Just going back to the NPC neighbours - I noticed that when meeting these new neighbours in a freshly started game, and querying what they did they were all service NPCs. One was a butler, another was a mixologist and the third was a maid (the fourth door was empty). Could this be the reason why newly-placed apartment blocks fail to generate NPCs once a hood's been played? Perhaps the game is only using these empty "apartments" to house already generated service NPCs.

I get that on community lots too when I invite a group. After a short while I'll get the "I'm leaving" popups, but none of them ever do. Some of them even follow my sim onto the next lot.

Ah, but I'll bet Bottle-o-cunt's using some sort of UI mod for non-default skins.

Hmm. The welcome wagon worked for me. My sim got the phone call and I got a question in that message box on the top right of the screen asking whether or not I wanted to buzz in the visitors. I clicked on Buzz In (the other option was Ignore, I think), and the visitors were able to enter the building.

You're a 12 with no manners. We are not obliged to help you.

The routing crap is definitely annoying, especially when you try to get a couple of sims to hold a conversation. I'm fairly certain that in TS2, one sim would walk up and the conversation would commence, so what is with all this damn shuffling about in TS3?

Then there's the psychic abilities that all sims seem to possess. Every time the postman appears on the lot, my sim, in an apartment four floors up, suddenly realises she needs to talk to him for no apparent reason and will drop whatever it is she's doing and head straight for the elevator unless I cancel the action. Cancelling the action ends up being fruitless though as the game instantly queues it up again and won't let me cancel until she exits the elevator.

Oh, and whose bright idea was it to have the paper delivered outside the communal entrance instead of outside the apartment door?

All the more frustrating when time in-game moves so quickly to begin with.


I'll give this a try tonight. Even so, whoever built these lots went to the trouble of laying down tiles that looked like fake parking spaces. How much of an effort would it have been for them to actually put the markers in?



They did this with the base game patch and I'm glad of it. It was frustrating every time my sim went to work that the game would kick into third gear regardless of how many times I switch back to normal speed. Now, if only EA could do something about the AI - more specifically, how it insists on constantly queuing the same interaction mere nanoseconds after I cancel it. Also, make the Free Will slider actually DO SOMETHING! Low Free Will should not function the same way as no Free Will.

Also, if you're not running it already, use Twallan's Relativity mod here to slow down time in-game. I've set it to 10 and now have a lot more time to play with, especially with those slow elevators and dodgy public transport choices.

And the annoyances keep coming...

I stared a new 'hood because frankly, my previous Bridgeport was buggered to hell. I also decided to create a new sim, rather than import one from one of my other hoods this time around, and I hit a new problem. I picked the same el cheapo apartment as before and realised I wanted to buy my sim a car. Problem? No bloody car park! Oh sure, there's a layout of lines at the rear of the apartment building that look like parking spaces but that's it. They simply look like them. There's no driveways there!

So, I thought to myself - no problem. I'll pop into build mode and add a space or two. The game's having none of it. "You can't build outside your apartment boundaries!" it cries. Sod it.

So, I tried using public transport instead. What a royal fuck up that turned out to be. For instance, a taxi trip from the apartment to the nearby dive took my sim 2 in-game minutes (I'm on Twallan's Relativity mod here, so assume 15 standard in-game minutes, including using the elevator) to complete the trip. Great, I thought. So I sent my sim back home and what happens? Well, the sim gets a taxi to the nearby subway that took her further away from the apartment block, and then she walked the rest of the way. FFS, 17 in-game minutes (Relativity) or whatever the hell that is in standard game time.

I've not experienced the stuttering that's been reported on here, but I have had lockups and CTDs. For the time being, I've gone back to playing my old, pre-LN hoods which seem to be more stable. I've added NPC-generating bars to the existing hangouts, and although it took a while, they did eventually spawn mixologists, as well as paparazzi for some reason. It seems that rather than dragooning existing sims, the game generates new ones for these roles.

ETA: Another thing. It seems that the professional bars might be borked too. Earlier I had trouble serving meals to customers, but now on a clean game, I'm having trouble actually ordering food at these bars too.

This whole mixologist thing hasn't really been playtested, has it? For instance, you know how mixologist NPCs can pull food out of their arses? You can't. Instead, you get to stand there whilst actions are constantly cancelled from your queue because the game expects you to actually cook the food. Of course, you can't as there's no facilities to do so.

