Sorry, I misunderstood.


LOL, without giving a long, convoluted theological answer, I'll just say my analogy was over when I wrote that. XD

Well, looks like the vacation locals were so enthralled to see a pet tag along with a group of travellers on vacation, because they normally never see them! I guess that explains why they pet Bonzo to death.

Glad to hear it worked - I think the next time one of my pet-owning families go on vacation, I'll bring Rex and Ginger along.

Yeah, I'm totally going to take my pets on holiday too. That reminds me of a question; can dogs swim in the sea on a beach lot?

If the pet ghosts can dig in the Sims garden and make temporary (real) holes, then I don't see why I can't haunt my computer. I'll just have to carefully instruct my off-spring to not touch my saves :P

Thank you all for your help and concern. I have now decided to revert to a slightly older backup from 19th November, which is a few days before I first noticed any corruption. I have only played a handful of lots since then, for a combined total of only about 4 Sim days, so I won't lose a lot of gameplay, and a lot of that I can repeat. Saddest is that I lose the welcoming party for my new family the Moores at 26 Via Veronaville, as they're unlikely to get the same Sims to welcome them when I play it again; they got their near neighbours Bill McBain (84 Via Veronaville) along with Martin and Manuela Moltke (100 Via Veronaville). Martin and Manuela have enthusiastically supported the Welcome Party Movement ever since they moved in themselves, and it was nice to see them coming to welcome yet more newcomers to Veronaville. I'll just have to see what happens this time. Another new Sim was given a piano for a dream date, but, if his date doesn't give it to him the next time, I'll give it to him myself! Otherwise I can probably broadly repeat what happened the last time. I do hope the Craig Royce, the Slob and the Warden of the Teen Townie Hostel, still gets his long-overdue promotion to Convenience Store Clerk! (Incidentally all my problems happened while playing his lot.)

I haven't really been enjoying playing since all this started, so I do hope I can get past the point where I started to lose those wants and get back to paying for fun. If not, I fear it will mean getting Tarlia's Veronaville, and starting to rebuild everything from scratch as gummilutt suggests. It will be a massive undertaking though, with 66 playables, 70-odd townies and a few NPCs involved in my game. And some things I'd definitely lose, like the NPC's who have spawned in my game. Remington Hurt spawned as the waiter for my Poolside Restaurant in Veronaville before I added a downtown, so he must be unique to my game. He's turned into a bit of a character, swimming across the pool to nip out on an errand when the restaurant is quiet. I could import his likeness into a new 'hood, but he wouldn't be an NPC any more.

Anyway, thanks for everything, and I'll let you all know how I get on.

AndrewGloria, as far as your waiter goes, look for the for sims by sims people's websites. Somewhere there are instructions for how to take an existing sim, and, using SimPE, make a game generated NPC exactly identical (so the player can have a sim in a custom fire-fighting career and have his doppelganger show up for actual fire alarms).
I think the slob coding that your now-playable slob still carries is likely to give you more trouble in terms of rebuilding than creating a matching waiter. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can tell you if it's possible/how to attach that code to a playable.

Maybe alternative surgery could let you replace the looks of an NPC with the look of that one, and change the name the regular way?

Looking on Google for "for sims by sims" I've so far found a couple of sites about Simmington Hills (FSBS). Am I on the right track?


I wouldn't be too upset if the slob became a little bit less of a slob. The first teen ex townie to move into his hostel was Mallory Mace with 2 neat points. Even she was shocked at the Slob's standards - she started to autonomously clean up after him! The two boys who have since joined them are a little bit better, but the state of the showers is still pretty appalling! And clogged, unflushed toilets are the norm!

Andrew, I think you are. What you want to do is use SimPE to replace the appearance and genetics (and you want Theo's AltSimSurgery plugin, think it's on MATY still for that), and change the name, the personality, and interests if those are important to you. I think I read the tutorial on a site about a neighborhood named something like Apple Orchard, or maybe it was linked from that site. Anybody got a better memory?

Apple Valley, perhaps? Can't find the tutorial though....

Dogs can't swim in a swimming pool, so I don't see why EAxis allowed them to swim in the ocean.

That's where I was thinking of, but I can't find it there either. Sorry, Andrew.

Okay, this is how (I think) to do it. Back up please!

