More Awesome Than You!

Hi again all!

I'm coming to the point in my multigenerational Hatch family where keeping the extended family members living under one roof could cause problems as this newest crop of kids matures together. See, I have the children of cousins growing up together in one house, but they're relationship panel doesn't denote them as family (I guess because the game sees nothing beyond first cousins). I really don't want to have to break up the family into different households, just to avoid the future possibility of wants spinning up to have romantic attachments with each other! Is there a way to just denote all the extended family as cousins or something with SimPE, just so they don't get all hot for each other when they're all teenagers with raging hormones? I'd be willing to do this kind of thing manually for each additional child born to the family, just so that I can keep everyone co-existing nicely. TIA for your help!

You can mark them as family in SimPE with undefined as the relationship. That's one of the easy things to do with SimPE and pretty much impossible to mess up.  I think you just have to check the box for one of the sims in sim description and the rest sorts itself out. I usually edit both sim descriptions cos I'm cautious.   Hope someone will tell us if you have to do it a different way.   I've done it for step fathers/fathers in law who were lusting after their partner's children.

Yeah, well, see, um...I shoulda mentioned that I did that already in SimPE with all the kids, and they still aren't noted as family in the panel. Are they safe, or does the family icon need to show up to be romantically-inclined proof?

I've noticed that just checking the box marked family doesn't quite do it, you need to go into the family ties bit and add those there. If you have the 'keep consistant' box checked it means you only have to edit one of them. I think once you have one of the sims open in the family ties editor, you right-click the portrait of the sim you want to add ties to to get them in the box, then fiddle from there.

Sounds like that won't really do what she wanted - cos they're already related and presumably she doesn't want to actually change the family tree.   Perhaps what is needed is a hack that stops Sims in the same household initiating romantic moves unless they already have a memory of having done so (ie the player has to tell them to the *first* time).

The real problem is with the autonomous bed. If it has 2 sims with a high relationship & the appropriate gender preferences relaxing on it together, it can cause them to initiate romantic interactions on their own. This is exactly the feature I like most about that bed, but I don't want it thinking my distant Hatch cousins are all fair game for each other. Plus, the bed itself has nothing to do with the Want/Chemistry system itself, which might make the cousins want to interact that way in the first place. I don't want to have to pretend the cousins are all siblings, or otherwise alter the family tree (they all trace directly back by blood to the family matriarch). Does it help if you define the relationship (eg. as cousins) in SimPE as well as checking the Family box? I had checked the boxes but left the actual relationships undefined.

Well, I don't see why you can't mark all cousins, whether first, second, third, removed or whatever, as cousins.  Unfortunately you can't do it in Family Ties too.  As you may have noticed, both Angela Pleasant and Dustin Broke appear in simPE to be related as they are checked as Family so the game obviously regards that as unimportant unless a relationship is specified.

Stupid thing is, though, a while back I had a couple of teenage boys who were best friends and so were the father of one and the mother of the other.  The parents decided to move in together.  The boys living together and sharing a bedroom meant their relationship stayed almost permanently 100/100 and without any pushing from me they fell for each other.  This was fine until the parents decided to marry after which the two boys had all the relationship wants but couldn't fulfil them.  As soon as one grew up (this was pre Uni) I moved him out, and then when the other grew up I moved him in with his friend.  Now, I thought, it'll be ok, but it wasn't!  I didn't have simPE back then, so my only option was to make the parents break up (he was romance so that wasn't difficult - the difficult part was getting them back together afterwards!) which worked, The two sims were able to get joined, and adopt kids and everything worked out.  But for some reason the game must have decided they were brothers, but at the same time not brothers, it was extremely annoying to say the least!

Can't you use something like my security system to mark the room the bed is in as unavailable to the particular sims in question?   Or give them a "naughty bed" each, for entertaining their legitimate lovers and in each case use the security token to ban from the room those particular sims who they should not woohoo with?

If you look at Veronaville, almost all Montys and Capps are marked as family. I guess this was done to prevent autonomous flirting, but I'm not sure if this works.

