I think I can say for sure that the telephone anomaly is not related to either teenenabledadultwants or phoneback.  I tried taking them both of my game, one at a time, and still get the same results.

I still have some sleuthing to do, but thanks for your help!  Knowing what it's not is a goodly portion of figuring out what it is! 





Oh... dear... what have I done to my game this time? 

(Back after a busy week.)

I'm running just the base game + University.  (After uninstalling Nightlife some time ago.)  I have "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" in my startup file, but I'm not seeing any errors.  I think I'm update with all patches.

When attempting to have a conversation with another sim on the phone (any sim), they just stand there.  No animations.  No mood changes.  No relationship changes.  No sound.  All the other telephone actions seem to work fine.  I haven't seen any other anomalous behavior in interactions between sims.

Yeah, this is something I've not seen before either.  The only reason to wonder if this hack is involved is the timing of when I first noticed it, and I'm not sure that it started at the same time as installing this hack, so it we can conclude that they two are even related. 

I'm still mucking about in my downloads folder trying to figure out the anomaly.  It might be somehow related to the fact that an old version of the DMA Sims controller is showing up, though again what that would have to do with the telephone is anybody's guess.

I'm thinking that it might be related to the way a sim on the phone is sort-of-but-not-really present on the lot as a guest. 

I'll try it with phonehack temporarily removed and see that has an effect.

Is there any chance that Teen Enabled Adults wants could be conflicting with the University version of phonehack?

My sims have developed an anomaly that I'm trying to figure out: When they get an incoming call, or call another sim, they just stand there holding the phone without talking. 

The only reason for suspecting this hack is that I first noticed the telephone problem some time after installing Teen Enabled Adult Wants.  (I really should keep better records.  Silly me.)

Yup, that appears to be the case.  In my experimenting so far, teens will start the standard sequence of want to (1) talk to, (2) flirt with, (3) make out with, but then roll up some different stuff when "(4) woohoo with" would normally come up between adults.  For me it's not a big thing; it's sufficient that relationships don't have to fall apart just because one partner had a birthday.

Teens do, however, develop a desire to Go Steady with their lovers of any age.  That's kinda cute; but now to satisfy that want I have to try out another of your hacks! 

(Does "adults go steady" allow them to go steady with folks of other ages?)


And yup, what jsalemi said about Melissa Fancey.  She has shown in up all 15 of my neighborshoods as a standard townie adult Romance sim; totally insatiable; same flaming pants; same silly haircut; same personality; same Jurassic Park genes.  In my game, her want for Alexa will remain unsatisfied.

I supect that my lurking Danny file came from the ancient days of DMA Sims before he started using the "DMA" filename preface, so finding the elusive file might be an adventure.

Meanwhile, back at the hack at hand, I discovered that the inverse situation works, even for an NPC.  Here we see the infamous reprobate, Melissa Fancey, moments after she met teenager Alexa Forth.


Melissa wants to flirt with Alexa.

Melissa is still a townie but when she showed up, I wanted to give her a tune-up.  So I snagged her with Merola's Mind Control Mirror and used JM's Lot Fixer to upgade her.  When she rolled up some wants, there it was in the pole position!

I don't think this counts as a random flirt want.  Melissa would flirt with the refrigerator if she could figure out how.

Progress report:  The prognosis is good!

Removed DMA stuff.  Started game with neither hack installed.  Got an error about "request to run animation for third time" but otherwise no other errors.

Installed new version teenenabledadultwants hack.  Played three households in my test neighborhood.  No errors!

(In case someone missed it: This is with University installed, but not Nightlife or Open for Business.)

Conclusion: Whatever you did to accommodate the change for NL and OFB is working! 

Suspicion: There might be a conflict with the DMA Sims stuff that I had installed.  This will require more investigation.  I thought I had cleaned it all out, but Danny's Controller (yellow thing) and Appearance and Outfit Changer (red thing) are still functional in my game, but only with the functions of his earliest version.  I'll have to do some more meticulous housekeeping in my Downloads hierarchy to figure out what's happening there.

Preview of Coming Distractions: There were no teens in my test neighborhood so I played the Forth household, where I originally encountered the error, until all of Sally Forth's kids grew to teenhood.  Gave 'em all the Knowledge aspiration because as young adults, Knowledge sims seem to be quickest to develop the desire to gain knowledge of the carnal kind directed toward a specific target.  Now I just need a more mature /v/i/c/t/i/m/ partner to test the rest of the functionality.

