I've binned a couple of hairstyles with Theo's plugin with no apparent problems. Double checked them in the game, and everything looks good. Should I pull them out?

I am consistently getting a freeze up when I attempt to look at the Memories option for a Sim in the Plugin view, but maybe I'm simply not giving it enough time to load. (It seems to stick on a "Dragon?" query. Makin' Magic vibes.) I tend to use Simpe mostly to get information and not a lot for editing. Also, I got my copy through a link here, so maybe it's a dated version.

Deadly scissors: I think they still work, they're simply not as deadly as they used to be. I recently put the latest downloaded version from the official website to use against Lorenna Sunset (knowledge Sim and the prettiest adult female in my game) to satisfy her desire to beat death. Her SO, Flower Forth, had a desire to save someone from death. Neat when it works out like that, but I held my breath when Grim showed up. I've only had one high relationship ever fail the pleading, but still.... (Loved the tension, however.)

Lorenna did have to make several runs with the scissors before she got the desired results.


Death to Ugly Sims?: I'm still a bit puzzled over the prejudice against ugly Sims in the game. Sure I want some attractive Sims in the game, and I'm very pleased when a plain child blossoms into a swan, but I like to be able to spot a Sim going by on the street and immediatly know who it is. Everytime one of my Sims makes an age transition, I send them to the mirror, put them temporarily in a generic hair style with no makeup, glasses, or facial hair, then take screenshots in full face and profile. I've got enough of them now that I can say that the Sims I deem the most attractive are almost identical, with only noticeable differences in the minor facial features. Since I want more variety among the population, I don't kill the uglier ones. (Okay, the really ugly ones I don't let breed as much.)

Of course I've got a large number of Sims at this point, so there's room for a lot of variety.


Difficulty letting go of my Sims: Yes, I'm a wuss. I can't pick and choose which ones to bump, especially since I'm not practicing any sort of eugenics program. But its cool when one of them bites it at random. And with the capacity to resurrect the dead, I don't feel quite so bad about letting them go. At some point I intend to get a group of bereaved relatives together at the household of the one Paranormal expert and roll a number to bring one of my dead Sims back. Some fun tension, because I won't know until then who it will be.


That really appeals to the random events freak in me. I may adapt it for my own game.

My current count of death types for my main neighborhood (not counting Sims that died and were sucessfully given a second chance through Reaper pleadage):

Old Age: 8 (I allow my Sims liberal use of the Elixer of Life, with the requirement that they have to be Platinum at night to take it)

Disease: 2 (Both Sims dropped dead unexpectedly shortly after I loaded the lots - game glitches.)

Starvation: 2 (Non-playeable Uni Student dropped from starvation via piano playing - shades of the Red Shoes. Probable death of an NPC maid in one of my dorms. I didn't know he was dead until I ran across a death memory in one of my Sims memories. I assume he never got the 'time to leave' message and cleaned until he dropped, in the girls bathroom.)

Electrocution: 2 (I make my Sims repair their own appliances)

Lightning Strike: 1 (Season townie outside hottubbing in the rain. I think he may have been hit twice.)

Scared to Death by Ghosts: 2 (Families should have moved the tombstones out to the cemetary rather than leaving them about for gloating/knowledge-sim-wants-to-see-a-ghost purposes.)

Cowplant: 3 (Secret Society)

The only really "accidental" and non-glitch death (not counting the Old Age deaths) is the one townie hit by lightning. Probably I could have prevented that by shooing everybody inside when the rain hit.

I'm generally a benevolent overseer (see liberal allowances of Elixer of Life) but I like my Sims to tell me their own stories as much as possible. The few glitchy deaths definitely added memorable milestones in the history of the neighborhood. So for me, more unexpected deaths, more randomness (at one point I ran my list of Sims through a random number generator to select 10 to have babies), more unexpected 'good' but very rare events (a Sim could discover an oil well in her backyard). SimCity used to have a Disaster mode that could be turned on and off at will. That sort of thing could work nicely in context of the Sims.

Count me as one of the fans of the fantasy silliness of the game. I can't wait to give the wishing well a try. (Although I'd welcome a very nasty troll at the bottom of the well too.)

Just a wild guess, but easy enough to check out. You might try checking to see that the cables are firmly seated. My monitor goes off color unless I have the monitor cable very firmly plugged in at the back of the case.  A loose connection somewhere could cause sporadic color changes.

I'm sure there are people here who know more about computer hardware than I do, but I think the key may be what upgrades your motherboard can support. My motherboard is made by Gigabyte, and when I go to their website and check out my specific model number I can get a list of supported processors for the board (I can upgrade to an AMD dual core x4800 max, and I'll have to make sure I get a socket 939 processor, because most of the AMD dual core processors are now made for the newer AM2 type boards). If you bought the computer from a regular manufacturer, like Dell, you can probably go to their website and find out what upgrades are available for your system.

