Yeah, because the question wasn't posted in the right section or anything.

Well. I guess this means no alien abductions. Or at least, "lacking the fun part" of alien abductions. The first time I had an abduction occur (and it was w/o cheats or even mods, way back in the day), I had no idea the abducted Sim would come back pregnant, so when he popped I was completely taken by surprise and vastly amused. In other words, it was a lot of fun for people like me who are easily amused. *sigh*

Wow. I thought they would reduce your rent. That's really pointless - worse than pets.

What IS the point of apartments, then, overall? Aside from more realistic game play, that is*. I mean, I like the idea of apartments but they're not expensive enough to make them realistic in-game and there seem to be more problems associated with them than not. (On the other hand, houses aren't realistic either. Theoretically a house should appreciate somewhat in value (not, of course, anything resembling the recent real estate bubble).) But the benefits of houses are that the school bus still shows up and you can place items outside as well as inside, plus you don't have to cope with neighbours coming and going; and, to go meta for a moment, you don't have to worry about the several "cloned" sublots that occupied apartments create in your game files.

Maybe if rent was collected more frequently than once a week... I don't know. I have played several apartments and ended up moving the families into starter-type homes. This roommate thing just adds one more reason not to bother with apartments.

_{*I am not addressing the fact that apartments can be useful for people who use Sims 2 to advance story/plotlines. I can certainly see their usefulness in that case, although, again, I think there were existing mods pre-AL that made "apartments" possible for the purposes of storytelling.}

Just finished my third computer build and would agree that the thermal paste (and heat sink/fan) included ought to be sufficient, esp. for that processor.

Taken out of context... this is ROFL-worthy. I want to see this on a Mac/PC commercial now.

I do the same thing, particularly if I dislike the Sim but not enough to actively seek his/her death. Hey, if they're red when they transition, does it take away days? That would be particularly awesome. Must test.

I've been using 0.71 "by accident" since I saw where you said Turn-Ons/Offs were borked in 0.68, so I went and found it and d/led it a couple days ago. It's definitely faster than 0.66, which is what I'd been using up until then. I just d/led 0.72 and I think 0.71 loaded even faster than .72 (if that's possible) but both are faster to load than 0.66. The Neighbourhood Browser is faster. I've only used it to edit Sims in a new neighbourhood (personality/traits/the usual) and it's working fine, changes are sticking, etc.

Also - I ran it for about an hour last night and 0.71 did not eat up my CPU resources.

I got to the tribal stage last night but stupidly didn't realise that meant I had to stop evolving. Tribal stage is pretty boring compared to Creature stage, at least so far. I've been attacked by another tribe and have failed to charm two more tribes. It's very boring compared to creature mode. It's like Age of Empires  (I) only with fewer options and worse animation. And no cheat to add the gray guy with the laser gun to your camp! *g*

My son's in Space mode already and loving it, but I'm not sure I'll ever get past Creature mode at this point because Tribal is way boring and I like reinventing my creature all the time. Dressing it up is just... stupid.

The arrr'ed version that we got came with a creature pack so we have not yet felt the need to go online/register.

But where's the fun in that?

You're probably already aware of this but. FYI.

Saturday morning I d/led and installed the 8/30/08 updated hacks in the FT directory, including macrotastics. When I went to play the uni lot I'd been playing for several days prior, the option "College...Do Homework" was gone. "Rampage" was available but did nothing when clicked on. "College... Write Term Paper" was also not available for any of the four students, so while it's possible one of them had written a term paper that semester and thus the option was no longer available for her, I'm certain that all of them had not written term papers (I only write term papers/do homework if they roll the want and two of them are Popularity sims).

I was playing with my normal game, nothing "new" installed aside from the updated hacks; several hacks were updated on the 8/28 round and the options to Do Homework and Write Term Papers were still there as of Friday night.

I tried adding a plain desk (because this is my thought process: the Sim now needs a desk or a place to do homework, right?) and still nothing. Also deleted and bought new computers (Maxis cheap computer).

Restored hacks from a DC I d/led at the end of June, and the "College... Do Homework" and "College... Write Term Paper" options were back.

Thanks - I was wondering about this. I was so looking forward to AL and now I'm thinking I'm not going to install it until I have to. :/ I love my Marvine spiral staircases, not least because I can set a left and right one next to each other and it looks very cool.

Stupid EAxis...

I finally installed IKEA SP and was severely disappointed. It looks like they just threw it together to get $$. So glad I didn't pay for it. But my daughter, whose bedroom has recently been completely done over from IKEA, was delighted by the idea, so I went ahead. I cannot believe EAxis released this SP and CHARGED MONEY for it. I can't believe how badly it was put together. And I can't believe they just threw the new beds in at about the lowest possible ratings.

New beds!

...new beds with 3/2/0? WTF???

So I remembered that you had a hack to fix the comfort for the beds and went looking for it to see if I could hack the IKEA beds. To my delight, you'd already done it! And the instructions to install it were crystal clear. I made my kid late for school this morning because I had to go look at my "new" beds without custom stars by them and with 6/5/2 ratings.

Happycat is so very happy. Thanks for all the work you did on this.  BAAAAA! BAAAAA!

Wow, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to post the link to that. I have been getting more alien abductions since installing FT and recently had a child transition to teen and was reminded of this problem.

MATY rocks like a rocking thing.

Is this why the default alien skin I am using doesn't have eyes for the teenagers? I use contacts as a work around because I like the skin but this sounds like something I could fix. ::is excited::

...I wish you were MY Oversoul.

