They couldn't all be fathered by townies that later up and "moved" and now don't actually exist?

Sounds like that would be a big deal breaker for people who would want to play legacy style!

That sounds like a theme park ride.

Seriously, no matter what your interpretation is of the word "box," it probably has more room inside for add-ons than a laptop! 

I bought a Dell laptop a couple of years ago, not because I don't know anything about computers, but more because it's not realistic to build your own laptop like you can do a desktop computer...and Dell was shipping computers with XP instead of Vista.  I picked a rig where I could choose all the components myself, and it's still running everything I would like it to nicely.  I'm thinking about upping my RAM from 2GB to 4GB, though, because I like CC, and I can.

If you're insisting on using a laptop for gaming, you have to be very careful before you make your purchase.  Check out reviews for that model, determine where all the fans are, that sort of thing.  Laptops overheat a lot easier than a regular box...a lot of times if your box is getting too hot, you can stick in another fan.  That's not possible on a laptop.  Even if you have a good fan in the laptop, depending on where the heat is channeled out, you can have problems with the heat damaging other components.  There is an HP laptop series where the hinges all break because the heat outlet goes right past the metal clips that hold the hinge on and they melt.

I'd also doublecheck the components.  The model I ended up going with offered choices on the videocards, and I went with an ATI instead of an nVidia because of the infamous issues EA has with getting Sims 2 compatible with nVidia cards.

The vast majority of laptops aren't upgradeable.  You can add more RAM, assuming you haven't topped out what your OS can handle, you can change the harddrive, and that's about it.  If you buy a laptop, buy it with the knowledge that if it's not top of the line, and you are using it for top of the line things, you will be wanting to replace it within a couple of years.

It's not that big of a deal, it's just a pain in the ass, especially if you've bred them.

For skins, you just need to change their DNA (you could just change it to S2, or you could pick another skin and change it to that), and the DNA of every one of their relatives that could have a gene for that skintone.  For eyes, you need to fix the DNA of sim and relatives, but you also have to fix the agedata in their Character file for their "new" eye to show up.

I've always had geneticized skins in my game, and my problem came from my downloading of the first "townified" skins that were floating around, made using a method that wouldn't allow them to show up in CAS.  I eventually switched them out for versions that could be townified and be in CAS at the same time, and I had a bunch of DNA to fix up.  It's worth it for me to have tons of variety in my genetics, and nowadays I do all the file modification myself.  I just make sure to boot up bodyshop and check the quality of new custom genetics before I townify it and let it randomize itself into my game.  Just make sure you only put in stuff that is up to your standard of quality, and it shouldn't be much of an issue.

It has to be post-NL.

I first started playing on a laptop that barely had a video card.  So I was running just Uni/NL for awhile.  When I got my new laptop, I played a very short while under that configuration, and then I installed Seasons.

I have a few shots then running under Uni/NL.  It was actually these shots that made me realize I used to see stars under a shorter draw distance than I do now with Seasons.  And it's not my video card gimping out with Seasons.  My current video card exceeds all the requirements for all the EPs, I have smooth edges and the ability to see fish, etc.

These shots aren't awesome, as I wasn't trying to get the sky, but they're decent evidence.

Night sky with stars and clouds, moar night clouds 1, moar night clouds 2, and daytime clouds where the distance is definitely set to medium.

Contrast with:
Daytime shot under Seasons with medium draw distance that would have definitely had had clouds before, Daytime, XL distance, empty sky, Ditto, and night sky with XL distance--I can't prove it, but I think the stars are appearing in a higher, smaller radius in the skybox.

I think that if I hadn't had installed ceilings and ended up making my interior shots much better, I would've noticed this earlier.

I used to get glitches similar to Timoram's with the pools and with window glass.



The gypsy walking through walls was one of the more amusing snapshots I got of the phenomenon.

In my case, the whole issue was solved by turning Smooth Edges on.

I use this mod by niol for my pond water, and I think it really improves the pond water in my game.

Niol also made a mod for the neighborhood water which looks great in neighborhood view, but looks strangely transparent in lot view and, as I've got a whole custom hood built with the sea as part of the deco in the background or on flooded lots, that was not going to work for me at all, so I removed it.  I'd be really happy with a mod that had a similar effect as the pond water one when it came to hood water in lot view.

Also, I know that my sky in Seasons is affected by my distance view settings.  If I set my settings to see as far from my lot as possible (Extra Large), I can see stars in the night sky, but other settings keep the sky quite boring.  I'm not sure if all the other effects from the past remain at that view setting or not.  I tend to stay on Medium or so in regular gameplay because otherwise I get a bit of lag from snowfall landing on the entire neighborhood in the background in winter.