Oops!  Yeah, after "Bad Wants Controller" it said something about Gosub.  I'll give the new version a run!

Oddly, even with neither teenenabledadultwants nor norandomflirts installed, that same error is popping up.  That indicates that I have something else lurking under a rock in here.  It doesn't seriously affect game play but it's worrisome enough that I'm sifting through my downloads looking for potential culprits.

I think the only hacks I have installed that aren't from MATY are Inge's goodies, Danny's toys from DMA Sims, and the one from Jenflowers that prompted your teenenabledadultwants project.  So far I haven't found anything that affects wants except for teenenabledadultwants and Pescado's stuff.

Thanks! 

I think I might have learned that this one requires Nightlife or maybe Open For Business.

I tried it without either of those installed and got a "Bad Wants Controller - #112" message as soon as I entered a household. (No Nightlife or OFB installed.)  But I'm not sure because I got the same message when I entered that same household after taking it out, with or without Pescado's norandomflirts installed. 

The one sim who was home at the time had 4 of 6 slots empty, but she got her whole set back as soon as she satisfied one of the two wants that were there.  (Adult, female, mom, wanted to help one of her many children with homework.  Now she wants to help a bunch more of them them with homework.  In other words, I didn't test it with teens so I have nothing to report about its actual function.)

I think I got lost in the double negatives, so just to make sure I got this right:

If you DO want to have the functionalty of Pescado's norandomflirts, install teenenabledadultwants.package and remove norandomflirts.package.

If you do NOT want the functionality of Pescado's norandom flirts, install teenenabledadultwantsrandomflirts.zip.  (And, of course, do not install Pescado's norandomflirts.package.)

Izzat rite? 

No, not really.  There were hundreds of Sims 2 sites in the Ultimate Sims List before MTS2 came along.  (I host the Ultimate Sims List, y'see; I've seen thousands of Sims sites come and go over the years.)  I can't think of any feature of MTS2 that was new.  MTS2's growth came from effective marketing and being the original host for many modders and hackers, but not from any great innovation.

MTS2 is an impressive achievement and can stand proud among the giants of the Sims community.  That should be sufficient laurels for anybody, with no need for false advertising.

The mistake underlying the user complaints was changing the user interface.  MTS2 is a very large and complex site.  It takes work to learn how to find things.  Every time you change things around, people have to go through the same work all over again.  With thousands of other sites, people will tend to just go elsewhere rather than invest their time and energy keeping up with your changes.

Greg

Hey, welfare is big business, especially in the areas of health care and housing!  Never doubt the ability of people to think of ways to make a profit off of anything that the government spends money on; and the Department of Health and Human Services gets the lion's share of the federal budget.

I think it means that you can take leave if you're a liberal.  That's only half good news for me because I'm only a liberal on odd-numbered days.  On even-numbered days I wonder why the USA needs a socialized space program!  

Hmm... today is an odd-numbered day.  Perhaps that's why I'm having such difficulty presenting a cogent conservative argument for my idea about a no-fault welfare program.  Ask me about it tomorrow.  For today, let's just blame the whole thing on global warming.

BTW, my name is Greg.  (Note the four-letter Anglo-Saxon monosyllable in my sig.)  SimsHost is just a hobby, one of my many crimes against normalcy.

I can't argue with the first part of that.  Given an opportunity for mischief with money, people will commit mischief.  Now, here's the neat part: the program I suggested would reduce the opportunities for mischief by eliminating the complexity of our existing welfare system.  Opportunities for mischief would be limited to creating false identities, which is less costly to investigate and report than the bazillions of things people can do under the existing system.

Still, I doubt that a significant portion of the budget for the Dept of Health and Human Services is lost to graft or corruption.  You can clearly see where they are legitimately spending the money on the facilties, investigators, and folks who staff the help desks in all the welfare offices across the country.  This grand scheme (which has zero chance of ever getting passed by Congress) would make most of those jobs and offices obsolete, so it's not something we'd want to rush into with our eyes shut.

