hewo ^_–
yes i took a screenshots of blue suits on a blue background and i think it's a genius idea xdd
apron stolen from 4t2 EP01 Retail Low conversion by MDP (post)
eye sclera was also stolen, but it has been on my PCs for 15 years (or more) and i can't remember where it came from xdd
tbh at first i did this just for myself (i hate ts2 servo design so much) and didn't want to share it, but I really liked these guys that i decided to share them! i hope someone will want to adopt them in their game too!
what's here
default replacement for Servos - download here.
It's hard to talk about, but there is nothing to download as custom...
So i LOVE @episims' maxis-match correlated werewolf default, but the one thing I wanted was sharper teeth. So I took it upon myself to frankenstein a sharp-teethed werewolf default using @crispsandkerosene's pointy teeth masks
You can only have one default at a time, so take out any other werewolf defaults you may have before installing this! Also, you need BOTH package files in the .zip file for it to work properly!
Calling all Sims 2 treasure hunters/bug enthusiasts!
Knowing me, this is gonna be a long one, so:
TL;DR: There's a Sims 2 glitch that's really fascinating me and I would like to make a video about, detailing what's supposed to happen/intended game behaviour versus how the bug works, why it happens, and showcase the fixes available, because it appears to be quite common! Problem is, though... well, there are multiple problems, and I've run into a few dead ends. Any help/information/extra testing would be MASSIVELY appreciated!
So if any of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, please check out more under the cut :)
Sooo... what's the bug?
This pesky little bug in question is the infamous 'disappearing homework' glitch that typically affects orphaned child and teen sims. If you're unfamiliar, it probably sounds a bit strange, but it does make sense. Basically, when a child or teen sim gets an A report card (for the first time, though the checking whether the sim already has the relevant memory isn't present in the base game version, so presumably that was added in a later EP), naturally they want to share the good news with a parent who can celebrate with them!
You can see this process in the BHAV titled Interaction - Report Card (0x2032).
The cheering parent is selected via the global function Family - Get Parents - Obj IDs (0x01E0), and their object ID gets passed as Local 1 (Parent ID).
But what if the sim's parents are not on the lot, as in they are at work*, living in another household, or deceased?
*Though technically still on the lot, their room will be less than 0; off the top of my head, I believe the value here should be equal to/greater than 0 if a sim isn't off-world, and it's something like -1 when they are off-world, but of course when I need it, I can't find confirmation of that, haha. So don't quote me on this one! ^^;
Well, what's supposed to happen is that, in the event of no parents being available/found, the primitive Set to Next (0x001F) is called instead, in the hopes of finding another eligible sim to be the cheerer. It will keep looking and checking until it finds another family member of the cheeree who is older than a teenager and on the lot, i.e. with a room value equal to or greater than 0. If it finds one - say, a grandparent, or an aunt/uncle - then that sim's object ID is passed as Local 1 instead and they fulfill what is usually the role of the parent. If, failing that, absolutely no suitable sim can be found, the child/teen's object ID is used, and they should cheer for themselves.
This does not always seem to work, however. Players commonly report encountering a 'jump bug' or an Object Error (if testingcheats are enabled) when playing orphaned sims returning home with an A report card. The cheering can't go ahead, resulting in their homework not spawning because the report card event occurs before the homework is created, and an error of course breaks the routine. This can even result in child sims being sent home early because the school bus disappears, though I haven't personally tested that yet to see what happens exactly. It also doesn't reach the part in the code where the Want can be satisfied or in particular when the memory is created before hitting an error, so it's just going to repeat all over again the next day. Reports on whether this affects school grades negatively or positively seem to vary.
Apartment Life attempted to fix this bug... except it only made it worse. It mutated, if you will.
tunaisafish, who created the recommended mod Get Parents Fix, explains it best in his original post over at Simbology/the Read Me file included with the mod:
BUGS/ANNOYANCES FIXED:
- When only one parent is found, no longer leaves garbage data in the second slot. (All games)
- When the first parent is missing, will continue to look for a second parent. (Base to FT)
- When no parents are present, will no longer substitute random objects in their place (AL+)
As the function sometimes returned garbage, then weird bugs would happen such as a child thinking
that it is the offspring of a driveway or window. After AL, that made families with no adults present
a pain to play. If you hit the bug once, you'd be likely to keep hitting it again and again.
For other families, the conditions necessary to hit the bugs would be rare, and have varied effects
depending on how the garbage data was used.
Essentially, with AL, sometimes orphaned sims will try cheering to/with an object that, of course, can't exactly do that ;) Hence the Object Error/jump bug, which is usually 'Object referred to must be a person' - pretty self-explanatory! Although in my testing - and I think in other people's experiences sometimes too - I also ran into 'Slot number is out of range', typically with Build Mode objects. But it's the same core issue causing it regardless.