As I said, just the family tick doesn't work, there has to be some other thing which makes them see each other as family.  And the family tick can remove itself - I had a family where Don moved in and married a sim with a daughter who was then a child, and Don treated her as family, friendly hug, family kiss etc.  This continued through teenage, but as soon as she grew up, different story.

I have all my extended family marked as "cousins". It's worked so far for me.

I think probably the best way is just to mark them all as cousins.  It doesn't actually specify in the game that cousin means 'first cousin' - I think it does, but it doesn't actually say so.  The worst scenario with this problem though is that a great-grandparent and a great-grandchild don't show-up as related and the idea of a romantic liaison coming out of that relationship ... ugh!  I think the reason for this may be to stop the memories being passed on for too many generations, but with things like elixirs and vampires/zombies in the game, it's not exactly impossible for these generations to all be alive at once.  Even a great-aunt/uncle and a great-nephew/niece relationship wouldn't be something I'd want either, but as far as I can see there's nothing in the game to stop it.

I've had a lot of peculiarities with this in my game, such as half-cousins marrying, but not being able to get romantic with relatives of their spouse who aren't actually their relatives.  The system isn't really very sophisticated if you think about it.

Well, I'm trying the cousin designation out on one of my sims in the family today, we'll see how that goes. The reason I can't really use the security doors to keep certain sims from certain beds is because of the layout of the house. I have 4 of the autonomous beds in 3 rooms, and 7 single beds in 2 rooms. The children and teens all sleep in the single beds, and the 7 adults (only 2 of which are a married couple) sleep in the doubles. I HAVE to allow non-married adult sims to sleep in the same room and even the same bed simply to have somewhere for them all to be, and when the next generation grows up I'll have the same issue, only the game won't automatically see them as relations! Hopefully the cousin thing will make this a non-issue.

it works I use simpe all the ime to link cousins regardless of how far removed

How about small bedrooms with dorm doors?

ZZ, there just isn't logistically the space to break up all the rooms & still have any kind of windows in them all, and I like having them look like actual bedrooms & not prison cells, plus I want the teens to be able to relax on the autonomous beds with their non-family playmates & maybe get into a little InTeen-related trouble! You know what would be cool for all of us who play these kind of extended families? An object that sets the relationship to cousin/family in-game! Like a painting with a menu that says "Make me cousins with..." or something to that effect. I'm sure I'm not the only one that'd get good use of that!

Perhaps you could suggest it to TJ or Crammyboy?  I don't play large families, and find large houses just too much for my game to handle for long, so I tend to have kids go to uni then come back and get their own place.  But I'd still find a use for something that stops a great-uncle who is still an adult due to loads of elixir lusting after his great-niece!  Maybe he isn't technically a cousin, but at least if he thinks he is, then he won't get these unacceptablel wants!

Going back to what I said earlier, you would think the game would realise this would happen with the various things in it that prolong life.  Seems ridiculous that they won't allow sims to have sex until they're 26 or whatever it is they are, yet they can have it off with their great grandfather whenever they feel like it?  Something very wrong there.

I tell ya, it's bad enough when the non-blood relations don't see themselves as family! Lemme give you a little rundown of something that happened in my game last week:

Zuzu Hatch (I was doing a production of It's A Wonderful Life when I reinstalled & restarted my game) moved back home & got engaged to Destry Hanby. Her brother Pete was already back home married to Arianna Copur. After Destry moved in, Pete & Arianna started having kids, the oldest girl was named Annabelle. Years pass, Zuzu & Destry have 4 kids (Xander, Riley, Willow & Oz), and tie the knot a day before Zuzu becomes an elder. Meanwhile, Annabelle & her siblings have grown into adults, and she and her sister stayed on in the household. Pete dies, Arianna dies, then Zuzu dies. Lonely Destry, only a day from death when his wife passes, decides to relax on his bed. While I was off tending to the other sims on the lot, Annabelle joined him. Suddenly I hear the harp music signifying a love connection, and go back to the bedroom only to find Destry and Annabelle under the covers! Ewwwww! I know she was just his niece by marriage, but even still, this man was around when she was getting her diapers changed, and he was devoted to his wife his whole life, why go and spoil things on his last day alive?! I tell ya, when old Grimmy showed up the next day for Destry, I wasn't sad at all! The letch! The luckiest thing about it was that even though they were trying for baby, Annabelle didn't conceive! Now there's a family tree I don't want to be dealing with!

