I had it on PS2 but I didn't play it long enough to see any weather. In fact, after trying to navigate my way through menu after menu just to hold a sodding conversation I just gave up and shoved the game in a drawer out of the way, never to be touched again.

No puddles though!

No, not BS at all. The original implementation of weather was borked - It would rain inside houses, and at the time they couldn't come up with a solution so they simply disabled it. The filter cheat that they went with in Seasons was actually quite effective as it was the same technique most 3D games used for weather effects and it got around the weather indoors problem. The downside to this of course was the inability to see the rain or snow from inside houses.

The Urbz was pretty much the same in that regard, except you could pass out. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't kill my sim off. Yet despite this minor problem, the game itself was actually quite rare among the various Sim games released on PS2 - It was actually fun, albeit ridiculously short.

Orange - Seeing as all sims need is a toilet to sit down on to eat, you could pretty much remove the table and chair and still have a functional lot. You could probably get rid of the shower too seeing as a sink seems to be good enough for my waster sims!

Absolutely shocking game, TS2 on the DS. I know because I wasted thirty quid on it.

Shockingly piss-poor graphics aside, the story and the game itself was no better. Your character crashes their car or something in some random village (to call it a town, like the game's creators did is just taking the piss - it's a bloody cul-de-sac with a handful of buildings) in the middle of nowhere, and decides that rather than get the car fixed, they'll erm... Run a hotel. For a "town" that gets no tourists, populated by people who can't do anything for themselves. Oh, and like Animal Crossing, the game keeps going long after you tire of it - which you'll do after half an hour.

Yep.

Great. In that case, I'll give it another shot then. The last time I tried it, it threw up a load of "fragrant error" messages, pointing to a nonexistent driver.

Stupid question here:

Is ASM now actually integrated into Awesomemod or is it still a separate driver?

Going off EA's previous record, I wouldn't even expect that. Instead, if you're lucky, you'll get a half-arsed neighbourhood terrain editor with most of the functionality removed and accessible only via a cheat code, a la FreeTime.

They don't really elaborate except to say that even on a fresh install, the patch won't work (so presumably they must be working with the PC version), but in the thread linked by the OP, Lemmy does point out that they've not had the time to really investigate it further. Another posting further down gives another clue to their abandonment of the mod - namely they've got a big project going on which needs their full attention and they can't spare any more time updating ISM, hence the offer to hand it over to someone who can.

Well, to be fair, Lemmy and Binky are drawing fire on two fronts here. On the one hand, EA's latest patch won't install for them (which makes any further mod development pointless and obsolete if they're still running from 1.2.7) and on the other, you have a lot of ungrateful arseholes lining up to bitch and moan about the lack of updates.

I don't even bother with the Booty. As far as I'm concerned, if it's payshit, it doesn't go into my game.

Yeah - I get a "channel doesn't exist" message using /join #grah

Same here. I know where the server is, and I can even log in with a proper IRC client, but all I see are #ellatorture and #kikistan. I'm clearly doing something wrong.

Even with the baldness and beard, Pescado will still have an excuse. He'll say he's spending all his free time on Awesomemod and nobody's letting him play the game!

No, what I'm saying is obvious secret makers are obvious.

You're not honestly telling me MSTY is getting no submissions at all? Not one since the 18th?

Problem is though - MSTY seems to be exclusively MATY secrets, and 99% of those relating to Retardoland, and not really secrets at all.

SimSecret is certainly not as good as it used to be, it has to be said. Recent submissions could be broken down into four categories: Spam, GOS hate, Pretentious Shit and MATY. There's also a fifth category that turns up occasionally: Everything Else.

Indeed. Fire in general in TS3 is a bit crap. Using "discoinferno", I expected a massive casualty rate to go alongside the entire town burning, but it didn't happen. I think only one sim actually died, because I made sure he did.

Meh - SimSecret actually updates though.

Discoinferno's brilliant, even if it does grind my PC to a halt for five minutes beforehand! I haven't tried the Trogdor one yet because I need to go back a couple of pages to find the code.

Had my sim go out on a rock hunt, courtesy of Supreme Commander and had her send off all the metals and gems to be smelted and cut. Got five Mr. Gnomes back in return.

Laid then out in the garden, and for nearly two weeks they happily moved about - two of them seemed to have a permanent fixation with the mailbox, dancing around it whilst the other three roamed the house.

Then I saved. Gnomes carried on going about their business. I exited the game.

When I went back in, the gnomes were now frozen in whatever poses they had been in when I saved the game and haven't moved since. It would seem that the game, when writing the save data is treating these gnomes as normal gnomes and must be flagging them as such, basically killing off anything special about them. I can still rename them of course, and if you have developer cheats enabled, there's still an option to reactivate their old behaviour (don't know if it works though), but they won't do any of that sneaking around stuff on their own. Trust EA to break functionality through the criminal act of actually saving the bloody game!

I also see they tried to do something with timescale too but it looks like it's hit a wall. In an attempt to slow down global time to something more useful, the modder must also adjust 82 other XML entries to bring animations, motive decays, work durations etc up to speed to sync with it. I definitely don't envy that job.

There's been no posts in that particular thread since the 5th, which suggests that either a) the modder gave up, or b) it's been put on a backburner.

Well, I tried deleting SimCompositorCache.package again and it didn't work. However, I then started looking for other cache files in obscure places and looked in DCCache, where there were additional cache files for Riverview (the town I'm currently playing). Deleting Riverview_sims.package fixed the issue, but once again after five minutes of trying out CC's skins, I had to remove them because of the aforementioned missing spine/"shrimp-back" issue that's too difficult to ignore.

I've only tried the Club Crimsyn ones, but I ended up having to take them out after a couple of days. In daylight they look great, but for some odd reason, once the sun's gone down, they take on a very chiseled appearance, with the backs on female skins in particular looking like someone had gouged out the spine.

The other problem I had (and it will probably be the same with all default replacements I try) is that no matter how many different cache files I deleted, the game would only apply the skin to my current sims instead of the whole neighbourhood.

Bit of a shame that doesn't happen with my so-called "Lucky" sim then. She's been robbed three times in two weeks and electrocuted twice whilst repairing an expensive TV (which keeps breaking, I might add). All of these happened with the "feeling lucky" moodlet active. The Lucky trait seems to be a waste of a slot and seems to do little more than make her applaud herself in that stupid, timewasting manner (you know the one - where the sim will yell out a load of gibberish whilst clapping for no apparent reason and will queuestomp anything to do it) whenever she gets out of bed or out of a car, as though waking up or arriving for work was lucky in itself.

Useless, useless trait.