Or, perhaps, “More Awesome than EA Games.”
OK, so what really happened with Layla turned out to be a bug introduced by the World Adventures expansion. I’d read about it on a couple of Sims modding forums, but I never found anything specifically about it on the official EA site. I thought when I read about it that it might apply to me, but I sort of figured that something that serious would be talked about in some official source, so I kind of assumed that I as a rather naive user wouldn’t be subject to it.
The deal appears to be that EA changed the way some of the relationship information was stored when they released World Adventures, and the data wasn’t ported over quite right. The result was that if you entered into a relationship before upgrading to World Adventures, then broke up AFTER upgrading, some data structures wouldn’t be updated to recognize that he was now single. You’ll be listed as single, but you’ll never get any menu optioned relating to starting a new relationship.
When I upgraded to World Adventures, Lancelot was still with Malika. He broke up with Malika afterward. She was listed as his ex-girlfriend on his relationship menu. She was heartbroken, and he took a nasty hit to his mood for breaking her heart. However, the interactions menu still thought he had a girlfriend, so he wasn’t given the option to ask Layla to be his girlfriend. Sweet Sims who are programmatically restricted from two-timing. (Not cheating, just officially two-timing :).)
So, it looks like EA probably released a bug fix for this shortly after Lance broke up with Malika, but it didn’t retroactively fix characters who were already screwed up. The only way to do THAT was to install the legendary Awesomemod by J. M. Pescado, a.k.a. “More Awesome Than You.” I wasn’t wild about doing that b/c it’s a really extensive, unsupported third-party core game hack. I don’t know what effect it might have on installing future expansion and so forth. Also, MATY is kind of a current-generation l33t haxx0r. He talks big, delights in offering sparse, cryptic documentation, and heckles posters on his own forum.
That said, he really knows his crap, and the kind of bugs reported with his Awesommod are really minor. And he, not EA, actually figured this bug out and offered a fix for Sims that were already bugged. I just had to install his entire suite of configuration hacks in order to get that one thing. The only other thing I was that interested in was that he’d coded better skin tone blending for biracial babies. EA’s genetics model is pretty cool, except that it treats skin like a binary choice: if a lily-white character and a deep black character have babies, their babies are either lily-white or deep black, not the expected mocha. This really bugged me, since I kind of dig interracial relationships and the resulting babies.
At any rate, digging through the forums to figure out how to install this on a Mac was pretty hairy, and I was reluctant to post any questions on MATY’s forums b/c I’d inevitably get flamed into next week. Even better, the instructions I found for installing on a Mac were from before the release of World Adventures, and they didn’t work. The favored failure mode for this thing is crash on bootup, which is the source of just a bit of stress, lemme tellya.
So, without further ado, how DO you install Awesommod on a Mac? Well then.
The big thing you need to now is where the “World Adventures directory” is. Once you’ve installed the expansion, the mod framework and Awesomemod must be installed in the expansion directory rather than the main game directory. This is probably easier to find in Windows. On the Mac it’s this.
– Applications->The Sims(TM) 3->The Sims(TM)3.app
– Right click, select “Show Package Contents”
– Contents->Resources->AddOns->The Sims(TM) World Adventures.app
– Right click, select “Show Package Contents”
– Contents->Resources->transgaming->c_drive->Program Files->Electronic Arts->The Sims 3 World Adventures
The final directory is where you’d put Resources.cfg and the Mods directory. Put the dll file in Game->Bin.
Gee, I wonder why I didn’t figure that out immediately?
Sorry you had so much trouble with it! After WA I too got the awesomemod- but it's so big that after LN my game load times were forever with it, and I had no interest in it's features anymore, so I ditched it. Makes me wonder if my game would be more stable with it though? The majority of my mods now are Twallan- because he's super duper amazing and nice. 🙂 Do you still use awesomemod?
I totally dumped Awesome for Twallan. I didn't even discover Twallan until later.
Twallan's mods are more methodical and better-documented. And it's SOOO nice to be able to just go ask questions on his forums without being mocked and trolled.
I believe I faced off against this bug as well, and then the hundreds that followed after it haha. Like the game crashing if you tried to save after building a second story. And the constant zombies. Mods are a beautiful thing. 🙂
I love your description of Pescado. I actually had my evil sim Beatrice Troll the forum on MATY and taunt them for a while. (http://simdalesims.blogspot.com/2014/09/take-me-to-moon-takin-care-of-business.html). Anyway, it was AWESOME of you to post this info for how to install Awesomeware on a Mac. And I love seeing what variety of skintones can come from different parents, so it's nice that his mod fixed that in the game.
Heh. I'm not sure how accurate this tutorial is anymore, since this was before Sims 3 added the supported interface for installing mods. I hope it helped out some people back in the day, though.
I never used Awesome to its full potential, largely because of the inability to get support on the MATY forums. I later switched to the NRaas mod suite and got pretty involved in the forums there. Twallan really was a godsend to Sims 3 modding.