I have one particular "romantic interest" couple (no commitment) who seem intent on "Romance: Every Possible Rabbithole in Town" a couple times every day, but no pregnancy there yet either. When I checked them once on the radar, they were just "touring" and didn't seem to actually be doing any woohoo/try for baby, but I may have missed it. Other times I looked at the science lab or place in question and they didn't seem to actually be there. Maybe they hadn't arrived yet?

Though the bar moves while they're waiting outside, any opportunities that are supposed to finish upon going to school don't until they're actually in the building, as I learned last night. I turned off the clipping avoidance hoping it would get all the kids in the building, but there's still a huge pileup of them until 12:00 at least. There's some sort of precedence thing because they will all stand and wait for one particular kid to get his ass in gear and move through the door before proceeding, no matter if there's a huge bunch of empty space and no one in the way for someone else to go. I don't care so much because at least they're going to school now, but, still. In my Riverview Indie wolfing run, before these latest couple of updates, I'd have kids go to school and end up playing on the playground all day when they got tired of waiting outside. That neighborhood is full of neurotic, insane, evil, inappropriate, etc. Sims now because they all failed school so very hard.

Also, there's a door at the back of the school building but it's apparently only a facade... I wonder if it's possible to make that an entrance too, somehow, though teleporting in is definitely no worse than the teleporting cars and bikes.

I've definitely noticed performance degrading if I play for a long time. In the worst case I've had Indiemod completely quit in the middle of my playing and revert to EAxis storymode, which one time I only noticed when I realized one of my playable families had suddenly moved out of town despite that being turned off both in Indie and Awesomemod. Now I make sure to save a lot and when I see the storymode notifications reverting from the Indie verbose notifications (and when I see teens getting jobs and elders retiring, neither of which happen with Indie in my game), I make sure to restart without saving

Had a townie toddler with close-cropped hair named Stacey and I finally found out it was a guy when he became a teenager recently. I wonder if one of the parents had the Inappropriate trait, now that I think of it, because I believe someone mentioned that Sims with those traits might autonomously give their kid a name from the wrong gender's list...

I have just recently gotten my first laptop and after seeing the issues my sisters had on theirs with fan coolers, I ended up getting this heat pad with crystals in it that absorb the heat and turn to gel, then turn back to crystals when they cool. So far I haven't noticed any slowing issues but I think elevating it off the desk might be a good idea too because I'm sure at some point it will get so hot it can't absorb any more. I don't use it on my lap for this reason, so it won't absorb body heat, but I'm not sure if a fan is actually a better idea or not. Don't want to ruin it...

Awesomemod's "sacredness" is totally seperate from the Indie Stone features and gets disabled when the driver is on, correct? Because so far so good, except I just got a popup notification that one of my "sacred" Sims just got married, and not only does she have commitment issues but her husband was already married at the time. He's the one who was subject to the early story-mode moveout that left him married on his wife's side but not on his. I thought I'd fixed it, but I guess not. Both his original wife and my playable showed the rings icon in his list. He's met with his accident now; too bad I didn't remember to do it earlier. I suppose the only way to prevent this is to turn off marriage with Indie Stone on all my sacred families and do it manually if I want to...

He's not "unflirty", is he? I have a couple of those but I haven't tried a romance with one yet. I have noticed that they don't have the standard romance options upon just meeting a Sim like others do. Then again, if they're best friends it's not like they can get to know them much better...

That really annoyed me, too. I mean, sure, it's blurred by default, but at least in TS2 they had a naked pregnant morph. It strikes me as even lazier this time because they ought to know the blurs would be removed first thing the community did, but I really shouldn't be surprised, should I...

I've had a couple babysitters just stand out in front of the house and do nothing while the kid played and their motives went into the red, while some others wouldn't leave the kid alone and kept getting them up to watch TV with them. I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to stand in one place outside the whole time (I observed this in my sister's unmodded game too) but otherwise it does seem to be luck of the draw in regards to traits. The best one I had was Family-Oriented and also a Slob, but I accidentally aged him up after moving him in, so now he lives in town and will probably make good marriage fodder... I kinda miss him as a babysitter, though.

