Ahh... good to know. As for Pescado's hugginghack, I don't think it entirely eliminates the hugging, since I recall Pescado burninating after being called a softie or something for keeping that part in.  Actually, I believe that it prevents the hugging from completely obliterating the child and the parents' queues. So instead, the hugging just gets queued up, but the priority isn't super high that it stops everything the child was doing.

I'm not sure if there is a hack that completely eliminates hugging altogether. There might be one, but I'm not sure. If by "no welcome home" you mean that Family sims don't do their "I'm home" animation, I believe dizzy2's hack for bringing home food (grocieries or pizza) from work also eliminates this animation altogether. But again, I don't think his hack eliminates the hugging. *shrugs*

Ste

I've been busy the past few days, plus my laptop harddrive crashed yet again, which really fuckin sucked cuz of course I didn't manage to back it up. I never fucking learn my lesson. 

Anyways, so it looks like they didn't have time to include other stuff, like the whole NPC/Vampire thing? But at least they managed to get a huge list for Uni. Looks like theres stuff on there that I wasn't even aware of. And I really love how they say some of those bugs are "rare" 

It's been tough to keep track of all the bugs that have been mentioned already, numerous times, but are there any glaring bugs that stand out as still existing and haven't been addressed by either of these patches?

Of the NL related ones so far, probably the one where peeps mentioned that Vamps can bite Mrs. Crumplebottom? I vaguely recall something about that, and how it could lead to very bad things. There's also that issue with teen vamps and skins? I suppose shaklin's fix is still required then? And what about the Gypsy being all buggy and giving you crappy mismatches for dates despite how much you pay her? Please don't tell me that's by design.   

What about Uni and Original issues that may have been overlooked by these patches? I can't remember al the major bugs. I vaguely recall MaxisTom saying something about how they would/will eventually have to release a second patch for NL, but considering how long it took for this one to be released, I doubt that we will see the next one anytime soon. Plus, since NL has only just been released, who knows what other bugs lie in wait for discovery. Oh much fun that's going to be.  I still refuse to play right now since I'm still waiting for Pescado to get his EP and update his hacks. In particular, I'm really holding out for the romancemod, but that will probably take forever I'm sure, considering how much more complicated things will be with the chemistry and dating systems. I suppose I will have to either make do with nojealousy at all for now or just try and be real sneaky with my slutty sims. No more three or moresomes for them.  *sigh*

Ste

Have you read some of the threads lately... in my not so humble opinion, it's already started... *shrugs*

Not that I haven't contributed to that myself, but I'm just a drip drop in the bucket. 

Ste

Thanks once again dizzy, for all your awesome help and guidance. I added the changes as you noted and did a bit of testing, and so far so good. I know I need to do a lot more testing to be sure, however, since I don't know exactly what are the conditions required to reproduce the error, since it did not always happen. I suspect it has to do with timing, perhaps either the spaceship showing up at the time a sim's carpool is also supposed to show up. The two times it happened was when Nina Caliente returned from her abduction. I didn't note the time, but it seems logical that perhaps the return coincided with the moment that her carpool to take her to work shows up. And perhaps the spaceship or spaceship locator object gets found first before the real carpool and the code gets confused and pops up that error. Hopefully after some more rigorous testing, I'll have a better idea if this solves the problem.

I noticed that Maxis left in a non-function Point Break.  I don't see why they don't bother cleaning up their code. I guess it's theoretically harmless but wouldn't it be better to leave unnecessary lines of code, both to avoid confusion and to cut down on file size (and therefore, theoretically loading times as well)? I looked at one of the other Send to Work BHAVs, I think it was in the CarGlobals, and there's like a whole section of code that never gets used at all. It was either intentionally disconnected or it is accidentally broken. I didn't bother to really look into it and figure out what it did, or was supposed to do, but it looked like it was supposed to handle school buses differently than work carpools. *shrugs* If it was disconnected and not used on purpose, they should just delete all of those lines of junk code! Unless they purposely leave this junk code in, perhaps as afterthought of something that was unfinished and maybe they will later finish it in other expansions? If this is common practice of Maxis, or game developers in general, I find that a bit discouraging, if not altogether unsettling. But meh, I don't know jack about the game development process, so who am I to complain? Hehe. 

Ste

Well, there may be a more elegant solution, perhaps improving the search/Set to Next call or something else, but due to my lack of experience and knowledge, I can't think of a better one right now. And I know it's pretty obscure, and as I suspected, the problem only seems to be exposed if you use any hacks related to abductions to begin with. I'm surprised this error wouldn't have shown up for people more often for those who may be using twojeffs' increased abduction odds hack. This is probably similar to the hottub errors that occur "normally" in the game, but get exposed and show up more frequently if you use hacks involving the hottub, such as LizzLoves' stuff, which I think she even warns about. I don't know if the source of that issue has ever been determined or solved. Anyways, it seems that the more abductions you have, the more likely you might get this error, and in that case, I'd like to correct it, at least for my own game, since I would like to have these abduction related hacks.


@dizzy-two: Thanks dizz, I'll take a look at your recommendations and see if I can make a fix and test if it works.

What is the Spaceship Locator? Where would a test for this be necessary?

