1> I think Inge made a shrub that kept your houses from trashing all furniture when you moved all sims out.  I don't have it on hand, but I'm sure one of the nice people here can point you at it for general use later.

2> Debug mode is better known as boolprop.  I'm pretty sure you know how to get extra interactions to show once you've set that cheat up.  If not, there are tutorials that can explain it fer better than I can.  (Although for a quick rundown, shift-click a lot and experiment in a throwaway 'hood first.)

I'm using .58, and while simply trying to delete all the entries post-DAC alone doesn't properly remove them, I find that if I delete and then save before closing, the files are gone.

Word of warning:  I've heard that when the wedding arch is used on a community lot, if the newlyweds weren't already part of the same family it caused the game to get a little bent out of shape.  I don't know for sure how that'd work with the ressurrectamacallit, but given that it adds to your family you might run into similar problems.  So not having that option available might actually be a good thing for you, in the long run.

I'm tempted to blame sadorandomness, myself, as I've noticed no such correlation.  What's happened with me is that I've never had sims I wanted abducted get taken away.  Rather, the abductions I have had happened when some other sim snuck over to a telescope and triggered the whole scenario before I realized unauthorized personnel were stargazing.

More generally speaking, when you consider the number of situations where such a chain could have happened, your odds go way up.  Given that the first abduction happened without needing to be called, it's only the odds of the second that make this event noteworthy.  So while it still sounds sadorandom to me, the whole situation is more likely than it sounds at first brush.

Besides, the only reason to refresh thumbnails is because there are very few angles your sim looks good from.  Refreshing en-masse means the odds of everyone settling on a good one are vanishingly small.

If Braveheart wants to refresh specific NPC thumbnails, the best option probably involves the lot debugger and making them selectable.  Afraid I can't say with confidence what will happen if this is one of the oddball NPC's like PT, Crumplebottom, or the reaper.

I'm not an experienced modder, but I have a minder how the game muddles through things.  And barring specific maxian code to the contrary, it shouldn't be that hard to build in a return-delay.  They mentioned repeatedly that "unified time" was one of the things they wanted to ship with OFB, I have a feeling the problems you mentioned above were the reasons they considered it unworkable.  Well, those and issues related to how many sims exist in the house at any given moment.  (Having to juggle different sim departure/arrival times would be doable for the computer, but a pain for the player.)

Of course, if someone more awesome than me can point out technical hangups, I'll pipe down.  But at the moment, I'd say to keep an eye on player comfort and edge cases for the "problems" inherent in the whole game.

What Avalikia said.

The 8 sims per lot thing is purely to keep players from bloating their lots with sims and then coming to whine about it when their game slows to a crawl/goes asplodey.  There are even rumors that Maxis is working on a cheat to let players break the 8 sim cap in an official version of the game.  So just the grave markers alone won't do much of anything to your game.  Now, what multiple grave markers might mean is multiple ghosts active on your lot, and that will cause things to slow down.  But given that it'll take a lot of ghosts to have a noticable effect, and that you don't have any reason to care about these sims anyways, feel free to go wild.

3>  A quick search lead me to his director's cut.  Go to that thread (in the armory) and load from there.  His other stuff there comes highly recommended also.

1>  Even if you removed the obsession with SSX3, they'd get obsessed with something else annoying when you weren't watching them.  Making them do productive things with their free time requires either proactive effort, or a hack that points them at productive things.  Your best bet is to probably use hacks that specifically point them at useful things, rather than trying to stomp every annoying behavior one at a time.

2>  Uhm, same idea as 1 I think.  I don't know exactly how the advertising is weighted for taking out the trash, as mine usually find something else to do.  Probably because I don't play with too many super-neat sims, though.

Out of curiosity, how many townies do you think you'll want roaming around?  I don't remember the regen threshold off the top of my head, bit would it be more or less than that?  You might also want to make your own, as normal townies seem a bit well-kept for the end of society as we know it.

BTW, gali, are you using all the subhoods?  If rohina isn't, that'll cut down her numbers notably.  By reference, I have a main hood with no subhoods, and 160 total sim files.  That includes a few playables and service NPC's, although I can't remember who I added when to get a more exact basic townie count.

If they're smart, EA will let the fans come to the advertisers.  Remember the McDonalds campaign where you could get a CD with a few bits of sims1 furniture?  Once word hits the BBS that site X or promotion X can get new objects for their sims, fans will gleefully load such ads all on their own.

The only other product placement possible in the sims really seems like it would be a waste of money for the advertisers.  Usually in a movie/game the camera can be held just so to showcase the product without making it blatantly (and annoyingly) obtrusive.  In the sims, if it's not obtrusive it can easily be overlooked.  So while I wouldn't object to a real-world corporate symbol on, say, a sims billboard, I don't think advertisers would see it as worth their time.

