"Most profitable" really needs to take into account $ / page, not just raw $.  Assuming that time required to produce a novel is directly related to the page count.  The highest $ / page I'm seeing on Bast's list is Satire, at $3 / page, but that's for a hit.  The Romance listing is $2.4 / page.

I've finally created a full-time writer.  It's much more interesting than a Sim who barely manages to write one or two novels while holding down a regular job.  My royalties are much higher, but he was tuned to be a writer with "Bookworm" and "Artistic" and the "Acclaimed Author" perk, not to mention the bonuses from Specialist and Prolific.  I had fun with the book titles - Children's books such as "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" and "The Noodle Incident," or a Romance novel titled "Do Androids Watch Electric Porn?"

Since there are benefits to volume of books, there's some strategy to writing some of the shorter works like Children's and SF.

 - Gus

That is very strange.  Thanks for pointing that out - and yeah, that's definitely Phail on the part of EAxis.

 - Gus

So far, I've noticed that "paint portrait" doesn't get marked as completed, though I may be Doing It Wrong.  Learn New Composition doesn't seem to trigger when you read sheet music, either.

 - Gus

I'm curious what effect, if any, the genre type has on actually reading the books.  I've never quite understood the value in the very expensive books in the book store.  The books with game effects I understand, but not the ones that only increase Fun.

I wonder if we'll eventually get a SimPE-like took that will let us add additional markers.  Since, for example, you can't write Pregnancy books, there are only 2 in the game, and Sims constantly roll Wishes to read them when having kids, even if they've already read both.

 - Gus

One thing that puzzles me is how you get the first quest in the chain.  I haven't seen it myself, but I've read about the quest that gives you the cheese-and-eggs seeds.  I've had a couple of Sims get 10 Gardening now, and it never pops up.  Perhaps the trigger is one of the career tracks?

 - Gus

I might try that.  Moving didn't work - the baby showed up in the move dialog, but not on the lot after the move.

 - Gus

I had a household with 2 adults and 5 children, and I ran a birthday party for one of the kids.  During the party, I noticed that the guests were taking care of the noisy larva, which seemed convenient at the time, since the adults were either sleeping or dealing with the guests.  I pretty much ignore babies until they go yellow or start yelling.

The next morning, after 3 of the kids are off to school, I glance over at the Sim list and suddenly realize the baby's missing entirely.  My best guess is that the party guest who was changing, feeding, etc. the baby simply walked off with it.  Exiting and re-loading did not restore the missing baby, though the family portrait still shows it.

I think the parents are secretly happy.  They both wanted a daughter and got a son instead.

 - Gus

I think it's important to keep in mind that game development costs money.  If TS3 included everything from TS2 and the expansions, it would have cost as much to develop as all of the above.  Well, perhaps a bit less, but it's fairly obvious that the engine had enough of a re-write that code re-use was problematic.

As it is, the game included a fair number of key elements from the TS2 expansions if not all the chrome.  My complaint was more in the way of really basic stuff that somehow got omitted this time around, even as they stuffed in lots of new features.

 - Gus

Actually, I miss Lot Full Of Sims too.  But since the game is all of 10 days old, I don't feel justified in complaining about what mods haven't been resurrected yet.  Stuff that was in the base TS2 but not in TS3, though, seems like a reasonable target.

 - Gus

I just experienced this myself.  It appears to be a bug.  The fish are copies of what were in the refrigerator, but the originals are still in the refrigerator, so you haven't lost anything.

They're mounted, stuffed versions of the fish.  Thus, they're decorations.  Or you can just put them on the wall and then sell them.

 - Gus

Video games count for "play game."  I use that fairly often because it satisfies the Wish immediately, you can fit at least 4 Sims into one game, and Sims will play from any nearby location, even if the chair doesn't quite face the TV.  However, if they're going to put "play a game" Wishes in, more activities should qualify.

You're right that all the various collectibles demand a display system.  Beyond tucking them on top of dressers, anyway.

