Oh..I'd like some visiters toO...

Not sure if you are using Castes but in general: from City Hall or a Computer:NRaas>SP>General Options>Options Stories>Disallow Story - you can select from that list stories you do not want to see
There are also options under General Options>Options Sims>Stories>Personality Members where you can select what you want to see i.e All, Blood, Friends, etc.

For visitations:
From City Hall or a computer>SP>General Options>Options: Situations>

Oh..sorry to have to correct my esteemed feline colleague here but that's not quite right. SP Situations do not govern inactives coming to visit you. I think it's pretty well acknowledged that NRaas SP kills the random visitors to your doorstep scenarios, unless they are cleverly disguised as stray animals, paparazzi, uni mascots, or trick or treaters. Not sure, but that may actually have been by design. I think it's on the drawing board to be revisited at some point.

The notifications about science experiments pertaining to sims you don't even know anything about are coming from the game itself, not SP. I also frequently see the one about hey, you might want to dial back the romance in public before creeping the rest of the group out when my sims are not grouped up or doing anything romantic, it's a misplaced warning about some other sims in town also coming from the game itself.

Not sure where the campaign party donation messages are coming from, don't think I've ever seen those.

I like NRAAS story progression for what it does with the immigrants. With EA's story progression, my towns would turn grey and start to be depopulated. NRASS-SP keeps the population a bit interesting. However, I was a bit p.o.ed when I played that one world with the Adam's family that was obviously the Addams family with Gomez, Morticia, Pugsly Wednesday and Uncle Fester and NRAAS SP disappeared them.

Another ting: NRASS SP is like salt peter for sims.

Everyone is hooking up and having babies but your player sims. Every sim out there is a "zero" match or they're partnered and very resistant to player sim's attempts at Romance.

I donno, it looks like it is a very powerful mod with lots of potential, but I have no clue how to use it. I tried playing with making castes, but I spend more time debugging the tweeking the caste than I do playing the game.

I'm not sure what you mean by NRaas SP "disappeared them." If they were full fledged residents with their own household and you mean emigrated them out of town and therefore out of your game, that is a feature of EA story progression. Emigration exists in the NRaas version of SP as well, but you have to work really hard to enable that, it's not something that happens by default, and even then only happens under special circumstances.

As for the challenges you have tuning SP so that the Romance manager becomes less aggressive or at least moves more slowly for your tastes (I don't like how fast that works by default myself) and your difficulties in working with castes, I have seen you complain about the complexities of SP before. On this very thread, even. So you have of course come to us at NRaas for assistance and...were we really no help at all? Or did that just not seem like a good idea for some reason I am stubbornly not understanding?

Actually I had never seen it before either, at least not until adding in the Career module of Story Progression. Now I see them pop up every now and then when the game decides some inactive working in politics is going to throw a fundraising party. I had also never seen any inactives throw a fundraising party before I added the Career module, so either that module is pushing the parties or I just never saw an inactive throw one before. The weird thing is I don't think they're SP events, because these parties are actually taking place unlike SP events which you never actually see happen.

One other thing, and it's NRaas related. What in SP blocks a sim from being attracted to someone who is homeless? I've been trying to find someone for my current sim, and I felt that there was at least one person they met in school who was homeless that would have a high attraction. Yet when I checked the attraction it was a big fat zero. Checked another homeless sim I thought would be good, zero. Then another, and another, and all had no attraction score. I found the "Link to Story Progression" setting in Woohooer and turned it off, suddenly there was an attraction score for two of those homeless sims I checked before. I tried browsing through the interactions for SP and Woohooer on the NRaas site, but I don't see anything that would really cause this. Would I have to keep the "Link to Story Progression" setting off for there to be attraction to homeless sims? Also, if I turn that off will it affect the stories in SP, and would there be any negative affects from turning that off?

By the way I would love to see SP updated to allow visiting sims. Blocking visitors is one thing about SP I really don't like.

EDIT: Forgot to add that the messages about the science experiments also didn't start showing up until after adding the Career module to SP. With or without SP installed those experiment and donation messages never appeared until I added the Career module.

Many thanks for the correction igazor. I guess I always assumed the reason I had a nice flow of visitors, inactives included, was some time ago I adjusted those settings thinking I was pushing the visits. My apologies for misleading anyone

It sounds to me like the science experiments and political donations might be happening because sims in those careers are reaching career levels that they might otherwise not have without the SP Careers module and are then being pushed to advance further. So these messages are probably more of a by-product of inactives' career successes than a "let's make the mod find ways to annoy the player with unnecessary notifications" kind of thing.