I recognize Sedona as one of the terrains available to you if you go to make a custom neighborhood.  I'm wondering if they wanted to tie flyovers to terrains, which makes a bit of sense, as they can be different elevations and sizes, but they didn't want to expend the effort necessary to have the game autogenerate this stuff for custom hoods in the end?

It's kind of a shame, because I'd love to get this sort of thing working for custom hoods I've spent a lot of time on.  I do like seeing the camera fly over the Veronaville that my one legacy family has completely taken over at this point.

I've never had that problem with generated teens.  However, I recently had that problem with some manufactured teens.  I am populating a neighborhood with other people's sims, and I was making groups in CAS.  It's easier for me to make them as adults but age them down.  I have one holding lot which I use to teleport in sims, give them custom hair if they are known for wearing it (so they have proper genetics), and age them down, then turn them back into townies again.

I found that my issue must have been that I re-townified them before they were completely done age transitioning.  I ended up with a bunch of sims that looked like teens but were regarded as adults--annoying because my game made other townies for the kids to bring home from school, and I had random teens coming home from adults with work.  What I did to fix it was to summon them back to the lot, age them into teens yet AGAIN, wait a decent amount of time so I know that they are officially teens, and then turn them back into townies.  This worked.

While this does not explain what's going on with your teens, this may be a way to quickly fix them so they are behaving as teens AND sendable to college.  I used InSim's functions, but I'm sure any combination of hacks and/or debug mode that will let you change the age of a sim and townify them afterwards should work similarly.

While I can completely understand where people are coming from when they say that playing Legacies bores them, for me, it's really the only way to play.

Genetics is the best part of the game for me!  I have heaps and heaps of geneticized and townified custom content.  I use several sets of face templates to generate townies, and I often roll for townies' random recessive genetics (whether they have any, and then what recessive genes they have).  Once I'm a couple of generations in, it's not unusual for me to get sets of siblings who have a few facial traits in common, but little else.  That's not to say I wouldn't get bored if I only have one family, but each one has its own theme--one's an alphabet, one's an uglacy set in an inclusive hood I'm building that actually has a plot, and I just started one that is "I'm Surrounded By Idiots" where you may only control the current heir--so I can just play another family if I get sick of one.

I like to allow them a good amount of autonomy.  I use ACR and Trips and Quads so I am surprised by their procreating.  I am horrible person and use the Kitten Killer for miscarriage, YA/teen dating, and graduating teens from high school halfway through the age span.  But then, that leads to things like the eldest Knowledge daughter of my ISBI family being completely screwed over.  Her father didn't have enough time to help her do her homework as a teen because there were toddler triplets in the household, and she ran out of time to get her grades up to get into college.  If she'd had the full span, she would have been able to catch up, even with the four other siblings in the house.  I've dropped kids out of college for getting pregnant.  I had two brothers decide to (happily) share a wife.

The only mildly boring thing is the money aspect.  But let's face it, it's ridiculously easy to make heaps of money even if you aren't doing a legacy, so that doesn't bother me too much.

I have a family on Gen 12 and one on Gen 7, and they have both been living on their current lots for about 7 generations...eventually the lots just start getting laggy, so I'm about to move them both.  They may or may not have their funds completely liquidated and be forced to buy their homes with tons of mortgage bushes...I haven't decided yet.

Out of all the wedding limo glitches I've had, I think this one is my favorite:


Just because merging with his glasses-wearing, heavily pregnant wife make the merge even more complete.

I don't get interesting glitches too often, though.  Mainly pillow-fighting through walls and stuff like this:




I wish I'd taken pictures of some of my accessories flashing blue before I fixed them.  Bloom's glove mesh, in particular, was pretty funny when it went flashy blue.

I don't have the game up, so I can't look and find the maker, but there is a ridiculously small ceiling light on MTS2.  It's definitely smaller than Windkeeper's.  I use it on sets, the only problem is I need a larger lamp somewhere on the lot to click to turn all the lights on.  I'm sure with some fiddling, you could get those placed on the first floor to get the effect of lights above continuing down to the first floor.

Doing a full two story area is easier than getting split levels lit up, for some reason.

The engine was unstable enough that when I was running up to NL and put in some hacks from here (this was back when TJ and his ACR stuff lived here), one kept erroring and the official twojeffs solution was "NL is unstable, some installs have issues, take the hack out."  I was very surprised!

I know that it's been said that OfB's engine was rather stable, though, and Seasons doesn't seem to be too crazy, after the temperature fix and crying baby fix, anyway.

I have a twelve generation legacy running in the Veronaville from my original game install.  Full of character files and all other sorts of fun things.  Being pretty anal about your game means you simply don't get the game exploding type errors that many others do.  However, being anal about your game also means installing all the critical fixes and things from here.

