A conflict just means that they cover the same code. The program covering that code which loads last is the one that will be used. Sometimes this is a problem and sometimes it is not. In the case of these in-game editing tools, most of the time it will not be a problem. They all do essentially the same thing (allow access to functions that are normally only available through the testing cheats when the game is running), but some of them do more things, and some may do the same thing in a different way.

I'm not a coder so anyone who can explain this better or has more information feel free to speak up; but conflict is only likely to be a problem when different programs are operating different pieces of related code. Say that Program A, which loads first, contains code involving family relationships. Program B, which loads last, also contains code involving family relationships; so for purposes of family relationships, Program B is in charge. But wait! Another piece of code in Program A involving insurance payouts specifically references the shared bit of code - which is no longer there to interact with. If the superseded code in Program A is sufficiently similar to the active code in Program B, this won't be a problem, but it may also set up an irreconcilable set of instructions, as if I were to tell you to put the car in the trunk of the tricycle. If you don't already have the information that a) the car in question is a toy and b) the tricycle in question is a motorized vehicle with a luggage compartment, you're going to stop and ask for clarification, or write me off as an unreliable source of instructions. The program can't ask for clarification, so it either cobbles together an unsatisfactory response or it has a meltdown.

So the HCDU can only highlight the programs that are most likely to cause problems because they address the same lines of code. It can't tell you whether they will conflict in a meaningful way, or whether merely making sure that Program B loads before Program A would fix it. And if you have four programs overlapping the same bit of code, it may take you awhile to figure out what arrangement of them will get you the optimal results, or whether one program renders the others superfluous. There's no substitute for testing, sorry.

250 Main Street.
base game Prima Guide mentions a hot tub on that lot; which I have not seen. was it removed before game was shipped?

shipped version objects.
is there a list telling their locations in the catalogs? a similar list for base game Buy Mode objects in function/room/community sorts; base game Prima Guide.

Create-A-Sim/Body-Shop.
hypothetical; if the fitness line of a Body Shop body was changed to fully fit, would sims created from that body be fit?
any way to create infants in Create-A-Sim? cheats/hacks/mods/etc

That's probably the best conflict explanation I've ever seen Peni. Props! *shamelssly saves for future reference*

Oh, thank God. This happened in a new neighbourhood that I've spent hours on in the last fortnight. So you're fairly sure nothing permanent has occurred? What causes this in the first place? All I did was move in 2 townies, move them out together, then back in the same apartment lot so they were playable roommates instead of townies. That's when all of a sudden one of them created a double.

Thanks Peni for that thorough post. I know that one has to test, but as the Sim Blender and Manipulator are widely used I thought someone may have known already.

Is there a way to add custom music to musical instruments (sorry for asking again, but nobody answered the question last time)?

Probably not. Musical instruments are objects not music. And sound what they make is written in code of these objects.

In that case, it sounds like a glitch with the apartment controllers rather than the portals - do a HoodCheck if you're nervous.

Oh that's just what apartments do. It remembers who lived there and the sims will show up and hang around outside. You need to grab them with move objects and delete that instance of them off the lot. Otherwise they may end up peeing and passing out and if you load up where they really live and check their memory panel, pee and pass out may have been added as a memory. I find one reset (delete-save-load something else) takes care of them showing up in that way.

I'm planning to add custom downtownies to my game since my installed Downtown is empty.
Is it a way to set some of them as the Diva and Mr Big?

How can I have YA sims in my main hood without them attending community college or university? Can I just age them and not start use semester tester?

I age those not going to college with the simblender since aging with Squinge's cake gives them a 'went to uni' memory. Sometimes they still try to go to class, I just stop them.

Be warned, this is rather silly for a question.
How, do you bring a child on a community lot? (I warned you)
I tried ask to form casual group/for fun, then made the mom walk to lot/community. She started to walk, child following her...then she stopped and throw that..*I know I have responsability, but can't..blah, blah..children alone) She has one child, and she was fallowing her, but hey...
Then, I try the car, still forming the casual group...same deal.

I am actually trying/testing a car for someone, so maybe this is the problem, but I doubt it, since the dad was able once, to bring his child to the park. I am confuse...how you do it?
Does walk to lot usually works?

unanswered::

older questions of mine::
hidden sub-neighborhoods.
they get attached to the neighborhoods that were made before the respective expansion installation? or to neighborhoods made both before and after?
can the characters from those sub-neighborhoods also appear in the tutorials (the icon that appears on each page of the neighborhood chooser)?

something else::
the coffee and espresso objects; how to change how much they contribute to sim's Energy?

So long as they child has been included on the list there should be no issue at all. Maybe it's different with a casual group? I don't use them a lot mostly just for weddings.

I take kids to community lots all the time; however, there's usually somebody old enough for the child to stay with left at home, too, so the message doesn't appear - whether the child leaves first, or the older sim does, nothing triggers the dialog. It's not always a group, either - just "who do you want to go with you?" "Take the kid." I only put together casual groups if they're going somewhere to eat or something like that.

When there's no one at home old enough to mind the kid, there's a little bit of a hitch. Getting into a car is leaving the lot; leaving the lot is leaving the lot; so someone may object. Timing matters. If you're taking two sims who are old enough to leave by themselves, maneuver the kid closer to the portal than one of the older ones, then have the older one who is closest to the portal do the leaving with the others following - that way the kid doesn't have to leave by himself, even momentarily, nor the older sim leave him alone, even momentarily.

