Oh, yes, I ought to have said make sure everything is backed up in case you do make a cock up.

How do you arrange a ranked chess match?

From what I recall, you need a chess table with two chairs. Click on your Sim's Phone and it should have an option to "Call Over Next Ranked Opponent" or so.
Then you call them over, like a visit and you can ask them to play you. At least, I think that's how it's done. Haven't done it in a while.

When the next ranked opponent is on the lot, you have an option on the chess table to challenge ____ to a ranked chess match. That's the one that counts.

It can also be done if they are both at a community lot with a chess table. (So if your next ranked opponent is the guy manning the alchemy register, you can buy the alchemy shop and add a chess table to it.)

When populating a world, do you generally go for 'proper' hair- and eyecolors or just mishmash with blue and pink hair? If the world is not one overrun by occult sims, I mean. Just curious.

For me, I use NRAAS's fast immigration and pull from the sim bin. I think about 90% of the sims there have 'normal' hair and eye colours, but there are some that have some more unusual colours (and I headcanon that whoever does has some Imaginary Friend DNA back in their family tree). Pastel blue hair seems to be pretty popular.

My bin is 98% full of occults, so pulling from the bin gets occults in my game.
(It would be 100%, but my husband still has a family.)

Dumb question:

If I was going to attempt to play whatever Origin considers the 'base game' TS3 download (because that's all the money I'm willing to officially give EA at this time), are there any mods that will just work with the base game, and/or how do I find out the compatibility status of them?

I'd be interested in functionality fixes, aesthetic fixes (is there any universal 'pudding face fix'?) and whatever the "best practice" is considered to be for dealing with Story Mode.

This question is quite urgent because I am bored.

If you're planning to get the base game and you don't have any EPs, I recommend you buy it from Steam so you're not forced to have the patch 1.69 (AKA say bye to performance) and EA's Spyware (AKA Origin) running in the background. As regards mods, they all should work as long as your game is patched to either 1.67 or, God forbid, 1.69... Some mods might require certain EPs, but for the most part the only thing you need is a fully-patched base game.

The Number UNO fix you need is the whole NRaas Suite (mainly ErrorTrap and Overwatch). I also fancy Awesome Mod (from MATY) because it fixes countless little bugs and has, IMO, the best story progression you can get. More Sims Club Mod (here) is a personal favorite because it pushes more Sims to visit nightclubs and really makes them look like in the trailers (but you need a powerful computer if you're gonna have so many Sims in one lot). My favorite modders are Arsil, Buzz, douglasveiga and icarusallsorts, and I pretty much have every mod they've released. But these mods are enhancements rather than fixes.

Regarding the base game: I seem to have bought it from Origin in some sort of fever/hallucination state (Okay, I think it was probably a summer sale about four years ago). But your advice re: Steam is noted, and if the game 'sticks' with me this time, I'll keep that in mind before I make any more potential purchases. (I'm a hardcore TS2 er, I occasionally try TS3 but it never sticks. Trying again.)

Regarding the mod advice, thank you! Am I crazy, or were "Nraas" and "AwesomeMod" at one point incompatible because they were both 'core' mods or something like that? Is that outdated info?

(I did actually try googling this stuff, by the way, and checked for maybe a 'basic beginner setup' sticky in the Help forums before I resorted to the 'stupid questions' format. Thank you again.)

Edited to add: the nraas/awesomemod thing may be moot for now, maty seems to be offline (or at least throwing internal server errors).

Most of the Nraas suite is script mods. In particular Awesomemod and Master Controller can both be in your game. I have quarrels with Awesomemod--so many of the "fixes" on it are just things that bring the game to Pescado's taste and are not tunable or even documented. Also, I think Pescado's sort of done with the Sims, and the people who hang out in the forums there are unhelpful, even hostile. But a lot of people like it.

For Nraas, go to the website: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/, and particularly go to the pages that describe the mods, and to the "chatterbox" which is the forum there. The people are very friendly, knowledgeable & helpful, and a lot of problem solving gets done there. Two of the most helpful mods from the Nraas suite are Overwatch and Error Trap. Error Trap catches script errors which can be uploaded at Nraas and friendly experts will analyze them & help you to figure out what's going on.

If your base game is from Origin, you're stuck with Origin unless you uninstall & rebuy from Steam or second-hand disks. That also means you're stuck with the 1.69 patch eventually. The good news is that the only effects 1.69 has are (1)Origin always loads when you start the game, (2) you can only start the game from the launcher, you can't bypass it, and (3) if you do get expansions you will have to check the expansion pack window to make sure they're being recognized & loaded. Every so often, usually after Origin does an update (which you can supposedly refuse but in reality you can't), the launcher will forget you have them. In that case, you abort the launch & start over until you get the message that you've just installed new expansion packs (which of course you haven't, but humor the silly launcher)>

Once the game is started there are no effects on your game from 1.69 at all.

As for Story Progression, a lot of people like Awesomemod's the best. I haven't compared it to Nraas Story Progression. But Nraas Story Progression is customizable, and I appreciate that. EA's own is capricious.

