The difference between Sim behavior and human behavior is that humans don't think "I am tired, hungry, and I need to pee. Therefore, I shall go mourn at some dead persons grave, and this will make me feel better."

Which will finally eradicate the kudzu. And, quite possible, George Bush.

I don't like the way that Nightlife object sounds . . . I mean, do they honestly think that people don't have more ASP than they know what to do with? The only way to make it actually unusual would be to make it cost upwards of 500,000, but I just can't see that happening, considering that Elixer is only like 30,000. Or maybe you'll only be allowed to do it once . . . no, that would be silly. Huhm.

What the heck will "Pleasure" sims have for LTW? Go on X dates? I can't see them aspiring for career based stuff . . .

What is it with the burned food obsession? Is it an artifact of the Maxis craptastic conversation topic generator? What is so titillating about burnt food? My sims talk about that more than they talk about people cheating. It gets a little annoying after a while.

Bother. Honestly, I wasn't going to lock you in a 3x3 room or anything. Honestly I'd be rather afraid that you'd find out some time, find my house with Google Earth, and run it over with your tank. Or hack into a satellite and zap it with a laser.

I have that "improved" version of fwiffo's Multiple PT hack, and I have a weird sense of humour. Can you guess where this is going? I thought it might be entertaining to upload it to MTS2 without telling them *exactly* what sims were in it. Heh.

That's actually good news. If the problem is known, and apparently fixable, then that is a good thing. Even if Maxis does keep throwing new crap at us.

What is an 0x85 error? How does one recognize it in-game? Just so I can keep an eye out for problems, and help with the bug hunting in future EPs.

I like this forum better than variousimmers, mostly because I like it when the administrator(s) of the site are very involved with the community. It might have been because of the threads I read, but I never got that impression on VS. Same thing with MTS2, although the main reason there is that it's just too big. Here, JMPescado is a visible presence everywhere on the site. Which I think is a good thing, although that may just be because I'm crazy.

Twojeffs needs to come over here, or something. He and JMPescado seem to work well togethor, and there's no point in them duplicating each others work. I'm drifting into incoherency here.

The Yummy Channel rocks. It makes me laugh even if I can't see it. Just that guy ranting in simlish about grilling stuff is entertaining.

We already have something like that, don't we? It's called, "dice."

I could theoretically make an excel file that gave you an optimal aspiration based on various factors like personality and skills already gained, even possibly adjusting for aspirations of friends and relatives, but that would be kind of ridiculous.

Yup. I'm not getting NL until JMP has had it for at least a month. And even then I might wait for a while. I have no particular interest in any individual sim being able to go on dates, as my style of play tends to focus on the grand arc of the neighborhood.

I also don't trust any Maxis product that Will Wright was not personally involved with, and now all the Sims games fall under that category since he has moved on to Spore.

The AI in the sims annoys me. It's what caused me to eventually get bored with TS1 and go back to Sim City. It's not emergent or complex. There's no feedback.

That's the big problem with it, actually. Feedback. And I doubt we're going to get feedback, because I can't really see Maxis not doing anything other than recycling the old engine and adding a few bells and whistles to make it explode for TS3, now that the Wrightmaster has moved on to other things. As it stands, the engine would completely implode if you added feedback, because a variety of the more interesting behaviors are what I call "exceptions," in that they're tacked on rather than grow out of the simulation. Grieving, for example. If you magically caused the TS2 engine to give sims feedback on whether an object actually did what it advertised, they would learn that mourning was completely pointless. They would also never care for their children, because the game gets them to do this by tricking them into thinking it will do something for them.

AI wise, The Sims is sort of like those fake houses they make for TV sets: as simple as you can possibly make it and still have it look like its doing about ten times as much as it actually is.

Self-interactions are often demented, I've noticed. I suspect this is because the original sims engine, which appears to be basically intact from the first game, is really not designed to handle them. Same thing with teddybears and RC cars. Although meditation works fine, which sort of blows a hole in that theory . . .

SimMe? JMPescado has a sim of himself? Will you upload that? Please? I have a hack that could use that . . . I made one from your TS2 avatar, but having JMPescado made by JMPescado would be even better.

I've noticed that if you breed a sim from other sims while in CAS, they can have recessive genes for hair, eyes, and skin tone. I don't know if the facial genes have recessive versions. Because of this, I now always create two "parent" sims, "create a baby" to make the desired sim, then delete the parent sims when I create sims in CAS. Makes the gene pool a little more interesting, and allows me to cram more genes into one sim.