That said, I've had single parents leave before, and just the other night had a family of three walk to a lot, with the kid leaving last, and the parents blithely went off and I got a notice about it not being a good idea to leave him unattended, just before he followed them.

What you may be up against here is a matter of game configuration. The way traveling between lots works changed from EP to EP, so it may very well be a lot easier for me to take a kid out than for someone without all the EPs. It may simply not be possible in certain game configurations.

Here's something to try, though: Set up a permanent social group that includes the adult you want to leave, the kid you want to take with him, and someone who doesn't live on the lot. Call the non-resident member and arrange a meeting. See how that works.

Or else you can get this mod by BO: BO - Kids & Pets Unattended



That message of how you take care of the children is very disruptive and I've always disliked the 'nanny' tone it takes. Just a hint of realism in this game..just like real life, where kids are left unattended sometimes for days by their families, which is not a good thing, but it happens.

I just send the kids outside first - something I got used to doing while playing the vanilla game.

BO's mod disables the social worker completely which is not what everyone wants, though.

Strange, though - I have no issues taking kids to community lots with an older family member, whether as part of an outing (rare for me) or just walk/drive/taxi to lot.

Rosebine, what's your testing environment? If it's your full game configuration, you may need to troubleshoot. I suppose it could also be the car. Stranger things have happened.

If you don't want to have no social worker at all, Pescado's older anti-social worker hack has an hour without a parent as okay, I think it is, and some leeway built in for bad grades.

Yes that is the one I use. However it wouldn't stop the problem of the game thinking a sim is leaving a child home alone just because the parent leaves the lot first. The hour without a parent is game behaviour anyway - it's if the kids come home from school before the parents that that situation occurs. I have found they are okay for 2-3 hours after school until the social worker comes using Pescado's hack. But it doesn't let parents go to work or community lots and leave the kids unattended (which I am fine with).

I use them both together with no problems (along with a ton of other mods!) :-)

You'd be better off asking creating-related questions in the creation forums. This thread is not intended for that, and your questions are likely to go unanswered.

Most need-related boosts from objects are either controlled inside the BHAV, or in a BCON. You'll find the relevant BHAV by looking at the TTAB of the espresso machine, look at the action BHAV of the interaction you want to edit. Then you'll have to decipher the BHAV to see if it's doing it by internal BHAV bits or if it's grabbing a number from a BCON.

Here's my stupid question for the day: How does a Sim choose which chair to sit in in order to read a book?

I had thought -- without any investigation into the issue -- that they picked the closest one. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Nor does it seem that they pick the most comfortable one. For instance, in the attached screen shot from the household I'm playing right this very moment, the Sim picked the book from the bookcase shown in the pic. The living room seating is closer to that, even considering how weirdly the game sometimes calculates "closer," and far more comfortable than the dining chairs. (8 vs. 3 for comfort rating.) Yet, she chose a dining chair to sit on to read her book. And sometimes they traipse a lot farther away (again, even considering how oddly the game sometimes calculates distance) to sit in dining chairs over living room seating, both to read and, sometimes, to watch TV. Is this what y'all observe in your games as well? Are dining chairs somehow coded to be preferred for these things? If not, then I'm thinking I need to do some looking into my mods... (For the record, none of the seating in the image is blocked and all of them are placed using the quarter-tile cheat, so it's not like they're favoring chairs that aren't placed that way, either.)

I have the same situation in my game, dining chairs always wins over any kind of sofa or armchair, as long as the chair is in the same room. No idea if it happens vanilla though, don't remember how it used to be back when I had no mods It'd be nice if one could reverse the process and have sofas/armchairs take priority over dining chairs. I do read sitting in dining chairs, but only if I'm eating at the same time

Maybe you could check this mod by Cyjon, Smarter Chair Selection :
http://cyjon.net/node/340

Yeah, see, I have that mod. :\ I probably downloaded it at some point to address this issue and then promptly forgot that I had it. I'm guessing it's being overwritten by something else I have. Maybe MogHughson's "Watch TV from any chair" one, since that's loading after right now... Hmmmmm... But I guess it's good to know that this might be the "vanilla" behavior, at least, rather than borked behavior. Game's loaded and I'm playing right now, but hopefully I'll remember to screw around with things a bit before I load up next...

Apparently I also have Cyjons mod, and Mog's watch tv from any chair. I suppose it might be a good idea to check if there are any conflicts of the kind HCDU can't detect.

I also have these two mods, but I don't know if I have the same problem. I'll try to pay attention when I (or I'll?) play later.
Sorry for the English mistakes.

I didn't see any grievous English mistakes, no worries. Although in the second sentence, you'd want to just use "I;" since you started the sentence with "I'll," a contraction of "I will," the "will" is implied in the second part of the sentence.

@gummilutt
Yeah, that would be good. Although if they can't work together or can't be made to work together, I'll probably just live with the odd selection for reading chairs. I'd rather have them sit anywhere to watch TV rather than stand to do so. *eye roll* (Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? )

Did the graveyard change address? because i'm getting a 403 Forbidden error when trying to access it even from the link on their twitter account.

