More Awesome Than You!

This was really bizarre.  I don't know if it's a one-off or repeatable glitch, no error was generated and & I didn't save for obvious reasons!

Mum is in the kitchen. Baby is sleeping in her cot upstairs in the dormer.  I get a message saying the baby is cold.  Baby's icon is not red (prob yelllow). Mum goes and gets the baby and takes it downstairs to feed it (what should she have done?).  Social worker arrives, but can't interract with anyone as they are all busy. No messages on screen.  Social worker leaves (normally I think).  Baby disappears but her icon is still on the left as part of the family & mum is suddenly pregnant again.  I run the house fore a few more sim hours, but nothing changes.  I quit without saving.

I've had seasons for months and this is the first heat related problem I've had thanks to my awesome hacks.  I thought the dormer problem was fixed in so far as I thought at all.  It's one of those houses where the upstairs is widened in places by big dormers. 

I have the current version of SShack.

I've had problems with rooves since seasons too.  Especially the maxis modern masterpiece where shed rooves form the upper story - snow wasn't getting in (which I've had in other houses), but the temperature would drop and freeze my sims while sleeping upstairs.  I got around that one with some extra walls inside...  but it seems that some of the more interesting roof structures are now unusable and borked completely when it comes to seasons.

Haven't had the social worker show up and make a sim pregnant, though.

I think the roof thing may actually be an intentional "feature". Isn't it normal that the attic is typically too hot or too cold?

I believe that may be giving mEAxis a bit too much credit.  I don't think they actually came up with that idea on their own.  I think it has to do with the accidental and rather arbitrary nature of dimensions used in the game.

It is the walls built in the attic that intersect the sloped roof walls that are the root of the problem.  Previously, assuming no change of slope of the roof, one could construct a wall three grids from the edge of the floor plan so that they intersect with a sloped roof wall and create usable space in the attic, even without a dormer.  The joint of the sloped roof wall and the regular wall is not a perfect fit, but it used to work well enough because there were no graphic anomalies of walls protruding through the roof.  Somehow, it must be related to the stretched and arbitrary nature of the vertical dimension in the game that was more than likely done by nothing more scientific than 'eye-balling' to make it look right.  If walls were truly three grids high and the roof slope is actually 45 degrees, and we know the Pythagorean theorem, then the walls built three grids from the edge of the plan would make a perfect fit.  They do not, if one were to do this in 'walls-up' mode the roofs removed, it is plain that they do not, and there is a slight gap.  This is where the outside temperature gets in, even if the ceiling is tiled as it apparently must be for Seasons, because roofs have no effect keeping weather out.  It snows through the roof, requiring floor tiling above any usable interior space, which I think is proof enough that this was not an intentional feature.

In short, walls must be built to join sloped roof walls four grids from the edge, instead of three, in order to eliminate the tiny gap at the top of the wall junction and for them to make a weatherproof seal.  This can be done by deleting the last grid section of wall and then building a diagonal wall from the third to the fourth row to make the junction with the sloped roof wall.  A bit of a hassle, but normally not impossible to do.  Another demonstration that this is an accident and game anomaly and not intentional, since such a basic fix would not even be a fix if the attic being cold or hot was on purpose.

Now I think YOU are overthinking this. Do you honestly believe they did an air-permeability test? That is computationally expensive and FAR more work than they would think of doing, not to mention unnecessary. No, the roof walls simply don't count as "insulated", period. This problem will persist even if your house consists of a roof drawn straight along the ground, with no standard walls that intersect or touch it at all. It is almost certainly an intentional feature. There is no "little gap test".

Far as I can tell, it only snows through the nonstandard OFB roofs, and maybe the odd diagonal roofs.

Put a sunken hot tub in a flat tiled roof, and it snows through the roof.  Was not impressed to discover that one!

I actually didn't think about it much at all, although I did make some assumptions.  And no, I do not think they tested these things much, if at all, obviously.  I don't use attics much, and I had one house that I noticed this problem with.  Cutting the corner of the attic space cleared up the issue, and that was it.  Also, it snows through all of the roofs in my game.  Maybe this is not the way it was supposed to be, but that is the way it is as I am seeing it.  If this is not the case for you, then I can not explain that.  Do you always cover the top level of a house with a floor, even if there is a roof over it?  If there is no floor, then presumably you would not see the snow accumulate on it.  I can not explain this, only observe it.  The snow does not accumulate and get deeper, like it does outside, for some reason, but it does cover any floor built under any roof on the roof level.

I reckon it's much simpler - roof walls don't count as "real" walls, so attics made using them are kind of outside. Similarly, I have had messages saying I can't have ceiling lamps in attics because it's outside.
The snowing through roofs I've had with a Maxis octagonal roof - and the snow layer on top actually hovered above it.

From what you're saying it looks like all the sims who sleep upstairs are in danger of freezing in this house.  I guess I either add another floor with proper bedrooms or just change the season.  It's a TSR challenge house which probably means it was a maxis house.   

What I'm more worried about is the baby disappearing, but still part of the family and the sim ending up pregnant again.  All with no error message or log.  I hope this isn't a common feature of SS visits since seasons!

Put floor tiles directly under the roof.  Solves the whole problem painlessly.

Not always, Lerf.  Didn't solve the problem with my house - only the walls did!

Explain "cutting the corner". There are "corners" in your attic space that you can "cut"? With what?

Yes, but I haven't seen snow in the under-roof either. It does, however, always appear to rain in all houses, even indoors, when it rains, but the sims never seem to notice and no puddles form inside the house or under the roof.

Octagonal roofs are nonstandard roofs and do not block weather. Only the standard "square" roofs that came with the original game appear to function. The "Diagonal" roofs are untested.

Attics- like on that one farm lot in Riverblossom Hills (the one with the orchard and the barn?) I can't even get it to let me put furniture in the one on the barn...

Where is your camera when you are seeing this inside rain, Pes? If the Live mode camera is outside the house, you'll see rain. If you zoom into the house (which usually means uncomfortably close and impossible to see whatever else is going on), there is no rain to be seen.

Well, it's definitely within the house. As you can see from my screenshots, I tend to play from a distinctly high-angle overhead perspective, and given that most of my houses are at least 3 or 4 floors of unallocated storage, the camera is well within the physical confines of the house.

But then, is it really raining?  :P Maybe it's a purely visual artifact like the sprinklers. 

If a tree falls and no one hears it...

Huh. I play viewing from outside the home, angled at about 25% up from the horizon and either level with the sidewalk or at a slight angle with wider homes...the widest of my homes is 2xX. But my screenshots are usually much more close-up than yours. I don't see rain when zoomed inside the houses.

I solved the problem once, a long time ago, and can't remember how. For my current house, I added in an extra wall and make the poor Simmies live without windows in the attic. LOL But maybe I did solve it with the rooftile thing and then deleted/replaced the wall. I guess I'm off to check.

I found it wasn't a hard problem to solve in my existing houses - delete the roof walls, replace them with regular walls, then re-roof the space. I use dormers extensively when building, proabbly because I usually build sim houses to look somewhat like my house  :), and I was abe to fix them with no problem. No temp warnings, no snow in weird places.

I couldn't get it to work again, by any means. Not if your roof is more than one story high, at any rate. I tried the diagonal walls, I tried floortiles, and since my roof is 2 stories high, deleting the wall and replacing it doesn't work. Well, it might WORK, but then it would look really dumb to have the peak with no wall. That lot is having Issues, though, because I had Sims freeze in the hot tub.  ???