and to scrape the bottom of the barrel (sorry), New Zealand can contribute The Penguin. Once seen, never forgotten. I saw it demo'd at a phys ed'ers party many years ago.

One person projectile vomits, another tries to catch the vomit in their mouth.

I only ever attended one phys ed party.

Edit: Sorry, alzheimers, it's called the Pelican, not the penguin.

Try memtest86 from http://www.memtest86.com/
my technician b/f says he uses this at work. Can be put onto a bootable floppy if required.

I use the b'day cake, no problems so far, occasionally in the old n'hood (that crashed and burned), I had a cake command that didn't work, but since the new n'hood no probs.

I see a couple of people say the party needs to be at 6pm, have the sims blow out the candles at this time, this is not true. The party can be held at any time during the last 24 hours, the cake can be done at any time.

I have stopped using a cake for the infant to toddler transition, the two times I've done this both infants became toddlers before 6.30pm, no problems.

Socialisation is the key to parties, not food, not toys. Use JM's autosocialiser on maybe three sims during the party and most of the time it's a roof raiser.

So, sorry JM, this is one bug I don't got.

I've just started a new n'hood, I made three families and hope that's enough to populate the gene pool and provide some interesting crosses. I will time sync these, three's not too many to manage I think/hope.

I loved Heinlein when I was a little hippie in the '70's, especially Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love, but I've been going off him ever since. He got seriously weird about incest in his later books and it creeped me out so much I can only read his earlier stuff now. Feminism helped turn me off his theme of old balding hook-nosed blokes who got all the nookie, as well.

Bugs of course, lots!

I agree, you put that so well!

I'm amazed by the variety of the people here and also, I have to say, by the generally high levels of educational achievement. I knew the discussions here were on a different plane, people can write, spell and comprehend for a start, but I'm totally blown away now. 

I've always felt a little ashamed of being a grown woman playing games, I keep it a bit quiet at work, but I'm just about out of the broom closet now I've read this thread. 

I think the Sims is a great game, revolutionary in concept to have that open ended gameplay. Will Wright seems to have an acute insight, I'm dying to see the new Spore. The sims, both 1 + 2 have kept me captivated for nearly five years, I play many other games but always return, no other game is as addictive for me.

The extras, the modding, fixing, building, importing, creating, sharing and talking about the game on the net expand the experience in many unexpected ways. I think the game itself is fantabulous, it is so amazingly complex I wonder how it works at all - sometimes I feel that way about computers too, I'm just grateful they go at all.

Unfortunately there is one main flaw, the iteration problem, and quite a few other smaller problems. No other EP has been this bug-ridden. I remember the 1st or 2nd EP of sims 1, I was disappointed because the occasional bag of crisps got stuck on the floor. 

I suspect this lowering of quality lines up with EA taking over Maxis and running the programmers into the ground in search of the mighty dollar. I'm sure Maxis is not full of happy little elves gleefully getting our xmas presents ready, programmers probably work on modules, some may never have seen the game they're coding for, testing is not done for long enough, the whole programme development lifecycle has been accelerated. I got a quote off the net once that I think is applicable:

"You can have your software;       Fast     Good     Cheap            - Pick any two."

I don't hold up much hope for a quality increase, no matter how many maxoids are employed on the publicity team. 

I read a study about silicon valley & autism recently. Apparently rates of autism and aspergers are very high in the valley. It is supposed that geeks are actually breeding 'cos they're meeting each other at work in their programming cubicles.

My degree is in computing and I work teaching computing. I relate better to animals & my computer than people. My partner is a technician, we can spend the whole evening in front of our machines, hardly speaking. It's great.

look for "MTS2_31594_VAMPY BITES V^^^^V_NeighborhoodCamera.zip" on modthesims2
when you find it, it goes in the C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Cameras folder.
I can't post it, it's not mine to share.

Veilchen, yes I made it. I think you would need simcity4 to make the terrains in this way. I thought the default terrains were quite ugly so I made one I liked. The square on the right was to be the commercial district, though I've ended up not playing community lots at all since JM's clothing outfitter.

JM, yes some of the surfaces are a little uneven, I like that for landscaping ideas. Not many areas are more than a 15 degree slope, I alter max slope value so I can build there anyway. I quite like sloping sections for basements with windows along one side and so on.
"and more about random orbital bombardment around the edges" ? You make it look like your n'hoods have been bombarded? 

