Everyone has certain ways of doing things and these ways are mine. The best method you use to do something is what suits YOU better.

There are now official PATCHES for your game....if you have not already gotten them, you might wish to do so. A ton of issues have been fixed. Of course there are other little things that need fixed but nothing major from what I see in my game. Everyone's game runs differently because of the differences in computers. Once you read whats been fixed, please be very sure you remove any hacks you have that were to fix a certain issue.

Expansion pack Pre-Install tips

Do a scan-disk, defrag, and back up your game once each household is prepared to your liking. :) I love to use BoolProp and noticed right off that problems I was having could have been prevented if I'd been more careful with how I left my families. One big issue was if a sim was playing on the computer or the video game, after installing the expansion the computer could not be turned off....the sim would turn it off but you'd still see the game on the screen and hear the sounds! I deleted them and bought new ones and got error messages. Some families had been dining and after installing the expansion all prepared food had to be cleaned up. So from now on I'll be going into every house and making SURE all sims are home, no one is doing anything other than sitting on a sofa or chair and there is time to get everyone fed before school/work or whatever. Energy will be maxed so its best to save the houses after they awaken at 6:am. I guess there isn't anything you can do about the "missing fish" issue....every family had a fishtank and all fish were GONE.

"Nightlife"!

If you haven't purchased "Nightlife", I hope you will be able to! Its wonderful! Its very heavy as far as graphics goes, and I'll end up getting more RAM later but its worth it. lol I love how their eyeballs move now when talking to another sim....the dining experience is over-long because they talk too much but its so nice to experience seeing how animated they are now. You probably won't have time to get them fed before school and work unless you hurry and get something prepared. hehe

I miss the "EA Games...Challenge Everything" intro. Although I love the expansion they fiddled with things that I loved in the game and are no longer there! I understand the ONE homework fanfare now...its better this way due to too many "A" report card memories and by the time you had cousin's memories from each "A" it really added up! Something I don't like though, is once your child gets that "A" report card, they keep getting the want to get an "A"....its pointless and ties up a want slot since they only get ONE now.

I like adding townie teens to my families, however now things have changed....I don't get the ask permission to go out, if they go to town they disappear from the family and you have to re-get them in, and they can't leave for family outings. Going to school is no problem, they come home as always. I haven't tried adding a townie adult yet so don't know if they'll be able to leave the house or not.

It looks very ODD but my kids are sometimes able to play "tag" with teens and adults. lol

I was disappointed to see that when an adult goes to a community lot there are NO kids of any age there. Only if you take one of your kids along will you see a kid of that age there.

The phone is a major irritant! No one has yet to come up with a hack that enables you to set the ring count and to stop getting such annoying phone calls, since Nightlife was released. I counted 20 rings...it went on for over a sim hour. If a player can hack the phone to allow the player to select the amount of times the phone rings it seems Maxis should be able to do the same for us. Its intrusive and annoying as it is. lol

Nightlife help and tips

If your downloaded eyes, hair, makeup or other files are not showing up, be SURE your "Downloads" folder has a capital letter "D". If it doesn't, rename that folder and put the capital "D" in. If it DOES have a capital "D" and you can't see some of your downloads, remove the "Downloads" folder to your desktop, make a NEW folder where that one was and name it "Downloads" being careful to put a capital "D". Now, the folder you dragged to your desktop, open and drag the contents of that folder into your NEW "Downloads" folder and see if that helped.

Nightlife is pretty much bug-free. Yes it has its quirks but its not BAD! Most of the problems you encounter are because of previous expansion pack HACKS. Remove your hacks until you check to see what will or will not work! Anything to do with PHONE or the prevention of the spawning of townie children or adults needs to be DELETED! These items will cause freezes, crashes, or lockups if the game cannot find what it needs.

If your game was already buggy, the best advise I can give you is to restart a new neighbourhood and create all new families. Never import a family from another neighbourhood in there! Never import families from other sites including the Exchange! If you don't create the family in that neighbourhood then don't stick them in it! Why? You will get the "Jump Bug" which can basically render some families un-playable. Not to mention other bugs you can get.

Nightlife is very HEAVY as far as graphics go. If you go into a house and its real sluggish, go into the game properties and disable "decorations". Shut off your "reflections", "picture-in-picture", and "shadows", set lighting to medium, and you may have to disable the cinematics of first kiss, first woo-hoo, etc. Tinker with other settings if that still doesn't help. Thankfully the patch fixed the issue of your lot view settings going back to default.

