I had a sim get frozen twice without anything texture-related, and my computer didn't seem to be straining at all.

Both times she had just finished teaching a toddler to talk and got stuck cross-legged on the ground, needs dropping and life continuing around her as normal.  Didn't move at all.  The toddlers struggled a bit but were unable to escape the interaction/gorgon stare until I used resetsim on their mother.  After that everything was fine.

I haven't had any other sims get the same problem with toddlers, just her.  But she is an evil daredevil, so I figured she hated her kids and was trying to have a who-starves-to-death-first staring contest.

I hate to doubt so much shouting, but if twins are DETERMINED AT CONCEPTION then why is it possible for Brandi Broke to have either a single baby or twins?  (Or so JM says in the Myths post.)  I was under the impression that baby number was determined when the sim pops a second-trimester belly.

I've always had Sims 2 installed on a different partition to Windows, and I moved My Docs to yet another partition after installing University.  I've had to reformat a couple of times, most recently when I upgraded my computer and got a new primary HD, and the only time I had any trouble was when I installed one expansion pack onto C by mistake and all the others onto D.  But as long as they're all in the same place, it works fine.  No manual registry changes or other complicated tweaking involved.

I honestly had no idea it could be a problem, I've been blithely installing games wherever there was space since Windows 95.

I just had to reinstall everything (twice) and the only thing the updater wanted to patch was Pets.  That was kind of annoying, since I was going to install Seasons anyway.  I'm glad it doesn't really work, though, if it had tried to patch every bloody EP I would have gone mad.

Thanks for the link!  Houses that I build are usually boring, mildly sucky boxes, so I spent most of last night building one of their bigger houses.  (My housemate laughed at me, I had the floorplan open on my laptop next to me while I built on the desktop.)   I had to get the hang of the constrainfloorelevation cheat to get it right, but I did and it's the best-looking house in my neighbourhood.    I'm still decorating so I haven't played it yet, but it can hardly be less functional than a Maxis house and it has an awful lot more room.

I have a bit of a phobia of cockroaches, so I understand the fear part of it.  I avoid them as much as humanly possible, if there's one of the household arachnophobes around I'll make them kill it while I run into the other room (they owe me for all the spiders I kill for them) and if there isn't then I'll beat it to death myself, THEN run away.  I screech and flail around with a shoe like a big idiot, but I don't cry about it.  Particularly once I've killed it, which is what bugs me about the sims.  I understand being upset when they're right in front of you, but why sob about it once they're dead?  Be happy, your enemy is vanquished!

It sounds like you've got something invisible stuck in there to me.

I had an inexplicably awful environment score on the patio of one of my houses that didn't seem to be caused by any objects and it couldn't have been the flooring because they used to like it fine.  After I carpet-bombed the whole area with the stuck object remover it deleted two 'destination' objects and that seemed to fix the problem.  I suspect it was stuck dog pee, since the dog stopped peeing on the patio and started peeing on the concrete in front of the letterbox afterwards.  Gotta love how Maxis pets prefer peeing on some sort of non-absorbent surface so they can properly display their work.

At least it gives the toddlers something to play with.

Well, it did kill him the first time.

I haven't modified my templates, but I did notice that Seasons added two Maxis families to my otherwise pristine custom legacy hood.  I was so offended - since I went to considerable trouble to burninate the default townies/NPCs and make new ones and only have one family that I made in play - that I used the Tombstone of L&D to kill them all.

I've since discovered that those same two families have been added to all of my hoods (all custom and all differently themed).  Even if I was the kind of person who'd play with them, which I'm not, I can't imagine that I'd want to play the same families in three different previously-established neighbourhoods.

It's just so RUDE.

I have a knowledge sim who's managed to fill the struck by lightning want twice, much to my disgust. (Once in the hot tub and once in a puddle, both autonomous actions.  Cheeky bugger.)  He doesn't have a visible memory of either time, although I suppose he might have some invisible ones.  He does keep wanting to get hit again and his wife developed the fear of being struck by lightning after having to plead for his life the first time, but that could be coincidence.

Her latest set, the pixie ones, are much better than her previous ones.  They're a lot less shiny and all very pretty.

I had to pick the worst time of year to have something go wrong.  Still, it's a pretty bizarre one.  Bear with me, I've put down everything I remember doing today because I have no idea what caused this or what to do.  Sorry for the length and rambling.