Ahh, wonderful. Maybe he'll just have to meet with a fatal accident, then...

My experience with Story Mode, pretty much with AwesomeMod in the whole time, though early on there weren't as many of the limiting features.

I finally investigated the status of some of the townie families the game spawned when I first set it up after gassing the default Sims out of Sunset Valley. The Bradford father had moved out by himself into the trailer; when asked about his relationship status he replied he was single, but his wife still had him listed as her husband. I ended up kicking him back in with his family to free up the house, because there wasn't any indication he moved out because of a divorce or argument, and he was good or best friends with his wife. I just set them as spouses again, though it doesn't want to show up on his panel for some reason. He's stayed put so far.

Then there was Garland Bateman who was living with Beth Ingram and, I discovered, their two daughters, one who started as a teen and one who started as a kid but is a teen now. One had the mother's last name and the other had his. They were engaged and I don't know how long they'd been engaged, or if they started that way, but obviously the Story Mode never pushed them to marry and they never did anything about it, so I had them get married manually through the menu option rather than the cheats. Oddly, though he proposed the marriage, he and the whole family took the mother's last name, even the daughter who was born with the father's.

All the other townie families are apparently already married. They spawned or were created with a couple toddlers early on, which are now children, but there haven't been any new kids with them for a long time now, and so the only new kids have been with my playables. I had one pregnancy early on come from Story Mode with one of my pre-married CAS playables, and the rest I had to get going on my own.

I have had two Sims so far form romantic relationships on their own, both from "sacred" families with a non-sacred townie, so I don't know if Story Mode pushed this on them from the townie side before the notification option or if they actually did it on their own. However, I've played about 20 Sim days over the past couple nights, and I haven't gotten one single Story Mode notification at 1:00 AM. Now that they can't move houses like they used to (hurray for persistently moving out to become homeless and leaving your toddler with your roommate) I actually took "sacred" off my playables to see if something would happen. Nothing yet, but it's only just started.

I've been playing on a mix between Long and Epic and the toddlers I started with out of CAS have just become teenagers. And, apart from the usual random antagonizing and befriending, and one parthenogenesis baby that was shot down before it got off the runway, that's all that's happened. I turned on the Bus Kills one time to see what would happen, and a random homeless Sim I'd never met or even seen around was killed each night, so I turned that off again, because I imagine they'll just spawn more if they kill them all...

So I guess all this is to say - I really hope for Awesome Story Mode, because it sure seems to be needed

Thanks! It looks like it's CTRL-SHIFT-click with the newest build of the mod, and I had to set the kid with Genealogy/Adopt (the spouse was set with Relationship) but otherwise the ties were fixed and it worked. Lifesaver!

Where is that in-game relationship setter, or in what thread was it mentioned? Most of my families seem to be okay now, but I found one where the mother isn't set as the mother or set as the spouse, and since I've been playing for a while now I'd like to fix it rather than redo them...

I made a family in CAS, two parents with a toddler, set them as spouses and the kid as theirs. Then when I choose them as the family and go in, the child shows as a "friend" and has no parents in the family tree. The two adults are still spouses. I remade them and tried again, and it did the same thing. The other 13 or so families I made... it's looking like the ties are all broken on many of them, even between the spouses. It looks like even the single parents, despite holding their kids in the pictures, didn't keep their ties. I wonder if this is because I put them in houses via merging with the existing Maxis Sims and then splitting them out and deleting them?

Is there any way to at least set the children properly with parents within the game with the Awesomemod? I seem to recall someone saying they did that with the partheno-babies. I can deal with making the parents fall in love and get married if I have to, but I really don't want to have to remake all these, since you can't edit them when they're in the library. Geez, now I know why both my sisters gave me their copies of this game!

Edit: I did a test with a fresh neighborhood and an uninhabited lot - the ties stayed where I set them when moving in normally. So it was stealing the houses via split that destroyed the family ties, for whatever that's worth!

Far as I know it doesn't break anything, but it's unsupported so it could, potentially. I certainly hope not, because it's way too useful. I had the complaining problem before I'd even set up the business, so I wasn't too keen to keep trying, but I'll try it employee-style with that hack in and see how it goes.

