More horrors from Mod The Sims 2:

Green Building by Matheus.

I think it's supposed to be a block of flats/apartments rather than a single family home, but it's just so ugly. It looks like it's made out of Lego or Stickle Bricks, but it's not that cool.

Does anyone else get pissed off with houses that are billed as from some historical period, but don't actually resemble houses from that period very much? This "medieval" house, billed as a "genuine slice of Old Europe sitting ready for the true renaissance family" is a fine example of that. It's not a particularly stupidass house - it seems perfectly playable, although the decor is not to my taste. But the windows, the outdoor stairs, the open balcony area halfway up the house, the convenient positioning of the driveway - none of these things are at all period. It takes more than covering the outer walls in stone to make a house medieval.

I must also confess an unrelenting hatred of most "A frame" houses. Take this example, which I can't actually nominate as it was posted on 3rd June. My problems with them are that firstly they look really weird, and secondly there's a whole load of floor area that's inaccessible to the sims and their furniture, unless you use move_objects on.

And one more entry: Moi's Slideur002 by niol. Again, tons of the floor area is inaccessible. The stairs waste even more floor area. And it's perfect for voyeurs.

But I've saved the best 'til last with the main screenshot:

Yes, the roof has fallen off the house, and the flat area that remains has sprouted little rooflets, like crystals. How very weird.

Are they actually 10 different houses, as billed? To me it looks like a mere 4 different houses, with the 10 different colour schemes. Or possibly 9, as there are two in blood red.

The rooms look unbelievably small in the screenshot - 2 x 4 or something like that? You wouldn't even be able to get a double bed in there and expect the sims to be able to use it. That's pretty stupid.

I'm guessing it's another cheapass way of making Neighbourhood decorations - the castle is supposed to be plonked down for show in the Neighbourhood view, but you're not actually supposed to try to have sims living in it.

I thought you said they were beautiful to look at?

Who's judging this month's monstrosities, apart from Emma?

Better make sure it doesn't have any garlic in it. Pescado hiss at garlic.

This Challenge - or rather, the version sagana found - is absolutely made for Ethiopian! The more sims you have in the house, the crazier it becomes - either you leave them with Macrotastics running and just check their Hunger & Bladder status, or you attempt to micromanage everything and hit Pause every 10 seconds to check what idiocy the dear sims may be up to. Guess which technique I chose?

Combining it with Email could be interesting - it's rather hard to build multi-levelled houses without walls. I suppose you could add the walls to the first floor, then put the second floor tiles down, then remove all but the occasional segment of wall from the lower floor (individual wall segments are allowed, it's contiguous walls that are forbidden) - but even that may count as cheating for the purpose of Email. Rather better would be to use pillars, columns or arches to build legitimately on the second floor.

Allergy to "everything" - oh man! *lol*. Go for it, heaven knows my real life is annoying enough at times. What will you do, make me randomly collapse vomiting if I eat something containing dairy products, or give me fits of sneezing if I do gardening?

So far my Asylum Challenge is going to hell in a handbasket, principally because I was an idiot earlier today. Although the official rules do not say "No quitting without saving & reloading if something you don't like happens", that's how I play Challenges, as otherwise it's just too easy. Today's fire - the second since the Challenge started - was my own fault for not noticing that bloody Goopy had put pork chops into the oven before I walled off the kitchen to stop the sims going in there five times a day. In my defence, I had clicked on the oven with my controllable sim, but had only got the options "Make..." and "Make Many...", nothing about "Get Pork Chops" (it seems you have to hit exactly the right pixel on the screen to get that to come up). Goopy started the first fire too, and this despite him having acquired at least two Cooking points in a Yummy Channel Marathon (tricky to arrange without Macrotastics, as my controllable sim has entirely the wrong personality to want to watch TV).

Honestly, it's terrifying how much sims will over-eat given only Maxis free will and unlimited access to the fridge - as well as the sim who started the Challenge fat (Mickey Dosser, from La Fiesta Tech's fraternity), Dina Caliente and Andrezj Centowski (cow mascot) are now waddling around. It will not surprise anyone who's learned about Efficient Sim personalities that 5 of my 8 inmates have less than 2 Active points. It has surprised me how much the sims seem to prefer fish fights to using the Fun-building items in the house - so far I've seen the two Active sims using the chessboard autonomously, and Goopy using the easel, but apart from that it's TV or fish fighting. No one has used the exercise equipment at all.