In the JobDataGlobals" Send to Work tree (Group = 0x7F8F4EB6, Instance = 0x200F) BHAV, would it be sufficient to add a check for the Spaceship after finding a carpool? I'm assuming that the category test that is getting checked in that line:


is to make sure the Stack Object is a valid carpool vehicle. So... if this is true, then I can add in a check after this to see if the Stack Object itself is a Spaceship. This seems logical to me.

But where would I need a check for the Spaceship Locator? Does the Spaceship Locator also have a category (0x3B) that matches the carpool? And therefore it will erroneously return a true state causing the same error? Is that what happened in my error log?

Hopefully I'll have a bit of time to play around with this sometime tomorrow after class.

Ste

Okay, so if I understood that correctly, it is an inherent bug that my hack exposes but does not cause directly. In otherwords, theoretically, this would happen with any abduction. So... if I keep trying without hacks and just use the testingcheat, then this could still happen. Whenever a push interaction for Send to Work occurs while the spaceship is around, this error could potentially occur. It doesn't seem like this would happen because of something I changed.

Would the only way to fix it would be to hack the Send to Work bhav and make it check if the vehicle is NOT a spaceship? Right?

I went and looked at that bhav:


It looks like these lines above might be related to what you are talking about? I'm still not quite sure about how attributes work, how to relate attributes to a specific/kind of stack object and how to look up what are valid values for each. I guess if there was a way to distinguish a spaceship from other vehicles, one could add a test for that, which should return false if it was a spaceship?

Ste

How very strange... thanks for taking a look at it btw, I really appreciate that. Is there any reason this would be related to my hack in particular? I can't see how any of the changes that I added should cause this since none of the lines of code I added should affect any temps or stack objects, as far as I can tell. But then again, I have a pretty limited understanding as it is.

Could this error simply a consequence of a sim being abducted while a carpool comes and they are not there? I would have to test more to see if it is possible. It might be just an unforeseen consequence that might not have been caught since the original Maxis code pretty much has very low odds for getting abducted to begin with. I had an issue with getting abducted as well way back when I was testing twojeffs' increased abduction odds when he first released it. Only that issue was with teen sims getting abducted and then a "carpool" showing up for when they were supposed to sneak out.

What happened was that I would have a teen call to sneak out earlier in the evening, and while they were waiting for their friend to pick them up, I had the teen stargaze. When they got abducted and the friend showed up at 1:00 AM to pick them up, I would get a pop up error, and after reseting, the abducted teen would "teleport" home and end up in the foyer. No sneak out and no met aliens/abducted by aliens memory. One time, this resulted in the "invisible" jet/carpool issue I had, which I posted way back on VS in Pescado's now defunct forums. I had an invisible object, most like a spaceship vehicle/portal that never got deleted properly. As per Pescado's advice, I had my sims run/walk down the street and they ran into an invisible object they couldn't walk through, and complained with spaceships in their thought bubbles. I burninated it with buyable fire and it became floating ash. I finally "fixed" the household by moving my family into the sim bin and then back into the house, basically reseting the lot. It was only later that it seems people figured out something was going on with car portals getting deleted. I'm not sure how it works, if the portals are always supposed to be present, or if they get created and then deleted once vehicles show up and leave, but perhaps that is what went wrong with the teen. Once that event happened, I tried Several days (almost two weeks plus in sims time) to get Any of those sims abducted and it Never worked. Prior to that, I had abductions at least once an evening, if not every other evening. I had my sims stargazing almost all night from 7pm to 7am, so usually one of them got abducted. But after that error happened, no one got abducted, until I reset the lot and it went back to "normal" again. I did get the error again, just to confirm what I thought, and it did happen again, when a teen was supposed to sneak out, but got abducted and wasn't hope, the error dialog popped up. That time, I did not save to avoid fubaring the lot.

Anyways, with the Caliente house and this error, which I've only gotten twice by chance and haven't figured out how to consistently reproduce yet... I did not get a problem with spaceship/carpool portals. I was still able to get sims abducted, both just by stargazing and by the boolprop cheat. I don't know/can't see why my hack would cause this, so I'm hoping it's unrelated, and maybe just because the game probably doesn't count on sims getting abducted so often, that this scenario was never caught by Maxis as far as testing things out. Maybe the error comes from trying to push this interaction onto the sim's queue, but fails because the sim is abducted but still considered to be on the lot? I don't know exactly how that works either, but that's my guess. I definately need to do more testing, but I never got this error before.

Unless it really is my hack and I somehow, somewhere do not have something set correctly and somehow, some parameter is getting changed or set improperly? When adding my lines of code, I pretty much looked at other existing BHAVs in the objects.package and other mods/hacks as examples. I'm not quite sure what are valid parameters and what all those individual boxes mean, but I pretty much just copied what I saw and barely made any changes myself. Oh well... back to the drawing board huh? Lol.

Ste

Oh most more awesome than me, and any modder who has the time to take a look at this... I've tried to update almecho's abduction pregnancy for males and females hack on my own, with a few personal tweaks such as making pregnancy random rather than the default. I extracted the BHAV from the NL objects.package basically starting from scratch and slowly adding my changes line by line and it seemed to work fine. Testing with twojeffs' increased abductions, sims are successfully abducted and sims get pregnant randomly (25% of the time), it works for both males And females and the births turn out fine (no errors).

