Sim3Pack Unpacker, maybe?

Yes, I've seen this too.  In my game (Mac version with BV) if you bathe the wolf and then have a resident sim take him/her to a community lot off the lot for a walk, it appears to fix the problem.

It's been several months since I've had a wolf with a job but as I recall, if you bathe the wolf and then send him/her off to work the problem will be fixed when the wolf returns.

edit: correction

Not even the Tricous?  (They appear to have been placed in the game specifically to be resurrected.)

I suspect that those rabbit-hole buildings are placeholders for expansion packs.

I wonder if there will be an in-game cheat object, like the tombstone in TS2, which allows a player to accelerate pregnancies.

It's more likely that they're trying to concentrate their losses in FY2009 with the hope that FY2010 will show a profit.  Basically, if you already know that you're going to be under water in a given fiscal year then it's to your advantage to take all your losses in that year and defer (potential) profits to the next year.  If it works out then you can tell investors "yes, we lost money in FY2009 but look how we bounced back in FY2010!"

TS3 will sell well, no doubt, because there are so many players who will buy any Sims game just to give it a try.  Whatever I may think of EA's technical and creative decisions, I have to admit that pushing out the release of TS3 was probably a good business decision.

If the problem cannot be traced to custom content, disable the Picture In Picture Window and see if that makes a difference.

When I replayed the scenario, I tried it both ways:  selecting Mary then clicking on her mother and self-clicking Mary's mother.  In neither case did I get an "ask to leave group" menu item for Mary's mother.  The only option was to end the outing altogether.

I should point out that Calvin's father is the group leader (what I call the Invitor) not Mary.  If Mary had initiated the outing, perhaps she would have been able to tell her mother to leave the group without ending the outing?  (When I get a chance, I'll test that.)



I agree with you, seelindarun, I like the spontaneity of autonomously spawned dates and outings.  One of my sims got a call from a downtownie she met briefly on a community lot and he asked her out on a date.  I was surprised at this because their rel score was only 5.  She accepted and they had double-bolts for each other, and now they're married.  I'd like to see more surprise dates and outings in my game.

This is a naive question, but what are "the stubs"?  Does that mean unpaired (or mismatched) SWAFs?

Tigerlilley, I had the same thought.  And when Mary's mother was assigned to the outing, I initially assumed that she was meant to be a chaperone.

I have saved games which reproduce each of these scenarios, so I spent an afternoon replaying and analyzing them.  For the sake of completeness, I'll document what I found here.  (Experienced Simmers probably know all this stuff, so if you're an old hand you can stop reading now.)

Scenario described in my first post:  Mary's mother is a Popularity sim and has 20+ best friends, one of whom is Calvin's father.  When the game autonomously spawns an outing, it assigns a random selection of the Invitor's friends to the outing group.  If one of the friends happens to be a member of the Invitee's household, the outing starts right away because part of the outing group is on the lot.  The taxi never arrives because the game treats this situation like an at-home outing.  (magicmoon, my game doesn't give Mary's mother a way to leave the group - she can either go along or end the outing entirely, those are the only two options.)

This bug could easily be fixed by checking to see if a randomly chosen friend is a member of the Invitee's family before assigning the friend to the outing group.  Given that the Invitee can chose family members to accompany him/her on an outing, performing such a check would not close off any gameplay options.  (I'm astonished that EAxis has produced 8 EPs and at least as many patches and has not addressed this problem.)

Teleport scenario #1:  There are multiple incoming calls in the queue and Cassandra teleports to the lot.  The outing timer starts as soon as the Invitor is on the lot, but the taxi was summoned before she teleported.  The game does not treat this like an at-home outing so the Invitee can select family members to go along.

Teleport scenario #2:  It doesn't matter whether Mary accepts or declines the date - Calvin teleports because there are multiple incoming calls in the queue.

After posting this thread, I observed the teleport phenomenon in situations where no outings were involved.  Mary's household has lots of friends and if I use the call-friends macro to keep all of the family members talking on their cell phones, somebody will eventually teleport to the lot.

More weirdness . . .

1.  I'm playing the Pleasant household.  Cassandra Goth and Mary-Sue Pleasant are best friends.  Phone rings, Mary-Sue answers, it's Cassandra.  Cassandra invites her downtown for an outing.  This time, I get the dialog box which allows me to select family members to join the outing and I select Daniel.  As soon as Mary-Sue hangs up, Cassandra materializes in the basement of the Pleasant house !!  The outing timer appears and Cassandra wanders upstairs to chat with Mary-Sue while they wait for the taxi.  The taxi arrives and the three of them get in.

2.  My teens, Mary and Calvin, have had two dream dates now.  One evening, Calvin calls Mary to ask her out again.  Mary's motives are low so I decline the date by selecting "Stay Here".  Mary hangs up and Calvin materializes in the basement of Mary's house  !!  (All of my houses have basements.)  He wanders upstairs to flirt with Mary, Mary tells him goodbye, and he leaves the lot.

