Those glitches with the social jigs also happen without mods. The mods just give you an easy way to get rid of them.
Also, for my playstyle, the game is unplayable in the vanilla state. That's not an exaggeration. It simply stopped working. Originally, I installed mods to be able to continue with my game instead of restarting over and over or moving from town to town all the time.
In principle, statements like the one in the quoted thread are just boilerplate language that allows for refusing any support in such cases, which in and itself is an understandable position for a company. It's important to understand though that the issue here is not the mods themselves, but the overload to the system one may cause, because the mods let you do this. Given that this "overload" is, most of the time, the goal of using the mod in the first place (for example, playing with several families at once), this is something to keep an eye out for everyone who plays this old game with its engine limitations.
It should also be pointed out that NRaas in particular has its own support mechanism. We aren't EA of course, but I wouldn't really say that their version of tech/game support, as provided by EA employees and those to whom they outsource the service by way of help functions, is anything worth writing home about unless you like being read to from scripts by help associates who don't really understand the game they are supporting. Customer support for things such as account issues might be different, on that front EA has a much better reputation.
But anyway, if an NRaas mod user wishes to find out if something they don't like that is happening with their games is attributable to the mods or if a different combination of mods/settings can make things better, we are quite approachable on the NRaas site. While Twallan has long since retired, our developer has been in charge of the mods for coming up on six years now, he is a professional programmer/coder, and there are others with such strong skill sets available to help over there.
And no, the mods do not cause abandoned social jigs. At least, not directly. They instead might increase players' awareness of them and they might push inactive sims in particular or those operating under their own autonomy to do social things more often that leave these annoying things behind, but they also provide the tools to get rid of them more efficiently than having to keep doing the evict, copy, bulldoze, replace, move back in Edit Town procedure, which while also effective can be much more disruptive to gameplay than flushing them out with MC.
Very good point(s) @igazor. Thus far, any time I've had a question about Nrass, you and @Turjan have been right there to help. Nrass seems a bit complicated for the average user. I consider myself above average and thus with your help can get this figured out. From my past posts over the years, you know I've had an aversion to mods because I've seen what they can do to a game. In the case of Nrass, it's obvious that the designer(s) are/were professionals.
I'm just learning about how to use this program to enjoy TS3 the way I want to enjoy it. For a decade I had wished the TS3 was more like TS2 with the rotational play. And with this program, I've so far had a blast enjoying my six founding families. It's a learning curve to see how the town plays along with me.
ETA: So I had forgotten to make sure my stay-at-home parents were either registered as retired or self-employed on my first rotation with the families. I got them all on second rotation except for one family: the Diamonds. The mom was pregnant and you can't register when you are pregnant. So I let them go and rotated out, making sure to put them in the caste rotation. Then I moved on to my other five families, playing 5 days each. When I got back to the Diamond family, apparently the mom decided to be a stylist while I was gone, and she had gotten up to level 8 in her career! All this time, her two babies were laying on the floor of their little house (or so I assume). So my dilemma is whether to have her husband give up his career as a professional athlete to take care of the kids, or have mom quit to stay home. Alternately, I have learned if mom can make it to level 9, she can work from home. I might just have her husband take a couple of days off so mom can realize her dreams! What an interesting turn of events that I totally didn't plan!
Those glitches with the social jigs also happen without mods. The mods just give you an easy way to get rid of them.
Also, for my playstyle, the game is unplayable in the vanilla state. That's not an exaggeration. It simply stopped working. Originally, I installed mods to be able to continue with my game instead of restarting over and over or moving from town to town all the time.
In principle, statements like the one in the quoted thread are just boilerplate language that allows for refusing any support in such cases, which in and itself is an understandable position for a company. It's important to understand though that the issue here is not the mods themselves, but the overload to the system one may cause, because the mods let you do this. Given that this "overload" is, most of the time, the goal of using the mod in the first place (for example, playing with several families at once), this is something to keep an eye out for everyone who plays this old game with its engine limitations.
Yes, I know it can happen without mods, but it seems to be extremely rare, so far I've only seen it once, or possibly twice in my games. That's not too bad, considering I've been playing for 8 years now. If I remember correctly I got rid of it/them with testingcheatsenabled on/Object/Delete.
What playstyle is that?
Have you been able to figure out exactly why it stopped working?
For me it has taken around 3 sim years, and 1-2 real life years before the save file in question gets so large and complex that it starts throwing error code 12 messages, and/or crashing to desktop without warning, and also takes a very long time to load, more than 20 minutes. Then I know it's time to save the sims in it to the bin, and place them in a fresh new copy of the same town they were in.
