I press C multiple times to get the shot right without unwanted bits visible, or sometimes accidentally because the camera movement keys can't be found by touch. Then if I delete the image from then GUI, only the thumbnail gets deleted, but the bigger image stays and is not visible.

I abused walk a lot to get around using a car. Now I try to walk only to close destinations. But occasionally still end up walking. I think you could program a restriction or add higher motive cost using get separation between lots generic, but it needs to be passed on to where motive hit is applied later. I haven't done this, just a flat hit to energy and comfort.

I seem to have been banned from Sims content on YouTube by their AI, with most comments going into the bin. I would write a couple well formulated paragraphs and then nothing. This topic seems to be designated risky, to the same level as politics, ethnicity, medicine and chemistry; maybe this is because alternate sexuality is occasionally adjacent to or the main topic of Sims videos. At the same time I can still comment about other games. Sometimes my comment about those is pulled out a month later as if it went into a spam box.

My negative reaction naturally goes to the author because AI is too vague concept to feel an emotion towards. We don't even know what it looks like, what kind of computer system it physically is. Maybe the author can select on their panel that they don't want risky content; I can't see that. Or possibly it comes preselected by default, and they don't even make that choice. YouTube keeps taunting me by still offering videos about prohibited topics on the right side, weeks after I stopped watching them.

When I comment about games with violence, I always tone down my language in some way: kill -> defeat; enemy -> opponent, shoot ->attack. But AI is much too smart. I think it figured out "unalive", "seggs" and "corn" on the first days or weeks. Life was simpler before. You couldn't talk about politics, warez, curse words, and that was pretty much it, without delving deep into any rules. And there was also some feedback when "rules" were broken, so you knew what not to do, observe other people getting penalized and learn from that. The standard now for several years has been "shadowbanning", invented to frustrate people. You have to probe the system like a black box over a long time, like a living thing for its thoughts.

Strangely, Reddit shows a lot of content that has been removed from violating policy. Usually removals are brushed under the carpet. I was once hit on Reddit about sharing sexual content, when I wrote about canning food. There were no related words that I could recognize and no strong language. I could appeal about that. But a lot of stuff goes down the drain if it includes a hyperlink even somewhat disguised. I might offer someone to share some content, they agree, and then I share it and it goes down the drain. The other person might think I ignored them. Or I feel ignored if my first post goes into the bin. I participate on retro software forums and those related to music, where file sharing is often needed. I had to quit the Sims forum because of this.

The stories of fiction books are coming alive before our eyes with these smart computer systems. A "multivac" that runs the whole world and follows you.

I recently started working for an IT company and I've been assigned to an AI-first project. Basically, you give the AI access to the repository where all the project files are, paste the open ticket you're working on (e.g. "new feature: sign-up form" for a website, but with way more business-y text that covers all possible scenarios) and depending on the model, within the next 5 to 10 minutes, the entire ticket is done. The catch is what comes next: reviewing what AI wrote, by hand. Therefore, it feels like all is up to the business analysts and code reviewers (granted, which have to have substantial experience in development beforehand).

It feels a bit creepy seeing how the model "thinks" along the way. Basically, it's not that during the 5-10 minute generation period there's radio silence, no; it keeps writing small messages that look like human-esque thoughts. Something like,

"The tool I need is not installed on the machine. I'll try fetching it.
[code executed in background]
I tried using the tool to help me better understand the structure. It seems that the architecture principle used here differs slightly -- no, wait: differs substantially -- from my original script. I'll have to rewrite what I wrote to better assess the current workflow."

Those "thoughts" (the process is literally called "thinking") pop in-and-out as it tries its best to map business lingo into code. What's creepiest is that every single time it generated a solution so far, the program I'm working on ran straight out-of-the-box. It does still make fucked-up logical errors that are very hard to catch if you don't use the good ol' pen and paper, but I remember not that long ago getting pissed off when studying for my probability exam, I asked AI a bit of a "page 2" example task and it calculated that the probability that Jane Doe pulls an ace out of the deck is p = 3.2. (for non-math people: according to AI from not-so-long-ago, there's a 320 % chance for Jane to pick an ace). It even had the nerve to try to convince me that I'm wrong for suggesting that the solution is definitely less than 1 and that it should try again. I don't think it's been more than two years since that incident; now, it finds its way around some TypeScript language better than I ever have, and makes some very pretty apps, all based on just a to-do list!

