Yeah, can't imagine why it would have crashed, total mystery



It's ok, the second ceremony turned out much better. The bride and groom had these autonomous actions when they met at the altar, which I thought was super cute and made the reboot totally worth it:

I've just lost over an hour and a half's typing in a post I was making about SelfSims in the "Sims 2 Thoughts" thread. I know I should keep saving my progress, like I should when I'm playing The Sims, but, when nothing's gone wrong for a while it's easy to lull myself into a false sense of security. I've lost everything except the first sentence. I guess I must have pressed the wrong key. Usually in cases like this on MTS I manage to recover my progress, but nothing is working this time. I guess I'll just have to type it all again.

Before I do so, I probably ought to cook myself some dinner. I wish Andrew was with me. With his high cooking skill, he could cook me something nice while I set about retyping everything. At the very least I'm sure he'd let me cry on his shoulder!

P.S. In his other rôle as my Imaginary Friend, Andrew is with me, and he's letting me cry on his shoulder.

Oh no! I do this often. What I learned helps is to make a new text document on the desktop, and write it all on there. That way, if you accidentally close the browser you still have the post you were trying to make.
I send hugs too, I would hug you if I was there!

That wasn't the end of my problems yesterday. I then spent the best part of two hours customising a house for a couple of Sims to move into, and, when I went back to Neighbourhood View, the house wasn't there at all. I feel I should have been aware of this problem, because it has happened to me before, but it was a good few years ago.

The Maxis base game Ranch Retreat is possibly my favourite Maxis house. With a price tag under §11K, it is well within the reach of families just out of CAS, and it has two decent sized bedrooms, so it will comfortably sleep a family of four, even without any alteration. So I sometimes use it as the basis for further development. Anyway I wanted a slightly bigger version of it, with at least three double bedrooms, a second bathroom, because all my Sims entertain a lot, and toilet queues are often a problem after meals. I wanted a design that I wanted to reuse (usually tweaked a bit every time I use it). So instead of building it in situ in Baldrair Bluffs, the 'hood I'm currently playing, I built it in Aedicia, my Simless building 'hood. When I'd finished it to about the same condition as the Maxis original (plumbing, kitchen counters, bathroom fittings, plus basic lighting -- which I think is missing in the original!), I saved it to the lot bin. I then placed a copy of it back where I'd just taken it from. Then I opened Baldrair Bluffs, took my new house from the lot bin, placed it on a corner site on low lying ground a little bit back from the north bank of the river, and started editing it. A couple of hours later, I had it more or less how I wanted it, so I saved it, and went back to Neighbourhood View, and my new lot was nowhere to be seen!! Well, it was still in the Lot Bin, but it wasn't in the the Neighbourhood at all!

This really shouldn't have surprised me, because the same thing happened nearly ten years ago, when I was developing New Desconia. I made a house (also based on the Ranch Retreat -- this time squeezed into a 2x1 lot) in Aedicia, then as now my Sim-free building 'hood, and then copied it to New Desconia via the Lot Bin. Like yesterday, I edited it for a while, only to find when I saved it, that it wasn't there after all. The solution (or at least a workaround) is to quit the game and restart it. I did that ten years ago, and I did it again yesterday. But of course on both occasions I had to redo all the work I'd just done. When I finished yesterday, I immediately moved my Sims in and started to play. I played them for four Sim Days, saving and restarting several times, without any problems, so I have every confidence now that their house is now here to stay. By the way, the one in New Desconia that I remade in the same way ten years ago is still OK. I was playing it earlier this year, and the Sim who lives there is still doing fine. His name is Michael, and he sends you all his greetings.I've posted a couple of pictures of some of things my new Sims (Liana Connell and her daughter Jennifer) have got up to, in the Random Pictures thread here. I also intend to post pictures of the house itself in the Houses and Landscaping thread shortly. I'll add a link here when I've done that.

When I was setting up Riverbreeze, I accidentally left SimPE open while launching the game. This resulted in putting down a house and having it disappear when I went back to neighbourhood. I ended up deleting and restarting (I hadn't done much aside from picking out the terrain, thankfully).