If it's changed addresses, then it doesn't appear that anyone's found it, and you'd think they'd announce that kind of thing. There's a lot of "Where did it go???!" on my Tumblr dash. I hope it's just in maintenance or something, but...

@iCad
Thanks, I appreciate the help with the English Grammar .

I just did a little test with the dining chair, sofas and reading but I kept all my mods and not just "Smarter Chair" and "Watch TV from any Chair" so it's maybe not really conclusive.
I put dining tables with chair, a desk and chess table again with dining chairs, comfortable ones, next to a bookcase, and on the other side of the room I put a not comfortable sofa. And a lone dining chair.

If the dining chair is next to the bookcase, when I order a sim to read they choose it, whether it is more or less comfortable than the sofa on the other side of the room.
If the dining chair is next to the sofa, the sim choose the more comfortable one (dining chair or sofa).
They didn't sit on the dining chairs next to the tables, desk, chess table even if they were closer.
Of course, that's just a quick little test on one room.

I've got one house with sims that frequently seem to want read at the chess table, despite it having less comfortable chairs than the living room set nearby. Another variable to consider in how they choose seating could be where the sim is standing when told to get a book; does that change where sims choose to sit?

Why did my plant sim start her culinary career at level 3? Obviously, she never went to university.

Also, I keep getting this message that goes something like "Eureka! The nuances of the /skill/ skill are now much clearer to me." What is that supposed to mean?

If she was looking for job by computer there are chances they can get higher level job if they have required friends and skill points already.
Eureka! is lifetime aspiration benefit for knowledge sim. If you added that point, they will learn faster.

Likewise, although Mog's often result in weird choices for me. But the upside of a weird sitting down choice as opposed to standing up is that you can use moveobjects to move them to a more logical seat. Remind me to look into it, would you? By the time the intense work period is over I'll have forgotten

I have a problem that ive tried to do 50/50 on but i couldnt find the mod that i was looking for. Whenever my sims adopt a pet the next day or so they roll a want to be friends with that pet as if the pet is a sim. It only happens when the has been adopted through the normal channels and ive had pretty much from day dot.

Does the want fulfill if the Sim becomes friends with the pet?

Speaking of plantsims, is there a way to send them to Uni? Even via hacks or something.

No the want doesnt fulfill it isnt able to as the want is thinking the pet is a sim not a pet and most of the times the sim is already friends with the pet. Pretty sure the only way to send a plantsim to uni would be to cure them as a toddler and then send them as a teen and then once they are an adult make them a plantsim again.

Is the following good or bad advice? (I wasn't sure if I should make a new topic since it is probably easy to answer):
Taken from this page.

"I am big into created awesome lots that are fully furnished and ready to go, I then save them, and place them in my Lot Catalog so I can play them anytime I want in the future. I do this a way that a lot of people don't, because most people just package their lots and then install them that way. Also, sometimes I'll place the lot and move a family in, and then due to new EPs or SPs I will update the lot that my family is living in. Then I think to myself, "Damn it, I wish it was that version of the house in my Lot Catalog," well there is an easy way to put the updated version in your Lot Catalog without the family (unlike packaging the lot with them or moving them out and losing all the details).

Here is how I do it:

1.) Go to C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\
2.) Then go to the Neighborhoods folder
3.) Go to the Neighborhood with the lot you want saved in your Lot Catalog
4.) Go to it's Lots folder

* Side Note * - You can do all of this while the game is running. It will appear in your Lot Catalog when you do this right away in your game while running.

5.) Go to your game screen and open the cheat menu (Ctrl + Shift + C)
6.) Type in "boolprop ShowLotPackageFilename true" without the quotations
7.) Hover over the lot you want saved, with or without Sims living in it, and remember the file name
8.) Go back to the lots folder you have open from your neighborhood and find the file name
9.) Copy the file
10.) Go to C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\LotCatalog
11.) Paste the file
12.) Rename the file cx_00000001.package and if that name is taken, rename it whatever the next number is available. So, if you have files in there named cx_00000001.package all the way up to, say, cx_00000021.package then you need to name it cx_00000022.package.

Make sense?

Basically, that is it. It will be in your Lot Catalog forever now, or until deleted by you. You can do this to a lot of any type at any stage. There can be Sims in it or none at all. It will ONLY take the lot and all your hard work with it.

I know for me this is awesome, because I tend to use a lot of the same houses in different neighborhoods as well as apartment complexes and community lots."

I have seen a plantsim-with-lifestages mod used, but do not know where to get it.

Not a problem. English is a terrible, awful, and diabolically hard language to learn to use properly even when it's your native language. And when it isn't your native language...ouch. For that reason, it's kind of a shame that it's become the "official" internet language, really.



Conclusive or not, it was informative! Thank you for doing that. It seems like some more complex programming is at work here. Because if it was just a distance thing, then the chairs should fill in the order of proximity to the bookcase, taking into account that the game sometimes has weird ideas about "closest." If it was just a comfort thing, then they should fill in that order. But they don't seem to do the same thing consistently, do they? I'm wondering if @stitching is correct and the location of the Sim when commanded to read might have something to do with where they ultimately choose to sit...

I'm getting ready to fire up my game, and I'm going to reverse the load order of Cyjon's and Mog's mod, making Cyjon's load after Mog's, to see if that has any effect on this in my game...

