Uni questions, and playing advice

[KevinTMC]

I've just finished graduating seven Sims from University, and find there are still a few things that I don't understand even after reading through tons of threads here at MATY. So perhaps someone can help me out with these:

1) Secret Society lot and money. I finally got a sim inducted into the SS at Sim State. I was surprised to see that her money disappears whenever she goes to the SS lot; whenever she arrives there she has exactly zero Simoleons. Is that supposed to happen? (If so, that helps squash my temptation to use the resurrection phone. Raising enough money to bring back a friend would take, what, around five days straight of work on the counterfeiting machine?)

2) There sure were a lot of people milling around the SS house. Does the game ordinarily create upwards of a dozen members on its own? (And yes, I've got the relevant Pescado respawning hacks installed.)

3) Has anybody else gotten error messages when switching from live mode to the build or load/save menus while in the SS house? I didn't write it down last night, but the message that came up was something like "DEBUG: Inventory error". And the odd thing was, I didn't even have testingcheats enabled.

4) Is there any way to kick dormies out of their rooms? This flexibility would be useful in a number of ways, but especially in the event that I decide to come back to the dorm I played three of my sims in before, since the dorm doesn't appear to "reset" like the popup message in the game promised.

5) I was surprised to see "Big Woman On Campus" messages in the memories of a couple of my sims. Should I have noticed somehow when they achieved this status? I don't recall seeing a thing. Also, is this awarded solely on the basis of number of friends, or is there some other consideration?

6) The lot synchronization thingy doesn't seem to do anything on Uni lots in my game. Is this as expected?

Finally, a more philosophical gameplay question. I plan on playing all of the sims I just brought through University in my neighborhood. The ones who graduated first I will start on day 1, the next class a day or two later, and so on. After 5-10 days, depending on how I space things, I will have gone through my pool of graduates.

If I'm trying to stick to a realistic-ish schedule it would then be high time for their friends back at Uni, especially the freshmen who I restocked the Tri-Var house with before graduating my last played sim, to get their degrees. But Uni play goes on so looooong compared to regular play; I feel like I'd hardly ever get to play the non-Uni neighborhood if I tried to move all my graduated sims' friends through in a reasonable amount of time.

How do some of the rest of you handle this? Do you let some of your played sims' Uni friends just stay YAs? Bump the ones you're not personally invested in up to Adult using testingcheats/hacks? Decide just how many and who you will get involved playing when you first start Uni, and ignore everyone else, even best friends and lovers, after everyone on your original list has graduated?

Don't get me wrong. I've liked playing Uni...probably more than the average bear. But I fear that I'm gotten involved in recruiting and playing so many friends and sorority members and secret society people that Uni play is going to overwhelm everything else.

[jrd]

1) Secret Society lot and money.

The SS lot has its own money (at least since OFBp2, prior to that there was a bug in how this was handled). Presumably due to the bug your SS lot has gone bankrupt. I'd give it ~§40000 since they start out with around that amount anyway.

2) There sure were a lot of people milling around the SS house. Does the game ordinarily create upwards of a dozen members on its own? (And yes, I've got the relevant Pescado respawning hacks installed.)

Without Pescado's mods, yes. The game will happily generate dozens of them, up to your visitor limit. With Pescado's mod in place, the SS pool will be filled up to your visitor limit with existing dormies, but it will not create any more to fill this limit.

3) Has anybody else gotten error messages when switching from live mode to the build or load/save menus while in the SS house? I didn't write it down last night, but the message that came up was something like "DEBUG: Inventory error". And the odd thing was, I didn't even have testingcheats enabled.

Not necessarily on that lot, but I've seen those errors before. They seem to be Mostly Harmless.

4) Is there any way to kick dormies out of their rooms?

Make them selectable, and let them unclaim their doors. They'll go away, and usually another dormie will take their place (if one is still available).

5) I was surprised to see "Big Woman On Campus" messages in the memories of a couple of my sims. Should I have noticed somehow when they achieved this status? I don't recall seeing a thing. Also, is this awarded solely on the basis of number of friends, or is there some other consideration?

Any Uni Sim with 20 Best Friends gets the memory. Due to counting errors this memory may occur earlier (if a best friend is lost and regained, it counts for two).

6) The lot synchronization thingy doesn't seem to do anything on Uni lots in my game. Is this as expected?

Yes, since everyone can choose how long they let a semester last. I play by the two semesters = 1 day rule, so I set the number of days on the synchronize clock equal to the number the Sim had on the day he left, and manually add one day for each uni year passed.

How do some of the rest of you handle (uni)?

Those YAs with whom my Sims have gotten romantically involved I usually make playable, and let graduate. The rest I treat like all townies/downtownies, and abstract their immortality away.

