I'm having the same problem with my sims ALWAYS running...  they never walk anymore, not even when I specifically select "walk" from the drop-down menu.  I checked 3 random houses in the neighborhood and all of the sims in all of the houses seemed to be stuck in this "always run" mode.  I actually don't have WA installed, so this isn't WA-specific. 

Yeah, in my game there's definitely a few second delay (3-4s maybe?) for some of the rotating images to appear at all, followed by the slow ass rotation...  Not all of the 3D previews are slow to load - the items with a bunch of recolours are the worst I think, whereas a fancy spinning tree (for example) appears instantly when I click on one in the catalog.  Anyway, the delayed load of the preview, plus the sloooow rotation once it appears, is making building/decorating annoyingly slow...  Which is just bizarre to me, because live mode runs really smoothly, and isn't laggy at all.  I had my fingers crossed that there might be a way to replace the rotating image with the static thumbnail that appears when you go into create-a-style, but maybe not.   

Yeah, I ended up reducing the video settings pretty quickly, after noticing that my laptop was becoming insanely hot while the game was running...  the lower video settings definitely helped with both the graphical slowness and my laptop temperature (as you would expect I guess).  There's definitely still a delay in the appearance of the fancy rotating object preview, but it's not as annoying now that I've become more used to the new items and catalog.  I agree about the paintings though - a thumbnail image of the front would definitely be more useful.  Actually, for most items, a single image would probably be just as useful as the slowly rotating 3-D graphic, but that wouldn't be nearly as shiny...  and I'm guessing that this isn't much of an annoyance for most people, as the dang preview probably loads & rotates more quickly on better gaming computers. 

Hey all,
Just wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to replace the rotating object preview in catalog mode with a normal non-moving thumbnail pic...  or if there's some way to turn off the fancy spinning object feature so that a normal thumbnail shows up instead (like the still thumbnail that shows up when you click on an item in create-a-style mode)?  I just installed the game on my laptop, which is slightly below the required specs, and while live mode runs surprisingly well and is definitely playable, I'm finding buying objects & decorating houses to be more slow...  when I click on objects in the catalog there is a few second delay before the rotating preview loads up, which makes it annoying to click through a bunch of different catalog items or recolours.  The rotating preview images of some of the build mode items (the ones without recolours I think - gates, trees, etc) load pretty much instantly, and I just noticed that the fence previews don't rotate (woo), but the buy catalog items and doors/windows are kinda a pain to look through.   
Thanks!

@Tingeling - For exapansion packs I'm using all except for OFB, Bon Voyage, and Free Time.  And I have all Stuff Packs except for Holiday and Family Fun.  Hopefully that works for you, I'm glad you like the house   

Also, thanks for the nice words Emma!  I'm glad you like the design.  It was a lot of fun playing around with the colour scheme when decorating.  And I never thought I'd actually use those futur nu arches in a lot, but there they are, haha.  They were the first thing I put in, and I was determined not to take them out.     

@ Crunk - Looking at my first lot again, I kind of agree about the walkway...  I think I originally put those bricks in to tie in with the deep oranges, browns, reds & beiges used on the interior, but against the dark brown exterior they're probably a little too orange.     

This challenge has been a lot of fun.  I look forward to seeing what else everyone comes up with. 

I agree Tingeling, I'm having way too much fun with this month's house!  I really like your forest cabin...  it has a great layout, looks fantastic, and keeps to the theme really well throughout.  Nice job!

I made another version as well, without moving any trees this time.  I was going to try to make an ultra modern futuristic type of lot, so that I could play around with a bunch of maxis items that I never really use, but then I realized that that type of house doesn't really work on a lot with a bunch of trees...  so I toned it down a bit, and now it's just modern-ish (I think).  It also sticks to a red, white and black colour theme (White Stripes inspired, ha). 

It costs $67,539 and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  Here it is!


