ETA:


Yeah, I often do the "pick sitting Sim up and move them" thing, both for TV-watching and if they decide to read at the dinner table when others need to sit at that table to eat. Like I said, I'll see if changing load order changes things. If not...Yeah, something to put on your "to do" list, since you're better than me at looking into this stuff.

I have never thought of moving the Sims - just let them sit there with their backs to the TV, watching a move

Yeah, I often just let them be, too. It's really only if I'm taking a picture of something or if they're sitting in a spot that another Sim needs to sit in -- like if they're sitting on the chair in front of the computer to read a book and another Sim wants to use the computer -- that I'll bother with moving them.

THAT said, though: It seems that it's working better with having Cyjon's Smarter Chairs loading after Mog's "Watch TV from anywhere" mod. I've not played too many households since loading up my game, but in those that I've played, it seems to work that a Sim will choose the closest chair to the bookcase to read in and a TV-watcher will preferably choose a seat directly facing the TV (which is unmodded behavior), but if those are filled, they'll choose the next-closest including diagonally placed ones. So, it seems like with this arrangement both mods are working as intended. I think. I don't want to say for sure because I've only played three different households so far, but it seems to be the case...

Is it? Makes me feel better about all my spelling mistakes.

Yup, the way it's spelled is one of the things that makes it hard. Most languages are spelled phonetically, at least mostly, which makes spelling very easy to learn, once you know your alphabet. Or in those that aren't mostly spelled phonetically there are usually consistent rules about how things are spelled, at least. English? Not. No, in English we have things like "i before e"...Well, unless it's after the letter "c," in which case it's "e before i"...or if the word has a long "a" sound like "weigh" (which, by the way, is not the same thing as "way" or "whey" even though they're all pronounced the same...um, way and let's not forget that "way" has at least ten different meanings, too, not all of which are even the same part of speech and... Yuck. Just yuck. Awful, idiotic language. I vote we change the internet language to Simlish. I mean, it's gotta make more sense because it can hardly make less sense.

Speaking as a good speller - once you grasp that English is an amalgam of every language it ever came into contact with, it gets a lot easier to deal with; and it makes learning to spell in a lot of foreign languages nearly effortless, because you've already learned a lot of the spelling conventions of German, French, Spanish, Algonquin, etc. You pretty much have to change alphabets before it gets challenging. This is one reason English has become the lingua franca - it's basically a trade language anyway, and the near-absence of grammar in the sense that, say, a German understands the term makes it a lot easier to learn than languages that are more consistent.

Look how easy it is to understand most people on here who are apologizing for their bad English all the time. Because English's grammar is so weak compared to other languages, it's hard to make an error that renders a sentence into nonsense. English speakers puzzle out meanings in the absence of signposts every time we communicate. It's not a big deal.

I dunno, I tend to think most non-native English speakers can speak it well enough to be understood because, in most countries where English is not the "mother tongue," kids are forced to learn it in school, and doing so is usually started in the early elementary grades. By the time they're old enough to be using forums on the internet, yep, they can communicate in it pretty well, at least in written form. (It's usually easier to communicate and be understood in written form in a language that you have not completely mastered.) Plus, there are online translators now, too. They're far from perfect, but they will allow the user to get their general point across to a native speaker. (But probably not so much to a non-native speaker whose own grasp of the language isn't strong.) That doesn't mean that it's an "easy" language to learn at all. It's quite widely acknowledged that English is one of the more difficult languages to learn. Anyway, we really can't say that just because "X" number of people speak it well enough to be understood on the internet that it's an easy language to learn. It isn't.

Personally, I think that once you know one Romance language, you can learn others more easily because they all have the same basic format; it's "just" a matter of learning the vocabulary...which often has commonalities between those languages, too. But English isn't a Romance language. It's also not fully Germanic (although it is most closely related to those languages), and doesn't have much Slavic in it at all (aside from the fact that English has some Greek to it, from which the Slavic languages sprang), and those are the other main linguistic branches spoken in the West. It is, as you said, an amalgam of many things, from Yiddish to bits of Native American languages. That doesn't make it necessarily easier to learn, but it does mean that it shares some things in common with a wider variety of languages, yes. Because of that, more people might have a chance of getting a foothold in the language, so to speak, but to learn all of its complexities, especially where the language is greatly different than one's native one, and then to learn how to use the language properly is still very difficult. Heck, using it properly is difficult for native speakers, let alone non-native ones.

I've noticed much of the time the non-native English speakers have far better grammar than native speakers. I think that's because people who are used to English get lazy with it.

Well, we aren't really taught grammar, are we? Only serious language nerds know about things like subjunctives, nominatives, and direct vs. indirect objects. English speakers don't know much about the structure of language, only about making themselves understood and 'sounding right.' "It's me" is understandable and sounds right; "It's I" sounds wrong and stops understanding in its tracks; so the fact that "It's me" is incorrect (Since both pronouns refer to the subject of the sentence they should both be nominative, but "me" is accusative) doesn't matter - any reasonable person will say "it's me."

In order to speak and be understood in German, you do in fact have to understand something about the structure of sentences, because different parts of speech change the forms of words far more radically than English has done for years. So German speakers, once they get over the sense of bungee-jumping through a paragraph, find it a lot more intuitive to break down an English sentence than an English speaker does a German. Most English speakers are never introduced to grammatical concepts till they have to learn a foreign language - and we tend to revolt from it. Speaking isn't supposed to be this hard! There shouldn't be this much conscious effort involved!