I'm OK with much of the stuff they left out, since much of it showed up in expansions.  It's the basic stuff that bothers me.

And you're very right about stairs, fences, and roofs - if everything else can be re-textured, why not those?  The stairs in particular scream for it, since the existing color / texture selection isn't very good.

You might be able to get ratty-looking columns by fiddling with textures and colors.  The game lost the "interior unfinished wall" texture I often used for garages, but I was able to make a good substitute by grabbing one of the paneling textures and replacing the fancy wallpaper with flat gray and the pillar color with a wood texture.

 - Gus

I suppose we should be grateful that the guitar isn't the flypaper that the older musical instruments were.  I stopped buying most of them in TS2 because guests would beeline for them and then play until they got too tired, hungry, or had to pee, and leave.

 - Gus

• A cheap shower tub.  Instead we get we get 2 showers, 4 tubs, and one really expensive showertub.  How many tubs have you encountered in real life that didn't have some dinky showerhead and cheap curtain?  EAxis's priorities are screwed as usual, since showers are more functional than tubs in the game.  Yes, tubs can eliminate the Stressed moodlet and can give +10 mood from the Ducky, but usually the time required isn't worth it.
• Recessed lights.  Or a basic ceiling dome light.  None of the ceiling lights are appropriate for most rooms, instead they all hang down fairly significantly.  Purely aesthetic, of course, but annoying.
• The piano.  Seriously, who plays guitar in an orchestra?
• The changing table.  I don't like how trivial diaper changing is now.  It's so fast and trouble free you might as well change the larva's diaper every time you pick it up.  It also means we have even less reason to buy tubs, since they're no longer required for scrubbing larvae.

 - Gus

I almost never have that panel up.  I'm certain I did not when the Sims aged naturally.

That said, I did an experiment, and allowed another Sim to age naturally.  This time the new trait stuck.  About the only thing I did differently was fiddle pointlessly with the trait-choosing dialog after I'd chosen the trait.

 - Gus

Ye gods, you're right.  I was kind of puzzled that there was no empty lot tool, but now that I've fiddled with it, it's clear you cannot place new lots, just dump houses on existing ones.

I can't think of any good reasons for this.  Beyond the fact that you need easy road access to any non-fishing hole.  This seems very lazy, they needed a tool to make the neighborhoods, why not make it available to the player?

One thing to keep in mind about completely scratch neighborhoods is that the new design has pretty hefty requirements for community lots.  There must be at least 19 specific unique lots (i.e. bookstore, library, school, and job lots).  A TS2 custom neighborhood could be a single residential lot.  In fact, I've done that, a "new settlement" with a single founding family, a residential lot, and an all-in-one community lot (in TS2 I didn't see the point of specialized community lots).

 - Gus

Uh... I meant to say that.  Really!

To be honest, I've only skimmed the booty, so I wasn't aware it was exclusively about destroying pay sites.  I knew that was its primary mission, but I thought other less-licit stuff would go there as well.  So MATY would remain a bit safer.

However, it's true that there's been plenty of traffic about arr'ing stuff that EA really cares about, like Splotch and the Horror, so a link to something like the Prima guide seems minor by comparison.

I think it's also worth noting that this particular file seems to be a bootleg PDF.  In the sense that it looks like it's scanned and converted, rather than an original document.  Some pages are slightly out of focus, and there are slight alignment issues on a few pages.

 - Gus

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that the shared stuff (i.e. Sims Store material) is being displayed so openly, even here.  Generally that's restricted to the sister site, which is not usually directly named.

 - Gus

It's PDF.

It's worth downloading, but ye gods, the amount of useless filler in between the tiny useful bits.  Particularly the "tips" and advice from the author ("Brownie Bites.")  This is probably good for the BBS sheeple, though.

 - Gus

It took me a while to figure out those stupid triangles too.  What's more, if you click on the triangle rather than drag it, it opens up a window with a list of all the items individually, so you can move items of a specific quality from a mixed-quality stack.