Uni is way too easy and boring, and often I just let my Sims mature to adult, and use the lot debugger to "graduate" them.

[Orikes]

Aaah. That explains the Big Sim On Campus memory that some of my sims have gotten. I wasn't sure if it was a popularity thing or what.

I don't play with a specifically synced neighborhood, so I tend to wing it as far as playing Uni goes. All of my playable teens go to Uni, move into a dorm and then immediately join the neighborhood Greek House (Phi Dagga Katta - The Hurle House). Having all my YA sims in one place helps ease some of the repetitiveness of Uni and I don't have to worry about the dormies or other dorm issues. I try and keep it around 6-7 playable sims at one time in Uni, because if I actually hit 8, my head esplode.

Since I don't worry about keeping the neighborhood exactly synced, I tend to play families (and subsequently my Greek House) in stages, then switch to another house. So far it's worked fairly well.

[KevinTMC]

Thanks. That helps clarify things a lot.

Without Pescado's mods, yes. The game will happily generate dozens of them, up to your visitor limit. With Pescado's mod in place, the SS pool will be filled up to your visitor limit with existing dormies, but it will not create any more to fill this limit.

So if I take it that since I have the mod in place, if I go into SimPE and arbitrarily clear the secred society flag for a bunch of the dormies, I should be able to get the total down to a saner number.

On a tangential note, I don't quite understand what's so secret about a "Secret Society" whose members parade around campus in distinctive blazers all the time. Though with the SS house being so secret that it doesn't even show up on the map even after you've had a sim join, at least they've got that going for them.

[jsalemi]

Of course, one thing you need is Pescado's College Clock, found in his forums and/or the director's cut version of his hacks.  It lets you shorten or extend semesters as much as you want, which is particularly handy when a sim is maxed out in the grade bar and still has 40 hours left until the final exam.

[KittKitt]

So if I take it that since I have the mod in place, if I go into SimPE and arbitrarily clear the secred society flag for a bunch of the dormies, I should be able to get the total down to a saner number.

I'm not sure whether that method works or not, but with the hacks in place to prevent more of the little buggers from being generated, one thing you can do is to go to the lot, and kill off as many as you wish via whatever amusing means you desire.

Makes a great source for tombstones if you need any someplace too. 

-Kitt

[seelindarun]

5) I was surprised to see "Big Woman On Campus" messages in the memories of a couple of my sims. Should I have noticed somehow when they achieved this status? I don't recall seeing a thing. Also, is this awarded solely on the basis of number of friends, or is there some other consideration?

Any Uni Sim with 20 Best Friends gets the memory. Due to counting errors this memory may occur earlier (if a best friend is lost and regained, it counts for two).

I don't think that it's 20 Best Friends.  I'm pretty sure it's only, like 12.  I've had greek house founders with the "Big Sim" memory before their house reached level 6, which happens at 15 family friends (which is just personal friends if there's only the single founding member).

Of note, if you send a teen to Uni with 12 or more friends already, they won't get the memory, which peeves me.  

[jrd]

Could be that it's 15. Counting is bugged in any case.

[Fish Dude]

You get the "Become big woman/man" when the influence meter is full, which is about 12 friends.

[KevinTMC]

Could be that it's 15. Counting is bugged in any case.

You don't say. I could swear that the Secret Society counting is still bugged too, even with MATY hacks, since I know that some of my Tri-Var members who were never tapped were friends with at least three of the people who showed up, at one point or another, in the SS house. But perhaps the game isn't super-scrupulous in making sure that only actual SS members ever turn up on that lot?

That reminds me of another thing that I was wondering. Is there any easy way to call up a list of pledges and members of a Greek house, or members of the Secret Society? The latter would be helpful for pruning purposes; and the former would have been nice when I was trying to remember just who I had, and had not, pledged in my frenzy of pledging to ensure Tri-Var would be restocked for the next go-round. I think I was finally able to reconstruct a complete list by hand...but that's presuming that the member who electocuted herself, and is still on the lot in the form of an urn, is counted in the member total you get by clicking on the greek letters. Otherwise, I'm still missing one.

[SaraMK]

4) Is there any way to kick dormies out of their rooms? This flexibility would be useful in a number of ways, but especially in the event that I decide to come back to the dorm I played three of my sims in before, since the dorm doesn't appear to "reset" like the popup message in the game promised.

Dormies will move out if you move in some playable sims and there are not enough rooms. You can also kick dormies out by deleting doors, thereby reducing the number of rooms.

[trudy]

Those YAs with whom my Sims have gotten romantically involved I usually make playable, and let graduate. The rest I treat like all townies/downtownies, and abstract their immortality away.

