Thanks for your help.  The accessory is a tiara and it works pretty well.  I just wanted to make sure I didn't start having mystery problems down the road.

I changed an accessory to be available for both genders.  I changed the recolor and everything works fine.

Now I'm wondering if the mesh specifies gender as well.  I look at it with SimPE and couldn't find anything about gender.  I don't want this causing some kind of weird problem down the road.

Yes, and stereos should be the same way.  If I'm listening to Brian Eno's "Songs that are quieter than silence itself," the stereo shouldn't wake me up!

I suggest putting "The Great Divide" room dividers around the pet beds.  These are those little flat strips in the fencing section, they look like a threshold when you put them down.  They act like walls and keep sound out.

They're also great to use around cribs.  You can have a crib in the child's bedroom, and the baby won't wake up the child.

I appologize, I didn't realize you had to be registered to read threads.  Here's what she did to get her sim back:

1.  Backed up her N001 folder.

2.  Used Clean Installer to browse the N001 Lots folder to locate the vaction lot her sim was on.

3.  Removed that lot to her desktop and restarted the game.

4.  Selected her sim's home, to enter it.  It loaded and the shuttle arrived and dropped him off.  She saved an exited and everything was fine.

Of course, this means you lose a vacation lot.  However, I think it would be fairly easy to get a fresh copy of that.  I hope this helps.  I've been too much of a coward to install BV!

You may be remembering this thread on unsticking a vacationer:

http://p218.ezboard.com/fstarlightsimsfrm51.showMessage?topicID=16355.topic

Just be sure to make another backup before you play around with this.  If it doesn't work, restore and try teleporting them into another family, like you did before.  I suspect that would work just fine.

magicmoon - the kids can only do a static shock with the Maxis rugs. 

It doesn't work with echo's rugs.  I rarely use Maxis rugs, so I rarely see a child shocking anyone.

I have read that you can grab the butterflies if you have moveobjects on.

The person who did this said it was very tricky to find just the right spot to click on.  Once she did, she moved them out of the way.

Thanks for all the replies.  I have played with constrainelevation before, so I tried Khaki's idea. 

I got a roof that looked nice, but the floor tiles didn't reach all the way to the roof.  I'm afraid it would rain in the house!

As a fast-n-dirty fix I put on narrow hipped roofs all around, then put flooring down across the entire top of the second floor.  Looks silly from the top, but fine from in front.

I think it would be possible to do this, then lower a layer of flooring down onto the roof for looks.  I may play with that later.

Ok, I'm trying to make a roof similar to this.  Notice the slope.



I use the cheat to set the angle to 75.  On the left are some sample roofs I did.  On the left is the Mansard roof as I'm pulling it.  It's nice and steep.



I let it go and it is a regular 45 degree roof.



I change the angle to 15 degrees.  The Mansard roof is still 45 degrees.



What am I doing wrong?

Yes, it's possible for sims to fall in love without kissing.  One of my teens fell in love just from holding hands.  It was adorable, but obvioulsy would have to be taken into account if making a hack.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to blame Paladin.  By "something weird" I meant a limitation of the actual game, not some mistake on his part.

I didn't realize robots shared bases.  I started a robot shop, but obviously haven't worked very hard on it! 

I just realized this problem is more serious than I thought.  Changing the time won't work with vampires.

I find it so frustrating that light can be toggled on and off in buy and build, but not in live mode.

Here's a possible workaround.  Simwardrobe has made a "Sani-Bot" because he didn't like the cleanbot.  I *think* this is a completely seperate object, so your employees shouldn't get confused when restocking.

I haven't tried this robot yet, but I believe it's crafted at the station just like other robots.  The web page is here:  http://www.simwardrobe.com/

Ok, I just checked, and it's a buyable object.  There must be something weird going on with the bases, because he has a warning that his Cantina bot uses the same base, and the robots may return to the wrong bases. 

You could post on his message board and ask if his Sani-Bot would help with your problem.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'd be afraid to tamper with time to that degree.  I take night photos pretty much every night, sometimes for long sequences. 

Night has that curse that it looks fine while you're playing, but the photos are too dark.  I'm currently doing an "evil" sequence, and I'm using spotlights underneath. 

This sounds like a great idea.  Here's some more categories:

Wedding veils
Wedding bouquets
Shoes/slippers (such as the bunny slippers, tiger slippers, and swim flippers)
Shoulder sitters (parrots, pixies)

Also, some "misc" bins, such as:

Misc hand (already mentioned)
Misc head (like the swim snorkle)

And if it's not too rude to hijack things briefly, I wonder if anyone can tell me how to make an accessory work for nude only?  I can make them PJs only, or formal only, etc., but can't seem to figure out nude only.  Or is that just not possible?

I've brought this up on a couple of message boards, and no one seems interested.  When I take photos at night, I go into buy mode and toggle daylight on.  Then I go back to live mode and play a moment longer, then back to buy mode to make it light enough for a good photo.  This is time consuming and annoying.

