Q: I've came across some S2 pictures where cars are parked on the road.
How one can achieve that?

If it's a community lot that a playable Sim visited in their own car, it's just left on the road where the Taxi would stop while they're on the lot (parking enforcement in SimCity is evidently pretty lax)

You can place cars pretty much however you want using various build/buy placement cheats, (look at my Parking Lots upload for an idea what I mean) although if they're not on a proper residential driveway, they're not usable... just really expensive decorations, at that point.

Ask ICAD, though - she recently devised a usable way to park on the street for a specific neighborhood she was designing.

The thing is, though, that these two sims were at 100/100 or very close to it, as I had been playing both their households quite recently. I don't tend to let relationships I, as the player, care about decay very much. What happened, which I seem very bad at explaining, was that there were three sims involved: Sim A (Popularity), Sim B (Family), and Sim C (Knowledge). (Sim C is Sim B's sister.) Sims A and B only have 1LB, and Sims A and C actually have negative LB. All thee of these sims were over at another household while I was playing that household, so I was not in control of any of their actions. Sim A first flirted (I assume flirt, as I didn't actually see it happen, but neither got a "First Kiss" memory popping up) with Sim B who promptly fell in Crush and Love at the same time. That was fine, though surprising (and a little disappointing, as I prefer couples to have at least 2LB). But then Sim A went and flirted with Sim C (who accepted it, despite the negative LB) and Sim B freaked the hell out and slapped him (as sims tend to do). That was what caused the loss of the BFF status.

Yes, I'm sure I do tend to overreact "slightly" sometimes when something like this happens in my game. As I said in my initial post about this, I feel very protective of Sim B, and I don't want to see him hurt.


I was controlling another household, yes (one with a toddler, so I had to keep my attention on him a lot). These sims all showed up after school on the same day (one came home on the buss with the teen in the current household, and the other two were walk-byes I had her greet).


The aspirations were Popularity (Sim A, the serial flirt), Family (Sim B, the one who fell in crush/love then freaked out), and Knowledge (Sim C, Sim B's Sister, the one Sim A flirted with after getting Sim B to fall in crush/love).


The sims accepting the flirts in this case were Family and Knowledge, respectively. No Romance sims were involved; none of my playables in the entire hood are Romance (not even as a secondary aspiration).


Well, that's somewhat...distressing? I mean, I've been playing this game off and on for over a decade now (I think), and I've never see anything like this before. I've seen sims who didn't know or like each other make enemies from random fights on community lots, but I've never seen a sim fall in love and then get their heart broken because their BFF flirted first with them and then immediately with someone else! (Something I'd expect from a Romance sim, sure, but not a Popularity one!? lol) I've never seen anything even remotely like this.

But, okay, fine, I mean I've never seen a lot of things in this game...I've never seen a ghost scare someone to death, and I've never seen a satellite fall on someone's head. I've never even seen a Social Bunny. So obviously, no matter how well I think I know the game or how many hours I've spent playing, there's always going to be something I just haven't seen. But the question, then, and maybe this really does count as a stupid question, is...how to I stop it? I don't want my sims to go randomly flirting with their BFFs and their BFFs' sisters and breaking hearts all over. That's sort of the main reason I don't have any Romance sims in this hood! Would getting one or all of these sims into committed relationships help?

Also, and this really is a "stupid" question, I guess...what all even counts as romantic interactions? (Maybe this is something I could find listed on a wiki?) I know I was blindsided in the past with "throw food" being romantic. As many people said, it could be my sims were doing romantic interactions I didn't see...and that's very possible; it's also possible I saw the interactions and simply didn't realize they were romantic!

I'd say TOO many interactions are or can be treated as romantic actions. I do not really appreciate this. It seems that the more 2 sims get along, the more romantic whatever action will become. One thing I like about sims 3 is that all friendly interactions will be listed under Friendy, and all romantic ones, under Romantic. On a sim's pie menu. Now that is sorting I like.

These are teens, right? You can't expect old heads on young shoulders. So the Popularity sim just learned to flirt and overdid it. It could happen to anyone. They can work it out - in fact I bet when you play them you'll get wants to apologize, talk to, etc. They'll be BFF again before you know it, stronger than ever and quite possibly an inseparable couple.

Bad chemistry, by the way, doesn't mean repulsion - it means that they've got a mixed set of signals. Probably one or both of them hits a turn-off. When I'm making matches or playing as a Romancer prowling for dates I'll go for bad chemistry over no chemistry, as it's fairly easy to leap from bad chemistry to good chemistry to bumping boots. No chemistry means you want to make friends first and then suddenly you pull out the flirt and they're single-bolting.

