Apartment Life Borkiness, or how i ended the world in 1 hour.

[fway]

well, you never know zazazu... EAxis is always borrowing changing the engines from previous expansion packs and making them worse better.

Ok, I am getting messages for my playable neighbors when I am not even playing them! 

[GayJohnScarritt]

   If i'm not mistaken, Stevie is the name of the person calling.  Either EAxis messed up on the phrasing, or it's something to do with the UK English we all are playing with.

[Alex]

Out of interest, where is the popup dialog text stored?

[Dark Trepie]

So, yeah.  Being the very observant guy that I am, I just noticed this happy little button down in the corner of my screen.



Now the EAxian apartments can has ceilings.

[Crash]

Does anybody know what's supposed to happen with the good witch animation? I am not sure if this is a bug or not. I played the Cordial sisters,
and Samantha was turned into a good witch, and she got the sparkle animation. Then just suddenly when she got back form work one day, the animation is gone (skin overlay is still there). She had gone to work before without losing the animation, so I wonder what is going on?

[Tsarina]

Only the totally good witches have the sparkles. If she changed alignment (a little is enough), she could lose her sparkles.

[Crash]

Only the totally good witches have the sparkles. If she changed alignment (a little is enough), she could lose her sparkles.

Yes, I figured that, so I made her study 'the way of the light' until the good witch alignment bar was seemingly filled. But I don't know how this works, so I'll just make her study more then.

[Capitaine Marie]

I'll probably be poked with pointy sticks, as I haven't removed all unsupported hacks (if you want me to be moar specific, I'll be happy to tell you); but I wondered about my ceilings.  I can only see them using the 45-degree angle button.  I don't have ACR, Inteen, etc.; I *have* updated all awesome hacks.  Could it be because I have integrated graphics, or could it be a bug?

Also (possibly unrelated to AL) I can only put a couple beards on my males in Body Shop.

Any insight would be muchly appreciated. 

Update:  I tried removing all unsupported and/or non-awesome hacks and still cannot see ceilings in live mode. 

[ShortyBoo]

I spent more time playing the game and I can definitely confirm that the sims' portraits do change constantly and not just when they change clothes. I turned free will off and had two sims just stand around for like 5 minutes and both of their portraits kept changing every few seconds.

The ceilings, I'm not too happy with. Besides them cutting off most curtain rods, borders and tops of certain windows, they tend to look really screwed up if there's a roof over them. I built a house and when I noticed that the roof alone didn't give ceilings to the second floor, I laid some floor tiles under where the roof goes. This is what the ceiling looked like on the second floor:



The first floor looked fine. I'm not sure if it was just because of the roof, but still, it shouldn't be looking like that. I ended up removing the floor tiles from under the roof and just placed the ceiling tiles from MTS2 instead. Actually, even though they're a pain to place them one tile at a time, they look much better than the ceilings that come with the game.

[Mandapotpie]

Has anyone tried out the butler yet?

I have a vanilla game folder and ordered the butler and after he showed up my sim went to work. I got the notice that the children shouldn't be left home alone. Then the social worker took them. According to the Prima guide the Butler will dismiss the nanny and is supposed to offer child care! 

ETA: This makes me wonder if the Neighbor child care will work as well. Has anyone had any problems with that?

[Inge]

The thing about the ceilings is they're only the same as the bottomful floors that have been around.  Basically they are at the height the bottom of the floor tile thickness would be.  The wallpapers were always too tall technically for the rooms, but we didn't notice because we could "see through" the floor.   I guess we have to have our mouldings lower now, and then have a small strip of the main colour above, in case we want it to join up to the wall above in stair wells.   Some industious person needs to make overrides for the maxis papers that have been made wrong.  It's just textures to edit.

[virgali]

• I don't think anybody reported this here yet but I did ask about it in the podium. My Evil Witch won't make the "lamp thingy". She just keep on stirring the pot for hours and hours and doesn't make it.
• Also the Butler doesn't clean the "petplates"

I have a question about the borked Physiology that Pescado reported. I was too tired to say something about it before but now I understand why my sims maxed out body so quickly. I'm not sure how many simhours it took but I'm pretty sure it wasn't more than 3. What I want to know is will she learn everything else superfast too? I'll go experiment with her sister. All I know is that she maxed out body just by jumping ropes before her sister with the knowledge aspiration perk gained one point in logic I believe from 8 to 9.
In that case I wouldn't mind keeping this borked! lol

[notveryawesome]

Has anyone tried out the butler yet?

I have a vanilla game folder and ordered the butler and after he showed up my sim went to work. I got the notice that the children shouldn't be left home alone. Then the social worker took them. According to the Prima guide the Butler will dismiss the nanny and is supposed to offer child care! 

I have not tried the butler, because I do not own the game yet, but by all accounts he's just a servo that doesn't look like a servo and that can be hired, instead of built. I'm assuming that, like servos, the butlers become part of the 'family' the way servos do. If this didn't happen, then I'd say something's borked. Somebody feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm basically just talking out my arse.

[Mandapotpie]

Also, my second problem, is that one of my sims is learning everything really quickly - like virgali said about body skill, but for all skills. The sim in question is the playable Tara DeBateaux, and I haven't found it with any other sims yet but I've only played with her and like 2 other playables, the rest were my own CAS/born in game sims. It's like she has the smart milk bug, but of course she starts as a teen so it can't be that.

Did you have her study Physiology?

