I gave what I can afford. I've already felt that I wanted to give Pescado some money for all the work he does that has made it possible to play this game. I don't want any titles (assuming I'd even be considered for one). I just want to pay back in the way I can for what is being given freely.

One of the things I enjoy most about the sims is getting them together and then seeing what offspring they produce. It's interesting to me to see what traits the children inherit. I don't have big families, because I also find taking care of babies and toddlers tedious, although the babies in TS3 are easier because you don't have to clean up their dirty diapers and pick up their spoiled bottles. The toddlers are still work because you have to spend so much time teaching them to walk, talk, and use the toilet. In my TS3 game so far each family has only one child. In TS2 there were usually 2 children.

I like seeing family trees grow and find the whole genetic thing interesting.

Apologies for the double post. I am not aware of where I repeated myself but am profoundly sorry for doing so. In TS2, the jobs were not as interesting as they are in TS3. Sims went to work, and you didn't see them again until they came home. They had to make more friends and increase skills for advancement, and all you saw from the advancement was a better car picking them up for work and more money. When OFB was released, I enjoyed that because if your sim owned a business, you could go to work with him and do a variety of things to help the business. Aside from that, I never found employment to be that interesting in TS2, so for an elder to have a job in TS2 was not all that much fun.

Are you offended that I find old people boring? Sorry,I do, that's all. And guess what, I'm an old person. Just as in real life, in any Sims version, young people have so much to look forward to and experience. For elders, everything has happened and there is only death at the end. No more surprises, no more goals to attain. Although (and now I am repeating myself) in TS3 they can pursue hobbies and that makes playing them more interesting.

My experience with the unmodded TS3 makes me feel like an observer, not a participant. If I want to observe, I'll watch TV.

For me it's what I want. When I come back to a family I haven't played in a while, most things are pretty much as they were when I left, as opposed to the way it was before I installed the mod. Because I didn't realize what story progression would do, I missed out on one of my first TS3 sim's adult life. I went back to her house, not realizing that she had already become an adult a while ago. After playing her for 2 sim days, she suddenly became an old woman. What a waste. Another of my new sims had two daughters by miraculous conception by the time I went back to her. That's the stuff I hate about TS3 and that doesn't happen with the awesome mod. Maybe there are things going on that I haven't noticed, but playing TS3 with the awesome mod is the only way I will play this game.

Thanks, edalbformat, but I don't really mind that she died, I was just curious about why it happened offstage. In fact I couldn't wait for her to die because I didn't like her, but I didn't kill her myself because I didn't want to cause her family unhappiness that was my doing. Generally speaking I find elders a bore and am happy when they die,  although in TS3 they are more interesting because they can spend time gardening, fishing and collecting. In TS2, until the ability to garden and fish was in the game, they were a complete bore.

Have you installed the swesome mod? You won't feel that way if you install the mod. For me, with the addition of the awesome mod, I am the one driving the story. When I stop playing a family for a while and then begin playing them again, things are basically as they were when I left them, except that their food is spoiled and one of them is off talking to someone in town. If you haven't installed the mod, you should, because you will feel like you're playings sims the way you used to.

The death I mentioned above is still puzzling because I have two chosen elder sims who I haven't played in about a month  but they're still alive. Shouldn't they have died by now, even though I haven't played them?

I guess that's it, I want it to behave like TS2, and didn't realize that even without story progression TS3 was a different game. I thought it was TS2 with the option having things happen that the player does not initiate, i.e. story progression.

Okay, I guess I misunderstood what awesome mod does, because I thought it prevented things happening in the lives of the Chosen by turning off story progression.  I guess it just prevents the stuff that really ruins the game, like making families move out of the town and parthenogenesis, and having them age while you're not playing them, etc. Although I thought that if she aged enough to die while I wasn't playing the family, then she was aging while not being played, which I thought wasn't supposed to happen with the awesome mod.

Not suggesting that the awesome mod is wanting, because I wouldn't be able to play Sims 3 without it, just saying I must have misunderstood. Which happens frequently when I try to grasp the mechanics  behind games and mods.

I was playing a family yesterday, and the Chosen elder female's life meter was full, so her death was imminent. The next day I played a different family, one of whom invited the previous family to their house, and the husband arrived heartbroken because his wife had died. I have the awesome mod installed, but have not enabled Awesome Story Driver, so shouldn't that death have waited until I played the family again?

