Really?
Helen Hooven Santmyer was a woman's rights activist and prominent scholar who, after a lifetime of mild writing success, was 88 when she published her most famous book, ...And Ladies of the Club. I've always admired that.

Sorry, I can't help you, but the mental image of a sim stuck in a mailbox is hilarious. I picture her peeking out and shaking her fist at the mailman when he comes by to drop off the bills.

Happy, non threatening ghosts get so dull after the first encounter. I mulled over the idea of populating my graveyards with deceased sims carrying the evil, grouchy and hates the outdoors traits in hopes that I could get them annoyed enough - what with being outside in a graveyard and grouchy all the time - and mean enough to at least make half-hearted attempts at scaring the odd sim to death rather than making them into new best buddies just because some loony rock star wannabe sim came and played guitar for them every night.

TS3 really is in desperate need of creative sim death. Yes, yes, I know; some folks want to keep precious, so-much-loved sims all safe and cosy to old age but I want death, dammit! Sim plagues, violent ghost apocalypse, death from collected radioactive meteorites. I could, theoretically, lock the occasional sim into a stove-and-counter equipped locked torture (torching?) room, but I'm a softie and would rather the game killed off my pixels than having to do the job myself.

I expect - hope - that swimming, sandcastles and (please) watersports are planned for some expansion or other; I sense a Beach Party Pack somewhere in the future.

The ability to have sims perform concerts, or even get together in a semi-realistic way to play on a community lot stage, was sorely missing in TS2 and I hope it is planned for TS3. The old Superstar expansion gave fashion shows, recording studios and other goodies - and yes, the magic shows from Makin' Magic were fun - so there's not much excuse for holding back now. The creative spark behind the original seems to be missing and TS3 is shaping up to be increasingly mini-game centred with everything too linear for my tastes.

I had the zombie and vampire action hacks as well. A sims without zombie hoards and dangerous vampires isn't the same. Cheery household ghosts aren't my kind of supernatural buddies.

Now that folks have brought it up, I'd forgotten all about Makin' Magic. That was by far one of my favourite expansion packs, TS1 or 2. In fact, I felt let down repeatedly by the expansions available for TS2. They simply didn't live up to the possibilities I expected. For instance, with the popularity of downloadable, statue-like and semi-animated horses, I half expected ridable horses in Pets, which would have fit perfectly with the rural feel of the game (not to mention make pre-car towns easier to create). Again, with Bon Voyage, I hoped for a return of the snowboards and carnival games from Vacation, but no. I expect I'll be waiting forever for EA-made sim skateboards, boats, motorbikes and toddler trikes. Yes, I know such things were available from the cc community but smooth animations for interactive items hasn't exactly been a community strong point. It's so much easier for the game developers to add this type of item.

While I'm on about items I'd like - which, I know, is sort the opposite from the thread topic - a built-in, no hacks or mods required way to create and populate different types of neighbourhoods  would be great. I mean, something along the lines of an expansion that added, let's say, a true medieval setting, a futuristic  city or a fairy tale landscape where NPCs generated in appropriate clothes and with appropriate names and careers. They give us the building items, a bit of furnishing and the odd outfit but no good way to use these extras. There's nothing more annoying, to me anyway, then having added some EA (or cc) knight's outfit and then having NPCs show up around an ordinary town wearing the damn thing as a winter coat! Keeping themed content requires outside editing to remove 'available to all' flags unless everyday is Halloween in simland. I'd like a way to flag items and outfits as "for neighbourhood X only". Something like that I'd consider worth paying for as an extra, whereas the Sims Store concept, which is no more than an in-house pay site, is a rip off.

I miss vampires...
And weather.

As far as objects go, the social ones, like pool tables and cards, are obvious. I also used the hobby and Freetime items a ton; many of my sims were into pottery and kicking balls around. Not having instruments for the kids also bothers me, as that was one skill I liked giving them a head start on.

Once I create the families, build and decorate them a house and get rolling with the game I get bored very quickly. I need as many objects and interactions as I can find just to keep me interested after a few days of those tedious bathe-school-work-skill-sleep simlives. The base game - especially with all these rabbitholes - is kind of dull after a while, for me anyway.

I would love little people sims! Call me weird, but one thing I've always wanted, right from TS1, is a way to create sims with physical and mental differences. I had a mentally challenged family member who passed a few years back, and all through university I worked part time (and some summers) as a recreation counsellor for special needs kids. I adored getting to know them, and wish sims could spawn more unique children in my game.

Sad but true: I used to tweak the rare sim in third party programs to keep toddler or child characteristics and actions while still appearing teen or older. They made neighbourhoods more interesting by adding some variety.