However, I AM getting a strange error regarding a 'Send to Work' BHAV. This happened one of the first times that I was testing, and I thought it was related to my changes that I placed incorrecty, but it seemed like I fixed that problem and now I have no clue why this is happening. I had all other hacks disabled and the only ones that I was using were mine (which is basically almecho's hack with some of my minor tweaks), twojeffs' increased abductions, and numenor's blur hack (which is not bhav based if i understand correctly and shouldn't interfere).

I've tried duplicating the error with all hacks disabled and so far have not yet managed to get it to happen again. It looks like it happens with the Caliente house, after getting Nina a slacker job, and then her being abducted. It "looks" like it might happen when she is abducted and misses her carpool. But I couldn't remember exactly what was happening the two times that this error occurred.

I just looked through my objects package both in the C:/Program Files/EA GAMES/The Sims 2 Nightlife/TSData/Res/Objects/objects.package

And the one I copied separately so I can extract BHAVs from and play with. They are the same size, same timestamp and I was able to locate the 0x49D BHAV in 0x7FD46CD0 set of globals. It looks like when I view the CarGlobals 0x7F4EA230 and the instance 0x200C, that  is the BHAV that calls 0x49D. If I open this in SimPE, it shows up as an unknown global, but I can open the BHAV directly and it shows up fine? This looked something similar to when I opened up any BHAV that referenced some Uni specific BHAVs like the "Am I a Young Adult?" check, which shows up as an unknown global, but if I filter for that group and specific instance, I can find it fine. It seems like this was a limitation of SimPE, but I'm not sure and I have the latest 0.48c non Q/A release. I've checked if there was an update, and there isn't one yet.

Anyways, I am now pleading for someone with more experience to take a look at the error log that I've attached and if anyone can offer advice as to what is going on, please let me know if there is something I can do to fix it.

This is my original code:


I tried to meticulous check all the params to be sure that I didn't set anything incorrectly, and I've mostly just copied what I had seen in other BHAVs and other mods. I'm not sure what exactly could be the problem... unless somehow some global value is getting screwed up? But I can't see what it could be. I used a Local arg instead of a temp since I thought that would be safer. I've made the lines that I added/changed bold. As far as I can tell, there shouldn't be nothing that should be referencing this "Send to Work" bhav. Jase (of InTeen fame) was kind enough to take a look at it and he had this to say:


But as I said above, I checked my objects.package and it all seems fine. I pretty much scrapped my old neighborhoods and I've been working on an entirely separate user account in Windows XP which I specifically dedicated as a TS2 Hack Testings account.

It is most likely something wrong with my hack, but what it is, I can't tell. And I don't know why it would reference any other BHAV. And so far, the two times I received the error involved Nina Caliente after getting her a slacker job. It looks like something funky might happen with the carpool, but I'm not quite sure what's going on. If anyone could help, I'd greatly appreciate it. For any non-modders, if you happen to play the Caliente house or any sim with a slacker job, if you could test what happens when a sim misses their carpool while they are being abducted, I'd greatly appreciate it if the error is reproduceable Without any hacks involved (or at least without my hack, then I know it can't be my hack that's the problem. ).

Ste


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I also want to throw my 2 cents in the hat and offer thanks for all your dedicated efforts MaxoidTom. I think it's fantastic that you took the time to addresss our concerns and issues, and hopefully you, or someone at least, will be able to do so each time a new EP comes out. I think the most crucial period is in the first few weeks/months of releasing a new EP that the community experiences an uproar over new "features" and bugs. The response is both good in bad over improvements and unforeseen issues that come up which may have unfortunately not been caught in time before a new EP is released. I think it's great that Maxis has made an effort to actually listen to its customers about these issues. I think the biggest problem is receiving placating or patronizing responses which feel condescending at best, insulting at worst.

Anyways, thanks again for everything you've done thus far and hope that you continue to provide the wonderful contact and support you have, schedule permitting of course. I think after getting past and catching the more flagrant, critical bugs, the community tends to settle down again, and starts to focus on more creative, personal tweaks and "fixes" for adjusting gameplay tailored towards individual tastes, and that is something I definately look forward to.

Ste

That's quite a vivid image that you've drawn up for us. But come on, stop being so coy and stop beating around the bush. Tell us how you really feel. 

No, seriously. Actually, care to elaborate, as I don't know if I've had any experience with this ass raping Peter Molyneaux. What else has he been responsible for? I'm too lazy to search on my own right now, so please divvy up a summary.

Also... off/on topic, B&W looks very cool. Although I've discovered that I mostly almost totally completely suck at resource driven type RTS games, or RTS games in general. Although WarCraft II was fun and StarCraft, I just really did not fare well when it came to acquiring resources in a timely, fashionable manner and efficiently mining those resources and building up an army or whatever. I dunno what it is, but I am just totally inept when it comes to that kind of management. *sighs* My ex-bf used to kick my ass all the time whenever we played against each other, and it was one the most frustrating humbling moments for me as far as video games go, since typically I have a knack for picking up games quickly. I guess my weaknesses are RTS games and shooters, I've never been great when it came to aiming.

