Checksky3--
1- Yes, it is fine to change anything you like about an EA sim - it's sort of like changing their clothes. The same goes for their lots. You can even totally rebuild their houses, change all their traits. The only problem is deleting them because of their files and family trees etc. As they are not truly gone, just made invisible - and if you delete them on the clipboard, then you make them invisible and homeless. But they are not really gone. But changing any sim in the game is fully okay.
The same goes to the Vamp question - it is fine as the game allows a cure - however you achieve it, and it allows for them to be turned many ways. MC is programmed to tell the game one of those ways allowed are done. Twallan is a brillant modder and uses the games programming to tune his mods, they are just a simpler means to doing something difficult in the game. He does not really make the game do anything it cannot do and in fact corrects a lot of the things the programmers might have missed or left unconnected.
You can use the townies as you would any other sims, although I have found the some may have kids, even marry your sims, they hardly ever will move in with the sim on their own - but yes townies are full fledge sims - that the game run until you take possession of them. Treat them as you would any sims. They are often just harder to lacate as many are considered homeless or live off world. Once moved in somewhere the game will more or less make them regular sims - which is why they often are then jobless and such. Many do retain some skills gained though when they were townies. The only sims I actually am leary of are the service sims as many do not have full files like most sims or townies do - service sims are like the mail carrier, paper boy/girl, bartenders, maids, etc and trying to play them tends to cause some game corruption. I am sure Twallans mods might fix some of those issues, but I still would not play with the service sims as a move in. I have had sims even on their own marry and have kids with some of them - they never come home though, and I don't have a problem - so as long as I don't try to move them in or anything it seems fine. But that is just the service sims, not the townies.
To raise the limit of your render use the cheat mode and type in - Fps on. It should show up in the right corner of your screen. Now click the f12 key on your keyboard to raise the number to higher so your game render from that gray scale faster. I run mine always under 90 fps now generally keep clicking the f12 until I reach about 80. But I am sure it all depends on your video card as to what number is safe. I can run at 100 with no heat increase, but I stay a little under that for my own peace of mind. You have to do this each time you start your game, as the limiter is defaulted at 30 fps. It will stay at what you put it on for that session, until you reboot your pc.
Yes it is safe to change lots any way you want - the only problem is adding new lots. Sometimes you can get away with adding 1 or 2 empty lots to the world, but I always would save my game with a new name before I added the lot so I don't lose my whole game. I do not generally add lots, but I do test it out after every game update to see if EA has perhaps fixed it. It was great until LN, that's when I started seeing the problems adding lots the most. It has gotten worse with each ep. One of the side affects I saw adding lots is that sinking in ground one of the posters mentioned. One simmer added like 5 little 20 x20 lots to one empty street. The lots locked right in perfectly, and she had no trouble placing houses or sims having any routing problems. What she did see was cars and bikes and animals going along the road in the area with these new lots sink into the road - cars and all as if they fell into a hole and then come back up just near the last added lots. So adding lots even affects the roads. When she restarted her world and did not add those lots that road was fine, with no sinking at all. So that was a new problem WE added lots caused after Pets came out. This was in a perfectly flat neighborhood with a perfectly flat road too. So you can't even blame it on the terrain being altered. But already existing lot, you can bulldoze buildings right off of them, change them from residential to community and back with no problems, even use the hand to move a lot to another empty lot and I have not seen any problem doing it - so far anyway. I have done that a lot to move houses out of areas I define as my town area and move building into the town area and haven't had a problem changing from residential to community or vice versa or changing the buildings on those lots.
Well I hope that answers some of your questions. Real life beckons - so I have to go.