Hoe du you "anstract their inmortality away? I would realy like for my townies to age and die..

[Jelenedra]

You pretend it's not the same sim. =)

[Venusy]

What about using syberspunk's Grow Up Townies hack?

[Kyna]

The number of SS members on the SS lot is the same as your max number of visiting sims.  I set my max number of visiting sims to 20 in my userstartup.cheat file so I could have parties with more than 2 guests.  Until the first time I went to the SS lot after that - there were 20 SS members there.  So I reset it to somewhere around 6 or 8. 

Sometimes dormies get 'stuck' in their rooms, or in another dormies room, and they don't come out for days.  If this is what you were talking about you can get them out by walking in the room yourself.  I usually click on build mode (or on my sims inv) as that unhides the contents of the dorm rooms, to find out where dormies are hiding then send my sim to that room

Alternatively you can use the dorm build cheat and modify your dorm to have a 'vanishing' room.  If it's a 5 room dorm I build a 5x1 room with 5 myne doors.  I replace the original myne doors on the bedrooms with ordinary doors.  Once all the doors are claimed, my sim unclaims their door then reclaims it.  Any dormie that goes in the vanishing room will walk out again straight away if your sim was the last one to claim a door on it.

The problem with aging your townies until they die is that you get more of them (unless you have the no regen hacks).  If you do have no-regen hacks and you use townies/dormies as marriage material, then you will run out of marriage partners eventually.  To "abstract their immortality away" I pretend that the townie is the child, niece, younger sibling or whatever of the original townie that was befriended and that their imaginary family remained friends with my sim that befriended them.

In my 'hoods I usually delete all chars, then generate new dormies.  I find that the first few dormies that move into a dorm are also going to be SS members, but they aren't given their tokens until the first time my sim goes to a Uni community lot.  I have to send my first playable sim at Uni to a Uni community lot so that the dormies can get their SS tokens.  If my sim is already friends with enough dormies from their dorm, they get inducted into the SS later that night.

EDIT: To keep track of who is in the greek house (but not living there), including pledges, you could use Sims2DB by Pegasys.  It's a database that helps me track of my sims.  You can import most of the data from SimPE, but some data (such as Greek House membership) needs to be entered manually.  Then you could search for a list of sims who are in the Greek House.

[KevinTMC]

The number of SS members on the SS lot is the same as your max number of visiting sims.  I set my max number of visiting sims to 20 in my userstartup.cheat file so I could have parties with more than 2 guests.  Until the first time I went to the SS lot after that - there were 20 SS members there.  So I reset it to somewhere around 6 or 8. 

Is the max number of visiting sims the same as the maximum number of people it lets you invite to a party on the phone? Because that limit is 8 for me...yet there were definitely at least a dozen sims on the SS lot.

EDIT: To keep track of who is in the greek house (but not living there), including pledges, you could use Sims2DB by Pegasys.  It's a database that helps me track of my sims.  You can import most of the data from SimPE, but some data (such as Greek House membership) needs to be entered manually.  Then you could search for a list of sims who are in the Greek House.

I felt lost in that program the first time I fired it up, but I should probably give it another go.

Odd that it can't tell who is in the Greek house on its own though. And hmm...now that I'm poking around in SimPE, the location of that data isn't obvious either. Neither am I stumbling across the tokens for secret society membership. Okay, I'm lost. On the SS front, I guess I'll just have to start killing them if I want to thin the ranks. I'm not a sim-murderer by nature, but this game seems to force you into it sometimes...

[Kyna]

If you look in the memories of your SS members in SimPE, you'll see the SS tokens there.  I've never particularly noticed Greek House tokens (I don't tend to play Greek Houses), but I assume they can also be found as tokens in memories.

[dizzy]

Don't get me wrong. I've liked playing Uni...probably more than the average bear. But I fear that I'm gotten involved in recruiting and playing so many friends and sorority members and secret society people that Uni play is going to overwhelm everything else.

The whole point of Uni IMHO was to compensate for the poor AI in the base game, making it simpler to deal with game play elements of the original (especially for casual players). Nightlife went the other way by adding "furious" (making it harder to socialize), and OfB went back the Uni direction (with all the business perks that enhance socials). If this pattern holds true, then the next EP should increase this difficulty again. 

[syberspunk]

1) Secret Society lot and money. I finally got a sim inducted into the SS at Sim State. I was surprised to see that her money disappears whenever she goes to the SS lot; whenever she arrives there she has exactly zero Simoleons. Is that supposed to happen? (If so, that helps squash my temptation to use the resurrection phone. Raising enough money to bring back a friend would take, what, around five days straight of work on the counterfeiting machine?)

