I reckon 8 SS members is about right for my game, for the moment.  I don't like to run more than 8 Sims on a lot at a time anyway as it seems to slow down gameplay quite a bit.  Might have to look into those dual core processor solutions offered in one of the other threads.

Fair enough, but she's legitimately earned those skill points (or rather, I made her legitimately earn those skill points).  I'm just looking for a way to get more realistic grades for her, given the current situation.  Not planning to "punish" her for her previous successes.  She will keep her skills and simply bag out of classes for a bit.  Should free up social time and make her very happy.

That was my solution as well.  I had to set at least one as SS member with the pie menu or Insim.  Now I'm just waiting for an abduction.  I'll be interested to see how many of my other nonplayable dormies end up in the SS when that happens.

Well, bang goes the "limit skill points" strategy.  My playable student was a teen in the neighbourhood before she went to uni, so she already has quite a number of skill points, especially creativity and logic (she likes the musical instruments and playing chess with friends).  Consequently, she is high enough in skills already to have an expanded performance bar.  I'll try limiting class attendance and overall academic work, without having her fail out.

If she still graduates with high marks, I guess I'll live with it.

OK, I don't understand this.  I used blank college template and nodormieregen to create my uni.  I created a number of custom dormies (about 30 I think).  However, when a playable Sim goes to a community lot at the uni, they run into one SS member, but the other dormies there are not SS members.  In fact, my game did not generate a third SS member (necessary to allow for induction/abduction of the playables) and I had to designate a third SS member using InSim.

Jordi, are you saying that, if there are no other dormies at all (i.e. if the uni stays "dormie free" and clean), the game will create one SS dormie, even with nodormieregen?  Would it create a second and third SS dormie as well?

Don't have Seasons installed, so I have no way of knowing what season it is.  Generally looks like high summer in my game.  Hence, the autumn study bonus is not a factor here.  All she did was go to class every day, complete one assignment, and go to the final on time.  The rest of the time, she was socializing, partying (unfortunately no woohoo yet because she has not concentrated on one single relationship that much - her wants revolve around having lots of friends).  She is generally in platinum mood, due to her activities, which might be why she also does well at the Uni.

I don't want her to get expelled or fail.  I just think she's not really academically minded and should not find it that easy to get on the honours list.  A "B" or "C" grade would be more realistic.

This could be the problem.  I have only created enough dormies to fill the dorms currently occupied by my playable sim students.  That means that total uni population is below 39 sims.  Additionally, there are only about 3-4 SS members created so far, and none of my playables has been kidnapped so far.  With nodormieregen installed, the game is not generating new SS members, so may be duplicating the ones it has.  As mentioned by others, this does not appear to cause a problem with game play, so I will just ignore it for now.

It's not restricted to one uni either.  I have La Tour Academie installed, which is where I noticed the glitch.

Here's a new one for me, and I didn't find an old post on this.  One of my uni YAs went to a community lot to meet people and there were two "occurences" of one of the secret society sims.  Very funny when one "George" decided to hang out with the other "George".  Doesn't seem to affect play (although I haven't tested what happens if my sim relates to one or the other - does it affect both?).  No jump bugs or error messages.  This has happened as well with another SS sim who duplicated on a community lot (one version in the SS blazer, and one in her everyday clothes).  Only happens on community lots, never in the dorm.

I have checked via windows and SimPE and there seems to be only one "George" in the game (no duplicate files), and all my dormies/townies are CAS created (none generated by the game).  If it helps, I (still) have just the Base and Uni installed. 

I'm mainly wondering if anyone else has had this happen, and whether it's a bad sign.

Frankly I find it pretty annoying that the consequences for uni students aren't more defined.  I have 2 YA female students at uni now, one is a knowledge sim who does all her assignments, goes to class, and is frankly having trouble making friends because her wants all concern getting her damn term paper done.  She goes to the semester final and gets on the dean's list.  Her friend from the neighbourhood is a popularity sim with wants to make lots of friends, have parties etc.  She only goes to class, but does bugger all else academically.  She went to the final and makes it onto the dean's list.  Isn't there a way to get a B or a C in uni?  From now on, I'm not sending her to class.  She'll graduate anyway.

