NewSO Update 536854 – The New Sims Online

Thrown objects actually look thrown now

YEETing something with the Power Glove landed it in the right place, but what you watched was your sim throw, then bend down and put the object on the floor, and then the object slide along the ground to where you aimed. Not exactly a throw.
The put-down is gone. The object now leaves your sim’s hand the instant the throw animation finishes – there is nothing to watch in between.
And it arcs. Thrown things lift out of the hand, rise over the middle of the throw and come down on the target instead of sliding along the floor. Longer throws arc higher.
Putting something down from the menu still works exactly as it did, animation and all – only the throw skips it.
A few awkward things – wall-mounted objects like urinals, for instance – cannot simply drop where your sim is standing, so those still shuffle to a nearby spot before flying. They do at least fly now: previously the throw was refused outright and nothing happened at all.

Circuit Breaker Box: enable/disable auto for every light, and it stops eating the floor

The Circuit Breaker Box menu now reads Turn All Lights On, Turn All Lights Off, Enable Auto All and Disable Auto All, and all four are always on the menu.
Turn On and Turn Off used to hide each other – the box remembered which one you pressed last and only offered the other one. On a lot where some lights are on and some are off that is exactly backwards, so both are now always available.
Turn All Lights On and Turn All Lights Off hold every light where you put it, but only until the next sunrise or sunset – after that the lights go back to looking after themselves. The two auto options below are permanent.
Enable Auto All hands them all back to the game: they go dark in the daytime and come on by themselves in the evening, exactly as they did before anyone touched the switch.
Disable Auto All does the opposite – every light on the lot stops paying any attention to the time of day and stays exactly where you put it. Turn On and Turn Off still work on them; they simply will not change on their own again until you use Enable Auto All.
The breaker was also behaving like a piece of furniture standing on the floor rather than a panel bolted to a wall. It claimed the whole tile in front of itself, which left a dark patch on the floor and stopped your sim walking up to it – they halted a tile short and the panel offered no actions from there.
It also did not reserve the wall it was mounted on, so a picture or a wall lamp could be hung on the same wall segment and the two would overlap.
Both are fixed: the breaker no longer occupies the floor in front of it, sims can stand right at it, and the wall it hangs on is its own.
Your sim also used to stop a tile short of the panel and reach at thin air. He now walks right up to it and faces it.
A breaker you have already placed picks the fix up as soon as you move it – pick it up in buy mode and set it back down on the same spot.

Wall posters and the Hanging Spiral Wood need something to hang on

The Superstar movie posters (“Two Men, A Woman, and One Monkey”, Betty Yeti Attacks!, Blue Inca Pilot Live!, Sunday Night Fashion Match-up), the four Makin’ Magic animated portraits and the Unleashed wall masks could all be dropped anywhere on the lot. Off a wall they placed their “lying on the ground” picture, which for the posters is a sprite you cannot really see – so it looked like you had paid for nothing and lost the object.
The cause was in the objects themselves. Every one of them ran a “put me on the wall” script the instant you picked it up, and because nothing is behind an object sitting on your cursor, that script threw away its own “must be against a wall” rule before you ever chose a tile.
They now keep that rule the whole time you are carrying them, so buy mode will only let you hang them on a wall, and they always place as the framed picture.
The Hanging Spiral Wood hung off nothing at all – it could be placed in the middle of a room or out on open grass. It now needs a wall behind it, like every other hanging decoration.
Posters, portraits, masks and spirals already placed on a lot are left exactly where they are. If you pick one up to move it, though, you will need to put it back against a wall.

Victor Hollywood stools no longer sink into walls

The Victor Hollywood Bedroom stools (yellow, blue, green and pink) drew about a fifth of a tile closer to the camera than the tile they actually stood on. Anything that should have hidden them – a wall in front of them most obviously – lost the argument, so the stool punched straight through it. Their price was corrected on an earlier pass; the clipping was not, which is why the ticket looked fixed and was not.
All four now sit at the correct depth, so walls, other furniture and sims occlude them the same way they occlude every other seat.
Lots that already have one of these stools placed pick the fix up automatically. Nothing about placement, price or the catalog changed.

City Chat window is readable and scrolls

The City Chat window used a font a size larger than the rest of the game, in the smallest window on screen. It is now the same size as every other panel, and the window itself is bigger, so you can see roughly twice as much of the conversation at once.
City Chat had no scrollbar. Whatever had scrolled off the top was gone. It now has the same scrollbar and up/down arrows as the IM and Activity Log windows.
If you scroll up to read something, new messages arriving no longer yank you back down to the bottom. That only happens if you were already reading the newest message.
Emoji shortcodes typed in city chat now show as emoji instead of as `:the_raw_text:`.
Clicking a message to open that person’s profile used to open the wrong sim’s profile whenever an earlier message had been long enough to wrap onto two lines. It now always opens the sim who actually sent the line you clicked.
Text typed into city chat can no longer be used to restyle or hide other people’s messages.

MOMI station picks up the Skill Cheater’s admin commands

The old Skill Cheater arcade cabinet carried a handful of tools that the MOMI station did not, so admins needed both objects on a lot to cover everything. The useful ones now live on the MOMI station itself.
New on the MOMI station: Motives/Set Room (the one motive it was missing), Money/Get $5000, Skills/Enable Skill Degrade and Skills/Disable Skill Degrade, a Pests menu with Spawn Pest, Infest House, Deinfest House and Is House Infested?, and Fun/Create Flood.
Everything the MOMI station already did is unchanged, and the new entries are admin-only in exactly the same way the rest of its menu is.
The cabinet’s leftover Maxis engine tests, its nightclub music bank and its Concentration minigame were left where they were – they are development scaffolding, not admin tools.

Resident NPCs sleep through the night instead of napping in shifts

Resident and caretaker NPCs were breaking every night into three or four short naps. They would go to bed at their proper bedtime, get up again a few minutes later, drift around the house, then climb straight back into the same bed – over and over until morning.
The server has a safety net that gets a sim out of bed once they are rested, because not every bed in the game reliably ends its own sleep. That net was firing at 90 energy, while a bed keeps filling a sim all the way to 100. So the server was pulling sims out of bed early, just as the night-time energy drain was at its steepest – which emptied the small gap between “rested enough to get up” and “tired enough to go to bed” in about a quarter of an hour, and sent them right back. Doob, Chad and Patches each did this every single night, going back to bed at exactly one point below the get-up-again line.
The rested-and-up safety net is now limited to daytime naps. Inside a sim’s own sleep window the bed is left to do its job, and the sim stays down until their wake hour. Being hungry, or having a scheduled meal come due, still gets them up in the night as before.

Food cart NPC portraits no longer vanish from the people list

The vendors who work the food carts could disappear from the list of people on the lot, with their portraits flickering in and out, even though the vendors themselves were still standing at their carts.
The people list decides which portrait is yours – so it can leave you out – by comparing each sim’s ID against your own. Vendors, clerks and other NPCs the game spawns for you all carry ID 0, and your own ID also reads as 0 for a moment whenever the game is still working out who you are, which happens again every time the connection to a property re-settles. In that moment the list decided that every NPC was you, and dropped all of them at once. Players were never affected, because a player’s ID is never 0 – which is why only the NPC portraits blinked.
The list now only makes that comparison for a real player ID, and the game no longer forgets who you are while a connection re-settles.
Reported by Théo.