I made a beach lot apartment which I'm quite happy with after fixing the sinking problem and moved a couple of my MATY Inverted families in. So far so good until the single bloke in the upstairs 1 bedroom apartment gets pregnant with twins. Being too lazy to move him out I used the two cheats mentioned (boolprop aptsublotspecifictoolsdisabled/aptbasespecifictoolsdisabled) to expand the apartment upwards to a second floor and added some spiral stairs. It all saved fine and the sim can access the new rooms in his expanded apartment so I disabled the cheats only to find that I can't place any bought furniture in the new upstairs. It seems to be treating the upstairs as if it's a communal area but it can only be accessed via that apartment entrance. Is there any way to have the game redetermine the extents of an apartment?

EDIT: I found a recalculate rent option on the apartment front door (debug mode - shift/left click) and I can now place items as normal.

Yup, it's my MATY Inverted 'hood and you are the most pissed off ghost I have ever seen! I'm really not sure what makes some ghosts angrier than others but yours will actively track down sims and scare them multiple times in a row. You also look really angry all the time, screwed up face and much knuckle cracking.

This reminds I have not updated the story for a while and there is a veritable mountain of back story to write up, pictures to annotate etc...

 I forgot to mention that, if like me, you keep graves on the lot then the body count is only going to increase. Although he passed on in happy old age, dead Zazazu is angry and vengeful, already claiming the life of a visiting townie and almost one of his teenaged kids too.

Whenever any of my sims greet someone passing by, the visitor now comes in and stays, usually until morning by which point they're dropping from exhaustion. I then get a really snarky message appear along the line of "I'm going home now as you invited me to stay the night but didn't offer me a bed". In my books saying hello to someone passing by is not the same as saying come into my home, eat my food and by the way why don't you stop over tonight while you're at it. I'm assuming that this is a new shiny AL annoyance and is there any way to get rid of it?

@SalixTree - I love the Pink Floyd inspired house. I always think night clubs or community lots when I see that decor so never really thought to try it in a house.

I have installed both the Ikea SP and AL since starting off my house. I had a look at it yesterday and it still loads fine so I may get it finished and up today. It's got a distinctly blue theme to it at the moment but that may change with some of the new content. It's more or less complete but I like to playtest them first to check for any design stupidity or missing essentials.

Custom curtains at least require the creator to create a diagonal mesh which a quite a few don't bother to do. It might be that certains CC objects were never able to be placed on diagonals due to lazyness on the part of the creator.

There's some interesting wording there, but it doesn't actually state what EA's policy on third party creations/tools will be or how they will enforce it. It just says EA ultimately own the copyright to everything and don't complain if someone else makes money on the back of your creations, so it cuts both ways. I'd hazard a guess that in using the term EA partner's site they probably intend to allow paysites to continue in some shape or form but that there will be some sort of licensing governing them, call it an official stamp of approval. It's much less hassle for EA to have TSR pay them for the privilege of doing what they do as it means EA don't have to employ a small division of people to do the equivalent. I imagine that the sheepboard already sucks up way too much of EA's precious time/resources so it's much easier to license it out to a third party. While the wording can be interpreted as giving carte blanche to redistributing pay site content, it can equally well be turned 180 degrees and gives paysite the right to charge for free content. Ultimately it allows EA to cherry pick the best creations and innovations then resell or redistribute them themselves e.g. in an EP/SP or invidual pay download.

I just had a dig through the cowplant BHAVS/BCONS and I think I'm going to have to put it down to the RNG hating me/loving my sims. I can only find a straight 50% chance of a tease (snuffle) each time the sim grabs. The hygiene test is in BHAV Group 0x7F9FDDF5 Grab Cake - Just Sniff? and it looks like it just checks that motive water / hygiene < 0xFFB5 (BCON 0x1003:0x06). That value is pretty meaningless to me as I've no idea what the min/max hygiene values are and the lot debugger info ranges from +/-100. (I assume the lot debugger display was done to make the value meaningful.)

