If you change a sim's age using editsim, even temporarily, you will mess up their earned Rewards.  some of the rewards will disappear, others will show <null key>, and other weird glitchy things might happen, none of them fatal as far as I know, just messy.

If that's what happened, you can fix it by going back into editsim, writing down their attributes, then clicking the dice thing to roll all new random attributes, then set attributes back to the way they were, or the way you want them.

If you want to have a laugh, just read it out loud.  Reading it silently in print barely does it justice.

This Wuthering Heights.  A little over the top, but that's 19th century gothic romance for you.

I like that idea, too, a "Creeped-Out" moodlet.

And another idea: Hopeless Romantics should die of a Broken Heart.  After X number of rebuffs from an ex-lover, they drop dead on his/her porch leaving a ghost of some color. (Pink?  Whatever.  Maybe better to keep it simple and make it an existing color.)  A ghost that still hits on the house owner.  All very Wuthering Heights.

Oh well... I understand there isn't supposed to be any hidden traits or behaviors of ex-newspaper-carriers, but I wanted to see for myself.  It just intrigues me that there are some NPCs in this game that have fewer traits than others.  It makes you think something must be going on there, but I guess in this case, there isn't.

I'd still like to graduate her from high school though.  I guess down-aging and up-aging is the way to do that.  She's not part of the chosen family anymore (I moved her out, into her own house), so maybe I'll just let her live the rest of her life as a high school student.

I think it's carpool-related.  It doesn't just happen at 9am, but seems to happen even for the 3pm and 4pm jobs as well.  As soon as the car arrives outside and honks, the sims go into some time warp where it takes them an hour to get to the porch.  Pausing the game to help it catch up rendering doesn't help.

I'm still using AM+ISM, so it might be an ISM problem.

This is such a mess, I need advice.

I wanted to get a former newspaper girl NPC into the neighborhood as a playable.  What I did was this:  First, I ctrl-shift-clicked her to set her age to be one day from birthday (It's one of the options under Sim.../Aging.../)  The next time I invited her over, she was a teen.  I did the same thing again.  The next time she came over she was a YA.  At that point I invited her to move in. 

That very same evening, she transitioned again to Adult! 

Okay...  That was a little unexpected.  It turns out that if you do this to grow up NPCs, they age transition a second time after you move them in.  Something to remember.

I changed her back to YA with Simedit and saved her.  But there was a new problem, or one I hadn't noticed before.  She was still listed as a high-school student, albeit one with a part-time job.  I sent her off to join the Criminal Career.  She did that fine.  But she was still listed as a High School Student with grade C, and with a job.

If she weren't a former NPC, I could fix this myself by just changing her to teen wotj Simedit and then aging her up again.  However, BECAUSE she used to be an NPC, I don't want to do that because aging down to teen will lead Simedit to change her traits.  She will get her fifth trait back after aging back up to YA, but I doubt she will retain whatever Papergirl-ish special traits she may have had through this process.

So, please advise me:

1. Was there a less painful way to age her up?
2. Is there any fix for the High School thing?  Can I get rid of that without using Simedit?
3. If a special NPC's traits are changed with Simedit, are unlisted NPC characteristics roached?  I assume they must be.  If so, that defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

By the way, RussianBrides is HOT!1!!11  I tell you, when I get desperate enough to marry somebody by email-order, it will be them.  Aw, shit, who am I fooling?  I'm desperate enough now.  But I can browse, can't I?  And the coolest thing is they're all white!  I know, that might sound racist or shallow, but shit, all the whores on Hollywood Blvd are all Hispanic and black, so white would be a welcome change of pace.  The whole Russian Mafia boyfriend pimp kicking your ass and robbing you thing is a bit of a turnoff though.

As the traits work now, there is so much overlap that there is no point in trying to be synergistic with traits.  For instance, Flirty + Hopeless Romantic is a waste of a trait, because they both get almost all the same socials.

Personally, I think Hopeless Romantics should be stalkers.  They should fixate on one romance or especially an ex-romance to the exclusion of all else, even to the point of showing up on their doorsteps at 3am in nighties, leaving teddy bears on their beloveds doorstep, calling them up all the time.  And they should have some special actions like, "Why did you REALLY dump me?"  And "I know you still love me, you just won't admit it!" And "I'm going to kill myself with rat poison and haunt you forever."

If you just leave the camera still and focus on those blocky sims for a while, they straighten out and finish completely rendering.  That happens a lot when you are starting the game or especially if you have deleted your caches. 

Echhhhh....  *shudder*.  Man, that was like running a popsicle stick over a sensitive tooth.

If you could only upgrade one thing, I'd go for maxing out the RAM.  But since you will probably find out you need a new motherboard to do that effectively, you'll probably end up having to upgrade everything, cheap.

