Thanks, I will try that.

Recently I've been having problems with families moving out of their homes. I have also seen half a family move out of a home -- the mother, son by a different father, and all the pets left, her fiance and their daughter stayed. Is this allowed by Awesome Mod? I haven't seen families do this before. I'm also getting a lot of messages in the newspaper about game-generated families moving in, though I haven't found them on the map, and there are no empty houses.


The only things I've changed recently are I've started using CC Magic and Simport. CC Magic hasn't moved AM, and other AM functions are working, mostly (I've been noticing that Sims aren't changing out of their work clothes reliably.) I've read that the moving out of town thing is something that EA story mode does.

I'm going to stop using Simport because I think it's the reason I have a borked pattern that's infecting all my other patterns.

Any ideas how I can fix the moving away problem? Thanks in advance.

I'm back to simming after taking some time off. I was going to play my old custom neighborhood but I found that didn't have enough room for all the new community lots, so I am starting a new neighborhood. I want it to contain only my custom sims, no townies (I don't mind npc's.) I started a new neighborhood, did "destroyallhumans" and moved a family in. Instantly the game added several households of townies to my neighborhood. How do I stop this? I know that in my old neighborhood I had fixed it so no townies would appear, but I can't remember how I did this. Do I have to remove all houses except the ones with my sims in them? This is sort of a pain, since I'd like my sims to be able to move around on their own, but I sort of remember doing something like this before. I've searched this board and the awesome mod board and haven't found any advice. Thanks in advance.

Edit: Ok, after more research I think this was happening because I hadn't turned off EA story progression. I did say it had been a while since I played the game.  

Edit 2: I wanted to modify this because I have since learned some things -- Turning off EA story progression also turns off awesome mod's story progression, which was not my intent. To keep AM's story progression without townies I had to remove all the empty houses in the neighborhood and convert the lots to community lots. I tried using NRAAS's register to stop immigration but that didn't work.

Well, I have homeless sims in my hood that fill in as co-workers and such.

I guess what I really want is an option to bar townies from breeding/forming relationships with custom sims. I don't mind them hanging around, I just don't want them polluting the gene pool.

Are there plans to add an option to turn immigration off in AM? That's the only feature I miss from ISM, which otherwise didn't work for me.

In the meantime, is there any harm in regularly deleting the townies that move into town?

As Jordi suggested, try booting the game withOUT enablescriterror.package. I was having the same problem and removing this seemed to fix it.

Whenever my sims paint a still life or portrait, or take a picture of someone with a cell phone, the result is red and grainy. Does this happen to anyone else?

Screenshots taken with the ingame camera turn out fine. Here's a screenshot of a portrait of one of my sims painted by her daughter, whose artistic skill is level 9 --

That's the right size.

Unrelated question -- I downloaded the razor version and my antivirus program tells me there's a virus in sims3setup.exe. Can anyone a non-virusy version of this file? Thanks

edit: Scratch that. I found that I could open sims3setup.exe with WinRar, extract the real setup file and delete the virus (codec.exe) (Thanks Kyna, you answered my question as I was editing this post.)

Please elaborate.

Did you forget that when a watermarked TSR file was changed using the wardrobe wrangler, it would cause the game to crash? Major fucking pain in the ass.

Thanks

I just read somewhere that with AL you can change the position and orientation of stuff that you hang on the wall. I'm sure I'm overlooking something obvious but I can't figure out how to do this. Google has been no help. Any hints?

Alas. Does the apartment controller control the whole building or just that apartment? Just wondering if moving out the one family is likely to fix it.

Also, are there does and don'ts of apartment building/installing/upgrading?

I had a similar problem, though the error message I got was from ACR. I asked about it on the Simbology forum -- http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php?topic=3645.0

The error was caused by one of my sims not having an aspiration. I used TJ's blender to give her an aspiration (SimPE didn't work) and that fixed the problem. You might check their aspirations to make sure they both have one.

My apartment controller is creating errors when I save and eventually causing my game to crash when I play a certain family. I've run the bat box's apartment residency fix (my playables were marked as npc's?) and run the hack conflict utility and gotten rid of everything that conflicts. I'm still getting errors so I assume I have to delete the controller somehow. I read in another thread ( http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13493.0.html ) that hitting delete when the error message pops up might cause my apartment to turn into common space. I'd rather this doesn't happen. Is there any other way to fix the controller without moving the sims out?

I'm attaching my error log if it helps any.

I didn't manage to fix my sim, so I killed her with the tombstone. She managed to die without any fuss. Yay! Her husband is less buggy now that she's not around. I'm going to keep playing things the way they are and hope for the best. At this point, if a BFB hits my neighborhood, I'll just let it burn until Sims 3.

