Attack of the 1950s demons! What's going on here?

[Gwill]

I hope LJ allows me to direct link pictures...




When this townie girl first appeared on a community lot I though "oh, so townies can be autogenerated with custom accessories?", and made a note to have her killed off.
Today, another, almost identical townie appears, with the same 50s dress and the same demonic wings!

What's going on here?  Have I somehow downloaded a mesh that ovverides some maxis default?
There is yet another townie with the same dress roaming around downtown, but she does not have demon wings.

Can anyone give me some insight in what's happening here?
My instinct tells me Sapphire Sims is to blame, but that might be unfair of me.

[Karen]

The dress is one of the Maxis ones that comes with the game.  I have a teen in one of my families who got that same dress when she aged into teen.  No idea about the wings, though.....

Karen

[radiophonic]

Those wings are actually glasses. You can find them there and stop them from creating demons in your game.

[Gwill]

Those wings are actually glasses. You can find them there and stop them from creating demons in your game.

Well, that's what I assumed they were.  But I've never seen the game use custom glasses before, I have a LOT of them, so I should have noticed.  And why two identical townies with the same dress and same "glasses"?  If it picked one pair of "glasses" by random, the odds of it picking the same one twice are astronomical.

[IgnorantBliss]

Maybe it's the same kind of a glitch as with identical siblings? You know, identical blonde demon teenager townies  . Something that the game just keeps generating over and over again.

[florican]

I just noticed that when Nightlife generates downtownies it creates a lot of identical sims. I just started a new custom neighborhood, deleted all characters and generated new townies and downtownies. The ordinairy townies were all different, but when it created the downtownies it created quite a few identical pairs. Same faces, hair, clothes and makeup. (Although they seem to have different aspirations. I haven't checked whether they have different personalities.) I imagine that's what has happened here and the game just happened to choose that pair of "glasses".

[myskaal]

Jeepers Creepers 4
Spawn of The Creeper

"All they wanted to do was bowl..."

[syberspunk]

If it picked one pair of "glasses" by random, the odds of it picking the same one twice are astronomical.

I wouldn't say they are astronomical. I'd say, at least in this game, it is fairly likely. I mean... if the game is prone to the "First Born" effect, then I could easily believe that other games may be affected by this non-randomness. I wonder what the problem is, why they can't fix this. It is probably something they might have to change within the executable itself... but it can't be all that difficult to have your random function actually random by seeding it with the clock. On the other hand, they must have written some code purposely dependent on the non-randomness, and if they did try to fix it, it probably would just open up a whole other can of worms and break everything else.

Ste

[SciBirg]

ROFL this was hilarious!

Can you upload a story to match somewhere?

[radiophonic]

Maybe they're just groupies for your vampire/zombie combo there.
I say: Move 'em in!

[Gwill]

Maybe they're just groupies for your vampire/zombie combo there.
I say: Move 'em in!

Too late. My cow plant ate them. 

[dewshine]

OH, oh *raises hand*  Bring them back as Zombies!  LOL

[Gwill]

Ah, what a family they'd be.
One alien vampire mad scientist,  one family ambission zombie, and two identical demonic zombies anno 1950.

[Dark Trepie]

I've yet to mess with the downtownie generator.  Does it create townies with makeup and facial hair and all of that.  If so I would imagine that it uses some kind of templet to create them.  (and a rather limited one most likely)

But if the generator is left to randomly choose makeup, glasses, facial hair and all of that.  I can only imagine what some of the horrific outcomes would be...

[Gwill]

Townies are not normally generated with custom content at all (unless custom hair is sorted into the correct bins).
Which is why I'm confused about these demons.

[Gwill]

I ressurected them just to have a look in the mirror.  The demon wings are accessories, and they show up in the glasses catalog without the little daisy.
It looks like some crap I've downloaded (I have a lot of that) has overwritten some of the default glasses.

So I'm deleting the demons and lobotomizing both my alien vampire and my zombie.

[Gwill]

My instincts were right!
Sapphire Sims were definitely the culprit.  Bloody incompetent modders.  I downloaded all their meshes in one whopping huge zip a while ago, because they had no sensible way to download just the mesh you need, and I didn't think unused meshes would cause any problems (shame on me), and since my downloads were already passed 3GB i figured it wouldn't load much slower (my computer kicks ass, I built it myself for the explisit puropse of playing the sims).

After I managed to weed out the offending wings, and do some more cleanup of shitty accessories, I noticed some horns or ears or whatever they were supposed to be had also snuck in a replacement.

So now I downloaded all their accessorie meshes and deleted them from my downloads.  No more demonic townies.
Some day I'm going to weed through all the clothes meshes from that site and get rid of all the stupid mermaid stuff and find the mesh for the ONE dress I wanted.

Memo to self: Never be tricked into downloading  200 meshes when you need just one.