A few weeks ago when TS3 came out, I bookmarked some cheap upgrade items on Newegg.  I bookmarked this ASUS motherboard ($69.99) with dual core Phenom II cpu ($102.99) as a reasonable starting point.  It has room for 16gb ram, although 8 would be more than enough to last until the next upgrade.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131381

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103680

I can't tell from the pic if she's wearing sleepwear (too dark on my screen), but if she's not, I wonder if the problem is with her maternity sleepwear.  If that's the case, since you can't change pregnant sims clothing with the dresser, I don't know what you would be able to do about it.

I had a sim-baby born last night with the Burglar trait.  Googling around for this brings up conflicting information about what this trait can actually do.  Some have said that it only gives the adult "Burglar" trait sim the ability to sneak anywhere, but that's it. 

Is that good for anything?  Can they swipe objects?  If not, then what good is it except maybe for story-making filming purposes?  Is it a waste of a good trait?

For background: the baby is the grandchild of a maid NPC with the Klepto trait who became a thief.  Her daughter, the mother of the baby is a level 3 thief, but has no special traits and does not have Klepto. 

I looked at the mod generator.  That wasn't what I was really thinking about, although it looks very handy.

I was thinking of something like a Preferences or Settings utility that would be universal.  It might generate a mod XML but that would be transparent to the user and you wouldn't have to know its name.  You could have everything set up in a nice GUI app with the EA defaults that you could change as you pleased, all in one place.  Why have several different mods with different names that aren't terribly descriptive of what they do if you could have one app that does it all for you, all in one place? 

If, then, you wanted to change something, you could just tell people what setting to change in the app rather than releasing a mod.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a single offline GUI utility that would let you modify all or any of those values and then spit out a single XML package that contains them all.  That way you wouldn't have to keep track of all the individual XML tweaks you have in your system.

With LIFE FRUIT??

Ok, I'm curious.  Did everybody who ate a serving gain a day of life?

I'm going to guess that HighRoller means he has the Opportunist reward, which means they get more reward out of any successful Opportunity.

It takes me longer to load a save-game than it does to start the game .exe.

Go to Demonoid and download the AwesomeMod crack.  It will get rid of that warning.

Maybe I wasn't clear with the teleport reference.  I was thinking, just have them VANISH off the street or out of their homes at 8am or whenever, and then walk out of the office front door at 5pm.  No car pool, no routing to a taxi, no bicycle, no running.

Is there alleged communal ownership of property in the TS3?  No?  Well, then it's not communism.  It's definitely centralized economic planning, though. 

Perhaps Sunset Valley is at war with Riverdale?  If so, then they are on a war footing and may have a war czar directing the economy.  No new townies and babies means no new conscripts for the Glorious War Effort.  And they need to keep the police department well-stocked with sims in blue uniforms to crack down on dissidents and root out Riverdale sleeper agents.  You never know what kind of incriminating evidence you'll find in somebody's trash can.  What if one of those sleeper agents had a ticking nuclear timebomb?  Can you afford to take that risk?  I suggest the Mausoleum would be a great place to hold and interrogate suspects pending their show trials.

When you see that weird kind of square pixelation, that's caused by shadows, probably from the hair.  Like this:



Turn off shadows and they will go away.  And your game will be faster.  And your game will look more natural. 

Somebody suggested that you need to have the "particles" graphic option set to high if you want to have shadows on and work, but I haven't tried that.  I just keep shadows off.

I wasn't suggesting teleporting MY sims to work.  I was suggesting that the game teleport all the TOWNIES to work.  I'm quite happy with my sims taking the carpool or bus to work.  I just wonder if it wouldn't be less laggy if the townies took a shortcut.  I rarely follow townies from home to work, so it wouldn't be no big loss and it would keep them off the roads in the morning.

I don't think it would necessarily be that hard to spawn cribs in good locations.  Spawn them next to a bed.  Even if that's clumsy, it's not unrealistic.  Even when people don't keep their babies right in the bedroom, they keep the babies in hearing distance of their sleeping arrangement, even if it's just a baby monitor.  When you first get a baby home, if you haven't had one before (I've only had one so I can only speak for myself, heh), you find yourself arranging things in a hurry and that can include jamming a crib anywhere it will fit in the room, even blocking doors and TVs.

In TS2, when children got home from school, they would instantly try to place their homework on or as close to a desk as possible.  If the same object-of-a-type search routine is in TS3, a similar thing could be done for cribs.  Instead of identifying an empty spot close to a desk, it could find the closest empty spot on the floor close to a bed.  (The facts that cribs are two-tiles, though, might ruin that whole idea.)