More Awesome Than You!

A number of people have asked for something to remove the apples and watermelon affect from the game. When they ask they have usually been refered to page 13 of the Awesome Mod Requests thread where Captain Swooptie posted his mod to make the baby gender chances 50/50. With his kind permission I've given the mod a home where it can be direct linked to http://www.genensims2.com/guest/MadameMim/MimiPudding/CaptainSwooptie_5050gender.zip

It doesn't have a page but now that it has its own thread here and a simple link maybe it'll be easier to find for people.

Watching with extreme caution what my sim eats during pregnancy can be a little annoying, but I always get boys if it's random and I prefer to have a much higher female population than male for some reason.  Though the hack is great for those who want it, I like the advent of gender selection, as it allows me to continue at least the active family however I like.  Lol, though I hope I don't go so far as I did in TS2, where single females outnumbered single males about 10:1, and it took something like ten reloads to get a female baby.  How does the RNG work without apple/watermelon influence in TS3?    Does the hack actually do anything more than remove the gender selection influence those foods have?

I've had six girls in a row since installing this hack.  Is it a coincidence?

Honestly, I have no idea if this mod works at all. People were asking for Awesomemod to remove the genderfood effect, but it appeared to be controlled by a basic XML value tweak, so I put it forth as a "Try this and see if it works" kind of thing. I haven't actually had time to play the game much at all, and cranking out babies has never been my style anyway. It's much quicker to just make an XML tweak and offer it up as a science experiment.

From what I've seen, base gender offset is listed as .5, and the two types of fruit add to that offset (by .15 IIRC) to a maximum of a further .5, bringing that gender's offset to 1. So presumably, you eat 4 apple-based meals and you're guaranteed a boy. All I did was change the .15 to a zero, the idea being that the fruits would then have no effect. That's the theory, at least, and that's as far as I'm able to go with it at the moment.

Keep in mind that there can be only one pregnancy mod. If you're using one that makes pregnancy longer or whatever, then it'll conflict, and if the load-order is as per usual, any mod whose name begins with a letter will take this mod's place.

I've had five in a row, without the hack and while avoiding watermelons and apples. The odds are low, but it's definitely possible. I had longer single-sex streaks in TS2.

FYI, Jonha at MTS did the same thing, and I had a mod of my own I'd done a couple days ago. Small XML changes are dead easy, so we'll probably see a lot of this. Should make some good fights, like with the original no-censor hacks.

Could you point me at where a good diff tool can be had, Jordi?  I've been wishing for one...

Might be some good fights - but there's also the potential for a lot of subtle differences to agree with everyone's playstyle.  I have Jonha's, but I didn't like the other changes in it (water breaking, changes to the odds) so I cracked it open to reset some of that stuff, and I used to longer pregancy hack to find the defaults that Jonha had changed.  But that one had OTHER things changed.  So in my search for "how it should be" - here's this one.  

Hopefully those who have interesting ideas and are comfortable fussing with the XML will continue to churn out slightly differring versions of things, and we'll all be able to tweak our games until they're just how we like them.

If it could be done without a lot of sniping and "you stole my idea" drama-bombs, that would be awesome, too.  But so would bacon-flavored spinach and brocolli and I'm not holding my breath.


Edit: This has me thinking that maybe it would end up being easier for people to each have their own packages in their Mods forlder, and then for mods to be presented as steps for editing the package, instead. Like mods for PHPBB are.  

So, for instance, the 50/50 pregnancy mod, rather than being a downloaded file, would be presented as:

• Open pregnancy.package
• Find <kGenderOffsetPerFoodEaten value=".115">
• Replace with <kGenderOffsetPerFoodEaten value="0">
• Save and close

Then if there was another mod for pregnancy length, it would also just be its instructions, which would be performed on the same .package, eliminating conflicts.

Short version: Yes.

Long version: Tuning those XML-files are, for the most part, so easy that taking credit for anything seems stupid to me unless you a) was the very first to discover something that eluded everyone else (lots of people will probably falsely lay claim to that one) or b) your tweaking is somewhat more involved. I just like that the XML-tunings I have won't be conflicting with each other any time soon.

Some things are a bit beyond my limited capabilities, though, as I've never done any of this before. I was trying to tweak pregnancy before I even noticed any other pregnancy tweaks being uploaded, but my initial results were stupid (e.g. no bump but my sim acting as if there should be) so I canned them. I don't know if the ones uploaded are any better (I sure hope they are), but for now I'm doing without as I switched from long to normal lifespan anyhoo and the default length serves me fine for now.

I count on mostly taking other people's tunings as potential guidelines for how I can best do my own tunings. Except when it comes to things where I am simply too lazy and/or care too little to look at it myself. For instance object tweaks. Hunting down every goddam sink in the game, for instance? No, thank you.

I don't intend to share my personal tunings, however, can't see who'd want them, so who I should give credit is a non-issue.

I do like that I'm not depending on someone else typing the exact numeric values I want, though. This feels like that time I realized I could very easily use SimPE to assign default skins myself for TS2. :D

Ok, enough ramble. Sheesh. Sorry about that.

Well it's not like eating some watermelon is terribly difficult. Try it out! Report back with results!

Well, it has absolutely zero physical basis in reality, but they probably put it in there because people liked that system of controlling things, like the Cheesecake Myth that they made real.

That's what you have a problem with? Seriously? When sims can have babies with ghosts, and even have ghost-babies, it's the 'fruit influences gender'?

The gender foods thing is really only playing on pre-existing superstitions, it's not like they're the first people to think it'd be neat to be able to choose the gender of babies. There was one man in the news not too long ago who thought that he would get a son if he smoked pot and didn't bathe. And he's been trying this method for the past thirty-odd years. That's dedication. While I doubt his chances at getting a son, I don't think he's getting any more daughters, either.

I read something about you supposedly being able to influence the gender of your offspring prior to conception with up to... idk, 1-2% more chance in their favor, so, not much. The idea in that was that boy sperm is apparently lighter, weaker and faster while girl sperm is heavier, stronger and slower. So if you drink or do drugs, the boy sperm will be the first ones to die, but that's obviously not a good solution.  If you time your conception to certain days of ovulation, however, the boy sperm will either have tired out while the girl sperm will still be going strong or they will be fertilizing the egg before the girls have a chance to catch up.

I sincerely doubt that any of this is really proven, though. Especially since it's such a LOW chance. Methinks it's mostly very ineffective voodoo. Much like eating apples and watermelon is in my game after a slight change in an XML. XD

There are also methods of influencing gender based on the acidity. We learned about it in my child development class in college a few years ago. One gender survives better in a more acidic environment than the other. Therefore if you can increase the acidity or lower the acidity, you have more of a chance of those sperm surviving. It is a small chance though. Nothing near what the game does with the apples and watermelon.

I understand the most reliable method is centrifugal. You simply sort the results in a centrifuge, and skim from the top or the bottom.

Post coital breakdancing anyone?