I found this hardware guide to the Sims 2 to be very informative (it was written for the base game):

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6133243/index.html?type=tech

The Sims 2 is very CPU intensive.

My vanilla nannies do an okay job. They're definitely better than my non-directed playable Sims at the diaper changing. (For some reason my regular Sims will almost always opt to bathe a baby who needs changing, which takes longer and still leaves the kid with a full diaper. The nannies opt, correctly, for the changing table.) Now if I can only stop them from feeding the toddlers half a dozen milk bottles all at once.

One of my Family Sims got a three bolt attraction for one of the nannies. Since his lifetime aspiration was to have lots of grandchildren, I thought it made for an amusing dilemma for him, so I married him off to her. They've got one adopted kid, but that's as far as I'm going to go for him. The nanny has tons of cooking points, so at least he'll eat well. I'm thinking the best nannies should probably have high cooking, and for personality high nice and activity points with low fun. (A couple of my Sims got so furious at one of the prankster nannies that I felt obliged to let them fire her.)

BTW, does anybody know of a hack that will have the nanny track the schedules of all the adult Sims in a family? Seems wasteful to have her hanging around for several hours after the first adult gets home from work (or arriving hours before the last adult leaves). I know they can always dismiss her, but best option would have her automatically leave.

When my computer went down last night and wouldn't boot, part of my brain was thinking 'oh no my motherboard is gone' and part of my brain was thinking 'yay my motherboard is gone'. I keep looking at the dual core processors and putting together an upgrade list, but Intel dual core currently blows AMD dual core out of the water, so a new (Intel) processor and new motherboard would inevitably lead to new RAM and probably a new power supply ... and I really try to make each new computer last 3-4 years. I've got another year to go with the current rig, at least.

Much better having to replace the graphics card.

I've been checking http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/06/the_best_gaming_video_cards_for_the_money/
every month. They recommend the x1950PRO in that price range.

My GeForce 6600GT graphics card crapped out last night while I was reading this board. Computer shut down, I tried to reboot and saw a spark, and there's now a singed spot on the graphics card. Better the card than the motherboard, since I've been planning to upgrade the graphics card for some time now. I was hoping to last until the ATI R600 series came out, but the release keeps getting pushed back, and now I can't wait any longer.

Looking at either a 8800GTS (downside buggy drivers and potential headaches with the Sims, but, other than the GTX, it is the one card at the top of the graphics heap right now) or a Radeon X1950XT (fewer problems with the Sims and cheaper, but I'll probably have to upgrade it sooner). I really want to play Oblivion at top settings, so I'm leaning painfully towards the 8800GTS.

I wouldn't even consider a Celeron for a gaming machine. I think they're probably marketed as a budget chip mostly suitable for people who only use their computers for reading email, browsing the Net, and writing the occasional Word document, and who want a bargain basement price tag on their computer.

When I was researching parts for my build two years ago, the Antec PSU's had very good reviews. I bought an Antec 480W PurePower 2.0 and haven't had any complaints about it at all.

FWIW, I made those mistakes about a year and a half ago, and the neighborhood is still going strong, with few minor glitches and no major glitches (or no major glitches not caused by things like external power failures). I imported one CAS grandmother from the Strangetown neighborhood, and moved some families out just after creating them and setting them down (I'd meant them for my cartoon Townsville neighborhood).

Even so, that created about 100 empty character files. I know that at one time Sims neighborhoods would start encountering problems around the 800-900 character mark. EA upped that limit with one of the expansion packs, but even so I figure there has to still be a limit. I'm bumping up toward the 1000 Sim mark now. It would be a very good thing to clear out those empty files, but the tutorials I've seen for doing so look complicated, and because the neighborhood is currently running smoothly, I've gone with the philosophy of don't fix what isn't broken (yet).

I deleted Chester Gieke unplayed from the bin, only to discover later that he had dead relatives. No problems yet, but I expect it probably added a straw to the neighborhood's back. (I've got a lot of trash files from bad practices back when I was naive and thought that just because you could transfer binned families from one neighborhood to another within the game, this was a safe practice.)

Cyd, Porthos, and the Critturs, on the other hand, appear to have no dead relatives.

I've discovered that a number of Sims in my main neighborhood now have different LTWs. I'm assuming this happened when I installed Seasons, but I can't be certain. The Sim who brought it to my attention is a Romance Sim who now has the LTW of reaching the top of the Medical career. I've done a sampling of the neighborhood and as best I can tell: Almost all of the resets are at least appropriate for the Sim's aspiration, some of the resets are LTWs new to Seasons, and the Sims affected have contiguous Package ID Numbers ranging from about 0427 through 0488. Any Sim before or after seems to have maintained its LTW. Nothing else looks off with any of them

Any ideas? I can easily enough change the LTW back with the lot debugger, but I'm concerned about whether there are any long term problems in the offing. I can go back to last week's backup, but I'd hate to lose a week's worth of gameplay.