I'm playing on a low spec, by comparison to most here anyway, system and haven't noticed any troubles aside from mod or prepatch game-related ones that are no longer an issue. My game is noticeably slow to load and save, but once it gets going there's no obvious lag in game play. I'm a bit surprised by that; my computer is primarily set up for design, not gaming. I have graphic, animation and editing apps, not to mention huge graphics files, eating up most of my (one and only) hard drive right now, leaving me with less than a third free prior to even installing TS3, but I do have 4gb ram. Back when I built my own desktop pcs, I used to keep a stock supply of extra bits around and make regular visits to a work-related parts supplier (discounts!), taking time to build game-ready systems, but finances and life in general kind of made all that less of a priority.

I never even attempt to play games, TS3 included, without shutting down any unnecessary process my computer might have lurking about for no useful reason. I even switch off my internet connection and shut down the firewall just for any extra resources I can free up. Maybe that's why, even on a Vista os laptop and with all options aside from sim detail at the highest setting, the game seems to run as it should. So far, anyway.

What? Babies being returned to the hospital? Oh, this I have to see! Dropping a larva in front of the hospital seems suitably insane (too suitable, you'd think, as to be by design).  This can't be how the patch is removing single-parent babies...or could it? No, no way, but it's still funny.

I didn't even bother reading closely enough to know that the latest patch was suppose to stop one parent NPC spawn or remove them altogether. In either case, I'm not positive that I like that.

The question mark walls happened to me shortly after patching to 1.3. I had IS and AM both at that time, so this was before I dropped IS for the AM story driver. As mentioned by others, the wall patterns  were disappearing after returning from playing at a community lot or making changes in CAS. All I did was, as also mentioned previously, mess about with palette alterations for a minute, restore the pattern I wanted and voila, no more question marks. I've since played this same lot with no troubles.

Since upgrading to 1.4, I haven't seen the question marks again but that doesn't really mean anything. When it happened, I thought the problem was computer related, as in my game being corrupted by lost data due to less-than-optimal hardware. At the same time as the odd coloured walls appeared, I could hear my fans chugging and this, along with the usual big burst of hot air out the side of my laptop, tends to signal that I'm asking more of my computer than it can give me. 

Now a question for you; Did you install any extra files with the custom hair or only the hair? I just remembered that some cc comes with it's own resource.cfg. I doubt that's your problem but I'm trying to think of anything that could be causing a conflict.

^ I like this idea. Plop in any needed beds (or don't, if so preferred) and leave the households to do their thing. A middle ground between control freaks and laissez-faire players.

The only thing I want to add is about the bed issue actually; when my sims marry now, they inevitably move in with an existing household that has spare beds, so I guess anything beyond crib addition will cause homeless folks, or those without extra beds in their current home, to merge with families. That means that maintaining a realistic number of beds per household would require hands on monitoring of all the households so that beds were only added as spawn outgrew cribs. To much for me, so I guess the cribs for realism bit isn't so important anymore.

********

Encounter after removing IS, reinstalling and loading up ASDbeta:

(1) After playing three - five sim days, my game slows to a crawl, sometimes causing the sims to freeze in place then skip ahead a few sim minutes and freeze again. Saving, quiting the game and restarting brings speed back to normal until I hit the magic three to five day mark again and the stop motion world returns.
(2) At least one complete freeze per human hour of play. Game can only be exited via task manager.
(3) Entire game appears slowed; returning to 'home' from town lots loads up an empty house that slowly fills with blank and the textured objects, rabbit holes load noticeable slower so that switching to see a sim about to leave work gives an empty lot with until the building eventually appears.

Is the story driver running in sync with the timeline I'm using (not epic, but one step down) as IS was able to? I never had a slowdown problem previously and I'm wondering just how much is going on in the background. From my understanding, IS wasn't as picky about setting up events, hence wasn't as busy running calculations.

Game specs: ver 1.4.6.00002
Awesome Mode: updated August 9, story mode and supreme commander enabled
Machine specs (not terrific, but meets suggested requirements for TS3): Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop, Intel core duo CPU (150GHz), 4 GB ram, Nvidia GeForce 86000M Gt card, windows vista 32-bit os  All latest drivers installed and unnecessary processes killed prior to running game.

Would it be helpful for testing purposes if I were to reinstall without the latest patch and disable supreme commander?

Since I do have my sims visit other households, I don't mind adding cribs (and I also threw in a few single beds) since I'd rather there was a suitable sleeping place for any extra spawn as they grow. I don't want my poor little sheltered sim kids wandering into houses where the unfit parents have spawn laying around on the floors and in the garden while they sit there watching the romance channel all day, having those crazy, arm flailing conversations with their televisions that all my sims do.

While I was crib adding, two of my hood sims popped up the "is pregant" alert, so the cribs fit right in. There were also a few houses with sad faced, cribless toddlers. I'm guessing this was left over from running Indie?

