Having game X ask for game X-1's disk would cause outrage from everyone who didn't care for a given pack.  What the updates looked like to me were asking for the base game discs.  How much of the update was for compatibility purposes and how much they were meant as an antipiracy method, I can't say.  (Although they suck at the latter, as they don't ask for base game discs if you've already patched it.)

And as someone who usually waits for the second patch before loading a game, I wonder what the BV final verdict is.  Have most of the bugs and instability been mostly ironed out, and are the features and stuff-style things really worth it?  Especially the bits that apply to the core 'hood, as the vacation features sounded very flat to me.

The command runs the regdelnull program, which if you're like most users has been placed in somewhere other than the base C: directory.  Find where you actually put it, and go to My Computer/C:  Drop a copy of regdelnull in there, and the command should work from the command prompt then.

The game will auto-generate NPC's as needed.  Antiredundancy is popular amongst many MATY-ites, but only useful if you have an unpatched BV or want to keep your character count down.  Personally, I prefer the little variety.

And the folders in My Documents are the neighborhoods you play with.  Installing empty templates won't do anything to them.  To clean those up, you need either a massive Deleted 2 binge, or else to junk the neighborhood whole and start fresh.  Remember that starting fresh is exactly what it sounds like; all your current characters and houses will be lost.  Empty templates are mostly there for people who start fresh 'hoods, and don't want to see the same townies/NPCs/extra families dumped in all the time.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just backup your files and then uninstall/reinstall the latest EP?  Patches don't touch the files for other EP's, and almost everything the game only calls upon the files for the latest pack.  Uninstalling and reinstalling everything else is just wasting your time.

A few rules of thumb:

Avoid downloading lots when you don't know what's in them.  Especially until you've familiarized yourself with CPI and what it does.

If you have any files in your downloads folder that look like gibberish strings of text, they're usually okay to delete.  They're items that came with lots you downloaded.  You might end up deleting a piece of CC that you liked, but it's usually best to get your CC straight from the source.  Downloading indiscriminately can cause you to have hacks that cause unwanted behavior, or even ones that conflict and cause game problems.

Finally, if all else fails, it's pretty easy to remove all your hacks at once.   From your My Documents folder, go to EA Games and then The Sims 2.  You can then either go into the Downloads folder and delete unknown files, or if you're not sure what you want in there you can delete the whole Downloads folder.  Then you can either play just the base Maxis game, or else be more discriminating with what you download in the future.

One, is this supposed to bypass all ASP loss, or just the hourly decay?

Two, even if you do keep loss from fears around, the wants/fears game is so laughably easy that you just reinvented permaplat.  You can already set the permaplat flag with the lot debugger, so if this doesn't pan out you can skip reinventing the wheel.  If you want a sim to be unhappy then decay will already work in your favor.

All sims are very present-centered creatures, and real-life toddlers are very much the same.  Distracting them from the loss of a relative shouldn't be all that hard.  Of course losing a parent means that there are fewer people around to distract the toddler and fill its wants, but that's been worked around before.

Just saying "I want some major change to the game engine that I haven't even fully thought out yet" is BBS behavior and risks leading ot bad gameplay if anyone with power actually picks it up.  What elements that currently are tied up in the basic aspiration levels will apply to daily bar vs. lifetime bar?  What elements will be added to make this worth fleshing out?  At least have the decency to think things through a little before posting.

Really, aside from the "some random relative I've never met died and now my life sucks" factor, STA covers a lot of how people seek to feel better.  The random relative thing is only silly because it's a random relative, and is covered easily in modland.  The only change I'd apply would be to have certain wants/fears modify the decay rate for a set period of time; some fears make it it an uphill struggle to feel cheerful, and some wants are short term and self-destructive.  Otherwise, I have a strong feeling that LTA would just become another way that this game quickly becomes too easy.

Removing the noregen hacks should ideally only be done once you've made a habit of randomizing the sim generator at least once a session.  They can be an excuse to get into the habit as well, but make for dull gameplay if you start with empty templates and don't randomize.

And while certain functions of the townie tree/gun are a little wonky, the heavily broken thing you're thinking about is probably DAC instead.  DAC carries the MATY badge of disapproval, but it'd be silly to apply to an already empty 'hood.