I think "throw food" is the only off-the-wall romance trigger. Anything under the "flirt" menu is romantic, obviously. All non-family kisses are; except there's a glitch, fixable with a mod, that makes sims not perceive making out as romantic for jealousy purposes, which can lead to weird situations. All hugs except Friendly ones are romantic. Appreciate/Backrub and Play/tickle are ambiguous cases, in that they don't lead to love and can be used by family members; but they are relatively intimate physical interactions which prime the want trees to advance to the higher-level erotic wants.

This is a soap opera game, so you're more likely to find ways to ramp up the drama than to tone it down, but there's mods for everything and an infinite number of ways to play, so - ask on WCIF and maybe somebody knows something you can use short of friend-zoning through ACR, which seems to work imperfectly and anyway is a huge hunk of complicated mod designed initially to do the opposite of what you want there. Autonomous flirting that disrupts relationships is a standard game hazard, like cow mascots and fires. There's suppressors for them. There may well be suppressors for this, too.

Meanwhile, until you find such a thing, this is an opportunity to learn your way around the mechanics a little better. It's possible, if the sim doing the flirting, has been out looking for partners, that you set him up for it. Any sim who has ever been allowed to romantically interact with more than one person is more likely to pull out autonomous flirting, both with new people and old partners. This is why, in Widespot, it can be easier for old Romance sim Valentine Hart to be faithful to young Family sim Mary Land - during development, to keep things simple, I didn't tell him to have romantic interactions with anyone but his wife and Mary, and not with Mary till after his wife died, so he never had two loves at once and wasn't trained for promiscuity. (I figured players would take care of that once they started playing if they wanted to - it's not as if he didn't roll promiscuous wants, and I set him up to have the potential for a lot of good chemistry.) But for the starting set-up I wanted, Mary needed another lover, so Junior Mann made a pass at her after they were friends, so the Good Girl has two lovers and players are often shocked when they get her committed to one and she goes and flirts with the other, or goes off the deep end for a married guy from the Family bin, or whatever. I increased the likelihood of that behavior when I got her a two-loves-at-once memory. But even flirting multiple people without getting that memory increases the chance of autonomous flirtatious behavior. Which is one of the things that makes the AI so easy to read as humanlike characters.

Yeah, sometimes it jars with your expectations. But if nothing ever does that, you never get surprised, and what fun is that? The better you understand what's happening, the easier it will be to roll with the surprises and set yourself up for the kinds of surprises you prefer.

I actually exited the lot without saving, so none of this actually "happened" anymore.


Nope, haha; one is turned off by Vampirism and the other by Cologne. (I'm generally quite boring when choosing turn offs in that, unless I'm specifically trying to prevent two specific sims from having 3LB, I'll choose something very unlikely to ever show up - I currently have five sims in this hood turned off by Zombiism! And four by Cologne. And, uh, yes, I do have a spreadsheet with that info, so that's why I know...)


Okay, wow, I did not know that. I tend to think of those interactions as "safe" since as you said, they can be used between family members!


Yeah, I mean, I was kind of hoping to get all of these teens set up with partners at some point. But all I've had any of them do is "check sim out"...which probably counts? But how else am I supposed to know who anyone has chemistry with? (Also, I tend to overuse this - and "scope room" - as an attempt to re-roll wants.) But the thing is, I've also got a single adult sim in the hood (only one unmarried playable adult, lol; the poor guy) who was in the very first household of sims I moved in who I've been having "check out" literally everyone in hope of finding him a partner (and, of course, in an attempt to re-roll his wants). But the thing is, even though I've let him run around the whole hood unsupervised while I play every other household, he's yet to cause any drama?? He's not a romance sim, of course, but then no one in the whole hood is. So I guess that's why I was so surprised by this business with the teens - but I guess maybe you have a point about teens being a bit more eager and less wise about the whole romance game. I mean, that is true to life for the most part.

I do tend to be a massive control freak when it comes to the Sims (*coughs while surreptitiously kicking the aforementioned spreadsheet under the rug*) (and when "bad" things happen, it tends to stress me out, because then I have to "fix" it which takes time away from "important" things like skill building or regular relationship building/maintenance), so I'm thinking now I probably "should" have planned out the teen couples ahead of time, setting them up to have at least 2-3LB chemistry and all that (like I do when making married couples), but I sort of wanted them to have the freedom to choose for themselves. And look where that led. Sims tend to make terrible life choices!

As Peni said, I recently made a street of houses all with on-street parking. It does have some issues and caveats, but it generally works if you set it up right and don't block the portals for taxis/carpools/school buses and service vehicles for maids and nannies and such, if you use those. See this post on my Tumblr here for a testing report.