I've cloned my Strangetown for the purpose of strange Challenges that might break the game. (It was pretty easy using the Batch Renamer that JadeElliot, I think, posted a link to here a while ago.) Depending on how long this takes to play & how much time I have, I may make an Asylum that is entirely... well, that would be telling .

And an entry:
The Most Baller Thing On Sim TV Cribs by SimPimpette22.


This house features 17 bathrooms + 1 "public" bathroom, yet only 6 bedrooms. The creator writes:
Fully Funished, My house cost me 2.1 million bucks...I'm not sure of the price unfurnished (which unfortunately this house is when downloaded)...

REMEMBER...If it doesn't cost over 2 million....its just not baller

The house is so unplayably big that you can't even see all the details on this really zoomed-out screenshot:


When downloaders quite rightly pointed out it would take "forever" to furnish the house, and asked why she didn't upload the version with all the furniture, she replied:
Yea...so my house doesnt come furnished because i didnt feel like putting all those links...

Serious points for style there, kid. Not.

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Reading the comments, simfanatic3 wrote: Ok I admit you did a good job on this house....but you know our house battle isn't over yet, cuzzo. Just wait till i upload my mansion hehe. House... battle? So then I went to his profile and found enormous monstrosities galore, of which my favourite is Bill Gate's House(sic).

The outside is... bland.



The inside is dizzying. (Scroll down the MTS2 post for the part with "Foyer" and try not to fall over as you scroll through the maze of twisty turny windows, all alike.)

The "Lowel Level" kitchen is vile (why do people make such enormous kitchens then fill more than half of the worktops with crap so it's less usable than a kitchen with a quarter of the floor area?), while the "Upper Level" kitchen is just bland.

The fish eye camera angles of the dining room, office and "Party room" really make it, imo.

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Also by simfanatic3, Paris Hilton Home. Apparently based on Paris Hilton's actual home, although I wonder why anyone would spend n million dollars on something quite so bland:

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And speaking of bland: Neutral Nonsense by courtney176. I believe this was created as a joke rather than a serious upload, but it's amusingly bad. The creator writes: Since my first lot went down rather well, I went and uploaded this "colorful" lot. Neutral Nonsense is a 3x3, §136, 930 residential house modeled almost completely in...BEIGE!


Mmm, tasty.

I'm intrigued by the swimming pool in the Windows Windows Windows house, partly because it seems to have a wall - or tombstones- instead of windows; but mostly because it doesn't seem to have an edge for the sims to get in and out. Does it even have a pool ladder? Or does it exist solely to kill sims?

LOL!

He did say "This unusual house was originally created for creating a series of sim-movies (to be aired on MTV) concerning the adventures of Chengwin and Chunk." So it's not just insanity.

I think the cock house is awesome! Fitting the rooms into the, er, ballsack is interesting. Just wish it wasn't so blatant - I don't like to play with mods/items that'd make me embarrassed if someone saw my laptop screen on the train. Any chance of revising it into a nice, family-friendly snail shape?  

The spiky "goth" furniture is probably made with rubber or soft plastic spikes. You can buy bags, boxes and cigarette lighters covered in the stuff. There's a particular polymer that you mix up as monomer with the dye, then shape it while it sets. Can't remember what it's called, though (brain fried from the huge pile of marking in front of me).

The car with teeth(?) will give me nightmares.

And the topic lurches out of its grave, zombie-like, shuffling its feet and groaning...

I agree. Been reading a bunch of stories today and while the multiple sim deaths were quite amusing, I think I can see loopholes in the rules for almost everything that caused them. I came up with an "interesting" modification of my own, so now I need to decide whether to go with your harder rules or leave it as it is with my evil twist . Or possibly combine your harder rules with my evil twist, but that could be messy.