Not sure if you've done a search already on disappearing lots.  This seems to be a problem other people have had as well.  So far I have not seen a definitive solution proposed.

In your particular case, there could be a number of causes.  Incompatible hack is one of them: make sure you are using the correct version of the mods/hacks in your game (i.e. if you have nightlife, make sure you have the NL version of the hacks).  For example, in and of itself, the phone hack should not cause problems.

Since you are not using cleaninstaller, a corrupted downloaded lot may be the problem.

It's possible that if you set an egagement flag for children, it could affect their behaviour to their intended partner and increase the amount of autonomous friend making activity between the two (making it more likely that the relationship would improve than if they were not engaged).

I've certainly made some of the more boring playables into townies from time to time, generally "extra" kids that I don't want to play into succeeding generations.  This results in the situation of some Sims growing old and dying off, while their siblings live on in perpetual early adulthood, but I always figure I have better things to worry about.  Once they're townies, they get treated like all other townies.  I don't bother to try to age them artificially, and at least their genetics aren't lost.

Yes, exactly. 


I have not tried that.  I will give that a go.  After that comes the tedious part of finding out which hack conflicts by adding them back in one or two at a time (if the test is successful, that is).


No, she's not even pregnant, so that should not be the problem.

Good to know it doesn't conflict with InSim.  I only use awesome hacks anyway, so there should not be a conflict with hacks in the game.

To describe the scenario, I have the game unpaused, select a female adult sim, click on the debugger on the lot and click on the re-randomize option.  As described the notification screen indicates there will be a pause, and that the game will exit to the neighbourhood screen.  All well and good.  I click OK, and nothing happens.

No pause, no freeze, no error, no jump, no announcement of a fixed number.  Nothing.  Game proceeds as normal.  This is consistent in my game in all neighbourhoods.

Does it help if I mention that the neighbourhood usually played is a clean custom hood with only bodyshop/CAS sims in it (the only Maxis sims are NPC - townies are created in CAS)?

I am painfully aware of this problem, having had one family that had 3 kids who all looked and acted similar (the two girls could have been exact twins).  I downloaded the lot debugger compatible with Uni, but so far have not been able to use the re-randomizer feature (nothing seems to happen - no game stoppage, no exit to neighbourhood screen, etc.), either with testingcheatsenabled true or false.  Does the debugger conflict with any other hacks (InSim?).

I have taken to manually randomizing using CAS whenever I expect a baby to be born.

Any ideas for fixing this would be welcome - I have only base and uni loaded. 

I generally try to play my families in reasonably equal installments, but sometimes this means that I play one family for several days, before moving on.  If there is a family that I lose interest in, I might leave them out of play for a while.  Sometimes this means that some sims stay pregnant for a long time (game time) or some kids don't grow up for a while, while their former peers might have become elders in the meantime.  I have stopped worrying about this.  It leads to some interesting situations, admittedly, like the grandchild of a sim in one family marrying a sim that their grandfather started school with.  To me, it's all part of the amusement.

I'm not sure a hack is needed.  If you want an "arranged marriage", can't this be edited via something like SimPE?  I've never actually added a check to the engaged box in the relations editor in SimPE, but I have certainly deleted the engaged status.  I would think you could simply check off "engaged" in SimPE under your Sim's relationship with their designated betrothed, and this would have the necessary effect, possibly without affecting the relationship bars (mind you, the engagement might fail if the relationship was too low).

Arranged marriage or not, presumeably you would want the relationship between the two newly married or engaged sims to improve over time anyway.