It should also be pointed out that NRaas in particular has its own support mechanism. We aren't EA of course, but I wouldn't really say that their version of tech/game support, as provided by EA employees and those to whom they outsource the service by way of help functions, is anything worth writing home about unless you like being read to from scripts by help associates who don't really understand the game they are supporting. Customer support for things such as account issues might be different, on that front EA has a much better reputation.
But anyway, if an NRaas mod user wishes to find out if something they don't like that is happening with their games is attributable to the mods or if a different combination of mods/settings can make things better, we are quite approachable on the NRaas site. While Twallan has long since retired, our developer has been in charge of the mods for coming up on six years now, he is a professional programmer/coder, and there are others with such strong skill sets available to help over there.
And no, the mods do not cause abandoned social jigs. At least, not directly. They instead might increase players' awareness of them and they might push inactive sims in particular or those operating under their own autonomy to do social things more often that leave these annoying things behind, but they also provide the tools to get rid of them more efficiently than having to keep doing the evict, copy, bulldoze, replace, move back in Edit Town procedure, which while also effective can be much more disruptive to gameplay than flushing them out with MC.
Firstly, I'm talking about mods and/or third party CC in general, from all kinds of creators, from all over the internet, not only Nraas mods.
Fortunately I haven't yet had any problems with the game that have been so bad that I couldn't somehow fix them myself, or figure out some sort of workaround. And no issues with my EA account so far, other than the occasional trouble with logging in, but that doesn't happen often enough to fret about.
No, but my guess is that they might increase the frequency of them appearing, since Rhiannon's got them already, so soon after starting to play with mods. Also the incidence of toddlers being kidnapped is probably caused by mods, since it's never happened in my game, and didn't happen to Karritz either until she started using mods.
Very good point(s) @igazor. Thus far, any time I've had a question about Nrass, you and @Turjan have been right there to help. Nrass seems a bit complicated for the average user. I consider myself above average and thus with your help can get this figured out. From my past posts over the years, you know I've had an aversion to mods because I've seen what they can do to a game. In the case of Nrass, it's obvious that the designer(s) are/were professionals.
I'm just learning about how to use this program to enjoy TS3 the way I want to enjoy it. For a decade I had wished the TS3 was more like TS2 with the rotational play. And with this program, I've so far had a blast enjoying my six founding families. It's a learning curve to see how the town plays along with me.
ETA: So I had forgotten to make sure my stay-at-home parents were either registered as retired or self-employed on my first rotation with the families. I got them all on second rotation except for one family: the Diamonds. The mom was pregnant and you can't register when you are pregnant. So I let them go and rotated out, making sure to put them in the caste rotation. Then I moved on to my other five families, playing 5 days each. When I got back to the Diamond family, apparently the mom decided to be a stylist while I was gone, and she had gotten up to level 8 in her career! All this time, her two babies were laying on the floor of their little house (or so I assume). So my dilemma is whether to have her husband give up his career as a professional athlete to take care of the kids, or have mom quit to stay home. Alternately, I have learned if mom can make it to level 9, she can work from home. I might just have her husband take a couple of days off so mom can realize her dreams! What an interesting turn of events that I totally didn't plan!
Don't we all?
Yes, I've seen that too... what they can do to other peoples games, that is. Not my own.
That would never happen in Sims 3 modfree vanilla version. Just saying.
This is a bit confusing, I thought you said that you started using mods with the sole purpose of getting total control of the inactive sims lives, and at all costs prevent unexpected and unplanned things from happening?
@SuzyCue72 My playstyle? I use all expansions I have at the same time. I also tend to play social people who know the whole town after a short while. The game then started forgetting portraits. Going to vacation world or university didn't help, because the list got even longer. Then the game started mixing up who is where, one of my Twinbrook guy's kids ended up as a homeless toddler in China (I didn't even know the kid existed, I only found him in the family tree), and every trip left my guy going naked to work, or worse, in some broken outfit that produced weird sprites on the screen, breaking stuff in the house, deleting my sims' vehicles, etc. Lets not talk about the game breaking completely when it bloated my savegame with useless pics.
Anyway, most of those issues went away after I started using NRAAS mods. They don't catch all the nonsense, but most of it, which is fine by me. And no, those leftover social jigs don't happen that often in my game, either (I've seen maybe 4 so far). However, the first one appeared in my Twinbrook game, without mods. I had to find out how to get rid of these, and the mod versions of resets tend to be less intrusive than the vanilla workarounds. This was especially important for university, where the game usually broke sometime during week 2. If you reset your sims, they will lose all academic progress, which is annoying. And yes, it happened both times I went there the vanilla way.