Get your family to a community lot....click on each member and "ask/form casual group/group outing". It is TIMED, which I don't like but if you click to form the group for FUN then you run into the problem of every sim in the family dropping what they are doing at home to go wherever the head of the group is in the house. I couldn't get anyone to play chess or anything else for very long because they kept stopping and getting the "go here" message to where the family head member was.

If you have user-created meshes for objects or even some hair and sim accessories, they can be way too large as far as polygon counts go. I've seen hair meshes that were 5,000 polygons and that is not good on your game! Most of the objects I had downloaded were created by people who either don't know or don't care about the danger of too high polygon counts. I really loved all that stuff but it can damage your video card and drastically slow your game down. If some of your houses are like dragging your mouse through molasses then you probably have some over-sized meshes *Maxis recommends roughly 800 polygons per TILE* so try removing the user created furnishings and see how that goes. Just because a site is a PAY site *donation, or whatever* does NOT mean they know what they are doing...if they don't post polygon counts I've learned to steer clear of it. You do not want a 5,000 polygon count Victorian chair in your game irregardless of how beautiful it is. :) There is one pay site that makes the most beautiful Victorian furniture I've seen on the Net, however everything I "bought" ended up in the trash because every bit of it was so high in polygon count that it wasn't safe to use them. So before you shell out $40 or whatever like I did, e-mail the site owner and ask about polygon counts! If they don't respond, or if they do respond and the counts are HIGH, then you don't want that stuff!

Useful tip: I always build my homes with NO family in them. Build and furnish it to your liking, then make a package file of it for save-keeping in the event you have problems and have to move your family out. If you download other people's houses, keep a copy of it somewhere safe. :)

Aging townie kids

I tried this with a townie girl-child and succeeded. You have to have your game set in Debug mode which you can do using SimPE ... OR by typing the boolprop testingcheatsenabled true in the cheat window. *If you use this method be danged careful about what you do...never ever use "Tom's clothing tester", never "make me know everyone" and in general just watch what you do...back up your neighbourhood very regularly..daily if possible* You may wish to click on the mailbox to make everyone's needs full or risk the teenager running away as soon as you make her/him "selectable". lol You do NOT have to add the sim to your family, just hold down your shift key, click on the sim and select "make selectable"! He/She will show up in your family window and you can control them. The child can go to school and will come right back home after school! You can teach him/her to study. I succeeded in growing her to a teenager! I'd not get the teen to call a taxi or drive your car anywhere. :) With Nightlife you can't even get them to ask permission to go out any longer. Every time you go back in to play that family you'll have to call that sim to come visit and make them selectable again but if you play for a sim-week, for example, the sim is there the whole time. I couldn't get her to change to different outfits but I did get her hairstyle changed and put some makeup on her face when she aged to a teen. When it was time to grow into an adult, she did! I didn't try to marry her to any of my sims to see if she could become a part of a family and be normal, meaning change clothing choices, leave the house or anything so you will have to experiment with that one. :)

Just be VERY careful about making your normal play family sims "selectable" while they are in another sim home! They AGE at 6:pm! I even had a female go into her second stage of pregnancy after I made her selectable to up her needs, and I'll never do that with a pregnant sim again! lol I fear that if I were to do that she'd have the baby right there in another sim home or even on a community lot! ouchie! Anyway, if you have a couple of teens living in different families and you want them to age together at the same time, you can have one visit the other, make the sim selectable and the sim would probably be there until you decide to quit playing that house. The sim would go to school and come back to that house the same as the townie I had did. I haven't tried that so can't say for sure....I prefer having my entire family age together, not separate. :)

Guests won't "join" a chess game

It nearly drove me nutty because sometimes I'd tell a guest to join my sim at the chess board and they wouldn't. If the TIMER isn't facing the WALL they won't be able to join....geez! lol If you put two chess sets side by side, turn the timers inward where they are facing each other.

Converting Young Adult clothing into Adult and vice-versa

Firstly, clothing that was created BEFORE the game was released seems to be un-exportable, at least for me! Between the time when Body Shop was first released to us and the version that shipped with the game, something was changed in the coding. So older files you have may not be exportable at all. I've had no problems exporting eyes, hair, etc. just the earlier created clothing.

