How can I adjust doors in SimPE such that they will let natural light shine through the walls? I recall Raynuss' paneled doors have this feature.

Thank you for your reply. I understand common errors as reported by the debug mode and can usually correct them. And I accept that if I change the program flow of an object that a sim is currently running, he will be on the wrong line and get an error.

This reset is different. The affected people will work normally afterwards. If you watch gameplays on the web, their authors might show or remark about sims being reset in households that haven't been opened in a long time. Some changes have occurred in their game in the meantime. Maybe a big patch was installed. In the case of a normal error ("jump bug"), people's motives do not get refilled. But after this "deep" reset, they all become green, except bladder is at halfway.

Have you checked your objects.package for changes? I had to reset it recently with its 2008 version. Another thing that occurs to me, have you checked if the neighborhood has sims without a character file? This is how I corrupted a neighborhood when I recently had pink flashing issues and random crashes when the game closed while saving.

A neighborhood reset will result in the members of each household being awake with their motives green except for bladder, as if they had just moved in. This happens when a new XP or major mod is added. Creators should mention that the mod causes a reset in the description, but "Should" is one thing, "does" is another! Mods that do this include things like the Visitor Controller and ACR,

I think I've been corrupting my neighborhood without knowing it. I've been overwriting older versions of the neighborhood with new versions that have been played further. I have NOT been doing this for backups. I ALWAYS delete the folder before restoring a neighborhood from an older state. Have I been screwing over my saves?

If you're overwriting, yes, you have. Always delete or move and then replace.

I'll just keep playing until the game gets too corrupted and then start over. It's not the first neighborhood I've lost to corruption.

Edit: After thinking it over, I decided to start fresh since it's something I've been wanting to do anyway. I just needed a push in the right direction.

So it's called a "neighborhood reset". Good to know. I was editing the Secret Hobby Lot controller. But there is not a reset after every change, only sometimes. I also entered the preferences to set the anti-aliasing for a nicer picture.

Objects.package seems to be fine. Still dated 2008. I haven't been inviting Crumplebottom. I don't know how to check for sims without a character file. The game has redeposited the standard lots, like Federal Fortress, in the LotCatalog bin at the time of the reset.

I didn't think this needed its own thread but if anyone thinks so I can make it -

Does anybody have any suggestions to find some nice custom paintings, the kind a sim can paint? Like to put in the Paintings folder with the pet ones the game comes with. I want to have an artist in my custom hood who does nothing but sell paintings in a home business. I've replaced the defaults but if that was all they painted it would get repetitive. I guess what I'm really asking for is like an image website or something that I can continuously grab from when I need new ones but they need to fit in with a maxis match game aesthetic.

^ Maybe post in the WCIF topic? There's a lot of custom painting uploads like that, so you'd probably get a lot of options. I think someone did sets with both TS3 and TS4 pictures as non-defaults, and there's a bunch more.

It's easy to make your own pictures - if you use roughly the shape of the original paintings (so you don't get too much cutoff), and not too big, you can pretty much use any JPG picture. Just put the pictures in the "Documents/The Sims 2 (UC)/Paintings" folder (I think it's "paint from reference" or some such, it's been a while since I did that). You can also take pictures of still-life and sims ingame and have sims paint those. The sims probably need some painting skills to do this, can't remember which level.

There's size and proportion limitations for what shows up well (or at all), but any .jpg has the potential to be a custom painting. The sky's the limit. Just do image searches. There are stock photo and clip art sites, museums that have all or part of their collections online, artists of all kind. Use your own photos. Do image searches on any subject you think appropriate. Take photos with your in-game snapshot camera and use those. Use the "still life" feature to set up pictures in the artist's environment.

Be prepared, though - an awful lot of those lovingly created iamges will turn into default pictures when, or shortly after, moving them to a new lot. For some reason apartments seem to retain custom paintings and still lifes best. Mootilda developed a fairly tedious workaround for recreating them, but I don't know of anyone who's fixed this problem with a mod.

I have some CC eyeliners that have been categorized as blushes. How do I make them show up in the eyeliner bin instead? The tutorial reference I always look at for stuff like this was this one by Almighty Hat but she doesn't mention how to recategorize makeup. (Although it did mention that eyeliners can't be multi-layerable while blushes can -- so that answered my mental question of "why are these in the blush category in the first place" -- the creator must have wanted them to be layerable with other liners. I don't use a lot of makeup CC so I don't see myself caring about that.)

[Also-- yes, I figured out my issue with SimPE crashing, it works now.]

I don't know the exact category, but you could try opening an eyeliner in SimPE (now it works) and see what bin that's in and then change your blushliners to match.

Stupid question from me - is there any way to extract a CC mesh from a recolour? I'm tracking down separates of my merged files and most of the time, I can just go and redownload them, but I've got a bunch by LindaSims from shortly before she locked all her free stuff behind a paywall and all I can find is her pay content. Plus to be honest, I made a lot of changes to the meshes to add morphs and fix gaps, so I'd rather have those out of the merged bundle. But the PJSE extracting tool in SimPE extracts the original game mesh, not the CC one. Could I put the bundle in my game files? Or am I going to have to separate them manually? Moral of the story, always keep backups!

