Does it count as "necromancy" if a thread is less than a month old?   

I had the gaping hole manifest itself for the first time yesterday.  John Burb's son Terry, on his transition to a toddler, had no face -- not that it made any difference to the yowling and whining, worse luck.  Exiting without saving and doing the transition over again didn't help.  I unlocked the plastic surgery device and his face was there, so I made no changes.  That didn't work either, so I used it again by carefully twitching his cheeks then setting them back to their original chipmunk proportions.  That fixed the problem.

My objects.package files for all expansions have been set to read-only for months, so who knows what the issue was?

I always have car pool issues in homes where a sim becomes pregnant.  The pregnant sim isn't required to go to work of course, but the car pool also fails to show for the non-pregnant members of the household -- all of them, even if it's supposed to show at different times.  This was occurring before I had any pregnancy or marriage modifiers installed.

The first time this happened I exited without saving then re-loaded the lot, and the same problem occurred.  Then I tried exiting with saving, but the carpool did not re-set.  Placing a driveway and buying a car (funds permitting) worked:  if after having a sim drive to work for one day I set the car ownership to <nobody>, the carpool started arriving again for everyone who needed it, and I could sell the car and driveway.  In those households that could not afford a car having just one sim quit the existing job and find a new one also caused the carpool to start arriving for all who needed it.

Other than this, I have no school bus or carpool issues, unless I do something really silly (only once, please be sure) like having sims that work different hours drive to work together.  The one that was due to return home later never showed up, and could not be retrieved with the FFS Debugger "retrieve missing sim" option, or with moving the entire family to the bin and moving them back in again.  I had to overwrite the game with a backup file, which thankfully was taken right before playing that day.

The cheerleaders, cows, and llamas are pestiferous, but I find if they're ignored long enough they go away.  One dorm I'm using -- the small 5-room penalty box, if that makes a difference -- gets a lot more visits from them than the other dorms, and in that much smaller a space it's more difficult for me to ignore them. 

I could use the cow plant to dispatch them, but I have more fun using my sims to soak them with water balloons, zap them with joy buzzers, and fart on them. They don't much like getting cocktails in the face, either (and neither do those psycho-stalker pervert professors).  How many times do you need to get soaked with a water balloon before you don't fall for the "look over there" ploy?  If you're Jenna Cameron, you'll never get it.  Perhaps she should spend more time in class becoming smarter instead of annoying people all over the campus, or screwing the quarterback, or whatever else it is she does at Uni. 

Autumn Knight, Beth Trimble, and Peter Smith, thy days are numbered. 

Some time ago I created a tastefully landscaped cemetery on campus (Le Tour est Finis) in preparation for the Big Moment, but local graveyards sound far more interesting. 

Christ, I've been waiting patiently for a dormie to die, and it hasn't happened yet.  As tempting as it is to interfere via Merola's mirror, I have a "hands off" policy in the dorms as I am amazed at the seemingly endless stupidity of dormies (and they don't need any help with behaving stupidly from me).  I have "no dormie invulnerability" installed, and while they pass out everywhere and often, piss themselves routinely, beat the crap out of each other frequently, never shower or bathe, and otherwise do everything right wrong, they never fail to eat.  Even after they've been asleep in their macaroni cheese for several hours.

None of my sims have died from disease, and I've had the five-minute cure happen nearly every time one gets sick.  A few of them have been electrocuted fixing appliances, but they survived -- in each case their needs and mechanical skills were high.  There are a couple of sims I'm getting tired of, and they have low mechanical skills . . . .

The first sizzling I saw was a repairman, and the old fool hadn't quite finished the job when it happened.  He left immediately (wouldn't you?).   

It's about the only thing the dormies in my game will play (they'll use the dartboard occasionally, but not often).  However, since I don't care if my dormies are having fun, and I do care about my sanity, I sell the arcade machines first thing.

I've yet to see a dormie play a computer game, despite the availability and good repair of the one I usually place in a public area.  My controllable sim, when not rampaging, will play on the computer.  Mind you, dormies are not the sharpest pencils in the box, which might explain it.  And I admit that when their fun score is really low (and they neglect their other needs), I find the results very entertaining.   

Ah, I see.   

I love the lot timer.  Before I installed it I was using bits of paper, which naturally didn't get updated unfailingly.  The timer was released here and promptly installed in my game at around the time Dustin Broke was about to become older than his mother, which just isn't right at all.   