Download Here

I've been on a bit of a building spree lately, so I thought I'd give this month's challenge a try.  I had forgotten how tricky it is to find matching items without using CC or maxis recolours... 

Here's what I came up with...  It has 3 Bedrooms, 2.5 Baths and is fully furnished (but could use some extra decorations, such as curtains, paintings, etc.).  It runs about $79,000.  The master bedroom has a small balcony and an ensuite bathroom.  The second floor also contains two other bedrooms, and another full bathroom.  On the first floor is a living room, study/fitness area, half bath, kitchen, and dining room.  It should have everything needed for skilling.  Somewhere along the way I had two copies of this lot in my neighborhood, so it became 12 Oak St instead of 10 Oak St. 








Some Detail Shots:







 


You can download it here. 



   

 

I don't use Insim either... I actually don't know much about it.  For some reason I have it in my head that Insim is bad news, but I think that's actually Inteen...  something about killing kittens and tight pants?  ha.

I don't suppose there's anyway I could save Pascal and his baby at this point...?  Through some SimPE magic perhaps?  Or are they pretty much destined for deletion?  I don't particularly care for the baby with the ghost for a mother, but I'd rather not delete Pascal if I didn't have to. 

Aaah!  I was not aware of this...  What should I do with the corrupt Pascal and his baby?  And does this mean his baby mama is hanging out in my neighborhood somewhere?
ETA:  Nevermind, just checked SimPE and she's dead...  she has no relations or memories except the "I am dead" and "had baby" memories...  so I'm guessing the game created her to fill the unknown parent role when the baby was born?    

Also, is there a way to avoid this corruption/borkedness when making a merged neighborhood?  I followed the tutorial and used the empty/cleaned-up templates posted over in the Peasantry and everything seemed to go swimmingly until this...  are there extra steps you have to take to fix Pascal and the Ottomans when using the templates that have the maxis playables in them?  Or do you just have to avoid playing those two families in a merged hood? 

Ok, so I've never played Strangetown before...  I did a reinstall recently, and decided to try making my own mega neighborhood using the empty/cleaned up templates, and with pleasantview as the main neighborhood, and strangetown, veronaville, and riverblossom hills added as downtowns.  The pleasantview I used was completely empty, but the others were cleaned/fixed with all of the maxis playables still there.  Anyway, over in Strangetown I was playing the house with the Curious boys, and Pascal Curious had his baby, and the birth had all of the weird alien animations and everything, but the baby looked like a normal human baby...  Is this weird?  Should the baby always be an alien, or is there a chance that it will be a human?  Also, I just checked the baby's family tree and he has a mom listed, someone named "danielle greaves", who also does not look like an alien.  Just a totally normal looking girl that I don't think I've ever seen before in the game.  Whatup wit dat?     

The issue is with Belladonna Cove, the E001 neighborhood.  I think you're right about E002 being the AL stealth neighborhood (i.e the "magic" neighborhood that is added to all neighborhoods), but I'm not totally sure about that.  The E001 glitch with the apartments can be avoided altogether (I'm pretty sure), so that the apartments can be used rather than deleted...  You just need to move the sims out of the apartments and into the sim bin, before deleting all the characters and making the empty template.  I tested this with my own neighborhood and it worked, but I'm not sure how to edit the E001 neighborhood file properly to make a truly empty template. Otherwise I would share it with you.  If someone who knows how to make empty templates could try this, to remake the empty E001, I'm pretty sure it would work. 

The workaround is to delete the borked apartments (the ones that had playable families living in them before the cleanup).  According to Giggy (she added this to her post a few pages back):

Enter the affected apartments, changelotzoning residential, save then exit, bulldoze apartment then replace.