When you venture into the discussion of socialized everything, you're moving away at right angles from what I suggested.  I'm talking about reducing the level of socialism in the welfare industry tremendously.  The government would not tell people how to spend their money or create industries to support them.  (Another flaw in the plan: some small percentage of the human population are not able to make purchasing decisions for themselves.  That's another baby we'd want to keep when we toss out the bathwater, but at a tiny scale compared to what we do now.)  Instead of establishing free clinics, pay the money directly to the people and let them make their own decisions about where to go for health care.  Instead of soup kitchens, let them decide where to buy their food.  Instead of of public housing projects, let the people decide how to spend their housing dollars.

The key point here is that I have more faith in the average individual's ability to make these decisions than in the government's ability to decide these things for them.  I also have much more faith in private industry to provide safe, comfortable housing, quality medical care, and good food and clothes at the best price. 

Take housing as an example.  If we make builders compete for those housing dollars, they'll build the best-quality housing they can for low-income families.  With government housing projects, we have all sort of mischief and even worse added cost because of the burden of writing and enforcing extremely detailed government regulations.  The trouble is that if the government does it, we need those picky regulations to determine a standard of performance for contractors.  But if private enterprise builds the housing, then the people who will be living there will be the judges of whether it's the nicest place they can afford.

Hooray!  Welcome back, reg! 

At the moment I'm sitting here in my house up in Wylie (northeast Texas) wondering how to find out if my house down in El Lago (southeast of Houston) survived Rita's winds.  I'm most concerned about the fact that the house was surrounded by huge tallow trees.

They're saying that the Johnson Space Center will be open again on Tuesday morning, but the last I heard they won't even let us back into El Lago until at least Wednesday, if then.  No hotel rooms available near JSC, either.  Darn. 

Oh well, at least the "liberal leave" policy will be in effect until they get the mess cleaned up.

My Internet access is feeble these days, so I can only catch up once a week, which leads me to bring back an old note:


Nah, I didn't propose anything that extreme.  Your arguments would make sense had I proposed a totalitarian Marxist state, but I was just talking about adjustments to the existing welfare system: "...pay a minimum living stipend to everybody whether they need it or not, and raise taxes to balance it out..."

We have to acknowledge that we already have a welfare system and it's not going to go away.  For better or for worse, our society in the USA today has rejected "work or starve" as an option; and the more authoritarian European Union is even more adamant about that point.  I don't see any reasonable path that would get us to a totally laissez-faire "work or starve" system anywhere in the world.  We might postulate a world-wide dictatorship, but would-be dictators haven't faired too well in human history and the few who've become notorious in their quest of totalitarian dictatorship have all advocated socialism as an economic policy.  So, welfare is here and it's here to stay.

We already try to pay a minimum living to people who we perceive as being needy, so I don't see how that scheme would discourage people from work any more than the existing system.  Quite the opposite.  It would encourage people to work by removing the penalty for not working.  If you want more than a minimum standard of living, then you'll do something to earn some money so you can buy luxuries.

The existing welfare system consumes more than half our tax money.  By eliminating the investigation of potential welfare cheating, we would eliminate the majority of the cost for delivering money to the people.  Consolidating all the complex systems (food stamps, public housing, demeaning make-work programs, medicthis, and medicthat) into one cash-based system would also fantastically reduce the cost of administering the system.  I would expect the amount we have to pay for welfare to be rather dramatically reduced without any reduction in the benefits that people receive.

I agree that it sounds incongruous to pay money to someone just to take it back in taxes; but hey, if it accomplishes our goal of caring for our people while removing all disincentives to working and cuts our welfare taxes by more than half, I'd be willing to cope with that incongruity. 

Yeah, what everybody said.  This is among my pet peeves about the game.  It's banal, obnoxious, annoying, and throws me out of the story every time it happens.

Maybe it would help if someone could deliver a load of grilled cheese sandwiches made from Smart Milk to EA HQ.

A 21-month-old toddler with her own computer?  Why, that's more awesome than JM!  Of course she should join MATY!

Addendum: You might get a kick out of my silly joke about this stuff:


The Storm Sisters: Katrina and Rita

Katrina and Rita are the sluttiest Romance sims in Bonnyview Shores. They're not nice at all and the concept of neatness is nowhere on their radar, but they are very active and outgoing, likely to drop in unannounced and unwanted and make a total mess of everything.


(The image is linked to their thread over at the Hullabaloo.)