I had a visiting Sim combust in the hot tub (the Aspiration rewards one with the roses floating out of it). I should've let him go - I would have had my fire death. This should be fun, however, since there are constantly guests out in my Sims' hot tubs until the early hours of the morning and there aren't always household members around to put them out. I should have my fire death by the time the fix is ready.

Pretty far from it. Colorado, USA. I used to have dreams where I was a kangaroo, so maybe I spent a long past lifetime in that sector of the globe.

The Seasons readme.txt lists a cheat to keep the fireflies alive once your Sim catches them in the jar:

bugJarTimeDecay  [on|off]
Should you catch any fireflies in a jar, enabling this cheat will make them live forever! (makes for alluring lighting!)

Maybe this cheat works for butterflies in a jar too? Or maybe that's a different object in the game.

Very good to know, thank you.

Only glitch so far, one of my Sims took the family kitten to work. (I expect this may be a pre-Seasons glitch that I haven't seen before.) Poor critter did come back when the Sim returned, still glued to the Sim's hand. His motives were pretty low by then, but he slept the rest of the day and recovered nicely.

Can anybody point me towards a comprehensive list of bugs caused by the Pets patch? I installed the patch just prior to installing Seasons. The only bug I remember off the top of my head was maid Lucy Hanby losing her red hair. She's still a redhead in my post Seasons patched game, but I'd like to check out some other potential bugs before investing a lot of time in my main neighborhood. A quick forum search shows me a lot of reports of botched genetics, but the one baby who has transitioned so far in my game inherited (properly) his father's hair and eyes, and looks fine to me. Anything else I can check out? I'm going to leave the patch in barring any major glitches.

I wouldn't expect custom objects made prior to any one expansion pack to include the options that the updated Maxis objects do, since custom objects are essentially cloned off earlier Maxis versions. The object creator has to do an updated version for the current expansion pack, and not a lot of them bother with it. (One reason why I don't download many custom objects any more.)

Target had the display up last night, $5.00 off,  and they were already sold out. Nobody else in town had it. I got a rain check, now I have to decide whether to actually wait for more to come in at Target, or go elsewhere.

Something similar happened to my young adult Alon Livingston when he transitioned to adult.



I think he was back to normal once I moved him to the main neighborhood. (Or at least as normal as a grown-up Alon dressed in a purple smoking jacket can hope to get.) Possibly I had to send him to the mirror, but it wasn't a major fix. I don't use replacements for the default skins, so Alon was all Maxis (and they can keep the credit for him).

I've noticed that frequently I'm not seeing any ghosts at my community cemetary. My current theory, as yet to be tested, is that the best time to send my Sims to the downtown lot is before the sun sets at the home lot - around 6pm. I have seen the ghosts out and about on several occasions, so I know that they are where they are supposed to be. I suspect the trick is mainly in the timing.

Unfortunately, I only know how to check in Simpe to see if a Sim is properly marked as a ghost.

Oddly enough, I was pondering this possibility just last night. My main neighborhood is actually in very good shape (knock on wood) but I've been playing it since day 1, and it's getting very big.

I assume that getting the Sims likenesses via Sim Surgery would be relatively simple, and you could edit the Sims' personality with Simpe to match their predecessor, give the right job at the right level. Where it might get tricky would be with the large extended families. I think you can add family ties with Simpe, but seems might it might get complex.

I'd take the Sim Surgery route, but make sure to get Theos Altenative Sim Surgery plugin. I think it simplifies the process greatly.

And wow, that Sim looks mangled, if not burned. Maybe the plugin would help, maybe not.

With 341 controllable Sims in my game, I don't want all of them reaching perma-Plat, especially since I make Platinum mood one of the requisites for access to the Elixer of Life. But I don't want to play favorites either. Since it's too easy for them to top out in the career LTWs, I've been making them take the third job offered them, regardless. (Occasionally one will luck out with a first job that matches her LTW. I've got one permaplat Professional Party Guest and one permaplat Business Tycoon.) I've been toying with the notion of making them continue the career roulette wheel even after topping out on the first job.

I might as well let them have their way with the majors, since they don't strongly affect how my Sims do in the long run and I can get some easy Aspiration points for them in the short run.

Never had a Sim roll up a want to change majors.

I let all of mine roll up a want, with the exception of a very few who have interests of 10 in a subject area. Probably a slight majority of mine never roll up the want and end up as Philosophy majors. (I also let them decide if they want to join a Greek house or not.)

Occasionally they'll also roll up a fear of declaring a certain major.