I last played (all EPs, no stuff packs) a week ago, I've been playing Pets for a while and aside from a stuck cat pregnancy and the you-can't-move-in-your girlfriend-because-she-counts-as-a-pet bug I've had no problems.  Since I had glorious nothing to do today, I downloaded some clothes (doing my part to destroy paysites while my housemates aren't here) and a couple of Awesome^TM tweaks.  Nothing big - enemiesaccumulate, dailygardener, things like that.  I made myself a new set of default replacement eyes.  I booted up Bodyshop a few times to check that the eyes were how I wanted and that I had the right meshes.  One of the sims I was using to check the eyes was a CAS sim, currently a teenager, who I exported because I wasn't happy with how he was aging.  I couldn't swear it, but I'm pretty sure that that's not what his face looked like when I made him.  (He started as a toddler, but I tweaked his adult face until he was good and pretty in CAS before setting him back to toddler.  Somewhere the pretty got lost.)  Anyway, there are two versions of him in Bodyshop, the original export and the clone that I've tweaked.  At this point, both of them looked exactly as they should.

I continued on with my downloading spree, looted some Chic gear from PMBD and downloaded the shiny new Pets edition of the Kitten Killer. (Yes, I know, please keep reading.)  After deleting some eyes and skins I had never used and hacks that I know conflict, I did unzip InTeen and my new clothes into the correct folders.  But as soon as those had unzipped I shut my computer down, plugged my secondary hard drive back in and backed up the entire Sims 2 folder.  I didn't start the game or Bodyshop before I backed up so the files were in there, but none of them had been used.

After backing up I opened Bodyshop to check the new clothes, but when the saved sims folder opened up both the clone I fixed and the original export suddenly had white faces/heads except for the eyes and hair.  I do have default replacements in, so I opened one up and tried changing the skin tone to one I know is in perfect working order.  The rest of his body changed tone, but the face stayed white whether I used one of the custom default tones or a straight custom one.  I can put full-face makeup onto the white, which was briefly entertaining.  Still, I figured I'd just re-export him and pretty him up again.  But when I open up SimSurgery in SimPE, he's not available.  He's still listed in the Sim Browser but it says he has no character data.

So I kill it, copy over the backup, put the skintone I deleted back in just in case (even though he's got Maxis-default DNA) and take InTeen out.

The backup showed identical size and modification date (19th December), and still shows no character data.  But the last time I played I was playing his house and he was fine.  And he does still seem to have DNA, relationships, skills all that sort of thing.  Unfortunately the last backup I have before this one is from when I installed Pets, and he was still a child then.  Is there a way I can repair the character data or am I going to have to roll the whole neighbourhood back almost two months?

Because that would make me cry.  And burn the whole neighbourhood to the ground then start over, because I'm vindictive.

Without free will you do miss the spontaneous hilarity.  Like this: in the middle of their shop one of my sims turned to his wife and congratulated her on the fact that he still found her attractive.  I wasn't quick enough to get a good picture, but that's what he's doing.



He's one of my favourite ever NPC move-ins, even though he had some bugs at first.  Normally I get sick of sims eventually, but even now he's most of the way through elder he's still finding new strange things to do and want.

I just saw this for the first time.  A child was watching her mother give birth and doing the usual weird hand-waving, and every time she did she started levitating.  I'll have to have her chat with people and see if she does it again.

My mum's dog likes rice if there's something with it.  But most of the dogs I've known and my cat are fiends for pasta even by itself.  (Of course, my cat eats avocado, bread and mushrooms, so he's not exactly normal.)

To be truly authentic they'd have to worry, clean or eat compulsively as well - which cuts into study time, of course.

 I love my kitten killer but yes, if a teen goes wonky that's always where I start.  Not only is it most likely to be the culprit, it's usually because I just haven't updated or RTFM correctly and that's easily fixed.

I had that problem with Nightlife when I first installed it.  I had a bunch of other problems as well, custom content didn't show up and Downtown developed some impressive corrupted graphics.  I reinstalled to fix the other problems and the reset stopped happening.  It drove me mental at the time, though.

Genetic data comes from somewhere, though, because my only reaper kid isn't a clone of his mother.  His mother's a CAS redhead with custom skin and eyes.  The kid shows her skin and eyecolour but has black hair and recessive genes for light blue eyes (that strangely he had as a baby) and the second skin tone.  But his facial structure is very similar to his mother's.