Quick but important sidenote: Get Parents is a very versatile function called by a TON of others throughout the game, not just in this scenario. I am only focusing on it in the context of this glitch however, because this seems to be the most common way players encounter it! I also just think it's neat and unbelievably funny
Sooo... what's the problem?
Well.
We know that Get Parents is the problem function, because at least two modders noticed and fixed it in the wake of Apartment Life's... additions. These modders are the aforementioned tunaisafish as well as Pescado, who included it as part of AL Fixes; it's undocumented, but it's there. From a quick glance, Pescado's approach seems to be a bit different to Tuna's, although that being said Tuna did also add a feature that randomises which parent gets chosen, since Parent 1 (who usually has the lower nID, i.e. they were created first) is normally favoured. Pescado just focused on the bug.
But, see, I want to be very clear that I am still learning about this sort of thing and I am by no means an expert! So there's PLENTY of stuff I haven't been able to figure out yet, and so I am being a bit cheeky and asking for other pairs of eyes, hands, and brains because I want to understand better, as well as ensure everything is 100% accurate :) So yeah, disclaimer, I could absolutely be wrong or misunderstanding certain things, and I'd like to know for sure.
I assumed this would be more straightforward, buuuuut:
1. I haven't been able to consistently reproduce the bug.
Nothing more annoying than when things work smoothly and as intended when you're DESPERATE to see it going wrong!
I'm going to use my favourite example from testing here to share what I've found from finally seeing the bug in action:
Juliette Capp came off the school bus excited about her A+ report card, and immediately ran... to the phone handset on the wall upstairs. Not even the whole object/base of the phone; no, no, it was just the handset she wanted to have cheer for her. Unfortunately, it couldn't do that, of course, resulting in this Object Error:
And poof! went her homework. Or, I guess, if we're being pedantic, her homework didn't so much as disappear as it never actually spawned in the first place.
This was very exciting, because the handset's object ID is 46. 46 converted to hexadecimal is 2E. That's Caliban Capp's nID!
It lines up with Tuna's description of the bug, and I'm guessing what happened is that the game got Caliban's nID at some point and maybe that was passed as Local 1 (the second local listed), but it's actually expecting the parent's object ID and so interpreted the value of 46 as an object ID, only that belongs to the handset. I guess this would mean the object chosen isn't completely random per se, but I am struggling with trying to find where exactly the bug in Get Parents happens that would pass the wrong arguments! If I'm on the right track, that is. This is something I definitely need a bit of help with; I've been trying to scrutinise every single line, but honestly... I think I can't keep up with all the temps and locals. But I'll get onto that because that's its own problem :)
Just to be sure this wasn't some crazy coincidence, I tested with sims I created and the results were the same (object ID of 'random' object designated as the parent matched the deceased parent's nID, in particular usually the second parent, if they existed at all), though there's still more I need to do to be extra sure. I also haven't been able to find any code to support what's happening here, if it is indeed the case! A bug caused by a mix up between object IDs and nIDs isn't exactly unheard of ;)
But it does mean that the possibility of the game thinking a phone is Juliette's dad is absolutely killing me, because this is the most random way this has ever been relevant:
MY DAD IS NOT A PHONE. DUH.
Anyway.
So I saw it in action with a few households and it lined up with Tuna's explanation. That's great, right? Yeah, it should be, except, um.
Juliette was the only premade where this happened.
I tried Romeo and Mercutio. They ran to their grandmother Isabella and she cheered with them, so I'm ASSUMING Get Parents didn't return true (again, could be wrong/misunderstanding, and most of all don't know why this would happen sometimes but not others) and instead went to Set to Next as it should, and her object ID was correctly passed as Local 1 in place of Claudio and Olivia since they're. Well. They're dead. Dead people can't cheer.
Annoyingly, it turns out I don't have this error log saved on this laptop/my external drive, but I did force an error while Isabella was cheering and saw the Brainiac Monster function thing somewhere in the stack that listed Isabella's object ID (believe it was 137) as a local, so. Yeah. I think I'm understanding it accurately haha. Feel free to bonk me on the head if I am not.
I did find it interesting that Isabella was chosen (tried a few times as well, same result each time) considering she has a higher nID than their grandfather Patrizio and I just would've thought he would've been found first. Anyway, in one test Isabella mysteriously died, so I could see what would happen in her absence. Yeah, no, the boys went to Patrizio instead and again it was all correct. Okay, so then both their grandparents mysteriously died, leaving them with no other eligible family members to be the cheeree. What do they do? They cheer for themselves. Their object IDs are passed as Local 1. It all works. Boo.
Interestingly, I did find one example of someone over at ModTheSims from, like, 2014 who said they haven't experienced this bug with Monty Ranch either, so I guess I found some comfort in knowing it wasn't just me x
So I tried with other premades where I've SEEN, with my own eyes, players post about having the problem in their own games. None of them ran into the bug either.