Now for an actual report on gameplay; I'm not saying this is absolutely ASDbeta related, but my game has frozen twice, requiring closing via task manager, immediately after clicking the X on an alert about sim whoever having no victims for romance. I never had a game freeze prior to turning on Awesome story driver. I see elsewhere that some people are experiencing similar game freezes after installing the latest patch, and I did patch, so it could be the beta, could be the patch, could be the two in unison or could simply be my computer. Rolling back the patch requires an reinstall that I'd rather not bother with today so I can't test the root cause right now. Just thought it was worth a mention.

I think this has been what's kept me less than enthused as well. I liked being the overlord of urban slums, Victorian towns and vampire-infested cottage hamlets. I don't want to be limited to rural suburbs  with inappropriately large athletic centres and art galleries, not to mention the one abandoned warehouse where all the criminals hang out. I love the ability to switch textures in game and enjoy the idea of unique personalities from assigning traits but am bored, and occasionally frustrated, with much of the rest.

For my style of game play, proper customization utilities are far more appealing than all this junk collecting (such as picking up seeds and rocks) and population shuffling. I really miss weather. I sort of miss pets. I want my vampires, werewolves, aliens and other assorted strangeness back. I need a neighbourhood editor.

I'm deliberately avoiding the perfect aquarium lifetime wish until we actually get aquariums instead of fishbowls that hold ONE fish. I guess that means that want is likely never happening for my sims. Seriously though, why no ability to put several of the silly things in a nice aquarium instead of having to build a fishbowl palace?  What a dumb idea.

I'd love to see a sim piranha go to work on his aquarium mates while my poor, inept fish keeper sim looked on in horror.  Heck, putting a piranha in a tiny fishbowl should be enough to trigger some anti sim piranha anger. I can be cruel to my pixels.

^ Yes, possibly. It's the one post-patch flaw I've discovered so far with my game. I'm not seeing as much lag as you described but it does seem to take longer for the little pixel folk to get moving. Also, every time my sims are temporarily stopped from doing what they intended to do by oh, let's say, some other sim standing in their path, it now takes eons for the blocked sim to do anything but tap his/her foot and look disgusted. The offending sim could be out the door and halfway down the street before the foot tapping tantrum stops. I don't recall quite this much standing around pre-patch.

I have multiple mods installed, cc and a few personal tweaks. Aside from a few moments of confusion when I had to figure out why my cc wasn't loading at first, the patch works fine for me. My game  is actually running better post patch than before. So far, anyway.

I did, however, remove modified/additional dll, cfg and ini files before patching and only added needed ones back afterwards.

^ Same. I want piercing accessories, not makeup, though it's good that folks are trying out ways to add the missing bits for those who want to make sims that aren't so bland.

I like the idea of custom skins because anything beats the Barbie default. Thing is, I don't care for the Super abs for everyone! look or oily sims either. What I really want is skins with a minimum of painted on detail or shine, but still shaded enough to be attractive and with something resembling proper anatomy. I'm using the default replacements from Club Crimsyn for now - and they're not bad at all - but I'm thinking I may put together my own set. I say thinking, 'cause it really comes down to a question of Am I more picky or more lazy? A complete set seems like a lot of work.

 ^ Interesting. Is there a difference in the age or gender of the sims moved out and in or is the game replacing same with same which, of course, is totally pointless and means design flaw. I haven't payed attention enough in game to notice.

That's what I figured was going on. It seems obvious to me that the game should generate new sims from a variety of age groups, removing some townies and moving in new families of different ages as necessary to keep the town demographics in a normal range and allow for plenty of social interactions, like a good number of townie kids for the tots to chum with or various ages of singles for relationships. I could even see logic in allowing players to plan games with neighbourhoods of mostly young couples or geriatric retirement towns if they so desired. The way it's working now, including booting out player-created sims, feels like a major oversight that should have been accounted for early on in story progression development. At worst, pre-release testing should have caught it.

Obviously story progression isn't working out so well after players get a few generations in. Silly EA, feedback should come before release, not after.


Overpopulation questions:
Who knows the population limits, where I can find the setting and is it hardware specific or the same for everyone? If necessary, and I expect it is, I'd like to make my own changes to the EA presets that always over or underestimate the abilities of my hardware, just like in Sims 2.

Is there a set range of children, adults, elders and is this number variable in relation to how many of each age group a player has created, or am I overestimating EA by even thinking that?

(I know, I know...search function. Sorry in advance for asking what's probably already answered. I searched but couldn't find.)

Yup. The edges of the walls in cutout view aren't looking so good either, but again, I thought it might be a video card issue on my end. The horror indeed...

Oh, malformed preggo belly and poorly executed clothing meshes happen to everyone's sims? I thought maybe it was a crazy graphics malfunction caused by my lunatic decision to put my video card in danger of meltdown by running the game with high settings on a laptop. I should have know better and assumed EA being lazy.

Half belly, disappearing belly and gravity defying dresses are great, but I'm partial to the ultra-thick bedsheets that swallow sleeping children. So much of this game looks so bad in closeup views.