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Random Sim Talk
A few days ago, I found out I could no longer load my Strangetown neighborhood. It'd load for ages (and it usually took less than a minute to do so) until the game crashed and my computer re-started by itself. I tried all the solutions I've read about a million times at MATY and at the Sims Communities: Take your downloads folder: Nope. Take your hacks folder: Nope. Try another neighborhood: Yup, I was able to play the other default neighborhoods, except for Moontown, which also crashed.
I have no idea what happened to Moontown, because I never played it. Of course I'm annoyed for losing it, because it took me a while to set it up, but it's not a big deal. Plus I have a new idea for a "semi-prosperity" neighborhood that'll also allow me to use the Puddings again :). I already started working on this story ^^.
What actually had me upset was losing Strangetown, for it was the home of the Broke Legacy. I knew I'd be able to re-store it because I had clones of my sims at my Box account, but it wouldn't be the same :(.
I asked at the sims 2 community for a link I remembered that has the Maxis lots ready for download. I got my answer quite fast (btw, the site also has the characters from Riverblossom and Desiderata Valley, plus a re-make of the original Pleasantview from The Sims 1) and started to "work".
First, I got rid of a lot of custom content that was bloating my downloads folder. Except for a few Holy Simoly items, I ditched ALL my objects (furniture, accesories, toys, etc.), because they no longer work with Free Time. I only kept some recolors of Maxis items I got from MTS and Piggy Sims.
Next, I dumped most of my custom clothing, and only kept the stuff from Migamoo, Fanseelamb, HP, Decorgal, Cloudlessnights and Simsboutique, plus a couple gowns from Bruno and Pronup Sims and a few Squirts outfits. I also got rid of most of my makeup and only kept one set of Bruno's lipsticks and a few subtle ones from Rensim.
Finally, I got rid of the custom hair. I had 1.3 GB of hair I never used, or that had insane poly accounts. I'm going to handle double heirs in this generation, so I wanted to avoid any extra work for my poor graphics card. So, I went to a community named Simpoly and used it as a guide to delete all my hair. Except for a couple hairs, everything that was over 5000 poly count got deleted. The few pay hairs I kept are low poly and downloaded from Rissa Styles (to make sure I'd have only the basic four colours and the gray hair, plus I like her recolors).
By the way, I also "banned" WInter from Strangetown, at least until my double heirs and their spouses die. Snow makes my game lag a bit, so I can't deal with it for now.
Once I had cleaned up my downloads, I got empty templates from MATY for all the subneighborhoods. I suspected my Strangetown died because it had over 1000 character files, so I wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen again. I also got the no townie regen, no dorm regen and antiredundancy hacks to avoid unnecessary characters. I set up my new Strangetown, placed the Specter and Beaker lots I needed and placed the new house I had decorated for my Brokes and then re-created them at CAS. I quit the game, edited them at SimPe so they'd have the jobs, skills, personalities, DNA and relations they had before they crashed and voila! I had everything ready.
I loaded my new Broke household, began to play and... then I realized that I couldn't age Wanda or Puck to elders. Everytime they blew the candles of their cakes, they'd get six more days of adulthood. I tried to age Cody and Lyla, but they also got stuck at six days before teen.
Once again, I went to MATY and searched for an answer. I got a lot of references to "tight pants" (they really need to update their glossary, between that and "souped" I often have no idea what they are talking about). "Tight pants" means that I had two hacks conflicting with each other (a MATY one and a "Non-awesome" one). I ran the Conflict detector utility and everything came out clean. I took my hacks away: Nope, they still didn't age. I took my downloads away: Nope. I figured I had made a mistake at SimPe, so I tried to re-edit them: Nope.
Already insane, I re-did everything. I also noticed that I had un-needed character files because my FT template wasn't clean, and I found an empty one. I also noticed that the Strangetown houses I downloaded also had the memories of the characters intact (for example, the Ophelia from my new neighborhood had memories of kissing Johnny, and he didn't even exist in this place!), so I figured that'd bork my game in the long term. I found an empty Strangetown template (just the houses), so I set it up as my new neighborhood. I did all the re-creating the Brokes deal again (arrrghh!) and got it ready.
The Brokes couldn't age again! ARGGHHHH!
I went to a new Pleasantview I had in my game and tried the Broke house. I could age Beau to a kid, teen, adult and elder, so it wasn't something related to my hacks. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong in the new Strangetown, so I took the Brokes from their lot and placed them on the Smith lot.