I'm afraid English speakers, especially American ones, are really obnoxious about learning foreign languages. But I don't believe English would've taken over the internet as it has just on that basis, if English weren't so good at what it does. At one extreme, you have people like an office manager I used to have, whose speech was almost word salad - a jumble of clauses, references, and non-sequiters that should have been incomprehensible. Seriously, she'd come in and say something like "So you know when she was looking and I was - and it has my - so I went - and now I don't -" And I'd hand her the stapler she put down absentmindedly in my office three days ago which had gotten shoved behind a pile of files and I hadn't thought about it since. I had the context and I understood her. (And she was smart - any new equipment or programs that came in, she'd figure out in an afternoon, no training classes. But she was wildly inarticulate.) And at the other end, you have all these elegant users invoking three or four different meanings at once with a single well-turned phrase; and puns; and precise nuances because laughing and giggling and snorting and chuckling and chortling and ROFLMAO are all the same thing but they're all different; and if we don't have the exact word we need? Let's mash together two words and now we've got one; or the Chinese have a word for that let's use that one. Whatever you need to communicate, English can do it.

I love English. It's like a complex character in a novel - difficult, yes, but all the more beautiful and somehow accessible for all that.

I think the tenses and the spelling in English are probably confusing to those who have to learn the language as adults - and we have been taught English since the first day in primary school, literature, language, spelling, grammer, all of it. Yet I believe the best way to learn English is to read as much as you can (even though one can get confused between American and British writers). Far from having mastered the language, I think I can handle it reasonably well, but I will put that down to reading three to four novels a week since I celebrated my 10th birthday, rather than to learning grammar and spelling rules.

Yeah, and therein lies part of the difficulty for non-native speakers, I think. Most languages are far more rule-bound than English is. (Or rather, than is English. ) One might think that that would make learning English easier for a non-native speaker, but I tend to think that the opposite might actually be true. (Although we'd need some non-natives to weigh in. Maybe Swedes since they speak English so damn well...although they do have an advantage since Swedish is very similar to English, having lots of common roots. Paging @gummilutt! ) Perhaps English's very flexibility is instead confusing to those who are more used to an inflexible language, in that perhaps they keep looking for rules to help them sort things out and make things comprehensible, but those rules just don't exist.

Honestly, I think US Americans, especially, have trouble with other language more because schools don't start teachin' them-there furrin' languages until middle school, if at all...although in some places -- places with higher concentrations of Spanish-speakers -- Spanish is started earlier, at least. Most Canadians can speak at least passable French because they have a whole officially-French-speaking province, and French (or English, for those who speak French at home) is started early up there, so I'm told by Canadian buds of mine, so it IS possible for multiple languages to be taught effectively to native English-speakers, if you start early enough. For me, I was mostly educated by a very old school private tutor (a nun, no less; she was in her 70s), so not only did I get cracked across the knuckles with a ruler a lot, but I also spent endless hours diagramming sentences (a lost art; I actually enjoyed doing it because it was like a puzzle), and I also started learning both Italian and German when I was 6, because of an interest in music and opera. I picked up both fairly easily because I was started young AND because I *gasp* understood grammar. You start in your teens, like most American schools do with other languages, and...Yeah, it's a hell of a lot harder. (And no, schools don't teach English adequately, either, which doesn't help; my son went to public school, and *I* had to teach him proper English. Hell, I wanted to go in and teach his teachers proper English. )

And, even if English was the easiest language in the world to learn to speak, it's still a mess to learn to spell, precisely because it's picked up phonemes and the "proper" way to spell them from a billion other languages. Give me Welsh or Russian any day! With English, there's very little rhyme or reason when it comes to spelling, so it's often down to just rote memorization of the spelling of thousands of words...although I suppose there's an element of memorization to all languages. The ones that are more gendered than English come to mind, although with that, there are rules that make it fairly easy to figure out and to remember. Not so much with spelling in English.

Anyway, once again I dragged a thread off topic (It's all Jo's fault ), but...Yes, I like English and I can be really, really nerdy about it...but I still think it's an awful and diabolical language. And now I really do need to get my butt in bed.

I am the one who learned English when I was over 35 years old. My daughter taught me some grammar so I am not facing mud. Spelling is still a thing what I prefer to avoid. Reading English texts takes eternity, so I prefer not to read long texts even if I understand everything. For watching films I download subtitres, so I can read and understand what they are talking. There is not so much people to practice verbal English where I live.
But I can communicate with people on forums and I think it is essential.

I am non-English, iCad

Lol iCad. Right now I am going through the Barton Reading system with my daughter who has dyslexia, and yes while there is weirdness from the various languages it's also been very interesting some of the rules we are both learning. I had never really given a thought to why a word should have a K or instead a CK I just remembered that they did but come to find there is a rule for it. I think most of us just remember words. I had no idea about why we spelled some words the way we do and now I am finding out that there is some method to the madness.

Edit: Okay so there is a whole other page of posts here on English that I did not see.

My sim just got a want to see the ghost of the NPC Penguin. Is this just a random want or a sign of something bad?