Also I have been noticing that when I haven't played a Chosen family for a while, most of the food in their fridge has spoiled, and one of them is usually off the lot even though they were on the lot when I left them. I usually shut the game down when everyone has gone to sleep for the night.

Are these effects off the Awesome story driver even though I didn't enable it, or have these things been in effect all along and I'm just now noticing?

Spotty, thanks, I did finally discover that and cleaned the disk. I have finally realized that before running to MATY for help, I should just google for answers. I know so little about the technical aspects of using a computer that error messages often sound to me like they are describing a huge crisis when sometimes all they mean is, clean your disk.

Oh sorry. Zaphod said "hard drive" so I thought that's what you meant when you said "drive." I will humiliate myself publicly by admitting that it turned out that the disk needed to be cleaned. After I did that, the game installed. The error message seemed so technical that it didn't seem possible it could have resulted from a fingerprint on a disc. Yes, I know, I am a hopelessly non-awesome tard.

If my hard drive were shot, wouldn't I see other evidence besides the game not installing? I was able to install it last night.

I uninstalled my game thinking I could get back the game with the previous patch and previous awesome mod (I had backed it up) but I did something wrong because I ended up with two Sims 3 folders and God knows what else. Without going into a recitation of everything that has transpired since last night, the basic situation is that I manually uninstalled the game using BBS instructions, and then tried to reinstall. About 2/3 of the way through the install, I get an error message saying:

E:\GameData\Shared\Packages\FullBuild1.package
Data error (cyclic redundancy check)

I looked at the file the message referred to but have no clue what to do to fix it. I tried reinstalling 3 times and got the message every time.

Is my disc irretrievably damaged, or is there some way I can fix this?

My experience, described in a post above, disproves what you are saying.

I installed the patch this morning and then installed the newest awesome mod, and I am having the same problem. The game crashes when I click the Play button. I uninstalled the mod and the game played fine. Don't know what to do.

I shut down the computer, because every time I tried to start the game it was telling me the game was already running. I had uninstalled awesome mod and the config tool and the mod that helps the game start when it crashes just at loading. I started the computer up again, installed the disk and opened the game. It opened up fine, no crash. I went into the family I had been playing to see if things looked normal (i.e., not like Sims 2), then saved and quit.

Then I reinstalled the latest awesome mod and the config tool plus the other one, and again when I get to the screen where you click to play, it crashes.

I know the BBS is shit but I wanted to see if this was related to having the awesome mod or if it was the patch itself. You know more than I do because I don't recall replacing the TS3.exe at all. I have no voodoo to work, I have no idea what to do except uninstall, reinstall, and then install my saved game.

Here's what my error message says about the crash:
Exception info]
date: 2009-07-30
time: 18.27.41
type: ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x00000000
address: 0x00ba3b35 "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin\TS3.exe":0x0001:0x007a2b35

I checked the BBS and a lot of people seem to be having this problem, but I don't know if they all had mods installed or not. Somebody in the thread about the crashes keeps saying the players' graphics card drivers are out of date. Is a patch so sensitive that it must have the absolutely most up to date drivers?

Is there a way to remove the patch? I installed it this morning, and downloaded the updaetd Awesome mod, and now the game crashes when I get to the screen where you click Play to start the game. Or do I have to uninstall and reinstall my saved game that does not have the patch?

I have searched from the main page many times and have yet to find the answers I am looking for. No doubt that is my lack of awesomeness, but the fact remains, I know of no way to find the answers I'm looking for other than to read through every post to see if someone talks about what I'm looking for help with.

Chaos, the search function on this site is not that helpful. I know it's easy to reply to a request for help by saying that all the person has to do is search the site, but trust me, the search results are not as helpful as you seem to think. I think the only way to find the answers to questions here (assuming no one answers them) is either to read the board religiously every day so that you stay current with all the comments, or set aside an afternoon and read through 19 pages of posts in a particular category in hopes of finding a reference to the thing you're trying to find the answer to.

Okay, I thought they were connected. I deleted the fpslimiter and reinstalled it, and as happened when you did it, the flashing numbers stopped.

Thanks, witch. I'll re-download it, put 'fps on' in the cheat console, and see if that changes things, keeping in mind Pescado's comment that seeing the numbers is a random thing. It's always something, right?

If running it at that speed is the best thing for my graphics card, then I am grateful the program was created. Even though my computer is not exactly new, I bought it because of the graphics card, among other things, so I want to protect the card. I just didn't know what the numbers meant.