Meanwhile, I wish there was a preschool stage. The toddler to school aged transition is dramatic and can't really be fixed with mods.

I guess life moves too quickly for sim people. Plantmen skip over a stage of growing up entirely. Children are hardly visible in the game with 6 hours spent at school, mostly barred from visiting, never walking home from school or going to a commlot to buy sweets.

Here is mine: When you're a rich family living in an enormous mansion with stairs, and none of the family members can run and they can grow old walking from bedroom to carpool.

A preschooler can (for storytelling at least) be cheated a bit with a little bit of stretchskeleton and the way you dress them up. You can change the age on the kids a bit with the clothes and general look. Dress them "cute" or as if their parents dressed them if you want them to look young, and more "I have my own style" if they're older. Kids can work from anything between 5/6-11 years or thereabout.

After that it gets a bit iffy until the teen stage, which works fine from around 15. There's nothing that explains the jump between around 11 to 15 and it really annoys me, since you can only go so far with stretchskeleton and clothes. There's a kid's body, or there's boobs or large shoulders for the teens - nothing in between.

A preteen age would've been at the top of my wishlist, then a more interactive baby age (learning to crawl, more playing, can ineract with other ages, etc.), then a preschooler age (maybe a bit more like combined TS2 and TS4 activities, starting out more like TS2 toddlers and ending up more like preschooler age - but I honestly don't mind if toddler/preschooler was combined, since these are similar in age and aren't too different in activities. Depends where the kids were supposed to be in age in relation to the preschooler, and whether there was a preteen too. Can be too many ages to keep track of...).

The Go to College want. Maxis really wants to show university down our throats. Teen people want to go to college every day and all day if they have the Fortune aspiration. They want to willingly lose a good fraction of their life, abandon their love, and think they'll get accepted in university at 14 years of age without completing their primary education. They sometimes want to go to college more than kiss their girlfriend on a date. Fortune aspirants like Dustin Broke can be really miserable if they have broken up with their girlfriend and have permanent want slots for college, private school, earn $1000 and plant a seed.

How could I tweak this want? It does not have a check tree. I tried extracting the xwnt file and including it into a mod together with a new CT, but it doesn't load this way. I would like this want to show up when the person is old enough, and has medium or higher school grade.

Lately that little groan that kids do when playing tag has started to annoy me. Every ten seconds it's "Uuuuhhh!"

I like like keeping the camera angle low, and walls up (or at least cutaway) so that as near as possible I see their world as my Sims see it. I don't want my Sims to see me as a god -- I don't deserve that. I prefer to see myself as in the game beside them helping them. Maybe more their pastor than their god. If you like, my Sims are souls in my care. (Of course TS2 Sims have souls -- everybody knows that!) I do believe I have a duty of care towards my Sims, but as a pastor I have my limitations: I have to confess I am quite often guilty of leading them into temptation -- especially the Romance Sims. (When I played Pleasantview I used SetHour to give Daniel and Kaylynn more time for their woohoo -- and of course I ignored Mary-Sue's chance card so she wouldn't come home and disturb them.) As I've said elsewhere the one thing that could persuade me to buy a new release of The Sims, would be some form of Virtual Reality that would allow to have genuine face to face interactions with my Sims. Though ideally I'd want to be able to import Veronaville into the new game, because all the Sims I want to make friends with live there.

"Architect"? That has a special significance to me. A few years ago I took part in d_dgjdhh's Monopoly Game Town building contest. I had to name a construction firm, and I decided it would be Jones and Moltke Construction (Veronaville) Ltd., with Andrew and Julian as the company directors. Well Andrew, as by far the dominant one of that pair, became Managing Director (MD) and gave Julian the notional position of "Creative Director". I was their Architect, which meant that Andrew in effect became my boss. Well, I really enjoyed the dynamic of that relationship. We had to have lots of detailed (imaginary) conversations about the various contracts and how to build and furnish them. As a boss I found Andrew firm but fair, and it brought me close to him in what must be a very unusual relationship between between Simmer and Sim.

Actually, when I think about it, tidying up the shop probably was the last task Scott was assigned to when I last played the shop with them as the active family. When Scott and his teenage son are running the shop together, Ross usually stays on the till (because he's good at it), while Scott deals with sales, restocking, and general tidying up, only occasionally relieving Ross on the till, when the latter needs a break. When the shop closes for the day, they will tidy up together before going home. So maybe the answer is to assign Scott (the owner) to the till before they go home. I'm not keen on the auto cash register; people choosing to go to a family-owned grocer are likely to be looking for the personal touch. (In real life I hate self-service tills; I believe they're a cause of unemployment.) I have Squinge's Hire Family Members, but Scott isn't keen -- that would mean he'd have to pay Ross! Maybe I can persuade him that, if he employed his son, the money would stay in the family, so it wouldn't really cost them anything. Scott is a bit of a miser, but to be fair to him, he has a business loan from Consort Capp (Consort Hutchins-Capp since his recent marriage), and he's struggling to repay it. If Consort foreclosed he'd lose his business.

Anyway thanks for your help, and apologies for my tardiness in replying. I'll try assigning Scott to the till before he goes home first, and, if that doesn't work, we'll try making Ross an employee. I'd really like to see this shop succeeding.

Same here. Not for the "god mode" or anything, but because I prefer to see what my sims are doing (and because pictures look better when you're not doing bird's eye from a mile away). I honestly don't understand how people manage to play zoomed out with walls down for long periods at a time, because that would drive me crazy after just a few minutes. But each to their own.