Very much so!  I don't think they had good sex education wherever they went to school!

Sims do not recognize non blood related relatives as taboo thats why that happens.much like some RL societies

I know that they're not blood related, and I don't force non-blood relations to see each other as family either, I just think that kind of thing is bad enough without having distant blood-related cousins getting in on the same kind of act.

Besides, even if it isn't illegal, and arguably not even immoral for Destry & Annabelle to have had their little fling, I'm still mad at him!

Sounds like Destry was lonely to me

I'm sure he was, since his wife had just died...but if he'd only held out one dang day he coulda died too having been eternally faithful!

ahh but sims being the social creatures they are will always look for social comfort  regardless of how close they are to death or how close they were to their spouse while their spouse was alive

Well, he could have played Red Hands or smustled with her!

maybe he wanted  something more intimate ;D

Dirty Old sim!

maybe she was a pretty young bed warmer ;D

If it was Unleashed, he could have bought a dog!  (But then, death is rare in Sims1!)

good thing with sims2 no dog was available since he only had a day to live.poor dog would have been home less :-\

*giggles at the dirty old sim comment*


I've always thought that Maxis set the cousin thing up so that distant cousins would be able to marry and stuff for those that play with large familys but don't want a million sims in their neighborhoods...

Well, it works like that, I guess, but probably just less work!

But still, very upsetting for two sim teens whose parents decided to get married before they had the chance to grow up and move out!  David was so upset that he even wrote a long letter to SF Forum asking for help!  And they weren't related, they hadn't grown up together from babies, David was only two days off adult (before Uni) and they were besotted with each other.  And that didn't change, even though David was Romance!  He never rolled any wants but be best friends with any other sim! 

On a somewhat related note, I once came up with the following plan for a nuclear inbred family: (http://www.io.com/~torkle/images/family.png)

Six starting sims (A through F) pair up and marry.  Each marriage (indicated by flat diamonds in the picture) spawns two kids: a boy and a girl.  Then you breed/braid these three family lines together into an inbred knot of family togetherness.  You can keep going as long as you want - the pattern repeats.  The game allows this kind of thing because it doesn't look farther back than grandparents for family relationships.

You have too much time on your hands, Torkle. WAY too much time.

Nevertheless, nice diagram. It might be a bit easier to read if it was oriented so that the time progression was vertical rather than horizontal, as that is how the family trees are in-game.

I have to admit that I kind of want to start a redneck neighborhood now and have them follow this pattern.

Problem if they all have NO lightning bolts for each other!

Ah, but I don't have NL yet, so this lightning bolt system is still something of a mystery to me.

Actually, I have a question now. Can't you just disregard the lightning bolt system and force them to marry/have children anyway? Or will they reject those interactions with sims they don't have lightning bolts with?

They won't reject Sims that they have no lightning bolt relationship with.  They may have to work a little harder, and possibly there is less swooning over them, but I've had Sims that had perfectly happy relationships without any lightning bolts.

Well, true, but I prefer my sims to actually choose each other!  Of course, not possible in CAS, but I do try to make them compatible, though it doesn't always work.  1 lightning bolt seems to work pretty well though.  But couples I made pre-NL who don't have them will not be encouraged to split up!

Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to go ahead and get NL this weekend, so we'll see how that goes.