That is not good. Check your object.packages for any change in date.http://simswiki.info/wiki.php%3Ftit..._file_Read-Only

I checked all the dates in the object.packages and the only date that was different was with OFB which was February 6th and not May 25th so I guess that's not the reason for that weird want... I hope this doesn't mean I have to uninstall my game

When I was poking through allmenus for screenshot purposes, I found Flirt > Text Message. Does anyone know what that is?

Tuula, if there is an issue you might be able to replace your object.package with the one on the disk without a reinstall. However you need to also look at why, since it's quite hard to do things to your installation files. If you are on the UC try going into origin, right click and do repair/fix.

ihatemandatoryregister, I've never seen that, a mod perhaps?

As I understand it, that was something that Maxis put into the game, but never finished. Chris Hatch made a mod that enables the option. You can get it at a place I'm not sure we're allowed to mention by name.

Which section of buy mode are room dividers in?

So I came late to the English party . . . but my mother's field is linguistics. The kids joke that she's the "Grammar Gramma."
"English is what you get when Norman knights try to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids."
"English doesn't borrow words from other languages, it follows them down dark alleys, mugs them, and riffles their pockets for vocabulary."

I don't know the origin of either.

And I'll just leave this here for all y'all, so as to aid in your spelling efforts--read it out loud if you can, or at least without beverage! http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

The opening stanza:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

Omglo, if you mean the little boundaries like The Great Divide, those are build objects, under fences.

If you mean screens, those are in deco, but I don't remember whether they're Statuary or Misc.

Where are the BV fire pits found in Buy Mode?

Party, maybe?

Lightning/Miscellaneous?
Decoration/Miscellaneous?
One of them, if I remember.


It is the Slavic writing system, the Cyrillic writing, that sprung from the Greek, not the Slavic language. That sprung from the same source as (for example) Greek, Latin, the Iranian languages and the language where German, English and Dutch came from -- the (reconstructed, never attested) Proto-Indo-European language Just to be correct. Interestingly, Russian has some words that sounds a lot like the English versions - tri/three, menya/mine, dva/two, kapitan/captain.

I believe it's called the Cyrillic alphabet because it was invented by Saint Cyril, a Byzantine missionary from Constantinople who ventured forth to convert the pagan Slavs.

What about those Simlish words that sound like English ones? Why do women keep saying "Arse to Tiggy"? What have they got against hedgehogs?

I used this guide http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Objects.package and I replaced the object.packages of my latest SP and EP. Then I patched my game again and I noticed that when I'd installed The Sims 2 to this computer a few years ago I apparently had forgotten to patch OFB Others were patched correctly so I guess you can blame that for at least some of the corruption... I also made all of the object.package files to read only so hopefully I can avoid corruption a little bit better now in my new neighborhoods.

But I've come to the conclusion that it's better to restart this current neighborhood now before it becomes unplayable I'd planned to restart it anyway but I thought I could squeeze in a generation or two before it'd become too corrupted to play. I never thought that those very bad corruption signs would start coming so soon. I've only been playing this neighborhood for less than an year and the oldest of gen three kids just aged up to teens

This brings me to another question probably a very silly one but I just want to be sure Once I've created the new neighborhood for my sims and the clones of my old sims are living happily and corrupt free there how do I remove the cloned sims appearance from the CAS as I don't want to clutter it with clones that I'll probably never use again? Do I remove the heads straight from CAS or Body Shop or do I need to manually remove the files from the SavedSims folder?

Thank you for all the help! I've been playing The Sims 2 since 2010 but I still think of myself as a noob when it comes to all of this techy stuff of playing

Tuula, if your hood is still playable, play on (make the clones and what what what, yes) - you say you have signs of corruption, I know, but I have played mine for four and a half years. (Granted that it was completely gone one day and that made me very unhappy, since I did not know about things like corruption back then).

It may depend on how severe your corruption signs are, I know, but to let a hood go is not an easy thing. ( Example : My Ottomai twins not only grew up, they went to Uni, got married, had children and became grandparents, (and me completely unaware that Peter does not show as their father - I just thought all of them were related to a random townie). I did not know anything about corruption back then and I just kept on playing. Corrupted or not, that hood was my all time favourite one. More than a hundred families before it did the into space thing. So if you think you can squeeze in another generation, I'd say: Go for it. In the meantime you could start preparing your new hood.

Does anyone know if Paladin's Vocational Training Controller works on apartment lots?

And on that note: Can I change dorms to apartments the same way, I change community lots to residential? (I know it's not the same codes, but hopefully you get what I mean.)

Just curious, what scenario are you playing where you need the vocational training controller on an apartment lot?

So I want some of my YA sims staying in the neighborhood to have 2 years of community college. However, I wanted to try something other than sending them off to class. I realized I could use Paladin's vocational training to give them enough skills/badges for the future.

RoseHill9991's City University Campus Lot (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=309673) would serve me well for both nearby apartments for my attending YAs and a good place for them to go for classes! I would have to make some changes to the lot, but it could work.

That is a super cool lot! Ok I see now what you are trying to do. I know that I can put the controller on community and residential but never tried apartment. My hood's community college is my own residential lot kind of like the one you linked being self-contained but instead of it being apartment doors, I just used the dormitory doors. The unclaimed rooms didn't fill in with NPCS once I started playing but it made it so the door was 'claimable' by my college sims.

I would just go ahead and try it and see if it works if no one comes with an answer. I don't think it will do anything bad to your game.