I also don't get how you'd play with a first-person view for regular gameplay with TS2. It's just not built to work like that. Must be kinda clunky and difficult to play (for videos and such it could probably be useful as an addition to the CAM mode, that's something else). It's easier for pictures than movies, though - if I need a "POV" shot I can get one with the CAM mode and the camera hack I already have. Wouldn't add it to the regular live play camera...

Walls down, zoomed out is exactly how I play! I don't like to be too far out, but I definitely like to see most of the floor, so I can keep an eye on several sims at once--and I gotta be able to see walkbys. I guess I'm nosy, because I always feel the need to see who's walking by, ringing the doorbell, or just jogging through the block. Never know who will show up and who I can introduce to my sims! I can't stand playing with walls up--not only are my walls not very interesting, but usually I feel like I can't see what's going on. But I don't see myself as a god, either. I just watch over them. Or get them into trouble. Either, or--depends on my mood.

And yeah, because of the way the game is, I also don't really get the first-person view thing, but, like I said, I have seen a few asks/wishes for it. I think that'll be a thing in some future games, especially if EA wants to go the virtual reality/metaverse route. It would synergize well with their goal of making everything multiplayer and connected to social media somehow. For me though, playing TS2 is more like writing my own stories. And I'm not the main character so things like first person view and playing the game at sim-level don't really make sense to me. It's definitely more third person narrator for me, if that makes sense.

And AndrewGloria, it is a tough decision. Sure all the money would stay in the family (though Ross would get the memory of earning money), but when you play them at home, Ross would be ineligible for the Young Entrepreneurs Award, if you care about scholarships. OFB jobs don't have ranks like regular Maxis jobs. And then he'd probably try to go to work, even though his dad is at home and not at the shop!

I really wish Maxis coded OFB jobs better. If you hire playables, they're basically working double time and end up making a ton of money (because they get paid when you play as the owner, but then, if you play their household later, they go off to work again, often for longer hours, and get paid again. Doesn't really work in a game set up for rotational play.)

I like playing with cutaway walls and have the camera really close to my sims to have the game be more immersive. makes you feel like you're in the room or outside with them and you can see the facial features of your sims as they go through different emotional states. I also like playing that way to see how well I made a sim or outfit and what I can do to improve on them.

I usually play with the walls down though I pretend they're still up and they are for my sims as it's only down for me to control them if they started to do dumb things like so often happens when they try to take a bath when they've got a full bladder.I also tested my modified version of the power fridge and it looks like my old annoyances with it are gone.

I wish that adults (and teens and elders too) could pick up a teddy bear that's causing an obstruction, and put it down somewhere where it's out of everybody's way.

Oh God yes. I had an apartment where somebody put a teddybear outside, right in front of the stairs, just as the entire family had gone to school/work and all the neighbours got stuck. And because it was outside, I couldn't grab it either. I had to wait for someone to come home so I could order them to use it to talk through and get it out of the way.

I am all for NOT having a teddy bear at all

BUT- but...

I couldn't do that. That would just be too sad in real life.

I've had a teddy block a doorway in a family's home once on my old computer which I no longer use and I was able to get into a sim's inventory while eveybody was at work or school to move the teddy into the child's inventory as she was about to age up to teen soon anyways.

In RL it would be sad.
But in RL people don't pee themselves because the teddy bear blocks the bathroom entrance, or freeze to death in the snow because the teddy bear blocks the front door
I just had enough of that nonsense, no matter how cute @simsample showed the toddlers to be - they are just as cute when they hug a big dog, but there is no way each toddler in my hood is getting one either.

^ Solution: Deco teddy bears (got plenty of those, and they don't get stuck everywhere)

The toddlers got plenty to play with. The toy box, for instance. There you can actually ask a sim to clean up the toys if they start getting annoying.

This is why I play the sims!

I had a dog taken away to the pound because he was starving. It wasn't until I reloaded that I figured out why he hadn't eaten from his full dish - the little girl had flown her kite in the morning before school, then put it down on a tile that blocked the dog's exit from his pile-of-leaves outdoor napping spot. The dog couldn't walk off his pile of leaves in any other direction and he couldn't step over the kite, which was visibly at a fair distance from the edge of the dog bed - it was such an illogical situation that it took me ages to figure out what was wrong.

I was finally able to get a new graphics card and play Sims again, and It's so awesome. But the game decided to welcome me back by giving me another duplicate of all my jewelry, so now every item shows up 3 times. No idea how I got the first duplicate, and no idea how it's now triple, but guess I got another thing to troubleshoot at some point in future when my brain works xD

Raising up twins is freaking tough. My Vidcund had twins and I had to control this family . The parents are dead tired and starved but twins cry so much and house's messy.
So my mouse is near dead clicking too much. My tendon was tensed for real.

Nannies, visitors and whoever else who feel like they have the right to steal our money trees! Now I remember why I never used them in the first place.

It's having to do a ton of work to update once custom item in my game to avoid trouble.I have to remove old buyable soap displays from every lot in every town in the game folder before installing the updated version.

The fact that you can spend sim-days upon sim-days to teach dogs that they have to pee outside (especially the less "Genious" ones or the ones that are more on the "Piggy" side!) and they end up peeing outside the damn front door
I mean, technically, it is outside but... but...

That's the dog the Ramirez family have in Bluewater Village. He can spend almost his whole day running around the back yard (he is Hyper!) but he thinks his... toilette is outside the front door and the only thing I can do about it is... hire a maid just to mop the dog's pee once a day