Locking Gates?

The ability to lock gates came with the World Adventures EP, so if you have that expansion installed, you should be able to lock any gates. Aside from needing fences to be put on, gates should function exactly as doors do.

If you need to keep Paparazzi away, then you need to correctly install an electric gate, these are found on most celebrity villas in Bridgeport and should be available in Build Mode also. To function correctly, the gate must be set as the front door(if you cannot do this, check the front door of the house itself, and unset the front door, then you'll be able to set the gate as the front door), and the fence it is installed on must be built totally around the lot (if there are other gates in it, these must be locked so that only household members can enter).

There are Late Night gates called privacy fences there's only 2 of them i believe and they look different because they have a call box outside of them. look for the gates with the late night purple plumbob on them. Those are the gates they are mentioning.

The gate to keep out the paparazzi is the most expensive one. Keep it closed and they shouldn't enter the property. You'll have to let guests in though.

Thanks for responding, everyone. Firstly, I do have WA EP installed and still cannot lock gates. And I have tried all gates in my game, including the Celeb gate with the call box attached. However, I haven't tried setting the front gate as the front door, so maybe that is the problem. I wasn't aware that setting gates as such was even possible--I've never seen that option before whenever I clicked on them.

The odd thing though, is that my Daughter can lock gates in her version and all she has is Pets EP, that's it. And she thought it was a base game feature, as it has always been available to her in her game. She got her game through Steam, while I bought mine as a bundled starter pack at Walmart. It came as a base game along with Late Night EP and HELS pack discs. My base game and all EP's have the latest patches.

I'll start a new game and set up a gated fenced-in yard and see if I'm able to set and lock the front gate.
I'll report back here with either a success story or a fail... :P

As far as I know, the game is no longer supported by EA on Steam, since they've moved to Origin, their own online digital shop. This means that the Steam version may differ somewhat from versions availble on disc or the digital versions on Origin. However, gameplay should still be exactly the same, no matter which version you have, so it might well be a case of a glitched game.

If you still have trouble finding the gate-lock, you can try to super-patch your game to see if it fixes any bugs. It will ask you if you want to patch your game when it's already up to date, but go ahead and do so. Follow the instructions as given: forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/175477/official-ea-download-link-for-the-sims-3-cumulative-manual-update#latesthttp://
That's for the PC, so if you have a Mac, go to the Mac discussion thread to get the super patch.

Okay, I just did a test run on a lot in which I built an enclosed yard and added the Celeb gate, and a square-box gutted temp house with only a front door. I cannot lock the gate in Live Mode, it still has only Open Gate and Close Gate options. Un-setting the house door as 'front door' does not allow setting the gate as 'front gate.'

However, after enabling testingcheats, and while in Build/Buy mode, and by holding CTRL+Shift and left-clicking on the gate, the option for 'Lock' was available. So I selected that. I also selected 'enable for triggers' or something similar, and then activated that, I was able to set the gate as 'front gate' in Live Mode. From there I could designate who could pass through the gate.

But I shouldn't have to go jumping through hoops just to get this feature to work, so if that Super-Patch @veiledstar so kindly suggested will fix this problem, I'll download it.

Thanks again, everyone!

Just wanting to point out that during my last post I was using a 'normal' Sim, not a Celebrity, and that appears to be the reason why I've been having those issues. I recently started a game and this Sim ended up becoming a celeb, so at that point I tried the celebrity gate again and it functioned as intended, didn't even have to lock or set it. So now I'm assuming that the gate only works for celebs, or has anyone been able to use it with normal Sims without having those issues?

Well..as far as I know, locking gate function was patched to the base game since Pets. It depends on how you made a fence. If you place the fence around the front door only, then it won't work because it's partly placed but if you make whole fence around all your house and put a gate, then it works as long as your patch version is above 1.63. If it doesn't work, it shows the reason why you can't when you hover over your mouse on the gate. When I installed Pets, I always built a fence around whole garden in the yard, and set the gate that only my household can open it for preventing my home garden from wild animals. This is about all kind of gates.

Also as for the celebrity gate, even though your sim is not a celebrity, it's not possible to visit. There's an empty celebrity house in Bridgeport. I put my normal sim in that celebrity house and changed to the active household to other NORMAL sim. That normal sim was not able to visit my the other normal sim in celebrity house. You don't have to lock the celebrity gate. Just do "set as a front door" in Live mode and it will work.

I just want to show how to do with screenshots but it seems like I'm not allowed to post any pictures here.

While I recognize some time has passed, The solution to this (I think) is that the fence needs to completely enclose a space before any gates attached can be locked.