Anyhew, the somewhat off topic bit that I wanted to throw out was that I am eagerly awaiting further development, news, and the release of Spore. That game seems like totally cool! I love the idea of including some form of evolution. But if the genetics have anything similar to what's been implemented in the Sims 2... well.  Plus... seeing how noticeable the bugs are in these TS2 games is also kind of discouraging. At least with the original Sims 1 games, if there were any bugs, I hardly noticed them at all. But then again, I probably didn't play enough to really notice them or even realize there were bugs, or just assumed that any bugginess was actually mistaken for gameplay.  Still... Spore could be pretty promising.

Ste

Without looking at the code itself... that looks like it should be okay... but I can't tell you for certain. I'd have to see it in SimPE myself and I'm certainly not an expert compared to other peeps, obviously.

But... if that is the line that seems to check if a sim is of a certain type and then the rest of it (Line C and forward) proceeds to allow the sim to skill on the comm lot, then yes, changing this so that they both continue should allow all sims, regardless of whether they are that type or not should be allowed to skill.

As for dizzy's suggestion to add a check for Knowledge/Wealth, that should be easy to do too.

Just add a line that checks for those aspirations:

1) my person data 0x002E Flag Set? Constant Value 0x013E:0x03

checks for Fortune (Wealth)

2) my person data 0x002E Flag Set? Constant Value 0x013E:0x06

checks for Knowledge

You can add this check after the above line you mentioned, and then True would go to C, False would return False.

The instruction settings to check for fortune/wealth aspiration should look like this:


To check for knowledge, change the 03 to 06.

If you want to include BOTH checks,  you should have the False Target of the first check go to the line of the 2nd check, so the logic of the pseudocode flows like this:


Assuming that the first line in the hack is the one you (Motoki) posted:


After running disaSims2, it should look like this:


In fact... you could probably just get rid of the 1st line altogether... at least logically that makes sense. *shrugs*

I don't know if this like a total faux pas in "revealing" info about modding or whatever, but I submit my lips as a sacrifice. 

And any real modders, please do correct any glaring mistakes as I don't want to be responsible for diseminating false information, which I am quite prone to doing.

Maybe if I get time this week, I'll make this tweak for myself. Lately, I've been doing these sort of mini-customizing tweaks myself to some of my fave mods. Hehe. I've even managed to get a working version of almecho's abduction pregnancy hack compatible with NL (MINUS the InTeen bits... for now, until I can figure out how to add those back in) with my own tweaks to disallow YA pregnancy (which I've heard can still occur in Uni supposably *shrugs*) as well as a 25% chance of getting pregnant now. I love twojeffs' increased abduction odds because I loved having my knowledge sims actually getting their meet alien wants filled, but I hated that they would always come back preggers. At least now, they will only get preggers some of the time, and my neighborhood won't be flooded with aliens due to excess overpollination. 

Anyhew, hope this helps and what not. And incidentally, when I was in elementary school, I used to take a short bus. Probably explains a lot...  (Actually... our bus wasn't that kind of short bus... HONEST! It was mostly for peeps whose kids lived too close to the school to "qualify" for a long bus, but still Too far to just walk... or in my case, kids whose parents were far too overprotective and wouldn't let them walk 5 blocks to school. )

Ste

Disclaimer: I only recommend futzing around with SimPE if you have a basic clue of what you are doing, with the caveat that any changes you make could potentially turn your game and/or computer into a bfbvfs. So... always back yo' shit up, foo!

I highly recommend reading up on stuff at the SimPE site (Carrigon's tuts) as well as Dizzy's tuts/how-tos on VS. I've learned a great deal from there, and I still have a looooooooooong way to go before I can even understand simple things, but those tuts are totally helpful.

PS. I took a look at the set of globals for group 0x7F01EC29 and here is a list of the different aspirations:

Const 0x13E:0x1(1) Romance
Const 0x13E:0x2(2) Family
Const 0x13E:0x3(3) Fortune
Const 0x13E:0x4(4) Power
Const 0x13E:0x5(5) Popularity
Const 0x13E:0x6(6) Knowledge
Const 0x13E:0x7(7) Grow Up
Const 0x13E:0x8( Pleasure Seeker
Const 0x13E:0x9(9) Grilled Cheese

I'm not sure what 4 would be... I just only looked for those. 4 might be Power... whatever the hell that is. I've seen it show up when playing around with the Sims Modder baby object that's now available with the testing cheats. Perhaps it is an unfinished Aspiration? I set a sim to it, and there is now Aspiration icon for it (like how Knowledge has a stick figure man holding a book, Popularity has a stick figure holding two other stick figures, Romance has a stick figure with a heart or something, etc.) Ok... I took a quick peek again at those globals and 4 does in fact represent Power. When I set a sim to that aspiration, they rolled up wants to get jobs in the miltary and politics. I suspect that it is indeed an aspiration that is unfinished. Can't say for sure, but I have never seen it mentioned in any other threads/posts before in any of the forums I've visited. It would be neat if they did add it back and fleshed it out, but perhaps it was just too similar to other Aspirations or they couldn't decide how to differentiate it? Your guess is as good as mine.

I don't know if this is the same issue but check out my post here. The original post is actually found in the InTeenimater forums over here. It sounds similar, but I can't say for sure that it is, epsecially since I haven't experienced it myself, but then again, I haven't even bothered to play NL yet.

Don't know if that will help at all. Obviously, if you haven't already reported this with the official bug form, I hope you do so and hopefully this will be figured out and fixed in time for the 2nd patch.