The pudding faces are not that bad. Make your own faces for a few sims, download a few sliders (you don't need a lot of them unless you're really into modeling faces as your main game activity), and you'll get enough variety so that those faces just blend in to the crowd.

From what I remember, the thing that really makes a big difference in minimising pudding face is putting a multiplier on the existing sliders, rather than new sliders. I mean, those can help too, but unless you're looking for specific features it can be hard to figure out which ones to get.

I think it might be an included feature in Awesomemod? It's probably in one of the Nraas mods as well. But yeah, a 2x or 3x multiplier can make a BIG difference, while still keeping features within a fairly realistic range.

In terms of Awesomemod vs Nraas, I think there's very little that's incompatible at this point? You can have both installed at once without your game going kabloom (and actually, some of the nraas mods will, as mentioned earlier, actually make your game far less likely to go kabloom). It's mostly more that there's a lot of overlapping features, and so anywhere that happens the game will only implement one set of rules. The awesomemod tuning file and the nraas settings will help you tell the game which rules you want enforced for which features, though it will take some fiddling. Most (pretty much all, I think?) of the things awesomemod does can be done with something from nraas. So really, the main reason for having awesomemod installed is if you want to use that story progression system rather than the nraas one.

Different people have different opinions on which story progression is better, a lot of it comes down to personal taste. The nraas one does use a lot more resources though, from what I understand, so it can cause a bit of lag and stuff on less powerful computers. That's the reason I've never tried it out tbh. I already have some lag as it is (my tendency towards larger families no doubt is at least partly to blame) so as much as I really like the sound of the nraas one, I've decided to stick with awesomemod rather than make my currently tolerable levels of lag worse. But, thinking about it, if you're only playing base game, no EPs, you probably should be able to handle either story mode without lag, unless your computer is pretty weak, right?

Not at all. I don't have time to go into details but 1.69 DOES affect your game performance. It seems the game is sending certain information to Origin and receiving some information as well. The problem with TS3 is that everything gets loaded into memory. For example, the folder FeaturedCreations downloads thousands of images and EVERY SINGLE ONE of those images gets loaded into memory. This not only affects the performance of the game but it also adds up to 3.5 GB memory limit TS3 has. The only way to BY-PASS this system is to delete the folder AND launch the game with your internet connection DISABLED. Other tricks, like denying writing permissions, but none of this will work since as long as you're connected to internet, the game will try non-stop to download these images. This problem seems to be worsen by 1.69 with other changes made to force Origin to be opened all the time.



Yes, there's some overlapping but they also have unique features. For example, Awesome Mod allows you set a household as SACRED, which prevents to house from being affected by StoryProgression when you're not playing with it; that's to say, it allows both ROTATIONAL gameplay and story progression. On the other hand, Overwatch and ErrorTrap are MUSTS if you want your games to run well. Since you can combine any Nraas mod with Awesome mod, I see no reason not to have both. There's even a document over at NRaas Industries that explains which Nraas mods are already covered if you have AwesomeMod.

There are certain limitations, however. NRaas Story Progression will ignore the Sacred status of Awesome, for example, and Overwatch will override all aging settings (TS2 Style aging or no aging for ghosts etc.) you have configured in AM.

@gwynne You should look into all the NRaas mods. Some help your game, some add much awesomeness.
Here is a link for the various ways Awesome and NRaas interact: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Awesome
The list of modders that Naus Allien mentioned are well worth looking into.

Is anyone else wondering whether the Don Babilon nectar racks have remained veggie-free?

They have! You can have all my spare cucumbers now.

The standard trick is to replace the FeaturedItems folder with a text document named FeaturedItems (remove the extension). The game cannot store its junk in what is actually a document. Process Monitor reveals that it will keep trying for a while, thus wasting a small amount of resources while it does so, then it tends to give up. This was happening well before 1.69, though.

I have detected no performance differences while in-game on 1.69 over 1.67. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the patch and starting up is a pain, but then except for Origin sitting in the corner being annoying by its mere presence and using up <80 MB of RAM, it all runs the same. I think it might be safer to say players' experiences vary with that one.

As for the Awesome together with NRaas question above, this is the page being referenced: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Awesome

The only mods in our collection that are core mods are ErrorTrap and UntranslatedKey (the latter is mostly for developers). It's okay to run more than one core mod on TS3 as long as they don't impact exactly the same game resources.

Hey guys--I'm the OP of the "help me try out TS3 again" post. I have read and appreciate all the responses. I admit I find it a little overwhelming trying to absorb this all, probably because my brain is already full of 'everything anyone needs to know to get TS2 playable'.

Couple of things: the patch level thing is interesting. Performance is important to me--one of the reasons I end up giving up in frustration every time I try this is because of the slowness of certain things like CAS content catalogs. (Admittedly, I usually try this with an ARR'd version that contains everything.)

While I did buy the base game through Origin, I would def. rebuy it through Steam if the patch level issues are significant enough.