I thought I'd share some pics of the Hatch family - partly cause I'm bored, but mostly because I love taking pics of my sims but can't be bothered to make up whole story albums :-)

This first one has my vote for most embarrasing labor. Poor Willow didn't even have time to spin back into her clothes before the pains hit!
(http://jennydee.com/img/willowlabor.jpg)

This is her son (with Sabastian LeTourneau) Nick, all growed up into a teen...you can see he shares his parents' penchant for costume makeup!
(http://jennydee.com/img/nick.jpg)

Here is Lilly, daughter of Willow's cousin Joey and Caryl Couderc (or whatever her last name was). Caryl actually cleans up decent once you get some makeup on her, but nothing about Lilly as a child prepared me for the exotic beauty of her teen incarnation.
(http://jennydee.com/img/lilly.jpg)

A lonely evening with the telescope brought Willow's brother Riley little Christina here, who as a child had more than her share of run-ins with the family ghosts. One night of multiple hauntings left the poor thing too tired to even make it back into bed!
(http://jennydee.com/img/christina.jpg)
(http://jennydee.com/img/petescare.jpg)
(http://jennydee.com/img/christinasleep.jpg)

By the way, I use GunMod's Radiance Light and Camera systems in my game, makes a HUGE difference in my pics, at least I think so. Oh, and the ceilings are a must have IMHO as well. Hope posting these didn't bother anyone!

Where did you get the ceilings?

You know, I had a feeling I was gonna get asked that!

Celing tiles are here: http://charlotte.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=42789

Keep in mind that if you get a stuck invisible object indoors & use Pescado's hack to burninate it, it'll burninate the ceiling tile above as well.

Lighting mod is here: http://charlotte.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=101456&highlight=ceiling

It took a process of trial & error (still ongoing) to get the right amount and quality of lighting in rooms using this mod. The thing to remember is not all lights give off the same amount or even color of luminance, so experimentation is key.

Camera mod is here: http://charlotte.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=97642&highlight=ceiling

Simply awesome how it lets you get right in close to your sims. Couldn't live without it now!

Yeah, I have the Radiance lighting mod and the camera mod, which I am still new to.  I love them both, although the lighting mod in a bunker is a bitch!

Thanks for the ceiling tips.

Hey, just something else I noticed today, and I dunno if its the camera mod or not, or something about my resolution (1280x720), but I find that when I frame a snapshot in Camera Mode, the resulting picture generally has a good deal more vertical image captured than I see with what I'm framing. How much more seems to vary with the level of zoom I use. Lately I've started purposely correcting for this in my snapshot framing and its doing a world of good for my picture composition. Just thought I'd pass the info along...

Of course, I'm a picture junkie. I actually have my Storytelling folder mounted on my laptop over my network so I can instantly check the composition of any picture I take, and then I can adjust the framing if I don't like how it came out!

reading this treat, i thought i drop the confusing familytree of my 6 aliëns.

the founders of my family are Victor and Gary, 2 married (well, the equivilant of that) males. Gary got abducted and gave birth to Starman. in his tree there is Gary and Polination Technition, as his parents. Victor got abducted and gave birth to twins, Starlady and Starnext. Their tree: Victor and Polination Technition, as their parents. so far nothing to be confused about. all 3 are adults now.

Starman got abducted and gave birth to Veron. his tree: only Polination Technition, no second parent or grandparents. i also got the twins gave birth to aliëns, Joy and Stan. same story. if i clic on Polination Technition in the tree all 6 aliëns show up next to eachother, as if they all are brothers and sisters. that is what confuses me.

jean

Unfortunately, Aliens do not seem to be controlled by the same rules as ordinary sims.  Since all of your sims have Pollination Technician as a parent, the game will consider them all as siblings.  This is perhaps why the second parent has not shown up.  You can put the birth parent into the family tree yourself with SimPE. 

I've had alien sims get abducted too, and this happens, and family trees get sooo confusing!  I'd suggest in future if you don't want the problem, only have the cheap telescope on lots with aliens sims. or, you can use SimPE to "treat as female" in which case, I assume they would not get pregnant from an abduction.  However, if they want a baby, or they have a wife who does, you'd then have to treat the wife as male, and let him carry the baby!  (I have a feeling that if you change him back again after he's been abducted, an alien baby would suddenly make itself felt!)

thank you zz. apperently. i was thinking, in this way inbreading can occour in the game. but it can't or won't handle it and make them sibblings, or maybe the tree can not display it, but remembers it in the background.

well, i wanted to have some aliëns to play with and i really love their personallity's. after my first, Starman, i'm comepletly hooked. so i forced the abductions of Victor, Gary and Starman with testingcheatsenabled. the twins, i didden't even bother to abduct them. i hoped that some other Polination Technition's would show up, i don't like the inbreading part.