Ste

Er... wait a minute... I just read this in another thread and... if I get this correctly, this means that it is coded specifically to include biting NPCs (which Mrs. Crumplebottom falls into). Which is very bad for aforementioned corruptive reasons, right? 

But, according to dizzy's statement then, if you install a hack to prevent biting of all NPCs, then essentially vamps will have "open season" on biting, since the only time they stop biting is when "10 or more NPCs (not townies/downtownies)" are vamps already. If you can't make NPCs vamps, then they will continue to bite non-selectable characters. Right?

Can I get further clarification on what constitutes a "non-selectable character" ? I am inferring that, for this category, it Does include townies,dormies,downtownies, and NPCs, all of which are normally not selectable. Yes?

But... does this ALSO include the case when your other normally playable (Maxis-shipped or CAS player-made) sims show up as visitors (either on a resi, dormie, or comm lot) and thus are non-selectable. In other words, these are sims that Would be selectable IF you played their lots or were controlling them and bringing them to a comm lot, BUT... if you are playing another/different household, and these sims show up at the comm lots too, they are essentially non-selectable, so do they get included in the population of non-selectable characters?

If this is true AND it is true that selectable characters are always bitable, then essentially, if I'm not mistaken, if you install a don't bite NPC hack, then the rest of your population will be supsceptible pretty much forever, unless you actually bother to make 10 or more NPCs vamps. And even still, this ONLY will protect non-selectable sims since selectable characters are always bitable!

This seems really extreme. Hopefully someone will hack this and make it a bit more reasonable. Maybe it should be Any 10 sims (selectable/non-selectable, including townies, dormies, and downtownies, but EXCLUDE NPCs since that seems to lead to corruption ) unless someone can actually do it so it is a smart, actual 10% of the total population and not 10 NPCs specifically.

Ste

Hey peeps, I came across this at the Inseminator website under jase's InTeenimater forums over here.

It sounded very similar and I thought I had read about this before. I'm guessing this is a similar problem. Since I haven't encountered it myself (due mostly to the fact that I have been avoiding actually playing until I get all my hacks updated ) I thought it better to post it here rather than report it officially via the EA bug form.


Also ilikefishfood posted this as well:


I don't know if they mentioned it here yet, but jase now has a fix for that here and here is his reply:


It looks like he already officially reported this, but I hadn't seen it mentioned here yet (unless I missed it, in which case sorry for double posting), so I figured why not add it to the list. Oh yeah, and sorry about double posting anyways, but I thought it would be less cluttered to have this as a separate post from my last one, and plus these are separate issues anyways.

Ste

I'm confused about that last bit... so it checks the entire neighborhood to see if there are 10 NPC vampires? So... even if you start getting random bites and having your playable/player-made/controllabe sims turned into vamps, there will still be autonomous vamping from NPCs, until 10 NPC vamps are made? I am assuming that by NPC you mean Non-Playable Characters, which can be any "working" NPC (maid, fireman, policeman, etc.) OR any "flavor" of townie (townies, dormies, or downtownies) that are all initially non-playable (at least until you either marry or move them in).

So, in other words, are you saying that autonomous vamping still occurs until there are 10 non-playable vamps, OR 10 vamps total in your neighborhood (INCLUDING either vamps you created or CAS made or Maxis shipped (i.e. Pleastants, Goths, Oldies, etc.) vampified sims).

Would someone, anyone please clarify this for me as it seems that there hasn't been any definitive posts on what is considered 10%. I've read some posts saying that this 10% is not really 10% and it might be Maxian weird defination of 10%. I've noticed that in some BHAVs that supposedly use percentage, at least where lines of code are Supposedly choosing out of 100%, the random number generator is actually choosing between 0 to 100 (which is actually out of 101 members rather than 100, since 0 is a possible, returnable value). Instead, they should be choosing from 0 to 99, but they obviously don't.

Ste

Hey MaxoidTom,

I was just curious, since according to Dr. Boris' constantly updated list, the following hacks apparently are still required? with the NL EP, so I was wondering if these issues will be fixed by the patch?

handheldfix - I think it fixes the issue of handhelds causing crushes (possibly tweaks other issues such as obsession with the handheld or wants to play handheld with someone who doesn't have one)

deathfix - fixes the following:


marriage-postmortum - fixes the following:


moveoutbugfix - fixes the following:


If I'm not mistaken, I believe this is related to the various jump bug/too many iterations issue that a lot of the Critical Fixes are for.

noreunionmemory - fixes the following:


noteleportpuddle - fixes the issue when puddles seem to "teleport" magically out of range from the creator of the puddle, which I think sometimes happens when dripping water in the bathroom or sims peeing themselves and the puddle magically ending up on the other side of walls.

And I guess the pianofix is already planned for the patch?

nocorruptdeath - fixes the following:


noplagiarism - fixes the following:


There might be a couple of more that I haven't mentioned, but I think the other mods/hacks are mostly changes to gameplay. I think the ones I listed here can be considered bugs. I suppose I can go to the official website and submit them, but I'm betting on the possibility that these have already been mentioned and people probably have already reported them previously too. I was just curious if you are already aware of these and/or if these issues are already being addressed by the patch. Thanks.

