Apparently not exactly free, according to some emails received by a current subscriber and posted in another forum. A couple of choice bits:

"We now sell our ad space direct to advertisers allowing us to negotiate better rates and sponsorship deals. The new version of the site includes more ads than we currently show and this increased exposure is what will pay for the site and our Premium Content in future."

"With Version 9 we are introducing a VIP Member status which again allows users to browse the site without Ads and to use the extra powerful features but for a new, low rate of just $2.99 per month."

Possible translation: we will make using our site a living hell unless you pay us 3 bucks a month.

(Source post here: http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php?/topic/7816-the-sims-resource/)

I haven't tried Uni yet, but the same thing happens at the school in regular worlds if there are more than about 10 children and teens in the hood.

If you are looking at a different spot in the world that is sufficiently far enough away, the game must consider the school out of sight and won't try to actually route the sims through the door. Instead students just magically pop into the rabbithole and start classes at the correct time. I'm not sure exactly how far away you have to be, but halfway across town seems to work.

I've never tried it, but there are instructions over at MTS here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=418050

If you reset a magician sim, they may lose the Box of Mystery and Box of Danger.

My magician was taking part in a SimFest in the park and was about to start a new trick when the "Finish Show" action popped up. For whatever reason his queue froze. I couldn't right-click to cancel either of the actions, nor would they proceed on their own. After letting him sit frozen for a while, the only way out seemed to be to reset the sim.

That worked, sort of, but I didn't notice that his magicians' boxes had disappeared until it came time to set up the next show on the following day. Of course, I had already overwritten my old saves by then so I couldn't revert to an earlier one.

I haven't found a way to get the equipment back. It's not in BuyDebug or anywhere else I looked. Trying to quit the Magician career and signing up again didn't seem to work. Evicting him or the complete family then bringing them back in didn't help either.

So if you have to reset a magician sim, I suggest making a special save point beforehand in case this happens.

Most of the Sims 3 audio files are in the FullBuild01.package. You'll find a bunch of 'Guitar-***' files in there. These have to be extracted and converted, a process discussed in this thread on MTS: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=418050

I ran into an odd situation where I could not even reach the hidden floors of an existing apartment to edit them. It was the white Maloney building, which has a small apartment in the basement and the three top floors have Skip Floor markers only.

Yes, I had activated the appropriate cheat commands, but not matter what I did, I could never see inside the shell to reach the upper floors. It just skipped from the lobby to the roof, the behavior one would expect while in Live mode, not Build mode. By chance, I pulled out another shell from the BuyDebug group but cancelled before placing it. After that, I could see the three upper floors of the Maloney building just fine. Very odd.
 
I tried to duplicate the bug in a fresh game of Bridgeport and from a previous save point, but it never happened again.
 
Only thing I can think of is that before that bug appeared, I was hopping from building to building with "Build On This Lot" to see how they were put together. After 10 buildings or so, perhaps some memory leak or something led to the problem. Or am I missing something obvious?

True enough. I was sufficiently curious that I just tried it myself. Moved a family into a brand new Sunset Valley and all three sims kept their drum, piano, and bass skills. This was the current style Sunset Valley that has the Ambitions buildings added to it, but I doubt that makes a difference.
 
So Nutboii, there must be some other glitch that caused your sims' problems. For the record, I'm not using AM, only mods are the NRaas MasterController, OverWatch, and Decensor plus some of my own.

Quite true, and sims can use the mixology skill on a bar at home. That's what I meant by referring to "officially-sanctioned" venues, that if none of those lots are present in the neighborhood, perhaps the game does some cleaning up on import even though sims could in fact use those skills elsewhere.

I'm not sure if it would make a difference, but did the Sunset Valley you moved them to have at least one of the new venues? A dive bar, lounge, or dance club? If there is no officially-sanctioned location use those skills in the neighborhood, perhaps when importing the sims the game zeroes them out.

While waiting for that, you can use your NRaas Master Controller to force gig opportunities. It's under the Basic category, but you have to know the name of the Opportunity. The first one at Waylan's is "The Up-Beat" and the second one is "Caffeinated Cacophonies" I believe. Haven't played enough to find any further ones, but you can just select ones from the list and cancel them if they're not what you're looking for.

There's a 416-page thread on this subject over here: http://phorum.mustnotbenamed.com/index.php/topic,1982.0.html
 
That thread concentrates on payware disasters, not free stuff.

Not sure if this is an LN bug or it just became apparent thanks to the emphasis on bands and playing instruments.
 
One my sims in a band has the normal acoustic guitar in her inventory but was playing an electric guitar she just bought, the one from the HELS pack I believe. When she skills up, the next level's acoustic guitar tune starts playing *and* she keeps playing the electric guitar. The two tunes are overlapping and it sounds hideous. In fact, when I tell her to stop playing, the phantom acoustic tune keeps going. All night. The next day. Forever. Fortunately saving and reloading finally got rid of it.

Just a guess, but I wonder if it's caused by the single exterior door on each bedroom.

Do you have any other similar house designs where the sims do behave properly?
 
I've built houses with no interior doors and the game seems to get really confused when there's only one big space. For example, an inventor could gain experience working at his bench but not actually produce any inventions. Some other oddness too. I added an interior wall & door and things worked fine.
 
Try adding a temporary wall and door in each bedroom, or just adding an interior door to the rest of the house if that suits your layout, and see if that fixes the odd behaviour.