And they could suddenly age! They worked just perfect!
So, I figured the problem was with the lot I was using, because it was a house I downloaded from MTS2 that I just adapted for my double heirs. I created a package of the lot and tried to re-install it with Clean Installer (it had a few ACR hacks and ten million re-colors I didn't even use for it).
I sent the Brokes to the new lot, and once again they couldn't age! I tried the lot debugger, but I was only able to fuck the Brokes up again!
So, I had to re-create Strangetown for the third time and re-create the Brokes and edit them with SimPe and ARGHHH! I'm so sick of SimPe right now :P.
At this point, I was afraid of using a custom house for my Brokes, so I had no other choice but to build my own lot.
Yeah, the girl who builds ugly box houses.
I read a couple basic tutorials (they need to make a "Building for Dummies" one, though) and began my "job". It took me two whole days and a lot of cursing at the screen (until I realized there is a hammer tool to erase your mistakes :P) but I finally finished my "masterpiece". It's a 4x4 lot and an almost one floor house with enough space for a lot of sims (I had to build a small second floor for the elders). It has a music room, games room, a laboratory, a greenhouse, an "art" room, a gym, a large kitchen, dinning room, 4 bathrooms, 3 master bedrooms (two have attached nurseries) and 4 regular bedrooms. I placed the sleep controllers next to each bed and the bathroom controllers near the toilets (for this generation, I'm using macrostatics or I won't be able to handle them at the same time). It's not a pretty house, but I hope it's at least playable :).
The only thing I needed, was my legacy portraits and the graves of Beau and Cosmo. I have a series of pictures showing the lame way I re-created those, but this post is already too long. I also re-created the Specter family (and a few of the important graves for the story, but those are spoilers :P) and placed it on it's lot. I'll re-create the Beaker family once I'm in the mood to use SimPe again (although it's not needed for now).
I placed the Brokes at their new home last night. And it worked! After a week, I was finally able to re-store them. I swear that if my neighborhood blows up again, I'm dropping my legacy. There's no way I'm dealing with this non-sense again! :P
So, that's the reason I still haven't posted the notes for Gen 5.0 and Helena's story. I'll work on those later.
But first, I wanna see if I can finally make Marsha give birth to her first child. She's been pregnant for weeks! :P
See you later! (and thanks for your help!)
I have no idea what happened to Moontown, because I never played it. Of course I'm annoyed for losing it, because it took me a while to set it up, but it's not a big deal. Plus I have a new idea for a "semi-prosperity" neighborhood that'll also allow me to use the Puddings again :). I already started working on this story ^^.
What actually had me upset was losing Strangetown, for it was the home of the Broke Legacy. I knew I'd be able to re-store it because I had clones of my sims at my Box account, but it wouldn't be the same :(.
I asked at the sims 2 community for a link I remembered that has the Maxis lots ready for download. I got my answer quite fast (btw, the site also has the characters from Riverblossom and Desiderata Valley, plus a re-make of the original Pleasantview from The Sims 1) and started to "work".
First, I got rid of a lot of custom content that was bloating my downloads folder. Except for a few Holy Simoly items, I ditched ALL my objects (furniture, accesories, toys, etc.), because they no longer work with Free Time. I only kept some recolors of Maxis items I got from MTS and Piggy Sims.
Next, I dumped most of my custom clothing, and only kept the stuff from Migamoo, Fanseelamb, HP, Decorgal, Cloudlessnights and Simsboutique, plus a couple gowns from Bruno and Pronup Sims and a few Squirts outfits. I also got rid of most of my makeup and only kept one set of Bruno's lipsticks and a few subtle ones from Rensim.
Finally, I got rid of the custom hair. I had 1.3 GB of hair I never used, or that had insane poly accounts. I'm going to handle double heirs in this generation, so I wanted to avoid any extra work for my poor graphics card. So, I went to a community named Simpoly and used it as a guide to delete all my hair. Except for a couple hairs, everything that was over 5000 poly count got deleted. The few pay hairs I kept are low poly and downloaded from Rissa Styles (to make sure I'd have only the basic four colours and the gray hair, plus I like her recolors).
By the way, I also "banned" WInter from Strangetown, at least until my double heirs and their spouses die. Snow makes my game lag a bit, so I can't deal with it for now.
