Stupid stairs corrupting!

[Emma]

Sometimes you also have to remove a wall or a balustrade.

Yes, and once the stairs are placed you can put the wall back

[ZephyrZodiac]

Just so darn fiddly!   And I don't know about you, but it always annoys me when you put a wallpaper on the walls, that it doesn't go where the stairs are!  You have to remember to do it separately - and if you don't, the room score for the hall and stairs goes WAY down!

[Emma]

Haha yep-I always forget

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, so do the Maxis builders!

[Emma]

Do they? Which houses have they screwed up then? I never play in their houses, and have deleted them all.

[ZephyrZodiac]

One of the Uni houses is like that, can't remember the name though.  I don't delete a lot of them, I just redesign them - I find it satisfying to make a Maxis house liveable!  But some I just find impossible!

[ThyGuy]

*Cough* summerdreamhouse *cough*

[Inge]

VIOLA, back to playing.

Well yes, rather one of those than a screechy violin any day.  I can't stand them, especially when there are about 50 of them going garrity when a movie's getting to the exciting bit.

[ZephyrZodiac]

*Cough* summerdreamhouse *cough*

Don' get me going about the Summerdream House!  Not to mention Capp Manor!  And the house next door to the Summerdream House where you can't replace the floor when you move the darn stairs!!!!!

VIOLA, back to playing.

Well yes, rather one of those than a screechy violin any day.  I can't stand them, especially when there are about 50 of them going garrity when a movie's getting to the exciting bit.

Ooh, Inge!  You never make typos?

[Renatus]

There's a three-story house that comes with the game in the bin - it's not the farm house although I want to call it that - that I found was impossible to replace the uppermost set of stairs. I fiddled endlessly with the roof, floors, and walls, and finally came to the conclusion I was better off sticking to the ugly cheap wood modular stairs, or even better, building my own damned house.

The only prebuilt bin house I play with anymore is the yellow victorian, which I have an inordinate fondness for. It's cramped and the layout isn't that great, but for some reason I've been really attached to it ever since I first played a family in it.

[agcons]

Speaking of violas, how do you tell if one is out of tune?  The bow is moving (har-de-har).

I've remodelled the Maxis houses so much that they're hardly recognisable, and for similar reasons:  unpleasing layouts.  The Craftsman house that came with the original game might be the one Renatus is talking about; the stairs to the attic were built with the moveobjects cheat.  At least, that was the only way I could place the stairs I wanted to use. 

[ZephyrZodiac]

I quite like that house, once it's had a few modifications!  But why this obsession they seem to have with long thin bathrooms stuck in the middle of the living room?

I quite often use the European Townhouse too, but again I change it a lot!  But it's a good house for making changes to as the family grows.

[Tgdrysix]

I totally delete all the stairs in my sims multi-level homes and put in elevators....works great!!!! tgdrysix

[resin]

Speaking of violas, how do you tell if one is out of tune?  The bow is moving (har-de-har).

How can you tell if the concert stage is level?
The violist is drooling out of BOTH sides of his mouth.


A man walks into a club and sees a beautiful woman in a black concert dress at the bar. "Of course", he thinks to himself, "this place is across the street from the city symphony hall." Figuring he has the perfect line, he sits down next to her and says, "Excuse me, I see you just came from the symphony. I know a great viola joke!" The woman glares at him and responds in an icy voice, "I AM a violist."
"Oh...okay, that's fine," the man replies, "I'll tell it VERY...SLOWLY..."

[RainbowTigress]

What do a SCUD missile and a viola player have in common?

They're both offensive and inaccurate.

[agcons]

I quite like that house, once it's had a few modifications!  But why this obsession they seem to have with long thin bathrooms stuck in the middle of the living room?

I like it too; I think it's the best of the supplied houses.  I did make several changes, including relocating the bathroom and finishing the attic properly.  I don't like the bathroom slot in the living area either:  it's a home with some aspirations to graciousness, not bachelor apartment.

[Ancient Sim]

I think I had the same problem as you yesterday.  I noticed at just before midnight that the maid's van was still outside the dorm I was playing.  When I checked in Merola's mirror to see where the maid was, I found him right at the top of the dorm in the vanishing room, together with half-a-dozen dormies, a couple of visitors and a cow mascot.  There were also two visiting SS members pacing up and down near the stairs, one of them with the icon "Leave" and most of his stats almost fully red.  I tried everything, including the burnator thingy, but nothing worked.  When I teleported one of my Sims up and right-clicked on the stairs then told him to go down, he went down with no problem, so there was NOTHING blocking those stairs.  However, all the Sims stuck upstairs were convinced there was.  In the end, the only way I could sort it was to delete the stairs and replace them. 

