Hi. I have just installed sims 3 again after a year or so. The game appears to be hosted on Origin. It installed and did all of the updating. I downloaded the Mod Updater and selected my favorite NRaas mods and it did download them.

Problem is, they do not appear in the launcher or in the game. They did unzip into the Mods/Packages folder.

I did delete the 4 files we are instructed to delete.

I did also unzip the RESOURCE file into the Mods folder. However, the game will not run when the RESOURCE file is in the mods folder, and I must delete the RESOURCE file from the mods folder in order to get the game to start.

Any ideas what may be going wrong?

Thank you

Hi there, and welcome to NRaas. Sorry you're having trouble, let's see what we can do here.

The game isn't actually hosted on Origin, but with digital installs currently the Origin client is required to manage them (unless you are playing the Steam version or on a Mac, but apparently not). Subtle difference at best, but mods work the same way regardless.

May I as where you got this Resource.cfg file from? If it's from before 2011 or so, it would likely be outdated and not work.

My suggestion would be to pull your entire Mods folder out as it now stands and set it aside someplace. Then download this one from MTS, unzip it, and place it in your TS3 user game folder in its entirety (without the zip wrapper). It includes the Resource.cfg file already and two simple script mods in the correct places, NoIntroMovie and NoBuildSparkles, so you can test the setup before adding in anything more complicated.
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=G ... _and_Files

Regardless of how you get there, the setup should look just as illustrated, plus or minus some unimportant cosmetic differences for different operating systems.

Thank you. As advised, I went to the link, downloaded the framework zip, unzipped it into the folder. The resources file is there as it should be, and the game starts now, must be a newer file. However, none of the mods appear in the launcher or in game... yet.

Mods do not ever appear in the Launcher and you wouldn't see those two mods in-game, only their effects. So the question becomes, did the Intro movie startup or was it suppressed? Be sure to clear the scriptCache.package file before trying again if you didn't reflexively do this.

I get the Maxis intro, the little egg popping open, then the green diamonds, then the loading screen where it wants you to find and click on objects, then the game itself loads. Sorry I thought the mods showed up in the Installed Content area of the launcher.

Aha no, TS3 mods are always package based files. The Launcher doesn't know anything about package files, it only deals in sims3pack format.

There is another version of NoIntro around someplace that also suppresses the Maxis part, but the full length intro movie is much longer than that so it sounds like the test is working (doesn't matter if you keep the two test mods now or not).

So the next step is to try one obvious to see in-game NRaas mod, maybe MasterController (the base mod only), clear the scriptCache again, and see if it loads. Your sims, lots, and City Hall should then have an Nraas menu on them, with MC commands underneath. If that's successful, then I would say you have a properly working framework in place and can add your other mods into it.

ok so, umm, I think I messed things up further. Uh, I kinda went into the packages folder just to look at the mods there, and they all had the mod name and then .package and they looked like little blank sheets of paper. I thought, hmm, should they be blank? So I opened the one at the top and chose notepad to open it so I could just make sure there was content in the file. Well, all the mods then got a notepad icon at their left, and the .package is gone from all of them. I deleted them all, redownloaded them with the mod updater and they all went back in place, but still all have the notepad icon and no .package after them... sigh

You didn't mess anything up from the sound of it. Mods cannot be opened in a text editor in any meaningful way. But the icon that displays there is the auto-open preference that Windows sets for files. It can be anything, doesn't matter, that only dictates what happens if you double-click on a package file. The game doesn't care, it will read package files exactly the same way no matter what the auto-open pref or icons look like.

An application that would make sense (to us) for a package file to have as an auto-open pref would be a package file editing program like S3PE or NRaas Packer. But there is no need to install these if you have no interest in dissecting and editing package files that others have created.

Whether a file extension (the bit after the final dot) like ".package" shows up in Windows is a function of whether you have file extensions turned on or suppressed in Folder View. Makes no difference as to how the files work either, it's just a display thing.

Ok, thank you. I will test your previous instruction in a little bit, bf is taking over the pc for a few to do some work stuff.

BFs taking over PCs I'm afraid we don't have a mod to address. Let's see if we can get our developer working on one.