now i'm thinking about the male in my avatar to be abducted. he is not related to this family. i want him to produce a non related aliën to marry one of the six, but probably Polination Technition will pop up again.

don't have simpe, but reading here about it i'm realy getting intrested. ha, would realy like to experiment with 'treat as female'. of most of the males in this family their 'gender pref' is male. oh dear, do they wear female clothing then? anyway, if i have simpe i will try to do something about treir tree. first i have to sort out some other things, then i'm going to look at simpe.

jean

Until the current Pollination Technician dies or retires (unlikely I think) then all alien babies will be siblings, so it seems it's not possible to iintermarry them.  (I think it might be possible to clone some in SimPE and then put them in a different neighbourhood, but I'm not sure about that.)

If you "treat as female" your sim will have a female voice and be able to have babies, but will still wear male clothing and look male.

mmm. i did hear there are 4 of those technician's, but 25% is to big a risk if that was my only reason to abduct him. on the other hand, a bit of gambling.. well i don't like the idea of intermarry them, even if i can. i even don't like this inbreading, with the first one, veron, i thought he maybe is a clone of Pollination Technician, but after the other two it was obvious that this was not the case. joy is a girl and stan has normal lips as his mother has.

great that they still look male en wear male clothing. i like to be on the edge, but there's alway's an edge. oke, i want simpe. i do have a boy sim and i was wondering what to do with him. his gender pref is males, and i have downd some very nice clothing for that.

thanks zz

JeanMaas, Do you have Nightlife?

I ask because I use to use a hack for multi-pollitechs made by fwiffo on mts2, not sure if it works with NL (I know it does work with Uni)

sleepycat, no i have no ep's yet. i'm about camping next to my mailbox because nl is on the way. i won it on al local forum, could take some time, so i problaby have to wait a bit more. thanks a lot. i'm sure going to look there, maybe it's updated. would that be something, a hood with only aliëns. oh my imaginatoin makes overtime. need to go to bed, my husband is about to get up for work.

thanks
jean

JeanMaas - If you get tired of the green skintone for aliens you can try out the default replacement files I made

http://www.insimenator.net/forumdisplay.php?f=80 
their on page 2, I got tired of green aliens so now I switch colors every so often *laughs* 

There may be four PTs but I think there's one for each hood, plus PT9 and that's how they reach the count.  I know that I have one neighbourhood with quite a large number of alien children, and all of them have the same blood line and are all siblings.  I do have an alien who was abducted and had twins, so I'd have to load that hood to check everything out (don't want to close my game just yet and look in SimPE)  but I'll see what the family tree looks like in the game!

Well, I loaded my old hood and tried to load the house, but it froze so I had to reboot (this may simply be that it's a Uni hood and I need to move families out and put them in new houses - hope that's all it is) so I went into SimPE and checked the Whyte family tree.

Well, Zack Whyte has two alien boys, Zen and Zeb.  Zen and Ianthe Blues had a daughter Iona who has a pale skin and is (one assumes) one quarter alien. 

Now comes the interesting part.  Zen goes and gets himself abducted twice and ends up with twin daughters, Zoe and Zena (I think) who are still kids. Now when I checked in Family Ties, they are both shown as siblings to Zen (along with all the other alien children in the hood) and in the Relationships panel they are checked as family and siblings again, so although Zack is recognised as Parent B of Zen, Zen is not recognised as Parent B of Zoe and Zena.

So much easier to make all aliens siblings than to put in a code to prevent children of the PT getting pregnant by him in the first place!  However, at another level I know the game recognises him as the parent, he's a knowledge sim and had all the usual knowledge sim wants about the twins, Teach to Talk, Walk  etc., I definitely remember that.

I actually only let him get abducted because (a) he was desperate to meet aliens and (b) I wanted to find out what would happen!

