My electric bill suffers just for you JM. Just for you.

I built this one for neighborhood lot filling in keeping with the house style on Maywood Lane in Sunset Valley.
Functional 1 (double)bedroom 1 bath home. It's just over 24k furnished so not exactly workable as a starter out of the box. Doable with the wand I'm sure.

Street view:


Floor plan:



Download here:
http://www.box.net/shared/l7o3g70jja

Enjoy or don't!

Late to the show, of course. Adding my self-pudding to the mix in case anyone is in need of fresh abuse-ables.



MATY name: Myskaal
Sim name: Myskaal Asimaha
Gender: M
Age group: YA
Attracted to: F

LTWish: Be a Rock Star

Favorites: French Toast, Indie Music, Purple (or Lime Green)

Traits:
Absent Minded
Hopeless Romantic
Hot Headed
Lucky
Virtuoso

Additional possible traits:
Grumpy (though I think this doesn't add with the Hot Headed trait. It really should. I am often merely grumping about without flying into hot-headedness. Perhaps an either/or choice)
Great Kisser
Loner
Perfectionist (and I am still not happy with my mouth and nose. TS3 sliders FAIL)
Heavy Sleeper
Natural Cook
I could indeed admit to some mild neuroticism.

Definitely NOTs:
Green Thumb
Workaholic
Hydrophobe
Frugal


I believe the only custom content used is the everyday shirt shown in the screen shot above (store item).


ETA: Who the hell I am.
Long time MATYmooch (oh look another trait).

Not so old it's necromancy and this is the only thread I could find related the problem I just encountered in my game.

I had my sim attend the neighborhood grill-a-thon and he is now stuck with a permanent "continue grilling" icon queued. It doesn't (thus far) seem to be preventing him from performing any other actions, but it is annoying nonetheless. The icon highlights, as if it can be acted on, when moused over but it refuses to be canceled. Other action icons layer over the top of it rather than cancel it out.

No clue on a fix. I came here looking and this was the only reference I found.
I'll go through the motions of general bug-fixings and report back what I find, if anything.

ETUpdate: Problem resolved on restart after deleting cache files.

I need "Sim Bin" clarification. ISM pulls from pre-mades in the CAS bin or from sims sitting in the Library bin?

Nevermind. Reading comprehension ftw

Going by tooltips, I gather that in TS3 The "sim bin" is where you place and select premade CAS sims *in* CAS. When in CAS if you click on the "more" button next to the sim you are creating's thumbnail, one of the options is "place in sim bin" - which then makes him/her/it available for premade selection when in CAS.

The "Library" which was the sim bin in TS2 is now only the "Library" in TS3. However, habit from TS2 makes it very easy to call this the bin again which will be forever confusing in discussions about these 2 particular things.


my 2c

Or just delete the CEP-EXTRA_Phones.package. If you auto-installed it should be in Documents\The Sims 2\zCEP-EXTRA.



...it should be fairly obvious custom phones and recolors likely won't show up after doing this.

Only managed to play for a very little bit to check things out, but thus far I can say...

Annoyed by:

Ceilings (yay?). If they disappeared with the walls with the wall down options I could deal with them.. but a floating floor with no walls attached? Might be just me...


"Shadow people" in non playable apartments. Furniture, etc, disappears but you can still the occupants standing idle inside the dark apartment.


Closets:
I know there are clothes inside. I don't need to see them AND the closet door blocking all my click paths.



Very like:

Most of the new build/buy mode objects.



...little list so far. I just installed!

I'd like to interject that, at least in my game, identical sim twins born in game do in fact exist. Of the 2 sets of twins I've had born in my game (yes. 2 sets. in all these years) one of them *was* an identical pair. Two boys, exactly the same features/looks and exactly the same astrological sign and personality points. The only difference was in their interests. And they were born after rerandomizing with the lot debugger.

Unfortunately that set was born in a neighborhood I did not save when SP3 blew up my comp and forced me to reformat so I have no proof.


But it happened I swear!

You might want to read this thread:  How to get rid of SecuROM, NOW

The idea of a no cd crack isn't to get a game for free. It's to have a game that you paid for function properly because EA sucks. Can pretty well promise you you've been infected with secuROM. It's really in your computer's best interest to get rid of it and it might solve the problem (if it's not corrupted files from the crashing).

Play Sanity doesn't squelch pranks, just the autonomous play interactions.
At least that's why I've always left them in together. Antiprank doesn't (that I know of) stop the autonomous snowball fights, waterballloon fights, toss football, or play catch in the same way Play Sanity does (which is the way I prefer). So Play Sanity takes care of the play side and anti-prank takes care of the pranking (at least to a degree).

OR... does antiprank actually stop the fights and tossing of balls the same way now? I recall playing for a while without Play Sanity in and had to stop all that nonsense manually rather often.
Which is why I put Play Sanity back in.
If it is a case of antiprank stopping all the auto-play, and Play Sanity over rides that *and* the anti-prank functions of anti-prank.. then I guess Play Sanity takes care of the pranking also.

