@TashaFawn: Thanks! That took care of it. I was under the impression that if one deleted the thumbnail files, then that was redundant, but I tried it anyway.

@Pescado: fiddling with the fade and view distances made no difference

For any other Mac users who find this thread, I'd like to point out that pressing command+control while clicking with a single-button mouse will have the same result as control+rightclicking.

might be relevant to the small problem I'm having.

Some of my chairs (both dining and living) and sofas have oddly translucent thumbnails. It's not a great problem but I would like some insight into what's going on.

I combined three screencaps into the attached image to show what I mean.



At the time I took these screencaps, I had already pulled out my Downloads folder, checked {each EP I have}/TSData/Res/Catalog/Bins to make sure there were no other files except globalcatbin.bundle.package, and deleted the five thumbnail cache files in Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Thumbnails. I don't download lots and my SavedSims folder is empty.

The actual chairs and sofas are always correctly textured when I place them.

What's causing this, is it a VBT, and how can I fix it whether VBT or not?

A man walks into a bar. OUCH!

Okay, so it's a feature, not a bug. But if one wants to have a playables-only hood with a reasonably integrated economy, then it's a real problem. I need to test but I've noticed that a handful of my playables never come to the town's most popular (level 10) entertainment venue. Through observation, I've noted that these playables have pathetic 3-figure household accounts. I don't think this is a coincidence. As illusionofjoy pointed out, the 10% method wouldn't work. I need to test this, but I'm guessing the game has a safety threshold of 1000 simoleons or thereabouts. Edited to add: Preliminary testing shows that the value is about 500. I'd hope any hack that appropriately adjusted the playable sim's household account would reference this some way.

This annoys me too. I wondered if it was a bug in the game's code.

Maybe you'll find it easier if you put a watermelon in your head.

I've already done this a few times. How badly is my Pleasantview* FUBARed?

*fortunately not a neighborhood I give a rat's ass about in the long run

There's a tutorial by Phaenoh on MTS2 about recategorizing which will give you some clues on how to do this. She talks about recategorizing items in buy mode but there's some discussion in the thread on how to extend that to build mode items.

floatProp tvVolume 0.1
uintprop maxTotalSims 23
uintprop maxTotalHumans 23
#uintprop maxTotalPets 5
intprop maxNumOfVisitingSims 15
#boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true

alias moveon "moveobjects on" "moveon" "moveon"
alias moveoff "moveobjects off" "moveoff" "moveoff"
alias allow45 "boolprop allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation true" "allow45" "allow 45"
alias disallow45 "boolprop allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation false" "disallow45" "disallow 45"
alias gridon "boolprop snapObjectsToGrid true" "gridon" "gridon"
alias gridoff "boolprop snapObjectsToGrid false" "gridoff" "gridoff"
alias cfeon "boolprop constrainFloorElevation false" "fixfloor" "fixfloor"
alias cfeoff "boolprop constrainFloorElevation true" "freefloor" "freefloor"
alias debugon "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" "debugon" "debugon"
alias debugoff "boolprop testingcheatsenabled false" "debugoff" "debugoff"
alias slomo0 "slowmotion 0" "slomo0" "slomo0"
alias slomo4 "slowmotion 4" "slomo4" "slomo4"
alias slomo8 "slowmotion 8" "slomo8" "slomo8"
alias pb "plumbbobtoggle" "pbtog" "pbtog"
alias amon "allmenus on" "amon" "amon"
alias amoff "allmenus off" "amoff" "amoff"

I don't know if I'm ever going to get Petz or not, but if I do, I'm ready. And at the moment, I can't remember why it is that I have "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" commented out. There was a reason for this, but it's slipping my mind at the moment.

That seems unlikely. I've sort of been testing your theory unwittingly. I'm playing the Apocalypse challenge, neighborhood still set to Winter-Winter-Winter-Winter because I haven't lifted Music yet. Thus, my sims get to sponge-bathe outside because I sadistically placed the outdoor sink (CC that looks like a bucket) on the balcony. Not-so-clean-to-start-with sims get stinky working out to the boombox, then go sponge off starkers in a raging snowstorm. And their thermometers do drop into the blue while they wash in that delightfully cold water.

Not a one has gotten sick. I'm still only in the second generation, so I will watch out for any evidence of sickness. I really think sims need to come in contact with a disease vector or ingest spoiled food in order to get sick.

I suppose the most acid test would be to let a sim get filthy, then have it go swimming outside in a snowstorm. I think I'll try that. 

Edited to add:
Blargh. Stupid EAxis. A sim shouldn't be able to swim for two hours in a snowstorm and not get cold. I guess the pools are heated? Bah.

But the sim got cold in a hurry once I had him get out of the pool. It's late so I didn't wait to see if he would come down with a cold. More investigation is warranted after I get some sleep.

I don't track most of the sims I play. I just remember what was going on. If I haven't played a family for a while, I might look at their house in neighborhood view, scratch my head a little, and enter the lot anyway. At that point, I usually remember whatever I needed to know. If there's something really important I don't want to risk forgetting, I can note it in the family bio and erase the note when it's no longer relevant.

For the handful of sims I feel like cloning, I take screenshots of their personality spread. I couldn't care less about interests.

I had one Poverty challenge family where the relationships got really tangled. Two half-brothers who were also first cousins at the same time was one of the easier relationships. Heh. So I made a family tree for them. There is one other family I've played for 14 generations. They have a simple family tree too. I used a drawing program; that's how undetailed the family trees are. :\

There's a custom neighborhood still in the planning stage. I've made notes of the names and attributes of the sims I'm going to use to start off that neighborhood Prosperity Challenge-style. Once I get that going, I don't know if I'm going to bother keeping notes on them or not. Probably not, but I won't rule the possibility out.

Does that apply to just moving them around? F'rinstance, if I wanted to plop the Broke trailer across the street from the Goth mansion to piss Mortimer* off, that would be a VBT?

*I doubt he'd care, but one can dream.

Good. Given what I've read about EAxis screwing up coding and not error-checking things enough, I wasn't sure if it was even safe to use carried-forward functions or not, but I'll go ahead and chance playing with these functions more. I've backed up my neighborhoods anyway.

I have NL & OFB. A little while back, I attached the default Downtown to a neighborhood I was planning to trash, then downloaded Smonaff's Resurrection Potion because I really wanted to get a look at the Tricous. I didn't think it would work but it did work.

I've since trashed the neighborhood but I want to know if I was doing Bad Things to my game in general by using something like that without Uni installed. Also, it's an option on my Lot Debugger to Upgrade Pre-Uni sim. I tried it on a sim in that same now-deleted neighborhood and got the extra slots and locks.

I've looked around online. I know some stuff gets carried forward in later expansions even if you don't have the earlier ones but that info still doesn't tell me if that's okay to resurrect dead sims or have faux graduates running around in my game.