Oh great!  I use your teleporter all the time Inge, but I've never tried the lockable/keyholder doors. 
This is probably wishful thinking...  but would there be any way to incorporate the lockable doors into the apartment buildings, to set up a system where multiple people/families could live in separate apartments in the same building, but could be controlled at the same time?  I know you can set up home-made apartments on residential lots using the lockable doors, but would it be possible to hack the doors somehow (or the apartments somehow, I guess) so that the doors could be used in apartment buildings, where you wanted to control more than one family?  So that you could leave the zoning as "apartment", and keep the other "features" of apartment buildings intact...  e.g. paying rent every monday, the landlord, the other apartments filling up with townies...  I'm thinking something along the lines of "special doors" that would let you set up a 4 apartment building, with two playables, each living in separate apartments, and two townies filling up the other two apartments...?
I have no idea how the coding or hacks work, so I'm probably just grasping at straws, but I thought I'd throw it out there in case it is possible.

I'm a bit behind, and just started playing AL over the weekend... 
Just wondering - Is there any way to simultaneously play multiple sims who are living in the same apartment building but in different apartments?  I hate when I have two sims living in the same apartment building, but different apartments, and I can't control them both at the same time...  I was hoping for something similar to the Uni dorms, when you can control all playables living in the dorm at once...  I know it would suck if you had big families living in the same building because it would be too many sims to play at once, but with single sims I would love if I could control all playables on the lot simultaneously, rather than playing one while the other hangs out in blackness, and then playing the other to catch up. 

I tried using the empty Belladonna Cove, and was having the same problem with the previously lived-in apartment buildings still thinking there were still families living in them...  So I tried emptying BDC out myself, but I'm not sure if I did it right.  Basically I let the game generate a BDC with all the characters, went in and moved everyone out of the apartment buildings (to the sims bin), then shut down, deleted all the characters in the E001 folder in My documents, then restarted the game, loaded up Belladonna Cove again, saw that everything was in fact empty (including the apartment buildings where people had been living) , then shut down again.  Deleted all characters in AL Userdata -E001 -Characters, replaced the E001 package file with the E001 from my documents, deleted the Neighborhoods folder in my documents, then booted the game back up again, and checked the newly made Belladonna Cove.  And it seems ok so far, everything is in fact empty...  But I have no idea if that's how I was supposed to do it, of if my method will eventually bork everything.  I tried to find a tutorial, but the only one I came across described how to clean and empty things, using the already cleaned up / empty templates.  Oh crap, nevermind, having just looked at the file in SimPE I'm thinking I have to edit the file as well...  Do I just delete stuff like sim description, sim DNA, etc.?  Are there instructions somewhere?  Something tells me I'm in over my head here, ha.  Alternatively, if someone who knows what they're doing wants to re-empty it after moving the families out of the apartments first, I think that'll fix the glitch. 

And speaking of which, is there a cleaned up Belladonna Cove kicking around?  With the Maxis playables, but all the extra characters deleted?   

I tried a few random things to try to see if they would help...  I tried installing the first free time patch, which didn't work...  then I uninstalled and reinstalled freetime, but that didn't work...  And I tried updating my video drivers, but that made no difference either...  All of my other drivers/BIOS/etc seem to be up to date, so I dunno what the problem is.  With SP1 installed I can't even get to the neighborhood selection screen, everytime I try to load the game it crashes at the scrolling text.
 
Stoopid Vista.

So anyway, I kinda gave up and used system restore to restore to before the SP1 update.  Gah.  But now my game works, and that's what's most important, right?

So a while ago Vista (ugh) installed Service Pack 1 on my laptop, and afterwards I was unable to get my game to load...  It would constantly crash at the load screen during the scrolling text with the classic "the application will now terminate" error.  Removing my Downloads folder didn't fix the problem, and neither did updating my drivers, etc.  Anyway, I ended up using system restore to return to the day before, and voila, my game loaded up fine.  Anyway, Vista has been harassing me to install Service Pack 1 again, and so I finally gave in today, and sure enough my game won't load again.  So it's definitely the Service Pack 1 update...  but I can't seem to figure out why this is causing the crash, as I can't seem to find anything about Freetime + SP1 incompatibility...  One person over at MTS2 had the same problem, but a ton of other people seem to have no problems running the game with SP1.  So does anyone have any idea why this is causing my game to crash?  Ideally I'd like to keep Service Pack 1, as it's supposed to actually make Vista somewhat more operational.  I'm running FreeTime (no patches) + a NOCD crack.  All Eps and Sps (except Ikea) installed.