I've run with the link between Woohooer and SP off for years because, like so many others who travel our sims around different worlds, find that the link is not stable and keeps causing blocks on all romantic activity when we know it shouldn't both during travel and after sims return home. No serious ill effects from breaking the link at all, maybe the occasional inactive sibling-in-law being a bit friskier than they otherwise should, but those are manageable. In fact, in the new version of Woohooer currently in beta testing (v130), the link is off by default as we've had so many reports of it acting up. But without the link causing total romantic borkage for you, I would say that you might have a homeless or service pool caste that is disallowing romance/flirts with your actives. That might have been the default setting because in so many games, homeless sims are seen as truly transient and there isn't much point in pursuing romantic relationships with them -- though in reality, many of us don't play them that way. What fun is having maids, repair sims, and exotic dancers around if you can't manage an occasional flirt with them (or more)?

I will engage with @brappl separately to find out what she has done to foster surprise visits from inactives. Maybe my correction above was too heavy-handed, but always thought the Situations settings only govern the off-screen "gatherings" reported on by way of stories, not actual sims showing up on actives' doorsteps. There might be something else in play, such as long forgotten Retuner adjustments or a tuning mod from another party.

Thanks igazor, I think you're right about those messages. In the past I never would have seen those things because the EA story progression is mostly a big pile of crap, and inactives would never even come close to the career levels where those messages would appear. I just wish I could disable the messages, especially for the campaign parties, because once a party starts I usually get spammed with those donation messages. I think I'll also keep the link between Woohooer and SP off. I always assumed it was best to leave it on, but you make it sound like it's best left off. It's probably easier than sorting through the millions of options in SP trying to find the one blocking the attraction.

Oh and a completely unrelated thing I wanted to add. Ever since adding the Career module and turning on the "Force Change Work Clothes" option I no longer have any problems with invisible sims because of bad work outfits. For so long I kept wondering why I would get sims that weren't showing up, and over time I determined it was because of work outfits that were messed up. That option seems to keep things in check perfectly because I'm yet to see an invisible sim with it turned on. Then again I guess technically I've never actually seen any invisible sims, since you know, it's kind of hard to see something invisible.

I tried reading the FAQ and Internations at nraas, but it doesn't say what to do when families disappear. It was right at the start too. I went to go meet the Adams family, and there wasn't anyone living there. :-(

Is there a help feature at nraas??

If you are sure the problem is from a particular mod, you can post the question on the mod page. If it's a more mysterious or general question, post in the "Chatterbox" which has a link on the left side of the front page.

Are you certain they didn't just move as an entire household to a new home? If you have MasterController, could you Focus on any of them (run from City Hall or an in-game computer)? If they really were gone entirely out of your world/game there isn't likely much could be done to get them back but again, this just doesn't happen unless some rather complicated steps are taken to enable emigration. Or unless you had SP's progression switched off and EA's was in control instead. I've had specific households I've actually wanted to emigrate out peacefully without having to drag out the big guns like MC's Total Annihilation, and sometimes they get stubborn on me and refuse to budge.

http://nraas.wikispaces.com/page/messages/Chatterbox
(free registration on Wikispaces and then an approved membership request to the NRaas wiki required to see the big blue "New Post" button at the top)

If my Sims own more than one home, can they have parties at houses other than their primary home?

I've never tried that, because the other time when I had sims buying secondary homes I came to the conclusion that the only reason to do so was to keep other people from moving into them until your teens grew up and were ready to move out on their own. (Or, in the case of my loner sim, to own a lot of empty houses that you can refuse to allow anybody else to use, thus keeping the population from expanding. At least I -think- that's why he keeps rolling wants to buy more real estate after buying everything else that's available.) (Yes, this is the same sim who discovered that he was getting 300K every time he uses Fire Blast, followed by a fire extinguisher. I needed something to do with that 30 million he made while I was busy with another sim. )

I'll try it and let you know. (As soon as he gets back from China.)

There are other uses for a second residential lot. For example, a farmer household with lots of livestock might want to expand their allotment of land to work with. Or if the two properties are side by side, one could have fun getting an extremely large family to live over both lots though sims will keep routing from one lot to the next to do mundane things they could have done just as well where they were.