Is it hard to understand the code that AI wrote to check it? Could it happen that the AI modifies other part of the codebase and breaks existing functionality that should not have been affected by the update?

I got curious and looked myself up, but my description isn't near as positive as everyone else's.

Pinkdynamite is a The Sims 2 creator known for custom content and default replacements hosted on platforms like Mod The Sims, which became part of a community discussion regarding hidden files.

Community Findings and Research:

Creator Content: Pinkdynamite provided creations and default replacement sets on Mod The Sims.

File Investigation: Documentation from community researchers like Tumblr examined hidden character data and Pollination Technician references tied to legacy custom content distributions.

Evidently one of my default PTs was hijacked and shoved into someone else's accessory files?? Not sure what the point of this was but there you have it, I guess.

You have to explicitly prep the AI before you start working on the project. Luckily, it takes regular English (or Croatian! or both at the same time! Working in Croatian IT hurts my ears). But despite it being just plain language, you have to be thorough, and say stuff you thought were implicitly understood, e.g. not to touch the backend contract if you're working on the frontend form (don't make Joe from warehouse suddenly drive a different-sized forklift just because you changed Janet the cashier's makeup or had her water the plant at the front door).

As for whether it changes some files unexpectedly, it may happen- e.g. made it work on Objects.package, all of a sudden Sims04.package is changed too after my prompt- that's easy to handle using some file history/versioning solution, i.e. Git. After AI does its job, I just change the IDE view to staging area to see what files were touched from the last commit (and which files have just been created), I review it, and if it's working, I commit. If it's too much to change, I still commit intermittent steps so that I can again easily track which files contain changes from my last prompt, and I later usually squash the commits into one logical unit (instead of the file history being 10 WIP changes, I rewrite file edit history to just be one change (feature add, bugfix etc.)).

Is it hard to understand what it wrote? Not if you're proficient in the language it generated. I'm fairly good with Java so it's usually a breeze, but TypeScript is something completely new to me so it takes maybe 3x as long for me to review that code, simply because I'm green at the syntax level alone, let alone some advanced TS magic. It also leaves (sometimes stupid, redundant) comments in the code so finding your way around is easy. However I'm not working with a very advanced model out there. Who knows what the best models today offer; right now my company is trying to minimize costs while still finding a model people can effectively work with.

I don't have that problem. When I delete a picture in the GUI, it deletes both the thumbnail and the snapshot files. But I can't use the C camera in-game pictures to exclude things I don't want in the picture, as I play the game full screen using the wide 1920 x 1080 setting of my laptop's built in screen (ratio 16:9), but the in-game pictures at maximum resolution are always 600 x 450 (ratio 4:3). This means that my in-game C camera always include bits at the top and bottom of the picture that I can't see when I'm playing. This is best illustrated by two pictures of the same moment in my game, one showing how I see it on my screen, and one showing how it appears in an in-game picture:


There is a bug in my game that stops me deleting older pictures in the in-game "Organize Story" feature, unless they appear in the first "page" of 24 pictures. If, for instance, I try to delete the ninth picture on the second "page" (that is second row, third column), the game instead deletes the picture in the same position on the first page. I have no idea if this was corrected in later EPs.

[I think I've now finished composing this post, though there are probably still typos that I've missed! So I'll now delete the temporary message that I added at the beginning. Sorry for posting before I was ready. I accidentally clicked on Submit Message, when I meant to click on Preview Post. Sorry again!]

Here is an illustration of that problem. I play FreeTime. You can see that there is one thumbnail and one snapshot alternately where I didn't delete. But then later there are extra snapshots. I have no joy going over these hexadecimal numbers, so I just leave them be.

I can see how this could be an incovenience. Maybe I would try zooming in closer. When I take a screenshot, it is not easy to insert into the storyline. It can be done to obtain higher quality, but requires manually working with files. I can also see the version number in the corner because I always have debug mode on.

I recently grabbed too many teen-adult clothes conversions. I am impressed that so many had been made. This process seems so hard.

@Jonasn, if you arrange your view with Extra Large Image and group them by Date Modified, you can easily see which of your snapshots have and don't have thumbnails and delete the ones you don't need wholesale. You don't have to look at the file names at all.

I'm very surprised to hear that deleting from the story album deletes both the snapshot and the thumbnail for AndrewGloria; I wonder if this is one of the things that changed with later EPs.

I can start Business 1.3.0.249 easily. Both snapshot and thumbnail are deleted via the family album! The bug is also not present in Pets and Seasons.