All of the custom hairs I've tested (and had mess up) have been Raonjena or XM Sims as well...
I'm not sure if that's  significant, or just a coincidence...  maybe those are just the main places we get these odd hair colours... 

It's funny, because I've only tried binning a total of 5 custom hair colours (because I rarely download non-standard colours), but all of them changed to a normal hair colour in game.  Which made me think it was a glitch in the binning process...  But since it happens so rarely to everyone else, I guess I just have bad luck!

Woo, I'm glad it's fixed!!  It's been driving me nuts.  I tried searching for a solution before, but I always just got a pile of useless information about custom hair.  I just exited my game to come post about it, when I saw your post.  What a coincidence.

When re-binning mine with Wardrobe Wrangler I just noticed that for the hairs binned "custom" with theo's tool, the colour bin value and family value are exactly the same...  Could that be causing the problem?  Or is that normal for hair in the custom bin?

ETA:
Nevermind, I don't think it matters...  I tried changing the colour bin value so that it's different than the family value, but the hair still looked brown/black in game...  the only solution seems to be changing the family value so that the custom colours are no longer associated with the normal colour family.

I'm having the exact same problem...
 
I only have about 3 or 4 downloaded hairs in the custom bin (weird colours like blue, pink, purple, etc.), but none of them show up the right colour in game...  Like you said, the colour looks right in the change appearance window, but not once I exit.  Funny thing is that the portraiture picture of the sim changes, so that in their little portrait they'll have purple hair, but in game it'll look black or brown.  The 4 hairs I have are from different sites (XM sims and Raonjena I think), so I don't think that's the problem...  but I'm not sure.  

All of my custom hair colours are binned into the custom bin using Theo's colour binning tool in SimPE, so that might be causing the problem...  I'll try re-binning to remove the family association...  and maybe I'll try re-binning with wardrobe wrangler, to see if that changes anything.  Let me know if anything works for you   

oooh, thanks floppyboo
I guess I haven't played around with the lot debugger much since installing freetime...  I didn't notice it moved.
Thanks

I seem to be missing the "regenerate portraiture" option since installing freetime...
I have the latest lot debugger that came with the freetime director's cut.
Was this option taken out at some point?  or is something borked on my end?

Egads, I don't know how I didn't notice that before!  I guess I've just had a lot of babies popping out lately...  I tend to forget about vacation days and as soon as the carpool shows up, off they go.
 
And to think I just told all of MATY that I have "Woohoo Teens" installed for nothing...

Thanks Pescado.

Hi everyone...
I searched for this, but didn't find anything...  My apologies if I just suck at google.
Anyway, since installing FreeTime, everytime a woman has a baby the "3 days off to care for the newborn" box pops up, but the new mom sim doesn't actually get any time off.  She goes to work at the next scheduled time, even if it's just hours after she had the baby.
I've only noticed this since installing Free Time & the kitchen/bath Stuff pack (I have all expansions/packs installed)...  I did replace all of my hacks/mods and with Free Time versions.  Most of my hacks are from the Director's cut.  The only non MATY mods/hacks I have are MaryLou's appliance friendly counter mods (mts2), the slot enable package by Numenor (mts2), TwoJeff's FT aspiration fix, JenFlower's woohoo teens, Lord Darcy's SP7 kitchen/bathroom object fix, the teleporter painting, and the chair/sofa booth sectional thingys.  Oh, and the grow up townies mod by Ste.     

Thanks a lot for your help!