Out of interest, those of you who've been doing the Challenge: what hacks have you been playing with? I know the rules say Cheats/Hacks – not allowed, but I really don't want my game exploding in a big fiery ball visible from space, so there's no way I'd remove Critical Fixes or the Lot Debugger. Also, I see no point in removing hacks which are entirely irrelevant for the challenge, e.g. the various business fixes. I intend to remove only those hacks which actually modify sims' freewill behaviour.

FFS hacks which modify freewill behaviour: antifoodnap, firemod & noeatcrap definitely need to be removed. I'm not sure about Macrotastics, dontwaveatme and lesswhiny - you wouldn't be allowed to use Macrotastics as it'd be cheating, but I don't know if it needs to be removed as long as you can withstand the urge to use it. As for dontwaveatme and lesswhiny, I think the point of the challenge is to have fun and laugh at the stupid sims, not get so frustrated you throw your computer out the window and have to buy a new one.

TwoJeffs hacks which modify freewill behaviour: Always Flush Toilets, Food Already Available Fix, NL No Indoors Kicky Bag Control Freak (*sob*!), No Autonomous Napping. I'm not sure about No Whining at Missing Objects or Visitor Snacking Fix - as you guessed, I have issues with sims whining.

Crammyboy hacks which modify freewill behaviour: No Force Watch Fight. Not sure if that needs removing.

Inge and syberspunk hacks which need removing: none. Although I have several of Inge's No Autonomy hacks, they're irrelevant for the challenge (e.g. No Autonomous Video Games, when computers aren't allowed to the inmates of the Asylum).

I suppose I should probably also remove the Insimenator, as it's such a big hack it's bound to conflict with something. Although it does have a handy "Make Unselectable" feature... hmmm.

Hehehe... oh, the plotting .

I always wonder if she has a special hacked version of BodyShop. It annoys the hell out of me that it defaults to females when you Create New Project. I'd like to hope the stupid thing would "remember" that the last few things I made were all for males, and I might want to continue with more of the same.

So, I know the contest is over, but I found these utterly hideous outfits yesterday and thought you should see them anyway. They're all by Parisienne at TSR, who has also made some quite tasteful things. Click the image to go to the download.

This first one would have been disqualified from the contest for being swimwear, but it doesn't seem very family-friendly. Has been up since May 31, 2004.


Now for a teenage ass hanging out of oh-so-short skirt. Apparently categorised as Everyday though several downloaders have complained that it showed up in swimwear. On TSR since Jun 1, 2004.


Finally, this... delightful... creation is apparently Formal wear. I think that says it all.

I think I'd like to nominate the Medical Set by JohnBrehaut1. Amazingly, this atrocity is a Featured upload which "showcases the best talent and creativity available on MTS2 and in the community" (!).

Granted, the  hospital bed and chair aren't too bad. The operating theatre is blocky, but recognisable. The shape of the oxygen cylinder is ok, even if its texturing is awful. But the heart rate monitor and check-up bed are boxes, the medicine fridge is unrecognisable, and the "pile of ash" and "body bag" in the morgue make me want to commit murder.

The morgue, for your viewing "pleasure":

Everyone who can't mesh objects feel free to stop looking now .

I'm looking for someone to make me some keytars for a Sims music video. A keytar is a keyboard that can be strapped on to the musician like a guitar. This allows the musician to walk around while playing the keyboard, something that is not currently possible in Sims 2 as all keyboards must be played sitting down.

I imagine "all" you'd need to do is remesh the guitar - or possibly the bass - that's already in the game. It doesn't matter about the sound, as I'll be videoing with the game sound turned off.

I'm pretty sure this is the keytar that the real-life band use, though I can get you a bunch more pictures.

So - anyone want to take it on? I'm looking for a reasonably quick turnaround, like within a month. You will win a very prominent credit in the video, and probably free CDs or other merchandise from the band if you care for that type of music.

I have that exact problem too. You mean with the hairstyle on the alien sim in this picture?