Ste

From the sound of things, it looks like its way too easy to make too many enemies and maybe way too easy to go on successful dates? I'm hoping that an update of the romancemod will eventually deal with this. Not that I want dates to be super hard or impossibly challenging, but they shouldn't be super easy that you can pretty much get good ones all the time. And on the flip side, although it is more interesting now to have rivals and enemies or whatever, it seems almost ridiculously out of control according to the accounts I've been reading about. People just don't really have that many enemies in real life. Or if they do, they may not even be aware of it, or too aware of it, depending on the case. 

Anyway, I don't know if this would be possible to mod, but it seems like it needs to be toned down just a tad. Or... maybe the romancemod would hopefully lessen this effect, since some if not most of these conflicts have to do with the attraction system and/or slap happy fests due to the ridiculousness of Sims jealousy. I really miss how that was fixed especially when it came to children and to non officially committed relationships. Just gotta hold out a couple more weeks...

Ste

Uhh... any reason why you skipped gamma? 

I've used jordi's better names package and it's pretty cool. I'm planning on scrapping my old neighborhoods tho and starting all over anyways. Hopefully this time around my game will generate townies with no/few duped names since I'll have his mod installed from the get go.

I haven't played the game enough as it is. You guys are all crazy to have gone through 13 plus generations? haha. My sister has barely made it through 3 in her legacy game. I sorta got bored with my legacy and instead I've focused mostly on my regular game, in which I have tons of sims that I've created based mostly on people I know. Mostly my friends and some of their friends. I actually don't play Sims 2 like most peeps must in the sense of actually trying to build generations. I've been playing it mostly like the original Sims and pretty much dragging my ass sticking with the first generation since I'm trying to make my sims mimic real life as much as possible.  Which is partially why I'm rebooting my game/families so I can start over and make them even more realistic since I've created tons more sims. I didn't want my sims to miss out on dating and stuff. 

Ste

I've mentioned this to twojeffs' before... but I guess it was too minor of an issue. I didn't have my sims pop out of the bed, but I had a problem where only one sim was in love with the other and casual romance options no longer popped up. However, regular options for woohoo was still not available because apparently the feeling wasn't mutual.

I was hoping that a check could have been added so that it requires both sims to be in love before casual romance options disappear. For now, probably the only way to get them to woohoo again is to either play Andrew Thayer or have him move in or use regular romantic interactions with him in order to get him to fall in love as well. If you're getting pop up/jump bug errors, I would both request and recommend that you post any error logs you get from this in TwoJeffs' Junk Box forum. If you don't get error logs, then you should turn on the boolprop testingCheatsEnabled cheat to enable debug mode. Hope this helps.

Ste

Lol 

This thoroughly amuses me. And I vaguely recall reading RabidAngel's thread from way back when, but I never did follow up on it to find out what caused it. I think it's hilarious that it was eyeshadow. Hrm... it's always the thing you least expect.

Btw, if you could do peeps a favor and maybe post again specifically the following:

Name of the file/package
MD5 #
Description as displayed in S2PCI

And any additional info that could be helpful in identifying this hack so that other peeps could remove it if it happens to them. I'll have to keep a careful, watchful eye out for this. Fortunately, I don't really download custom stuff like makeup and what not.

Ste

In case you didn't know already, I've been reading around and supposably, that cheat is broked.

Ste

Sounds like something we need a hack for. Maybe something along the lines of TwoJeffs' previous work, like Casual Vamping or Casual Siring.

Also, curious as I haven't played NL at all yet, even though I've installed it. Hehe, still waitin patiently on updates...

But... if a sim bites, is this action always "accepted" by the bitee? In other words, can the victim ever reject the vamp that is tryin to bite them? Or is it basically 0% fail rate/100% success rate. A bite will Always turn the victim into a vamp. Thus, you can't really protect yourself from autonomous bites, and you'll be forced to buy the potion to devamp yourself if it happens.

Oooh, I can think of some other new great hacks, maybe like the cow head or ghosthacks for repelling vamps. We'd need meshes maybe for crosses and or garlic or something. Maybe these could be tokens or objects like however Cell phones and other objects are carried by the inventory system. Then sims could purchase and carry these objects to repel vamps the way that the TwoJeffs' cow-head hack does for Uni cow mascots or Pescado's ghostbusting vacuum does ghosts.

Oooh, and maybe there could be meshed stakes and/or recoloured potions as holy water, which could be used by "normal" human sims to kill off vamps or set them aflame! *evil grin* Hehehe... I'll have to suggest/request this again somewheres after the dust settles and old hacks are updated and people start creating new hacks.

Ste

Edit: I meant garlic. I got that confused with onions, although onion breath could probably repel vamps or other sims in general. Lol.

That's what I was sorta saying in my post, which it seems most everyone didn't bother to read. Well, I tend to get longwinded, so that's my own fault. But anyways... I totally understand that supposed reason as to why they think it was bad to have teen sims stuck with unfulfillable LTWs, but that would just be a consequence on the player's part due to their decision of how they choose to play. So... if they opt to not send their sim to college, then they are doing so by their choice and thus denying the fulfillment of that sim's LTW. I totally even forgot about the situation where elders would end up with unfulfillable LTWs. Especially if they are CAS made elders, then those sims are totally screwed as well, since there would be no way for them to achieve career related LTWs since they can't get "real" jobs anyway. At least not without hacks. So yeah, that sort of just ends up contradicting the seemingly half-thought decisions that were made. Apparently it is ok to screw over elders, but not teens.