I've left SimPE open so many times with the game open that I cannot understand how something hasn't gone wrong. Yet.
I open SimPE, I do something there, I forget about it, I open TS2, then when I'm finished playing I close it, and proceed to stare at the SimPE window which was open all this time.

I keep Sim PE open, but not the neighborhood loaded into it. It is usually Sim Pe who fails to load stuff from locked files (strings, bhavs), not the other way around. I keep editing the neighborhood with Sim Pe to a minimum for things that can't be edited from within the game.

I quite often find that I put a lot into the lot bin and then it seems to disappear - I think they are just hard to find, though, because I do usually find them if I take a deep breath and take a break and come back and look carefully at them one by one. I do find the lot bin frustrating that you can't sort it by date and it seems to shuffle houses into random order.

I'm trying to have Leod McGreggor run a farmstand in my latest uberhood, and it really makes me annoyed that Riverblossom Hills, the neighborhood introduced in Seasons, by default makes it literally impossible to do any gardening for HALF THE YEAR unless your sim shells out for a greenhouse. Leod can't afford that! So Leod just... can't run his business half the time. Yes, I know you can change the seasons per neighborhood, but the seasonal setup also makes Riverblossom Hills unique, so I'm not sure whether to change it or not...

As a Midwesterner that's just realism.

What I think a lot of people do in Real Life in that sort of situation, is to take a temporary job at the times of year when they can't work on the farm, then give up the job when they're able to farm again. This gives a year-round income, and any surplus money earned in their job might be invested in the farm. I don't have Seasons myself, but I think it should be possible for your Sims to replicate this pattern of seasonal work.

Indeed; here in Germany, there are many gelato shops traditionally run by Italian immigrants. During the hotter months they do a roaring trade. During the winter, the shops close and the owners often used to return to Italy to spend time with their families, especially over Christmas.

These days they sometimes open as gingerbread-themed shops in the autumn and winter. Take a break from Christmas Eve until February, then open again as gelato sellers.

Hosting party scenario - *surreptitiously hides fridge in locked room*.

Flipping it backwards also works, though Sims tend to throw pathfinding fits.

Isn't Nouk's classic curly-tail hair awesome though!

Party's all set to go on my current lot, with the fridge chilling outside in the snow in an inaccessible garden. But I'll remember the flipped fridge for next time!

Landlords in this game. For the supposed sin of asking for a repair, Sanjay Ramaswami's landlady proceeded to hang around in the apartment for over an hour repeatedly queueing up 'poke' actions. I used Inge's cat to zap her off the lot.

I wonder if the visitor controller could keep landlords off the property, too?

Because they are annoying, both in the game and real life. No need to see them every day in either case..

But then the plumbing would remain broken! The game doesn't let you call the repairman in an apartment.

Possibly why I don't want apartments in my game! I don't want my Sims having to pay rent all their lives to some parasitic landlord, for a property that will never be theirs. Especially with my "Aging off" playstyle, they'd probably spend much more in rent over their lifetime, than they would to buy a similar property outright.

Just got to say, I love this post.

I think that the idea is that they can afford to rent long before they can afford their own house.

If one plays a vanilla game, (without the 'No20khandouts), most pixels will be able to afford a very basic house in the game. Especially if one is prone to hitting the cheat window and putting in the code to increase their funds)

It's far different from real life right now where no matter how long you rent you will never be able to afford a house in the US now..and other places, too.

Amusingly, I used to be one of those players, I would cheat money and I would cheat needs (Like seriously, you ate 3 meals and your hunger bar is only half full?!) and after a while it just got a bit... meh.

So with my current hood I decided I'm not going to cheat money, and I'm not going to cheat motives with one exception:
I still cheat the energy motive, but in reverse. Otherwise my pixels almost always have a full energy bar at night and won't let me send them to bed, so I drain their energy bars at around 1am.

Beyond that? No cheats for those guys this time around. If it's not a regular feature of the game, they don't get the benefit. (For example, genie lamp is acceptable, as this falls into the standard in-game gameplay ways, where as motherloader is not.)

It actually seems to have made the game more interesting, as now I actually have to tell them to do things. Though, they do tend to spend most of the day eating just to maintain that motive, very little time for anything else.