Sims will only show up on hobby lots if they have the required enthusiasm level to get the membership card thing. I'm not sure if that also applies to townies, and if it does, what causes them to get given the membership card. It may be that townies just get automagic membership to their one true hobby lot.

Try making a test hood with loads of sims maxed out in the same hobby and if they don't show up either, something else may be causing it.

Does anyone know if anyone has made a staircase which takes up only 3 tiles rather than the usual 4? (Not counting the space at the top, just the staircase itself) I am sure it must be possible, because there are the ladders which only take up 1 tile and work perfectly fine. Just not sure whether it's been done.

I have a weird thing which keeps happening with the mini-fridge from Uni. (It has happened on at least 2 of my lots, in the same neighbourhood, and happens even if I sell the fridge and buy a new one)

Basically, when a sim uses the fridge, it disappears, but they continue to prepare the food and serve it. When they pick up the plate to "serve" it appears momentarily (ie in their hand) but as soon as they put it down on the invisible fridge, it also becomes invisible. All sims can take food from the plate with no problems, but I can't click on it or pick it up to delete it. I tried using the stuck object remover and that made the game crash. This has happened twice, on two separate lots.

This was puzzling and annoying me for ages, and then one day I happened to zoom out and noticed that right in the far corner of the lot, actually off the lot, there was the fridge, just sitting there. I went into buy mode and picked it up and for a second the green placement square flashed on the square where the fridge was originally placed, and then it snaps to where the cursor is, and is red because it is outside the lot boundary. I can move it back into its original position, and it works fine. Or, I can leave it in the off-lot position and sims continue to use the invisible fridge.

You can get children to "Tease" their toddler siblings. They hold a toy out of their reach until they cry, basically. I think that has always been possible though.

Ah right, it definitely is my video card according to that link, it's ancient. Just posting this for future reference. Think it's time I went over to the Upgrading a PC thread.

Nope, I have texture detail set to high and they still look pixelated. Like if you try to stretch a really small picture. Having looked again at the preview for the custom ones I think that those just do suck, however. But they *are* crisp and unpixelated.

...or is it just in my game? This has been bugging me for ages. If I use a Maxis terrain paint it just looks like a load of stretched-pixel splodges, not like grass or soil or whatever it is supposed to be. The default grass looks fine, but I made a hood with a concrete base and I'd like some of my lots to have grass or dirt in.

I downloaded some custom terrain paints and although they looked fine in the pictures, when I used them in my lot the texture came out really huge - like blades of grass the size of a sim's arm. I'm starting to think it would be easier to get some custom floors which look like grass, but annoying due to having to use moveobjects on to place stuff.

I searched and realise custom terrains are bad - I didn't realise this before. However I never package lots so I don't know if it is a problem (and was it fixed in a patch at some point?) I have got all EPs except BV and AL and no SPs, and I have a NVidia graphics card.

The overbite-stomach thing looks like the effect you get if you play with pregnancy wear any outfit installed and dress a sim in separates - for some reason, EAxis enabled pregnancy meshes for nearly all the tops, but none of the bottoms.

Ooh, those are really nice, and I hadn't seen them before. Thanks.

I think I might try to be disciplined and only let the actual face templates be used to generate NPCs though. I can just about be bothered to make my own townies, but NPCs, not so much.

I'm thinking of starting a new neighbourhood completely from scratch with no EAxis fuglies and no strays and I was wondering if anyone wanted to share their methods for making unique sims, because mine always end up all the same and I invariably get bored - and I have read on here and other places that after the first couple of generations, a hood gets interesting, so I really want to make myself stay in that long.

I'm thinking what I will probably do is track down a few sets of default replacement faces to keep swapping in and out during sim creation and gameplay - any suggestions for good ones which have a good variety in would be great - and for most of my CAS sims and CAS townies, make them look like real people by modelling them off photographs and possibly downloading a few well made selfsims. However I've found you have to be careful with selfsims and photo modelled sims because if the features aren't positioned close enough to the original templates you get weird looking sims with mouths almost in their noses etc.

I've also downloaded pretty much every one of Enayla's skins and narrowed them down until I have only the ones I like, and plan to make them genetic. There are 15 in all so that should provide some variety. I wish we could make a new hair bin, as I'm not really a fan of putting light brown in brown and hoping it goes through to the brown/blonde sims. However that's another thing I'd be interested in - your favourite hair creators/sites. There are so many to sift through on MTS2 etc I don't know where to start.

