Family ties not setting right out of CAS

[Swiftgold]

I made a family in CAS, two parents with a toddler, set them as spouses and the kid as theirs. Then when I choose them as the family and go in, the child shows as a "friend" and has no parents in the family tree. The two adults are still spouses. I remade them and tried again, and it did the same thing. The other 13 or so families I made... it's looking like the ties are all broken on many of them, even between the spouses. It looks like even the single parents, despite holding their kids in the pictures, didn't keep their ties. I wonder if this is because I put them in houses via merging with the existing Maxis Sims and then splitting them out and deleting them?

Is there any way to at least set the children properly with parents within the game with the Awesomemod? I seem to recall someone saying they did that with the partheno-babies. I can deal with making the parents fall in love and get married if I have to, but I really don't want to have to remake all these, since you can't edit them when they're in the library. Geez, now I know why both my sisters gave me their copies of this game!

Edit: I did a test with a fresh neighborhood and an uninhabited lot - the ties stayed where I set them when moving in normally. So it was stealing the houses via split that destroyed the family ties, for whatever that's worth!

[FredNotBob]

The Family Tree is one of the more easily 'broken' parts of the game.

Here's the results of less than ten minutes' banging on the CAS engine:

I (accidentally) made a polygamous family (two husbands, three wives, all of whom were, according to the engine, related); when I added a child to the mix, after a bit more nudging, it became the biological child of all three 'wives' and both 'husbands'.

Throwing caution to the wind in an attempt to see how far I could go in my experiments, I attempted to add another 'husband' to the mix, but three wives and two husbands appears to be the upper limit for mutated pseduo-families.

The 'family' I created was accepted by the engine, and was perfectly functional when I finally loaded them into the game (ie, all interactions were intact and I could see no visible bugs or glitches).  However, *before* I loaded them up, the Family Tree had a bit of a seizure. 

Apparently, it wasn't tested thoroughly enough by People who Think Like Me (ie, the kind of person that will go into an adventure game and try taking 150 napkins when you'll only ever need one and a napkin has no real use in the game anyhow). 

The Family Tree choked after a bit more fiddling, first by taking away everyone but the parents and one of the non-related children, and then seizing up totally and leaving only one parent, one child, and an ellipsis (which is the '...' used to indicate extended relations) and totally refusing to ackknowledge any further alterations to their Family Ties.

I couldn't see any other family members, nor could I change any relations, but the game was still fully functional and all members of the family were present and recognized by the game engine when the family was loaded into the game.

If you push it any farther, you'll end up with a blank Family Tree window.

As a note, I'm not really certain how I did it in the first place -- all I know is that if you change the family's name at the Family Tree screen, and then go back and fiddle with the family member's last names, you'll eventually break the engine if you do it often enough and in enough variations.

[Madame Mim]

It's not only clean snaps and polygamy. I made a Curious family- ie, Pascal, Vidcund, Lazlo, Jenny, Chloe and Lola and (although all of them showed up on the family tree as related properly) Vidcund had a social interaction flirt option with Lazlo (but not visa versa). Somebody had mentioned in another thread that there was an ingame relationship setter (either naturally or enabled/created by the Awesome mod) so I used that to fix as brothers and it was fine from then on out.

[Grumblesnort]

I normally make just one- or two-member families, so I hadn't encountered this before, but one way it seems to break is when relationships are set in random order. While I was making a six-member family, I noticed the breakage while using the Edit Relationships button at the end of the creation process. The problem started after I'd made four Adult children and their Elder mom. I had already set their relationships when I decided they should have a dad in their family tree too, even if I was just going to kill him. That's when it messed up.

Dad was set to spouse with mom just fine, but none of the kids were related to him, so I dragged and dropped each one onto him. Only the last one set to "child of" would become his son/daughter, reverting the one before it back to "Housemate" of both the parents. The lines that connect everyone in branchy fashion showed the difference, as the designated child was separated to the left by a large space, even though they were all still siblings. I went round and round dragging and dropping, but it just didn't help.

Finally I just finished the family and stuck them in the game, hoping the relationships would magically be corrected. The mom was related to the two boys, but they were strangers to each other and their sisters, one daughter was related to only the dad though she was a housemate to him, and the other daughter was a stranger to everyone. The only thing it seemed to keep in tact was that the two elders were married. I tried using the Awesome Mod to fix the relationships, but no options for sibling or child appeared.

Luckily I always save sims in the bin, for just such occasions. I remade the family from the bin, added "man" to the end of the original last name of "Zimmer" to avoid any other issues, and set their relationships. First the spouses were set, and then I dragged each child onto the dad. It set up the relationship to the mother and each sibling status on its own, and they all remained intact in the game.

[Swiftgold]

It's not only clean snaps and polygamy. I made a Curious family- ie, Pascal, Vidcund, Lazlo, Jenny, Chloe and Lola and (although all of them showed up on the family tree as related properly) Vidcund had a social interaction flirt option with Lazlo (but not visa versa). Somebody had mentioned in another thread that there was an ingame relationship setter (either naturally or enabled/created by the Awesome mod) so I used that to fix as brothers and it was fine from then on out.

Where is that in-game relationship setter, or in what thread was it mentioned? Most of my families seem to be okay now, but I found one where the mother isn't set as the mother or set as the spouse, and since I've been playing for a while now I'd like to fix it rather than redo them...

[Madame Mim]

It was somewhere hip deep in the Awesome mod requests thread - I did a little search and found

1) Open the cheat window and type in: setconfig enabledebuginteractions true
2) CTRL-Click on the intended sim (your sibling)
3) Click through the "More..." menus until you find "Genealogy" - then choose the appropriate action

[Swiftgold]

Thanks! It looks like it's CTRL-SHIFT-click with the newest build of the mod, and I had to set the kid with Genealogy/Adopt (the spouse was set with Relationship) but otherwise the ties were fixed and it worked. Lifesaver!