Thanks Veilchen, you are a veritable fount of information! 

If anyone would like to try a new custom designed n'hood, I have one available for download from here:
http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=1726

Sorry about the large size of the image, it's sitting on my homepage directory and I can't change it from work.

Is this one of Inge's? I don't recall seeing it around. Sounds good!

Yeah, I tried last night. The file maid opens a wizard. The wizard shows me the options I can scan for, I selected all available tick boxes. It scans, gives me a list of files it considers dodgy. Tells me it can't scan yet for missing textures or skins as it's beta. I select files to get rid of, click on 'delete', nothing, click on 'move to temp folder', make temp folder, nothing. Finally click next on wizard, message box says, 'beta cannot delete or move files to temporary folder.' I downloaded off the datgen site so I presume is latest version. 0.79? maybe - I'm at work. I uninstalled, tried a previous version. Can't find plugins. Put plugins in plugins folder on offchance, no joy. Have directx9c, .NET framework, .NET patch. Very frustrating evening! 

The point is kind of moot anyway, datgen shows the list of downloads, then flatly refuses to do anything about them. 'Delete' or 'move to temp' are apparently disabled in the beta version, but I didn't find that out till I'd been clicking on things for a while and finally went 'next' in the wizard. And I can't manage to see the plugins at all in a previous version. All in all, not a successful evening so far. Well, back to good old clean pack installer...

Hmm, maybe I will open it up one more time.

Hi JM.
Why do you think datgen sees two of your files like this? Is it reading them wrong or is it because of the object you used for the eye in the sky and the one for the toilet paper?
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~witch3/temp/datgenimage.jpg
Might be easier if you view a larger image, posted here it's too small.

I had an option to only make instant meals once, but it turned out there was still burnt food in the stove that I couldn't see. Have you replaced the stove?

I was looking at the cars on simslice yesterday, sims can get in - several at once - and do what I don't know - but their fun & social go up. Simslice even have hacked helicopters that sims or townies can ride in, or so they say, I'm not game to try and I don't think their downloads are free anyway. So they're definitely hacks rather than just decorative objects.

I got datgen downloaded and installed. It scans. I love seeing all the categories and the details, like the objects with googleplex polygons that can slow down the game etc. Very informative, this looks like the best option so far. I couldn't make datgen delete files or remove them though, right click or anything else. I don't want to search 1Gb data by hand but may have to. I'm still on the track of starting a new n'hood but want to prune my downloads first.

I tried the Maxis scanner, it got a lot of stuff wrong, not nearly so much detail as datgen, clunky cartoon interface, very windows XP, very yesterday.

You can put new lots on quite hilly terrain too. Someone called 'boatnana' worked out how to change the 'max slope value'. The game default is about 15 degrees. If you search modthesims2 for the keywords you might find out how. I can't remember, I think I downloaded a file.

Hey JM, I used this no20khandout hack in my last n'hood, it was great, some of them went home to mum and dad, some started out in squats. Just like RL.  People are often surprised that I add hacks that make it harder to play.

I wasn't able to kill sims at that time. 
I'm now becoming used to killing sims, thanks to Pescado et al. Bad influence you lot! I won't have any townies in my new n'hood. 
Just as soon as I finish re-installing the sims2 uni yet again.

Sidenote, I am re-installing because last night, from a clean test n'hood, I uploaded a lot to the ea server. Before I installed the lot into my game the sims2pack was 2.67Mb. By the time the lot arrived on the sims site, via the sims2 game, it was 50Mb. After re-installing sims2 but NOT uni, I tried again. This time the lot on the ea server is about 2.7Mb. A poster (Jordi?) warned me that the object package could become corrupt, I wonder if that affected the lot in some way.

My first n'hood was riddled with sickness, before any hacks dealt with the issue. I never had a single sim die, I thought it was a really low chance but other posters seem to have had a lot of trouble with sick sims. The most irritating thing was every time I got a family well, visitors would re-infect them and I got really sick of the endless pop-up messages about who was ill with what.

What is the percentage chance of dying from illness? I never did anything special with sick sims, I usually just got a message in the morning saying they were well again.

Oh yeah, this ROCKS!
Will experiment ASAP.