To set it up is easy if you have Mootilda's rotatable driveway mod (but can be done without it if you don't; it's far more labor-intensive to turn the driveway piece without that mod, though) and an invisible driveway recolor. The basic process is you turn on moveobjects (So that you can place things on the road), grab a driveway extension piece (Not the one with a dog-leg, the other one) out of the build catalog, turn it so that the arrows point in the direction you want the car to face, and then place it where you want it to go over the road. I also turn off grid-snapping so that I can shift the piece over a bit, so that when a car is sitting on it, it sits right next to the curb instead in the middle of the lane. Then, you make the driveway piece invisible. Then you can place a car on the driveway piece and it will be fully usable, although there will be no animations; it will just teleport on and off the parking space. Like I said, you do have to be a little careful about placement and there might be some trial and error involved to make sure carpools and such can arrive and leave normally, but otherwise it works perfectly fine. If you try it and have any questions, feel free to give me a yell.

Is there any thrid party program, or a plugin that lets you import anim from the game, into milkshape?

It's not a life choice yet. Let me tell you a little story.

So, Trent is a Knowledge sim. With a Romance secondary because of the family he's from. He lives in a duplex next door to Hallie Capp, who grows up into a Family sim and hits his turn-ons, so the boltage is strong. She's best friends with his sister. They go out and are each other's first kiss and are always very cute together. But then Davine Newson, who also hits his turn-ons, follows him home. And Fortune/Knowledge only gets them to double bolts but the girl's in near-constant aspiration failure so he asks her out to cheer her up. And then Tammy Ottomas, who comes home with everybody, flirts with him and that's triple bolts like Hallie and basically he goes all through high school dating all three girls and mostly gets away with it. Mostly. Tammy sees him with Davine and revenge-flirts her little brother Gabriel, and is his first date, and then she and Davine make up, partly orchestrated by Trent's little sister, who is Popularity and wants all her friends to like each other. But Trent's brother Geoff sees Tammy, whom he's friends with, and Gabriel, who he's not friends with, romantic hugging and he's livid. Tammy still likes him, because he refrained from slapping her, but his relationship to her is tanked. And he's straight-up enemies with Gabriel.

Davine goes to college and Trent has a lot of drama going on at home (no longer right next door to Hallie because they moved) but manages to juggle his two remaining girlfriends. He and Tammy go to college a semester behind Davine, who's been too busy getting into the sorority and making up for a teenhood of grinding work and poverty to date anyone, but immediately rolls a want to call Trent. Meanwhile Tammy arrives with a want to get engaged to Trent. But Trent for Reasons is determined to remain unattached. He dates Davine, Tammy, and another playable student, and does some flirting around, with much drama. Tammy and Davine lose and remake friend tags so often it's hard to keep track.

Meanwhile, Hallie is coming home with Geoff or their little sister every. Single. Day. She hangs out with Geoff, who is Family/Romance and going steady with another girl slightly younger than him. They don't flirt or anything, but they're together more often than he is with his steady girlfriend, who is Knowledge and stays home a lot. Hallie goes to college and the first thing I did was throw her and Trent together - and, nothing. They're triple bolts and unattached and attending the same parties and they're best friends and neither of them moves on the other. (I free-range a lot.) But when Geoff arrives at college a year later, and her household is invited over, she walks straight up to him and goes in for a full-on romantic kiss, the very first romantic contact they've ever had. They're engaged and he's moved her into the house he shares with Trent before the end of his first semester.

Gabriel is also moved in. Geoff still hates him. Trent doesn't know why. Gabriel makes no move to resume his relationship with Tammy. And Tammy, against all reason, doubles down on her attempt to land Trent. So I let her. She didn't move out of the sorority till she and Davine made up (again; I think they went from BFF to fighting to BFF again four times over the course of five semesters). She and Hallie were never friends in high school, but they are now. Geoff and Tammy made friends again. The house runs amazingly smoothly. But Geoff's old girlfriend just came to college. And Gabriel just dated both Geoff's mother and his cousin, though he doesn't know that...

This is all a lot more exciting than matching people up ahead of time and sure, there were some "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!@!!" moments in there. There may be more to come. But at the moment I have every reason to believe that Trent/Tammy and Geoff/Hallie will become happy married couples after graduation, that their little sister will be BFF with everybody, and Gabriel...well, who knows? And what is high school without the occasional unwise flirt, the occasional stupid fight over a boy, or the occasional partner switch? And isn't there always one Gabriel out there who just has to go stir things up and help people do stupid things?

custom content.
disabling, moving to out of game, deleting; would those 3 actions have the same effect/effects or different effects?