The fringe (bangs) has filled in randomly since I've had the game. Don't have a picture of it going wrong, because the in-game camera fixes it if I try to take a photo of it. (In fact, I often take photos that I'll later throw away just to have the hair reset itself.) I'd have to remember to take a screenshot to show what it looks like in-game. It looks to me like the alpha slips sometimes, but I don't understand why that would happen with a Maxis hairstyle. It's most common when I've been playing for a while in a single session, making me wonder if it's to do with some kind of memory thing.

I've had that hairstyle on children, teens, young adults and adults, and had the same problem with all of them. I have all the EPs up to OFB.

And I just checked. I have an NVidia GeForce Go 6200. Hrm.

It'll take a few days for everyone who wants to be involved to sort themselves out. Not everyone comes here multiple times a day .

I do hope the titles will be gender-modified for the standard binary genders.

Out of interest, do these numbers apply across the whole Neighbourhood, or just across a sub-Neighbourhood? It could be argued that Strangetown and its Downtown are separate constituencies, so you could have a sim elected as Congresscritter for Strangetown without affecting the availability of the job in its Downtown...

(This would be a nifty addition to the hack, if not already there. And should be easy for the man who wrote Local Walkbys! )

Wow! I've been wanting this for ages! Sadly, while I have omgzPets (Richard bought it for me for Christmas in a panic that he hadn't got me enough presents ), I won't be installing it until after I've played with OFB for a while. So I won't be able to help you with the initial testing.

The thing I would REALLY like to see is probably impossible with the current Maxian code, but I'll tell you about it anyway:
Any career available up to e.g. level 4, but for certain careers, promotions are only possible past level 4 if you've graduated in a relevant discipline. So a non-graduate sim could enter the Medicine career and work as an EMT or a Nurse, but never be promoted to Doctor.

To make that work without sheep bleating that their sims didn't go to Uni so they're stuck with "crappy" jobs, you'd need a Night School hack, so that sims who chose not to go to University after being teenagers could still study on the computer and unlock some of the later levels of their career. Even then, it would be impossible to get to the top of some careers - because it's very difficult to become a university lecturer without a degree of your own (e.g. Scholar & Theorist, Science track).

Also, I really think you should reverse the Associated degrees for Medicine and Military:

I can just about see History being linked with Natural Scientist (geology? hmmm), but Literature for Medicine?! Psychology seems much more useful for Medicine than Literature is!

I officially finished the Ethiopian Challenge around 21:30 on Monday 13th November 2006. I'm sure Pescado will insist that I'm not awesome despite finishing the Challenge, because it took me something like 6 months of playing to complete it, rather than his couple of days. Oh well .

My final score was, by the way, a very respectable +1. No sims Grew Up Badly. However, not all sims achieved their LifeTime Wants (damn Family sims!). I got caught short because Profoundly Tormented, my Generation 1 sim, decided to die at the end of his 73th day instead of at the end of his 80th day. He most definitely did die of Old Age, however, as many people in the Neighbourhood benefitted from his insurance policy. And it was impossible for all sims to maximise all skills because when the Challenge ended, two sims were still toddlers.

All my Ethiopian Challenge stories are up on my sim page:

Tormented Family 1: Extreme Challenge Time!

Tormented Family 2: No Food and a Baby!

Tormented Family 3 :All Ur Skillz R Belong 2 XT!

Tormented Family 4: Profoundly Gets His Man!

Tormented Family 5: Twins R Not So Cute!

Tormented Family 6: Teenage Trials

and now, NEW!! Tormented Family 7: A Very Nice Relationship. Faithfully Oxfam describes his courtship of Very Tormented.

Chapter 8 will show Unearthly's new family, and Chapter 9 will finish Very's story and the Challenge. Now, it's collating the photos and writing the story that's taking the time, rather than the Simming . Hope to have it all up within the week so I can FINALLY install OFB. I've also put together a Best-Of featuring my favourite photos, many of which didn't make it into the main story for some reason.

Please read & rate .

All Pescados Suck  .

It seems that the restaurantbarfix dated 15 july 2006 from the NL version of moreawesomethanyou.zip makes a community lot of mine crash to desktop, repeatedly. I'm running Nightlife + NL Patch 2. It is only the restaurantbarfix that's the problem - with it removed and all other custom content & hacks intact, the lot is playable. And yes - the lot is a restaurant.