If you want adult clothing converted for Young adult, clone the outfit in Body Shop as for instance yaf_jeanblue then import to game. Close Body Shop, open SimPE, open the new outfit *file/open*, click on "property set" on the left, "property set" on the right. Click on "plug-in view", click on "age" and replace the last two digits in the RIGHT side panel *08* to 40. Commit and save. Bring up Body Shop and you have a new young adult outfit. :) For converting your Young adult into adult, repeat the steps above, only replace the 40 with 08, commit and save. For ELDERS to be able to wear some of the Young adult outfits, repeat all the above, but change the last two age digits to 10. Clothing that is male won't fit a female very well unless they are KIDS or TODDLERS but you can try it...Gender instead of age, 1 is female, 2 is male and 3 is unisex. Hair works the same...select gender but remember it won't FIT exactly right on all the ages. I'm not fond of seeing gaps or holes in my sims heads so don't use the genetically altered hair. hehe

Should you desire clothing to show up for both young adult and adult, select "age" and set the last two digits as 48, commit and save. :) To save room on your hard drive, and if you want items for BOTH young adult and adult, I recommend this last method of setting age at 48. That way you have only ONE file for that clothing item on your computer and not two!

Files installing

I get a lot of mail about where to install files! I use Windows XP so thats what I'm using to tell you this: Again, this is MY method, do what makes you feel better. hehe

Firstly, create a TEMP folder or sub-folder somewhere that you'll use just for Sims 2 stuff that you download. I have one on my desktop. When I install files I stick them into that temp folder. Inside the temp folder I've got another folder for "clothing" which is where clothing, eyeballs, hair and such goes. I've got one called "Objects", one for "hacks", and etc. I like things NEAT and tidy in my game so I start out by downloading them into categories to make it easier on me when I go to install it into my game. hehe With Nightlife we can now put hair, eyes, and other things into sub-folders in the "Downloads" folder so I keep everything separated as I download and simply drop them into the proper folder as I install everything.

I totally recommend you use IZArc....go on a downloading frenzy and extract all files in one whack, no more one at a time extraction! Its FREE so you'll have no nagging box pop up on you. A lot of us use .RAR files. It condences the files into a smaller size and some things like hair it condences quite a bit more!

After extracting the files, bring up Windows Explorer.

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2

Thats where you want to install what you've downloaded. If you do not have a "Downloads" folder, create it by clicking "File" "New Folder" and name it "Downloads". This folder is where you place clothing, eyeballs, hair. You can create sub-folders, meaning folders inside your downloads folder just the way you created the "Downloads" folder. The stuff you stick in sub folders will show FINE in the game but you cannot stick clothing, hair and such in a sub folder or it won't show! :) File/New Folder/ for "Objects", new folder for "Walls", one for "Floors", one for "Hacks" and whatever else you need a folder for. I have one for all the new user meshes that are being made in furniture.

Besides keeping it all neat and tidy in your downloads folder, its also good in case something is wrong. All you have to do is remove the entire folder to see if something in it was causing problems.

Get the most recent copy of Sims2Pack Clean Installer from Mod the Sims 2. If you were to download 100 walls, for example, you can install them ALL at the same time very quickly! How? You want them to be in a temporary folder, for example on your desktop make a tmpwall folder or whatever you wish to name it. Stick all the zip/rar files in there and extract them. Close the folder. Right click on the FOLDER itself and select "Install all". Clean Installer pops up and you can install all those walls and floors in one whack! Then simply look in your downloads folder and drag the floors to your "Floors" folder and walls to your "Walls" folder. If you don't keep your downloads separated its a good idea to start doing so! :) With Nightlife you can even have a separate folder for "Hair", "Eyes", and etc. and they'll show up fine.

Crashing houses?

If you are suddenly experiencing crashing houses, think about it for a second...have you removed any "Ground Covers" aka terrain files? Hopefully you have a back-up of them and can put them back in your game files. Removed ground covers explains why you suddenly see flashing blue all over your yards, too. If that happens, go into build mode, ground covers and spray the yard with a texture! Nightlife seems to have fixed the terrains issues, at least its better in MY game! Select any terrain, make it the largest spray size, hold down your SHIFT key and spray your entire yard to remove terrains. After that you shouldn't have any crashes...hopefully not anyway. :) I've succeeded in removing every user-created terrain I had and am getting NO crashes, since "Nightlife".

