I take it that the 'no cheats' rule means we can't use the agesims cheat to age toddlers out of toddlerhood?

Eagle, I was nervous about putting NL on my system with my low-end video card (I have only ever had one resolution available in the game - 800x600).  I installed NL anyway, thinking I could take it out if it got too slow.  Was I surprised!  I'd swear my computer is actually better at handling the graphics now - lots load at reasonable speeds.  I can even turn the graphic details up (mirrors, texture detail, etc) and still run the game.

And NL gives me reasons to go downtown.  I enjoy the structure of scored outings and dates - you know why you're going downtown, you have goals to meet while you're there, and you know when it's over.

Like Windy Moon, I used to despise community lots.  After the first week of having the game, my sims never visited a community lot.  Ever.  Now my sims are constantly downtown.

Intolerance is based on fear of the unknown.  If people don't know any gay people - or think they don't know any gay people, cos they probably do - then they will never learn by experience that it doesn't matter whether someone is gay, straight or bi.  A person is a person.

I'm not in your shoes, Motoki and I can't possibly know how you feel.  But I have had forum/game burnout elsewhere and I know how that feels.  I hope your break is brief and that you return to us soon, refreshed and full of Motoki-ness.

20 loves at once is easy with Pescado's mods. 

I use the 'make friends' macro from autosoc to build the STR to 100.  Contact outings are especially good for this, as making friends with the contact boosts the outing score early.  Then I use the same macro to make friends with other sims present (choosing those that are my sims preferred gender).  There's 3 or 4 new friends, easily.  I send my sim home, wait a few days until the LTR relationships build up to best-friends status.  Invite the friends over to the home lot one at a time, either for a visit or for a date, romance them, and bam there's another love.  Then I rely on autoyak and run the 'call friends' macro every day - relationships stay at 100/100 barring no neighbourhood social disasters, such as running into lovers while on a community lot. (OK, I admit that sometimes I create those disasters just to spice up the neighbourhood  ).

Thanks for that Jorenne.

I know I said I couldn't be bothered testing it, but I have to admit I was starting to get curious and pondering which of my families to test it with ... now I don't need to

Thanks FlyBaby Ivy for taking the question

FlyLady's website and daily emails helped me establish simple housekeeping routines that suit my life - and they're not long routines either.  When her website was first suggested to me I was a bit skeptical about the whole thing, but thought I had nothing to lose by trying it.  Frankly I was amazed at how much I can accomplish in 15 minutes of housework a day + one hour weekly home blessing (which I used to think of as chores).  And how much better I began to feel as my house gradually started becoming a home.

Gali, I thought I was a likely candidate for one of those makeover shows, except that I would have died of embarrassment to think that my messy house would be on TV where other people would see it.  And my house would have gone straight back to being messy in no time at all.  A makeover show wouldn't teach me what I needed to know.  FlyLady does.

Well, I haven't actually tested it, and I'm certainly not one of the awesome ones who dissects the code.  I'm just an average Sims2 player.

To be honest, I can't be bothered testing it.  If you don't want to test it either, mention it on that other forum you spoke of - and suggest someone there test it.  Then we'll both have it confirmed 

There is a Maxis bug to do with clothing.  I don't know if this is your problem, but Crammyboy has a fix for it here

Cwykes those 4 different personalities born in one day's playing session have nothing to do with how much those sims were played with by family members.  It's the 'first born effect' in action.

They were all born in the same playing session, so the sim-generator rerolled after each birth.  That couple gave birth to the 1st-born personality mix of the parents, the 2nd-born personality mix, the 3rd-born personality mix, etc. 

Assuming these were the only births in the player's session, if they were to have another playing session and those same sim parents had 4 children in the new session, the 4 new children would have personalities identical to the first 4.

If you save right after a baby is born (i.e. before anyone has interacted with it) and go into SimPE you'll see the baby has a personality - this is it's genetic personality, assigned when the sim was generated during the birth, and since it can be seen before any interactions, clearly has nothing to do with the level of interaction with family members. 

In fact, you could test the theory of interactions if you wanted to.  Save as soon as the game lets you after the baby is born.  Go into SimPE and note the baby's personality.  Then go into the game where the baby is a newborn.  Give it lots of attention.  See what it's personality is when it ages into toddler.  Don't save.  Exit, re-enter the lot, this time only meet the baby's food & diaper needs, don't give it any other attention.  When it ages into toddlerhood this time, you'll be able to see that the level of attention made no difference to it's personality.

Or maybe I could have Petula ... but she'd always want to be Downtown.  On the karaoke machine, no doubt.

