NewSO Update 536853 – The New Sims Online

Volleyball works again

Sims sent to the volleyball court would walk over, then just stand there with no animation, and the game never started.
The court works out who is playing, and which spot on the court they are standing on, by asking “who else is on my tile?”. A change on 23 August made that question refuse to answer in one specific moment – while a sim is mid-step between two tiles – and that is exactly the moment the court asks it, on every step a sim takes across the court. So the court could never work out where anybody was standing, and nobody was ever added to the game.
The question is now answered properly in that moment, so the court can see its players again. The crash-protection that change was originally added for is unaffected.
Reported by Théo.

Water balloon game works again

Throwing a water balloon set your balloons down on the ground instead of throwing one, and the game menu listed Throw Balloon twice. Once your balloons had been dropped, your sim would not go near the balloon box to pick up more, so a game could not be restarted.
The Power Glove is built out of the same object file as the water balloon set, and the two share their pick-up and throw behaviour. Recent Power Glove work taught “throw” to launch whatever your sim is holding – correct for the glove, but a player in a balloon game is always holding their balloons, so every throw launched the balloon stack itself. The extra menu entry came from the same place: a menu the glove needed was being offered to the balloons as well.
Both are now limited to the Power Glove. Throwing a balloon throws a balloon, your stack stays in your hand for the next throw, and the box hands out balloons again.
Reported by Monica Bing while testing for Beach Party BINGO day.

Website dashboard shows your real skill numbers

The Skills & Locks section of the player dashboard on the website reported every skill at exactly double its real value. A sim with 15 Cooking and 20 Body was listed as 30 / 20 and 40.26 / 20 points, and the bars sat pegged at full.
Skills are stored internally in hundredths of a point – 2000 means 20 points, which is the maximum. The dashboard was dividing that by 50 instead of 100, so everything came out twice as large as it should be. Nothing was ever wrong with the saved skills themselves; only the website was reading them incorrectly, and the game has always shown the correct values.
Fixed on the live site. The dashboard now matches your Sim’s skill panel in game, and the bars fill proportionally again.
Reported by CatDaddyBoo.

Launcher updates finish instead of hanging on a black window

Updating the launcher from inside the launcher did not work on Windows. The download finished normally, you clicked Restart Now, a black console window appeared – and then nothing, ever. The launcher stayed on the old version and the console window sat there until you closed it.
The update was handed to a small helper script that waited for the launcher to close before running the installer. That helper asked Windows “is the launcher still running?” using a command pipeline, and the pipeline hung: the process on the receiving end never exited, so the helper never got an answer, never gave up, and never started the installer. It waited forever.
The helper has been replaced with one that does not use a console window at all – nothing black pops up now – and that watches for the launcher to exit directly. It also gives up waiting after a short while and installs anyway, instead of stalling indefinitely if something reopens the launcher meanwhile.
Downloads that silently die mid-transfer no longer freeze the progress bar forever. If nothing arrives for 90 seconds the update gives up and offers you the manual download instead.
Clicking update twice no longer starts a second download on top of the first. Two downloads writing to the same file produced a corrupt installer that could not have installed anyway.
If you are on 3.0.10 or 3.0.11 you will need to install the update manually one last time – the broken helper lives in the version you are running, so it has to be replaced from the outside. Every update after that one works from inside the launcher.

Housemates stop binning food you just cooked

Resident sims tidy leftover meals off the table. They were far too keen about it: a meal a player had just cooked could be thrown straight in the bin, because the “is anyone still hungry?” check only ever looked at the other resident NPCs and was blind to every actual player on the lot.
It also never asked the platter whether there was any food left on it. A full group meal and a set of clean plates looked exactly the same to the chore.
Four things now have to agree before a resident clears a meal: their profile allows cleaning, nobody on the lot – players very much included – is anywhere near hungry, the meal itself reports that it is empty or spoiled, and nobody is eating it or on their way to it.
That last one is why residents also stopped throwing away their own plate: a sim carrying a serving back to a chair now counts as using it.
Genuinely empty and spoiled platters still get cleared, so tables do not pile up.

Catalog descriptions read like the game again

A lot of custom content arrived with the creator’s readme sitting in the object’s **catalog description**: an email address, a website, “Made by so-and-so. Base by someone else.”, the source filename, redistribution terms, or the name of the tool it was built in. Clicking an object in the buy catalog often told you nothing about the object at all.
All of that is gone. 2,764 descriptions were cleaned up. Where the description was nothing but a signature – 1,757 of them – it is now simply blank, which reads better than a stranger’s email address.
Where a description had real text and a signature, only the signature was removed. The garden fence that explains how connecting fences snap together still explains it; it just no longer gives you a web address afterwards.
The game’s own writing is untouched. Descriptions like “Designed by ClubLanzhou chef Chow Sum Phat”, “By who? By Tommi Co. of course!” and the amber candle’s warning not to clone dinosaurs from prehistoric insects all read exactly as they always did.
Object names were not changed at all – “Whimsy Wash Dishwasher by KitchenArt” and friends are the game’s own brand humour, not a real credit.
Nothing was deleted from the content files themselves; the original credits still exist, they are just no longer shown in the catalog.