After a lot of wasted time and red herrings (6 hours today, and I'm not even sure how long yesterday), I have found the culprit for my lot crashing. It is:
Pescado's restaurantbarfix.package, dated 15 July 2006.

I spent several hours trying to find/fix blue flashing recolours, missing/broken meshes, orphaned meshes and GUID conflicts; but I've sorted out all of those and the lot still crashes. If the restaurantbarfix is in Downloads, the lot almost loads - it gets right to the end of the loading "blobs" across the top of the screen, the lot sounds start up, then I get the popup window about the application needing to terminate. I'm running Nightlife + NL Patch 2.

Logs posted here Sims2Exception 2006.08.22 23.30.46.txt & Sims2Exception 2006.08.22 23.30.46.mdmp.

Thanks IgnorantBliss! (and jsalemi, who told me that my thread had been updated). I was sure there had to be an easy method. I just wasn't using SimPE properly .

So, I have some Maxis object recolours that flash blue.

I went through Buy Mode making a list of the objects with blue-flashing recolours. It took a while, but I have it now.
ad-a quaint barstool, 5 recolours; 
simple sit chair, 6 recolours; 
plasticity chair, 2 recolours; 
stark inspiration chair, 2 recolours; etc

I thought it would be horrendous to match the recolours up with object .package names, but it turned out to be the objects in one folder from MTS2 that was causing all of my blue-flashing. They're all objects that are very old - published in January 2005, when people were just learning about recolouring. I'm guessing that what made them break was some change in the way the game finds textures between the base game and University, except I only got into Sims 2 when University came out, so I don't know anything about that.

The weird thing is, if I go into SimPE, select Tools --> Object Preview & drag-and-drop the recolours onto the big word "DROP", the objects that blue-flash in the game display properly. SimPE is able to locate the Maxis item they are recolours of and apply the texture correctly. This is suggesting to me that there must be some way to "fix" them, but I don't know what it is.

Can anyone help?

And without Downloads... everything is fine  . Have gone into the lot and played a few sim hours, without any crashing to desktop.

So now I need some program/technique for finding the broken recolours and/or orphan meshes. I know I have at least some broken recolours, because I have blue flashing objects in Buy Mode. I've heard good things about Paladin's SimCategoriser, but I'm under the impression it doesn't find Maxis object recolours, and most, if not all, of my blue-flashing downloads are Maxis recolours.

Like, WTF, people?

I bulldozed my awesome house with the broken thumbnails, N002_Lot148.package. As I thought, it made no difference to the One-Twenty-Five Cafe problem. As nothing else seemed to help, I bulldozed the One-Twenty-Five Cafe, so that space of ground in the Downtown area was empty. Went into another Neighbourhood (N004) and moved that version of the Cafe into the Lot Bin. Replaced the empty ground in N002 with the Cafe from N004. Went into the lot, edited it a bit and saved. It still makes the game crash to desktop.

This is a totally fresh copy of the lot, with a totally new Lot ID number. It is furnished entirely with Maxis content. As far as I know, problems where lots crash to desktop are usually due to missing/broken meshes, but I can't see what would be missing or broken if everything's Maxis. I do have some blue-flashing recolours of Maxis objects, but they're fairly standard objects (e.g. the chess table) and haven't made other lots crash.

ARGH! Can anyone help?

Apart from losing her alien eyes, your sim also seems to have changed skin colour. When she was a child, she had a bluish green skin. When she became a teenager, she's become a more yellowish green.

Mind you, she also seems to have changed gender - from a really girly toddler to a boy child. So don't mind my observations .

I hope this doesn't count as necromancy, but I'm wondering if you guys have checked to see if you have duplicate hacks in the game? I had the phone (cell phone & ordinary phone) causing teleportation when I had multiple copies of the Phone Hack installed at the same time. (One of them was the up-to-date version of the Phone Hack in my Pescado Fixes directory, the other was called something like fgiourtoistgjhaiowruw34ojgsjdg.package and had come along with an installed house.) Removing the duplicate Phone Hack cured the problem.