Back in the early days I did things that I never knew we shouldn't, such as installing occupied houses.  I installed only one such house (a couple of other attempts were so disturbingly unsuccessful I stopped doing this all by myself), and fortunately it dragged in only 5 non-linked characters.  I've never seen the corrupt memory squiggles, but that of course doesn't mean they won't show up in the future.

After much reading here, I got seriously worried about the BFBVFS potential, so I've spent a great deal of time looking things over in SimPE.  First I moved the house occupant into a different home.  Then I deleted all his memories of the unlinked sims, removed his family connections to them, checked every damned sim in the neighbourhood for memories of these unlinked sims, and deleted them when I found them (not too many).  Finally I deleted the unlinked sims.  Today I'll enter the lot again and see if things get -- well, "exciting".  Also, I made sure that any sims I ditched directly from the sim bin were safe to delete, then I roasted them too.

Apart from that, the only unlinked characters I see now in Pleasantview are -- wait for it -- ones that were supplied with the game.  For example, there were two Diane Pleasants, two Jeff Pleasants (hmmmmm . . . . ), and the Burb family is so fucked it's beyond belief.  Any attempt to load any Burbs in Family Ties results in an object reference error, neither of the Dianes nor Jeffs have any relations, and John's memories are of only one pair.  I noted the ID number and deleted the surplus Diane and Jeff.  That's another household I have to load today, too; more potential "excitement".

I've also found a number of screwed-up memories (lots of things wildly out of order, or duplicates, or completely unconnected to the sim) for sims that existed prior to Uni being installed.  If this has been discussed then I've missed finding it here, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed this.  Sims I created post-Uni installation have been fine.

I've noticed haircolour DNA strangeness with Angela and Lilith Pleasant.  They should show one or the other haircolour genes (logically the recessive one) as black, from Mary Sue, but they don't.  They look like Dan -- I see nothing of Mary Sue in them -- so surely they're Dan's self-pollinations. 

Here are the haircolour strings for both twins:

1 (dtString) 00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
268435457 (dtString) 00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Game play in all my houses, from the one-room tips to the 20-room symbols of wretched excess, is smoother and faster once I fix the AWOL Headmaster.  Even if he wasn't broken to start with.   

One of my pre-NL houses did barf -- spectacularly -- when I moved a CAS sim in with the current residents.  There was so much chunkage the only solution was to delete all the sims and demolish the house.  Needless to say, I haven't done that again.  I like the red shrub idea, too.

I haven't heard any of the screeching either (thank Christ) and I have a good mix of shy and outgoing sims in the neighbourhood.  The shrieking between spouses or sims who are in love always made me especially crazy.  "You've seen each other naked a thousand times, you can hardly be surprised now, so STFU already". 

I spent months doing nothing but building so I didn't discover a lot of things about the actual game play until quite recently.  That includes aging off or on affecting the lot and not the family.  I cannot recommend aging off in a household with a baby based on the following.

I moved a family of two parents (one pregnant) and a baby to a larger house; I had been playing them with aging on.  I had moved the previous sim owner out of this house months ago, and hadn't played the lot since.  Everything seemed fine for a bit, but I noticed the 12,000-hour "help with birthday" vigil did not start that night as it should have.  I couldn't even "grow up" the baby on my own the next day.  The pregnancy continued normally, though, and now there were two babies.  Then I realised I hadn't heard the aging chime for the adults.  I would have played the previous owner with aging off, so I figured the attribute had to apply to the lot and not the family.

I knew then I would be exiting the lot without saving, so I continued just to see what would happen.  I turned aging on, the birthday vigil started that night, and then things got really grotty.  The game would slow to almost a stop for 10 or 15 seconds (real time) then pick up, the parent holding the infant would dump him on the floor and continue to stand there, and the "help with birthday" action would enter and drop from the cue repeatedly.  Sim parents dump babies on the floor quite frequently, but it's usually to do something far more important like play chess, look out the window, or empty the trash compactor because the maid never will.  I've never seen them drop the baby then just stand there.  I exited the lot (without saving) with as much haste as I've done anything.

I quit the game, re-booted my computer, and started it up again.  When I re-entered the house, the first thing I did was turn aging on.  After that everything progressed normally.  I cannot say for certain that the aging being off was the sole or even a partial cause of the weirdness, but as I made no other changes between visits I have to wonder.  I'm not anxious to try duplicating the situation, either!   

I timed the game load from the start of the splash screen; I had no inhabited lots in the bin, and between timing tests I added no custom content, nor did I make any other changes.  I finished timing when the main neighbourhood screen loaded, and instead of 8 minutes the game loaded in 4.  I also timed the load several times before and after, and the load times were pretty consistent. 