Another house crashing cause is if you had something IN the house that changed the way the game works and deleted it, the house could crash. Some user created furnishings can mess up and crash your houses too. I very rarely use user created meshed objects in my back-up houses.

Sharing houses

Another good reason for making sub-folders inside your downloads folder instead of just sticking them under the Sims 2 directly, is so that before you create a new house that you'll be sharing with others, you can remove the entire "downloads" folder before creating the new house OR before packaging, versus having to remove several folders. :) If you do not remove that folder then when you go to package the lot, you are also packaging a bunch of other stuff like hacks and even objects! So to give people a good CLEAN file all you want in that file is the house. If you've created special walls, objects, floors and such for that house you can either leave ONLY those items in the downloads folder or even better zip them separately, which ever suits you better. I created a special house using nothing but Maxis made things, packaged it and looked at the file size. It was nearly 100 MB!!! Even though I did not put anything user-made in it, it grabbed a ton of user made furnishings and packaged them all with the house!

Maids and fish tanks

I love having fish tanks, however some of the maids are driving me batty by cleaning it a few dozen times until finally they say its late and must go. Well, you can solve this issue by dragging their "neatness" down to about FOUR. Any lower and you may have un-made beds. :) I use BoolProp so make the maid selectable, change the neatness and then make the maid unselectable. If you don't use BoolProp you can easily do this using SimPE or another editor. Just be SURE you always back up your neighbourhood before doing anything!

Where are my walls and floors installing to?

When you install floors and walls that are in Sims2pack format they go temporarily into your "teleport" folder. When you bring up your game or homecrafter they plop over into your "downloads" folder. They aren't named wall or floor, but a long string of letters. Anyhow, if you like to categorize your stuff, after installing all those walls and floors open your "downloads" folder, click on the LAST file in there so you know whatever after that is new walls and floors. Open your game or homecrafter and the files will go in there. Then after you close homecrafter or the game all you have to do is slide the files into another folder. Files downloaded from this site are already in their package format so you don't have to deal with all that yourself. ;) Someone on one of the message boards I go to figured all this out so its to her credit, I'm just passing on the info to you.

I use a program called "Sims2 Pack Clean Installer" which can be downloaded from Mod The Sims 2. What this helps with is when you extract sims2pack files they'll go directly to your downloads folder and be named correctly! :) So then you just slide them into your "walls" or "floors" folders! :) It also helps track down any hacks you've gotten after installing someone else's houses. grrrr hehe Its also good because when you double click the Sim2Pack files you can see exactly what is IN that file. Then if you spot something you don't want in your game just uncheck the box and it won't install that item/items.

When putting walls or floors in a house, hold down the SHIFT key! lol You do not have to put one at a time out! hehehe

Bodyshop crashing?

I used SimPE's surgery tool to export sims born in my game into Bodyshop. All was fine at first but suddenly Bodyshop started crashing. Three of those files had somehow gone bad. They are easy to find in your 'SavedSims" folder...look for N001, N008 or whatever and remove them all, replacing one or two at a time until you are certain all are ok. Now what you need to do, so that the files are available in your Create-A-Sim is to clone each of your imported sims. Then delete the original to prevent problems like I had! lol It took a good hour to track down what the problem was so save yourself the hassle ahead of time! :)

University Students

I have only put four sims in University and I doubt that I'll repeat that experience any time soon. lol Here is something that I noticed right off and someone on a message board basically called me a liar but this was in MY game and MY experience. grrr hehe

I had two sim teens who were BORN in the game and were given Smart Milk as toddlers. I decided to stick them into college and went ahead and created two new young adults to put in with them. After the first semester exams, the two born in the game went directly to their sophomore year and the two NEW sims were still freshmen and went to the second semester. Ok, after Senior year first semester exams the two born in the game graduated and the two new ones were just starting the Junior year.

So my experience was that the sims born in the game and raised on smart milk graduated TWO YEARS ahead of sims not given smart milk. All four had their required skills, all four had the required term papers, all four had done homework. Why would I lie about something like that? lol Try it in your game...experiment with it and see if you get the same result! Toddlers learn quicker with smart milk, as kids they learn their skills faster, as kids they bring home "A" on report card quicker, they learn quicker all through their lives. So I'll add this to what I just said, its that way in MY game! lol My smart milk kids learn quicker and advance further than a sibling NOT given smart milk. I've got some who are higher skilled than one a few days older sibling child created in Create-A-Sim, living in the same household. So those of us who are belivers in Smart milk know its not a bunch of hoop-la bull! Period!

