Or just don't tell it here at MATY, where the unquestionable motto is "TSM is awful".
I agree with you, InPinkClover - it's a great, funny, addictive variant of the Sims, with great gameplay improvements. But discussing this is heresy, here, we both risk the Pit.

I had the exact same problems when I was using the RELOADED 1.1 cracked version. They are fixed now that I use the last uncracked patch with Nraas No-Cd.

I agree with Motoki and the Doc on this.
Or, to put it otherwise : I don't need rational sims or event.
The Indie Stone mod would just need a litle more features, like the possibility for some sims to have children without marrying - or illegitimate children, elder sims retiring from work or rich sims staying unemployed if they don't have a work LTW or the workaholic trait.
In short, events should respect the traits of the sims.

When you play only one family, you don't need more - events are a background. Bu I know that I will be happy to find AwesomeStory when I'll want to play six families at a time.

It seems I uploaded the wrong file - if it doesn't work, please download again.
Some reports suggest that it may only work with new games, not with existing ones.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

And a very bad news for those who don't intend to use Awesomemod.

Please note that this unawesome XML fix has not been tested with AM, nor with the last patch. It may be already corrected (or not working) with any of them.

While reading XML files I discovered that the shows at the theater should work as follow:

- from Monday to Thursday, one evening show, Movie only
- Friday : one evening show, may be a Movie, a Play, a Concert or a Symphony
- Saturday, Sunday : a matinee (Movie only), an evening show (Movie, Play, Concert or Symphony)

In my game, there never was a show on Saturday/Sunday evening, only a matinee - making the "see Symphony" wishes useless.

Problem was that Matinee shows ended at 17:00, just at the time the evening one should have began - making the second show impossible.

This childishly simple xml mod has the matinee show begin at 10:00, leaving room for the evening one, and changes nothing else.

Simply put : on Saturdays and Sundays, you'll have two shows at the theater : a Movie one beginning at 10:00, and eiher a Movie, a Concert, a Play or a Symphony at 17:00

It looks more like they spent much time "tuning" other aspects of the game play, at the active sim/household level, and ran out of time for developping the "neighborhood" gameplay/gameflow. It also looks like some decision takers thought the players didn't want any kind of story progression anyway, and would rather play TS3 as they played TS2, without using story. Sacrificing story design to respect the deadlines seemed not a big deal...

EA (and most of the industry) have problems understanding what building big games for a lot of customer means. They made a lot of work on "user content and creativity", but they still think they can produce a "one for all" game play, satisfying everyone - what TS2, Spore and TS3 showed is that, if you create a game that attracts a great number of layers, you HAVE to give the players way to personalize the game play itself, to easily configure each point of the game.

Back to the point. There are many ways to design a "story progression". Some players only want to have a "changing" neigborhood, where they can play without having to find jobs and lovers for everyone in the city. IndieStone does that well. Pescado has another approach, it is a good thing and will please other kinds of players.

The only problem is that as long as the highlander rule can't be cheated with, a player will not be able to take only what he wants from a modder. IndieStoneMod and AwesomeMod are not so much "mods" than different versions of the full game.
With TS2, the players could customize their gameplay by chosing the precise mods they wanted... At present time, gameplay customization on TS3 is just chosing between different "visions" of the game by different authors.

Well count me among the tards I like to make my sims life harder and unoptimal, and liked the limitations on food availability. I just pretend the limitations are still there and check my written list when they cook, but it is an undesired feature. I can do with it.
This is Pescado's mod, so he does whatever he wants with it (and does it awesomely, I have to say), it doesn't mean that each and every aspect of the One mod is wanted by everyone using it.

As I already said a looooong time ago in a similar thread: what I'd like to have is a mod where the higher you are in your job, the lowest the chance to get promoted - even if you meet all requirements.
Having an adequate diploma could give some bonus (depending on the diploma level?), and having highers skill thant required, and more friend, would help too - but the chance would still stay low.
Add an "old timer effect" (the chance to promote grows slightly each day you are not promoted), and I would be happy.

I'm dreaming of a "zombie killer potion"... you drink it, you attack a zombie: if you win, the zombie dies. If you lose, you lose your brain...

