I've tried to fix Lucy Hanby's hair by shift-clicking on her, selecting 'make vampire' and then 'cure vampirism' as suggested and it does work temporarily but the changes don't stick. The next day when she comes to work her hair has turned blonde again and is still blonde when she shows up on other lots to clean.

Any other ideas? Please

I have all the expansion packs and for all my sins have installed the Pets patch. I have quite a few hacks by Pescado, TwoJeffs &  Syberspunk but I'm pretty sure they are the latest versions.

Tank (one of my dogs) turned into an elder and I got his owner to ring up the pet's work so Tank could retire but I keep getting an error message stating that the object must refer to a person. I have tried using a mobile and also a normal phone but cannot get Tank to retire.

I don't think it is either Syberspunk's callprivateschool or Pescado's phonehack that are causing the problem as I have tried to retire Tank without those hacks in and I still get the error message.

Would someone please have a look at my error log and give me some idea of what to remove?

I'm currently filling in lots of QA forms in the vain hope that someone will a) read them and b) act on them

I used to have an nVidia card but got sick of all of the problems. I now have an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and WOW it is nothing short of amazing.

Wedgetail - the Pets patch is out.

So Maxis/EA seem to have tracked down the problem between some nVidia cards and Pets. You can read about it here but the work-around according to Maxoid Sam is as follows:

"Enter the cheat code "boolprop useshaders false" in the console (while the game is running, type CTRL-SHIFT-C to bring up the console to enter the code -- do not type the quotation marks when entering it). Unfortunately this will disable some of the nicer graphics capabilities of these cards, but at least it will get the game running while we figure out how to get you a better solution.

A few of you have posted some info about your PC's that has been very helpful in tracking this down. Can you also email me your "DXDIAG" info from your PC? That will help us narrow down the problem even further.

To do this, press START--->RUN---> and type "dxdiag" in the dialog box (no quotes). Once that's up, press "Save All Information". This will prompt your PC to save a file to your computer. Save that file to your desktop, then email it to me at splayer@ea.com."

Ste - in Litter Box TJ says that the puppy-kitten parentage hack is the only one of his that conflicts with the new patch.

I agree with Katze. I'd rather find out about the implications of the patch on the hacks first.

Re the snapdragons - the pinkish fumes are not always pumping so you may have to wait for a while before they show up. Also your sims' needs could be decreasing faster than the snapdragon can increase them.

It might be worthwhile downloading Windkeeper's OFB extracted craft objects at MTS2 if you wanted to play around with snapdragons that definitely work and save you having to keep getting your sims to make the flowers. Just remember to go into collections for Build mode though and not Buy mode in order to get the objects.

Settle down tabbs, help is here. 

You need to do is download the files and then extract them using winzip, 7zip etc. You need to put them into your downloads folder \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Downloads. As there are rather a few files, you might want to put them in a sub-folder and call it Beta Face Templates or something similar. If there is now Downloads folder within \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\ it means that you have not installed any custom content and therefore must create one. If you have already downloaded face templates from elsewhere then you need to temporarily remove them from the Downloads folder or just delete them as Nailati's are bound to be nicer.

If you want to try out all of the beta face templates including the latest that Nailati posted, then download them here:

- Rapidshare.com
- Mediafire.com

Once you have put these files into your downloads folder, you need to delete the thumbnails so the game will regenerate with the new faces and not the old maxis ones, so go to \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails and delete CASThumbnails.package.

It may just be lies and propaganda but it seems that a Pets patch will be out this week.

Installing Pets adds a couple of hundred extra files but they wouldn't be needed for a family tree display. I think this idea is great and would be very useful.

EDIT: I'm at 520 for Pleasantville but if you knock out the pets it would be about 300. I restarted at the beginning of the year.

Sorry. I didn't put in the file path as I had listed it a couple of posts above.

Which ones? You should put the face templates for 02, 25 & 27 into your downloads folder and then delete your CASThumbnails.

pm me

A cheat so you can have quads...like all the time. That would be so cool /sarcasm [shudders]

That's ok. At least you can always un-install the toolbar after downloading.

I haven't had any trouble downloading them (I tried again a few minutes ago) but as you are having problems, I've uploaded her #2 Beta Face Templates in the form of CAS Sims to Megaupload here

I'm not sure why the betas are no longer available - possibly because they have been made obsolete by the latest work Nailati has been doing. Anyway, I've zipped the ones that I have and you can find them at Megaupload here.

Please remember that these are only betas and so you may want to try them out in a separate neighbourhood or something (I use them in my main hood with no problems). You will need to delete your CASThumbnails.package found in your My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails folder which means your thumbnails will regenerate when you load up your game and show the new templates.

@ Nailati - if you removed your link deliberately and don't want these being shared then let me know and I'll delete the files.

Best not, they would probably take you seriously. 

The defaults have not yet been completed so the beta templates are all that are available. Naitali has created beta templates for most of the face templates but still has to create a few and tweak the betas.

Aha, now I understand. I thought you had to extract the thumbnails via SimPe but printing screens and then cut/paste/edit job is all good. Ta muchly

How do you extract the thumbnails of the sims? I have found the jpg/tga/png image under Character File but it doesn't have the background greyed out nor does it have the border or the rounded edges?

The problem with genealogy programs is that you will need to connect all the families at some point...if the families never intermarried then you can't usually represent them in the same chart.

If you are really worried about attraction between mother and son-in-law and you already have the romance mod then make them 'family' in SimPe. This will stop them from making any moves on each other.

You have the option of randomising their skills or randomising their skills (with no more than 5 points per skill).  You can also randomise their personality as well.

I like the distance between the eyes and the jaws. Very nice!