you.  Much of it is indecipherable to us peasants, but usually enough is understandable to give you a hint about what precisely caused the error.  Your attempts to do something about it (fix it, make it go away) will then be, although still perhaps a shot in the dark, better aimed.

MATY is not exactly a place where you can bounce in and say "No, it's great!".  If you really want to convey your positive impression of the game you're going to have to do better than that.  Why are the things that bother everyone else not bothering you?  What are the things that make it worthwhile?  People are posting these sorts of impressions, and they're interesting to read in a way that "This game is good, losers" is never going to be.


Most of us hate EA because 1) They install nastyware on our computers in a futile attempt at copy protection and 2) We see the potential in the Sims games, and hate to see how badly EA screws them over with lack of bug-testing, listening to the community, etc.

Nah, the Professor's no troll.

Ah, but you are wrong about the restrictions on the parent sim:

My main playing focus is families.  I'll build or adapt homes for them and occasionally create a new sim to throw in the mix, but otherwise it's all families, strict two day/two semester rotation.

I always think I want drama, but I mostly play Happy Families dollhouse-style.  The march of generations seems to be enough to keep it interesting for me; I like to watch the genetics and family trees and I think sim toddlers are really cute, so if I weren't concerned about keeping the neighborhood size manageable they'd be spawning all the time.  I seem to have found a spawning policy that works fairly well: every couple gets one child, but for each Family sim in the couple they get an extra kid.  Plus exceptions for Graduate Three Children, Have Six Grandchildren, etc.  Fortunately my population size is large enough that ltwvariety has seen fit to ban the Marry Off Six Children LTW.

I've been playing the same hood I've been since the game came out.  Originally Pleasantview, Rambelton has been through a lot -- as various things have been exposed as Bad Things, I've gone in and cleaned them up with SimPE and other tools, meaning that it's about as healthy as a hood this old can get.  The playable population is currently fairly stable at 130-140 sims; a full neighborhood rotation takes around a month.  It keeps me from getting too bored with any particular family.

I play with my sims on Free Will, and try to guide how I play a particular sim by its wants and LTW.  For example, I do quite a lot of community lot playing, but most of it is with those sims who want to Own Five Top Businesses.  BRY makes running businesses a breeze, so I think it's a lot of fun.  They are all on community lots, because if I have the patience or the boredom I like my other families to be able to visit the businesses.

I'm still playing in what was Pleasantview, and the atmosphere has stayed suburban.  I imagine my population will eventually grow large enough that I'll want to have playables living in subhoods, and those will definitely have a different atmosphere.  Seeing all the neat themed neighborhoods people have made makes me think they might be themed, although goodness knows I don't actually need excuses to do more downloading.

I play with pets and some supernatural creatures -- I have lots of aliens, although with a PT replacement because I can't stand the noseless.  I'm working on some plantsims, and would like some werewolves if I could just manage to attract some wolves.  I stay away from the immortals, because my population size needs constant culling through death.

Hacks are pretty much Awesomeware and various other fixy things.  The game is easy enough as it is, who needs to make it easier?

As I have no skills of an artist, the only things I've ever made are recolors by playing around with Irfanview's Color Change tool.

I'm also still experiencing the bed problem; I moved a family recently and once I'd placed the furniture from inventory, at least one of the beds started causing constant error messages.  When I popped out of the game to look at the logs, it was the same Test Interaction - Is Bed Being Jumped On? that has previously caused me problems.  I'm not sure if it was all of the beds or not; once I realized what the problem was I immediately replaced them all.

Actually, your jumping-on-mouseover problem sounds a lot more benign than mine; the two may be completely unconnected.

As long as they have the same family numbers in the SkinTone XML, seelindarun's suggestion should work.  Dunno if the geneticizers changed this value while geneticizing, but I doubt it -- weren't there some warnings upthread about using the geneticized skins alongside their non-geneticized counterparts for just this reason?

You might also want to check out the Maxis Match Skintones here - http://spiritworldfiles.com/sims2/skintones.php

While these don't include extra pale and extra dark skintones like Purplepaws' set, they come pre-binned and there are several gradations between the Maxis 3 and 4 skintones, which is pretty nice since those two are quite far apart.  Of course, nothing at all prevents you from using both or mixing and matching.

No, this is where you trot off to Theo's Shack and pick up the Color Binning Tool.

Eh, the pherverstool and SimPE both use recursive.  I'd imagine most people using any sort of tool are used to that terminology at this point.