Ophelia cheered with her aunt Olive. Olive mysteriously died. Ophelia cheered for herself. Cassandra took the place of her parents when Mortimer mysteriously died and cheered with Alexander.
I tried so many different scenarios with the Newsons, and still everything worked. They cheered for themselves. No Object Error. No thinking the phone was their dad. No disappearing/not spawning homework.
This is pretty frustrating, because a) they are families people report this issue with, and b) now I have no idea why the bug only happens sometimes. Why were only Juliette (didn't test with Hermia** and Tybalt, so that's something I'd like to do; the result is probably going to be the same) and sims I've created affected?
** I just tried typing Hermia and Tybalt at the same time, resulting in me calling her Hermit.
Aside from any insights and help in understanding why I couldn't consistently reproduce the bug, anecdotes/your own experiences would be extremely beneficial if you would like to share! If you have any error logs, that would also be a massive help.
2. I haven't fully figured out where Get Parents is going wrong, or exactly how tunaisafish/Pescado have fixed it.
Like I said, I'm still very new to all this and I want to keep learning and improving. I understand some of the code but admittedly I am struggling and getting a bit confused. Numbers aren't my strongest point; I have dyscalculia so I take a bit more time to understand what's going on. It's probably really obvious and maybe I've completely overlooked something somewhere. As much as I prefer figuring stuff out on my own, it's important I get everything right, and again ANY help would be amazing.
3. I only play the Ultimate Collection.
As mentioned previously, AL introduced the bug where the orphans try cheering with objects, and I have only been able to get that in action so far because I play the Ultimate Collection, the one officially released in 2014 available on Origin/EA app (ugh, yeah). I have some EPs and SPs installed from the discs with the latest EP being FreeTime, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get them running to test pre-AL versions of the bug! This isn't essential, I suppose, since most people do play with AL, but out of curiosity I think it might be helpful to have a comparison/baseline. Just showing what the bug was, to get a better understanding. So, if you play without AL and would be up for testing or have any information from your own playthroughs, that would be fantastic :)
I'm not 100% confident this would be a reason why I'm not able to consistently reproduce the bug (especially in the context of premades) while others run into it frequently, but I also would like to rule out the UC fixing it at all. Like I said, I don't think that's the case, since - if I'm understanding correctly, could be totally wrong - the UC is essentially a bundle and doesn't have its own unique game version, but again it would be good to rule that out and start exploring other avenues, if that makes sense? All I can think is that the UC objects.packages have later modified dates than the disc versions (not sure about the, ah, popular alternative(s) or Legacy) but again, I don't think this issue was officially patched or fixed after AL, particularly since I did have some success reproducing the bug with a premade and some CAS families at least. Honestly at this point I am throwing everything and anything out there in the hopes something will stick! I like to consider every possibility before throwing them out entirely, no matter how unlikely.
Sorry for the looooong post and rambling! Hopefully this has made sense and I haven't said things that are super laughably, embarrassingly incorrect... but I want to be open about the fact that yeah, there's stuff I am currently not understanding but want to.
Absolutely NO pressure; any help from sharing your own personal experiences with the bug to simply reblogging this post would be massively appreciated! If you're interested at all, please send me a DM or chat. If you're not, that's okay :) Like I said I am being a bit cheeky asking all this!
Also just to be 100% clear, this bug doesn't need fixing at all - tunaisafish and Pescado covered that many years ago! I'd love to understand their work and hopefully be able to explain how they've fixed it on top of also being able to explain/confirm what's going wrong in the first place.
I forgot to mention other instances where a parent/parents would be unavailable, like them living on another lot or the child(ren)/teen(s) simply not having parents in the first place - i.e. they were created as adults in CAS and aged down. Thank you to freezerbunny-sims2 for reminding me of that :) I tested both of those circumstances yesterday, as well as after deleting the parent both improperly (externally deleting from the Characters folder) and safely in-game via the Sim Bin. Unfortunately, the tests all yielded the same result - the cheeree correctly cheered for themselves, so I didn't run into the bug. I still need to test a bit more, in particular with two parents instead of just one, but one of the sims I tried with was Dirk Dreamer; I moved Darren out, and Darleen is of course dead. Dirk was fine and cheered for himself.
2. I downloaded another AL objects.package from SFS in case it would be different at all. It was modified in October 2008 (on my 11th birthday, apparently, but no one asked) so yeah, it's not the same as my UC one. However I couldn't find any differences or discrepancies. I suspected this would be the case like I said in the original post but figured it wouldn't hurt to be sure before ruling anything out.