From this thread page 2 Pes says

Here's a MEGABORK: The Physiology study option is apparently HUGELY borked. I was working on updating commskilling, when I noticed they added the +25 IQ "boost" for Physiology in an odd place: At the END of the code block, where it is deallocating the "situational" bonii like Asianland bonii and protein shake. It is then never removed. The exploit: If you learn "Physiology" and then study body, your sim will gain +25% IQ every study loop, and it will stick until the usual suspects reset it. This means you can easily get well over several-thousand-percent learn rate, and since it then affects generic IQ, it will apply to ALL skills. It is simply MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY borked.

So yes it affects all skills

I'm assuming that, like servos, the butlers become part of the 'family' the way servos do.

He didn't join my household and if he was part of the family I especially shouldn't have gotten the warning that they were home alone when the butler was there.

[Alex]

Has anyone tried out the butler yet?

I have a vanilla game folder and ordered the butler and after he showed up my sim went to work. I got the notice that the children shouldn't be left home alone. Then the social worker took them. According to the Prima guide the Butler will dismiss the nanny and is supposed to offer child care! 

ETA: This makes me wonder if the Neighbor child care will work as well. Has anyone had any problems with that?

Paladin mentioned something about EA failing to modify the code that detects child care providers on the lot. As a result, the game thinks there are no adults supervising the children on the lot.

The Butler is an NPC and very similar to Alfred in TS1. He doesn't join your family and works a certain amount of hours everyday.

[IAmTheRad]

Okay, there is a bug with witches losing their sparklies. I have an evil evil witch, with the max blackness they can get, and the sparklies sometimes vanish. I don't even use neutral spells on that sim anymore and that even includes the 'neutral' teleportation spell. What was EAxis thinking making neutral spells make you go closer to neutral alignment? They're the spells that you're most likely to use. Even if you have a spectral cat, calling it out is a NEUTRAL spell, and your evil witch can go closer to neutral witchiness (or good witch)

It's just too stupid to contemplate. I see the neutral spells like utility spells, NOT like 'oh, I'd lose my evil spells if I use them'.

If I wanted to be a neutral sim, I'd study the ways of grey. Not the ways of darkness (or the ways of good).

Seems quality assurance doesn't mean anything to EAxis anymore when it comes to The Sims.

Thank god that Spore isn't in the Sims category. It's been under the eyes of Will Wright all this time, while The Sims lost Will Wright working on it after Livin' Large (he was only a consultant basically after that)

[Mandapotpie]

Paladin mentioned something about EA failing to modify the code that detects child care providers on the lot. As a result, the game thinks there are no adults supervising the children on the lot.

Sorry! I thought I searched here thouroughly to make sure no one else had mentioned it.

[Alex]

Paladin mentioned something about EA failing to modify the code that detects child care providers on the lot. As a result, the game thinks there are no adults supervising the children on the lot.

Sorry! I thought I searched here thouroughly to make sure no one else had mentioned it.

He said it on the BBS. I should have mentioned that!

[Mandapotpie]

He said it on the BBS. I should have mentioned that!

Ahh! That explains it. I never go there because it annoys me and is non-awesome.

[virgali]

Another thing I keep on forgetting to mention is that in the tooltip/library thing for the Dutch version it shows the wrong keys to move things up and down the walls. It shows "^" for up and ":" for down. It says more stuff but I assumed it's all wrong and haven't tried them since.

I honestly do not mind that Physiology thing being borked!

[Katuchan]

Here's the lulz worthy movie:
HERE

Her name is Alicia Wheeler I think she came with this EP because I've never seen her in the hood before. She was a friend my Seth (Warton) brought home.

That's happened to me before, I aged up a child townie to an adult to see what she'd look like. Then she came home on the schoolbus with my sim's kid, and was walking like that. It was most excellent.

Update:  I tried removing all unsupported and/or non-awesome hacks and still cannot see ceilings in live mode. 

I believe you have to be in cameraman mode to see ceilings. Or, at the very least, have your camera set so that it's below the ceiling line. I haven't tested that second theory, though.

I haven't really run into any of my own bugs, except for one minor issue. I moved a CAS family (3 non related adults) into the apartment building with the DeBeauwhatevers in it. Saved, exited to neighborhood, and then moved a Maxis bin family into the same building. As soon as they moved in, they got a pop-up asking them to click a door to rent that apartment. My CAS family never got that pop-up.

Anyway, I'm going to stay away from apartments themselves for a while until everything's fixed. Many thanks and respect to Pescado and everyone else who goes around cleaning up afteer EAxis.

[fway]

Looks as if tenants (who aren't being played) have an OCD with the hobby magazines if left out.

Click

[ShortyBoo]

Are neighbors in other apartments in the same building supposed to be able to just walk in your apartment all the time? Because if it's intended, it's really annoying, especially in small apartments. It gets really crowded. I know you can lock them out, but I don't want everyone locked out all the time, I just want them to knock and wait to be asked in before they barge in and make themselves comfortable. They also seem to think it's ok to just help themselves to my families' newspapers.

[Roux]

Update:  I tried removing all unsupported and/or non-awesome hacks and still cannot see ceilings in live mode. 

I believe you have to be in cameraman mode to see ceilings. Or, at the very least, have your camera set so that it's below the ceiling line. I haven't tested that second theory, though.

Or maybe you didn't toggle the ceiling button? I missed it at first, too. TrepieDark Trepie posted a picture further up this thread.

[virgali]

I did toggle it... I have my d'oh moments but that's just too much! I didn't see them in live mode so I figured maybe green is not good so I toggled them off. I tested this and realised that green is on so I toggled them again and tested the zoom thing it works and also the new xeinling camera angle it works! I just don't see them in live mode. I tried with roofs on and roofs off with walls up, walls down...

I tried everything if I wanna see them I have to zoom in at a particular angle or I don't.