Which makes no sense because Play Sanity doesn't have anything to do with pranks.


abcdefghiJklmnopqrsTuvwxyz Play Sanity loads after antiprank.


Lord Darcy, it was the same conflicts that Witch posted about in your Armoire fix thread. Just doesn't seem like it would have anything at all to do with pranking.

I thought I posted this in Oops You broke it.

Antiprank would be the natural choice. I'm curious if anyone else is running both with no problems because they seemed to be playing nice until yesterday.

I've been playing with both the antiprank  hack and TJ's Play Sanity fixes installed and have not noticed any problems with doing so. I always figured these were a case of played nice evn though they come as a conflict, like a few other TJ and FFS hacks.

I've just sent a sim off to Uni and decided to hunker down and actually play through his higher education. Suddenly - and yes very suddenly - everyone is addicted to pranking. I had no problems whatsoever... not a single prank in game... until I sent this kid to Uni. It's not exclusive to the Uni lots, either. I loaded back into his house of upbringing to play the rest of his family up to speed and they are all suddenly prank addicted, too.

Having not actualyl played Uni in a very long time I'm curious if it is a play sanity/antiprank conflict that makes them nil each other out or if something else very out of the way borked in my game. The only conflicts I get in the scanner are the antiprank vs. Play Sanity and a few of Lord_Darcy's conflicting with each other. Lord Darcy's fixes for various EP objects are the only recent things I've added that I never had before - and I removed the TSS one that was conflicting with a few of his others.

Any ideas?

Playing in windowed mode has (so far) solved the crashing for me.

Have you tried loading the game fresh 'n clean style (rename your current TS2 game in My Documents)?
Playing with a no-cd crack? Removed SecuROM?

If it's not loading at all, my first inclination is to think the game files have been corrupted from the crashes and might require a reinstall. Perhaps it's not gone that far yet, though.

Meh you are correct about DX10 being only for Vista. I didn't look full into it before thinking it might be an option.


I don't run the game in windowed mode very often. I did recently and did not notice the error - I can't put that off as a solution, though, because of the no rhyme or reason. There's not any specific amount of time it decides to happen. Nor is there a specific incident in game that causes it. I thought at first it had to do with spinning the camera at a bad time, overloading the card by forcing it to render to much but then it started happening when the camera wasn't moving at all.

The error has also occurred with no alt-tabbing whatsoever.



ETU: Been playing in windowed mode all day and haven't had a single crash. Seems to be a definate work-around, I just need to suck up the lack of edge scrolling.
Of course now that I say that...

I apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere. A search turned nothing relevant up.

I continuousy get the error D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE and crash to desktop. This error with the game was actually happening before I completely reformatted (last week) and now continues after all my reinstalling and updating to get back working order. It has no rhyme or reason. Sometimes I can play for hours. Sometimes only 30 minutes.
Trying to track down the cause suggests over and over again it is related to graphic card drivers. My card is a Nvidia GeForce (7950GT) and I have the most recent drivers available from the Nvidia website.

On to my questions.

I am wondering if anyone here is using DirctX 10 on WindowsXP and if this might (since it is a card to directX issue) solve the issue.
Or if someone is running XP, directX 9c, a GeForce Nvidia and an older set of drivers with no problem - what driver version it would be.
Or if anyone is running DirectX10, XP, Nvidia GeForce and getting this error - or older drivers, DirectX9c, XP, and also getting this error.

*edit to correct actual card name

Double ressurecting to find out if anyone discovered if this was primarily an overheating issue or actually a driver related thing.

Prior to Freetime p.3 and installing the latest Nvidia drivers, this was not a problem for me. Unfortunately upgrading drivers and installing patch 3 fell on the same day.

My card has more than enough power. I made sure to buy well over the recommended power supply when I bought my GeForce7950.

Going on the idea that it is probably driver related - anyone with Nvidia running D3DERR_NOTAVAILBALE free and if so, which driver version are you running?

Have had them since they they became available.

If you're fine you're fine. I was fine until yesterday when I got the gumption to finally remove secuROM. Going through that process was apparently the cliff to leap off for my OS. It had been building up with little glitches here and there and that was the final straw for it, I guess.


So, back to me needing some help here... again. I've finished the reformat/reinstall (actually on the machine that went wonk now) and I've run into a problem regarding my video card. I replaced the card the that came in the machine with one of my own choosing. I just downloaded the driver for that card. The install wizard is telling me I do not have the hardware that matches the driver. In fact I do.. I know I do. I put the damn thing in and have had it running just fine and dandy for not quite a year now.

Opening up device manager reveals that the only graphics/video I apparently have are listed under "Other". There is no Display Adapter listed after Disk Drives, as there was prior to reformatting. Everything under this Other has the ! on it. Ethernet controller, PCI device, PCI Simple Communications Controller, SM Bus Controller, and -> Video Controller <-

So for some reason the card is not being found or recognized.

I tried checking in Setup (F2 .. bios I believe that is) to see if there was a setting I needed to change but I could find nothing. Video there is set to use the PCI Express slot, which is where the card is.

I'll continue searching for the solution but if anyone has clues or knows what this is about, I'd appreciate the education.

