More Awesome Than You!

I was under the impression that it was possible to get your male Sims to take their wife's last name when they married.  Is this incorrect?  I have tried it at least three times, having the woman propose marriage to both resident and non resident male sims, yet they always take their husbands name.

Especially in the case of legacy type founders, I'd really like the family to keep the name I gave the female founder.

The game uses the last name of the active Sim when you propose a marriage. So if you want him to take her name, let her do the propose - get married.

Pescado has a mod which overrides this and always has the male last name take preference (marriage-traditional).

There's a traditional marriage FFS hack. I'm willing to bet that you have it in your downloads folder. It will give the male last name always. If you take it out, then the sim who proposed marriage will give their last name to the other sim.

I had Cassandra Goth marry Darren Dreaner when I first started playing.  She proposed, he took her last name.  In my custom hood not too long ago I had a female sim propose to a male townie and he took her last name.

Both of these were at the female sims' residences.  I don't know if that makes a difference or not, but I thought it might be worth mentioning - if you haven't had them propose at the female's house so the male gets the "Sims moving in with..." screen.

It's surely the hack. I had it in my folder by accident once even though I try to always de-select it when installing the directors cut.

It must be the marriage-traditional hack.  Because it has always been a playable female sim asking a NPC or former NPC male to marry her.

Thanks for the help.  I guess that hack will be coming out of my download folder.

If you want to move to the male residence, but take the female name, have her move-in, then let her propose. He'll still take her last name. Actually I ended up changing the whole family's last name this way - not what I intended, but so be it.

It always annoys me, though, that you move a sim into a house, but the house still has the name of the last house he lived in.  This happened with Max and Cassandra in one of my games - although she took his name because he proposed, The house they moved to was still the Goth Family!  After he threw her out and he met someone else, I had to get him to move out and into HER house so the family could at least stop being the Goth Family, which out of them all, only Cassandra and Max's daughter actually was part of!  At least in Uni, if you move Jack Jones out of the Brown household and move him into an empty house, he becomes the Jones Family!

As stated many times in this thread, it's Pescado's hack forcing your sim to take the husband's name.  There's a way around this even with the hack installed, but it involves SimPE.  I'll explain the steps real quick on how to change a last name and the lot name.  It should work wit any recent version.

1)Open SimPE Classic.  You can use the other one, but if you do that you're on your own.
2)Plugins -> Neighborhood Browser.  Select your neighborhood from the popup.
3)Plugins -> Sim Browser.  This is a very useful feature in SimPE which was added quite a bit ago, but it makes this process quicker.  Instead of blindly searching every Sim Description file you can find your sim by Name and Family.
4)Now that Sim Browser is open, Find the sim whose last nime you want to edit.  Double-Click on it.
5)Go to Plugin View if you aren't there already.  There's a few options here but all you need to do is select the current last name of the sim and change it to what you want.  Commit changes.
6)Repeat 3-5 for any other sim you need to change the name.  If they took the wrong name, you'll need to do this to the other spouse and any children.
7)After all the names are changed, the Lot will still be under the old name.  We need to fix this.  Under Filetypes select "Family Information".
8)Select the first value under packed Files.  It should be something like "Family Information (FAMI, 0x4....)"
9)If that isn't the family you want to edit, press the down arrow key.  If that's not it, press down again.  Keep going till you get to the family that you want to edit the household name of.
10)Change the Name field to whatever you want it to be changed to.  Preferably the last name that you put for the other sims.  Anything is fine, but make sure you Commit changes.
11)Save.

Yeah, I know.  A bunch of you already know how to do this.

I know now, but back when I created Max, I didn't, and it just seems a bit stupid anyway!  Like, if you create two friends in CAS, they have to have the same last name, except in Uni they can have their own last name - so why on earth when they did that coding for Uni didn't they extend it to all unrelated sims?

Laziness, probably. That, and they'd have to alter the existing GUI for CAS, but those files appear to be embedded in the original datafiles.

I'd like a hack to have Sims marry, but still retain their own last names. When my parents married, for example, neither changed last names. Do you think you could make such a hack, Pescado? Pretty please?  :-*

That moves into the territory of "What do we name the baby?". Right now, the baby automatically takes the former host's name. It gets complicated when the names are never changed. Marriage-traditional leaves the names in place for same-sex couples because, traditionally, these pairs will never actually breed. It gets more complicated when this method is applied to breeding couples, since now we need to start hacking the baby-name-o-tron.

What I wish is that when the box comes up to name the baby, we can choose the surname as well as the forename.  I tend to forget to do it in SimPE and I get really irritated by it.  I nearly always forget to marry my couples before they have kids (probably subconscious, as I've never really seen the point of marriage) and they're all going around with the mother's surname when I'd rather they had the father's or a combined one. 

Maxis really ought to have offered this option, simply because (in the UK at any rate), 43% of births (at last count) are out of wedlock, which is near enough half.  I do wish Maxis would move with the times.  They're so puritan when it comes to sex.