Hi! I always try to ask this question but noone seems to know a way: for storytelling purposes, I need to spawn a novel or some other object that allows me to write its name and description, like a crafted flower vase or crafted toy. Is it possible to spawn instantly one of these items OR can I direct a sim to write a novel but force them to finish the novel immediately without hours of writing?

Second question: what happens if I use SimBlender to teleport a dead sim on the lot? Is it safe?

(Basically I need an already dead sim to write a novel or leave a message through other means, like a crafted flower vase's description)

You can't extract a CC mesh from a recolor - you have to do that manually, and the mesh has to be available somewhere on your computer.

It isn't too easy when you've got nothing to go on, but you can put a bunch of mesh files together with the recolor and do a 50/50 search with the game or Bodyshop until you're left with a reasonable selection, and then you can (in SimPE) compare the 3DIR instances in the recolor file to the SHPE and CRES in the mesh file, like so:
(This should work with merged files, too - here shown with a hair)

If you teleport a dead sim onto the lot they will just immediately disappear. It's safe.

I would use the Sim Manipulator for this. Temporarily resurrect them, then give them the necessary skills/badges to make the novel or craftable that you want. Sim Manipulator has an option (under Skills Manipulator -> Hidden Skills) that's called like... "Novel writing points"?? Something along those lines, I think that will speed up novel writing (to be honest I don't know exactly how it works as I don't usually write novels). Or, I guess you could also just turn off motivedecay and fast-forward through the novel writing. Then kill them again, get their grave back to wherever it's supposed to be if the grave is relevant in your story, and afterwards in SimPE go in and fix up any memories anyone accidentally got of them being resurrected/dying.

I don't know if craftables actually store the information anywhere of who created them, or if it's just that you get to customize the description...? If not, then maybe it would be easier to have some other random sim make the object, write the description you want, and pretend the dead sim made it.
There's also a thing in the manipulator that lets you buy all the craftables (it's called "At Home Store") but I think those just spawn and you don't get to customize them like you do on a crafting station -- I'm not sure though.

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Yeah that makes sense, LOL! Probably because I don't actually have any other CC eyeliners downloaded at the moment, it didn't occur to me. I tried to recategorize them with the Wardrobe Wrangler first, but it didn't seem to work, they were still blush.
I got stuck here, though. I was expecting makeup to have a Property Set resource like clothes do but it doesn't. I saw "bin" lines in the BINX resources but they're the same on these blush-liners as they are on the real eyeliners that I just went and downloaded.
I'm gonna give up on this one and maybe put it aside for a later date, I don't care enough about the makeup categories to justify this much effort LOL -- I was hoping it would be as quick & simple as recategorizing or townifying clothing is, but I guess makeup has more to it than that. I'm still a total beginner to editing CC.

I think the novel writing skill determines how well received the novel will be, but that's just from my experience with it. It makes sense for it to increase writing speed too, but I never noticed.

Ok, I have a new stupid question. What the heck is this popup?? It keeps showing up at random times, maybe once or twice a day, in one particular household. The sims are just living their lives and not doing anything in particular -- it happened while skilling charisma, while hanging out, and while sleeping. I checked their inventories, and they certainly have not acquired any colored glass, so it's merely a cosmetic annoyance at the moment, but it's very odd.

I mean I'm sure it's probably some weird random glitch, but I don't recognize this text string, so what I'm asking is when SHOULD this happen normally? That might help me narrow down if I have a mod or something that could be causing it.

^ I don't think I've seen that popup, at least not that I can remember, so I'd think it's related to a mod you have.

If it's in any way related to default gameplay it could have something to do with BV and digging in the sand for treasure (if I've seen it, that's where - I rarely play on beach lots), but that's all I can think of. If so, there should be something in the sim's inventory.

If you're not playing on a beach lot and there aren't any pets around, the message shouldn't spam. Could be a mod that borrows some functions from digging, either from BV or Pets. Possibly one that's got some parts missing.

Thank you so much for the ideas!!!! Though now I have two new questions:

- Can craftable items and novels in sims' inventories be edited through SimPE? Can I rewrite the description of an existing novel? I think this should be possible somehow, the information should be stored somewhere right? So it must be editable through SimPE as well.

- If a neighborhood is downloaded and played on another PC, do these craftable items keep their info? Because I have heard that custom paintings and portraits can disappear when you play the neighborhood on another computer.

I believe colored glass is something you can find digging in the sand thanks to BV and it goes into a sims inventory.

You mean beach glass? Oh, I can get that too! I'm happy the pixels can find it, because it's so much fun to collect it.

Try placing it on the lot and then opening the lot in SimPE. (backup first). You can edit antique camera photos that are placed on the lot (under textures) so you may be able to edit novels as well if they exist on the lot. (Probably not under textures.)

If I extract a Sim from SimPE, does it retain their Jewelry in Body Shop?

Yes, but you can't do anything about it until you get them to CAS.