Anyway, if one were really attempting to accomodate the less-knowledgeable, one would have to use "subfolders" -- because your typical Windows user is not going to think in terms of directories.

Li'l Brudder: You're right, apparently the Maxian alien skin is a little wonky in the way its dominance behaves.  IgnorantBliss explained it pretty well starting about here in the old Changing Dominant/Recessive Values on Skin and Eyes thread.

The Maxian alien skin ought to have value 0 just like any other custom skin.  I.e. what happened to you shouldn't happen.  I'm sure you've thought of the possibility, but perhaps you have something -- a mod or default replacement -- that changes it somehow?

I seem to remember that when I was first messing around with geneticizing skins I had no success with three decimal places -- but that was a long time ago.  My memory may be false or things may have changed.  I doubt you'll mess anything up very much if you try it.  It probably won't have any effect on your green problem, because that shouldn't be happening in the first place.

Amen.  It's only the waterballoon fights in the cold that really bother me.  Seriously, who does that?

Theo's site has a walk-through: http://theos.chewbakkas.net/tools/color-binning-tool-walkthrough.html

Theo's tool gives you a thumbnail too -- in fact, a thumbnail for every age.  Jelenedra is right in saying that havng more than one recolor per color bin is a little extra work, though.

In later versions of DatGen, Hairtoner is just a part of Skin Manager.  So click Skin Manager, then look up at the toolbars.  The Hairtoner icon is a little fire, the last icon on the lowest toolbar.

The latest release I can find at TSR is 7.8, which is probably not what you want.  I don't recall if HairToner was available in that version, but if so it was quite a primitive version with plenty of bugs.  If your heart is set on DatGen and HairToner, I would do whatever you can to find the 7.13 debug release.

However...

I highly recommend you look into Theo's Color Binning Tool for SimPE.  The thread is http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3844.0.

I used to be a big proponent of DatGen and especially HairToner.  While it was actively being developed, it beat the manual SimPE method hollow, no questions asked.  But even the very last version (7.13 debug) had a few bugs and ease-of-use problems, and it is no longer being worked on.  The Color Binning Tool is easier to use than HairToner (although it has the same basic interface, if I recall correctly), does more things automatically, and Theo is active and will (presumably) fix any reported bugs.

I wonder if you could let me know when CBOY_Clothing_event_fix, CBOY_portal_deletion_fix2, and CBOY_WalkbyFix were discontinued?  I.e., fixed by Maxis?

It seems likely that your massive loading speedup is mostly caused by the massive jump you took in available RAM.

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro here, and my rugs have definitely been doing this since before Pets.  Possibly even since they were introduced in Nightlife -- I remember being very disapointed about the flatness.

That would be an awesome tool.  My Pleasantville has been played since I got the game; Sims2DB tells me I have around 250 playable Sims (dead and alive); my character folder has about 450 files, but that's quite low since I've purged almost all townies, etc.

Nah, I've got free will on and my Sims are pretty happy to let groceries sit in inventory.  Sometime they'll put a basket in after coming home from work or a community lot, but mostly they just hang on to it until groceries get low and I tell 'em to put groceries away.  And even then they're content to just put one basket in the fridge.

Yep, I'm seeing it too, but I've only seen it on one kid of the six or so households I've played since installing, and though she did it most of the time I couldn't really detect a pattern determining when she did and didn't.  I thought she was just a little glitched graphically 'til you mentioned it.

Silly Jordi.  Surely you mean es is implied, not sum.  I agree, though, it was certainly common practice to leave such things implied.  Heck, you could even leave out the tu if you wanted, since we can get the subject from nescias. 

And actually es is the main verb here; cum latine nescias is the subclause or whatever, stating the circumstance in which you are an idiot.  Not that you're an idiot, but... oh, you know what I mean.

I'd also like to suggest vicanus instead of urbanus.

(Sorry, croidure, I've got nothing to contribute on the actual topic...)

Nah, scurra is a noun -- one of those first declension masculines.  Looks like Jordi's opted to leave the verb out of that second half.

scurra, -ae, m. : dandy, man-about-town, jester, buffoon  (from my 1968 Cassell's)

Ness, your standards for hair sound a lot like what I look for.  (Except I'm not nearly as good at keeping my greedy little hands off things that don't meet those standards...)  I'd be very interested in knowing what hairs meet the Ness-standard!