3. There's another version of the error people seem to have run into - Reference to tree tree parameter when no parameter exists. Interestingly, according to error logs, the game doesn't even get to Report Card - Brainiac Monster like in my tests, it stops at the frame before it. Local 1 is also 0 instead of what it should be (object ID of cheerer). As I haven't been able to reproduce that error by myself yet, it would be great to hear if anyone has ever run into that specific problem and would like to share more information about their own experiences :)
4. Upon reading more forum posts from over the years, it really does seem like yeah, this doesn't consistently happen all the time with every family. Plus tunaisafish himself says Get Parents "sometimes return[s] garbage", so. It's not just me being hopeless at testing ;) I would still like to work out why exactly it would only happen sometimes if that's possible, because I can never let these things be and I'd hate just to say 'ya idk why it doesn't always happen lol, sucks 2 b u if you get it'. There has to be a reason, please, I am begging
I am also still looking for anyone who plays without Apartment Life and would be up for testing what the bug was before its... mutation - maybe any Super Collection on Mac players? Just while I figure out how to get my discs running again.
Anyone who's up for checking out the code for Get Parents would also still be massively appreciated since I'm still getting my head around it at this moment in time!
Again, I appreciate it's super cheeky of me to ask. I'm not great at asking for help because I don't want to inconvenience anyone ^^;; So anything that you can do will be fantastic and I'd be eternally grateful. Every little helps <3
Throwing my experience into the ring as well regarding point 3 on this update post - I've had it happen countless times in my UC, although is almost always happened right after a child sim aged up and had the standard C grade. I can't remember any times it happened for an A+ grade for me.
The first time it happened recently, I had a child sim living on an apartment lot with his mother, his father was deceased. For at least 3 in game days I noticed his homework wasn't anywhere on the lot and finally caught a jump bug but with no error message in spite of my testingcheats being on. The bug also never happened to his younger brother by the same father.
Fastforward to both him and his younger brother aging to adulthood, his brother moves in after having a kid with a downtownie and subsequently dies (starved in front of a bowl of mac n cheese. im shaming him forever for it). Suddenly, the nephew starts throwing an error message - "Reference to tree tree parameter when no parameter exists" - every time he comes home from school and there's no homework to be found.
The strangest part, though, was that there was ANOTHER child sim living in the house, also with only one living parent (lots of accidents & fright deaths in that household) but unrelated to the first family. No bug to be found, all her homework came back normal and she cheered properly with her living parent.
I'm not sure if they're the same bug or two entirely different ones but i figured my experience is worth reporting!
really lazy previews today, i know, but making these kinda liquefied my brain a bit.
a set of pride flag heart crop tops, for AF and AM in two colors (white and black). i specifically made them for myself as add-ons to DeeDee’s set which i mostly just use the heart tops out of anyway.
swatches and more info below the cut
these tops focus more on gender identity rather than sexuality although I did throw a few sexuality flags as well (MLM, Sunset lesbian, and a few ace-spec flags). for gender flags there’s nonbinary, genderfluid, transmasc, transfem, demigirl, demiboy, deminb and agender. each flag comes in a white and black variant for both AF and AM and they’re all labelled with their flag :) i hope you enjoy them!
Hair Dump! Again...
(alternate title, I’m too lazy to make 6 separate posts for these)
So in this set we have six hairs in Poppet v2 because I have no self-control. Nightcrawler Gigi and Nightcrawler Pearl are available from toddler to elder, Nightcrawler Grace and Nightcrawler Galaxy are child to elder, and Nightcrawler Jennie and LeahLilith Renaissance are teen to elder.
All of them are binned and will go gray as elders.
Sorry for the lack of uploads, I’ve been busy working on this set of cat-pupiled eyes for you! I adore these eyes and use them almost exclusively in my game, but I have a few characters who I think would look nice with cat eyes. I made these as an experiment and thought they turned out quite well, so I’m sharing them!
I kept the names from the original because I liked them and couldn’t come up with anything new.
There are two versions, a custom set and a geneticized set. The ones with a red dot on their swatch are dominant, while the ones with green dots are recessive. Neither one should spawn townies (I felt like cat-eyed townies wouldn’t fit in my game) but if anyone is interested in a townified version, I could make one.
EDIT 11/11/21: I also made an overlay of with just the cat pupil, so you can use it with the original E/L/F set or any other recolors! It will appear as a blush and has a swatch to show that’s what it is.
Hello everyone! I have another hair for you all to enjoy (I know Poppet-sims made a version here, but I’m picky and wanted to keep the little skull clip from the original so...)
The hair comes in the 4 maxis colors, is binned (with elders going gray), and has the mesh included.
I live! And I have two new hairs for you guys, because I found them hiding in my downloads folder and had to retexture them.
As always, they’re binned, come in the 4 maxis colors (elders will go gray), and have the meshes included. If there’s enough interest, I might make some unnatural versions...? Let me know if you want to see them, and what colors you’d like!
2087
vaporwave
ellievsbear