I'm running with Pescado's darwincowplant hack but my cowplant is refusing to eat anybody despite some really determined efforts by certain sims. Instead of chomp I get the grab, snuffle sequence. I was wondering:

 - does the hack let the sim try for the cake then determine whether the sim gets eaten?
 - or does it prevent certain sims from going for the cake in the first place?

I know that the cowplant will not eat sims with low hygiene but even after a good long soak in the hot tub it still won't bite. Now the only thing with the sims in my MATY Inverted 'hood is that, apart from NPCs, they're either playables or townified playables. Is this going to make that much of a difference?

I store all my downloaded CC separate from the downloads folder. It's categorised by type and organised into sub-folders. The lowest level of organisation is by mesh and associated recolours so the sub-folder will have the mesh name and where it came from e.g. bodyshop\hair\MTS2NoukAndreHair, BodyShop\Clothes\AdultFemale\Casual\Outfits\LianaMesh117 or Buy\ByRoom\Living\HolySimolyPhoenixLiving. I also store an image of each recolour as I know I won't remember what it is 6 months down the line. If I see something and think I might use it at some point then I will download it. This means I have gigabytes of downloaded CC but only copy across to my downloads folder things I will actually use in game at that time. The downloads folder in my game mirrors the sub-folders in my storage area so that I can easily add/remove/update content.

I have coughed up now, so I'll stick with being part of the aristocracy.

I feel that I played out my enthusiasm for 'critter games' with the various incarnations of Creatures and Pokemon so Spore really doesn't interest me. I won't be buying and will stick with TS2, I might even install AL at the weekend.

Do we have a house for September yet?

Aw, you're no fun sometimes! The random chaos that ACR generates is an essential part of my and many other people's gameplay.

Back on topic, if either parent has the twins perk then there is a 50% chance each bump that a single birth will change to twins so you have to be carfeful who goes around fathering sim babies too. It's worth having at least one sim with family as primary/secondary aspiration just so you can make grandma's comfort soup.

Sorry V, but that is a totally US-centric view of how to pay. The cost of getting a US dollar money order in any country is prohibitive ($15+ in the UK) and then you have to add the cost of international postage. Paypal may not be ideal but at least they allow for relatively easy international money transfers and MATY regulars are based all over the world.

After carefully checking through all my hacks I've tracked the problem down to the Parsimonious Soulberry Aromatherapy object(s). I suppose my next move is to determine if it's one in particular that's causing the problem or all of them. I've also reported it on the Parsimonious support page. At the moment the flower arranging works perfectly without them in the game and is borked with them in the downloads. Grrr... and I updated to the patch3 as well in the hope that would fix it, but it was broken exactly the same way there.

The last time I had any of my sims do flower arranging was prior to installing FT and the florist bench was working just fine. There were a couple of now deceased sims who got their gold badges and made a few snapdragons no problem at all. I've bought a couple of florist benches for the Uglybutt family and had both Rohina and B using them. First off it seemed to take forever to get their bronze flower arranging badge, something like 40+ daisies when I thought it used to take 30. Secondly, and more importantly, now they have their badges the options for making the next tier of flowers is not available, so no tulips. Is this a known bug, or have I borked something? I did a search and I think the only reference I could find was from Zazazu who thought the skilling was taking longer but no mention of missing flower arrangement options. If it makes any difference I think I'm still running the first (withdrawn) patch with a no CD crack exe on a legit game - all EPs/FFS/GLS/H&M.

I vote for sticking with paypal for getting the bulk of the monies as it's much easier for those of us outside the US to donate. The Cafe Press style t-shirt, mugs, mouse mats sounds like a good additional funding plan but I can't see people increasing their spend to the point where you're going to achieve the same final influx of funds.

Someone floated the idea of converting it to a commercial lot so I thought I'd give it a try. I used the flat version of the lot for this so it should be fine to drop anywhere into your 'hood. I also figured out my previous problem with being unable to place walls in the basement - all I had to do was raise the ground 2 clicks first. Doh! This also means that the basement won't be underwater if you use the BV beach terrain (as I do for MATY Inverted).

