What are your favorite NRAAS features?

I think Overwatch and Errortrap are must haves for any TS3 player. Really helps to keep your game healthy.

I'm in love with MasterController and use it all the time. It's easy to do makeovers for noncontrollable sims, change outfits on the fly (it irritates me when they walk around wearing work clothes), switch active sim and fix some muck ups. Like yesterday, I wanted one of my sims to get the game developer job. He got to the required Nerd influence but was in University at the time. When he came back, the career offer never popped up and could not be found from anywhere. So MC to the rescue.

Storyprogression. Can feel a bit overwhelming at first but there's so many things you can tweak with it and I think its' miles better from vanilla storyprogression which, for example, moved out families without my consent. One day freaking Gunther and Cornelia Goth were just gone like abducted by aliens or something.

I've got almost the entire NRaas Mod collection installed and they're all favorites of mine as I've been able to take back control of my entire town and get control of my games as well as be able to ban teen pregnancies with W-Mistake by disable them and making them a blocked feature unlike when I played Mod-free and the game used to trigger those if the EA bugfest was on.

I've been seeing a lot about ErrorTrap here. I don't have it but I went to the nraas wiki to read about it. It doesn't say much about it (unless I'm missing something). What does it do? I would love my game to run better. OverWatch didn't do much, TBH.

"MKSizzle;c-16608963" wrote:
I've been seeing a lot about ErrorTrap here. I don't have it but I went to the nraas wiki to read about it. It doesn't say much about it (unless I'm missing something). What does it do? I would love my game to run better. OverWatch didn't do much, TBH.

ErrorTrap tries to correct and, if it cannot, captures ("traps") programmatic and data errors that could otherwise damage the ongoing game or cause it to crash, and reports on them by way of script logs. The logs can then be uploaded to us at NRaas and a support thread opened if the player needs assistance in interpreting them and fixing whatever the underlying issue is.

http://nraas.wikispaces.com/ErrorTrap%20Patch169
(this is the 1.69 version but it's the same for 1.67)

Here's an example, although it's kind of abstract.

The game sends an instruction to carry out that is the equivalent of dividing by zero. There will be no meaningful result, and the game will crash or whatever is supposed to really have taken place just doesn't. ErrorTrap catches that, tries to correct it, or traps the error and produces a log that says (with some practice at interpreting it) the sim's career level is undefined or the outfit they were meant to be putting on has no ID number so it may as well not exist, or an infinite number of other possible things. The sim stops in their tracks or gets reset if necessary instead of the game session just ending leaving the player looking at their pretty desktop all of a sudden and wondering why.

Along the way the mod also performs trash collection that should have been programmed into the game but wasn't. Not rubbish items that our sims throw away, I mean it removes garbage (useless data) from our games that could never have been needed for anything or was already too corrupt to be useful and thus helps keeps our long running games going.


This page could use some updating, but it provides a partial list of what Overwatch is doing.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Overwatch%20FAQ

If you were to switch Overwatch logging on, you would get a log a few sim minutes after each startup saying exactly what the mod has done to correct issues it finds. For me it depends on how long the prior session ran and how large and populated their current world is as to how long that log is, but most of them are in the many thousands of lines. I think most players prefer that the mod just does what it's supposed to silently on startup, for sanity's sake. Then there's the overnight cleanups and what the mod "watches" for along the way during gameplay, but those tend to be lighter and less instrusive. :)

Personally, my favorite nraas feature is how it stops my game from glitching out and deleting all my sims halfway through the second generation.

Of course I enjoy the features of a certain mod, even when I don't adjust the settings (which is often).

And I love using MC to find things out—traits of townies, career progress on my own sims, where the money tree seeds are hiding—and to do the occasional reset when required. As much as I love this game, its glitches would drive me nuts if I didn't have a way of addressing them.

I won't play without a slew of Nraas mods. I almost stopped playing TS3 years ago when I discovered that story progression was a lie and that the game didn't give me what I needed from a supposedly "sandbox" game. I was terrified of trying mods but a lovely young player "held my hand" throughout the process and I haven't looked back. Nraas mods have enabled me to take control of my game because of their ability to be customized to suit many playing styles.

Ditto on Errortrap, Overwatch and Story Progression! I first noticed problems with EA's story progression when every sim in one of my saves in Appaloosa Plains moved out, leaving my sims the only ones in town. Thanks to Nraas Story Progression, I get to hear about all the shenanigans everyone in town is up to and no one is allowed to move away! Tempest cleans up the autumn leaves in winter. Traffic fixed an issue in one of my saves where my sim got a tour bus as a reward for reaching a certain level in the music career, which for some reason caused thousands of car to spawn every night, leading to so much lag! Traveller allowed my sims to take a puppy and a kitten to Sims University. Cupcake fills the bakery racks so my sims can visit for a snack. The careers mod allows for custom careers, which means Fern can be a vet! Vector mod made my sims get simfluenza, which just added a new layer of difficulty, realism and fun.

If not for Nraas, I would have abandoned this game in a fit of frustration. Thank you for Nraas mods. <3