NOTICE!!!

If you re-install your game and you have expansion packs, do NOT use the patch that Maxis put up. "University" contains the patch and it will patch your game after it installs the expansion pack. If you prefer to use that patch Maxis put up install BOTH of them or go get a fresh copy of it from Maxis which contains both in one now. My advise is to not install it PERIOD since "University" will do it for you.

Hacks

Game hacks are pretty cool! Its amazing what some of these people have accomplished. :) BUT....install one at a time and watch your game closely for a while before putting in another. An example is one prevented adult sims from going to sleep after woohoo and also I noticed various problems on community lots using another. So just be careful and do regular neighbourhood backups as well. Before installing an Expansion pack remove all hacks and put them back little by little. Check message boards to see which you need to delete. People who made the hack to begin with are very kind to redo it if it didn't work after an expansion comes out so watch the boards!

Multiple births

If you want to be able to have multiple births, visit Mod the Sims 2 and find the triplets and quads hack in "Beta Downloads", "Game Hacks". :) You can select if you want them to have what they were going to have or twins or up to four at once! :) Provided your household has room for them all! If you have seven sims in the family you can only have ONE baby, if you have six sims you can have twins, if you have five sims you can have triplets, for instance. :)

Baby's Gender

Gender is NOT set at conception like twins are. Save your game just as your sim goes into labor....if she has a boy and you wanted a girl, right after it says to name the baby, exit without saving then go back in. Continue doing that until she has the little girl. I had one instance where I had a red headed and a blonde headed parent. I saved just as she started labor. It so happened that she was having TWINS! She had both babies of the same gender but I wanted a boy and a girl, one red headed and one blonde. :) After a couple times exiting and going back in she had exactly what I wanted her to have... the little girl had red hair and the boy had blonde. :) This will NOT work if you have a blonde parent and a black hair parent...the dark hair seems to be dominant. If you have two blonde parents and one of their parents was black headed, don't be surprised to see all their offspring come out with black hair! hehe

Back up your game!

If you play a lot, BACKUP as often as possible! I ended up losing a week worth of game play because I didn't backup often enough. Lesson learned! lol Before messing with SimPE or any other altering method, BACK UP your neighbourhood files! I've had two bad SimPE experiences in a week and it was NOT pleasant.

First of all, nearly every one of my sims was wiped out. Just GONE!!! Most houses had no sims in it, some had one. In one house all that was left was an infant girl laying on the floor. The only backup of my game I had was a week old! If you play a lot like I do, you can imagine how much you can accomplish in your game in that time. So now I back up daily or at least every couple of days and for sure before touching SimPE.

Problems with the game?

Get the most recent video display driver! If you have a laptop, do NOT download a driver from any site other than the maker of your laptop unless it specifically says the download is for portables like Radeon does. If your laptop seems to be getting a bit too hot, go get a laptop portable fan. They fit under your laptop. Do not leave your laptop AC adapter plugged into the wall when not in use. *lesson first hand with $100 less in my wallet* For laptop preformance improvement, shut off reflections, shut off picture in picture, shut off special moments and adjust other settings as needed. Its best to not put user created meshes hair/objects in your game if using a laptop unless its a dynamite laptop! Mine is not that great so I use nothing much at all.

For slow running games, click on Options, Display, set shadows to medium, reflections OFF, and set the display size to 800 x 600.

If you are playing with less than 512 MB Ram, get more ram when you can! Until then, the settings above will help a bit. Fiddle with the other graphic settings too...if you don't like what you see its easy to undo whatever you changed.

If you are seeing the great moments upside-down, its your video card. When you can get a new card, get no less than a 128 MB video ram card and only get one of the more recent ones. :) If you buy Memory make dang SURE you buy the same SIZE as you already have! In other words, if you have two 256 chips then buy 256 chips! Either that or just buy one or two 512 chips! Don't try running the game with different sizes of RAM! It won't work! At least it won't for my game!

AUDIO! My game was crashing left and right and I knew that it shouldn't be. I had all the recent driver updates and knew doggone good and well my computer itself was good enough. I went and got the same audio card I use to always use and my game is FINE now. I can actually play it with all sounds and graphic opitons enabled. :) Its the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS.