Thanks for looking into it Theo.  I would have addressed my question to you directly but I was under the impression that you weren't around.  Glad to see I'm wrong

Thank you so much Inge.  Obviously you and Peter Have Not Failed Us^TM

I have a wee question. and my apologies if this was already answered.  I noticed that Theo's plugins were included in the release and there was a note that they would continue to be supported.  Any thoughts to supporting his Sim Surgery plugin?  Theo's plugin allows you to load a package, created in Body Shop to clone an existing sims.  It's very nifty and superior to the current method of having to create a new sim solely for the purpose of making a clone.

I've tried it with one of the previous QA release and it threw up errors.

Hmmmm.  Has the PC always done that?  Random freezes are the most difficult things to solve.  Have you looked in the event logs for clues?.

Usually a problem like this is either hardware related or a driver issue.  It's something pretty low level, otherwise OS would have simply trapped the error.  Have you tried playing with the video driver.  Try updating the driver, or if it's up to date, try to rollback to a different older version.  Try finding a different driver.  Usually there is a manufacturer specific driver and a more generic one made for the chipset. Like Nvidia for example. Try changing it.  Make sure that you have the latest drivers installed for your MOB chipset.  Reinstall them even if you do.  Make sure you got the most current drivers for all the components in your machine.

Google your various components and see if anyone complains of random freezes. 

Trying booting to safe mode and leave it running to see if it freezes again.  (no point in using as there isn't much you can do in safe mode).  If it doesn't freeze again, try launching msconfig and exclude all your startup items and run with that for a bit.

Try disabling various non essential components in the hardware manager and run with it for a while.  Disable soundcard, network card, anything non essential. 

Lastly, try unplugging non critical components like your DVD drive and running with only the basics.  If you have an add-on soundcard and video card, and your motherboard has an on board equivalent, remove the cards and run only with the on board stuff as a test.

That's all I can think of for the moment.  The idea behind all this is to isolate the component that is creating the problem.

Sorry I wasn't being clear.  I was trying to reconcile having a fridge and stove with no electricity.  So I am calling it an ice box and a coal stove.  There are some custom content out there that makes a fridge look like an old-fashioned ice box and there is of course Numenor excellent coal stove.

Actually I just realized that there is a challenge that is exactly how I envisioned this

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8552.0.html

I'm not too keen on the group meal in inventory, as I want to keep it somewhat plausible in the context of subsistence farming.  So, plucking ideas from this thread, fishing is allowed, but only once per day.  You're not allowed to sell fish, only eat it. You're not allowed to store leftovers.  How about this, only children are allowed to fish, as it's considered light work and adults are too busy taking care of the farm. An exception would be at the very beginning before any children are born.  This should remove the gold badge advantage.  By the time all the children are grown, there should be enough food from the farm not to require fishing.

Any yes you're right jemjie, no dating.  Subsistence farmers are too busy to date.   No nannies or any service pc's.  You are too poor to afford that.  And of course no downtown or outings.  Too busy.  Although you can take the kiddies to the park or something.  Let's not be completely cruel.

No money making scheme of any sort, apart from selling anything but food grown on the farm.  No painting (no time), no book writing (no time, no computer). No electricity, except for candles.  (So no electronics).  The fridge is an old fashioned cold box.  You can download one here and there.  Download Numeror's Fully animated multi-purpose Coal Stove http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=131507.  You have to still be able to afford it, but luckily it's cheap.  (it's optional of course). 

In fact if you want to carry this rustic theme, I can provide all sorts of links, because I love that stuff.  Outhouses, half barrels bathtubs, old walls and floors.  Old beddings, worn furniture, barrel end tables, kitchen table on cinder blocks etc.  Maybe I should provide a lot hmmm.

So subsistence.  No skill building stuff (you won't need skills anyway), except for the cheapest bookcase, nothing that runs on electricity. Toilet out back.  No running water (we got to pretend for that one).  I'm still debating sprinklers.  We don't want to make the challenge overly annoying.  Although Pfox is right that macros that simply automate what you would have to do anyway wouldn't be so bad.

What do you guys think

Right, this needs a few dry run to see if it's too easy.  I've done the poverty challenge and it's not especially easy. At first you need to depend on community lots to wash and eat.

But I would rather do without the community lots.  This is subsistence farming, there ain't any food banks around.  I'm thinking that with a cheap grill and a fishing hole, you could feed yourself easily enough before the crops came in.  Maybe too easily.  That remains to be tested.

