Has anyone figured out yet what controls Sim attraction?  It appears someone has successfully produced an empty neighborhood now, so if we know what draws Sims together, perhaps we can at least design them specifically for their intended mates and any random hook-ups will be with the appropriate person?

I like the sound of SimP3, though I'm not certain it's entirely appropriate considering the function is quite different from SimPE.  It sounds to me more like a next generation Clean Installer.  Maybe Clean Installer 3 or some similar derivation?

Huh, that's odd, I went looking for those at GCW a few months ago and never found them.  Thanks!

ETA:  Oh, I remember now.  No-CD images exist for Uni and NL, but they have to be mounted in a virtual drive, which I dislike.  I do see they've got a proper no-CD .exe for the base game now though, which is cool.

Confirmed.  Also, for the record, you probably won't find no-CD's for the base game and the first couple of EP's.  The copy protection they used back then was trivial enough that things like GameJackal could get around it, so nobody apparently bothered with cracks.  (If anyone knows differently, please share!)

I would think the safest way to go about removing a custom career would be to not only make sure any Sims using it are at home, but to switch them into a different career before removing the file.

Well, if they wind up with a bunch of delinquents on their hands, they'll have no one to blame but themselves. 

Who the hell lets their teenager hang out in a nightclub til the wee hours anyway?  :p

Don't forget the spyware he puts in all of TSR's downloads.  :p

I'd suggest M&G just because that will bring you up to date on assorted stuff like build mode options, slots, and cheats.  Also, it will keep you current with new mods and content still being made.

Seasons is good for general ambience and new weather-related activities.  Pets is great if you like pets (obviously,) but it doesn't add a whole lot else to the game.  OFB and AL both expand your Sims' options quite a bit as far as how they can choose to live and work.  BV mainly deals with vacations, but it does also add new accessory options and beach lots.  Free Time mainly adds hobbies, and I believe (verify please, someone?) the secondary Aspirations came with it.

IIRC, OFB was supposed to be quite stable and Seasons wasn't bad.  Pets had some serious glitchiness and I believe AL was a bit of a nightmare (or that could have been BV, I'm not sure at this point,) but all of them have since been patched and modded to within acceptable parameters.

One of these days I really should get around to playing with the stdMatDiffCoef settings in the Material Definitions for the skintones.  I bet a lot could be done to adjust the coloring without editing the textures at all.

I would say yes.  That's how I've taken to doing it, and I find the results are usually better.  The game just doesn't seem to render dark stuff very well, or it may be a side-effect of lousy compression, but either way, making anything that's really dark and looks good takes a lot of extra work.  (Though even with light-colored items the SimPE method tends to give better results, especially if they're finely textured, bumpmapped, etc.)


The first defaults I ever made were a dependent set, and some Sims wound up having alien scalps with normal skintones.  Looked very weird.  XD  Also, the dependent variety leave you with two copies of the same skintone cluttering your catalog, which I find kind of sucky.  YMMV, of course.

One of my favorite tricks (though this only works if you're more or less happy with the overall coloring of the Maxis defaults) is to edit only those textures that really need changing, then edit the skintone file so that it picks up stuff like scalps and baby body textures directly from the game.  Saves a lot of space and guarantees the best quality textures.  I've also made skintones in pairs where I wanted (for example) the option of men with body hair or without, and had one skin draw everything except the male body textures from the other.


For me most of the fun of the game is tinkering with it to make everything exactly the way I want it.  I hardly ever actually play.  Maybe when TS3 comes out and there's not much new stuff coming down the pipeline for TS2 anymore... XD

I'm not even sure whether it still applies, honestly, as I first heard it quite some time ago; whatever BodyShop glitch was responsible may have been fixed since.  But it seems that some skintones that were cloned from S1, S2 or S3 didn't always turn out correctly--they'd have the wrong scalp color or such.  (Dependent defaults are also known to have odd scalp mismatch problems at times, btw, just so you know.)  But since any new skintone automagically gets thrown into the custom bin regardless of what color it's cloned from, and since we know to use the extracted LIFO's and not the files BodyShop spits at us as bases, there's no reason not to play it safe and always clone S4.

I always use the LIFO's when working with skintones now.  They're much better-quality than the crap images BodyShop turns out.  In fact, Bodyshop is best used only to create a new, working clone of S4 (as I have heard that clones of the other default skintones sometimes suffer from texture issues,) into which you then import your modified textures using SimPE.  For best results, use DXT5 or even Raw32 compression, especially for darker skintones.  (Just make sure to Compressorize afterward or you'll wind up with ginormous files.)  XD

AFAIK, you just extract them to .png.  If there's a better way to do it, I've not come across that information.  Use the biggest ones in there (can't recall if that's the 0 or 1 files offhand.)

LIFO's seem to be a bit of a mystery all around; I'm not sure why they're even used, since they appear to give no obvious advantages over regular TXTR's of the same size and resolution.

Not sure (I could not find any information on the subject when I looked) but I think Theo's color binning tool does automatically set eyebrow color.  At least I've never noticed mismatches after using it.