No kidding. I've been a car enthusiast my whole life, to the point of being involved in various basic grassroots-level racing, but I've never understood the desire to give a vehicle a name.
 
For such a seemingly minor patch, I wonder why a revision of CAW is required? Is there something else going on under the hood of this car-themed patch/SP? (bad pun, I know)
 

My assumption was more along the lines of "if somebody didn't bother with Ambitions, they probably haven't bothered updating to the latest base patch either". However, the OP did explicitly mention that they had updated and I missed that. My bad.

Since you don't have Ambitions, I assume you're using the old style mod framework located in the game's own folders? If so, when you removed the CC did you also remove the D3DX9_31.dll file from the Game/Bin subfolder? An easy one to overlook, but I don't know if it would cause the problems you're experiencing.

Maybe I'm missing the implicit sarcasm tags, but nah, MATY is all rainbows and unicorns compared to places like the RPGCodex.

My new inventor could use the workbench to increase his skill, but after going through four levels, he still could not actually create a single invention.
 
The bizarre reason? The custom house I built had no interior doors. There were some stub walls partially dividing areas, but no actual doors or arches, so the game considered it as one big room.
 
After I added an interior door, the sim could create inventions. Weird.
 
As an aside, the lack of interior doors also meant that I could not designate an exterior door as the front entrance. Any sim coming home went to the mailbox and stood there.

Any evidence that the core or script mods you use are being reported? Since we get that nice friendly message on start up listing them, I assume it would be pretty easy for that info to make its way back to the mothership unless blocked.

How about the other mods you might be using. Now that there's an officially sanctioned location for them, are the file names being collected and reported?

Oddly enough, selling inventions via the consignment store does not count towards the inventor career progression. Instead, from the sim's inventory, drag and drop the inventions on the simoleons box just to left to sell them. The amounts gained that way will count towards the next career level.

I've seen a similar issue with Ghost Hunting. While attempting to capture a ghost, it repositioned itself on the second floor porch of a house. The problem was there was no door leading out onto the porch, so the ghost hunter sim did its route failure foot stamp.
 
Well, if the game's going to cheat, so will I. Teleported outside to capture it.

Thanks for the suggestion, but if I recall those previous threads, the symptoms were slightly different. Sims and cars etc were frozen, but the ambient graphical effects such the SpeedTree movement still continued. My game was completely frozen. I tried your advice anyway, using Twallan's SuperComputer to reset all. No difference, same freezes and still getting crashes.
 
However, I finally noticed that the Ambitions installer messed up. Before installing the EP, it checks and updates the base game. But it either doesn't check if WA needs updating or the check failed because WA was still back at its original version number. Naturally, that didn't work well with the other up-to-date bits. I then reinstalled from scratch, patching manually at each step, and the crashes are gone. No DEP fiddling or 4GB tweak needed.
 
No crashes, but I was still getting frequent freezes. Updated the nVidia video drivers and those are gone too.

Just another data point: Two days ago my system ran the base game + WA just fine. A fresh completely vanilla install of retail base+WA+Ambitions led to game freezes every few seconds and crashes after a few minutes.
 
No CC, not even EA store items, no mods at all, started completely fresh with a brand new family in Twinbrook. Even moved all the previous user data, caches, and saves etc out of the My Documents folder, so anything in there is also freshly created.
 
The DEP trick did nothing for me. Tweaking the Ambition executable to use 4GB on my Vista x64 system seems to have cured the crashes, but the freezes remain. For example, with my sim just sitting in the library reading a skill book, approx every 5 seconds the game freezes for 3 or 4 seconds. This is a complete freeze, even the trees and other graphical effects halt. Lots of audio problems too, such as popping and dropping sounds, but I suppose this is likely tied to the same issue.
 
I'm going to try a new game in Sunset Valley next, but not holding out much hope for improvement.

From what I recall when looking at the cash registers while in Town Edit mode, they were labelled something like "Bookstore Cash Register", "Food Cash Register", etc. So I believe they are linked to specific types of inventories, you can't use them to sell arbitrary items. Think of them as a different way to browse a shop's inventory. Instead of the sim disappearing into the bookstore and a list popping up, you use the "Buy Items" command attached to the register (or clerk) to bring up the menu of items for sale.
 
But it would be interesting to see if a cash register could be modded to work with one's own list of items. Dunno where the current lists are defined, and they do change somewhat from time to time.
 

Thanks for the quick response and info Anach.

Sorry, but I wasn't very clear in my post -- I wasn't looking for a description of how to tell when a mod is causing problems and isolating it, but the errors in the mods themselves that you happen to have come across. For example, if you've found a number of them with missing textures, or links to other components that don't exist, or whatever. Those examples are just guesses on my part, since I'm not too familar with Sims mods yet.
 
On the other hand, maybe it's too early to try to build up that Sims3 modding folklore, or things creators should keep in mind while building mods, since the tools may still be in a state of flux. As you mentioned:


I don't have any background in previous Sims games, but have dabbled in various areas of Sims3 modding, some retexturing, tweaking some meshes, some XML tuning, and some core modding, and I didn't want to accidentally repeat some typical noob errors you might have seen while examing other mods. If you happen to think of any common mod creation problems, great. If not, no worries, I'll continue to lurk & learn. ;-)

Back on topic, thanks for clearly describing how to combine packages into a .dbc file, I'm sure I'll find useful as I accumulate more mods.