I personally think that, in the long run, it is better to have more options, especially to have LTWs that go with any new careers that will no doubt show up with each expansion pack. Again, as I was trying to say, if we only ever have LTWs related to the original careers in the base game, then there isn't as much incentive to ever play those other careers out. In fact, there wouldn't even be an incentive to go to Uni anyways for those sims who have career LTWs since doing so isn't required. I think having those Uni related career LTWs and supposedly there might be new careers in NL as well which should also have new related LTWs, it would just give further incentive to send sims to Uni so they can achieve those LTWs. Heck... I haven't even seen any regular wants to become Any of those new careers. I have seen wants to get a job in a certain career track before, but that has only been fairly rare on occassion, and so far limited to the already existing careers in the base game. Again, it would just be so much better and make more sense to have these other career related LTWs for more variety and gameplay incentive. And this goes hand in hand with having re-rollable LTWs at life changing events or Age Transitions. But meh, I'll stop ranting for now otherwise I'll just be a broken record. Hehe. 

I just don't know if I'll have the patience to wait for all my favorite global hacks to be updated and/or re-written or whatever. Especially having to wait for Pescado to get his copy. My Nightlife should be arriving tomorrow!!! I've been like constantly checking the tracking info at UPS. Hehe. Yeah, I'm that crazy.

Ste

I've sort of been lurking around and waiting and watching in silence, trying to be very patient about things since:

A) My NL has not shipped yet
B) I'm undecided as to whether I will install or wait until the patch and/or hacks are updated
C) The new school semester has started and I've been busy with my own "Uni" homework and TAing

But I'm glad that a Maxoid has been available for answering all our questions and concerns and I feel compelled to participate a bit. I would really like to see a consolidated list of Maxoid (Tom?)'s response, and not just what has been fixed but I am also really interested in what are considered "as designed" since what we may consider "bugs" or "flaws" may be a difference of opinion. If anyone has consolidated this list of responses, please provide a link. I know a lot of people are mentioning lists here and there, and some have provided links to the Same thread (kmlough's) on the BBS (which I never really go to anyway). But other people have mentioned other lists at other sites, and while it's great that you mention they exist, it wouldn't hurt to also provide a link, please?

I also have  a few questions about certain bugs or design issues that people have mentioned like this secret society memory loss? I'm guessing this is not the same think as greek amnesia? Could someone elaborate on this? If it is actual memory loss, why would this be "by design" instead of a bug?

People also mentioned a possible solution to things, such as the LTW re-rolling or only showing up at Uni. I prefer MaxoidTom's (which I will now assume that is who this Maxoid is, as I really don't like using HatedMaxoid - I tend to agree with what many people have said already, that we tend to take our frustration out on EA/Maxis in general and not at any Maxoid specifically  ) suggestion in that maybe it re-rolls at Age Transitions. I actually like that it shows up around the Teen years, and it is Especially helpful if the Teen is a Knowledge Sim and gets the Maximize 7 skills LTW, because this is certainly doable before entering Uni and coincides with getting as many scholarships as possible. It can make Uni life much easier for the Knowledge Sim.

What I would like to see is possibly a dialog box that pops up at the end/start of an Age Transition asking if you would like to re-roll the LTW. This could be similar to how the dialog box pops up at the end of Junior year and gives you a chance to change the Sims Aspiration. Only this would just allow you to choose Yes for a random re-roll or No and keep the one you already have. It would also be better if it followed Pescado's LTW Variety hack in a similar manner in that LTWs really should be based on a Sim's interests. It seems to me that, for the most part, the LTWs are fairly random and it only makes sense that they should be based on a Sim's interests. It is just one more way to make use of a Sim's interests and make them a bit more individual. We should also have more ways to change a sims interests "in game" rather than having to use tools like SimPE to adjust them. This is probably more of a "design issue" rather than a bug, but I think it would definately improve gameplay. I suppose if Maxis doesn't include this, hopefully Pescado will be able to update his mod.

And as many people have mentioned numerously already, it seems a lot of the Critical bugs have to do with the "too many interations" issue. While it is great that the iterations have been increased, I think that this is still just a minor tweak that may not really solve the problem. You could still theoretically get too many iterations, only now you have more iterations than before.   I think the issue is that the functions/BHAVs for searching are inherently flawed. I'm sure there are numerous posts/threads that we could find that describe the technical issues, or if any of the modders would be so kind as to step in and describe the issue, but from what I gather based on my limited understanding, some of the searching routines in BHAVs that require iterating through a list of objects (or Sims) fail and produce this error when the list is too large (say due to too many memories or too many sims in the neighborhood). It seems that these searches should be limited to valid objects (or sims) that make sense. There should be a way to validate the types of objects or sims that are being searched and not include the invalid ones (such as dead sims or possibly invisible memories or memories that have Nothing to do with what is being searched for).

Also, I think someone mentioned Crammyboy's solution to the missing (car) portals. I believe I read somewhere that these solutions are pretty much only work arounds and that modders also have not completely determined what causes it and why. I also believe that it was suggested that the bookcase might have something to do with the car portal, and although that struck me as extremely odd and totally related, I supposed it wasn't entirely improbable. I believe this was probably mentioned in Crammyboy's fix thread at MTS2. If I find it, I'll put a link here.