Yes in my game, it definitely deletes both the thumbnail and the snapshot. I don't delete many pictures, but I do delete duplicates and pictures that I took by mistake. As you know, I've been playing Veronaville ever since I made Andrew and Gloria on 30 November 2012. I just checked the Veronaville storytelling folder. It contains 8,089 snapshot files ad 8,089 thumbnails. I had no idea that it didn't work properly in later versions of the game. I wonder now if it will break in my game, if and when I install Pets.

I wonder if EA/Maxis fixed the problem I mentioned in the second last paragraph of my last post (of deleting a picture from the first page, when the user was trying to delete a picture from a different page), but in the process stopped it deleting the snapshot picture at all.

I'm not surprised that some mistakes were made in making The Sims 2. When I was being taught programming (of file based data processing programs) in the early nineties, I recall being advised not to give the end user too many alternatives, as the more choices you gave them, the more chance there was that the user would choose to do something that the developer had never even thought of!. That approach was OK for the sort of business data processing programs we were writing, but The Sims 2 is an open-ended sandbox life simulation game. There's a an almost infinite number of possible things that we can do in the game. Maxis even made the game moddable (if that's a word!). I'm sure we've all done things in this game that the developers never even dreamt of! I might moan about a few niggles, but all things considered, I can't help thinking that The Sims 2 is a remarkably stable and reliable game, and a real credit to those who designed and built it. It's certainly brought me enormous pleasure in the thirteen plus years I've now been playing it. And in the course of all that fun, my Sims have also taught me a few important things about myself. They (especially Andrew!) have helped me to understand myself better.

[EDIT] Having just read jonasn's last post, I now realise I'll still be OK with Pets.

If you don't use the C key, how do you collect that may pictures? Inserting pictures into storytelling manually takes some work, and I couldn't do too many.

Recognizing good and bad pictures visually would be challenging if I take two of the same scene with minor differences.

Personally, I've used various forms of doing screenshots (via a program like Gadwin, or via Windows' newer printscreen function that saves to a folder). I don't think I've used C-key pictures for ages. The ones I have are mostly the auto pics from CAS (nice to keep track of which starter families are in which hood).

I haven't used the storytelling "book" ingame for ages. I used to, to keep track of families and such, but nowadays I feel the pictures are too small and that there are other ways to keep track of sims, plus I don't play much generational.

I sort some of the pictures I take into folders for spesific families/stories/etc.. The others are a bit here-and-there, depending what they are for.

I absolutely take several similar pictures whenever I'm doing photoshoots. Move an item here *flash* move an item there *flash* move camera *flash* new pose *flash* move sim slightly to the left *flash* etc. For one picture I can sometimes have 20+ pictures to choose from

I do use the C key. I use it all the time! But that's mainly for my own use. The in-game storytelling feature -- the C camera pictures and their associated captions -- are how I keep track of what's happening in the many households in my game. When I return to a family 2 years after I last played them, it's these pictures and the associated text that remind me what was happening the last time I played them.

But, because these pictures are small by modern standards, and they often include stuff at the top of the picture that I didn't see when I was playing, and that I'd rather not include in pictures that I post, I usually use PrtScr for pictures that I post here on MTS.

When do I delete C camera pictures? What usually happens is that I press the C key and pause the game. I go away and do something in Real Life. When I come back to my computer, I've forgotten that I've already taken a picture, so I press the C key again. A little later I open the storytelling window to add captions to my pictures, and see that I've got two identical (or nearly identical) pictures. So I delete one -- usually the second one.

Save the camera angle (Ctrl + [4-9]), out of TAB, remove the notifications, back to TAB, hit the key [4-9] you saved the angle on, and you're good
You can save different angles in TAB mode and out of TAB.

You may want to check if your settings have the "square pixels" option ticked or not. I can't remember if it's supposed to be on or off (on, I think?), but it can help a bit with the ratio/what's shown on the screen with a widescreen ratio.

I extracted all new Mansion plants for use in FreeTime using Object Workshop and old Sim Pe version to boot. It was completely uneventful, done in one sitting. Everything just works with original group numbers. I could combine two flowers into the same package to share textures. TV and massive aquarium also work. No fiddling with Binary Index or 3IDR necessary. So much easier than with clothes/hair.

On YouTube, the same authors do make a conversation about other games than Sims. This more firmly proves that Sims is a protected topic.