Something weird I just realized about chance cards in FT:  They have apparently tinkered with the chance cards of some of the long-established careers, to make them relevant to the enthusiasms.  I have a Sim in Business career who happens to have 4 points in Music/Dance.  He rolled a chance card that said something like "Matthew (my Sim) is chatting with a coworker about music. <blah blah blah>."  I don't recall what the choices were, but the (positive) response was, "Matthew invites his new friend over!"

I also saw another chance card for a different career (NOT one of the new FT careers) where the penalty for guessing wrong was the loss of enthusiasm points (not skill points) in two different categories.

Have they actually replaced the existing career chance cards with new ones, or are these in addition to the usual chance cards that have always been there?  Does anybody know for sure?

Karen

Kids can definitely use it for drawing; I've seen that in my game.  (And then, just like the easel, it leaves a half-completed drawing on the table that must be "scrapped" by the next person to come along who wants to use the table.  )  I wonder if the activity table builds social (toddler-toddler or toddler-kid interactions) like the dollhouse?

I'm very pleased so far with the new toddler items in this EP.  It's LONG past time the little rugrats got some extra attention!

Karen

Pardon my ignorance, but what's CTAE?

I love the activity table.  Especially the fact that it 1) builds more than one skill, and 2) can be used by both toddlers and kids.  Good to know that it beats the other toddler toys, which I had long since grown utterly sick of

Karen

Any information yet on how the new FT skilling objects compare to the existing ones?  (Not really impatient here, just curious....)

Karen

So that 80% chance card perk really does what they claim?  I was wondering about that.... You're right, that's really going to be boring to play.

Karen

EDIT:  I would love to see a hack that put some randomization (or at least uncertainty) into it.  Let's say, 80% chance of positive outcome if Sim is in gold asp or above, otherwise 80% chance of negative outcome.  Or a hack that lowered the chance to 50% (or whatever).  Something along those lines.

I'll update again in a couple of hours when I get home from work   But yes, I do update frequently in the early days of a new EP.  (Not hourly, but I do check for updates before I start up the game each time.)  I'm reasonably sure I was running with the current version, whatever was in the DC as of early this morning.  Will test again, more systematically, tonight.  I've had the game less than a day.

Karen

EDIT to add:  Well, um, never mind....    I played another household with a toddler and the baby controller worked fine with the wooden Maxis crib.

Does the baby controller support the new Maxis cribs?  I have not seen my Sims autonomously put a toddler in a new-style crib yet.  (Have not played any lots with babies yet.)  They do use the new wooden changing table, which is great. 

If it doesn't support the new cribs now, are you planning to do so at some point in the future?

Karen

For those of us who don't have a Prima guide (and wouldn't necessarily trust what it says in any case...) can someone answer this question?

What exactly is the definition of a BFF (in terms of LTR/STR) and how does it differ from a regular best friend relationship?  I got three of them in one family in the space of a few minutes and I wasn't paying the slightest attention at the time.  Seems to me BFFs will be very easy to accumulate with autosoc/autoyak.

Karen

I have an elder on one of my lots who refuses to die of old age.  I am playing with only the MATY hacks updated for FT, plus ACR.  I tried spawning the tombstone of L&D and selecting Die from Old Age, but the action just drops out of queue.  Seems to me this is a VERY old bug, something I recall seeing way back in the days after the base game first came out.  Frustrating, though.  I want her DEAD!

On the plus side - I like the craft objects so far, the pottery wheel especially.  Thrilled to see new baby furniture, especially if it's usable by the baby controller. 

Going back in now to test again (forgot to put BUY back in when I played the last time and the lack of it is driving me nuts!)

Karen

Jadis:  But those twins aren't quite identical, are they?  Look at the eyebrows. 

I have had twins I couldn't tell apart except by looking VERY closely.  I had a set of triplets once, two girls and a boy, where the girls were so identical that I couldn't tell them apart at all except by their clothing.  That could have been the first-born effect too, though.

Karen

Is there any point to installing this patch if you're going to be getting FreeTime when it comes out?  Won't FreeTime use a new .exe anyway and therefore not be affected by any BV (or prior) patches?

If this patch will be bypassed when I install FreeTime, I'm definitely not going to bother with it.

About the room service bug -- I have not had problems with this since I started to make a habit of ALWAYS calling room service using the phone in the hotel room, rather than the cell phone.  I did have the "disappearing food" bug at first, but it doesn't seem to happen if you call using the phone in the room.

Karen

I have been using the Lot Sync Timer since the first version was released (I'm currently on day 184 on most of my lots, 183 on the rest).  I play all my lots in rotation, roughly 24 to 30 hours each.  I stop playing each lot either just after 6pm, or after some significant event that I'm waiting for, like a death or age transition, is completed in the evening.  The synctimer really helps to keep track of which lots in the rotation haven't been played yet (especially handy since I always play them in random order).

I have all my lots synchronized to the same day of the week as well.  On the rotation I'm currently playing, for example, all my lots start out on Tuesday evening and I play them through Wednesday evening.  If I create a new family, I always sync them to the same day of the week as the rest of my lots.

Like a lot of the other Pescado hacks, the synctimer is absolutely essential to my gameplay.  I can't imagine playing without it.

Karen

That's a possibility.  I am positive that I exited the lot after moving her in, but I'm not sure I actually shut down the game before playing that lot again.