Incidentally, in my own experience, I think I had this problem with a portal of some type as well, most likely related to the Spaceship. Admittedly, I did have a hack that increased the odds for getting abducted. In this household, I had a teen sim abducted. However, I also had him scheduled to sneak out that night. I think the problem was that, since the car pool to sneak out showed up, and the spaceship/portal was on the lot invisible, it probably caused some unexpected error. When the teen came home and later I tried having him sneak out on other days, he would always just pop up and magically teleport into the house foyer/entrance. And no, it wasn't that he showed up after sneaking his way home into the house, he just appeared there. I think if I had boolprop testingcheatsenabled I would get an error log. I don't remember exactly as it has been a while, and the thread I posted related to this has since been deleted since it was originally in Pescado's forums on VS before he moved here.

In any case, the other symptoms that resulted was an invisible object blocking the road, so all my car pools and bus pools would just sit in front of the house, honking until the end of the hour, at which point they magically disappeared. I even verified that there was an invisible object on the road, as when my sims tried to walk across it, there was a point where they were blocked, and they would complain about the route failure and in their thought bubble, they would have a spaceship. One time, the mother of this household came home in her limo (she was at the top of the medical career) and it was invisible. You could just see her and the driver floating in front of the house, almost as if they were in an invisible limo. I tried various solutions such as scorching the road with fire, hoping to burninate and destroy whatever invisible object was there. This only succeeded in burning it and then my sims complaining about an invisible object blocking their path (the thought bubble changed to the trail of footsteps ending at a red X). When I pulled back the camera, I could see a floating set of ashes on the single tile that my sims could not walk across. I was only able to solve this by moving my sims off the lot and back onto it. Not a total loss, and it had its fortuitous side-effects (my knowledge sim mother lost her obssession with her co-worker that she had been having a mini-affair with but then I worked very hard to make her enemies with) but it adds another useless Moved Out/In memory (which only further contributes to any possible "too many iterations" memory issues) and I had to redo my furniture, which was both good and bad, since I needed to redecorate anyways but it was a pain to have to do redo completely.

Oh, and this also brings up issues regarding romance and enemies. If sims do make enemies, there was an issue of "too many iterations" when sims became enemies, which was fixed by Pescado's nmefix. There should be a way for them to stay enemies much longer, which is accomplished by one of Pescado's mods as well. And it seems strange, and I don't know if this is "by design" how some interactions were inexplicably romantic (such as playing with the handheld, I think MaxoidTom mentioned should be now fixed, and the backrub, which I don't think was mentioned whether this was fixed or "by design"). Additionally, it seems odd that WooHoo does not affect gender preference, and although that might be something arguably debatable on a philosophilcal level (almost to say that it shouldn't matter who we woohoo with, it doesn't change who we are and we should be accepting of everyone regardless of who they woohoo   ) but it does seem odd that kissing and making out and other romantic actions affect a sims gender preference and woohoo does not. Finally, there's the "design" issue with the Apologize interaction, which frankly, I personally think should be completely re-written as it doesn't make sense that the Offended sim is the one who has the option to apologize to the Offending sim. That is just plain backasswards!   I mean, if the cheating sim gets caught, s/he should be the one that has to apologize to the sim that was cheated on. This definately appears to be a limitation and/or glaring error in how the interaction works and I can't understand how anyone would have approved that.  

A couple of things were mentioned that will hopefully be addressed:

The piano not being fun after the first day? I don't understand why that is "by desgin" either.
The obssession with the toasting set until sims pee or freeze up also seems to be flawed "by design."

As for the Uni career LTWs, I can understand why they were removed, but this just gives further reason why LTWs should be re-rollable. And it seems a shame that only Non Uni careers get LTWs, because in a way, it almost makes it pointless to go to Uni. Aside from getting the Uni career related rewards, there is no incentive for sims to go through Uni in order to get access to those careers. I think it would have been better to include those LTWs, and that way it is up to the user whether they fulfill them or not. They would at least have a choice to send the sim to Uni and work towards that goal, rather than not have an incentive at all. Personally, this is a serious issue in my book, and it seems almost pointless if, in further expansions, any new careers are added, but no new LTWs associated with those careers are included. If that is the case, there isn't very much incentive to pursue those careers. Getting stuck with an LTW that you can't fulfill if you don't send your sim to Uni is Just as bad as getting stuck with a career related LTW that forces or boxes you into one career. I think part of the enjoyment of Sims is the flexibility in being able to create your own stories and building your characters/families in the way you would like to imagine them to be. That's why it would make more sense to have More options for LTWs that include all new careers, regardless of whether they are Uni or not, AND allow for LTWs to be re-rolled at special moments such as Age Transitions.

Anyways, I've probably exhausted a lot of what I had to say and anyone who bothered to read this as well. I just wanted to throw my own 2 cents in and hopefully keep nagging about the same issues, even if they are "by design" so that maybe the designers would eventually be willing to listen to the players/consumers. Wishful thinking? Ha!

Ste

Could you maybe at least provide a link to the thread? I've done a little searching and couldn't find a thread listing bugs as you mention, over at VS. And it's a bit annoying that you have to wait 30 secs between new searches. Anyhew, you wouldn't have to post the whole thing, but a link would be nice and sensible.

Ste