Ideally, one's partner would have a solid sense of fun, awareness of their own body, and a knack for communication/feedback.  These trump raw experience any day of the week.  "love" is nice because it encourages communication and attention to one's partner.  But the above list is what really makes or breaks a lover.

As far as the experience thing, though, I do have to chime in.  When I get in bed with someone, it doesn't feel right if I don't feel special.  "You're special, the only one I've opened myself like this up for" is pretty much that in a nutshell.  "You're special, but I've felt this way a few times before" doesn't pack quite the same punch, clearly.  "You're special guy #47" tends to carry that super-sexy feeling of being told to take a number.  The people who deny that history does/should matter always sound self-serving and hollow to me.

First, to everyone who thinks this will make the game more challenging, can I ask how a random "you lose" button laying around somewhere will do that?  Especially given how hard you have to work already to fufill your sims' fears, LTF's would be nigh-unfufillable and as such rather pointless.  If you actually want the game to be more challenging, you're better off asking Maxis to stop balancing their games around the assumption that the player is a retarted chimpanzee.  Or rather, given the nature of your average sims fan, ask modders to help ramp the difficulty up for you.

Second, for people who like to torture their sims, yes it is because they're cartoony and harmless.  A large part of the fun is in their over-the-top emoting, and that wouldn't come across the same way if Karen Gast quietly cut herself in a dark room.  It might be fun once or twice to see the "you just realized your LTF!" animation, but like most sims animations it would get old fast.  And then you'd go back to torturing them just like you do now; cause their motive bars to plummet and then send them to a horrible end.

And finally, people already complain that LTW's make their game feel frustratingly channeled.  LTF's would have to be one of three things;

• Have (something reasonable) happen, in which case enjoy watching your favorite sims break on regular occasions.
• Have (something extraordinarily unlikely) happen, in which case what's the point of programming for something so obscure?
• (Something) doesn't happen before (specified point in time), in which case doing it once removes the need to care about a game feature you evidently want trumpeted.
  

So while the idea may sound good when you just think of it and want to say something witty for the board, even EA's concept people saw the flaws in it.  If they can do it, it can't be too hard.

ETA:  Avalikia, are you aware how difficult most of those things aren't?  (With the exception of family sims losing a kid, and even in that case they have so many they won't really notice one more or less.)  The only way you'll have a (romance virgin/knowledge ignoramus/family childless spinster/etc.) is if you go out of your way to make that happen, in which case the player shouldn't be punished for making such unusual choices.  If you want a way to keep your sims in the red, I'm sure Pes or some other modder could whip something up to cap how high their aspiration meter could go.  LTF's are a silly way to go about it.

And if you're one of those people who wants sims to go into permanent fits when their LTF's hit, just kill 'em off the old fashioned way.  A sim who literally can't do anything is like an undead elder before they patched university, and we all know how much fun those actually were.

From a gameplay perspective, LTF's would essentially create "broken" sims.  Much like the yammering at the official BBS for handicapped sims or the like, such requests overlook the fact that most players will simply discard such broken sims out of hand; just look at what happens to fully functional maxian sims that just happen to be ugly.  Sims who can't experience the fullness of gameplay tend to become headstones in short order.

And if you want permanent psychological scarring for your sims, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree.  I admit it's strange that fufilling a depressed sims' self-destructive wants will bolster their self esteem and return them to functional citizens in short order, but do remember that this game sells itself as escapism.  Escapist little cartoon/sitcom characters tend not to, as a rule, have deep seated issues that can't be resolved by the end of an episode.

Nec: Thanks, but if I wanted to go with plain bodyshop sims, I have the basic me already made.  That sort of bare-bones approach doesn't allow for any background or personality involved, which leaves out part of the charm.  (That, and part of the charm is also modding memories in SimPE in ways the game was not meant for; having one's first woohoo with sir bricks-a-lot is wrong in just the right way.)

Pescado: Paranoia and double-checking are part of every file I share, due to a long story involving family members, E-mail, and the forward button they couldn't refuse.  Still, my hack-fu is weak, so I'm trying to close off other avenues for ways one can be stupid.

I have a friend who wants to swap self-sims with me.  I've also read enough here to know that in general, moving a sim between neighborhoods is about as bright an idea as basing one's business strategy on short-bus preteens.  Still, vanity can make one do strange things.

So to the point, were a sim to be carefully scoured in SimPE of all ties to anyone in the neighborhood, would that alleviate the danger or would hoods still be in jeapordy?