The great majority of my sims, even those that have been around for a very long time, don't have max skills.
Never seen the point of skilling above what is required for work or by wants, but for the occasional "I don't know what to do today".
I like my sims to be imperfect and weak. And I like to see them trying to repair the TV set and scorch themselves.

JM, your mating rituals remind me of Pierce Anthony's "Xanth" books - you could be a perfect Ogre lover. (except your intelligence would be seen as a default by ogresses)

I recently imposed myself a new set of rules on what I can do or not.
The most important one is the "platinium rule": if a sim is in platinium mood, I play "normally": he does whatever I decide.
If the sim is in gold aspiration, or lower, I must follow its wants (and motives). I can't issue orders that are not in its want pannel.
Of course there are exceptions and special rules. But it anyway made the game harder, and more interesting. This rule contributed to destroy my perfectly ordered, predictable, happy neighborhood of overskilled sims. It's much more fun to play now - and the expansions became really useful.
End of personal note.

You forgot the most important uni addition: the permaplat. With this feature, you never have to satisfy wants... It was a great change from the base game, where wants were very important, and directed the game play.
I like LTWs, but find the reward unbalanced.
It would have been more interesting, I think, if reaching a LTW had given a new want slot...

Actually, the plague should be the opposite of what it is in the normal game.
With the "normal" diseases in the game, you have to micromanage the sim to make him die.

With the "new disease", the sim should die unless you micromanage it to survive.

Anyway, anything that brings some chaos to the neighborhood  would be a good thing...

What follows is only a rapid theory. It surely will be dumbly written, part because my english is really rusted, part because I try not to use "technical terminology".

"playing" - or creating - a sim means you can "incarnate" in it.
You "project yourself" in it, you animate it by "putting" inside a part of your attention/emotions, etc.
We could represent like the "possession" of the sim by the player (like in the exorcist:) )

The more the "animated" object seems "familiar" or "desirable", the easier it is to animate it.
Mainly, the process of "projecting yourself in some object" is easier when you can "identify" yourself with it.

It could partly explain the "self sim" effect: it is easier to invest yourself in your sim when you can recognize yourself in it.

But "identification" does not mean "perfect similitude to you". You can easily  "identify" to many different thing: a desired object, an object of fear, are easy to identify with.

"cross sexual identification" - the identification to a "person" of different gender - is not easy. gender difference is, for the human mind, something very mysterious - mainly because the body ( anatomically, but also on chemical level) and the personal history make it so that you can NEVER exactly know what it FEELS to be of another gender.

So, you have to "change" the sim to make it more easy to identify with.
A male with feminine traits will be easier to create/play for a woman, because he is "partly" woman: you can use the "woman" part as a firm ground, and concentrate on the remaining "male" parts.
"Acting" completely like a man would be "impossible", so the player has to only play "parts" of the male role.

(all of this is unconscious, or pre-conscious, it's an instinctive, uncontrolled behavior)

Men do exactly the same thing: it is impossible for us to "instinctively" act as woman (or at least we think it is), so our "women" sims often have many manly traits, in personality at least.
Or traits that men believe to be feminine.

The yaoi/gay love works on the same ground.
Pornography works if you identify with one of the "actors" or with the eye looking the scene.
As the other gender's body/sensation (or, in a more generic way, the body, feeling, sensations, of anyone but ourselves) are mysteries, a good part of pornography  is about trying to identify to the other gender, and participate in it's pleasure.
For men, it leads to lesbian fascination, but also to the "two men for a girl" thing,etc.

Mainly, in pornography as well as in sim creation/play, we have three opposed and complementary moves:
* try to understand what is different by focusing on what is similar (a man with feminine traits is partly understood, representation of the other gender experiencing known sexual sensations makes identification easier, etc)
* try to burninate the difference, reducing the "other" to something that is not different from you, or of what you think it is
* focus on the mystery

I know I am not clear - and anyway I am not sure it's podium material.

Anyway: everything we create (and playing is creating) comes from within us. We must use a "bit" of ourselves to sculpt our creations. So when we try to create something different from us, we have to use what we "dream"/"think we know"/"can understand" of what we are trying to create.  Or at least some tricks making our creation "not so different".