There were funny aspects to this.  When the maid finally went downstairs, he started cleaning again, and at 2.30 am declared everything was clean (it wasn't) and he was leaving!  On top of that, one of the visiting dormies never made it to the portal and collapsed with no energy right across the path.  This meant that the dorm cook got stuck (see pic) and couldn't leave.  He just kept moving his head and upper torso backwards and forwards continuously in a rocking motion (not also the maid's van behind him!).  The game spawned a new one at 4 am (by which time quite a few dormies were almost dead of starvation), but I teleported her off the lot because I didn't want a fourth dorm cook.  I also got rid of the stuck original cook, assuming he'd come back, but he didn't, so I had to buy a new oven to get him back. 

The problem I had with the stairs is very similar to the problem I had some time ago in my original Pleasantview when something that didn't exist was blocking the fridge.  I know for a fact there was nothing blocking those stairs, so all I can think of was that someone had been teleported out mid-flight or something and it had corrupted them. 

[ZephyrZodiac]

If you have the visitor zapper, you can just ban them all from the lost, the dormies would reappear, i would imagine through the front door.

[Ancient Sim]

Oh I know I could have teleported them all out, but then I'd not have been able to watch them suffer.  This is dormies and a cow mascot we are talking about.  I did teleport out the SS guy who was nearly dead - he started sobbing his heart out and ... well, he IS rather good-looking ...

[Dark Trepie]

I haven't run into stuck stairs untill recently, so I thought it was a NL problem.  And I've only had them happen in dorms.  So I figured that it was the same thing that caused the chairs to get stuck:  High traffic areas.

It only gives me another reason to perfer smaller, single story dorms.

I used the Stuck Object Remover on the tile at the top of one of these stairs and the entire staircase went away.  I ended up just moving my sims out of that dorm and into another.

There's a three-story house that comes with the game in the bin - it's not the farm house although I want to call it that - that I found was impossible to replace the uppermost set of stairs. I fiddled endlessly with the roof, floors, and walls, and finally came to the conclusion I was better off sticking to the ugly cheap wood modular stairs, or even better, building my own damned house.

Are you talking about Craftsman's Pride?  I rather like that house.  Played it quite a bit.  But I haven't played it lately since the need for driveways in NL.  Prehaps I should start using street parking.

[Grater]

I havn't used normal stairs since I discovered that modular stairs could be used indoors like normal stairs. For some reason this wasn't obvious to me until I saw it done in on-line tutorials (sometime around getting TS2U).

[ZephyrZodiac]

Guess you never played Pleasantview!  All the lofts have them!

[Grater]

Correct. The only pre-made buildings I've played in are the university and downtown ones. In the original game I quickly (and possibly erroneously) concluded all the houses were designed with maximum inefficiency in mind - traffic jams and such (and that being in the bad old days of hissy fits for route blocking). And besides, building houses is 63.2% of the fun.

I'd also avoid 2 story houses like the plauge (but slightly fond of basements). And, I confess, build borderline "pyramid roof" houses .
It was actually with the modular stairs that I got more interested in advanced dwelling design.

[Kochanski]

I used to loathe 2 storey or more houses until I discovered the 'Ascension Elevator Stairs' made by Targa over at MTS. They take up only one tile space and I have very few problems with them. Except of course trying to remove the invisible ones!

Every now and again some stupid sim will stand and play kicky bag on them and then I have to move them on, but it's a small price to pay for going upstairs rapidly!

[J. M. Pescado]

Correct. The only pre-made buildings I've played in are the university and downtown ones. In the original game I quickly (and possibly erroneously) concluded all the houses were designed with maximum inefficiency in mind - traffic jams and such (and that being in the bad old days of hissy fits for route blocking). And besides, building houses is 63.2% of the fun.

It's erroneous to imply that pre-made buildings were maximized for anything. That implies a process of optimization, or perverse anti-optimization (pessimization?), that Maxians simply don't do. Undoubtedly, the houses were designed by the janitorial staff after hours, which is why they look nice but are nearly completely unplayable: The janitors don't actually play the game. There is a persistent rumor that they also double as the beta testers.