                             
                                                                         

sleepycat - love what you made, i'm going to down the lot. i think in my story my aliëns wil get a rare dissease, turn white like micheal jackson and after that... btw, that make-up overthere is just what i was looking for  :-X  i'll post overthere. many thanks.

zz - that must be it, one PT for every hood. ha, you have it too. hum, probably it wil go on like that in every generation. grandparents wil be the siblings of their grandchildren. on the other hand, you could create an aliën thats about to be a clone of PT. don't think there wil be birthdefects due to inbreading.

hum, fun to try out, but i think maxis better go and think about this family-relation-stuf. well, if they can put in that females can't get pregnant, they would be able to put in that aliëns can't either. that can be done in the same routine. in fact i was very surprised that starman game back pregnant. nice though, but i didn't expect it. there is no diffence in the abdoctions at all, i think it would be nice if there was.

starman is a knowledge sim too, he looked as if he was in heaven when he game back, that was really great to see. don't know about his wants, i let veron grow up very fast, again, for my story. he is a child now. joy and stan are still baby's. all 3 are about to grow up again. then i will watch their wants closly. one strange thing is that the 3 adults don't realy are building up a relation with stan. hum, maybe it had something to do with his personality, oh dear.

thanks,
jean

Also teens and YSs of either sex can't get pregnant by abduction, so it really couldn't be that difficult to prevent the Pollination Technician committing incest!

I suspect the PT code is bugged, if pollinatees are not properly displaying the PT anymore. I'll schedule an investigation.

that would be great. i was just wondering why they don't use the routine that checks for family-relations. if this was ment to be, just because they are aliëns, it still sounds very strange to me.

jean

edit:
was looking at the hack sleepycat pointed out:
http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=71852&page=4&pp=25
they where talking about this one-parent-thing too, back in oct.
reading the threat they found that in simpe the missing parent isn't forgotten.
and that it even has happend where PT wassn't involved

JM, it would be great if you could find the problem and put it right!  (I know you will, of course!)

Well, I managed to find a working copy of the game my alien twins were in, (a back-up from before the hood became a bfbvfs) and I shall edit them so they know who their birth parent is!  Instead of loads of brothers and sisters, they can have loads of uncles and aunts, and just one big sister!  Since I know who's related to who, it doesn't really matter, I just shan't let my aliens intermarry anyway, even if they have a great-great uncle who's the same age!

Yeah. I used to use that hack, the multi-PT thing, and really liked it, but something in NL sort of FUBAR'd it. Not nice. Don't know what, though, because the pre and post NL code in that section looks exactly the same. I could very easily be missing something, though.

I dunno if its the Multi PT hack that made the PTs disappear from family trees in NL, because I didn't have it installed when Christina was conceived and born, and she only shows Riley as her parent, no 2nd parent at all. I haven't checked her info in SimPE.

on mts2 there was a discusion about it. they thought it wasn't. well, i don't have the hack.
well, today i downed it, but it is still zipped.

jean

I wouldn't mind so much if the PT was missing - I mean, it's fairly obvious anyway! But it's annoying when the one who goes through the birth (and just happens to be an alien/sim) is shown only as a sibling!

I also think an adoption hack where the spouse of the birth parent could adopt the child would be good!  (There probably is one already, but if so I haven't found it yet.)

That's a good idea ZZ! Hey, maybe they could tie it in with the Make Me Family With... one I requested, like a catch-all hacked object that deals with familial relationships without having to resort to InSim or SimPE  ;D

Yes, something like a nice plant which is also decorative would be good!

Or a painting. I was thinking it could even feature a family-portrait-type image. As for the actual hacking, I'll leave that up to the experts!

lol I just switched back to my white file too, if you want one of the better looking pollitech files you can grab it here http://mercury.walagata.com/w/sleepycat/newpollinationtechnician.zip  (I've gotten some really beautiful alien kids with it)
I couldn't find the thread for them at mts2, there was a couple posted in 1 thread and I only downloaded this one. I think it still works with NL (I know it worked with just TS2 and TS2/Uni) I haven't had a chance to try it out (my one sim to be abducted since I installed NL was to close to aging to elder to get pregnant)

I spent all day yesterday getting my new neighborhood started (decided to start fresh), just need to add a couple male knowledge sims so they can get abducted  ;D