A toilet isn't strictly necessary and neither is a shower.   

One problem I foresee is the money you'll get if you marry. We'd have to see if that would make the game too easy after that.

I agree that the money will start rolling in eventually, so this should be a short challenge.  Like maybe until your second generation turns elder.  Then it could be scored on how many kids you raised and what is your total worth, and maybe how many squares of garden and how many fruit trees you successfully managed to garden.


Good points LFox.  I'd say no pesticides (which also eliminates plan sims) and no talking to plants, no gardening macros.  No fertilizer, only compost. 

This is an idea I have kicking around my brain.  Do you think this could be interesting or just boring and stupid.

I'm envisioning a version of the poverty challenge.  You start with a singe sim on a large empty lot.  You start the game in spring.  You reduce your money to 100 Simoleans.  You or whatever sim you end up marrying is not allowed to get a job.  You are allowed to buy  a fridge when you can afford it, but once empty, you can't buy groceries ever.  All your food and money must come from farming and fishing.   I'm toying with a rule that doesn't allow you to use fertilizer, only compost.  And maybe you're not allowed to use pesticide.  This would have to be tested however since I am not sure what the impact of that would be, having never tried playing without it.  You'd be allowed to use ladybugs.  You'd be allowed to join the garden club if you qualify.  You are not allowed to use any gardening hacks, or any hacks that would give you an advantage.

You can start a business but you're not allowed to hire employees.  You can only use your children for cheap labor.  I'm toying with the idea of permitting jfade packing stations, but not the employee controllers.  Or allowing food to be baked and sold.  I think baked goods do come from the fridge right? I am not sure.

So what do you guys think.  Fun or trivial?

more skanky (but well made) X-mas gear



Hi Santa, is that a gift in your pocket or are just happy to see me.

http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/sims2/sets/clothing/624806/

Here's my contribution.  Not ugly, just rather skanky.  They should change Santa's helpers costume to this.  I'm sure that suddenly lots of fathers would show up with their kids and not a word of complaint about having to wait in a line filled with snotty-nosed, whining and screaming kids.







edit: linkie  http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/sims2/sets/clothing/621895/

Haha, I knew you wouldn't be able to resist!  You should try the zombie eat brain hack too.  Fun fun.

MadameUgly, the computer is allowed, but not using it to search for jobs. That's why I waited for that restriction to be lifted.

PS.  that spreadsheet is pretty cool.  Nice summary.

Can someone explain to me how that satellite in inventory thingie works?

I wanted to plan it out too, inspired (I should say copied) by Toast's Apocalypse strategy.  I got my founder a gold badge in flower making and planned to get her in the natural science career path to unlock the use of snapdragons bouquets.  Unfortunately that career was not in the paper, so I got her another job instead, hoping to see the natural science show up eventually.  But at the same time I was also conscious of the fact she had to reach the top of a career fairly fast, in order to move in a husband and get started on unlocking a second path. Eventually I had to settle on science, as that was the only half-decent choice.  I figured it would at least unlock the computer so I could have a better selection of jobs for her spouse, still hoping for that natural science career.  I managed to get her husband into medicine, but it took a long time for him to  get promoted, struggling as I was to maintain a half decent mood. 

If I had to do it again, I'd choose medicine for my founder.  It's so freaking miserable without hygiene.  The adults do ok with sponge baths, but it take so much longer than a shower, and you can't direct them to do it.  The less neat sims will either not do it at all, or do it only when they reach failure.  For the babies and toddlers a diaper change does the trick.  But for children, there is no way to get their hygiene up and being in failure makes them obessively wash their hands to no effect.  Which hogs the bathroom and prevents the parents from doing their sponge bath.  And stinky kids will refuse to do any homework.  (how unatural is that!).  I wish I'd find a hack that lets kids sponge bath.  It doesn't seem to make sense that they don't.

I finally unlocked the damn medical career.  It took FOREVER.  phew.  Guess what turn off all my sims will have this generation.  Stink!.  Should be a piece of cake now.

PS I just love Toast's stories.  They are hilarious.  I just finished her apocalypse story and am starting to read his Uglacy.  Are you sure it's a him? His/her? simself is female.

I suppose technically it might be possible.  I think you can change the default installation path when installing the game.  You can definitively move your 'my document' to an external drive and point windows to it, although I am not sure how windows would react  if/when the drive is not available.