 - Gus

The "Singed" moodlet specifically says that you shouldn't electrocute them again while they're still singed.  So I think the second shock is usually fatal if you haven't washed the first one off in the shower.

 - Gus

I had my older Sim roll a Have a Child Wish while the house was full of his 6 kids and his wife was too old for more babies anyway.  So I gave him a mid-life crisis and had him chase down some 20-something, woo her, and impregnate her.  From "meet" to "bear my child" was about 6-7 hours. He ended up with 2 kids with her.

Romance is too easy in this game, compared to the delays forced by the long-term relationship meter in TS2.  However, I do appreciate that a single flirt doesn't turn a friendship into instant love.

Two things bug me about the game.  The Sims rarely roll romance-related Wishes, even if they have the Hopeless Romantic trait.  "Have a Child," yes, but no "flirt with that attractive Sim" and only rarely "kiss so-and-so" or "woohoo so-and-so."  I've never, ever seen "marry" or "get engaged."

The other is the way non-playables spontaneously generate children without anyone else.  Having the kids with the townie allowed me to look at their family tree, and their half-brother did not have a father.  Similarly, I got sick of looking for a romantic interest for one of my Sims, so I created a neighbor guy for her.  They did OK, but then she discovers on the second date that he's got a newborn.

Awesomemod fixes this, but I get the impression it's still very much in early beta.  I'm not willing to trade annoyances for crashes at this point.

 - Gus

Depending on the code architecture, that may be more trouble than it's worth.  Code depends on data structures, names and parameters for functions, etc.  If all of that changes dramatically, all you're left with is the algorithm.  You can copy-and-paste the code and then manually correct it, but you can't properly re-use it as is.

Seeing as the new model allows much finer placement of objects than before, I wouldn't be surprised if the coordinate system were different.

 - Gus

You misunderstand me.  I've yet to have a problem when a Sim blows out candles - it's when they age naturally without a cake that they don't get the trait.  If there was a workaround, I'd love to hear it.

 - Gus

That's my experience as well.  With any chess set, not just the specific set you mention, the game is more finicky about how close you put the chairs to the wall.  I found moving the group (chess set and two attached chairs) a half square away from the wall solved the problem.

 - Gus

For the most part, the game has been more stable than TS2.  I've noticed what appear to be resets, but they don't result in endless loops or impossible actions, as with the infamous "jump bug" which was really a generic symptom for TS2 resetting an endless loop.

I did have a Sim get stuck once.  She was trying to put down a book, and the neighbor she was visiting was blocking her with his constant demands to flirt.  She was frozen, and could not move, because she was stuck in mid-motion putting down his book.  Eventually he got tired and wandered off to pee and she returned to normal.

The problems I notice most are adult-toddler docking and birthdays.  An adult and a toddler will be adjacent, and yet the toddler will crawl off 6-8 full tiles before finding an acceptable docking point.

Birthdays are more serious, but more avoidable.  It seems that if you let a Sim age transition to Child, Teenager, or Young Adult without using the Birthday Cake, you get the Trait dialog, but the game discards the result.  I've got a couple of Adult Sims with only 4 Traits as a result.  The first time I just didn't want to bother with the cake, the second time I just forgot it was her birthday.

Personally, I don't like the fact that the Birthday Cake lets you transition well ahead of time.  I understand the convenience feature, but I prefer the idea that Sims age in a natural progression, rather than some Sims aging abnormally fast.  It's inconvenient for me that the Cake dialog shows every Sim on the lot, not just those I consider eligible.

It looks like something like the Hackey Sack problem is back.  I have 4 tiles in one room which will not accept objects, and Sims will not walk on them.  We need Buyable Fire or the Lot Debugger.

Babies also stop the automatic speed-3 transition again.  They fixed that a long time ago in TS2, why did they forget it with this release?

 - Gus