Interestingly (or not) enough, when you improve your badge it doesn't eliminate the chance of failure for the items you've already learned to make.  Even having figured out how to build a flying robot, you can still screw up making a basic toy robot.

There's a hack here on the site which makes robot breakage less frequent.  I'm not saying it makes them hugely better, but there are a couple of robots that are worth using when they go for long periods without breaking down.

When robots are made at the crafting station, there is a certain margin for failure.  However when employees are assigned to make many robots they automatically put their finished item in the owner's inventory regardless of its state.  Furthermore, anyone assigned to restock items will put goods on display regardless of their state of repair, and customers will buy broken goods without a second thought.

If you watch your crafting stations like a hawk and spot a faulty item as it is finished you can pull it from the owner inventory right away and have someone fix it.  Other than that I don't see any other way to enforce certain quality standards.  Is it possible to chain a repair interaction after a defective unit is made?

Two of my Sims woohoo'd on this bed and as you can see from the screenie, the mattress and pillows are offset from the bed.  The only solution I've been able to come up with so far is to sell the bed and get a new one, but sooner or later the new bed breaks too.

I don't know what's causing it but I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened on any of my other lots, so I'll guess that a broken lot is to blame.

Squinge had a Call To Dinner fix and it's now in the graveyard under the name 'squinge_serve meal fix' in the food-related category.

There's a Servo Change Appearance hack at InSIM which works for Seasons.  There's still the issue of the appearance reverting upon visiting a community lot, but that happened with Squinge's mod too.

At least there's a chance it might see an update.

Alternatively you could get one of the energiser bunny mods in the same section and turns your Servos into wobowabbits.

There are a couple of problems with this idea.  First of all, the lots which make up the vacation destination don't necessarily run in sequential order.  The game allows lot numbers (for equivalence, files in the Lot directory) to be re-used if a lot is deleted.  If you do manage to extract only those lots which are part of the resort, their filenames may clash with those of existing lots in the second neighbourhood.  So secondly, if you rename to avoid filename clashing, this may cause problems when the suburb package file you've copied over tries to load the lots it thought it had a moment ago.  You could fix this in SimPE if you load the package and alter the lot description files (LTXT) so that instance number properly matches the lot number (on the files) but the latest public release of SimPE isn't BV-compatible (you'll get an error loading the package file).

In the most basic terms, it's not as simple as just hauling the files from 1 to 2, unless both neighbourhoods are blank slates (with the exception of the resort lots in 'hood 1).

I think they mean that those extra unneeded NPCs created before the patch anti-redundancy was installed will be unlinked.  There won't be any additional extras because the patch anti-redundancy has been installed, so there won't be any unlinkage spam.

I don't know why they bother releasing a 15 MB patch to fix nothing.  Most of the actual file is probably installer

I figured it out when I looked in the ol' inventory and saw a whole pile of painted pictures.  Oopsie.

I was checking my character folders just to see how many I had when I noticed by chance that there's one character in particular which takes up close to 5 MB.  The lot that they're on loads up just fine, but when I save and exit the game, the file size for that character doesn't shrink down to any sort of normal size.  It doesn't get a whole lot bigger either but I didn't play for more than a few minutes.

For comparison, most of my characters are close to 0.75 MB in size.

I can accept that character files will inevitably get larger because they record more data, but this seems a little out of the ordinary.  What might explain it?

If you've recently installed the latest ATI drivers, I recommend rolling back to an earlier release.  They don't appear to work with the 9600 at all.  I know, I spent the better part of a couple of hours uninstalling display drivers and then re-installing them 

I also recommend actually going to the page for Display in the Dxdiag tool and trying the Direct3D test, because the cursory scan of your graphics driver doesn't actually render anything on screen.

Like I said, the user interface changed somewhat with Pets but I'm assuming that it hasn't been altered by Seasons or BV.  These hacks should in theory be EP-proof and not need updating, although if I can figure out how to make the list start at the top instead of in the middle that would be an added bonus.

The initial problem with creating UI overrides was actually figuring out which UI script to change.  There's a lot to search but not much in the way of comments (like 'This is the UI Script which pops up the interface which lets you create a new Subhood') to help locate them.  Now that I know the instance number and the internal reference of the button image, I could re-create them from scratch if I had to.

I don't know a whole lot about how the game's user interface works, but I'm guessing that in Pets and above something was 'fixed' so that when there is a button control displayed in the listbox the text listing is suppressed or hidden.  When the button isn't present (either because it's been taken out by the hack, or by the game itself when the supplied Downtown or Bluewater has been installed) the text listing is not suppressed or hidden.

As far as I can tell there's nothing wrong with Sedona, just the in-game interface for installing any template other than Bluewater.

This fix removes just the part of the UI that plops an extra-large button on top of the Downtown template chooser.  It still allows you to choose Downtown as a place to go wild on the dance floor if you haven't already added it to a neighbourhood.

Before:


After:


Obviously, this requires that you have The Sims 2 Nightlife or that funky The Sims 2 Deluxe Edition installed.  The actual hack is based on the UI included with Seasons, and it only modifies the dialogue pictured above so it should be backwards-compatible.