"rolling the pacifier"
do those characters need to be made playable? or can they be canceled/deleted (before returning to neighborhood)?

Rolling the Pacifier

No; we'd have hideous character bloat if that were so! And you don't have to leave the neighborhood to roll it if you have the FFS lotdebugger, aka "the batbox." The batbox will roll the pacifier for you (and exit to the neighborhood screen without saving, so make sure you save before using it!) a random number of times. It will pop up a little number in the corner that says it has deleted X number of objects - these are the randomized simshells, without character data, that it's called up and dismissed in CAS in order to give your family genetic diversity.

One of the projects Mootilda was working on before she died was a problem with the batbox's randomizer, so pay attention to that little number. She always got a 13 the first time she used the rerandomizer in a test environment, but in actual play most people get different numbers. I remember numbers badly, but I do know I've seen single digit and four digit numbers (yes, it rolled the pacifier over 1,000 times in a few seconds!) She died before getting to the bottom of this as far as I know. If you get first born syndrome even rolling the pacifier with the batbox, you'd do well to roll it more than once, which is a pain. But still less time -consuming than entering CAS.

Have the same effect as long as you delete the cache files after each one you do.

Yes you can canceled/deleted them all you want to in CAS before returning to the hood.

Ah, see, now THAT is an understandable explanation of why you're upset about what happened. Yet, it is still a given that this could have happened with or without TwoJeffs' mods.

Really, as some of us have already tried to explain, sims will occasionally do what they think they need to do to raise their motives. Kissing, Making Out and having WooHoo, for example, are great ways for sims to fill their Fun and Social motives. And if there is one thing most sims are very keen on, it's filling their Fun and Social bars. Sometimes it seems like they are prepared to forget about sleep, food, comfort, bladder or hygiene, but no sim ever ignores opportunities to have fun and social interactions. And they don't see the consequences of such interactions. If it's advertising as fun, they will do it!

Reminds me when I first used the "Throw Food"" - thing. Buggered up two happy marriages that day - and had my first gay couple

Throw food is annoying, it should be under friendship, but no it has to be under flirt. At least now with BO's updated kiss check mod my sims can now kiss friends on the cheek. Also you have to be careful with the phone, ask on a date is right next to something else like call sim, so my married sim accidentally asked another sim out on a date, I had to exit without saving.

I have a mod installed to break up anytime. It's placed smack-dab in the middle of several other options. I hit it once...during a date. Yeah.

Question: I have Pescado's sshack installed. However, I'm still getting messages that the kid shouldn't be left home alone. Is this normal behaviour (and can safely be ignored) or should I troubleshoot? Last time I did a runthrough with HCDU nothing conflicted.

I have the no social worker mod and I don't get that pop up. BTW, this is one of my fav mods. I debated over it for years thinking it was really a little too cheaty. But I love it. I always hire a nanny anyway, but it's nice to know that if she flakes or the parents die, the kid won't go away.

What is Pescado's sshack ?

nm..SS for social services, i presume..but how does it work...

Here:



I prefer it to a no-social-worker hack.

BoilingOil also has a no social worker mod, called Kids & Pets Unattended; the social worker never comes, aside from if you've called about adoption. http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthre...tid=3005&page=5

Just a suggestion if anyone is looking for alternative versions; I'm using BO's and it works well for me.

Edit: If you do still want kids taken away for neglect, then BO's won't work for you. I manually take the kids away from neglectful parents using a teleporter and a foster family.

I used that mod before, but I switched to sshack because I wasn't quite satisfied with it. (not saying it's a bad mod - just that it didn't fit my needs in particular)

My own high school experience? lol I seriously didn't date at all until the summer before grade 12, and now at 35 I'm still quite happily married to that same guy. Obviously, you have a whole lot of fun playing your game your way, and that's awesome! I think it's great that there really are so many different ways to enjoy this game.

[QUOTE=stitching]BoilingOil also has a no social worker mod, called Kids & Pets Unattended; the social worker never comes, aside from if you've called about adoption. http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthre...tid=3005&page=5

That's the one I use.

I am very sorry, @stitching, but I must correct you:

The Social Worker will not come for children being unattended, so much is true. But if your toddlers or children are generally neglected, as in "most motives are in the red for an extended period of time", then she will most definitely show up to take your offspring to a better place. And if your children do extreme poorly in school, she may still show up, too!

I *only* ruled out leaving the kids alone for a bit. Because really, in the unmodded game, if your sim goes to a comm lot to do some shopping, or for whatever other purpose one can come up with, by the time your sim returns, at most 10 to 15 minutes will usually have passed. How can that ever be a problem in this game? Still the game engine wouldn't allow it.
So that's why I saw no problem with making this mod, when someone requested it.