I've noticed that if you get the mixologist to join your jamming session, they basically cease to function as a mixologist for 24 hours, leaving the bar empty and useless.

Also, my apartment block (one of the cheapo ones in the run down part of town) has yet to spawn any NPC "residents", and this whole celebrity thing is pissing me off. I shouldn't have to keep queuing up the same action for my starstruck sim because a celebrity is close by and my sim just has to get an autograph. This queue-stomping crap needs stomping out.

Also (yes, there's more): lights correctly illuminate internal walls multiple floors high. Why the fuck then can't EA repeat the job on external walls?

Annoying feature of this new patch (base game): The lights. No, not that problem, a new one.

Isn't it great when a sim leaves the house that all the lights switch off when they go, regardless of them having the Frugal trait or not? Yes? Well, how about when your sim, or any sim for that matter who is the last to leave any lot regardless of it being residential or community switches off the lights after themselves? In the park, the gym, the bloody scrapyard? Worse still, how about the huge park in Twinbrook when no sim visits it? All nice and dark until a sim pops by momentarily at 3am, and then all nice and dark again five minutes later.

You enabled this "feature" for community lots, EA? Good going.

On the other hand, at least the "Hangout" community lot setting actually does something now. Bar's packed in Twinbrook.

Back to the patch update for a sec. A quick peek in the options panel reveals a few changes:

Water and mirror reflections now has its own slider with four settings.
Number of high detail lots is now restricted to 8 for some reason.
Tree detail now has a "very high" setting.

Upping the reflections and tree detail settings to very high doesn't appear to do much except batter FPS, so they may as well be left on high. Why EA decided to drop the maximum number of high detail lots from 12 to 8 is anyone's guess.

Ah, you mean "normal mapping". From what little I've seen of the muscle slider when I played with it earlier, it appears to be a normal map that reflects light pretty well in CAS, but I haven't seen it in-game though, so it could possibly look like shit.


What annoys me about the lighting situation is that off-lot lightsources, i.e. lamp posts work perfectly fine, with the light reflecting off entire walls of houses. If you want to see an example of this, load up Twinbrook and switch off all the lights in the laundromat. When night falls, the adjacent lamp post does a pretty good job of illuminating the side of the laundromat - all four floors of it.

Well, even with the new patches lighting behaviour remains the same, but then I've largely given up hope of EA actually fixing it. Light given off by outdoor lights still do not cross lot boundaries and light cast on walls is still restricted to the level the light is on.

I've donated $30. I can haz speshul title now?

For fuck's sake, speak English.

I'll give it a try and see if it works. My only concern (besides the tl;dr description that seems to repeat itself) is that the mod was abandoned pre-Ambitions.

I've got that mod running in my game, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. The town is still largely deserted by 9PM except for a few stragglers.

I think at this stage it may be pointless playing around with this mod until the next base game patch is out (probably a couple of weeks from now, going on EA's past record). If EA's messed around with the code to get more sims out at night (especially vampires), then it could be a wasted effort.

Back in the old days (well, April, actually) I vaguely remember having a mod in my game that made the "hack" option available 24 hours a day on computers. Of course, that was on my old PC and I didn't have a backup of it when the thing died. Of course I had subsequently forgotten about it since because I didn't have any sims in my game with the "Computer Whiz" trait. Until now.

Anyway, Google has proved to be more of an arsehole than a friend and I can't seem to locate any such mod. Does anyone know where I can find it?

Yes, I can see it now. The hottest places in town - empty by 9PM.

It was slaughtered in the Great N00b Invasion of 2009.

Still looks shit though.

No, or at least not until someone finds a way of getting to the shaders.

Also, looking at those screenshots, it seems that shadows no longer cross lot boundaries. Another successful fuckup by EA then.

I had this sound drop-out (more like lag) issue last night, and unsurprisingly, going off what people have already said on here, I have an adult sim who rides a bike. However, I also noticed that at 3am when the game runs its usual 'hood maintenance, all the sound came back - as one huge cacophonic mess that lasted nearly a minute. Basically, it was every possible audio instance that should have played out throughout the day compressed into a minute of eardrum-destroying noise. After that, the audio behaved as normal.

I seem to recall this happening before, shortly after installing Ambitions, but I haven't really played the game properly for a while until last night.

It's just another entry in a long list of bugs that EA will sweep under the rug, along with the broken lights, the running glitch and countless others that I keep coming across but quickly forget.

Necromancers should be burned with the fire of a thousand suns.