Although this setup might be slower than installing the game on your drive.  Hard to tell not knowing your specs

I forgot one fun thing I added to the challenge, doh!.  It's what prompted me to start the challenge.  I installed JM's apocalypse zombie hack.  Before the game started, I used that annoying Traveller's family and killed them off.  I had the daughter resurrect them and turn them into zombies (I spawned the aspiration reward using the boolprop cheat).  Then I zombified the gypsy (lol, I enjoyed that) and a couple more unfortunate got zombified, who happened to drop by the lot.  You could also use JM's hack "make me a zombie". I discovered that only after I did all this.

So now there really ARE hordes of zombies in the neighborhood and they WILL eat your brain, if you loose the fight.  Make sure you got 10 body points lol.

I also installed one of Danny's multi-pc hack that allows you to phone the police to stop a fight.  I tested it and it works fine.  If you call the police they will stop the fight and take away the zombie.  Zombification only occurs if you loose the fight. Of course that can't be used until that restriction is lifted.  I also downloaded a dezombifying potion, but that won't be available till medical is unlocked.

I tried running a shop in college, before I noticed the rule against it, and let me tell you, zombies makes that near impossible.  They are constantly trying to attack you, so I had to prevent them accessing my sims, whose actions was constanly dropping from her queue trying to respond to the "attack" action.  But then the zombies attacked my customers instead lol.  Fun!

oh, here is a litle trick I learned reading a story.  Don't toilet train the toddlers, so when they poop their pants, you do a "change diaper" and that fills their bar halfway.  I'm hoping that my sims' husband will reach the top of his medical career soon, because I'll suffer with the kids, as there is no way for them to be clean.    It's really hard because his needs are too low to get promoted.  And there is no way to make him permaplat. Then I remembered meditation doh!.  I might actually get somewhere now.

I had to cheat and break the eat only once a day rule, because my sims would have starved.  That was before I remembered about meditation as well.

I haven't seen any update for BV, but I'll just ignore the whole expansion for now.  It's not like people trying to subsist in an apocalyptic world can have a nice little break away from it all

MadameUgly, your interpretation of the rules seem correct to me.  It specificially states"  Only Sims part of the bloodline and the spouses to heirs can unlock restrictions.".  To me that indicates clearly that any child of your founder can lift a restriction.   You are also limited by the fact that no member of your family can move out until the Military restriction is lifted. 

The way I see it, true blood children can lift restrictions, but only heirs can continue the bloodline (or at least for the purpose of lifting restrictions). The last doesn't seem to be stated anywhere but that's how I will play it.

Considering how hard drive intensive TS2 is, I wouldn't recommend installing it on a external drive.  You want the fastest possible disk access.

Why do you want to do this?

I've started this challenge and modified the rules a bit.  I'm ignoring the pets rules (and pets).  I just can't be bothered with that.  I am also ignoring the season rules, because I think the original rules are more than enough. However, I am going to respect the restrictions and career paths that unlocks the new features of Season. 

The one fun addition to the challenge that Season brought is to change all the season to winter.  That's an awesome. idea  I am going to only change it back, only once the challenge is accomplished.  That seems to make sense to me.

I had this problem once and I found this information : http://www.modthesims2.com/article.php?t=97876

And that fixed my problem

It's not necessary to use SimPE.  Package your house with its family using the package game option.  This should package all the custom content your sims are using, as well as the stuff from your house.

Now pay attention to this step.  Log on to a different user created for this purpose.  You might have to launch the Sims once in order to create all the game folders.  I'm not 100% sure if that's necessary or not, but it won't hurt.  Then shut the game and browse to where your packaged houses are (I think in packaged lots in the ea game/the Sims 2 of your main user.  Install those houses using the clean installer.  Whatever you do, don't install occupied houses in your main game.  In a throw away game that's fine though.  If you check the download folder you'll find all the custom content that your Sims was wearing including genetics, clothes etc and some of the custom content in the house.  If you are only interested in the clothing, just check out the folder with the clean installer and delete the irrelevant stuff.  But at least this way you are working with a much smaller subset of custom content

So leticron you were on the right track, and your plan would have worked, has EA not messed up this process.  But please never do what you suggested.  Your new game would be messed up in the extreme.  You see when you package a house it packages not only your Sims, but all the Sims they know.  So if you were to import several houses, you'd get duplicates, triplicates or more of some Sims.  And internally, your neighborhood file would be a huge mess that would implode in a big fiery ball visible from outer space, in short order.  HOWEVER, what you CAN do is follow my suggestion above, package all your houses and Sims.  Install them in a throw away game (not a neighborhood!!, a separate game altogether).  Then move the download folder of your real game to the desktop, and replace it with the download folder created from installing all those houses in your throw away game.  That would get you most the custom content currently in use.  This isn't 100% perfect however.  Currently BV is not including maxis recolors when you package houses.  And I am not sure if custom meshes are properly packaged.  But you can always go hunting for the missing stuff afterward in your old download folder.