It's designed to be a shop with the ground floor given over completely to sales. Downstairs are male and female toilets, a seating area, dartboard and photobooth. I've laid out the display shelves so that customers can move freely around the store. There's also plenty space to queue without blocking the aisles. Outside has been landscaped into a pretty garden area complete with seating and water features. I kept the roof flat as it suits the modern style of the building. Converted with all EPs/GLS/FFS/H&M installed.

I tested it in my MATY Inverted 'hood as I thought it was about time Rohan Uglybutt started pursuing his LTW of owning 5 top-level business. In case anyone hasn't seen them yet all the pretty vases came from the latest Parsimonious anniversary update - they're gorgeous!

Entrances - one each side of the building, both with double doors to avoid any pedestrian traffic jams.


Gardens on the left and right.


Ground floor display area.


Basement relaxation area and bathroom area.


Rohan Uglybutt serves an impatient Yul Brynne. There's plenty space for shoppers to queue and the counter is big enough to add a second till.


Earl Witch decides that one giant vase is just not enough.


Download the commercialised 73 Road to Nowhere from here.

I'm a bit surprised that I'm the first to do this, but as there is a basement I've decided to make a home for the vamps in your neighbourhood. Now I had all sorts of nightmare problems with the original lot basement even after levelling the edges with the lot expander so I opted to create the original lot layout from scratch then do the conversion. Sorry if this is cheating but despite my best efforts I couldn't place basement walls in the original. On the plus side it does mean the lot has flat edges so won't break your neighbourhood terrain.

I expanded the original basement so there is space for a normal bedroom, vampire bedroom, gym and bathroom. A new entrance was added upstairs and the old one converted to an 'architectural feature' complete with windows, lighting and a statue. The kitchen has been added to the back of the house and the original ground floor has a study area (one desk), chess area, pool table and separate lounge along with a second bathroom. The carport was positioned adjacent to the front door to minimise potential vamp exposure to sunlight. The grounds have been landscaped and a pool with slide added for moonlight dips. There is very limited pet access at the front of the house but no exposed terrain for them to dig up. Made with all EPs + GLS + FFS + H&M packs. Total cost is ~125k.

Basement:


Ground floor:


Entrance:


Pool:



Download lot from here.

Do they have to be an enemy? Any number of sims in my MATY Inverted 'hood seem to spend their time paper stealing and/or trashcan kicking.

I finally managed to finish and playtest mine to the point where I'm happy to share. I extended the house at the front and round the back/left. It's got load of leisure goodies so works well as a home ticket machine business. Upstairs there is an en-suite master bedroom, children's bedroom and nursery. There's also space to place career rewards, or at least those worth having. Links to other pics in the description - I didn't want to embed too many as there are still few dial-up users on MATY. I have all EPs, GLS, FFS and H&M.

Front


Back


Left side view, Right side view 

Ground Floor:


Leisure facilities including basketball, kitchen, lounge with TV area and one desk.

Upper Floor:


Stairs lead up to open plan landing with recreation area opening onto sun lounger balcony. En-suite master bedroom, children's bedroom & nursery.


On Rapidshare this time due to problems for FurryFox users last time: http://rapidshare.com/files/131394317/Re-Harmonised_Haven.Sims2Pack.html

As I'm reasonably fond of my MATY sims I haven't actually let any of mine die from basketball as yet. It's been a close call on several occasions especially with starving, pregnant sims who'd rather shoot hoops.

Cowplants are always good for a laugh - give the sims a choice between a tasty buffet or a row of tempting cowplant cake and see which way they jump.

Cool idea. Given their obsession with playing basketball, you could probably do a first sim to collapse or last sim standing style challenge around it.


I'd like to nominate Snowbawl so the townies can have their revenge.

Did we get a decision on which house to do next? If so, can some kind soul put it up for download as I don't have the default 'hoods in my game.