Now it's even worse.  When I go into buy mode the snow disappears!  This is great for building, but not great for photos.

Is it even possible to make a hack like I want?  I would want to make it daylight in live mode, and continue playing normally.

I like the camera reward photos.  They can hang on the wall or sit on a desk.  Could this be made into a buyable/recolorable object?

Would it be more trouble that it's worth?  Could the "sitting on desk" form at least be made into a buyable object?

Here are some details that may help you.

There's no need to show them the menu or do a sales pitch.  Customers will eventually browse the podium on their own, and buy without a sales pitch.

This will be frustrating at first, because there are so few customers.  As your rank moves up, you will have more customers and the flow will be steady.

You can do the sales pitch, if you like, to earn stars and move up in rank.

The fewer "fun" things you have around, the more likely they are to browse the podium.

If you want customers sitting next to each other chatting, put in a bar.  I mean, a long row of counters with barstools - not a juice bar.  Usually townies will be seated one per table, which can look odd.

If all you want is the face, then download an extracted polination tech.  This will put an alien face into step 2.

Step 2 is simply a chance to choose a pre-designed face.  It could be one made by Maxis, or downloaded.  You only had one face available for that skintone.  If you downloaded another alien with that skintone, you would have two faces at Step 2.

Carlynn - you got some info from a friend's computer.  Can you use that computer again?  Can you tell us the actual file names you're looking at?  And where they're located?  If you do, we can look for them on our computers.

Here is what I remember from way back when the game was new.

There was no way to get to the alien skin.  Maxis locked this away because they wanted it to be special.  Using debug mode didn't work, the skin simply couldn't be accessed by Bodyshop or CAS.

Someone extracted the polination tech and put him up for download.  By downloading him you got the skin, the eyes, his head, and the mad scientist outfit.

Does anyone else remember this?

Orikes - I'm 99% sure Kochanski  is right.  I've seen several threads on this problem, and the cheat fixed it.

Enter "setLotLightingFile clear" in the cheat box.  This will return you to normal lighting.

Kochanski's quote said this, but I can see how you missed it. 

Anyone complaining about product placement will be drowned out by the cheering Mustang fanatics. 

My brother is one, and I know he'll be thrilled to see this download. 

I think this is product placement done right.  It's an add on, I'm not forced to have it in my game.  Also, it's for something that seems "special."  A McDonald's burger doesn't seem special.

Now I'm off to download, so one of my sims can join the Mustang fanatic hoard.

Sorry, I didn't make things clear.

Don't leave your owner at his store.  Take him home, then go play another family.  When they go to the owned lot, the owner will show up.  Also, your employees will show up.  They will all be unplayable, and act like NPCs.

Every time you visit the lot, it will reset.  It will look exactly the way you did when you had the owner leave the lot.  This is useful with the crafted items.  Have your owner make one water wiggler and put it up for sale.  Now someone can visit the lot and buy it.  Then on the next visit it will be back and someone else can buy it.  This means the owner only has to make one.

However, this brings up my other point.  If you want your playable to buy the water wiggler and another sim gets it first, you're out of luck.  If the owner doesn't have one in his inventory, he can't restock.

This doesn't apply to non-crafted items.  The owner can always restock them.  But he may wander off to clean the bathroom first, so you may have quite a wait.

I imagine if you have more than one cash register, but only one worker (the owner), you'll have a lot of unhappy customers.  The owner will work one register, and customers at the other register will not get checked out.  I would suggest only one cash register, or hire employees.

Employees should restock, clean, and work the registers.  I haven't really used employees much.  The best thing is to experiment.  I've had a lot of fun letting sims buy their own things.  My goth sim loves pink.  Really.  I used SimPe to make pics of the houses I built and let sims buy their own homes.  My goth sim bought a pink house, a pink toilet, and a pink floral rug.

Ok, off the top of my head.

You won't need employees, but they will help.  When another sim visits the lot, your owner will wander around cleaning and restocking.  When sims line up at the cash register, the owner will eventually wander over to check them out.

Some sims will become impatient and throw their bags down.  If your playable sim waits in line too long, it will throw its bags down EVEN THOUGH you are controlling that sim and don't want it to throw its bags down.

If you decide to hire employees, it should help.  You won't be playing the lot so you won't ever actually have to pay them, except for that first day when you hire them and assign tasks.

Recommended - put Merola's mind control mirror on the lot.  Then you can control the owner and employees, if needed, and direct them to the cash register.

An important note:  You will have to visit the lot for sims to buy things, obviously.  The sim you control will not autonomously buy things.  Other sims will, and this should accomplish what you want.

If you want your controlled sim to buy something, move fast.  Another sim may buy it first.  Then you will have to wait for the owner to restock it.

What I want is a hack to control the number of kittens or puppies born.  I don't want to generate huge numbers of pets I don't have families for. 

At the same time, I want some of the pets to spawn.  If I control the numbers, I'd be much happier.