Not really.  I figured my sims have had it too easy for too long, so I did an extreme start legacy lot with one CAS adult, so she started with 1500.  After a week she married an NPC who brought 1500 to the household (good thing her ex gave her a dance sphere after a good date - some people might call it exploiting a game feature, I call it prostitution).  No money cheats, loans or otherwise unorthodox financial gain, except the Maxis-condoned prostitution.  By the end of the second week both of them were working day jobs and running a home-based toy store whenever they were home, which was often since my founder was on maternity leave.  To celebrate their uneducated, working-class nature I've also banned them from holding regular jobs above level 4 or hiring domestic help.

So far they're working their little pixelated butts off for not much profit, he's still got a day job and the business has reached level 4.  The baby's just turned into a kid, and grew up reasonably well despite the way her parents left her alone in the living part of the house while they sold toys.  She scared me when she turned into a toddler wearing a bear suit, though.  The parents cooed and cuddled and I went "why does my kid have a TAIL?"

It's been fun.  I've had to work an awful lot harder than usual, but it's been an interesting way to pick up the business concept.  And definitely more difficult than uni.  My first CAS students with their no skills or money never had it this hard, even when I left the game running while I made a sandwich.

IRC is a pretty good way to get viruses as well.  There was a comedy of errors over that in the first days of our home network - the mac user could use IRC as much as she liked and never have a problem.  But the connection she opened meant the PC running the DSL kept getting her viruses.  Took us a while to figure out that was where they were coming from, though.

I have one or less virus scanners running in the background of my computers, but I have four virus/adware/spyware scanners that I crack out every time there's so much as a hint of odd behaviour, or after I've installed a program from LimeWire or gone to dodgy Russian websites.  If I see ads for porn on any site I'm at, I scan.  Doesn't stop me using P2P programs or going to those sites, of course, I'm just aware of the risks.  Which, since I use Firefox, are actually quite small - I haven't had anything in months.  Anyway, the most massive, hard to remove infestation of nine or ten different things I ever had?  Came from Tripod, who were supposedly a legitemate webhost.  It took me over six hours to get rid of it all.

Spyware and adware are gonna happen, whether you use P2P and go to dodgy places or not.  I'm the dodgy one, my sister's browsing habits are mostly clean.  I spent over an hour removing spyware from her computer last weekend, which only one out of her three scanners picked up.  (The two programs she paid for, Ad-Aware and her virus scanner, both missed it.  Bazooka, the teeny weeny freeware program, picked up four seperate infections.  The more scanners you have, the better.)

Pfft.  I exposed my English/Irish skin to it and the Californian sun is pissweak.  Not only do they have a protective smog layer, they still have an ozone layer!  I sat out there for an hour and still couldn't feel that mutagenic radiation scorching through my skin, in an Australian summer I can get burned taking out the garbage.

California's got nothing.

Wow, weird.  Thanks for clearing that up, I haven't really played with aliens yet.  Although now I'm tempted to cheat and make myself a few.

Actually Maxis had it right, if simplified.  On order of dominance it goes Black>Brown>Blond>Red.  If a person or sim inherits two different hair colour alleles from their parents, they'll only express the one that's further left on my list.  To have red hair you have to get the red allele from both of your parents, which is why it's rare.

To use me as an example: My mum has brown hair like both her parents, so all of them have at least one brown allele.  However, my aunt has red hair so both my grandparents must have a hidden red allele as well.  So my mother must be either brown/brown or brown/red.  Both myself and my sister are blonde, so she can't have passed on a brown allele and must be brown/red.  Meaning I inherited a hidden red hair allele from mum and an equally hidden blonde allele from my dad (his hair's almost black, or was before it went grey), am visibly blonde and can sneakily pass the allele for red hair on to confuse further generations.


Is the dominance factor actually modified by the game in the second generation, or do you just mean that with a normal-skinned partner a heterozygously alien-skinned sim will produce alien offspring around half the time?  Because that would imply to me that the alien skin is always dominant, the normal skinned kids are just getting the alien-skinned parent's non-expressed normal gene.


I'm an enormous genetics dork.  I actually like that Maxis got it kind of right, although I'm annoyed that they wussed out of having particulate inheritance for skin colour.  I personally would have found it hilarious to have two dark-skinned sims of mixed ancestry produce a blindingly white baby.

Mine do, or at least two of them do.  I had a romance sim that was aiming for a 'woohoo 20 sims' LTW who got slapped silly by walkbys twice a few days apart.  Nina and a townie both ran all the way from the portal to the back of the house to bitchslap my sim for kissing someone else.  He had to get a bit more discreet.