I don't know if it is related, and don't know either if its the Pet Ep that changes the way thiings work, or one the hacks I updated since I have it, but I have problems with making sims friends. Have had a sim go to 100/80 with another, and no friend relationship. Probably the relations were not high enough on the other side, but it was strange. It seems now easier to make friends by phone than face to face.
Also, I have problems with friendly hugs, failing even between old time friends, or same family members. I am under the maybe misleading impression that the friendly hug now checks for gender preferences.
First time it happened was with a pregnant woman, when her beloved mother tried to hug her. She did not accept , too, when her mother tried to talk to the baby. I thought it was something special to pregnancy, and took note, but since, I've seen fathers refuse to touch their sons...
Don't know if it is a bug or just that don't understand the game as well as I tought. It is fun anyway, and reminds me of real life situations.

The family I played last night was reset. Thought it was because I just had installed the new updated romancemod.

I knew Conan was a grouchy knowledge sim 

I like my mean sims to have enemies - but I imagine the cops saying "this murder's motive is clear: the victim won one too many game of darts".
Sounds fun, actually!
But if I want a little peace in my families (especially one of them, all grouchy knowledge), it's either dispose of the dart and chess games, or dispose of the patch (and become friend with burglars, urk).
Choices, always choices.

No, I don't use any relation ship decay hack.

And I am surprised about what you say... I played months without the enemies accumulate hack (without any hack), and it seemed to me that fury had a timer depending on the cause (or the strength of the fury). I mean, the famous "puddle rage" was in fact short timed - one our two hours later, everything was fine again, but when one of my sims cheated his wife, it took three whole days for her to leave the furious state.
And with the dart game I mentioned, the "timer " was really short: it was half done in mere minutes...
Strange...

But would it make them furious? helen kept going furious at Aphrodite during the whole time I watched the relations: furious, fury dismishes fast, then goes back to full counter, and again, and again - with a relation hit at each time.
(and, before they began the game, they talked a little together, with no problem...)


My theory (I will test it wthout hack next time I can play) is that "losing a shot" to another sim, or being laughed at because you failed a shot, induces a very short time fury at each time (if you are grouchy enough) - but with enemiesaccumulate, the short timed fury as definitive results, and so the relation is permanently damaged, in the base game it would not be very visible because relations would go back to normal in a few minutes...
It is only a theory.

The problem is none of them was cheating, at least in the last half sim hour of the game, when I began to watch them... They continued with the game, speaking together, and playing honestly - or they cheated, thay did it perfectly, because I did not see anything. But the relations were still dropping.

Well, maybe they DID cheat and I don't know - I mean, I mainly have only grouchy sims in my neighborhood, so maybe I have never seen a "normal" game

This week end, as I was missing enemiesaccumulate, i installed the last version in the moreawesomethanyou pets archive.

One of my teenage sim girls, Helen, went back from school with a new friend.
Helen is a grouchy knowledge sim (2 points) with an attitude problem. But she wanted to be friend with the girl, another knowledge sim. They of course just had met: 20/20 relation or something like that.
They engaged in a game of darts.
Some time later, I went back to Helen and looked at the relation level.
She was in fury, with -50/-50 to her no-more-friend.
I kept checking them until the relation went all the way to -80/-80, with the fury counter going back full at least once.

I know grouchy sim don't like to loose at game - but it seems that each throw of the darts was inducing fury, broken relationships,etc. And of course, no going back to normal, as enemies accumulate.

Is it a known issue? is it a feature to easily make new ennemies?
Any way, as the "no more friend" is also a grouchy knowledge sim, both of them now want to kill each other. Next time they play darts together, I wonder which one will be the target.

I discovered a few days ago that Dogs can use by themselves the craftable "water spitting" toy (don't know the english name), you know, the hardest one to craft.
It satisfies their bathing needs, and their fun motive, and you don't have to do anything.

I don't use harderjobs, and before pets, platinium mood did not make promotions automatic for my sims, very probable but not automatic, even in the best of conditions.
Same with job performance - if mys sims have all required friends and skills, don't miss work and have max job performance, they have a little chance not to make it to the next level.
But If it is a "bug", then I do'nt want it corrected, I like it that way.

you mean, a dwarf LotP