I can't see a good reason for this, either. I did it before installing NL, so perhaps now leaving houses in the bin would make no difference. 

As for saving the lots elsewhere, I guess it depends on what we find easier.  I have loads of lots, and over time I tend to forget what they look like.  By dumping them in an unused neighbourhood I can see them, whereas if they're in Win Explorer I just have a not always descriptive file name.

I learned the hard way about downloading inhabited lots, quite early on.     I never download them now, either.

1.  FFS Lot Debugger:  Without fixing the AWOL Headmaster with this my game would schlepp along like mourners at a funeral.
2.  Phone hack:  If I couldn't set the phone ringer I would be in a padded room.
3.  No whatsthis:  Without this I would have to kiil sims towards whom I wouldn't otherwise harbour ill feelings.
4.  No baby harassment:  As for #3.
5.  Daily gardener:  On lots that have more than just a few shrubs and flowers it prevents everything from looking tatty.

I've noticed very little increase in load times with extra neighbourhoods, even those full of houses.  What has had a significant impact on reducing my load times is to have very few or no lots in my lots bin.  I created a neighbourhood specifically for placing those lots I wanted to keep, but did not want in the bin.  Doing this shortened my load time by almost half.

I've also had huge problems with the terrain paints in the past.  Generally I don't like them, except for a few of the EA-supplied ones, and I started out by removing them from downloaded lots with the Clean Installer.  Big mistake, as several of you have pointed out.  Once or twice I was able to enter the lot and remove those vast areas of the "blue ground of death" that appear where the paint would have been, but nearly always I've had to destroy the lot.

What I have had success with is this:  I install the lots I really want, without removing the terrain paints with the Installer.  Once I enter the lot, I remove the paint with the build tool, then save and exit.  I do this with all the installed lots, then I delete the terrain paints in-game at my leisure.  The edited lots have not caused trouble upon re-entering.  This process is very tedious, but I haven't found another way to remove them without screwing things up. 

I should note that I have not tried to re-package lots edited in this manner, so I don't know if doing this messes that up.

I have many of Pescado's "fixes and enhancements" in my game, and also many items from Inge, Crammyboy, and TwoJeffs.  I also use the DMA items, and I have no conflicts.  The DMA advice reminds me of Maxis' advice for TS1 problems, especially with the first (and relentlessly evil) release of Hot Date:  every reported problem was blamed on custom content.

Now I'm puzzled.  The hair of the blond parent doesn't show in SimPE, or in the game, as custom.

Here's a screenshot of his photo from SimPE.  God knows why he looks so lopsided; he's not that ugly in the game.  LOL




Edit:  now that I've thought about it, I may have used a custom hair colour when I first created him.  It was so long ago I don't remember, so I cannot say I definitely did not use a custom hair colour.  However, he's had this hair for (I think) as long as he's been in the game.  If I did use a custom hair colour, I must have changed it almost immediately.  I can't think of anything else that would explain it.

Thanks for the link.  I'm comfortable editing the character descriptions and the clothing of sims and I've even fixed object integrity, but I haven't explored much else yet.

Given your description, Rainbow, this is definitely strange:

Black-haired parent:
1 (dtString) = 00000001 -0000-0000-0000-000000000000
268435457 (dtString) = 00000001 -0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Blond-haired parent:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2

Black-haired twin 1:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Black-haired twin 2:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Blond-haired child:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

I can see that neither parent carries a recessive gene of another hair colour.  I'll re-state that both are CAS sims, and created using the tools available (meaning I didn't clone them from any sim in the bin).  The blond parent is the one who gave birth, and he was definitely not stepping out on his husband, unless he got up to something while I was playing another household.  LOL

The children are where this appears to get weird:  their dominant and recessive genes are identical, and yet the twins have black hair and the youngest is a blond.  They're all children, by the way:  the twins are a couple of days from their Teen transition, and the youngest just became a Child.

I'll try, except I'm not sure what to look for.  I've never edited, nor even looked at, sim DNA before.

In SimPE I've got loaded the Sim Description of one of the sims, and the last tab (More) has the option to open the DNA.  When I select this I see numerous entries that so far I find meaningless.

Would a screenshot help?

If black and brown were always dominant, I think something must have changed about the genetics.  I have two CAS sims, blond and black-haired, respectively, with three children.  The twins are black-haired, and the third child is a blond.

I use plans and/or photos sometimes, but I have the same trouble with scale.  I try to retain the flavour of the house but make it useful for game play.  Other times, I just start building without a plan or a photo in front of me -- often they're houses in my area of the city that have caught my eye, and I guess as to what the interior layout is like.