You need Sim PE. You need an alternative sim surgery plugin made by Theo: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,3563.0.html

Do this: https://www.modthesims.info/wiki...act_In-Game_Sim

Then read this: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=74939

Put the extracted copy of your waiter into your saved sims folder. Make your new neighborhood and get a male waiter to spawn. (If you get a female one you'll just have to find the sex change tutorial that's around somewhere) From that tutorial, skip to Step 1d. Use alt sim surgery in place of sim surgery. This uses your saved sims folder so you don't have to make an actual sim with that appearance to use.

Then do this: http://linna.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=56241

Now your newly created waiter should have the appearance and genetics of your old waiter.

Can anybody spot anything I missed?

I wanted to put an indoor pool in an already built house that had a foundation. The problem is that, as you can see in the picture, when you remove the foundation (because pools must be placed on terrain) it leaves a hole in the outer walls. Does anyone know of a way to fix this?

So the Freetime patch disabled the bird-watch option for teens (and younger, I think). Why is this? And is there a way to re-enable it?

Did you use this technique to build your basement?

You remove the foundation because foundation walls are treated differently than normal walls, so you remove the foundation (except at the corners) and replace the inside with walls, then reconstruct the foundation again.

Regarding the NPC appearance changes, I usually leave the NPC's name as is, so I don't accidentally tell my sims to interact with the NPC thinking they're the original sim. That's more of a problem for sims such as the maid than waiters, though.

Thanks Sunbee.

I loaded up my old backup, and opened a number of lots to check them before starting to play. I was dismayed to find even back then a missing fear slot for BJ Shaikh, the Tricou goth, who is now playable. However, when I open BJ's Wants and Fears in SimPE, the fear is there: it's "Rejected for going steady by Kendra McCarthy" (BJ's girlfriend). The fear looks perfectly valid in SimPE, but it doesn't show in the game (and the slot doesn't reroll either when I choose that option on the batbox).

I'm tempted, after backing up (yet again!), to try editing the fear in SimPE, to try to get it to something that the game does recognise. Why can SimPE read the fear but the game can't?

I'm really very disappointed. I thought that by going back so far, I'd get my game before the lost wants and fears hit it. I suppose I can go back further still: I'd loose two CAS Sims, but they're both new and still fairly peripheral, so it maybe isn't so bad. And I created them in Body Shop so I can import them again. My absolute limit is the birth of the McBain babies. I cant play the pregnancy and births again, so there's no point in looking at backups before that. It's looking more and more likely that I'll have to do the same as gummilutt if I want to keep on playing my Veronaville. The trouble is that gummilutt seems to have been rebuilding and re-playing her 'hood for almost as long as I've been playing mine! How long does it take, gummilutt?

I have another little problem that is possibly unrelated, but may be just a another sign of increasing corruption. The game says I can't place objects on a slope when the ground looks completely flat to me.

I extended the garden of this house using the lot adjustor, but the game seems to think it's a slope and won't let me place objects there. It must have let me place that tree there, but, maybe you can place trees on slopes! Does anyone know what's going on here, or should I go the lot adjustor's own thread?

I think how long the rebuild takes depends on how persnickety you are about it. IIRC, gummilutt wants her sims to have the exact same history in the new hood.
If you are satisfied with merely recreating the memories, personalities, and interests of the sims, it should go much faster. If you are like me, and say, you know, these guys fled a natural disaster, it's only reasonable their memories and interests would be somewhat different (ever sit around reminiscing with someone you've known since childhood? you know what I mean) and I'll just recreate families and personalities and find that good enough, it's a reasonably quick process, depending on how much cc you use and how long it takes CAS to load. 'Course I use a new map and all when I do that, and I've only done it a couple times, being much more a fan of just bringing a few favorites to another hood.
Do remember when you're extracting appearances with SimPE that you have to then load body shop and clone the sim there, and use that clone to make the new sim in the game. Why, I don't understand, I just know that a SimPE extracted sim has about ten times as much data as a body shop clone of the sim.