Do you have problems with visitors, doing it this way? I've had a few home businesses, but apart from the brothel which is pretty much open all the time, I haven't been able to run one with any success because of phone-invited guests complaining about things being dirty even when the business wasn't running (I put Squinge's No Customer Complain back in after that, no matter how it might bork things), and with visitors leaving when the store closes and becoming customers, and other things that just don't work with how I play :\

I've also used Paladin's playable maid controller, but since you can't interact with them while they're working and can't ask them to stay when they're done, I figured I may as well just go back to the NPC maid I always ignore anyway...

I had a dumped boyfriend of a Sim keep walking by her house with her new husband, and I'd heard about the "pay off" thing that apparently comes up, so I tried, and it worked. The girlfriend handed him some cash, there was a popup saying something like "Okay, I'll leave you alone, for now", and I'm pretty sure he did stop coming by after that. Both of them were popularity Sims. I've also had a divorced ex-wife keep walking back into the house without being invited for a few days after being divorced, and she is a romance Sim, too, but I didn't think about trying to see if she'd be paid off. (Plus she had kids there to visit, so she did have a reason to be there.) So I wonder if sometimes it's meant to happen, for certain Maxis variables of "meant", anyway.

Hmm... I wish it was possible to assign certain Sims in the house to "do chores" like a Servo so the big ol' manors can have live-in maids and butlers and the like. Currently you always have to macrotastics them to clean and then find them something to do so they aren't lounging on the couch. I know there are NPCs out there that do this sort of thing, but I'd rather use one of my many playables or townies. Something like Paladin's servo controller that would work on non-servos, perhaps...

It broke something else, as I recall - making custom clothes with the sewing machine got borked with the patch somehow.

Ahh, okay. My sims usually wear one thing per life stage, heh. But since the clothing rack is updated, that is probably easier (and what I was using for a while before it was abandoned. Yay for returning creators!).

I recently moved all my downtownies into the townie pool (since I didn't have any, and don't play downtown much) and changed their looks and clothes by using the clothing tool in one house to buy a ton of clothes. Then I used a teleporter (dizzy's "any bush a teleporter" I think) to drag them all over, and then dizzy's hack that allows you to change the appearance of anyone to choose their clothes and change their faces. Then I deleted them with the same teleporter bush to get rid of them. There's a SimPe plugin that removes the clothes from the family's wardrobe so it doesn't all stick around.

For bonus fun I used a randomizer to assign whether each townie was rich, middle-class or poor so my royals couldn't just marry the first townie they met and call it good

Oh, yes, so much!! What's the point of my royalty sims having a spare heir if the heir's not gonna die till they've already had grandkids anyway? Where's the dynastic infighting gonna be if everyone always survives?

Are they half-eaten plates of food or full? I've had that happen occasionally since BV at least, but it was mostly with pretty old leftovers that were only half-eaten. (Some hack I had in at the time had the Sims autonomously put away even half-eaten leftovers, so the fridges were full of that junk.) I liked it, whatever caused it, because it was a waste of time to make the Sims eat those two-bite plates, but I couldn't get rid of them any other way. I'd make them get each half-eaten plate, it would disappear, and then they'd get a serving platter and it was still good.

Changing skins and eyes and DNA was the reason I got the TS2Enhancer originally, since it just involves choosing from a drop-down menu and hitting "save". I remade my three custom skins to match my default replacements and was able to replace it on all the Sims with it with just a few clicks, which was nice. You still have to change appearance to get the eyes to show up any way you do it, though.

However, I am upset with having to pay for updates so often (and Freetime didn't change things as much as Pets did, for example!) so I am not buying it anymore and just using SimPe instead, even if it's more time-consuming. If you just want to make quick one-time changes, though, it does have a trial period and would be worth trying.

Inverted aspirations, perhaps?  Though I'd be happy with any new aspiration at all, or most particularly activation/reactivation of the Power aspiration, though it's probably just impossible. Sigh... most of my villains would be so much better suited to that aspiration than any of the others.