I was so glad it ran at all, initially, that I didn't even care about the pretty. I was amazed when I loaded it onto the Windows system (that has no great graphics card, mind you, just an X1300, but it does have 4G of RAM) and was able to see the wallpaper details and the shadows and reflections in the mirrors. It was like a whole new game.

So I agree - the game definitely runs faster on Windows than the Mac version does even on my MBPro, to the point that I uninstalled it from the MBPro except for the base game so I could build lots if stuck in an airport or something. I also like having SimPE available. But my Windows system is basically just a console system - Civ and Sims 2 and various entities that support those addictions, like Photoshop and SimPE.

I haven't yet had to install Windows on a Mac. For a while I thought I might have to but then they released SPSS 16 for the Intel Mac and I was good to go.

Two questions:

How do the spiral stairs compare with Marvine's? (By which I mean - right and left? Matching railings?)

How are the apartments set up? I was wondering if some of the houses that make good dorms might also make good apartments. Conversely, I've got some good "apartments" that make lousy dorms (darn that elevator bug!), but I've been hanging on to them in case they'd actually make good apartments for AL.

Up through Pets, I would say the Aspyr ports were definitely more stable than EAxis. I haven't played Seasons on the Mac much since I have a Sims-dedicated Windoze PC now, but my husband plays it on his MacBook and has not complained about crashes or instability.

At any rate, if you're running Leopard you need a Leopard crack. If you're running Tiger you need a Tiger crack. There's no two ways around it: Leopard cracks don't work on Tiger and vice versa. (And nothing from 10.3.x works on 10.4 or 10.5.) It sounds to me like the problem is a wrong-OS-version crack with the abrupt quitting.

That would surprise me less than two blue eyed parents having a brown eyed child, because while green is dominant over blue and brown is dominant over green, green still indicates the presence of melanin and blue is still the absence of melanin. So if there are enough polygenes piling onto the pigmentation (the way they do in the rufus gene in red cats) - which I've always thought was one possible explanation for the great variations in eye colour - then I can see that green could be 'hiding" brown.

At any rate, yes, it is possible - I was wrong.

Indeed!

Almost all of the examples cited, however, have to do with genetic mutations, "gene swapping" or fetal damage during pregnancy. Because of this, I am thinking the possibility of two blue eyed parents having a brown eyed baby because of an incompletely expressed gene  is more uncommon than the other causes.

But you're right and I was wrong: the question, can two blue eyed parents have a brown eyed child, can be answered "yes."

It's simply not possible for two blue-eyed people to have a brown-eyed child. But the thing that confuses a lot of people is when they call hazel or green eyes "blue." There are really basically two colours of eyes: brown and not-brown or "with pigment" and "without pigment." Not-brown is blue (or grey if you live in Europe *g*). "Brown" is every other colour: hazel, brown, green, blue-green, red-brown, gold, what-have-you.

If two blue-eyed people had a brown-eyed child, yes: either "Daddy" was the mailman or one of the parents has very light green or hazel eyes that contain a lot of blue-appearing pigment. But blue eyes basically *lack* pigment and therefore appear "blue" or "grey."

A basic eye colour website: http://www.athro.com/evo/inherit.html

PS: I have brown hair; both my parents have brown hair, my mother's almost black. My grandparents all had brown hair on both sides of the family. The last known redhead in my family was my mother's grandmother. My husband is dirty blond and has a sibling with "gingery" hair but it's not what you'd call red.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when our first child was a shiny new copper-penny redhead. He's 16 and is still shiny copper penny red (somewhat darker but still a lovely shade of copper-red) and so are his incipient whiskers. His sister was born a dirty blonde that's turning darker as she ages and will probably end up being brown. So the red hair skipped three generations and showed up out of the blue. Probably my father does not carry the ability to allow hair to be expressed as red, since my parents had five kids, including two blondes, and not a redhead among us. Yet my husband and I only had two kids and bam, we got a red head. Not only that, but it's curly too.

Our family joke, since we were living in Germany when he was born, is when people ask, "Where did he get the red hair? The milkman?" we answer, "No, the beer man!"

I too would be interested in knowing if the stats changed with FT. I had several abductions before FT - about seven, maybe, without cheats or hacks in the year and a half I've played, but since FT, which I've had less than a month, I've averaged one abduction per game play session. As you can see, this is a lot higher than pre-FT.

Each abduction has resulted in pregnancy too but since none of them were the result of Summon Aliens I expected this.

Thank you. I looked everywhere *but* there. I win at EPIC FAIL.

Make fun of me! But I finally took the FT plunge (arrrr!) and spent two days updating my hacks and CC. I finally got to play last night and found I was missing two things I hadn't realised I relied on quite so much: novelprogress and darwincowplant. Sad cat is sad. Are these obsolete or borked or what?

(Yes - my kid and I are evil. We love to watch the cowplant eat people, especially stupid townies.)

Ah, the "Kitchen Sink" EP.

I predict they will add more neighbourhoods that we don't need with more useless families that we don't need. This is to give us something to do, i.e. whine while we wait for those more awesome than us to provide us with clean and/or empty templates.

However, this might be a gimme and therefore disqualified as a prediction.

How about this? Graduating Sims have to go on job interviews and move to the above-mentioned new neighbourhood in order to take the job, and they have to come up with first and last and a security deposit out of their first paycheck.

That might be too much like RL. Never mind...