AL apartment specific build tools will be 0.01% more difficult to use than regular build tools, and this will result in sheeples whining all over the internet for HALP!

'Cept that's more borked idiots than borked game.

AL apartment specific build tools will conflict with dorm specific build tools and can't (technically) be used on the same lot. If you do try to use them together on a dorm lot, dormies will never move in, phones will not work on the lot, bills will never be delivered, the roof will leak no matter what you do, the cook will freeze solid at the stove providing you with a nice Chef Statue for the front lawn, and your YA playables will go to class and disappear from the game forever.

If you mix use of the build tools in your shiny new AL lot, Grim or Crumplebutt, secretly programmed by EA to punish you some more, will immediately move in and borke the whole damned game.

But someone will invent a hack that allows dorm tools and apartment tools to be used on the same lot and there will be happiness among serious players, while the sheeple scream 'YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!!!!11!!!!111one!!!'

Looks like they've been dipped in Lucite. Which is a scary thought.

So far as I know, the retrieved gnomes have gone into inventory since NL. I've also seen sims steal back gnomes they never owned.

I've also had the game tell me that there was a car that wanted to come home when the only cars the family owned were already on the lot. I put in a third driveway segment and got a free car.

I'll keep an eye out for that.  I've only seen it in Uni, though, knock wood. It's annoying.

In Buy Mode, occasionally, the icons for different categories disappear. This has ONLY happened in Uni, never in the main hood, and only Buy mode.  Build Mode, accessed with the dorm tools cheat, has never done this.

I go to Buy Mode, pffft, no icons on the top tab (Surfaces, Decorative, etc.).  I can still use the Buy Mode catalogue through the Rooms (is that what it's called?) tab, so it's no huge handicap.  The problem corrects simply by exiting to the neighborhood and reentering the lot, with or without save.

It doesn't screw up anything else. I'm just curious what might cause this.

You're probably right, but I'm so bored with easy money, I wanted to try something else.  This system requires that they build and shop with stringent economy at all times.  Part challenge, part experiment.

There are currently four families in the neighborhood; three of them are living under roofs on pillars--no walls, no floor tiles under their feet and not much of anything else.  It's mid-summer, everybody is gardening, but there's not a lot of cash around, which is what I wanted.  I'll be interested to see how it progresses. (Unfortunately, real life intervened and I didn't get to send anybody to the Poor House today. Maybe tomorrow. *sigh*)

Cool. I'll probably be raising the 'release merit' amount for sims that have more badges, otherwise some smartass who has a gold robot making badge could get his family out in a day and that wouldn't be any fun. I may end up charging bed-and-board for each family member against their Poor House earnings.

On most lots, I don't even use the burglar alarm anymore.  As soon as the burglar music starts, I smite them via the batbox. It's much more fun than the stupid fight with the wussy cop.

In my most recently established hood, taxes are half of the lot value per week. Families get the handout reduced to 5K before they even buy a lot, and EAxis careers are verboten.  They've got to come up with other ways to make their money.  Most of them are still living under roofs with no walls (except the lucky woman who married Mr. Big on Thursday.) 

Any family that reaches zero family funds must immediately move to a Poor House.  Money from the sale of their lot/house goes immediately to the mayor, because it's an awful, oppressive system. In the Poor House, they must work to pay off their debt (earn $1000 per family to merit release.) 

I've just started this as an experiment, and it's sim-Sunday night.  Sim-Monday morning is tax time, so today I find out who's going to the Poor House.

Edit to clarify, to my own satisfaction.

One of the first families I played extensively was a Romance/Family couple, and it worked out pretty good. You just have to make sure the slut doesn't get caught. Or you could let them hook up and let him get his heart broken. They don't have to all be happy all the time.

In Strangetown, Phillip was all hot and bothered over Meadow Thayer as a teen, who was Romance.  I grew her up with him, let him have a relationship with her, and of course, he caught her red-handed. He survived and went on to meet the town she-nerd, with whom he had a nice little life. (Meadow ended up as caretaker of the Olive Specter Memorial Museum and Mausoleum.)

I sometimes have a pairing in mind, but I usually don't force it.  The pairings they develop that I didn't expect can help keep the game from being too boring.  My singer and guitarist were supposed to hook up, but the singer was three-bolts for the aspiring politician, and the guitarist got along better with the trailer-trash queen. Rock star and mayor in the mayoral mansion, professional busker and perpetually unemployed, perpetually unfaithful tramp living in the Trashiest house in the hood (I love trashy CC); that was more interesting than what I'd had in mind.