ETU: Solved. The drivers had to actually be installed from the disk that came with the video card - not with the most recent available off the Nvidia site.

Uninstalling and rebooting forced the plug and play installation on the other unknown devices. Now I am down to only one unknown PCI device. The windows auto-install could not locate a driver for it.

Almost there!



NO MOAR SP3!

Of course.

Yes, indeed, the next system I get will *not* be factory shipped but built. Pre-made and ready to ship is just too much of a nightmare - especially with all the crap Dell likes to put on their systems before it gets to you. The first 3 month after I got this rig was spent just trying to clean all the crap that has no use off. I never did get rid of all of it.

Oh yay we're at appliaction installation. 30 more minutes to go.

I appreciate the support

**Update: All done and thankyou for the help. I can get to my files. I'm blind , now, mind you (I forgot what a fresh install with an unconfigured displaylooks like) but I can get my goods and nuke the uglies.

I think I'll actually head out and grab a non-dell-dirtied OS disk before doing the reformat.

I knew I should have bought a MAC.

*Thanks for the links. I'll definately be turning auto updates off this time around.
I'm going through the 2nd install now. Hopefully it will, at the very least, allow me to grab the files that have sent me into panic attack about losing. I'll be backing up a shitload more often from here on out. I definately don't mind reformatting(the comp needs it, for sure). I'm going to freak without thoe files, though.

HPBOX ... eruummm. No? And no AMD.

HP as is Hewlit Packard?

I have (like Simsbaby) a Dell. Although it's a desktop not a laptop.

Those steps you quoted above are what got me to the point where windows would load but would log me off again immediately after log on. The rebuild is what gave me the multiple OS menu after reboot.

Answered this in the Securom post, too, but honestly I can't say that I haven't. There was a recently installed update to windows which installed on it's own and rebooted my comp for me while I was at work. I'm wanting to say that was a week or more ago but I could be way off on my time line. I don't generally double check those things.

I have not manually and/or purposefully installed SP3.

Without being able to log on, I'm not sure how I would go about finding out if it was installed.

AFAIK, no. I will not say definately no. My computer did recently install some sort of windows update and reboot itself while I was at work. I only recall seeing the notice it had done so when I returned home and did not check to see what it had installed.

I've started a new topic in regards to my now totally borked computer on the Oops! board. After doing some research on the HAL.dll error I'm not sure if what's happened was caused by my removing SecuROM or if the messing around inside Windows' guts made the OS decide now was the best time to go tits up on me. (I've been waiting for it. I've gone a good 4 years on this install).
 

So I'm about at my wits end and a complete reformat is looking inevitable. I'm still thrashing about helplessly trying not to lose everything on my computer and trying some last ditch efforts.

Quick background: When attempting to remove secuROM, Windows decided to throw up and either corrupt or lose HAL.dll. Since that moment I have been trying recovery/rebuild option after option with very little success.
I have gotten to a point where Windows will start, but logs me off immediately after log on. Windows starts, shows my log on, I log on, I see my desktop background, windows logs off.

So I am now going to try installing a 2nd OS to at least be able to grab some of my most important files before ressting the whole damn thing and starting fresh.

However, there's a small glitch I created when following these instructions that I can not seem to find a solution to - thta I would like to solve before continuing on to a 2nd install.
By using the rebuild I now get a menu just after reboot for "which" windows XP I want to run. I really should only have one but apparently following the above instructions creates a new one.

So I get a boot menu that looks something like the one down about mid-page at this link: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000492.htm

Unfortunately.. I can not get windows to start through any means of noral or safemode. So I can't use the DOS command line instructions found there. The recovery disk instructions they have linked there do not explain how to modify the boot.ini from the Recovery tool.

I'm so extremly brain fried at this point I doubt any of what I am typing makes any sense but the gist of it is HELP!


edit: trying to clarify a bit, what I am trying to do is delete id1 and id2 in bootcfg. Unfortunately, in the Recovery Console there is no /delete command and rebuild creates yet another id to choose from when rebooting.

So, from the windows command prompt I would type in: bootcfg /delete /id1 and then rinse and repeat for 2 but I can't get to the normal windows command prompt (because windows will not let me log on) and I can not find any way to do this from the Recovery Console.


So.. should I just not worry about this step and install the 2nd OS? Or is that a waste of time because without fixing whatever is causing me to not be able to log on right now will continue to prevent me from logging on with a 2nd OS installed?

Any ideas?

So I went through the steps in the topic post. At the end of it all I somehow lost my HAL.dll for windows.

Going through the steps to try to replace that now but as a heads up for less experienced users .. be careful what you're pressing and typing and if you're not sure find someone who's more experienced in deleting things through the command prompt.

I believe this problem occured when I went ahead with:

after not being able to find a SecuROM folder in my Documents and Settings subdirectories.

I only received one confirmation of a file to delete and simply following the instructions to confirm without actually looking at what it was I was confirming has created a massive mess I hope will not cause the loss of everything I had on my hard drive.


But thanks for this post. SecuROM is a nightmare and it's nice to have help around on getting rid of it.