This is a bit confusing, I thought you said that you started using mods with the sole purpose of getting total control of the inactive sims lives, and at all costs prevent unexpected and unplanned things from happening?
Rhiannon forgot to register people she wanted to stay at home as unemployed. NRAAS Story Progression is still story progression, which means your inactives will be seen by the game, and no mod can prevent the game from interfering and stuff your people into careers if they don't have any. The easiest way to prevent this is to put "your" sims into careers yourself, and Rhiannon knows that, if you read her post. Juggling with several dozen sims at once means you sometimes forget something. No biggie.
This is a bit confusing, I thought you said that you started using mods with the sole purpose of getting total control of the inactive sims lives, and at all costs prevent unexpected and unplanned things from happening?
Using the basic download with Nrass, and not digging down to figure out what I can do with it which is much more than I am doing, I can control: divorce, marriage, aging, births, moving out of town, people moving in to the family's house, death, changing careers if already employed. THOSE are the things that matter the most to me and are already preset with Nrass without any muss or fuss. As @igazor told me when I asked about the career thing, since I left that Sim unemployed, the game gave her a career. My other stay-at-home parents I was able to get them self-employed or retired to stop them from doing things I didn't want them to do. Nrass doesn't completely freeze a family like TS2 does but it's close enough for me to be able to enjoy TS3 so much more. In all honesty, I was kind of happy with the way it turned out for the Diamond family. I played them yesterday and Mrs. Diamond got to level 9 stylist, a career I had never had a Sim do before. Ever. So that's been kind of interesting. Mr. Diamond took one day off work unpaid and then he had a day off on his scheduled. On day three, there would have been a 2-hour gap between the time Mr. Diamond went to work and Mrs. Diamond got off. So I had Mr. Diamond make sure the two toddlers had their needs taken care of and then he hired a babysitter (I know, I know). It turned out great through. The babysitter was very attentive to the kids and when Mrs. Diamond got home, she had very little to do. Interesting play I've never experienced before.
Do I think Nrass causes some weirdness? I personally think so. But it's not game breaking from what I can tell.
Just to add: I'm not some magical know-it-all. Quite the contrary, there are still many options in the NRAAS suite of which I'm not sure of what they do, and I'm sure there are other game options I don't even know about. This "forgetting to register career" is something I regularly do with my plumbots, because they don't have the trait chips that makes it possible for them to go to work. The game will send them somewhere, anyway, because inactives can skip all prerequisites. Or I do something of which I don't consider all consequences. I once told Register to use townies for roles, and I was a bit in a pickle when my, this time properly registered as "unemployed", nannybot was recruited to man the kissing booth during the spring festival. Oops. It was funny though. She didn't earn a single simoleon though. I wonder why Then it was also babysitter time, until I found the place where I could get the bot out of that role again.
Fortunately, there's an inbuilt plumbot caste that allows for at least a few settings.
I have to wonder if maybe the newly launched one-sided anti-mod, anti-cc campaign is going to end soon. I mean, the players being addressed on this and several other threads are intelligent and sophisticated enough with the game (even if they modestly doubt their own levels of sophistication at times) to know what they observe in a modless game is actually happening and not figments of their imagination.
The way script mod development works, when it is done up properly and not by a fly-by-night mod developer who then disappears from view after release, is that the mod developers see flaws and inconsistencies in the game code and then verify for themselves and with other players that such coding flaws do lead to unwanted effects in the game. And then they address them and put the changes out for alpha and then beta testing. Or perhaps they find things that are indeed working as EA intended but can simply be improved upon or changed to work in a way that is to some or hopefully many players more pleasing.
It's great to offer non-mod solutions to players who wish to play vanilla, limit their mod usage to what they consider the bare essentials, or who may have one or more vanilla games going in tandem with modded games utilizing different game folders. But telling us what is seen on-screen in a vanilla game by one or two players is what everyone must be capable of seeing, especially when we start talking about things we know are broken for many players as game time progresses such as lack of data garbage collection (this is where ErrorTrap comes in with its recurring correction routines), cash register attendants not showing up/functioning, or story progression in general, is I am afraid not helpful where we have plenty of evidence to the contrary and does not make the one posting come across as being overly informed or as helpful as they may intend to be.
If the intent is to help other players enjoy their games in the ways in which they choose to enjoy them and for longer amounts of time than the game itself typically seems to allow for, I'm sorry but there are other ways to approach that goal than the one currently being taken.
I avoided using third party content of any kind in my Sims 3 game until after Sims 4 was released. I eventually added a few NRAAS mods such as Debug Enabler, Overwatch, Error Trap and Master Controller.