But for parties, I believe the guests will always show up at the front door of the lot you didn't want them at, then make their way over to wherever the host (the one who called for the party) is located. If these two places are across town from each other, it may not work out so well.

Yes..but I tried this for farmers.
I loved to have a house on one lot, and the *farm* on the adjacent lot. Too bad, horses can't live on a lot alone, that would have been perfect.
I guess chickens or cows can, or *farm* lot can be of use for large gardens.

I don't have livestock, so I didn't think about farms. And a backyard garden
But yes, after declining no less than 5 party invitations that had Cyclon3 Sw0rd (his only friend) going to that one instead of my sim's party, I did discover that the guest will always go to the "real" house. (And the "real" house is the one by Stoney lake, so I can also confirm that having the party house too far away doesn't work, either. He showed up at the house, complained that he had nowhere to put his autumn salad that he brought, then discovered the video game system and enjoyed an epic party while his host made his way back home.)

Something I literally just noticed, actually: if you use the ordinary "Throw Party" interaction, the guests will always come to your primary home. But you can throw parties at secondary houses so long as you choose the "Throw Party At" interaction instead, which is normally used for parties on community lots.

I'm currently playing a large, branchy family where most of the members are artsy performance types who do a lot of entertaining, so this is good news.

You cannot, however, throw a party at a resort. Even if you own the resort.

When I tried Throw Party At, I couldn't see the houses he owned. Everything had the same "random Community lot" icon. (Although I suppose some of those might have been houses that I wasn't recognizing....)

Okay igazor, I'm pretty sure I disabled those campaign donation messages. I found an option in SP under General>Gatherings called Campaign Gathering Chance and I set it to 0. I've played the last couple of days and I haven't seen one of those messages about campaign parties or donations. Just wondering how you missed that option, because apparently that is what was pushing the campaign parties.

Also about those science experiment messages, I just found an option I'm thinking might affect that. In General>Careers there's an option called Auto Tones For Inactive, and the description says When enabled, inactive sims will choose what they do at work/school based on their traits. Does that mean it affects the way they work (business as usual, work hard, etc)? If it does I would think that would cause certain Sims to go with the experiment option while working in the science career, which would cause the messages to pop up. I'm gonna test this, because I have a feeling this might be what stops those messages.

EDIT: Just wanted to correct the path for the campaign gatherings option. I left out the Situations part before, so it's actually General>Situations>Gatherings.

Sounds like a good find. I missed the option because I've never noticed the notifications before thus never went looking for a way to stop them.


Well yes, that would likely stop or at least drastically reduce the science experiment messages. So would blowing up or bulldozing the Science Center building and not replacing it. Probably killing all the human sims in town and replacing them with small furry rodents lacking opposable thumbs would also be effective. But the price to pay in each case is a bit higher than seems necessary (to me).

Unless I'm just reading your response the wrong way, you make it sound like the auto tones option is something that should be left on. From the way I'm reading your response, you make it sound like disabling that option is going too far just to disable the experiment messages. So what kind of affect does the Auto Tones option really have on inactive careers that makes it worth keeping on? I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on the option.

What I could (should) have said was I prefer to keep the auto tones for inactives option on because I feel it adds an element of trait-related realism to the way in which inactives progress in their careers across the board. Instead, I tried to make my response somewhat amusing, got a bit carried away there, and neglected to mention the reasoning behind it. That, and I don't see the experiment messages all that often even though I have loads of inactives in that career in a few worlds. It would be worth trying with the setting off if the messages are so annoying.

I can understand wanting some realism. I'm sure without that option the game basically says "go to work, blah blah blah who cares, you're done go home", but with that option it's probably more like "oh you're a couch potato, slack off". I also don't see the messages that often, though to be honest I even get tired of clicking away the story messages I actually have enabled, so sometimes it just gets a little annoying clicking off a message that I don't really care to see. They're definitely not as annoying as those campaign messages. With those it's basically "Soandso is throwing a campaign party, Soandso received a donation, Soandso received a donation, Soandso received a donation, Soandso received a donation", okay I think you get it.

If this game automatically closed those message pop ups after a short amount of time like in Sims 2 then I wouldn't be bothered at all by them, but in Sims 3 they just seem to linger there for all eternity. Yeah they sort of auto hide off to the side, but I just think it would be much better if they closed on their own after some time has passed. Hey that made me think of a stupid question... is there a way to automatically close those messages instead of having to click them away?

Why don't you just disable all notifications from story progression if it bugs you that much?