Once I had cleaned up my downloads, I got empty templates from MATY for all the subneighborhoods. I suspected my Strangetown died because it had over 1000 character files, so I wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen again. I also got the no townie regen, no dorm regen and antiredundancy hacks to avoid unnecessary characters. I set up my new Strangetown, placed the Specter and Beaker lots I needed and placed the new house I had decorated for my Brokes and then re-created them at CAS. I quit the game, edited them at SimPe so they'd have the jobs, skills, personalities, DNA and relations they had before they crashed and voila! I had everything ready.
I loaded my new Broke household, began to play and... then I realized that I couldn't age Wanda or Puck to elders. Everytime they blew the candles of their cakes, they'd get six more days of adulthood. I tried to age Cody and Lyla, but they also got stuck at six days before teen.
Once again, I went to MATY and searched for an answer. I got a lot of references to "tight pants" (they really need to update their glossary, between that and "souped" I often have no idea what they are talking about). "Tight pants" means that I had two hacks conflicting with each other (a MATY one and a "Non-awesome" one). I ran the Conflict detector utility and everything came out clean. I took my hacks away: Nope, they still didn't age. I took my downloads away: Nope. I figured I had made a mistake at SimPe, so I tried to re-edit them: Nope.
Already insane, I re-did everything. I also noticed that I had un-needed character files because my FT template wasn't clean, and I found an empty one. I also noticed that the Strangetown houses I downloaded also had the memories of the characters intact (for example, the Ophelia from my new neighborhood had memories of kissing Johnny, and he didn't even exist in this place!), so I figured that'd bork my game in the long term. I found an empty Strangetown template (just the houses), so I set it up as my new neighborhood. I did all the re-creating the Brokes deal again (arrrghh!) and got it ready.
The Brokes couldn't age again! ARGGHHHH!
I went to a new Pleasantview I had in my game and tried the Broke house. I could age Beau to a kid, teen, adult and elder, so it wasn't something related to my hacks. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong in the new Strangetown, so I took the Brokes from their lot and placed them on the Smith lot.
And they could suddenly age! They worked just perfect!
So, I figured the problem was with the lot I was using, because it was a house I downloaded from MTS2 that I just adapted for my double heirs. I created a package of the lot and tried to re-install it with Clean Installer (it had a few ACR hacks and ten million re-colors I didn't even use for it).
I sent the Brokes to the new lot, and once again they couldn't age! I tried the lot debugger, but I was only able to fuck the Brokes up again!
So, I had to re-create Strangetown for the third time and re-create the Brokes and edit them with SimPe and ARGHHH! I'm so sick of SimPe right now :P.
At this point, I was afraid of using a custom house for my Brokes, so I had no other choice but to build my own lot.
Yeah, the girl who builds ugly box houses.
I read a couple basic tutorials (they need to make a "Building for Dummies" one, though) and began my "job". It took me two whole days and a lot of cursing at the screen (until I realized there is a hammer tool to erase your mistakes :P) but I finally finished my "masterpiece". It's a 4x4 lot and an almost one floor house with enough space for a lot of sims (I had to build a small second floor for the elders). It has a music room, games room, a laboratory, a greenhouse, an "art" room, a gym, a large kitchen, dinning room, 4 bathrooms, 3 master bedrooms (two have attached nurseries) and 4 regular bedrooms. I placed the sleep controllers next to each bed and the bathroom controllers near the toilets (for this generation, I'm using macrostatics or I won't be able to handle them at the same time). It's not a pretty house, but I hope it's at least playable :).
The only thing I needed, was my legacy portraits and the graves of Beau and Cosmo. I have a series of pictures showing the lame way I re-created those, but this post is already too long. I also re-created the Specter family (and a few of the important graves for the story, but those are spoilers :P) and placed it on it's lot. I'll re-create the Beaker family once I'm in the mood to use SimPe again (although it's not needed for now).
I placed the Brokes at their new home last night. And it worked! After a week, I was finally able to re-store them. I swear that if my neighborhood blows up again, I'm dropping my legacy. There's no way I'm dealing with this non-sense again! :P
So, that's the reason I still haven't posted the notes for Gen 5.0 and Helena's story. I'll work on those later.
But first, I wanna see if I can finally make Marsha give birth to her first child. She's been pregnant for weeks! :P
See you later! (and thanks for your help!)