Move-ins broke even more in Pets?

[jsalemi]

Here's the situation -- Florence Delarosa in Bluewater falls in love with a CAS sim living Downtown (CAS YA, actually, who recently graduated and moved into his own house). She proposes engagement, then move-in.  He does, but only comes with his available cash (around 5k), not his total worth, which should be about 25k.  When I checked his old house, everything he owned is still there -- car, furniture, even his career reward. It wasn't emptied out like in the past.

I'm not using Inge's 'stay things' bush, nor any move-in fixes.  I'm wondering if maybe in trying to fix the cross-hood lottery problem, EA went too far the other way?  I haven't had a same-hood move-in since installing Pets, so I'd be curious if anyone else has hit this (or not hit it in same-hood moves).

[Sleepycat]

a couple times (ages ago) after having a sim move in with another sim (never noticed if the money amount was less then it should have been) I happened to enter the previously owned Lot and found everything still there - including the sim! couldn't play him/her though.

game didn't recognise anyone as living there and I was able to move a new sim into that Lot, it was empty when the new sim moved in.

[miros]

I had the same situation a long time ago... a Sim proposed to another Sim, and all her stuff and herself were still in the old house when I went in to redecorate for the next resident!  I had to have the new owner buy the place (stuff stayed) then redecorate for her.

[Tyraa Rane]

I had a similar issue a few months back (with just OFB, no Pets)--a family moved into a vacated house to find the last inhabitants' stuff still there. I think it might have been because the last family moved out via the "Propose ... Move In" interaction and not the neighborhood screen, though.

[jsalemi]

This is the first time I've had this happen.  I'll have to see if it was a one-time glitch, or if it was a cross-sub-hood thing.

[syberspunk]

I can verify that this bug indeed exists, at least in my own testing. In a vanilla, clean Pleasantview (thanks to another computer meltdown - don't worry, I still have my main game intact so far, but I decided to clean out my testing hood) I did a couple of tests:

In the main 'hood of Pleasantview, I did move in tests with Don Lothario and found that he brings all of his household assets with him to the Burb household. When I tried to move in Malcolm Landgrabb VI from Bluewater Village, he only brought 28k instead of his 100k (I forget the exact numbers).

I then tried to test things from the opposite end and using the Delarosa household, I moved in Malcolm Landgrabb and he brought his entire household funds. But if I moved in Don Lothario, he brought in like a measily few hundred bucks.

There is definitely something buggy goin on here, and hard as I tried, I could not figure out a way to fix this. I will try pm'ing pinhead and jase to see if they would be willing to take a look at it. I suspect that it may have something to do specifically with how the game treats family assets. The code appears to depend on the family household number, and uses a variable $$FamilyAssets:0 to represent the value of the household funds. For some reason, if the target sim you are trying to move in comes from a different neighborhood, this number is reduced. I did all of this testing without saving... so I did not confirm whether the house/lot that the target sim/family moved out of retains all it's furniture and lot worth (I also do not use the 'stay things' shrub hack). But if this is true... perhaps this was the 'best' solution Maxis EA could come up with? *shrugs* This only appears to be a problem if the target sim is a playable sim. Townies and downtownies don't seem to have this problem.

Ste

[J. M. Pescado]

My guess is that because they live in other neighborhoods, the game cannot calculate their lot stats. The workaround would be to disallow move-ins from people living in other neighborhoods.

[syberspunk]

I thought that might be the case or somewhat related to it at least. I was wondering if you (or anyone for that matter) knew off hand whether these values might be stored somewhere... like possibly on a token that either the sim has or their lot has. And if so, could it be easily accessed somehow? Like, can I go from sim to sim household/family number, to the lot number/id or whatever that they live on, and then get the lots value/worth?

Ste

[jase]

JMP has it right.  For whatever technical reasons, the game cannot correctly assess or alter the assets of a lot that is not in the current neighborhood.  In the past, random garbage amounts were awarded for cross-neighborhood move-ins resulting in millions of Simoleans in your pocket (the lottery move-in bug).  Now the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction (or it may be that nothing is fixed at all and the random garbage memory that is read is now consistently closer to 0 instead of a billion   I just tried moving a sim from Pleasantville to Downtown, and with a $120,000 net worth, and they moved in with one Simolean.