What are the chances of the bugs associated with overpopulation being fixed? I think JMPescado has some hacks that fix various aspects of it, but I don't know how deep the problems are. Are we basically dependent on Maxis for this one? Or is the cause something fixable by outside hackers?

I've had exactly this problem. She comes, charges me $10, and leaves. Annoying. I just re-installed all my JMPescado hacks, during the process of cleaning and reorganizing my downloads folder, so I am using everything in "moreawesomethanyou" and the critical fixes. I'll test the different Eye in the Sky settings and see if anything helps.

According to the Prima Guide (Warning: Crapola ahead.) elders love the Yummy channel, toddlers and adults like it, teens dislike it, and children hate it.

I'll put this on my list of "things to test." TV reactions are something I knew off the top of my head for TS1 but don't know much about in TS2, mostly because my sims rarely watch TV. Flamingos provide all the fun they need, and socialization is managed by parties (Socialize--friends) and autoyak.

Do you read the webcomic www.userfriendly.org? Because I think Pitr (a character with a bad Russian accent who wants to take over the world) is your soulmate. He once forced Pepsi and Coca Cola to merge under his leadership and created "Pitr Cola." Ingredients: Caffiene.

Quotes:
"Sleep, she is for the weak."
"If the Giger counter does not click, the coffee, she is just not thick."

And who could forget "alien blood coffee," the freakishly strong caffeinated substance that burned a hole all the way through the building and into the sewage mains below?

Seriously, you should check it out. A computer geek/hacker/generally pithy personage like yourself would greatly enjoy it.

This is a cool hack. The differences between this one and some of the other food hacks available sort of showcase the differences between JMP's modding style and the general approach that most modders have. JMPescado's hacks make sims act in a more logical way, but also in a way more appropriate to their personality, rather than just a flat out more convenient for the user way. They sometimes leave in a certain amount of annoyance, but only if the annoyance makes sense. There's still challenge, just less frustration.

I'm still trying to sort this out. Not quite sure what's going on, but it looks to me like a classic case of "smart people who have no social skills and thus inadvertantly tick each other off and have no clue how to deal with it." If it is, then I am no longer the world master of this phenomenae. I once quit my roleplaying group and didn't see my four best friends ever for six months, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear to me. I figured them out well enough to be able to resolve the bulk of the problems, however, and am now happily roleplaying with them again. Or I would be, if we were actually roleplaying. Been spending the last two months trying to get a Star Wars campaign started. Not my first choice for a setting, but I'm working on it.

Anyhow . . . it sounds like Rentech was annoyed by Pescado's intention to move (if it is true that he was planning to move before this started) and Pescado took it as a personal insult. That's probably farther from what actually happened than Jupiter is from Cygnus 5, but it is the impression I get, so if it's erroneous I'd appreciate someone correcting me.

And since when are we only allowed to have one Daily Idiot? Maybe we should have a Daily Idiot: BBS and a Daily Idiot: Variousimmers and a Daily Idiot: MTS2. You know, sort of like how Survivor names its various seasons.

Eh, wild boars wouldn't be much fun without a tank. Have to find a way to fix my sims tank-less-ness when Nightlife comes out . . . heh heh heh.

It seems to be intended more as a user prop/torture device than as an item with an actual use. A purpose at which it succeeds quite remarkably, if properly implemented. Although nothing can beat buyable fire.

Except that the way it's set up, coinflip A choose between coinflip B and coinflip C, coinflip B and C choose between coinflips D, E, F and G, respectively, and those coinflips each choose between two PTs. It requires a power of two, but it gets a roughly even distribution, to my knowledge.

Hmm. Well, considering that I have no skill, and never did really understand arrays even in BASIC, I think I'll just stick with coinflips until I get a better handle on things. Thanks.

For anyone familiar with fwiffo's original, I have a modification that chooses from eight PTs. I'm going to post it on MTS2 as soon as I get permission from fwiffo, but in the mean time, does anyone know a better, more efficient way to choose between eight or more possibilities than coin flips? Right now it takes 7 lines of code. More would require around 15 lines. I know very little about simantics, but I figured there might be someone here who would have an idea of what the proper command would be. I'd like to be able to use around 20 PTs in my game, at least eventually, if it's not *too* insane.

Ugh. Duh. Oops. Sorry about that.

You know, you're starting to sound like Maxis. Problem? You have a non-awesome hack on your machine. Mind you, this actually makes sense, as opposed to the official tech support. Non-awesomeness is not a good thing.