Please excuse any error in my english, it's not my mother tongue.

The mailbox of my sims is filled twice a sim day with love letters/love presents. The average number of such mail in the box per day is 5. Mail senders include sims you never met - the only precondition seems to be that the attraction system paired them with your sim. If only one of those mails is sent by a sim that vanished afterwards your box will be broken and awesomemod will put your game into an endless loop. Overwatch will get rid of the trouble-making mail and will give you the rest into your inventory. Plain EA code will cancel the "get mail" action and reset your sim next to the mailbox, leaving the box in its broken state.

That is what I observed so far.

So what is the state now with the mailbox problem and awesome mod.

I read through all posts and would like to add my observations.

1. It does not matter much that the mailbox contents is named "Omni-plant" or whatever. You do not receive anything related to the Omni-Plant by mail. It appears to be the internal naming for mailbox contents.

2. The bug seems indeed be related to the sending sim of a mail disappearing from the world. This will happen without any mod installed. However, without any mod installed I noticed in such a case: with awesomemod installed game freeze, without sim aborting the mailbox access (I had to delete and install new mailbox using debug commands to escape from this situation). I dropped awesomemod and installed a couple of nraas mods, including overwatch, and now I notice an overwatch error every now and then when accessing the mailbox - and with overwatch I was able to reset a bugged mailbox to a proper state by accessing it.

So my conclusion is that EA poses error situations to the mailbox by sending mails and deleting sending sims afterwards, and awesomemod does not like that and freezes the game in such a case (causing it to go into an endless loop in some of its threads).

Thanks for the answers. I did not know of the efforts already taken place to achieve compability between the two mods, and got the wrong impression from the MTS site that Indie is happily taken code from Pescado. It would be very nice to see the two mods getting compatible. I apologize for causing the impression that I want to criticize Pescado. That was not my intent. The initial statement starting the thread made me think that Pescado did not like the Indiemod and would not bother about people who want to play with both. As that is obviously not the case I will just wait until things have been sorted out.

The other point I made is about Pescados ideas being "ambitious". I am still thinking that Pescados project has a high risk to fail. If I understand his ideas correctly, Pescados story mode implementation will be some sort of the good old life game, where the overall structure developing is determined by the micro behaviour of the single elements. From that game we know that obtaining a somewhat stable situation over generations is a good piece of luck. You can have all sorts of developments from a fast-dying-out population over a locally or overall cyclic population to an exploding one. For the purpose of the game only the stable populations would make sense IMHO. Of course one can fix odd developments by moving families in and out of the neighborhood whenever there is a need for that. But that is what the EA code does, and people don't seem to like it. There is a lot of ranting about "where are my families?" in the sim forum I normally read. And as the families the players want to stay in the neighbourhood not only include those actually played but as well those that are friends of the families actually played, the number of families available for moving out may be very limited.

The concept to simulate the population toward a stable condition by applying statistical heuristics  like the Indiemod does has the advantage that stability is built in right from the start. It is nothing you have to hope for, you can expect it.

The other problem I see is that micromanaging all sims in the neighborhood will overwhelm ordinary PCs. Although it would be nice to be able to watch initially dating sims, first kisses and all that stuff, I am more interested in having interesting sims to meet by those that I play. The Indiemod does deliver them.

Pescado, I did not understand your comment that the sims are not motivated to get jobs :-) If I start a new family one of their first wishes is always to get one. If I would have to create a concept how to micromanage sims by the PC I would follow the path created by the wishes that appear. Most often they make sense.

Actually I registered here to make the suggestion that Pescado and Indie should join their efforts. After reading this thread I am rather disappointed. There seems to be a ideological debate about how to deal with certain things.

I have a practical view on the issue: I played with the awesome-mod for some time now, liked most of his features, was happy that those clone babies were gone, was very happy to be able to switch households on the fly whenever I felt to do so. However, as the game progress with the clone babies gone the town runs into a demographic catastrophe sooner or later. And that is BAD. Similar problem with careers: vanilla Sims presents you singles without a job, but with a clone of themselves on their arm every now and then. Awesomemod presents you singles without a job and no babies.

IndieMod fixes the demographic issue very well and make sims going for jobs as soon as it makes sense. Why don't use it? If Pescado is going to demonstrate that he is able to write a story progression module that generates a living town over many generations just by micromanaging the sims in it, good luck. And make a science paper out of it once finished. The idea is very ambitious.

For the time being players like me are faced by the decision whether to have a stable, colorful neighborhood or a one-generation-and-then-start-the-next-game-neighborhood, as you can't have both mods in the game, just one. I really love the way the awesome-mod allows me to play more then one household, but frankly speaking: its storymode "improvements" are not improvements, they are just removing the rather unsophisticated solutions to certain problems EA has built into the game. The Indiemod is a better solution here, awesomemod is not. If I put a couple in love into a house - why on earth won't they have children? None of those couples I tried managed to get a baby so far this way, and I tried several times, each time waiting until pregnancy was no longer an option.

I am pretty convinced that the crash is caused by unproperly synchronized threads in TS3.exe. Wether they run in the intended order (no crash) or not (crash) may depend on everything including but not limited to the actual current output of your power supply and the position of the pegasus galaxy relative to the milky way at midnight. Only EA may be able to fix that, if at all.