So, I removed all of the Maxis/EA lots from my lot bin, because I ended up with tons of lots in there and it was taking ages to load and scrolling through to try to find the lot that I was after was a nightmare, and I never used them anyway. But now I'd like to use the Family Farmhouse in my current 'hood. How can I get it back in my lot bin?

Thanks. I meant the screens.

Are you asking about the octopus? If so, they're craftables. Your Sim can make them on the toy bench they have a high enough skill level, or you can download a buyable.

Seems rather a roundabout method, but creating a second The Sims 2 folder and renaming your current one to something else essentially launches a "new" game, with the lot bin full of all the Maxis houses. Place the Family Farmhouse, package it to a file, then rename the new folder and switch your old game back to The Sims 2. Install the file you just created, and the Family Farmhouse should be in the bin in your old game, ready and waiting.

Here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=1401134 post 3, it's how I got Brandi's trailer. Well I think it should work on bin lots also, Brandi Trailer wasn't a bin lot.

Thank you both! :-)

Page received, prepare for babbling.



You may be right that things like similar roots help, I haven't really thought of it. There are three main reasons why I'd say we are generally good at English.
1. English is a part of the school curriculum from day one. From the age of 7, you'll have classes. At that age it's mostly silly stuff like songs reciting names of colors and counting to 10, but starting early is important, as you said.
2. We don't do voice overs. Disney/Pixar movies and kids shows have voice overs, since small children can't read subtitles or speak English yet, but anything for teens/adults is in the original language with subtitles (whether English or not). I think this is really important. Not only does it expose you to the language constantly, it also gives a reason and an incentive to learn.
3. Tiny nation and "boring" climate. There are roughly 9,8 million Swedes, with a large portion of immigrants. That's our entire population. Unlike the French- or Spanish-speaking people, we can't do that whole "My language is the best and it should dominate the world", because we've got a population equivalent of the city of New York. You can be stubborn all you like and only speak your own language, but good luck with that. And because of the climate a lot of people prefer to do vacations abroad. You could get by with Swedish if you stick to the tourist traps in Marbella and Gran Canaria, but if you actually want to enjoy your vacation or go somewhere interesting, you'd better learn some English.

Based on the time I spent in Spain, I also imagine there's a spiral effect. Being good at English in general results in English teachers who are good at English, and therefore teach it well. I'm sure Spain has lots of great English teachers, but the ones my friends had were pretty sad. It took me about a year to convince my boyfriend that W is not pronounced with a G in front ("gwork"), and four years was not enough to convince him words starting with S don't have an E pronounced before the S ("espirit"). He was taught in school that they do, along with a whole heap of other "Say what now?"-stuff. How would someone learn if the teachers teach you things that aren't true?

As for English being hard or difficult to learn, I wouldn't know. I never really tried to learn. Between an aunt who married an Englishman and frequent trips to the UK, and school, learning was mostly play and little effort.



I had a high school teacher that taught Swedish (a strange mix of grammar, writing and literature history) and Italian, and he argued that speaking a language is memorizing every possible sentence. Not learning rules on how to structure a sentence properly and grammar, just memorizing random sentences endlessly. I haven't figured out yet if I think that's madness or genius



It sure is a very special language. It really can communicate anything, in all kinds of different ways. I've been fortunate enough to speak three languages well, and English is by far my favorite. There are so many things I can only say in English, because saying them in Swedish or Spanish would just sound silly.

I have a problem that ive tried to do 50/50 on but i couldnt find the mod that i was looking for. Whenever my sims adopt a pet the next day or so they roll a want to be friends with that pet as if the pet is a sim. It only happens when the has been adopted through the normal channels and ive had pretty much from day dot.

I've had a lot of sims want to become friends with their pets, and I'm pretty sure it's normal game behaviour. I think it's triggered mostly by adopting an animal, though I have had one or two popularity sims get the want after playing with a stray for a while. After becoming friends with their new pet, the sim often then rolls a want to become master of the animal - instead of wanting to become best friends, as they do with human sims.

Does Delphy's Download Organiser remove unused meshes after a scan? In particular, hair meshes.

Yes, you can, but if it's already occupied with dormies, things might get screwed up because dormies are issued a "key" to the dorm they occupy. (That's why the same ones show up if you move out all your playable(s) and then subsequently move in new ones.) Changing the zoning on a dorm that already has such keys assigned to it would...probably not be a good thing. Apartments are sometimes buggy enough as is. If you have an unplayed copy of the dorm you're talking about, I'd covert that. But otherwise yes, assuming that all the other rules for apartment buildings are followed, it should work so long as you switch out the dorm doors for apartment ones. Your playables are likely to roll up endless wants for toilets and fridges and stuff, unless those things are included in their individual apartments. You can use these paintings I made to take care of that: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=549880

@MikeJMW55
Do you mean that "Water Wiggler" toy? (Looks like an octopus, squirts water?) If so, then, unless you have a buyable version of it, that isn't in the buy mode catalog. It's a toy that can only be made on the toymaking bench and only by Sims who have a gold toymaking badge. But, like I said, there are buyable versions out there. They might even be here on MTS. I don't have them, so I don't know for sure.