I'd like the name we chose for the lot to remain the name of that household.  That would be the best way of telling the difference between one family and another in menus.  I mean seeing as the "family" name are nothing to do with their surnames anyway, by the time a couple of generations have got married, the family name is just a meaningless bit of confuscation.

Problem is, of course, that WE don't CHOOSE the name for the lot (Family) only the address.  In Max's case, he moved into the Goth House and married Cassandra.  The whole caboodle of goths then moved to another house, which was the The Goth Family.  Fine, Mortimer was still living there, it was his money etc.  But the house I moved them to I'd made far too big, and my game just didn't like it, so in the end I moved Mortimer and Alex out, leaving Max, Cass and the baby.   Lot still didn't work well, so I moved them out and into a smaller house, which although on marriage Cass took Max's name, was still called the Goth Family!   But, when Cassandra and Max split up, and I moved her into the little cottage in the woods - that house was given HIS name!!!!  Now, is the game befuddled on this issue or not?

So, at this point, I had three houses.  One, the home of Mortimer and Alexander, called The Goth Family. Two, the home of Max and baby Durham, called the Goth Family, and three, the home of Cassandra Durham, called the Durham Family!  Plus two more houses which I stuck in the bin.

That's what I meant.  I want the lot to keep the address you gave it as the name of the household.  In The Sims, family means household - and includes non-related lodgers, prisoners etc.   I remember who's in what house a lot better than what family name they might have been given and changed to for unfathomable reasons.

Yes, but confusing if more than one house is called The Goth Family!  And since Cassandra took Max's name, why on earth couldn't the house that they lived in together have been The Durham Family?   And why, when he'd kicked her out for cheating on him, did she have the gall to name her new home The Durham Family?  Me, I'd have named it Chicken Ranch!

Lol I'm not entirely sure we're having the same conversation here :)  I wouldn't call a lot a family, and you're not allowed two lots with the same address in one neighbourhood, so I would call them something like Goth House for one and Goth Lodge for the other, if they absolutely had to be named after a family.   But more likely I would call them 1, Simmie Street, or Rose Cottage, or The Lighthouse.

I think you're righ, Inge, we're talking at cross-purposes.  I think you mean that the address of the house, if it reflects the inhabitants' name, as Goth House, Goth Lodge, etc., is useful for remembering who lives there.  However, although I did call Max and Cassandra's house Durham Manor, the game still insisted that it was home to The Goth Family!  And that is what annoys me!  And Max still can't live in a family with his own name!  I had to move him in with his wife-to-be, whose surname was Mitcham, then move them back.  He still lives at Durham Manor, but the family is now The Mitcham Family!  How can a fortune sim with the desire to found a dynasty do so if the family is called something else?

Sadly, the only way I can see doing that is waiting until the baby grows up, moving the kid out, moving Max in with the kid, and then whatever after that. All that moving around just gave me a headache!

Well, she's at Uni now and in a relationship, so I don't know if I want to go that road.  But he could have another kid.  Or, his son Dorian could move his dad in to his house.  Maybe that would work, but whichever way, I'd have to return all his hard earned (nicked) goth money to him!

When I think about all the moving around you'd have to do just to change this guy's house name, it makes me wonder if this is all some sort of horrible nightmare or if that sim is being cursed for evils in a past life, or something.

 ;D He's a CAS sim without a past life and he's a well-behaved Fortune sim who loves his family!  But of course, he did the unacceptable thing - he married a goth and then had the nerve to throw her out when she behaved like a slut!

*cracks up*

That reminds me that in my new Pleasantview I've never played the Goths, even though most of the other starter sims are in their elders. I guess I should rectify that, hmm.

If you really must......but don't let Cassandra loose on the world!  Keep her on a very short leash, make her give up her job (that's where she starts fooling around) and stay at home and clean the house!  Age Mortimer down to adult, get him abducted a few times, and she'll have plenty to keep her busy!

In my original Pleasantview she married Don and had a bunch of kids (errr, which Don took care of) and mostly spent her time reading books in front of the fireplace. She was pretty much the only straightlaced person in the house. I'm going to try something more adventurous this time around, for sure. Mortimer alien-babies would certainly be fun!

 ;D

I did have her married to Don in one game, but he was one very unhappy bunny!  In the end he moved out!  I think he went to live with the Calientes!  Obviously, anything was better than Cassandra and her constant moaning!

Is this something that's going to be included in Open For Business? I've never heard of such a want before.

As far as I know there isn't one - I wanted it for him! ;D  After all, most tycoons do found dynasties (apart from Howard Hughes, that is!)

As to all the business about the household names--having six households called "Goth Family" that don't have any Goths in them or what have you--it's easy to change that in SimPE. What I do is rename each household with the real family name and also with the maiden name of the spouse ("O'Neill-Torres Family") which makes it easy to tell the households apart even if (as in my neighborhood) the O'Neills have bred like rabbits and taken over half the neighborhood. Households where an offspring is living alone just get "O'Neill II" and households with roommates get the last names of all the roommates. It's a lot easier than trying to remember who lives at 397 Church St and who lives at 214 1st Ave--plus the family name is listed on JMP's lotsync timer, and the address isn't.