3) Has anybody else gotten error messages when switching from live mode to the build or load/save menus while in the SS house? I didn't write it down last night, but the message that came up was something like "DEBUG: Inventory error". And the odd thing was, I didn't even have testingcheats enabled.

These two problems are related to the ss lot lottery bug. Are you using the sslotlotteryfix? I can't tell from your post whether you have OFBp2. This bug should have been fixed by the 2nd patch for OFB/FFS. But if you have NL or older, I doubt they rolled the fix back into the patches for those EPs. Anyhew, the last version I posted, I basically snarfed the code from the Maxis patch and it should work for people who only have Uni and/or up to NL.

Oh... and the game has a default value that it initializes ss lot funds to. I think it's 39822 or something like that.

Ste

[KevinTMC]

These two problems are related to the ss lot lottery bug. Are you using the sslotlotteryfix? I can't tell from your post whether you have OFBp2. This bug should have been fixed by the 2nd patch for OFB/FFS. But if you have NL or older, I doubt they rolled the fix back into the patches for those EPs. Anyhew, the last version I posted, I basically snarfed the code from the Maxis patch and it should work for people who only have Uni and/or up to NL.

I'm running NL. Thanks for the tip; I'll give your ss lot fix a try.

Ya know, there oughta be a way that game companies like Maxis could take advantage of all the widely-distributed enthusiasm, experience, and familiarity with the coding that springs up on the Net nowadays around big and influential games like The Sims 2. Firaxis moved in this direction by including CivFanatics/Apolyton stalwarts in its beta phase of Civ IV (and even earlier, in one or two cases); and also it built the game from the ground up to allow comprehensive customization, and released thorough tools to help modders take full advantage.

I also remember Apple being responsive in the past to what the shareware community was doing with its OS. One past update--maybe it was System 7.1--got tagged the "shareware edition" in the Mac press because Apple had rolled so many of the most popular third-party fixes and mods and hacks into the core OS (working with the original shareware authors in the process). It'd sure be nice if Maxis did something similar with one of its future EPs...especially for the sake of those poor benighted users who never have found their way here, or didn't understand what was going on when they did.

EA would have to cough up Pescado's site-license fee, of course...I'm sure he would cut them a favorable deal.

EDIT: Yay! I'm now a Blathering Buffoon on this site! (Just like in real life!) I've officially wasted enough of my time here to get ripped lips! What a unique and high honor.

[dizzy]

Actually, Mac OS 7.1 was "the one that you only need to reinstall once a week instead of once a day." Mac OS 7.5 bumped that up to "once a month." I don't recall Mac OS ever being community friendly (except for their marketing that is).

EA does have a system for taking advantage of fan enthusiasm. It's called "the exchange." They call it that because in exchange for your dignity, privacy and a bit of your sanity, they'll maybe let you have a place to rant about how wonderful you think their game is. 

[syberspunk]

EA does have a system for taking advantage of fan enthusiasm. It's called "the exchange." They call it that because in exchange for your dignity, privacy and a bit of your sanity, they'll maybe let you have a place to rant about how wonderful you think their game is. 

Lol! Way to pwn Maxis! w00t!

As for Maxis taking advantage of the modding community, hasn't it sort of been speculated that they kinda wait for modders to fix the problems for them and then end up rolling those into their patches. The thing that's sad is, and I don't whether that's true or not, with all the fixes out there, Maxis still seems to selectively choose which things to fix. I wouldn't necessarily think it was a bad thing to do, in fact, I think it would be great if Maxis actually did actively search for all real fixes by the modding community and indeed incorporated them into their patches. It could cut into a decent chunk of custom content users wouldn't need to load into their game.

Ste

[adriennelisa]

Quote
4) Is there any way to kick dormies out of their rooms?
Make them selectable, and let them unclaim their doors. They'll go away, and usually another dormie will take their place (if one is still available).

First, how do you make them selectable?

Quote
…since the dorm doesn't appear to "reset" like the popup message in the game promised.

Second, is there someway to have the game properly reset the dorm rooms?

[jrd]

Make selectable: either use this hack by Dolphin (recommended), or enable the testing cheats, and shift-click them to make them selectable.

Reset dorm rooms: No idea.

[Soylent Sim]

Second, is there someway to have the game properly reset the dorm rooms?

"Reset" in what sense?  If you you don't want the dormies to be there when you move in a new sim, I don't think so.  You'll have to have them give up their rooms by hand.  If you want a complete reset, on the other hand, you can always bulldoze the dorm and replace it with a carbon copy from the lot bin.  You'll lose any swag you bought for your dorm, but you will have the most complete sort of recall possible.  (And since students in the real world tend not to benefit from whoever lived in their dorms earlier, this approach is arguably more realistic.)