Prior to adding the mods I had long stopped attempting to play any kind of family game due to bugs in the vanilla Sims 3 game. Having Master Controller in my mods folder has meant I can now play families again and I play them all the time now. I haven't seen any issues with my family trees breaking and I've been able to add new sims to the existing families when I have felt the occasional need to do so.
It was interesting to learn about your experiences with the vanilla version of the game, it seems that they're rather different from my own. Why that is I don't know, but the fact that I always keep aging and Story progression turned off might be one of the reasons.
Also thanks to all three of you for being able to discuss this topic in a calm and sensible manner, like the grown ups you are (I think?). After all, mods and CC are only small add ons to a computer game, not the be-all and end-all of somebodys life, or a sacred and holy religion that is absolutely taboo to question or even talk about.
Last but not least, I hope that both you and I will be able to play TS3, with or without mods/CC, for a long time to come, and that bugs and glitches stay away as much as possible.
Comments
Also, for my playstyle, the game is unplayable in the vanilla state. That's not an exaggeration. It simply stopped working. Originally, I installed mods to be able to continue with my game instead of restarting over and over or moving from town to town all the time.
In principle, statements like the one in the quoted thread are just boilerplate language that allows for refusing any support in such cases, which in and itself is an understandable position for a company. It's important to understand though that the issue here is not the mods themselves, but the overload to the system one may cause, because the mods let you do this. Given that this "overload" is, most of the time, the goal of using the mod in the first place (for example, playing with several families at once), this is something to keep an eye out for everyone who plays this old game with its engine limitations.
But anyway, if an NRaas mod user wishes to find out if something they don't like that is happening with their games is attributable to the mods or if a different combination of mods/settings can make things better, we are quite approachable on the NRaas site. While Twallan has long since retired, our developer has been in charge of the mods for coming up on six years now, he is a professional programmer/coder, and there are others with such strong skill sets available to help over there.
And no, the mods do not cause abandoned social jigs. At least, not directly. They instead might increase players' awareness of them and they might push inactive sims in particular or those operating under their own autonomy to do social things more often that leave these annoying things behind, but they also provide the tools to get rid of them more efficiently than having to keep doing the evict, copy, bulldoze, replace, move back in Edit Town procedure, which while also effective can be much more disruptive to gameplay than flushing them out with MC.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
I'm just learning about how to use this program to enjoy TS3 the way I want to enjoy it. For a decade I had wished the TS3 was more like TS2 with the rotational play. And with this program, I've so far had a blast enjoying my six founding families. It's a learning curve to see how the town plays along with me.
ETA: So I had forgotten to make sure my stay-at-home parents were either registered as retired or self-employed on my first rotation with the families. I got them all on second rotation except for one family: the Diamonds. The mom was pregnant and you can't register when you are pregnant. So I let them go and rotated out, making sure to put them in the caste rotation. Then I moved on to my other five families, playing 5 days each. When I got back to the Diamond family, apparently the mom decided to be a stylist while I was gone, and she had gotten up to level 8 in her career! All this time, her two babies were laying on the floor of their little house (or so I assume). So my dilemma is whether to have her husband give up his career as a professional athlete to take care of the kids, or have mom quit to stay home. Alternately, I have learned if mom can make it to level 9, she can work from home. I might just have her husband take a couple of days off so mom can realize her dreams! What an interesting turn of events that I totally didn't plan!
Yes, I know it can happen without mods, but it seems to be extremely rare, so far I've only seen it once, or possibly twice in my games. That's not too bad, considering I've been playing for 8 years now. If I remember correctly I got rid of it/them with testingcheatsenabled on/Object/Delete.
What playstyle is that?
Have you been able to figure out exactly why it stopped working?
For me it has taken around 3 sim years, and 1-2 real life years before the save file in question gets so large and complex that it starts throwing error code 12 messages, and/or crashing to desktop without warning, and also takes a very long time to load, more than 20 minutes. Then I know it's time to save the sims in it to the bin, and place them in a fresh new copy of the same town they were in.
Firstly, I'm talking about mods and/or third party CC in general, from all kinds of creators, from all over the internet, not only Nraas mods.
Fortunately I haven't yet had any problems with the game that have been so bad that I couldn't somehow fix them myself, or figure out some sort of workaround. And no issues with my EA account so far, other than the occasional trouble with logging in, but that doesn't happen often enough to fret about.
No, but my guess is that they might increase the frequency of them appearing, since Rhiannon's got them already, so soon after starting to play with mods. Also the incidence of toddlers being kidnapped is probably caused by mods, since it's never happened in my game, and didn't happen to Karritz either until she started using mods.