I said guinea-pig for a reason.  I'm happiest just running BV-less, but if she really wants to try questionable SecuROM controls more power to her.  If she finds out something useful it'll be good for the rest of us, and if her computer blows up she might learn to listen to people who know what they're talking about.

Sugar, if you really want to guinea-pig that method of defanging SecuROM, mightn't it be easiest to delete it the official way here, and then simply create a backup account for simming and other infected games?  It'd be a little extra work, but might be the safest way to get it all done.

I remember in the lead-up to Seasons they mentioned monkeying with indoor vs. outdoor motive depletion.  Not running Seasons 'till I get a better graphics card so I can't tell, but has that been implemented and if so to what degree?

Worf, IIRC the base game starter doesn't allow you to use items from expansions above what you're running.  It also requires a different overall folder for every configuration.  It's a modder testing tool more than a style of play.

Tigerlilley, just nuking the vacation 'hoods will probably leave lots of digital garbage lying around, and you still have the problem of hunting down the gestures in everyone who knows them.  If you want to keep all of the BV goodies without the gesture epidemic, it might be wisest to roll back to your pre-BV backup, and just avoid attaching any vacation 'hoods 'till things are fixed.  You'll still have bits of BV glitchiness, you'll have to decide if these are worth the base-game features that tagged along.

Children are killable.  Toddlers aren't in-game, but simply giving them a "dead" token shouldn't damage anything too badly.  Toddler ghosts or crushing a toddler under a satellite might not be the best moves, but they don't sound like they'd muck everything up that deeply.

The maid, unfortunately, won't resolve herself in game.  This was a major issue in pre-patch Pets, where species code was incorrectly written for service NPC's.  Changing her species in SimPE might work, Deleted2-ing her definitely will, otherwise you need to find a way to kill a sim who won't show up on a lot.  And if you're running Pets, do patch ASAP.

Finally, RTFB!  The only support we officially give for inteen issues here is to suggest removing it.

Before I answer this question, tell me something.  Are you aware that the behavior you're talking about results from a mod from another site?  If so, why are you asking here rather than the place that you got it?  And if you're not aware, you need a lot more help before we get around to the problems you're mentioning here.

CPI should work, as should only modifying that lot in a given play session and sorting by date modified.

This has been asked repeatedly in the run up to BV, and the official answer has always been the same.  You cannot run a hotel as a business.  And since they were promising a lack of a feature rather than a feature, the Maxoids were right about this.

With a community lot sleeping hack you can mock up a hotel on your own terms as a venue, but it won't work like an official hotel.  Sorry, but them's the breaks.

It's probably easier to store the copied N0XX elsewhere, copy the freshly added suburb to the copied 'hood, and then delete the neighborhood-plus-townie spam and replace it with the unspammed-neighborhood-plus-suburb.  The reason for this is that the game looks for the stealth subhood, and if one isn't found it proceeds to add the subhood and then townie-dump.  If the stealth 'hood is found but there has been no townie-dump - if you, say, copied the stealth 'hood to an otherwise clean backup of the neighborhood - the game won't feel the need to do anything more.  Although it will recreate townies and NPC's as needed, naturally.

And yeah.  Just to be clear, do everything in the My Documents subfolder.  Attempting to do this with core game files will cause massive barfage.

Pre-NL the limit for character files was 800ish.  Post-NL, it was increased dramatically.  So long as you don't go out of your way to batch-produce characters, you should be okay until TS3 comes out.  Or if you're not okay, it'll happen for non-population based reasons.  (Although especially with Veronaville, do add antiredundancy.  BV has an ugly bug that can cause unpleasant population explosion.)

The ideal plantsim is best viewed as the "other parent" for plantbabies.  Simspawn avoid being exact duplicates of either parent because they have two sets of genes at work.  Plantsims buds don't have a normal second parent, so the ideal plantsim's genes are what keep them from being exact clones of the parent.  And while exact clones would be better in a horticultural sense, it'd get boring in actual gameplay.

Greek skin is probably being avoided for PC reasons.  That, the fact that aside from skin tone aliens are exactly alike regular sims, and the fact that other elements of "alienness" are all a little touch and go.  (Genetics make it easy to see plain-skinned sims with lineage to PT, and I don't know how well the game really keeps track of lineage past a few generations.  Alien eyes are not possessed by all green-skinned sims, and suffer the eye-color turn-on problems mentioned earlier.)