But I went to school with people named Karen, Tracey and Sharon.  So those names seem a little young to be nannies from my perspective.

Mine was, I'm ashamed to say, almost right.  2/2/3/6/6. 

Ok, I think maybe I'm a little neater than that - I certainly don't eat out of rubbish bins and definitely don't relieve myself in the shower.  Maybe neatness should be closer to 3.5 - 4.  And on the 'playing with ideas' question - for me that's a sign of seriousness, not playfulness, at least in Sims terms (or maybe it's my laziness, I'd rather play with ideas than play sport )

For anyone else who has a house that looks like mine used to, may I recommend www.flylady.net.  FlyLady helped me turn a messy house into a tidy home that I'm no longer ashamed to invite people to.  Or I would invite people if I wasn't too shy to have people over.

ZZ I wasn't being agist.  While I haven't reached retirement age, I'm hardly a spring chicken.  I'm one of the board members who remembers the 60s - which I guess means I wasn't really there.

When I play my multi-generational 'hoods I try to use names that are currently out of fashion for my earlier generations, names that would have been in vogue a century or so ago.  If these people are hiring nannies then the nannies need even older-sounding names, something that my great-grandmother's maiden aunt might have been called, if she'd had one.  For my nannies I wanted names that sound like they could belong to a maiden aunt, and that no game-generated character is likely to have.

No offense was intended to anyone who is named Trudy or Hilda, either - I have a close friend name Trudy.  In an interesting coincidence, she's in her 40s and has never married or had kids, although she always wanted them.  She does have nieces and nephews ... so I guess she is a 21st century maiden aunt.

Thanks for the idea Hairfish.  I now have Ermentrude Nanny with one of my families as live-in nanny/maid, and Gertrude & Hildegard Nanny are waiting in the sim bin for the next families in need of nannies.  Since they're elders, I tried to give them elder sounding names. 

I like the idea of sending them back to the sim bin and reusing them for the next generation - even though they're all elders, it's like creating a beloved nanny who was perhaps aged around 30 for the first generation, 50ish for for the next generation, and the third generation will be able to say "Nanny Ermentrude may be getting on a bit, but she's been with our family for 3 generations now."  Maybe after 3 generations I'll allow her to die of old age, and be buried in the family burial plot with her much-loved former charges.

In my game, the sim family that made friends with the burglar got robbed by the same burglar next time.  They were once again totally furious and the friendship was lost.

There's two options that I don't think anybody mentioned yet.

First one is to have one of your burgled sims make friends with the male burglar, then move him in.  I've had my sims make friends with the burglar while still furious with him, but haven't tried moving him in - so it might be better to wait until the furious state wears off.  No reason the dude can't have a 'mysterious swimming pool accident' after that to get rid of him    Or you could give him new clothes once he's playable and then send him to the townie pool using Inge's teleporter plus shrub.  The next time you get a burglary the game will spawn a new burglar - who may or may not be female.

Alternatively, look through the sims in SimPE and find a female burglar in the neighbourhood.  Go to her relationships, scroll down until you get to the sim you want her for.  Right click on that sim and an option will come up to make them known to each other.  Commit, save, exit.  Open your game, and your sim will now know the female burglar and can ring her up to make friends with her.

I had a nanny burn to death once.  It was fun watching it ... until the social worker came and took the kids.  So I quit to the neighbourhood screen without saving and first thing I did when I got back into the lot was install the fire alarm I thought I'd already installed.

I also do this for townies/dormies.  And to bring the excessive stats of NPCs down.

As long as you haven't quit the game, you won't need to do it again.

Sometimes I'll have several imminent births in my neighbourhood.  I'll play one lot, rerandomise, sim gives birth.  Then in the same play session I might be on another lot with a sim due to give birth - in this case I don't need to rerandomise.

On the other hand, if I quit the game (to use SimPE or add stuff to my downloads folder, for example), then I'll need to rerandomise before the next birth.

I use it on day 3 of the pregnancy.  Usually I queue it up for the first sim up to do it first thing in the morning before anybody is using their cellphones, so I can safely save.  When my Obsessive Compulsive Simming gets the better of me, I note the time of the first bump, and know that the birth will occur in 2 days + 2 hours.  So long as I do it sometime after starting up the game for the day's play session and before the time of birth, it works.  You'll need to save before you click on the "rerandomize sim generator" option, as the option dumps you to the neighbourhood screen.  Since the action is queued I find that once the sim is in labour is probably not a good time, the sim is busy screaming and won't accept actions in the queue.  There's no need to save during labour with this option, unless you're after a particular gender for the baby.