You don't have to, no.  This mainly affects elders when they're nekkid.  It may, however, cause a mismatch between elder male tops and bottoms if any of the tops are based on the nude mesh; I'm not sure whether any of the Maxian clothing is.  If so, you could elder-enable some adult male bottoms so you'd have something to match the tops with.

There's not as huge a difference between elder and adult males as there is between the females, so I haven't gone to great lengths to convert a lot of stuff for them myself, unless I really wanted a particular outfit to be available for elders.  YMMV.

Well, they'd have had a regular riot on their hands if they *had* taken it away, since they haven't provided any other tools for creating clothing, genetics or accessories.  I'm sure if they had just stopped supporting it, somebody would have come up with a viable alternative (not sure whether it's possible to actually make new BodyShop content from scratch using SimPE alone?), but it would have caused a tremendous uproar in the meantime.

Personally, I could forgive them for including both, if only they hadn't committed the unconscionable atrocity of not making Sims packagable from within CAS.  :p

I like my elder ladies to use the elder skins, but I hate the exaggerated body shape.  So I edited the nude top, bottom and full-body meshes for elder females.  As you can see, the shape is still noticeably saggier than the Maxis adult, but not nearly as grotesque as the standard elder, and the shadows are pretty much where they should be (which unfortunately is not the case if you solve the problem by using the adult nude meshes for elder ladies, unless you also alter all your skintones and essentially make elders identical to adults.)



Only the high-def female meshes have been changed here; they won't affect Sims in a game set to low detail.  Also included is a mesh replacement for elder males by Zirconia Wolf at Simbology (included by permission), which makes the elder males use the adult meshes; this is more practical for men, since there's less difference between the male adult and elder meshes and the boob-shadow problem does not apply.

As a bonus, this will also work for any swimsuit or underwear that uses the elder female nude mesh.  Downside:  Elder tops based on the nude top mesh will no longer match up with standard elder bottoms.  :/

I'm still fairly new to body meshing, so this isn't quite as perfect as I'd prefer, but it tested pretty well in my game.  If anyone has problems with it, please let me know.

You can probably limp along for some time before the inevitable BFBVFS occurs.  Some (but not all) of the damage could be mitigated by mucking out the dummy files created in the move with SimPE, but if you don't plan to keep the hood long-term anyway, it's probably not worth the bother.

ETA:


It does more than that.  It'll create a "dummy" duplicate file for every Sim known to each Sim in the household, which (a) clutters up the game with essentially useless data, and (b) if you put the household back in the same hood and meet the same people again, will result in two of the known Sim in their relationship panel, two memories of meeting them, etc.  Also, if I recall correctly, it creates problems by leaving a "hole" in the data of the source neighborhood which can later make the game behave weirdly, and breaks other lots whose occupants are known to the Sims in the lot you moved.  Also, if you put the lot into a different neighborhood, it will damage that one, too.

Timelycorruption, if you need to get an occupied house out of the way like that again, and don't want to lose all the Sims' belongings, I suggest the following procedure:

1.  In Neighborhood view, click on the lot and package it to a file.
2.  Move the family out of the house and into the Sim Bin.
3.  Use Clean Installer (NOT the Maxis unpacker) to reinstall the packaged house and Buy/Build contents only--uncheck the Sims in Clean Installer before you install, or you are asking for trouble!
4.  When you load the game again, you will now have the family in the Sim Bin and the furnished house in the Lots & Houses bin.  Double check that the house re-imported correctly, then delete the original (now unfurnished) house, or put it into the bin also if you like.  You can safely reunite the family with its home (in the same neighborhood) whenever and wherever it suits you.

If Gunmod's radiance is too dark for you, you might consider getting Spookymuffin's lighting mod instead.  It doesn't change daytime or nighttime lighting, it just adds a nice dawn and dusk effect in the morning and evening.  Topic here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=13778.0

If you do that, and also change the Material Definition references and remove redundant textures, doesn't that clean up the vast majority of the resource-hogging and catalog-cluttering junk?  Everything else should be just 'invisible' data.  Seems like you'd have to have a very large number of custom hairstyles before it would become a serious problem.

Facial hair and eyebrows can be both binned and townified, yes--there's a thread around here someplace on the subject.  An issue with that is that damn near every single guy generates with facial hair if you do it.  (I fixed this in my own game by making a bunch of invisible townified facial hair so many dudes look like they don't have any.)  For the record, you can also townify glasses and other accessories, which then turn up less annoyingly often for some reason.  Doing all of the above makes an enormous difference in the variety of Sims you get in CAS.

It's a little bit shorter and a little bit bigger around, but not too far off in size. 

Well, I set out to make the TS2 plumbob look more like the one in the TS3 ads.  While I wouldn't say I succeeded brilliantly, I'm quite happy with the result and thought I would share.

This is a very small (10k) file that changes the shape and appearance of the plumbob.  It should work with any EP from Nightlife on up.  Please report any issues you may encounter.