Lastly, I'm being ridiculously organised and/or OCD with this hood and have set up a wiki to detail all the starter families, who is in them, what age they should be on Day 0 - and giving them personalities and backstories or ideas for storylines before I start. Hopefully this way I shouldn't just get bored of playing, or forget which sister is supposed to be slutty and which one is supposed to be studious, etc. I have just randomised the families, how many people in each, what ages they are, etc. So I get some strange combinations like one elder, 2 teens, 2 kids, and a toddler, which makes for an interesting backstory. I can also link up the families before I start which should help matters.

Oh and I have a couple of families made up of real people, mainly my own extended family which is always interesting. In the sims my little brother *always* grows up to be gay, through ACR's choosing...

Is there a no-socialworker hack just for school grades then?

Actually, I might as well just get a universal one as I have my own orphanage in the neighbourhood now but it would be nice if the useless parents at least got the memories.

The question still stands though as I'd be interested to know what versions there are.

This is weird, I didn't even know you could select formalwear for toddlers. Is it functionality with a particular EP? I have all except AL and BV, and no stuff packs (Could they have come with CS?)

Also I wasn't aware toddlers could ever leave their home lot without cheating or hacks, meaning there is no way a toddler could come to a wedding, unless it was in their own home, in which case they would probably ignore it anyway and carry on playing.

I have a strange and annoying problem.

When I send a Young Adult sim to a community lot, or a group of them, the community lot loads and other (ie visiting) sims appear on the lot and walk around as usual but the sims I sent never arrive. I can't seem to notice any pattern to it as it happens in some households but not in others, apart from:

- It seems to have been triggered both times it has happened by telling the sim(s) to "Walk To Lot" rather than use a taxi or car. But if I subsequently tell them to call a taxi, they get into the taxi, the taxi arrives at the community lot and they don't ever get out of it.

- When I reloaded the entire game and went on one of the affected households, and directed a sim to call a taxi, it worked fine and I could then get them to walk to lot or use a car.

- It doesn't happen on dorms, only normal houses on the college campus. I don't have any greek houses.

If I get stuck on the community lot with no sim to send home, the only way to get back is to exit to neighbourhood and load the home lot - but the sim won't return from the community lot and since they are off-world I can't force an error on them. If they went in a taxi, the taxi returns but the sim doesn't appear in it. The taxi is stuck in a loop and doesn't leave. And then if I go to the options menu, save is disabled and clicking on exit to neighbourhood brings up the dialogue about exiting a community lot using the menu, even though I am on a home lot.

The only way I have found to fix this is using the lot debugger to nuke scenario controller and reenable controls, but the sim won't return unless I force errors on all off-world, which takes forever, and generates so many error logs I can't work out which one (if any) I need to post.

I can try taking hacks out but I don't know if that would help as it seems to be intermittent, I can't seem to recreate it when I want to, it only happens when it is least convenient. The only hack I have which I can think of which might interfere with these kind of things is the Community Time Project, which works fine in all other ways.

I only ever make them visit lots on campus.

I have all EPs up to FreeTime except for Bon Voyage, and no Stuff Packs. Any ideas?

If you want to move your sims from apartment to apartment, why not just put all their furniture into inventory?

This is what happens in real life! And you move and you have to redecorate the new place because your sofas clash awfully with the wallpaper 

I have various notepad files on my laptop, and a random number generator site open at all times.

The notepad files are:
* A "neighbourhood tracker" - every sim from toddler to adult is listed in order of what day (measured by the synctimer) they are due to grow up. This serves 2 purposes - it reminds me what day to age up CAS sims, lets me see how old they are (I have another file which tells me how many years old they are based on days left in age stage) which dictates what they are allowed to do (e.g. teens can't get jobs until they are 16.) and who they are allowed to bring home from school as kids/teens. (I use a TJ hack for this).

At the end of the tracker I have a list of every sim which has the plague, (useful for my apocalypse hood to prevent them from reinfecting each other and wiping out the entire hood AGAIN.) every sim who is gay or bi, and in my apocalypse hood where the criminal family rule, who is mean enough to be friends/breed with them.

