Hacks... I was just wondering...I have been downloading alot of clothes, hair, makeup...but no objects. Now I want to download objects but I know that these are more likely to contain hacks. I don't want ANY hacks in my game so I was wondering how do you know which ones have hacks or not?
Objects are fine. Just be careful about downloading houses from the internet, as that's pretty much the only way to have hacks sneak in without your knowledge. Some older objects have not been made ready for the expansion pack, so they might not work very well. Usually the website you download them from will tell you if the object is EP ready or not. BTW, hacks are not all bad. Some are very useful. But you are right not to want to have any that you have not installed on purpose. There is a program called the Sim2Pack clean installer that allows you to scan the inside of compressed Sims2 packages like the ones that contains houses. It allows you to find out what exactly you are getting along with your house. It also allows you to scan your download folder and identify what the files are. Lastly, whenever I install a house I downloaded, I create a new copy of The Sims 2 files and install my house there. Then I usually strip the house of every thing that it contains, including wallpaper and flooring and then re-package the file. Only once I'm certain the house contains no other files, do I import it into my game. Yeah I know I'm annal
Whether all hacks are bad or not, I really wonder about that. I've heard from a few webmasters that they got a nasty email from a parents demanding why the heck did they (Maxis) program the game to have nudity...and it appears the they got a hack of some sort from getting stuff from the exchange. I just find it more ironic that it appears they thought webmasters were actually the game developers of the game. Really funny :classic:
Further to the above ... if you stick to downloading houses from The Official EA.com exchange you will see that lots that contain custom content that was not made by Maxis have a yellow warning triangle beside the download link. If you avoid those you will be utterly safe from hacks. You can also list all the custom content in lots and make a note of their file names and delete any that you don't want after installing them ... tho' that could be susceptible to eye-straining error due to filenames like: simkatt1367_whtmblsimplesink.package 33f85934421033dd62562095accac95c
but hacks are so nice! heh...I just downloaded most of JMP's hacks and they're just great...it's like a nice big beefy patch for TS2U
Hacks (aka mods) are nice if it's something that you want. But they can be very bad if it's something you don't want. It's like the definition of a weed vs a flower: it's a flower if it's where you want it to be, but it's a week if it's where you don't want it to be. For example, some people really like twins or being abducted. However, I'm not fond of them and if I got either of those as an unwanted hack, I'd be pretty unhappy. Fortunately, the clean installer from MTS2 and the EA Maxis site have given us ways of preventing getting unwanted hacks, or at least not as often.