Greg

No worries.  I'm safe at my house in Wylie (northeast of Dallas), just waiting for the Johnson Space Center to reopen so I can get back to work.

I was lucky.  When I got to work on Wednesday morning my boss told me to secure my machine, fill out my time card for the rest of the week, and get the heck out of town.  I did exactly that, and called all my troops and told them the same thing.  I had already packed the car and secured the house so I was out of town before the big traffic jams happened.  Traffic was heavy but not much slower than I-45 usually runs on a busy day.

I have no idea how my house down in El Lago (just east of the Johnson Space Center) fared in the storm.  It's surrounded by huge tallow trees, and tallow trees tend to break, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that it got smooshed.  But if so, all I stand to lose is a pile of dirty socks that I didn't bother to wash and an easily replaceable bed.  All the good stuff is still up here in my house in Wylie, waiting for the moving van to pick it up next month.

We nattered about the hurricanes quite a bit starting with this message in the "Real Life Adventures" thread at the Hullabaloo.  I posted that note the night before I left town and just kept on blathering about it once I got up to Wylie.

(As with most BBS conversations, that thread also ventures into other amusing areas, including puzzling over global warming, ice ages, and the virtues of minivans.  Earlier in the thread you can read scintillating conversation about my day job and Philly cheese steaks.)

Greg

During the brief time before I uninstalled Nightlife, I discovered that it's important not to enter a household until you've restarted the game after turning on custom content.  If you enter a household, your characters can be permanently messed up.

Yup, mine too.  There are no really sane sims, but Romance sims seriously need professional help.  Except in rare circumstances, I don't allow them in my game.  (My solution to the mess that Maxis made with Pleasantview was 'deleteallcharacters.'  Fixed all the problems in one simple command!)

I'm hoping against hope that some Truly Awesome Sims Maestro can invent a cure for the Turn-Ons/Turn-Offs thing in Nightlife.  (Like maybe just make the whole furshlugginer thing go away!)  That's one of many reasons that I uninstalled Nightlife.

If we must keep that Turn-On thing, it would be nice to add "Married to me" and "Not married to me" to the list of available options.  And maybe "Romance" sims as a major turn-off.

Another hack I'd like to see: Only Romance sims, if anyone, does that wolf-whistle thing at Romance sims.  It's totally out of character for most of my characters.  Banal.

I had a rather successful adventure in getting the cheerleaders to pair off.  So of course I wrote a silly story about it!



(Click on the banner to go to the story.  It will open in a new window.)


Greg

I'd guess that not having a camera pooping in your game is a desireable feature. 

That's one of my pet peeves about the public assistance system.  People are punished for trying to earn money on their own, so it turns into a trap.  It's the same for disability benefits.  It almost feels like somebody designed the whole thing to make sure that the needy stay needy.  Not good.

Even worse, the Department of Health and Human Services has to spend fantastic amounts of money administering this complex system, to the point that only 10% of the funds the department spends actually end up in the hands of the needy, and a minuscule bit goes into actually distributing the money.

I would guess (without really knowing) that graft and corruption consumes only a tiny portion of the other 90% of the department's budget.  The rest goes to pay for all the folks and facilities that are required to make sure somebody isn't trying to cheat the taxpayers.

I have my notions about how to fix it.  Basically, we could pay a minimum living stipend to everybody whether they need it or not, and raise taxes to balance it out; but that silly idea would never get past the legislature in any country that has popular elections.  It would offend conservatives because of the idea of Big Welfare and even higher taxes; it would offend liberals because it cuts them off from the opportunities for demogoguery that get them elected; and it would offend everybody because the idea of paying welfare benefits to rich folks really goes against the grain.

Nevertheless, I like the idea.  It puts needy folks on the same ground as Donald Trump and Bill Gates; no stigma associated with public assistance.  It eliminates the vast majority of the costs of administering the welfare system, so the increase in taxes might actually turn out to be a decrease after all the dust settles.  It provides a solid foundation for all us working stiffs who are one paycheck away from disaster.  Tying it to citizenship would eliminate problems with illegal immigration; it provides a very strong incentive to become a legal immigrant.  And it makes sure that the truly needy are taken care of.

Aha!  Good point!  Babies can be an important bit of strategery here!

That's a better way to get the sims to spend some time in the shower than working their tushes off on the obstacle course or weight machine because you don't have to wear them out just to get them to do their duty.