I have noticed that if I "cheat" to make a townie selectable and move him/her into a household, that newly playable sim does not age, although everyone else in the house ages normally.  I got around this by adding or subtracting a day from the age of the sim (using InSim), and then resetting age (back to day one of the adult stage, for example).  After doing this, the sim aged normally with everyone else.  Hope this helps.

In my experience, the "newly selectable sim does not age" thing happens consistently and I always have to fix their aging as described above.

I agree.  Apart from the bits about "don't use nannies or NPCs", it's generally like my current play style.  Clean neighbourhood, one or two Sims, get them educated, married, start next generation, etc.  I like the idea of adding sub-hoods with different "nationalities" (does this simply mean "skin tones"?), but not sure about adding lots of new families or sims from CAS (population control) unless required, that is, if there are too many family ties and the gene pool needs expanding for procreative purposes.

By the end of 10 generations I would probably be at the point of wanting to restart rather than looking to go another 20 generations, especially without a real challenge point scoring scheme.

I was afraid of that too.  I've opted to leave the other "inmates" as selectable, but just not look at their details. 

Have played 18 sim days now, and have had 3 fires and only one death (not directly related to fire) so far (she collapsed in exhaustion and probably just starved to death).  Things are getting interesting.  I was bored stiff with an asylum full of people just happy to have pillow fights.

Another endorsement for the clean neighbourhood templates, notownieregen, and building all your own townies.  Last time I had a buggy maxis premade townie, I had him killed by satellite on a residential lot and my playables sold the scrap metal for a nice bunch of simoleans.

I agree with the idea that only "freewill affecting" hacks be removed,  mainly to get more fun out of the hapless inmates.  I'm definitely going to build an asylum and try this challenge.  Looks like great fun, even though none of the other challenges have ever interested me (too much like work to keep score through 10 generations, etc.).  I am keeping critical fixes and probably fixes for some of the more ridiculous annoyances, but I think it would add to the feel of an asylum if inmates always went to look at new stuff, whined a bit, left coffee cups lying around, etc.

Problem is that I have never seen the SS lot yet, as I have only just started the neighbourhood and the Uni and have only one playable student there at present.

What I ended up doing last night was creating a new dormie in CAS and making him an ss member using InSim's education adjuster.  He's already met my playable Sim when he did a walkpast at the dorm, so hopefully when the relationship hits friend status, there will be an abduction in the normal way.

It would be fine to simply cheat and make my playable an SS member, but I wanted to do the whole abduction/induction process.

Nice to know I'm not the only one with this issue.  I'll check to see if noredundancy is loaded (I think not, but I've been wrong before - I seem to go through a "I need it - I don't need it" cycle until I can't remember what's loaded).  I'll check out options in InSim, but may just resort to making one of the existing dormies an SS member in SimPE.  I can also check the dormies there to see if one of them is a stealth SS member (but from the previous posts, it looks like the game may just not be designating the proper number).

cheers.

I recently built a custom, clean neighbourhood, populated only with Bodyshop/CAS sims (NPCs were game generated as needed).  I attached a clean uni (La Tour Academie) and populated it with Bodyshop/CAS dormies.  There is one playable Sim in one dorm at present.  Uni population is probably about 25 Sims, including game generated NPCs (profs, kitchen staff, shop clerks, etc.).  Notownieregen and Nodormieregen are installed, as is Pescado's no SS respawn hack.

I've had the Sim visit all community lots, and he knows two SS members (identified on community lots by the black blazers).  He is best friends with both.  Thing is, I can not find a third SS member to trigger an abduction (I understand you need to be friends with 3 SS Sims for that).  On any community lot, the same 2 SS members keep showing up.  Once the same SS Sim showed up twice (beside herself), one version in SS blazer and the other in regular casual wear.

  Is one of them a sort of ultra secret SS member who never wears a blazer?  Does the Sim need to make friends with everyone to find the needle in the haystack?  Or, is my game failing to designate an SS member?  Any help or theories would be appreciated.