YES!  I had a sim child reset just the other day during a burglary and lose his smart milk.  I was sooo annoyed - as it was Friday night on the lot, and I was looking forward to 2 simdays of smart milk-enhanced, parent-assisted skilling.  At the time I wished there was a way to restore the effect.

[starts muttering under her breath] I must resist the temptation of giving this effect to my CAS sims and to the townies/dormies/NPCs who marry into my households ... Must resist ... Must fight the urge ...

I've been playing with a new neighbourhood and AllenABQ's new face templates.  I deleted all chars to get rid of the maxis standard dormies and townies, and now have a whole new set of them.  Since I have Motoki's clothing mod also installed I have a number of dormies and townies walking around in work clothes from careers that don't belong to them.  It's funny

I think the best one I've seen so far in this neighbourhood was the townie who came home from work with a sim in the slacker career - she was wearing the general's uniform.  I like to think that on her way to becoming a 'professional party guest' (do they mean escort perhaps?) this townie put in some extra hours with a military man, and afterwards she put on his clothes by mistake ...

EDIT: OOH!  Changing the subject completely, this is my 50th post and my lips have now been officially ripped.

Trepie I had a nightmare scenario like that this week.

This was the evening in Lilith's house:

- Lilith was aging to elder.
- Her firstborn (a teen) went out to not one, but two scored outings - she got home from the first one she'd been invited to, and got the second invite.
- Her secondborn was transitioning to teen.
- The thirdborn, a child, was trying to chat to family & friends on the phone.  I had the comands in her queue, however the commands kept dropping out because of the incoming calls for the firstborn.
- The result of her fourth pregnancy, a few days before, was twins - I'd aged one to toddler the day before, but the baby now had to transition.  (I normally age twins separately, they are never identical anyway, so I prefer to play them as siblings close in age.)  I like to train one toddler skill a day - on the day of transition it's potty, the next day it's talk, the next day it's walk.  This, combined with a few social interactions, keeps my toddlers in platinum throughout toddlerhood.  So I had a baby I wanted to transition & potty train and a toddler I wanted to teach to talk.

Fortunately I'm not into the game's birthday parties.  Particularly not with Lilith, who would she invite?  Her ex-lovers - probably not.  Their wives - possibly, a couple of those are still friendly with Lilith.  It's hard keeping track of which of her friends are mad at Lilith for her romantic activities, and which are mad at the ex-lovers and their spouses for 'cheating' on Lilith.  Any party she had would definitely have fireworks!  I figure she's had enough socialising recently - she managed to arrive as a member of nearly every scored group during her last pregnancy, along with her sister and sister's husband (who was, in fact, reponsible for that last pregnancy).  If she wasn't in the group, she was on the community lot when the group arrived.

I enjoy playing Lilith's lot.  There's always something happening in her life.  And she's part of what keeps Pleasantview from turning into a boring 'happy families' neighbourhood like some of my Legacy-style 'hoods.  Given how much fun her character adds to the game, I'll take nights like this one as part of the price of the fun.

I have JM Pescado's Baby Controller in my game.  It has a painless way of aging babies to toddlers. 

I've had this mod for so long now, I really can't remember what the transition used to be like.  I have vague memories of it failing, buying another cake, faliing again, repeat until it worked, then having to get a sim to clean up the undeletable cakes (back then I didn't really use move objects on a lot, this was back in the days when I thought move_objects on might turn my game into a BFBVFS).

Nah, dead is dead.

While I do use that reward in other neighbourhoods I play, Pleasantview is the most 'realistic' of my neighbourhoods.  None of my Pleasantview sims have been vamped so far, they don't have any cowplants or the resurrection hotline, and none of my Pleasantview lots have the expensive telescope.

Besides, if he's stupid enough to take a shower when he's about to stave to death then he's stupider than most sims and I definitely don't want to breed from him.  He must have inherited the stupidity gene from his townie father.


Hmm ... you may be onto something here.  I have Inge's teleporter plus shrub in my game.  I've noticed that my sims appear on the shrub in the 'clear off' menu after the taxi has taken them off to uni or taken them back to the main 'hood.  I now routinely check the shrub after I get the message that the sim can be found in the bin in the other 'hood, and clear them off.  In Ned's case, he was the only playable sim in the dorm when he graduated so I couldn't use the shrub to clear him off post-graduation.

That's the situation exactly.  I like the autonomous research as my sims can join in when they're rampaging - but perhaps an update to make dormies do something that would satisfy their fun would solve the problem.  So long as they don't start kicking my flamingoes.  I already spend too much time rotating those flamingoes because they get stuck when my sims kick them.  Besides, flamingoes are too good for dormies, the dormies don't deserve to use them.