Sometimes I'll break up a beautiful three-bolt relationship simply because they have incompatible Interests and can't have a decent conversation, which annoys me.  I rarely go searching for the perfect three-bolt mate, anyway.  They can get along fine in a one or two-bolt relationship if nothing else presents itself, and I find it more realistic when they have to choose the best they can get out of the sims they meet in the regular course of their lives. 

A want to get engaged/married means nothing to me; I decide whether they're going to be respectable, or just live in sin. The busker/trailer tramp got married; the mayor/rock star lived in sin (made sense to me.)

With CAS sims, I know who's going to be straight, gay or bi as I'm making them.  With others, it's sometimes off the gender of their first best friend as a kid/teen. It's pretty random, actually. And I play with preg for all genders, so no one has to get left out of the gene pool.  Unless, of course, they and their mate have truly incompatible face templates and I don't want to look at succeeding generations of fug.

As for the Uni-is-boring-problem, I deal with it by not allowing all the kids to go to college. The ones who are fortunate enough to go to Uni get sent off as early in their teens days as possible.  Some have to stay in the main hood, slogging through adolescence and teen jobs with no hope of higher education. Then I play the main hood and Uni in  synch, so I'm not spending an interminable amount of play time in Uni; about six days per lot while I've got college students. 

Most of my Family sims drop out of Uni as soon as they've found a mate, as I'm convinced the only reason they ever want to go to Uni is to trawl for Mr. or Miss Right.  Then they move back in with the folks and wait for their Twu Wuv to graduate and come to take them away from it all.  Knowledge sims are sometimes actively discouraged from relationships during Uni, as I tend to see them as academically obsessed.  Fortune sims have to make buttloads of money, Popularity sims have to join the Secret Society, etc., before they are allowed to graduate.

Sims who don't go to Uni get upgraded with the Lot Debugger only when they have a) reached the top of a career, or b) fulfilled a lifetime want.  I consider them graduates of the school of hard knocks.

If I'd been here earlier, I would have suggested an ongoing cockroach/seeing vermin challenge, with penalties for Asp. failure from sight of creepy-crawlies.

Okay, I don't have FT, but I just have to ask (curiosity is a dangerous disease): What the hell is the point of that?

Would it be easier to do this with AnyGameStarter?  Agree on what configuration of EPs you're going to use and voila--you only have to keep your AGS folders, hacks and CC synched. 

That way you wouldn't have to keep pulling and replacing things in your main My Docs\EA Games folder to play the shared hood versus your own 'hoods.

Huh. I once had a sim drop the dance sphere (which is pretty big) at a house with very little frontage, having only two squares of lawn between the house and the sidewalk.  The house had no foundation, though.

I seem to get the best gifts when the date ends sometime between 7 p.m. and midnight.

Missing texture. Somehow, the textures for the coconut trees are not being included in the packaged lot.

I recognize it, but someone far more Awesome than me will have to tell you how to fix it. 

Ah. 'kay, I'll give that a try and see if he can feed himself.

Edit: Big fridge works. In reference to comment below, I figured if the big fridge didn't work, I'd go without; but it's handy to have one on the lot in case I forget to fill his 'lunch box'.

Yeah, necromancy, mhmm. Sorry.

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if this is a problem with BRY.  I have a sim who owns an art gallery.  Customer accessible area contains merchandise and two public restrooms containing only toilet and sink.

Staff-only area in the back contains staff bathroom with toilet and shower, high-comfort sofa, Kick The Cheat, counter tops, waste basket, espresso machine and mini-fridge. 

The owner is the only worker, he has no employees. He has the gold business badges. He has food in his inventory, to wit; a platter of hamburgers, four plates chef salad and a pizza. 

BRY has him running around selling, restocking, cashering, BUYing, caffeinating, kicking, no problems. But he doesn't eat without my input.

BRY only makes him eat if I get the plate/platter out of his inventory and place it on a counter top. Then he'll go eat.
He doesn't go for the fridge unless I click it and tell him to feed himself.
He's been in the deep red hungerwise and still didn't eat, until I took the food out of inventory and put in on the counter, or directed him to feed himself out of the fridge.

From what I understand, they're supposed to pillage their inventories for food, but it's not happening. Did I miss something? Do I need to put in a dining table and chairs?  I'm at a bit of a loss here.

I have a couple in a custom neighborhood who have been around for a long time now, kept alive and youthful with the Elixir of Life.  Since the last dose of Elixir, one of them has stopped aging. Right now he has twenty-eight days left as an adult, and he's been stuck right there for fourteen days. Aging is definitely on for the lot; the spouse still ages and the kids are growing up/age transitioning.

