Sorry for my absence of late...
Between moving, keeping my GPA high, and helping other students do
the same, (I am a tutor and a student) I have had little time for the
Sims in general, much less this discussion group. Plus the "Sim time"
that I have had, has dis-enchanted me with this whole concept.

I'm guessing (hoping) that it is something I have downloaded that is
causing me some bugs, (and not the nature of the game itself), but
have little clue on how to isolate the offender. Maybe you folks have
heard of similar issues and their fixes:

1. Command Stacking - Put the game in Live mode, but on pause... Now
order a Sim to do something, then do something else, and yet another
thing too, etc... Many times when i give multiple commands in a
stack, the entire stack is suddenly "forgotten" and you have to
rebuild it. Once this bu has surfaced, I generally can not stack more
than 2 commands at any time before the whole stack is wiped.
Intrestingly, different sim charactors have different
levels/frequencies of forgetfulness. A game restart/machine reboot
does not solve the problem... Several times I have had to DESTROY
entire neigborhoods because of this. It seems to be the only fix.

2. High speed collisions - Turn on autonomy and let your Simmies do
their thing. Go for the highest speed setting and watch your Sims do
there thing real fast. Watch long enough and you will eventually
discover that two Sims are getting very upset, but are incapable (and
so are you) of doing anything about it. Normally, when two Sims
attempt to occupy the same spot, the software detects a "sprite
collision", and then diverts the paths of one or both sprites to
avoid them both being in the same spot. This could be a simple turn,
or a pause by one sprite, or they can bounce off of each other. But
sometimes when two Sims have a collision, it is apparently not
detected early/fast enough to avoid an actual intrusion into each
others "animation space". When this occurs, any attempt to move by
either Sim in any direction results in another collision being
detected and the movement stops. Essentially turning both Sims into
Siamese twins. Of course there is no animation for this, so they
still appear seperate, but they cannot move and will eventually lose
all needs points. If you eventually manage to free them (with the
incredibly unreliable move object cheat)they will immediately die due
to lack of food.

3. Permanent Bed Rest - This seems related to the above, in the sense
that a few Simmies have gotten stuck in bed. They are maxed out on
comfort and energy... sooo they wake up, and begin the animation for
getting out of bed. But they are stuck, they cannot rise from the bed
and will eventually lose all other needs points. A starving death
animation will fire-up as soon as you free them from the bed with the
move object cheat. Assuming you can get it to work.


I'm very disapointed with these issues. I'll admit it, I used to run
a pirated copy of the sims (on a trial basis trying to determine if
this would work for my studies) but as I ran into these problems more
and more often, I hoped that buying it would be the difference. But
it seems that the hacked version inherited the bugs from the retail
version... sigh.

Any help folks?