27 September 2007: Tested with Bon Voyage - successfully added a cleaned Downtown that I had installed as D002 (as per above screenshots).

See also: No more Bluewater button

Bon Voyage is my highest EP, although I would say I don't rate it as highly as Seasons.  If I take out the Bluewater button fix I can only see Bluewater in the list of business districts, I have no problems with my university templates though.  Bear in mind, these universities are basically just depopulated versions of the existing Sim State University and La Fiesta Tech.

I don't know why Bluewater would install characters from a different business district.  If this is happening somehow it should be okay to remove the template before starting the game and adding a district, and replace it after exiting the game.  The templates are after all only assets to be copied into play, and their absence won't be earth-shattering.  I also sucessfully removed the Bluewater template without adverse effects, but without an interface fix it will still show up as installable (and probably crash) unless it's already added to a hood.  With the interface fix, the only other business district I have (Sedona) goes to the top of the list when Bluewater is absent.

I'll try and figure out how to do a Downtown button remover (to revert the interface to how it was before) but it could take some time.

Edit: Apparently, some time is about twenty five minutes to actually find and edit the interface, and about double that much time to test, screeny, and document.  Downtown button fix here.

The game has no problem detecting a fourth or fifth university that has been added to the templates.  I'm surmising that the interface there was always intended to have more than one choice, so there isn't any upper limit.  The only reason why you don't usually see any more choices than the default one for shopping districts and downtowns is because there aren't any additional templates available.  Even with a huge button in the way you can quite easily see an additional template listed if it has been installed properly, ya just can't click on it.

I think that in pressing their ready-made templates on us they were rather hoping we would just shrug and never consider the possibility of creating an alternative.  Adding another layer of customisation makes life more difficult for them

You can revert the behaviour of the interface to how it worked before Pets, but first you need to find the relevant bit of it in the Seasons ui.package file.  When you've modded it you can put it in Downloads like any other hack.

Unfortunately as I recall there's no way to search the XML (yes, the entire UI is defined in XML) within SimPE.  You have to extract the whole shebang to disk and wade through it.  It took a while just to find the part which pops up the Bluewater button and change it back.

If you don't want them to restock in between sales, simply don't have them earn a restocking badge.  It'll be cheaper to employ them under BRY if they have less badges, although they'll be less versatile.

A while back I posted a hack that gets rid of the obstructing button and lets you choose one of your new templates directly.  It only addresses business districts though.

Well when I'm done testing things out, maybe I'll go look for a different game that I can drop in.

Then again, they're just Sims, they're not really going to know the difference if I trade their snowboarding game for GTA.

Incidentally, the head-to-head gaming seems to be over rather quickly much like the vanilla fighting.  Sims should at least try for best two out of three before conceding defeat, unless of course they're not very playful.

I checked out the hack that is mentioned here but I'm reasonably certain it's not meant to stop Sims from autonomously playing SSX on the console (the one that sits in front of the TV) and if it was, it doesn't work in Seasons.

The reason I ask is that while I was testing the new EP out, I noticed that every time a visitor's Fun dropped just a tiny bit he would wander over, pick up a game controller, play for about five seconds, and then stop.  And then repeat.  So, I'm thinking that either there should be a motive check before playing and/or that visitors should only play when invited to, or when there's a party going on.

Bizarrely, while I was putting Seasons through its paces today, one of my vampires was abducted by aliens.  I wasn't deliberately trying to make it happen, I just happened to be playing them

Oh yeah.  I'm guessing that vampires are impervious to the cold.

FYI, having tested this with Seasons, it will be possible to access your custom sub-hoods without needing to perform a directory switch.  Which makes the prospect of actually finishing up a custom business district a bit more appealing

When you have a whole bunch of people working on the same project, not necessarily putting helpful comments on their code, it's not hard to see how bugs are introduced.  It's not necessarily the case that there's a programming error, but a lack of foresight on the part of someone who simply wants to get his day's work done and get home.  When more code is laid down which then calls ClockWatcher's code, it too seems to work at first glance.  By the time the game or expansion pack in finished, his code is firmly entrenched by routines which call the routine which calls it.  You change his code, you have to change everything that follows from it.

When the game is played by people who have hours upon hours to experience the full range of bugginess, the shortcomings of ClockWatcher's code finally reveal themselves.  Rather than admit the mistake when it comes to light and come up with a fix either the offending code is superceded in the next expansion pack, or some sort of plastering-over of the cracks is introduced.

Basically if you want something done right and not according to some rigid timescale, you've got to hire people who don't declare victory so soon.

I haven't created a customised business district of my own, although I did successfully use the method I described to create a sanitised version of one of the Eaxis universities.  One of the problems of creating custom templates is that in order to try them out, you have to play them.  Once you start playing them, you sometimes forget about going back to the original template to add all those last-minute changes you made in order to make a business lot viable.

However I still prefer building from scratch where possible rather than getting attached to Maxarts-built lots and characters.