And there are features that I don't have in my game.  I am also another non-BUY user.  I also used to never use the sleep clock, however when I had a generation with ten kids in it, plus their two parents and three grandparents, I had to install sleepclocks so I personally stayed sane.

It's good to be careful with what you put in the game, and you certainly don't want to accidentally put something like zombieapocalypse into your game, but I swear, some people get overcautious about things just because they are called "hacks."  Hack as a word doesn't necessarily mean bad or dangerous!  When I get a new EP, I always get the Director's Cut, weed through it, and then generally there are a few other hacks I need to pick up from the general directory, too.

(I also use hacks from other sites, but I make sure they play nice with what I've got before I put them in, and my MATY hacks would be the last ones to come out after a conflict.)

Somehow I realized that monstrosity was supposed to be Kimono.  Which makes the arse marking paper lanterns.  I think I bought this one for one of my little cousins one year for Christmas.  As for how I could possibly connect the two, I have no idea.

I really need to add an alias for the individual roof angle cheat.  It's terrible, I can barely remember the two I already have set up, though.

intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 15
floatProp tvVolume 0.3
boolprop allow45degreeangleofrotation true

alias constraintrue "boolprop constrainfloorelevation true"
alias constrainfalse "boolprop constrainfloorelevation false"
alias gridtrue "boolprop snapobjectstogrid true"
alias gridfalse "boolprop snapobjectstogrid false"

It was Latin quizbowl, actually called Certamen, so we had a slightly narrower range of topics.  We had a "guess" guy on the team.  If no one on the team knew an answer to buzz in, we'd kick him, and he could guess whatever he would like.  The other teams would find him hilarious until he got answers right.  We actually did quite well on the state level, but man, I went to nationals once and the people there were insane.  No fun at all.


Spanish is really close to Latin.  I took four years of Latin in high school and did a bunch of contests with that, read a bunch of the literature, and then when I took Spanish in college, it was rather easy.  Verb conjugation is really similar, and there's even less morphology with the nouns and adjectives!  I did really well, except for the whole thing where habere/haber isn't the same verb in both languages, and the fact that we never really had to listen/speak much in Latin class.

I think it's a really common thing across the Romance languages to not require a subject pronoun because it's redundant with the conjugation of the verbs.

Here is my experience with clothes categorized as Maternity:

- If they are categorized as Maternity AND townified, it seems quite likely that the sim will "acquire" a custom Maternity outfit upon age up, like they do in all the other categories.

- If the sim "pops" into a Maternity outfit, however, it will still be one of the Maxis defaults.  (If you have a hack to allow all outfits for pregnant sims, they obviously won't pop into a Maternity outfit at all.)

- You can plan outfit and if a Maternity outfit is owned by someone on the lot, you can put the sim in it.

- On next lot load, the sim will be wearing the custom Maternity outfit in the family load portrait.  However, they will be back to wearing Maxis defaults.  You will have to plan outfit AGAIN to get them back into the custom outfit.

- I have had no issues deleting these clothes.  They are still normal custom outfits otherwise.

So, I've not really found the function useful.  Since I tend to keep a sim in the same outfit for an entire lifestage, I've found it slightly useful in that I can give a sim with a two-part outfit or one without a pregnancy morph in the mesh a maternity outfit, but it's a pain redoing it every lot reload.

Oh, now I'm remembering the good ol' days of taking Latin, and Carthago delendo est.  We'd go to quizbowl contests and that was one of our stock answers for bonus questions that we didn't know the answer to, along with Julius Caesar and 3rd declension.  We knew how to play the odds!

You could sell some magazines and stuff, I suppose.  There isn't a buyable newspaper, is there?  My mother worked at a newspaper, and I temped there one summer when I was still in college.  They had a small storefront where you could buy copies of the couple newspapers they produced, or place an ad.  So if you wanted to go that route, you could still have a public side to the business.  Assuming you want one. 

That's exactly why I mentioned it.  I know there's resources to get to that content (restoration project or no, I've seen a really entertaining picture walk-through that faked some of the cut-content that was only on the Xbox) and, while I'm sure the format was really similar to PC in this case, I thought it might be possible that the file compression system was the same among all the Xbox games.  And perhaps that could get you into those .arc files.

You obviously knew about that already.  Crud.

I don't know if there's a similar type of format conversion involved, but Xbox games have been ripped to add content to PC games before.  There's an ongoing project to restore cut material from Knights of the Old Republic II.  It was left on just the Xbox version, and they're making a mod to the PC version with the material.

That (or similar projects I don't know about) may be the place to start your search.

I love the windows on that, jim.  It's funny, I always seem to enjoy the looks of other people's modern lots, but I never think to use the style very often myself.  I also think the way that kids' room is decorated is adorable.