* A file for my "special" lots. Currently since my main hood is in its infancy this is just my asylum lot. Sims get sent here when they hit red aspiration failure and see the shrink, and have to stay a minimum of 3 days, or until their aspiration goes green. The file lists mealtimes, and what kind of therapy each aspiration requires. I keep want panels closed on this lot so it's a little mini challenge to get them into green.

When the hood gets more built up I plan on having a prison, orphanage, old peoples' home and possibly a hospital, and a military career lot. These will have their own files indicating things like sentence length, timetable for orphanage (bedtimes, homework, etc).

* A file listing how days left until transition translates into actual age, and markers when specific things happen (e.g. when male sims with the correct genetics start to lose their hair, when the chance of multiples increases for pregnancy, when they have to go to college, when they are allowed to drive, etc.)

* A file which lists what interests and personality combinations I require for each career track. (Because a sim should have to pass an interview, too.) I use this more for my apocalypse hood as it makes it harder, but I might start using it in my other hood too.

* A rich text file with all the apocalypse rules on, colour coded by career track, so I can group them together in sections for easier reference, but they are easy to look up and delete when I unlock a restriction, too.

Some things I keep meaning to implement but am too lazy to:
* Genetics, noted in a sim's bio or perhaps a separate document/spreadsheet about whether they need to wear glasses, go bald at a certain age, go grey young or not at all, cock size, possibly even secondary aspiration etc. I would need expressed and recessive genes for each subject though and a long detailed list so I haven't bothered yet.

* Something to track storylines for each character, note little things about them etc. I don't fancy having a huge notepad file for all my sims so I will probably get the wiki thing someone else mentioned as it should make it easier to keep track. Quite often at the moment I will have a long period where I don't play and it's quite hard to get back into it because I've forgotten all the little characters I have developed - for this reason I like playing with sims of real people. I have most of my family and a couple of my friends in my main hood. I am too lazy though to remember to take photos and/or write detailed stories about all of my characters, though I'd like to for my own entertainment if nothing else.

I use a random number generator a lot - I'd quite like to implement a system where I roll for everything from career to whether they ought to marry this sim, but it seems too rigid. At the moment I mainly use it for decorating/building, because all my houses were starting to look the same and there is furniture etc which I never used to use but now have discovered actually have some fairly nice recolours.

Luckily I have a lot debugger on the lot... since I haven't played the family since installing the new EP is it okay to assume they will all be unoccupied, because I think they probably are occupied unless they have been reset as usually happens with a new EP. And if I un-pause to cancel their actions, it freezes.

I don't think anyone is away from the lot, although I did send a teen to uni the last time I played. He doesn't show up in the family portrait though so I would imagine it is safe to assume he isn't considered part of that household.

I suppose I could just move them out and into another house. Annoying though. I wonder what caused it.

I recently installed FT and ever since then I can't play one particular household in my hood.

The lot loads fine, and it's paused when I enter and I can move around the house and click on things with no problems, but when I try to take it off pause the whole game freezes. Sometimes it will minimize if I press Ctrl-Alt-Del and I can end it that way but usually I have to switch the computer directly off and I don't like doing that.

It's a large lot (for my game) but I have larger ones which load fine. There are 7 sims on the lot. My other lots all work fine and I can't think of anything different in this lot to the others.

I could just not play them ever again but if I do I'd prefer to delete them because I don't want ageless sims wandering round my hood infecting all the other sims (a lot of them are ill, actually, but I went on another household where someone had the plague and that lot worked fine.)

Any ideas?

IIRC, this is a conflict between the kitten killer and the pets job fix hack. There is another hack which fixes the problem, but you won't find it here, it should be linked to on the kitten killer site though. In fact I have a feeling it is linked to on TJ's site as well.

Oh, that makes sense. I hadn't tried it since, but then I didn't used to play with it on most of the time and I usually do now. I need to get around to sorting my userstartup.cheat file anyway.

Thanks zazazu, I did get the general idea then

Now I feel like a spoon for not knowing you could change interests in debug mode.

To be fair I seem to remember ages ago in the base game trying to drag motive bars while in debug mode and it not working for some reason, (I was probably DOIN IT RONG) and I think my brain connected dragging things while in debug mode with L&P.

The older thread linked to a tutorial on MTS2 which explained how to clone a sim's appearance onto another sim, and now I have both tutorials I should be set - think I will probably end up experimenting before I let any technique loose on a proper family.