Not necessarily. I've been using TJ's age duration hack for a long time without problems.

Thinking back on the last time I played these sims, the problem may be caused by death by satellite and an over-crowded party. I remember this sim and her husband (who is also messed up, it seems) cuddling under the stars. They did this autonomously, which I didn't know could happen. They did this on the porch of their house, which I also didn't know was possible but I don't use the cuddle under stars action much. During this time there was also a party going on. I have the hack that lets you invite as many sims as you want and the party was very crowded.

So, my theory is that they were hit by a satellite while cuddling under the stars. Because there was a party going on, and lots of sims were on the porch, Death couldn't get to my sims to escort them to the great beyond. So my sims are partly dead and partly alive. I think the game may have crashed, too, at some point.

Then again, it could be something random like what ProfessorButters is experiencing.

I have a backup, but I'm trying to avoid using it, unless there's a way to restore just one house and not the whole neighborhood.

I have attempted to fix her in Simpe but she's still pretty messed up. I fixed her age, but she has no aspiration or LTW. I should have asked a more specific question. I'll continue trying to fix her and if there are specific issues I need help with, I'll ask about those.

I loaded a house today with two elders and their three children. I notice that the female elder is no longer an elder but an adult. Hm. I exit without saving and try again. I confirm that on the loading screen she is an elder. In game, I immediately zoom to her and her age line says that she's in her junior year in college (though she looks like an elder.) I unpause and she does an age transition to adult hood. I take her to the bathroom mirror to change her appearance and the hair color choices she has are black, brown, blonde and grey. I exit without saving and try a couple more times. Same result.

I enabled testing cheats to see if there were any bug messages (there weren't.) I do remember, though, that the last time I played the house there was a weird incident with hula girls. The girls appears at the corner of the lot and I got the zoom window you get for important events. They disappeared quickly, though, so I ignored them, which I probably shouldn't have. They were probably Death's hula girls, though I didn't see Death himself. I can't remember if my sim was old enough to die. I don't think she was, but I use the age duration hack, so it's hard to tell.

So, my questions --

Is there anything I can do now to fix this sim?

If I can't fix her, should I just age her back up to an elder using the tombstone of L&D and hope for no other signs of the BFB?


It's like a bad Rodney Dangerfield movie.

Amber --

Assuming you keep the original file name for your hair files, would you be willing to share the files you've fixed? I think a lot of people would love to have these.

I was going to take a stab at fixing some hair files this weekend. I wouldn't mind sharing mine.

Deleted 2: Electric Bugaloo -- http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6205.0.html

Nevermind, I got it to work.

I believe the time has come. It's a beautiful summer day so naturally I want to spend it removing and reinstalling the Sims. There used to be a post on the EA support site about manually uninstalling the Sims, but I can't find it now.

1) Backup everything in my Sims 2 directory
2) Remove games in reverse chronological order via add/remove programs
3) erase all sims 2 related stuff in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/EA Games

then
4) Reinstall all in order, patching as I go
5) Replace final EP (AL) exe with a no-CD version (I'm currently securom free)
6) See if the damn thing will start

Did I miss anything?

Actually, uninstalling AL deleted everything in my Sims 2 folder, not just my downloads. It left two files that had foreign characters in them, though. So, a warning to anyone uninstalling AL -- backup your Sims2 directory.

That happened to me also. I thought I had accidentally erased all my CC. Luckily, I had a backup.

I can't get my game to load. I have AL, but this problem started with FT, though I could get FT to load eventually. I don't know if this is a continuation of the FT problem or a new one.  The game stops loading at "Finding compatible roommates" and I get a popup saying "an error has occurred, this application will now terminate ..." I'm attaching the application error log if that's of any help. I'm not good at reading error logs but it looks like it might be an audio error?

What I've tried so far --

1) removing the downloads folder
2) removing my custom neighborhoods and just leaving the game created (unplayed) neighborhoods
3) removing neighborhood_manager.package (the game crashes before it generates a new one)
4) removing all of the cache files
5) removing securom
6) reinstalling AL

I think my problem with FT was in my neighborhoods, because removing the neighborhood manager usually helped the game load. My neighborhood is completely custom, and it hasn't been without glitches.  Is there a way to check the health of your neighborhood in SimPE?

Does anyone have any other suggestions for what I can do to get the game to load? I've run out of ideas but I'm trying to avoid doing the uninstall/reinstall thing.

**UPDATE** I fixed this. I had to uninstall the scriptorium.