That's what I saw too.  I would love to see a hack to fix this.  Sort of a "nouniprotect" for hotel lots?

Karen

No, I'm not, and even if I was....this problem occurs only on a hotel lot, not at home.  I don't have any custom content on this hotel lot at all.  I suppose there probably is a Maxis fridge somewhere on that hotel lot, to serve the restaurant, but I've never used it.

It's also entirely possible that the hotel lot is borked in some way.  Oh well, it's not a big deal, I just won't send her on vacations anymore.

Karen

I always run with debug mode turned on.  It didn't throw any errors when this happened.

Karen

So, I made the mistake of having one of my playables fall in love with a vacation townie.  They got married, she moved into the household, everything seemed fine.  Until I sent her and the rest of the family on vacation.  Turns out the ex-townie is unable to eat on hotel lots.  She can order room service but doesn't seem able to eat anything (the other members of the family are fine).  She sits down, starts to eat, immediately stops.  I placed a vacation "food station" thingie (don't know what they're called - the ones with the chef and 4 seats) on the hotel lot and although everyone else can use it with no problem, this ex-vacation-townie can't.  She can eat if I send her to a community lot but not on the hotel lot.  Weird.

Another odd thing - her hunger got down all the way in the red on this hotel lot, but she did not die.  I have "nouniprotect" installed but I guess it doesn't prevent vacation townies from dying.  (I want to investigate this further - I thought it was possible for Sims to die on vacation, no?)

I don't know if I have a hack conflict, or if vacation townies are just not designed to be able to eat like normal Sims while on vacation.  Has anybody else tried this?

Karen

I run the BV director's cut, minus a small handful of things:

lobonanny
firemod
clothingtool_globals
bedsidefix

I could not play without the phonehack, autosoc, autoyak, macrotastics, skillinator, BUY, baby controller, clothingtool, synctimer, collegeclock, and the lot debugger.  Kickthecheat is also a must for me.

I have all the OFB-related hacks from the DC installed, but haven't actually run a business in ages.

Karen

This may be a dumb question, but....what exactly can you do with the voodoo doll?  I know how to get it, several of my Sims have one, but it doesn't seem to do anything.  Is there a point to it?

Karen

I have TSS but I don't normally use SimPE to do anything complicated - mostly changing family names and tweaking DNA strings, that sort of thing.  I would be glad to test it out, though.  I've been using the QA version since BV came out and haven't had any issues.

Glad to see you stepping up to do this!  I definitely agree that it should be put up on more than one site - I shudder to think of the stampede at MTS2 as everybody rushes to download it all at once.

Karen

Tried the latest version and it's fixed now - thanks!

Something weird is going on with the latest (12/1/07) version of the Lot Sync Timer.  I have been using it since the first version and I've never seen this before.

I moved some family members from an existing family into a new house.  On entering the new lot for the first time, I did "Install for Family" and set the days-elapsed value to 168 to match the rest of my families.  Then I noticed that the current day on this lot was Wednesday, whereas all of my other lots are on Monday.  So I went into the synctimer's Time Warp function to set the day to Monday.  Ignored the warnings, clicked Engage.  The day now said Tuesday.  I set the day to Sunday via the synctimer.  It set it to Monday.  Every time I do it, it's off by one day (the synctimer sets the day to one day later than the day of the week I selected.)

I know you don't recommend using this function unless absolutely necessary, but it was working fine prior to this version and it seems to me that something broke.  Not a big deal, but could you look into it when you get a chance?

Karen

The problem, I think, is that you keep *fulfilling* their wants for chairs/couches/etc, which only makes them roll up more wants for similar items.  Stop giving them every single object they roll up a want for, and eventually they will start rolling wants for other things.

Karen

Anybody care to translate that into English?  What kind of "vacation service NPCs" can be called on the phone anyway?  Has anybody actually seen a crash like this?


And of course they'll advise deleting the problem family *in-game*, leaving all kinds of garbage behind....

Karen

I love this idea.  I've been wanting something like this at least since Uni came out.  I think it would be great to have the new aspiration be totally random.

Karen

The BV patch is now available (http://thesims2.ea.com/update/)  The list of changes is not very long:

"Note: Not all fixes will take effect on existing The Sims 2 Bon Voyage saved games. If you have an existing lot, Sim, object or neighborhood that does not seem to be improved by this patch, we recommend that you replace the affected object, or create either a new family, lot or neighborhood, depending on what is affected by the bug.

Sims will no longer have the option to call vacation service NPCs after acquiring the business perk "Head for Numbers" which was causing a crash.
Sims will no longer have the option to "Call Taxi" using their cell phones if they have driven to the community lot with an own-able vehicle which was causing a crash.
If the Sim misses the shuttle, it will no longer return to a vacation lot without the Sim at the end of the vacation. Sometimes, this caused the vacation lot to become unusable.
Game will no longer create new vacation NPCs each time a lot is visited which was causing many issues due to character file overload. Any existing extra NPCs will be unlinked and their character files greatly reduced in size.
Periodic Events Controller will no longer loop twice per hour through each neighbor which was causing extreme lag on certain machines.
Autonomous water-balloon and snowball fights have been tuned so the interaction will occur less frequently"

Personally, I think I'll wait to install this until others have had a chance to check it out.

Karen