More Awesome Than You!

Is there a hack to choose a baby's sex? Or can you make one? hehe

I'm having a fairly good time with a 'hood of my real family, and would like the babies to be the right sex...getting tired of exiting without saving, and kicking myself in the head for leaving the game running with a pregnant sim while I went to get my daughter ice cream.

I would really like this. While it isn't an absolute necessity, it DOES get annoying restarting a lot over and over because I want my Sim to have a male baby.

Sexist.
 ;)

Nope, this doesn't appear to be possible at all: The game has stubbornly resisted every attempt at changing this to date. In fact, it seems sadistically written to disallow this, as while the Make Character primitive DOES accept a gender-control argument, if told to make a baby from two sims, it will completely disregard this for no particularly sensible reason.

bah! thx for the reply :)

Next best thing is the Lot Debugger.  Just save when sim goes into labor and then if you don't like what gender the baby is, just run it and it will leave w/o saving.  Also helps all the kids from looking alike.

Run which command on the lot debugger?  I have some new hacks and not sure what's what anymore. (They are all JMP's though).

I'm guessing it's the "randomize firstborn" command, or whatever it's called.  The one that prevents all the first babies from being the first entry on some random table that isn't really all that random.

<stuff that was wrong>

The baby is only generated at birth. Twins are decided at conception, but the actual baby's attributes, gender, etc. are completely decided at birth, and you only need to save before the baby pops. The lot debugger's "randomize" function can be useful in defeating determinism in the random number generator.

Oops. I guess I'll stop giving advice on things I'm not sure of. ;)

Silly Chintznibbles.

cool I'll have to try that.

I had a sim that I tried an unorthodox experiment on, I had her have clone babies. (used the tombsone of L&D to make herself pregnant with...herself).  No matter how many times I did it, it was always BOYS.  She ended up with 4 more kids this way, all boys.  I tried the exit without saving method each time, like 10 times or so (no, I really don't have anything better to do with my time).  Next time I'll use the box and see if it changes.  I was wondering if the fact that the babies were cloned (being pregnant with herself) had anything to do with the fact that they were all boys, but theoretically it's random so *shrug*

That is not random. If you self-pollinate a sim with itself, the resulting outcome will always be the opposite gender. No randomness here. The logic of *WHY* this was done this way eludes me, but that's how it is.

The reason why being pregnant with youself results in an opposite gendered baby is probably because the game, when creating a Sim, creates a version for both genders, as I understand.  So, in this situation, the game is just using the leftover version of the original Sim.  That's a theory, anyway.

No, that's nonsense. It's not using your original sim for anything at all, other than the genetics contribution: If your sim has recessive traits, you may not even get a true clone. As far as I can tell, it's completely arbitrary and hamfisted, much like the way the Make Character primitive forcibly ignores the gender-control argument, for no really obvious reason.

I didn't figure I was right about the baby thing, but the game does create both genders for any given Sim.  But, whatever.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it creates both genders for any given sim". The expression of a facial form based on the genetic factors is an algorithm. I don't recall seeing the game generating unused resources for a sim in such a manner that the generated head is stored for both. However, you can flip a sim's gender, causing it to re-process its face in CAS, if you want, but this is an algorithmic procedure.

I know I read somewhere that when the game creates a Sim, each age group for each gender is created.  I wish I could find where I read that (it was when the game first came out).  Maybe I'll find it.

I'm pretty sure that's nonsense. Otherwise you'd be able to plan a sim's entire outfit for all ages right there during CAS. But you can't. The faces are procedurally generated.

Hmmmm. Ok I guess that makes sense (in a Maxian way anyway).  The sim I was trying to clone was a CAS sim, so if I impregnate one of her (clone) sons the same way, I would end up with a clone of her right? This is what I was trying to do in the first place, she was getting old and has like 11 kids now, but she was (in my opinion) the best looking sim I ever made, and I don't have the original in body shop anymore.  The only DNA they have is hers, no recessive genes.

Can't you export her into body-shop and age her backward? You know, make an adult out of her in there? I thought that was possible. Of-course, someone more versed with SimPe might be able to tell you how to do that in the program (SimPe) itself.


G.

You can export existing sims into bodyshop?  I asked about that before (somewhere else) and we couldn't figure out how to do that.  At any rate, my computer doesn't seem to want to open bodyshop anymore.  That is an entirely different problem I have LOL...anyone have any idea how to fix it without reinstall?

So if I took one of the boy-clones, and changed it's gender in SimPE, it would make it a girl?  I thought about this but was scared to do it.  Will it mess anything up if I do?  Or do you mean just in CAS?

Exporting via SimPe is quite easy. Open the neighborhood, then open SimSurgery. Select the sim you want to export and plop her/him into the top part of the surgery window by clicking "use". Then just click on "export" and you sim should be in CAS (and in the BodyShop).

I have issues with the stupid bodyshop myself. Everytime I want to use it, I have to take my SavedSims folder out of the MyDocuments/EAGames/etc/etc. and put in on my Desktop. I then create a new, empty, SavedSims folder in the EAGames-folder. Only then does BodyShop open up. I then proceed to take the newly created sims out of the newly created folder and putting them with the others into the folder on my Desktop. I delete the now empty folder, and move the one from my Desktop back into the game. A long and boring proceedure, I know. I'm sure there are shorter ones, but I'm kind of paranoid about the whole game and figure, better safe than sorry, no?

G.

darn it, thought that might work but I tried it and it still won't open.  Thanks for the suggestion though ;)

Sorry about that. The BodyShop is one cranky, buggy and annoying thing isn't it? Oh well, maybe maxis will have that fixed and purchaseable in another Ep :D

G.

actually...I found out by actually walking away from the computer for a while  ::) I was just being too impatient.  It does eventually load up, just takes forever  ;D

Is this true of boolProp-ing any two Sims of the same sex?  Will having two male Sims as the parents always result in a female baby, and will two female Sims as the parents always result in a male baby?  The reason I ask is that I have one particular Sim... a male... first he was abducted (obviously got a male PT), and he had a girl.  Then I used boolProp to mate him with the other male Sim in his household... the result was again another girl.  Then I mated a male Sim from a different household with him... and ended up with yet another girl.  Is this all a silly coincidence, or is that the way it will always happen?

No thats why its so comfusing. If two males have a baby it can be a boy or girl but if a male clones himself its always a girl.

Not confusing at all: If sim is pollinated with another sim, it is random. If a sim is pollinated with himself, or an invalid sim (defaults to self as a result), it will be gender-inverse.

How do you get a sim to self-pollinate?  The Tombstone of Life and Death?



Aside (because my mind jumps every time I see this): Words have gender.  People have sex.  A sim's "gender" preference would indicate whether that sim wanted to be addressed in the masculine or feminine, which may or may not be aligned with a character's implicit plumbing.  Nobody ever accused Maxis of being particularly literate.
-- Conan the Grammarian

yeah greg. TOLAD is how you self-pollinate.   ;D