Oh and once you've done that, take the opportunity to use clean installer to organize your new download folder.  You can sort items by type (clothing, makeup, eyes, etc) and then select several items and move them to a sub folder.

I literally have eyes everywhere (lol, that sounds funny).  I have this tendency to create multiple the sims 2 folders, plus like 3 folders where I have downloaded and stored stuff, plus folders I have temporarily put on the  desktop in one of my organizing mood.  It's a real mess lol, and I need to invest a couple of evenings trying to consolidate everything.

But anyway, thanks for your help.  I actually found a package file of my family that I've done some time back, and I think the eye is probably in there.  At least it's a good starting point

Funny thing about that family package is I tried to install it, in yet another fresh  The Sims 2 folder created for this purpose (I'm sure you are starting to get the picture why my cc is such a mess), and the house doesn't show up in my house bin.  That has happened a lot to me lately, some houses not showing up and I have no clue why

All good points thanks. 

Your method is simple enough JM, and good for the SimPe phobics or the SimPe deprived.  Although I found the SimPe method really quick and painless, and you don't have to mess around with restoring backup files or remember to enter the lot and save it.

But I guess you can't beat Inge's bush method for ease of use.  Thanks for letting me know it still works, so long as you don't care much about money.

*skitters off to edit her userstartupcheat file*

I stumbled upon this wiki while surfing and it seem to have interesting methods, I've never seen before.  For example see the "leave house intact" below.  I tried it and it seemed to work fine, although I haven't tried moving a new family in yet.

What do you guys think?

Leave house intact

Aug. 6, 2007

When you move every Sim out of a house, it leaves the house completely empty. There is a hack object called Stay-Things Shrub that will let you move every Sim out of a house without emptying it, but last I heard it doesn't work with Seasons (I have not personally used the shrub so I don't know this for fact). Here is a way to do it manually using SimPE:

   1. BACKUP YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!!! Go to Tools/Neighborhood Browser, click the desired neighborhood, and click "Create Backup".
   2. Go to Tools/Neighborhood Browser and open the desired neighborhood.
   3. Select "Family Information (FAMI)" in the "Resource Tree" pane.
   4. Locate your family's household in the "Resource List" and select it. This should open the "FAMi Editor" pane.
   5. In the "FAMi Editor" pane, set the following values:
          * Lot Instance: 0x00000000
          * Flags: 0x00000000
          * Album GUID: 0x00000000
          * Money: (any amount you want, default is the value of their property+furniture+cash)
   6. Click "Commit" and go to File/Save (CTRL-S).

When you get back to your neighborhood, your family will be in the bin and the house you moved them out of will be vacant and available for sale with all the furniture right where you left it.

Check out the rest of the wiki

Thanks Madame Min, but I'm trying to avoid that as I have a zillion eye files on my PC, in a ton of directories.  So locating them and opening all of them would take longer than just manually modifyng my character files.


Doc, the problem is I don't know which eye it is, and it's not in my download folder, or I would have just done as you suggested.  I must have moved it somewhere else on my drive, as I am endlessly shuffling my cc around.  It's a little OCD.

Is Theo still around??

I was wondering if this plug-in would be updated for the new SimPe (which hasn't been release yet, in case you're wondering).  I tested the plug in with it, and it the surgery part appeared to work.  However the export sim function gave a call to obsolete function error.

Is there any way of finding or searching for an eye using it's number i.e. 19655e4a-4153-6564-510e-7da41d432212.  I've no clue what I did with some eyes that my sims are using and I rather not have to change all of them.  It's a big family.  It's very likely the file is on my drive but I have so many of them it's impossible to find the right one.

Anyone has any idea?

I've decided that this is a clever parody.  Because I don't want to live in a world where someone like that exist, no manner what her age is.  You won't change my mind. So there.   Nahnahnahnahnah <sticks fingers in ears>

EDIT Hey!  I just got an idea.  We should start a free account on TRS and/or use someone's on TS2, and write incredibly bad stories in twelvese.