Thanks for the suggestions, anyway. I am a bit confused by zazazu's suggestion - I didn't think you could use plastic surgery on toddlers. Or would you age the toddler up and then down again? I have never used the plastic surgery machine so I'm not sure.

It's bugged me for ages that sims can't have identical twin children and the only way you can create them is in CAS. So I am trying to find out if there is any way I can clone a born in game sim. It's easy enough to change the personality etc in SimPE so I'm not bothered about that, I just want to know if there is any way I can clone a sim, if necessary age them down to infant (or toddler as a workaround and not let them age until the cloned sim has caught up) and make them related to the original "twin".

There is an older thread related to sim cloning here but it is quite old so I decided to make a new one, as new EPs etc may have changed things. I gather for example in the FT version of SimPE you can't change interests. (which is going to put a large spanner in the works of one of my 'hoods.)

From that thread I see two ways of cloning the particular sim.

1. I could export them (As a baby? Or would I have to wait for toddler stage?) in SimSurgery, clone them in bodyshop, create the clone as an adult in CAS, move them in with their "real family" and then age down and tidy up the relationships.

I imagine this method would mean the clone's DNA (by this I mean recessive traits) would not match the original sim's. To be honest that wouldn't be a hugely big deal but it would be slightly annoying. Could I access the original sim's recessive DNA information and copy or manually set it for the clone?

2. I could zoom in really far on the baby and see what colour eyes, hair and skin tone it has, then create an adult in CAS with these genetics, move it in, age down (to toddler, unless there is a way to age down to infant.) and then use SimPE to copy the facial data of the original sim across to the clone, edit the recessive genes and set the clone (if I have to use a toddler) to have a 7-day lifestage so that they are at the same stage as their "twin".

3. I could force twins on the pregnancy before the baby is born, then save just before she pops the babies out and keep reloading the lot until they both get the same eye colour, hair colour and skin tone, and then copy the facial template of one of the proglets onto the other, like in option 2. This would solve the toddler/age problem, and I wouldn't even have to make them look identical until they got to the toddler age stage. The only problem with this is if it's fairly far down the line and there are a lot of genetics involved, it might take ages to get two babies with the same traits. Or is it possible to change hair/eye/skin colour in SimPE as well?

Any ideas or suggestions? And I know this is the wrong place to ask but I find the SimPE forums hard to understand - am I right in thinking that post-FT we can't change interests in SimPE at all? The site just says you can't save it in SDS, but (helpfully)! doesn't explain what SDS stands for and I can't work it out. If you can't answer this one no worries.

I used to play this kind of challenge in TS1. That was always fun. The winner would get a million and a house. I discovered that in TS1, if they were unconscious on the floor when they caught fire, they would always survive.

Limit the food to 1 serving platter twice a day. Combined with ACR, that could get lethal. Especially if you have pets or later, because it allows sims to be born into the household if there are fewer than 8 sims in the family, meaning pregnancy could happen.

If we do it with townies, can we include a clone of Rod Humble?

Ah, that worked, I feel stupid now. Cheers It would work out cheaper for me to replace separate parts, my fiancé works in a computer shop and gets hold of parts more readily (and working out cheaper) than whole systems. The RAM seems fine as I don't run anything else, even AV, on my Sims PC. It never gets connected to the internet. Is the processor too old as well or is it just the graphics card?

My game had been running fine with this graphics card and ancient drivers (2003 version) until I started getting some weird graphical glitches (a huge object would appear in my neighbourhood screen and cause so much lag it was almost impossible to move the mouse)

So I upgraded to the latest driver, (2006 version) and everything was fine, until I went on my constantly winter neighbourhood. Now I get a moderate amount of lag every time it snows (and possibly rains, I can't remember) which means the game is playable but incredibly frustrating.

I have all EPs up to Seasons (so everything but FT and BV) and no stuff packs. I don't think CC would affect it and anyway I don't use stuff which has a high poly count. I also have 1GB of RAM, run Windows XP (SP2) and have a 1.53 GHz processor.

What is annoying me is I never used to get lagging due to snow before I installed the newer driver. Any idea what could cause this or am I better off just trying to get hold of a newer, non-NVIDIA graphics card? Money's not great at the moment so any other ideas to try first would be helpful. I have seen that there are externally made NVIDIA drivers, for example, like Omega drivers. Would installing that help? Is it worth a try? Or will I break something?

I've had sims freeze when they have fallen asleep in the snow.