Don't we all?
Yes, I've seen that too... what they can do to other peoples games, that is. Not my own.
That would never happen in Sims 3 modfree vanilla version. Just saying.
This is a bit confusing, I thought you said that you started using mods with the sole purpose of getting total control of the inactive sims lives, and at all costs prevent unexpected and unplanned things from happening?
Anyway, most of those issues went away after I started using NRAAS mods. They don't catch all the nonsense, but most of it, which is fine by me. And no, those leftover social jigs don't happen that often in my game, either (I've seen maybe 4 so far). However, the first one appeared in my Twinbrook game, without mods. I had to find out how to get rid of these, and the mod versions of resets tend to be less intrusive than the vanilla workarounds. This was especially important for university, where the game usually broke sometime during week 2. If you reset your sims, they will lose all academic progress, which is annoying. And yes, it happened both times I went there the vanilla way.
Using the basic download with Nrass, and not digging down to figure out what I can do with it which is much more than I am doing, I can control: divorce, marriage, aging, births, moving out of town, people moving in to the family's house, death, changing careers if already employed. THOSE are the things that matter the most to me and are already preset with Nrass without any muss or fuss. As @igazor told me when I asked about the career thing, since I left that Sim unemployed, the game gave her a career. My other stay-at-home parents I was able to get them self-employed or retired to stop them from doing things I didn't want them to do. Nrass doesn't completely freeze a family like TS2 does but it's close enough for me to be able to enjoy TS3 so much more. In all honesty, I was kind of happy with the way it turned out for the Diamond family. I played them yesterday and Mrs. Diamond got to level 9 stylist, a career I had never had a Sim do before. Ever. So that's been kind of interesting. Mr. Diamond took one day off work unpaid and then he had a day off on his scheduled. On day three, there would have been a 2-hour gap between the time Mr. Diamond went to work and Mrs. Diamond got off. So I had Mr. Diamond make sure the two toddlers had their needs taken care of and then he hired a babysitter (I know, I know). It turned out great through. The babysitter was very attentive to the kids and when Mrs. Diamond got home, she had very little to do. Interesting play I've never experienced before.
Do I think Nrass causes some weirdness? I personally think so. But it's not game breaking from what I can tell.
Fortunately, there's an inbuilt plumbot caste that allows for at least a few settings.
The way script mod development works, when it is done up properly and not by a fly-by-night mod developer who then disappears from view after release, is that the mod developers see flaws and inconsistencies in the game code and then verify for themselves and with other players that such coding flaws do lead to unwanted effects in the game. And then they address them and put the changes out for alpha and then beta testing. Or perhaps they find things that are indeed working as EA intended but can simply be improved upon or changed to work in a way that is to some or hopefully many players more pleasing.
It's great to offer non-mod solutions to players who wish to play vanilla, limit their mod usage to what they consider the bare essentials, or who may have one or more vanilla games going in tandem with modded games utilizing different game folders. But telling us what is seen on-screen in a vanilla game by one or two players is what everyone must be capable of seeing, especially when we start talking about things we know are broken for many players as game time progresses such as lack of data garbage collection (this is where ErrorTrap comes in with its recurring correction routines), cash register attendants not showing up/functioning, or story progression in general, is I am afraid not helpful where we have plenty of evidence to the contrary and does not make the one posting come across as being overly informed or as helpful as they may intend to be.
If the intent is to help other players enjoy their games in the ways in which they choose to enjoy them and for longer amounts of time than the game itself typically seems to allow for, I'm sorry but there are other ways to approach that goal than the one currently being taken.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
Zumi and the Winchester Brothers
The Watcher's Caretaker - A Limited ISBI
Prior to adding the mods I had long stopped attempting to play any kind of family game due to bugs in the vanilla Sims 3 game. Having Master Controller in my mods folder has meant I can now play families again and I play them all the time now. I haven't seen any issues with my family trees breaking and I've been able to add new sims to the existing families when I have felt the occasional need to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
It was interesting to learn about your experiences with the vanilla version of the game, it seems that they're rather different from my own. Why that is I don't know, but the fact that I always keep aging and Story progression turned off might be one of the reasons.
Also thanks to all three of you for being able to discuss this topic in a calm and sensible manner, like the grown ups you are (I think?). After all, mods and CC are only small add ons to a computer game, not the be-all and end-all of somebodys life, or a sacred and holy religion that is absolutely taboo to question or even talk about.
Last but not least, I hope that both you and I will be able to play TS3, with or without mods/CC, for a long time to come, and that bugs and glitches stay away as much as possible.