Pre-BV, I agreed with Emma's reasoning for avoiding eye color as a turn on.  The whole point of them was to chose traits that any sim could acquire on a whim to allow more player fine-tuning over attraction.  (There being perhaps three exceptions to this in the game, and even those generally allowing a good deal of wiggle room.)  Now that traits like "zombie" and "robot" are turn-ons, that line of reasoning is getting weaker.  Eye color would still be very difficult for a player to spot, but just due to the volume of requests I'd like to see official colored contacts to usher in eye color turn-ons, although I wonder in practical terms how popular they'd be after the "oh, cool" factor wore off.

Said sims would only be available for ploppage in other lots.  They're effectively lotbinned, although if you run them through a cleaning neighborhood with CPI they'll at least be safely lotbinned.  All you'll be able to do with them is drop another copy of them in another 'hood if you want their genes to proliferate.

If you're feeling particularly daring, you can disable plugins willy-nilly from the preferences tab in SimPE.  It will be an experiment to see what needs to be on and what needs to be off, but if you have the time to invest you might be able to make that work.  Just remember to back up your 'hood before fuddling around with all this.

The LxNR is hidden in the sim's personal data, not the neighborhood package.  Upside is that if you know the sim's instance number, you can copy their personal file elsewhere and have fewer if any errors thrown your way.  If you can identify a body shop template that you want to use for such a purpose (usually by making a throwaway one and checking which one was made most recently), you can replace the LxNR with one extracted from the original.  I'm running Pets with the latest Seasons SimPE so I guarantee nothing, but it should bypass SimPE choking on hundreds of other files along the way.

If you just think the sprogs are uncannily cute, you can always either store a backup of the 'hood or else just ensure they don't meet an untimely end in the next few RL months so you can extract them as adults and age them back down in BS.  This is definitely the simplest option, should everything else end up overcomplicated or unworkable.

The Pes beard has been iffy since Pets.  I'm a little surprised it hasn't been fixed here, but at least there's a sort-of workaround.  Some beards show up in certain color bins but not others, so change the hair color pre-bearding and then change it back after selecting what you want.

Except that ironically in a vanilla game, a romance sim is better off with the hard worker or one of the skill turn ons.  Due to the bilateral nature of bolts and the ease of building sim stats, that's free attraction with everyone.  Meanwhile, hair color (especially custom or recessive) will not be shared by a majority of the population.

Family sims, meanwhile, are best saddled with very specific turn ons if you expect them to be faithful.  Stick them with an easy-build one and they'll revert to their standard state where producing babies is less important than who they're producing the babies with.

SimPE will start throwing errors as it chokes on all the new functions it doesn't understand, but with patience you can click through the box for every single one.  I did this a couple of times when I had to mess with personalities and interests in SimPE interim periods, and it worked alright for simple modding.  Anything with memories or other areas that has been significantly retooled is off-limits, but the most elementary basics are good to go.

I'd assume simsurgery works alright once you click through everything the game throws at you.  If not, you can definitely grab the basic facial geometry file and append it to other sims as needed.  It'll be a pain to click through everything the program doesn't understand every time you load it up, but all you can do for that is wait for the next release.

It's worth noting that while the actual game files are best reinstalled by disc, if you can zip up your My Documents/EA Games folder and send it to the new computer that should help somewhat.  You'll still have to load and patch each disc normally, but at least you won't have to start the whole bloody game from scratch.

I actually got the idea that what Ste wanted was much simpler.  When the employee is working on someone else's lot, the owner loses money but the employee gains none.  The employer pays for work done, but the employee isn't doing any "real" work (from the perspective of their lot and the motives/lifespan they're losing) so doesn't get money from it.  When the employee goes off to work from their own lot, they're paid from the aether; nothing of value is happening at the employer's business, and all "costs" are to the employee's lifespan and motives, so that's where the money goes.  It should all work out to something roughly even if you play roughly time-synched throughout the 'hood.  Visiting as a third-party sim would probably work best if neither employer, employee, nor the business ranking had any adjustment; not only do neither do any real work or suffer any real losses, but lack of payment and business adjustment would prevent maxian stupidity from ruining a business' rank or the owner's bottom line, while the actual shoppers got their standard goods-for-cash swap.