I've gotten NRAAS and a few additional mods installed, and am vaguely remembering some of the things that took me forever to figure out the last time I tried this, like the settings that you can only get to via City Hall. (As a TS2 player my main crutches were usually the 'destination' version of InSim and various Pescado object-based hacks, NRAAS is a slightly different paradigm.)

Couple of questions: The game looks pretty terrible to me. Dark and plasticky. (I also hate how matte and flat and boring the UI is, but that's not fixable.) I'm testing it on a GTX560, and I also have a weird issue where some of the text in menus is blurry or half-missing. For a GTX560 (roughly a 5 year old card now, I think), should I be having to alter any configuration files? Anything I can do in the NVIDIA control panel to improve things a bit? Must-have lighting mods? I'm really not that picky about having a perfect looking game at an unrealistic framerate, it's really the darkness that's bothering me.

Edit: Okay, the GTX560 depsite being quite old now did need to be added to the graphics cards. Things look better now but menu text is still borked.

Spinoff questions: If I can get this into a state I enjoy, how about a GTX860M and a GTX970? I assume one or both of those would need altered config files to function properly with the game? Is there a resource/knowledgebase I can hit like leefish is for TS2?

Thanks for any info/discussion. The backstory here is that while I love TS2 and can't ever seem to get into TS3, it seems like a slight majority of people I still enjoy talking to about the Sims are mostly playing TS3, so I always have that sense of missing out on something. I know it takes a fair amount of work to get TS2 into a state of awesomeness, I'm just missing the same broad knowledge about TS3 and it seems so daunting.

Thanks Don- that is "AWESOME".
(And thanks for helping out in TS3 Building forum. )

EDIT:
Stupid question- How long will it take to see a butterfly after you place a butterfly spawner?

What does one get with Awesome Mod that you can't get with NRAAS Story progression and Woohooer? I'm still not smart enough to figure out NRAAS Story progression. I've heard that if you have a question about Awesome mod, the people there insult you and don't help. I'm thinking about trying this Awesome mod thing.

And I don't understand the meaning of "core" mod; in the tutorials here, the term is used in 2 different ways; do You mean changing the Sims dlls themselves in the programs folder or does Awesome mod get installed in the mods folder like any other mod? Or does it mean that "override" is used to make new Sims 3 dll methods and it is installed in the mods folder?

I wish could quit playing long enough to make more mods. There are some changes I want to make.

1- Awesome Mod fixes countless little bugs the plague Sims games. This document details all changes made to the game: here
Awesome Story Progression not only fixes EA but makes Sims more lively and do more things, unlike NRaas that's more of a Soap Opera tell-don't-show type of mod. NRaas will tell you things are happening, it will make changes to pretend these things happened but it didn't actually happen. Awesome makes things happen and if you read the newspaper you will find out exactly what happened. Am I being clear?
2- Yes, people over at MATY are MEAN but Pescado, the creator himself, is actually a nice guy. If you specific doubts he may answer you, if everybody else don't rip you to pieces before.
3- Core mod is as you said any mod that affects the main dlls of the game, but they work as overrides, so they're loaded on top of the original dlls. Awesome mod has its own DLL and it also overrides Sims3GameplaySystems.dll, Sims3GameplayObjects.dll and UI.dll. ErrorTrap, on the other hand, overrides ScriptCore.dll. That's why you can have both at the same time. Awesome Mod has to be placed inside your mods folder like any other mod.

One, two days, usually. They sometimes take a bit longer if you place them on your active residential lot. Butterfly spawning is timed and not universally consistent, however. They start appearing from 5am onwards, most of them should be "out" around noon, and they will disappear again at 7pm. Between 7pm and 5am they are replaced by Fireflies if you have Showtime, or remain inactive if you don't.
There is also a chance that they spawn a flower or small pet instead of a butterfly if you own Seasons and Pets. They may also spawn a dig site for dogs, but I am not too sure about this; these may well be restricted to gem and rock spawners only.

So, the C# overrides work!! You even told me where to look for examples. I was too lazy to try this myself. Thanks so much for that info. {evil grin}. Haha. HaHA! HAHAHAHAH!!

Is there anything wrong with having both sims3pack version and the package file of the same content in the game simultaneously? I could not get it to work with only installed sims3packs and later could not be bothered to go ahead and uninstall them

a lot. Solely the caste system is powerful enough to make a really *big* difference, and ability to change seamlessly settings while in game (e.g. you play Cold-War society with stay-in-home mums and only working daddies and after a generation you turn it for the hippie age, and so on) is irreplaceable.

Nraas Suite is powerful, flexible set of tools, yet also resources' hungry and requires a bit of patience for setting up particular, well... "settings".
On the other hand - Awesome I'd call "Sims 3 true 1.0 patch". It is a serious core modification making game working the way it was (probably and mostly) intended to work.

If you're OK with many arbitrary ways in the game itself and also Pescado's (locking teens as 12-ies for the whole life stage is the most discussed probably -.- but not only one) and you do not aim for any "more sophisticated", elastic and closed to (any imagined) reality solution - you'll be happy with Awesome.

The bonus from Nraas is also not so creepy, pretending to be "nerdy-script-kiddie-brat" community. But it's a matter of taste ofc.