EDIT @gummilutt:
*dies laughing over notion that Swedes speak English well because their climate sucks* But, you know, it makes an odd sort of sense, really. Most people who travel a lot do try to learn at least a little of the local language where they're going, and if Swedes travel a lot to get away from their country's climate and since English is often a common language amongst people in Europe because it's taught early there if it isn't the native tongue, then... But still. I didn't know you had a Spanish BF, though. My hubby is half-Mexican (His mama is Mexican; his dad was of Irish descent), and he speaks a lot of "Spanglish" sometimes and a lot of plain old Spanish when he's pissed off. (Like Desi Arnaz in "I Love Lucy;" it's hysterical and I have to fight myself not to laugh.) Also, my ranch foreman is from Ecuador, so, yeah, lots of Spanish floating around here, and I know what you mean about those pronunciations. Although I believe the Spanish spoken in Latin America is somewhat different than that spoken in Spain itself. My foreman is completely self-taught when it comes to English, so sometimes he comes up with...interesting...things.

Doesn't it? I actually think a lot of how we are and how our nation is built is in part explained by the weather. That whole socialism help each other makes a lot of sense in a place where you'll have a hard time surviving in your own. It's only been about 100 years since Sweden went from the spread out farms poverty to industry and cities. Recent enough that the people who built the foundations of our political system had lived or had parents that lived in that era.



Sure did! Dated him 4,5 years, and all visits combined I spent about a year in Spain. Ended up learning Spanish so I could talk to his mother, and not be so excluded in family gatherings. I feel very lucky to have gotten to spend so much time in another country, and learned a new language (although it's very bad now that I no longer use it regularly).

That does sound hysterical. Especially if it's Mexican Spanish, that dialect just sounds funny to me. Kind of like Norweigan I would have thought that was just a thing they did in movies.

Spanish in Latin America and Spain is the same as Britain and the UK. Same language, but the choice of words varies to the point where you may have trouble understanding because they use words you aren't familiar with. I'd say it's a bit worse than US-UK situation since american movies and television series are so widespread. One of my cousins is married to a woman from Chile, and we've given up on trying to talk in Spanish because between all the explaining we never got anything said.

Quick question about the clean Maxis neighbourhood templates:

By installing the cleaned versions, would I be able to add back families from a previous back up? Eg. The BLARGHs from Maxis' Belladonna Cove in to a clean version of BC?

Only if you extract them with SimPE then clone them and then you can remake them as they were in your old hood.
Make sure to write down all there states and if you want there memories then you need to write them down to.

The best and safe way of doing it. http://pixel-trade.livejournal.com/16091.html

Yes but its not the normal pet friend want. They think the pet is a sim like them NOT a pet.

I have some questions for you guys. Mostly just ruminations, but curious for your thoughts.

I was playing the Shaw family when Stella showed up for a visit. She was super pregnant, and stayed for quite a while. Meanwhile, one of the Shaw's cooked up some Cheesecake, to satisfy a want.
I thought nothing of it. UNTIL, that is, Stella sat down to eat Cheesecake, with the family.

Now, I know Cheesecake increases the *chance* of a sim having twins - but does that also apply to uncontrolled sims?

If I opened a restaurant and fed every passing pregnant sim cheesecake, would I have a twin-demic?


Also, as an extra thought: why do Sims not close the grill when they're done with it?

Yes, they will all have twins, if the lot has room for them. The only time cheesecake doesn't make twins is when the baby is the 8th humaniform sim on the lot. Doesn't matter where they live. Kitty Hawkins cheesecaked two of her pregnant daughters and got four grandbabies out of the deal, even though only one of the daughters lived with her.

Thanks. Good to know. *Note to self: No Cheesecake Bakery*

@marka93 Coolio, thanks
Just incase I mess up, I won't be using the BLARGHs (I love them too much)

You won't mess them up. I promise. The procedure's simple and produces a brand new set of Blarghs.

Just in case, there's a hack by TJ which allows a random chance to get twins after eating cheesecake: http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php?topic=16.0
I have a business where my sims sells grilled cheese sandwiches and cheesecake and I was a bit tired of having twins in my hood. I'm not saying that all of them are cheesecake twins though.

Oh, I definitely don't mind the twins. It's her first pregnancy, so I think it's all right. I just realized, despite having played this game since it was released, I'd never come across this particular Cheesecake situation before.

I'm amazed, sometimes, I still manage to uncover new aspects and situations after all this time.

You can also have a hood full of twins without any mods and where the eating of cheesecake has been declared illegal by the supreme ruler (that is me)

The last time I tried using Delphy's Download Organiser to remove a hair mesh, I saw quite a few meshes in a list that I really wouldn't want to delete. I'm sure the unwanted mesh I was looking for was in there somewhere, but with some hair, it's pretty hard to tell the name of the original mesh.

However, it's quite possible I'm doing it wrong. I tried it a couple of times and gave up.

Hi

I have this question up in another forum but i thought I can ask it here as well. Please do exuse me if this questions have alredy being answered. If you do think that the question is silly, please do not comment on that. I just been playing Uni for a short period of time so I do not know everything.

I just had a few questions about the shower that came whit the Uni EP. I did not try this out beause I thought that maybe there would be some sort of conflict in the game code if I did.

Q1. Is it possible to make a mixed shower (there both genders shower together instead of having the sections separated)?
Q2. Can the shower be used on a residential lot?

I don't know about the mixed showering (just try it, I would say), but the UNI shower can be used at residential lots too.