The hole in the ground goes somewhere again

A Hole in the Ground – the original Makin’ Magic clown portal – has been a decoration ever since its Magic Town menu was disabled for crashing sims and stranding them invisible. It is a working portal again, with two options.
Go Home sends your sim back to your own property. If you do not have one yet, or you are already standing on it, the hole tells you so instead of swallowing you.
Go Somewhere drops your sim on a random Magic Town lot – a different one each time. Magic Town houses are exhibits, so the hole will wake one up even if nobody is home and no invitation is needed. You never land back on the lot you jumped from.
Neither option can be taken autonomously: your sim will never wander off the lot on their own, and neither will anybody else’s.
Getting back is the same as always – jump into a hole on the far side, or use the city map.

Magic Town shops actually sell things now

The Hidimant Food Display and the Golden Meriklime Display are shops, not scenery – but the only thing you could ever do with one was Browse. The Buy option never showed up.
These displays refuse to sell unless there is a cash register on the lot. That is how they worked in Magic Town originally: the register is what the shopkeeper stands behind, and without one the display has nobody to take your money. The register was never in the catalogue, so on most lots there was simply no way to complete the shop.
The whole Magic Town shop kit is now on the Misc buy page: Cash Register – Spellbound, both floor displays and both counter-top displays. Place a register anywhere on the lot and the Buy option appears on every display – a gypsy clerk turns up to run the till on her own.
The food displays stock the Baker’s Oven ingredients – butter, honey, sugar and mix – so you can now run a proper grocery instead of hunting the ingredients down.
The bigger problem was that the goods themselves were disappearing. Every Magic Town shop keeps an invisible “stock list” behind the scenes, and on our lots that stock list was deleting itself a few seconds after the lot opened – so the shelves had nothing on them to sell, no matter what else you built. That is fixed, and any lot that already lost its stock gets it back automatically the next time it opens.
Known issue: a display you buy mid-visit will not offer Buy until the lot reloads. Leave and come back and it works.

Decorative catalog: clearer names, a functional radio in the right tab

The three airport suitcases all shared one name – “Suitcase stands on floor/lays on surfaces” – so the buy page showed three identical cards for three different bags. They are now **Suitcase – Green, Suitcase – Blue and Suitcase – Grey**.
“Essentials” Potting Compost is a watering can, and always was. Renamed to **”Essentials” Watering Can**. It still places the same way, including under tables and beside plants.
The Moderne Man Radio is a working radio, not a prop. It has moved off the Decorative page and onto Electronics, where you would expect to find it.
The “Essentials” Coal Skuttle can no longer be dropped inside other objects – it takes up its own space now, the same fix the Step Ladder got.
The 6-in-1 Baggage Carts advertised no Room score and contributed none. It now gives Room 6, in line with other decorations at its price.
Blank catalog pictures are gone. A lot of custom content shipped without a catalog picture, so its card in the buy menu was just an empty blue square – the Victor Hollywood valances, the Moderne Man coat rack and drapes, the airport suitcases and carry-on, and more. The game now draws the object itself when a picture is missing, so every card shows what you are buying.
Catalog pictures made with the in-game object tools were coming out on the wrong shade of blue, which is why some cards never quite matched their neighbours. They now use the standard colour.
The Harry Potter items (the house drapes, the Hogwarts banner and the wizard arcade game) have been taken off the buy menu. Anything already placed on a lot stays exactly where it is and can still be sold or moved as normal.

Missing trees and doors restored on the Magic Town houses

The imported Magic Town houses were turning up with content missing – most noticeably the trees. Whole stands of pine, birch and willow were simply absent from the gardens, and several of the fancier doors (the gypsy and spooky ones) left bare openings in the walls.
Nothing had actually been lost. The objects were sitting in each lot’s saved file the whole time; the game was dropping them every single time the lot loaded. Anything built out of several linked pieces – a tree, a two-panel door – was affected if it came from the Sims 1 content set.
Fixed. The trees and doors come back on their own the next time each lot opens, with no rebuilding and nothing for owners to do.

Resident sims no longer stay up all night after a snack

A resident who was only a little hungry would refuse to go to bed, and any resident who did fall asleep was dragged straight back out of it. The rule was “eat before bed” – but the quick snack they were allowed to grab only takes the edge off, so they woke up still hungry enough to trip the same rule, and could not eat again until they were much hungrier. The result was a sim who paced the lot all night, with energy sinking to the bottom and hygiene, fun and social going with it. Bob Newbie on the Newbie lot was woken over sixty times in one night this way.
Residents now only skip sleep for hunger when there is actually a meal they can go and eat right then. Peckish sims go to bed and stay there; genuinely starving sims still get up to eat.