Sunbee has a point in that how long it takes depends entirely on how picky you are. But the reason it's taken me over a year is because I've done it three times now. In both previous attempts to re-create I discovered signs of corruption about when I reached the third generation (third gen adults is the goal), and because I am the way I am I ragequit and started over yet again, being more extreme each time. The first time I binned houses with stay things shrub and moved them to new hood. I am convinced that that is why the first one went boom. In the second I rebuilt most of it, but not all, and got the same corruption sign as the first time. So in this third one I rebuilt everything except one community lot, as well as going over downloaded lots to re-build anything that had been occupied before. I hit third generation a few months ago and so far no sign of corruption.

You also need to take into account that I started med school in august, and before that I was studying my butt off for entry exams and classes I had to pass to be allowed to apply. So all of this rebuilding has happened during very busy time in my life, and in terms of total play time it has probably not taken that long. Your sim count is a lot higher than mine, but as long as you apply structure and organization to it, it's doable.

As I see it, there are two paths you can take, and two ways to play those paths. You can either do a basic recreation of the more important parts of their lives, only recreating big memories. Or you can be picky (like me, although the level of picky has decreased with each hood recreation) and recreate it more or less exactly. The fastest way, regardless of what you choose, is to cheat as much as possible. Maxmotives all the way, and just focus on getting memories down. You should be aware that this is boring. Very boring. The other option is to play them normally, but making sure to follow the path you followed before. It's less boring, but takes a lot longer. In my first remake, I focused on memories. In the second I was bored of that and played normally. Now in the third I cut down the number of memories I focus on, and abused the bajeebus out of a CC book that gives badges and skills immediately (and gives them memories of earning it) and maxmotives.

One upside of doing a hood recreation is that you get the chance of changing storyline if you thought of things afterwards that you wish you had done then. My hood was very small, so as I've gone along I've added new families that I can work into the storyline earlier now

I've said it before but I'll say it again. If you do decide to, I'd be more than happy to share how I've done it. You'll probably make up your own method, but it might help give some pointers

For the "Can't place object on slope" thing, try using the moveobjects on cheat, place the chair there, and get a Sim to sit on it. If they can sit on it, that'll be your temporary solution. Also, if you can, try extended a lot in another neighborhood using the Lot Adjuster, and see if things work there.

Have you tried flattening the area using the in-game tools? Then you'd know that the area was flat.
The LotAdjuster will create a standard slope between the neighborhood vertices. If the neighborhood has a slope between two tiles, then all of the tiles in that area on an expanded lot will have some slope. This is standard behavior and depends upon the neighborhood slope in the expanded area.

If you don't want a slope, then just flatten the area in-game. It's an easy solution.

To check whether an actual slope exists, you can go into debug mode (boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true) and then mouse over an area. Holding down the <alt> and <shift> keys will display information about the vertex that the mouse is over. Move the mouse around to see whether the elevation changes.

Homework.

If you don't do your homework your kid might be taken away by some evil lady (what will happen if teenagers don't do their homework?).
If my sim does his/her homework everyday he/she will eventually get an A.
What if I just want her to have a B or a C? Will it work out if I just complete half of the homework?

You can use a mod to give kids credit for completing part of their homework: http://modthesims.info/d/230189
Or you can use Harder Harder Grades: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...hp?topic=3091.0 (or, if that's too hard for your tastes, Harder Grades, which is... somewhere)

I just recreate appearance, skills, want slots, family ties, and interpersonal relationships (For instance, Helen Miller and Alexander Shankel are friends, while Alexander and his little brother Ivan only sort of get along. Stupid toddlers, always following you around and wanting to copy you!) I don't bother with data about interests (which I don't pay much attention to anyway, and they change through life) and I never bother with memories. I don't find that they have a long-term effect on my sims' behavior. I remember, and the end results are still there, so I don't really care what the memory panel looks like. I have a form I use to record all that info in an orderly manner, so that rebuilding goes much faster.

When you just extract a Sim with SimPE, character data comes along too, like when you put an occupied lot in the lots & houses bin. That's a bad thing. Clones don't have any of that extra data, so you don't insta-corrupt your 'hood.

Nothing except their grade will go down and they might get mad. If the grade is a D or less they can't get a aprt time job.

If you use harder grades your sim is not guaranteed an A ever, even if they do their homework diligently every day as it's tied into skills. Version one is just tied to logic, but version two that i use decides what skills are needed based on personality and hobby I think. Basically though you won't know what skills the kid needs. http://modthesims.info/d/131960