Edit - just found another nice PT at laverwinklesims
http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=17.0

sleepycat - love the white one, somehow it does look different, most white skins i have seen are goth-like. i don't know excatly to put it into words. thank you for the new tp's, wonder how they look like, hopefully i can see them in cas. the tp on laverwinklesims looks realy nice. now i can make a hole lot of different aliëns. love to mix them with the 6 i have.

on mts2 they talked about it. some did have no problem after installing nl, some did. they reiinstalled the hack, after that it workt fine. well, that's what i understood.

i have to go back to my game, reorganise some things, test some things and install a lot new stuf. but for days i'm reading here, there is so many info. really great.

jean

JeanMaas - after reading that multi-pollitech thread on mts2, I also got the impression that the multi-pollitech hack still works, you just don't see the "family" tie in the family tree anymore and the alien "siblings" are no longer related like they used to be, due to the changes in NL. 
I understand about my white skintone being different, not sure myself why, but I am pleased with how it looks in-game  ;D 

I really should go back to bed, only got a few hours of sleep *sigh*

It doesn't work last time I checked. First, it caused major issues involving a refusal to allow any sims to give birth, abducting the baby at birth, that sort of thing. Lately it just means that sims don't get pollinated when abducted.

If the no family tie thing was on purpose, to allow abducted sims to breed with each other, then I am seriously ticked off because I'd already had that problem fixed in my game, with eight pollination technicians (made some modifications to fwiffo's hack) and each one was different so I had a lot more variety in my alien populations. And it was actually kind of neat to have neighborhoods where most alien sims were unrelated, but occasionally one or two would have the same alien parent.

Stops all that clogging up of the memories for those sims too!  I might try it sometime.

Yep, I have that problem too. (My standard is 1280 x 800 on the laptop's own monitor, and 1280 x 768 on the external monitor). Basically, the camera only takes 4 x 3 shots, so if you use a widescreen setup, it'll never be right.

The video camera is even worse. If you use widescreen, what it does is compress your picture to 4 x 3, so the aspect ratio is wrong and it looks TERRIBLE. I find I have to switch to 1024 x 800 and select "Use square pixels" to get watchable videos.

comming back on my 6 aliens we talked about. today i had my first session with simpe. tryed to gave two of them their second parent, because it was not in simpe visable eihter. messed up, put the backup back. tryed again with a little less complicated situation. the two in my avatar are added to my family with tombstone l and d, so they don't have family at all. now they are father and son, that's what they are supposed to be. i gave him also a teen-mum, created the same way.

tested in the game and now i can see in their relation-pic's that they are related. but it does not show up in their family-tree-thing. seems i can not change that with simpe. is there a way to do that or do i just have to wait until the thing refresses, due to aging or birth or something.

btw. with the aliens i tryed to set uncle and aunt, but that option was not there. go and try tomorow again. if possible i want them to have their birth-parent inthere. well, with two of them, one is suppost to be a clone of pt.

jean

You need to open the Family Ties menu, then it's quite easy to add the family ties that you want, and then the family tree should appear.

thank you zz. i tryed that, in the case of the aliens the pic's of them are all there because they are siblings, then it is easely chanced. but in the other case the son is alone, and if i click on the dad he is also allone. i don't know how to get them both in the right part where you can set this relationship.

jean

In Family ties, open the list at the top, find one sim that you want to add a tie to.  Click on Add New Ties.  Find the sim you want to relate them to in the second list of sims.  In the list of relationships, find the relationship you want to add, so if you want to make them father and son, put "My child is".  Then, when the tie appears, Commit Relationship.  That should be all you need to do, but if for some reason the sim doesn't appear in the list, then play the game, enter that family's house, save and exit.  Then try again and since you now have them related, the sims should both appear in the list.  (Until the game recognises they have a relation, they won't appear in the list as there would be no-one to relate them to.)

thank al lot zz, it worked. well, could not find the list on top. i think i have another version. anyway, found out that just one right-clik on the picture of who i want to add gives the option. seems i have to edit their relations in both places. now i'm going to try this on my aliëns.

jean *backuping*

The lists I was referring to are pull-down menus.  I'm glad you found a way to get it to work, though.