This strange basement teleport phenomenon happens only when a playable from another household attempts to initiate a date/outing.  Any idea what's going on?  Is there something I could fix or nuke with the batbox that would repair this problem?

I would be willing to put up with some of this strange stuff if the outing timer didn't start right away.  That's a big problem because a full hour is lost before the outing group arrives downtown.

Ok, I restored my most recent backup and tried again.  Mary called a taxi and the game insisted that Mary's mother get in the taxi too, even though I never got the dialog box which allows me to select household members to join the outing.

Is there a way to remove Mary's mother from the outing group so that she's not forced to go along?

Here's the situation:  My first generation of born-in-game sims are teens now and they're going out on dates.  Two of my teens (Mary and Calvin) went out together and had a dream date - the date was initiated by Mary.  The following evening, Calvin's father called Mary and invited her on an outing "because his friend Calvin had a great time and told him about her".  Mary accepted the invitation.

The outing timer appeared as soon as Mary hung up the phone, even though she's still at home, and the taxi never showed up.  Furthermore, Mary's mother was somehow assigned to the outing group and both of them began walking around the house with the blue outing plumb-bobs.  No other family members were affected.  Eventually the outing timed out, and the game displayed a message from Calvin's father complaining that he had been stood up.

What's going on here?  My sims have been asked to go on outings many times by NPC downtownies and nothing like this has ever happened.  Is this a bug that shows up when playables autonomously invite other playables on outings?

Oh.  I tried clicking on the bubbles (like the way it works in CAS), but it never occurred to me to click and drag.  Kyna, thanks.

Ok, I know about the in-game cheat which sets a personality attribute to min/mid/max, and I know about the personality-randomizer feature in Sim Blender.  But I have yet to find a hack which will let me increment or decrement an attribute by one point.

Here's what I want to do:  I have a couple of sims with 5 points on the Lazy-Active scale and I want to increment the number to 6 so that they won't eat crap.  Is there a hack out there that'll let me do this?

Note to self: people with post counts > 5000 probably don't need my recommendations. 

I had a similar couple in my game and I concluded that the problem was a personality mismatch.  She's an Aries and he's a Gemini so she's attracted to his personality whereas he's repelled by hers.  She fell in love but he did not, even so, he was willing to woohoo and get engaged (but not make out).  I broke them up before they got married and they each found mutual love with other partners.

In this case, the sim who appeared to be frigid fell madly in love with a friend he brought home from work.

Is there a way to clone sims without SimPE, or are Mac users just out of luck?

Oh, it's not automatic . . . 

At the risk of sounding like a fawning sycophant, I wanna say that the garden macro is Awesome.  Until I tried it, I was ready to give up on gardens and orchards because they require so much micromanagement.


At the risk of sounding like a peevish pedant, just wanna point out that you can double the food-unit value of your produce by nurturing lower quality produce up to mouthwatering status before you harvest it.  Sometimes, one extra weed-and-water cycle is all it takes.

You're talking about ffsdebugger, right?  That's one of the few Director's Cut mods I didn't use.  I left it out because I don't want the sim generator to be randomized - I've been using the fact that the sim generator creates the same face/personality combinations in the same order (from startup) to select the child I want from the first 5 or 6 possibilities for a given birth.

I tried the tombstone, as TashaFaun recommended, but it didn't give me a terminate-pregnancy option.  (I running BV on a Mac so maybe that feature was left out of the Mac version.)

I'll try SimBender, as Marhis recommeded, as soon as I play all my occupied lots to a point where they can be reset without causing too much annoyance.  (I've noticed that adding a mod seems to reset every lot, maybe that's another peculiarity of the Mac version.)

The store items are also unavailable to Mac users.  When I tried to download the free items, I got a sims-store-not-supported-on-Mac-at-this-time message.

Just to clarify, I can't run PC executables (file extension .exe) but I can use mods that were generated with PC tools and saved to .package files which I can place in my Downloads folder.

For example, I'm using most of the mods in Pescado's Director's Cut and (I assume) they were created with SimPE.

Ok, I gather that the Ottomas family is borked and if you let Samantha's pregnancy proceed, she'll have twins with random fathers.  I'm a Mac user so I cannot use PC-based modding tools - given that, is there a way to terminate a pregnancy using in-game cheats?

I dealt with intellectual property issues in my past life as a software development manager, and based on my own experience, here's an interpretation of that letter:  Apparently, EA's legal department is going after mediafire.com   So somebody directed an intern to do google searches for sites with links to mediafire and this site (MATY) came up as well as a zillion other Sims 2 forums and fansites.  Then MATY along with who-knows-how-many other Sims 2 websites were sent a threatening form letter.  (It doesn't appear that the letter was written specifically for MATY.)

I did a google search and it turned up a number of mediafire links on MATY web pages.  Here's an example:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=13036.0  (edit: better example)

It appears that EA is trying to pressure you to remove all of the links to mediafire which appear on this site.

About a week ago, EA issued an earnings and sales warning for the 4th quarter.  So it may be that they're trying to shore up Q4 sales by putting the squelch on pirated content.