Normally, when you propose Move In to a sim not under your control and who is in your current neighborhood (such as a Townie or NPC), you are awarded 10% of their cash value (assets not being a factor for Townies and NPC's).  I believe Maxis probably did this to disuade players from bloating their wallets quickly by moving the entire city into their home and recycling them back onto the streets.  In either event, this logic fails when the move-in crosses a neighborhood boundary.  My no lottery move-in hack fixes the zany values that get computed in these instances so that 10% is always awarded regardless of where the sim originates.  But it too is unable to alter the assets of the remote neighborhood.  There just isn't a facility for doing this.

This failed logic was introduced in Uni and has bugged the product ever since.  Add to that the frackin' pregnant pet move-in bug, and you start to realize Pets is probably the most broken expansion to date.

J

PS. I updated my no-lottery-move-in fix for those who want it.  It's not "the solution" but its "a solution".  Feel free to edit this (but please do not redistribute) to award whatever % you want if you want more than the default 10%.

[J. M. Pescado]

I think what's happening now is that as of OFB, things became partially visible, and when a move-in occurs, it is not able to correctly extract the value of the lot, so you probably end up with the just the treasury. I thought I had something in my personal collection that messed with this, but I can't seem to find it, never released it, and forgot what I did.

[jsalemi]

So I guess the solution/work-around is to have a small empty lot in every hood and sub-hood, move the sim out to the sim bin, and then into the empty lot in the hood where the sim that's going to invite him/her to move in lives.  I guess that would get around the problem, since its getting tougher to keep sims from living in different sub-hoods as the main hood matures and gets more crowded.

[LynnMar]

I can't move anybody in any of my houses since Pets,  not even a townie.   I get a pop-up message that says,  "your pet is pregnant and you will have to wait until they give birth. ". 

The family did not have any pets or the townie.   

  Mine is probably from a hack, but the move in is definately buggy. 

[Sleepycat]

I can't move anybody in any of my houses since Pets,  not even a townie.   I get a pop-up message that says,  "your pet is pregnant and you will have to wait until they give birth. ". 

The family did not have any pets or the townie.   

  Mine is probably from a hack, but the move in is definately buggy. 

try syberspunks moveinfix (it covers that pregnant pet issue)
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=6631.0
 

[jase]

I think what's happening now is that as of OFB, things became partially visible, and when a move-in occurs, it is not able to correctly extract the value of the lot, so you probably end up with the just the treasury. I thought I had something in my personal collection that messed with this, but I can't seem to find it, never released it, and forgot what I did.

This bug actually dates all the way back to University (and is reproducible there with the right hacks).  The inability to query and/or manipulate cash assets across neighborhood lines has been there from the beginning (it's a problem rooted in the executable and afflicts GSC 0x32 specifically - i think its just a fundamental design flaw of Sims 2 neighborhoods).  Nobody noticed the bug in Uni, because nobody actively moved sims between neighborhoods then.  Nightlife was the first expansion to really set this zany bug in motion as people started shuffling sims between Downtown and the regular neighborhood and started realizing their coffers were becoming instantly plump-full of millions of Simoleans.  OFB only made it worse.  Pets seems to have the same problem, with just the opposite effect (ridiculously small amounts of move-in cash).

Anyway, there's yet another update to the update of the move-in fix:

http://box156.bluehost.com/~aestudi1/forums/inteenimater/viewtopic.php?t=54

The new version now gives the move-in sim "a fair percentage" of the household cash instead of the rather arbitrary 10% that Maxis awards.

J

[Andygal]

I was wondering where that hack was!

*redownloads*

[Menaceman]

Hi, I'm new here.
Would a possible work around be to place all belongings of great value and/or importance (ie aspiration rewards) belonging to the movee into the movees inventory before you get the invitor to initiate the move? That way can they flog their stuff when they get to the new lot to make up the value they should take with them?

[jsalemi]

Sure, that would work, so long as you remember to load up their inventory before you do the big move.   Unfortunately, that doesn't account for the sale value of the lot and house.

Or you can just do what I did and cheat them the value of what they should have brought with them anyway.