I don't mind having this glitch; I don't have to worry about him aging up before I want him to.

But is this a sign of impending doom for the sim/family/lot/neighborhood? I suspect not, but I thought I'd ask, just to make sure.

Any number of reasons, starting with auto save and ending with the option to choose the document backgroung color, since I'm myopic as hell and staring at glaring white gives me a headache after awhile.

Thanks for the links, though. AbiWord looks interesting.

Nice try, thanks, but I'm on dialup. If I'm reading right, that's a 37 MB download of a program that looks much more complex than anything I need.

I have located a download of ver. 2.6, but that feels so much like a consolation prize.
It's setting/preferences got deleted upgrading from ver. 3.0 to 3.2; I uninstalled the old version, instead of installing over it--and settings be deleted, too.
I did try uninstall/reinstall 3.2 before I contacted Jarte support.  Didn't help.

Here's (one instance of) the error from the Jarte error log:
Exception 'EOutOfResources' in module Jarte.exe at 0014F7B0
The parameter is incorrect.

Source file: UNKNOWN, Line UNKNOWN

Call stack:
:005507B0 [Jarte.exe]
:005507E8 [Jarte.exe]
:00554A22 [Jarte.exe]
:0054FCFE [Jarte.exe]
:00528A83 [Jarte.exe]
:0052B9A0 [Jarte.exe]
:00573C0E [Jarte.exe]
:0052DC92 [Jarte.exe]
:0056DE80 [Jarte.exe]
:005709EB [Jarte.exe]

Registers:
EAX = 0012F5D4  CS = 001B  EIP = 7C812A5B  Flags = 00000202
EBX = 00000057  SS = 0023  ESP = 0012F5D0    EBP = 0012F624
ECX = 00000000  DS = 0023  ESI = 0012F658    FS  = 003B
EDX = 005507B0  ES = 0023  EDI = F1013849    GS  = 0000
Code at CS:EIP
5E C9 C2 10 00 85 FF 0F 8E 36 93 FF FF 8B 55 FC
Stack:
00000018 0EEDFADE 00000001 00000000 7C812A5B
005A889E 005A9C30 0012EC50 00495B56 00495B5E
005507B0 0012F76C 00E02A38 00000000 005709EB
00E02A05 19DE2228 19DE210B 0056DE80 0016F9EB

I use a word processing program called Jarte (free version).  I like it just fine, better than most other words processors, mostly because it's not loaded with a ton of crap features I wouldn't use.

I recently upgraded from ver. 2.6 to ver. 3.0 (which came with a nifty new graphical design).  Suddenly Jarte, which has always been a nice stable program, starts crashing left and right. When it crashed 2000 words into a new document and I lost it all, I contacted Jarte support.  I was told to upgrade to Jarte ver. 3.2, released since my last upgrade.  That didn't help one damned bit--Jarte was still crashing.

I contacted Jarte support again, sent them the error logs and everything.  They told me the error indicates that Windows is running out of graphics resources, which they say they have never seen with WinXP. I also asked them if nVidia might have anything to do with it; they don't think so.  Jarte support has advised to upgrade to Vista, reinstall Windows, or (I doubt this will help, though I'll probably do it anyway) upgrade to WinXP SP3.  It's like I'm being told, "Well, we can't figure out what the problem is, so we'll tell you to do some stupid shit and just hope you go away."

Now.  This all sounds like some bullshit to me.  Jarte is the only program experiencing regular crashes on my computer. This is not happening with any other program. I can't remember the last time I had a program crash--other than Jarte.  And it totally sucks, because this is the only word processor I particularly like to use.  I miss it already.

Can I get some opinions from techy people here?  Other things I could try, more options, opinions concerning program support people who tell you to reinstall Windows to remedy a problem with a 5MB freeware program? 

Don't have Pets, but I hereby Officially Wish for a mod to "auto-3x time" when everybody is sleeping AND/OR meditating.

LOL
Of course, I would be tempted to make them moar hideous.

"Come here and scrub my toilet. And wear this ugly hair, too, because you're townie scum!"

Have you yanked your downloads folder to make sure it's not a piece of CC causing the problem?

Not totally off topic...

I usually put a "maintenance" sim in each neighborhood. That will be the lot I use when I want to edit townies, adjust the family funds on a new CAS sim, check out new CC, etc. 

Otherwise, Mr. Maintenance never gets played. Not an earthshaking tip, but it comes in handy sometimes.