Holy...crap!

[RainbowTigress]

Are you crazy??.... To fix the most pleasant glitch of the game?....

Well, you don't have to install the fix if you don't want to.

[dizzy]

Interesting fix. I wonder if the Maxoids have seen this.

[jase]

The GSC call that Maxis uses to extract a % of the assets from a remote lot fails if the remote lot is not in the same neighboorhood as the active lot.  There's no way to directly see if the call succeeded or failed here either.  Unfortunately, Maxis never initializes the temporaries (Temp 3 & 4) to anything prior to making this call (T[3,4] holds the move-in $).    Thus, if the call fails silently (as it will if you move part of a household across a neighborhood boundary), you are left with whatever junk values happen to be loafing around inside Temp 3 & 4.  And that is where the mega-million jackpot comes from.

However, I discovered that when you move the entire household, everything works as you would expect.  And the reason for that is because a different GSC call is used in this case: the combine household assets GSC call.  It does behave as you would expect across neighborhood boundaries...so by using this call instead in the partial-move in case and doing a little rejiggering of the numbers we get the result that we ultimately need (albeit what some may not necessarily want - lol).  Sort of a round-about backdoor calculation that yields the same value.

J

[witch]

Are you crazy??.... To fix the most pleasant glitch of the game?....

Well, you don't have to install the fix if you don't want to.

Pleasant glitch?!? My sims have to work for their money! There has to be some challenge in the game. Excess money gets banked with my banker sim. Thankfully I've not had one of those ginormous donations. I've installed the fix.

[Karen]

The GSC call that Maxis uses to extract a % of the assets from a remote lot fails if the remote lot is not in the same neighboorhood as the active lot.  There's no way to directly see if the call succeeded or failed here either.  Unfortunately, Maxis never initializes the temporaries (Temp 3 & 4) to anything prior to making this call (T[3,4] holds the move-in $).    Thus, if the call fails silently (as it will if you move part of a household across a neighborhood boundary), you are left with whatever junk values happen to be loafing around inside Temp 3 & 4.  And that is where the mega-million jackpot comes from.

Interesting....That may explain why it happened to me.  I moved Juliette from Veronaville into Pleasantview.  (This was way before anybody mentioned that cross-neighborhood moves were a Very Bad Thing.)  She got married, had 3 kids, and died of old age.  When her youngest daugher Nicole was an elder, still living in the same house that she grew up in (i.e. the house that had been moved from Veronaville), she had a fling with Don Lothario.  They fell in love, he moved in with her, and the "lottery bug" brought in $3.3 million.  This was a full 3 generations after the original cross-neighborhood move.  I had a bunch of Sims in that family grow up and move out without problems, but I believe it was the first time anybody had moved *into* that house.  So it definitely doesn't have to happen immediately.

Karen

[jase]

It probably happened to you on both occassions.  Whether you really "notice" this bug or not depends on what junk data happens to be lying around at the time of move.  There are 2 values that represent how much money your sims have.  The first is the # of simoleans x 10,000.  The second is the remainder (some value between 0 and 9,999).  If the first value is zero, nothing will seem all that amiss.  But if even a modest sized value appears in the first figure, you'll see some fairly extraordinary amounts.  In theory, your sim could end up with something just south of 164 million simoleans.  That's quite a jackpot

[Dark Trepie]

I had the Singles living in Downtown.  And Ajay there is obviously living in Strangetown.  So I guess that's technically a cross neighborhood move.

I think I'll download that patch.  Having a giant fortune like that isn't fun unless you made it yourself by working.

[dizzy]

Okay, so Downtown -> Normal hood can cause the GSC glitch as well? I wonder if this glitch occurs between subneighborhoods in Uni.

[jase]

Yes and yes.  In fact I first encountered the bug back in University when I was implementing support for university families for the InTeenimater.  University and Downtown can be considered "neighborhoods within neighborhoods" and partial-houshold move-in's between them (and/or the primary neighborhood) subjects you to this bug.

[Zeljka]

Actually, mine happened using the add to household feature of the InSiminator, original game only.
I like my Sims to earn their money too, so I moved her in with the townie who had a home and then used the Teleporter Shrub to put her back in her parents' home (without the money) when there was room.
Perhaps it's an InSiminator glitch? I don't recall it happening when I moved townies in the normal way.

[Motoki]

Perhaps it's an InSiminator glitch? I don't recall it happening when I moved townies in the normal way.

It's definitely not exclusive to the Insimenator, but the one common thing here among the reports seems to be that most people are saying they used some sort of cheat or otherwise played around with the files to move in a sim that you're normally not supposed to be able to move in, at least not in the way they were moved in.

[Zeljka]

I think you're on to something there,
I've moved in the occasional townie/NPC for various Challenges and have only had the windfall when snatching them in a 'cheating' way. I just use PE to get rid of the extra money, or have them donate it to the 'Jean Pool' in each neighbourhood (who is simply there for the purpose of creating a pretty adoption pool and doesn't matter)
I suppose messing with parts of the game not meant to be messed with can affect the distribution of the townies' apparent endless wealth. (think of the money you'd save by being homeless and filling your hunger, social and other needs in others' homes)

[Swiftgold]

This just happened to me last night. I had four adults and a child living in a house, and then I had one of the adults take the child and move out - I was going to have it be two of the adults and didn't click right. Ooops, well, I figured I'd have them ask her to move in after they moved.

So I moved them into the House of Fallen Trees downtown, because he was a new vampire and I didn't feel like messing with creating a basement or anything. Teleported over the other adult and had him ask her to move in - she brought something like 6,000,000 simoleons. She was born in-game, not a townie, and all they had had at their old house was something like 200,000 at the most So it was only "cross-neighborhood" in this case if you count the fact it was going from the main neighborhood to its attached downtown. Well, now they have a fortune to go with the vampire house and the vampire in the basement. *snerk*