If you don't know how to change the household names, each household is listed under "Family Information" in SimPE and you just change the name there.

No, I remember real estate addresses better than surnames, for some reason.  Maybe I am autistic.  Ok, so why not "the x family at y address"?

It's not that I don't know how to do it!  At the time I played this family, I didn't have SimPE, and anyway, the point I thought I was making is not whether or not we as players can change things, but that Maxis as the game creator ought to have sorted out anomalies like this.

I spend enough time in simPE altering stuff and getting rid of unwanted townies as it is!  Since they made the change in Uni, I couldn't see why it couldn't be applied universally.  And, quite honestly, I have no objection to six families being called The Goth Family if that is actually their name!  I have no problem remembering which family lives in which house, I frequently have at least four Broke Families, and I always know which family is which.

I wish I could change the lot's address.  When I first started playing Pleasantview, I placed a house from the lot bin and forgt to change the address to go with the addresses of the other houses ont that street.  For example, the house across the street might be 1 Sim Lane, so this one should be 2 Sim Lane, not "3 Bedroom Victorian".  I never could figure out how to do that in SimPe or if it's even something that could be done.  I tried changing the name of the lot in the neighborhood browser, tried loading the lot and changing the address there (used commit and save) but it would never take.

Now, in my custom hood, I've moved some lots from one street to another so I can keep my "rotation" in a certain order (by generation), and I can't change the street address.  So 110 Forrest Street might be next to 103 Forrest Street.  Or I may have moved a house on Forrest Street to George Street but the address is still Forrest Street.

It seems like you should be able to change the name of the lot whenever you move it or move a new family into it (like your Goth dilemma, ZZ).

Very creative street name!  Haha!
Don't feel bad.  I made a neighborhood called Seabreeze and wanted to name all my streets after ocean..um stuff, realized later after naming a whole street full of houses that Shallot is the onion, not the mollusk.

LOL!  Oooops!  And I thought just forgetting to rename the lot was a pain!  Funny thing is, you're the only one who know you didn't do that intentionally (unless you rat on yourself) but it will bug you as long as you play that hood!  I know it bugs me that my very carefully placed and named lots are now a jumbled mess.  But I usually just look at the name of the family when I load the lot anyway.  Had to, or else I'd have driven myself crazy with "I can't believe I can't change this lot's address string to ..."

As for Addresses, youou can change the string in SimPE if you didn't know that already.  Even if you're not a hacker, it's a useful tool to keep around.  You'll always find something that you mess up or find that you named a Sim the same as another Sim.  It's very easy to do, it's similar to changing family names.

1)Open SimPE Classic.
2)Plugins -> Neighborhood Browser.  Double-click the neighborhood you want to edit.
3)Under Filetypes, scroll down to Lot Description.  Click.
4)Under Packed Files, select the first value.  It should be something like "Lot Description (LTXT, 0xB)".  If that's not it, press the down arrow until you find it.
5)When you find it, you can edit the Lot Name(Address) Value if you want to change the address.  If it's a community lot you can also edit the House Name, but you can already edit that field in the game.  Commit Changes when you modify the values.
6)Save.

I'm not sure this will work in the other sections where sims live though.  While looking through the list, I only saw files that were in my Westfall Neighborhood, not its satellites.

Yep, that's what I did.  It wouldn't take.  Even opened the lot file itself and tried to change it there, also, but it still didn't take.  The lot address never changed on the lot window when I clicked on the lot.

Haven't tried again for awhile, so maybe the version I had at the time was bugged in that area.  Will have to try again.

Have you tried moving the family out and then packaging the lot?  Works for me every time.  You just have to reinstall the house and then replace it where it was before and you should get the option to rename it.  Bonus is, you now have a permanent copy in your lot bin.

I never thought of that!  Probably because when I tried before, it was pre-NL and I didn't want to lose belongings, but the thought of moving the lot into the bin didn't occur to me.

I would just bulldoze the lot that's left in the hood after I put it in the bin, then put it back and rename it.  Too easy, I guess!

Doh! (bangs head against desk)

Just hope it doesn't have any custom terrain paints!

Terrain paints fixed, post-patch.

So, Elvira needs to install the patch before packaging the house?

Yep.

All this after I checked every single downloaded house I have in my files for terrain paints and deleted all the ones that had them!

Hey, I accidentally installed a single terrain paint once, and reinstalled my entire game from scratch.  Didn't even use a backup.

Just think of the heartache Maxis would have saved if they'd put the terran paint fix in the first sims2 basegame patch!

I don't use custom terrain paints so I should be OK, I guess!

I don't use them NOW!  But there still in my game as I have lots which use them, and I don't want to have to relocate half my sims!  It's a lot of sims!  Especially as I don't know for certain which lots are fine and which aren't!