More Awesome Than You!

So I have this Sim, Bianca Shakespeare, and she's part of my Legacy family.  I've shipped her off to college, and she gets a rather nice default YA outfit - goes well with her lipstick.

(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d108/BlueSoupForYou/Shakespeare%20Legacy/snapshot_11853877_f1853878.jpg)

She writes her college term paper, and then gets an error for the College Rampage, which makes Uni unplayable now, so I decide to take a look around to see if there's any prospects.  What I find is not encouraging.

Bachelor #1
(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d108/BlueSoupForYou/Shakespeare%20Legacy/snapshot_11853877_11854453.jpg)

Bachelor #2
(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d108/BlueSoupForYou/Shakespeare%20Legacy/snapshot_11853877_f185447b.jpg)

Bachelor #3
(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d108/BlueSoupForYou/Shakespeare%20Legacy/snapshot_11853877_718544c2.jpg)

Eek!

Numbers one and two could become acceptable with different hairstyles. Also, young adult male Sims often grow into their noses a bit as adults. I just went through something similar with a legacy Sim (story on my website), cringing whenever I looked at her college boyfriend, but now that they've been married forever and have two kids, I'm finding him quite adorable.

As for Bachelor #3... you could make an uglacy!

Well, that one has Blue hair, so he's obviously no ordinary rabbit. I suggest you just pick one that's active.

well ................ at least #3's blue hair takes away from the face.

number ones quite cute. go with him

blue hair dude is definitely cow plant chow. I would make her do some more searching, she can do better!

Give Number One some dreadlocks from Compulsive D - they'll more than balance out the nose!   (Hey, you should see Sophie in the long dreads!  She's still just as nasty, really, just looks like she mightn't be...)

Look people, if we look beyond Mr Number 3 blue hair and his awful expression here, I thought he have pretty nice features compared to Mr Number 1 and Mr Number 2.
Nothing too drastic. Mr Number 1 have big nose and Mr Number 2 have a big mouth.

If you ask me, Mr Number 1 is cowplant food. Look at his nose. Do you want kids with that nose?!!  :'(

It's mostly down to the vieing anngle, I think!  Have you noticed if you buy a sim some new clothes and change their appearance, when their head in the menu bar turns to face a different way, they can look very different, sometimes far better, and sometimes for worse - and all you've done is given them a different blush!

Hey, at least she didn't get Mitch Wolosenko!  One of mine did!

gah ... just feed em ALL to the cowplant ... get some new ones! lol

Ok...I hate to ask this but I must!

What the hell does Mitch Wolosenko look like?

He's one of the delivery NPCs in Pleasantview.

Yea, and he's pretty fuggly compared to the other two delivery folks. I've got a set of CAS replacement faces I found on MTS2, and I make it a habit of grabbing townies, maids, delivery folks, etc and using insim to change their faces so I don't have to look at their ugly mugs in the relationship panel. :)

Or you could simply make them SELECTABLE in debug mode and have them use the plastic surgery table!  (I used to use Merola's mirror, but this doesn't cost my sims any of their hard-earned simoleons!)

I really don't think that's fair game in a Legacy. Besides, it won't get the ugly out of the gene pool.

That's where SimPE comes in handy.

I know, and obviously in a legacy it can't be done, and I never bother much with NPCs (except once in a custom hood there was a really popular made called Charlie something, and he was really really ugly, and it was such a shame, so I let him change his face to something acceptable) but if I'm going to move dormies or townies into my game they often get a complete makeover.  However, in this game Lucy Burb is in for some big-nosed brats if she goes ahead and marries Ricky Cormier, (and she knew him before he had the nose job!)

I haven't tried a Legacy game yet (one of these days), and I usually only grab the naturally decent looking townies from the pool as potential mates, so I keep most of the fugly out of my gene pool. :)  Most of the time I look for mates among the playable pool, though my pleasantview is getting so interbred between families that it's getting harder to find someone not related.  May be time to add another townie/dormie or two to the mix, or better yet go into CAS and make a new family or two to add to the neighborhood.

Well, Ivy Copur (the teen one) turns out really well as a YA, Meadow is really pretty in an insipid sort of way, and the really surprising one is Tosha Go  - get rid of those silly bunches and find her a nice hairstyle and she's gorgeous.  As for Sophie, it's her personality that you wouldn't want passed on, not her looks.  The male townie teens are another matter entirely, though!  Randy London isn't too bad, but the rest have all had face-lifts in my game!  (And only the OFB kids still even exist!  The originals like beloved Marsha were scrubbed at the outset!)

Yea, I was thinking of adding Ivy Copur to the gene pool, since one of my teens finally rolled triple-bolts on her. May be time to send her off to college.  Meadow is already a mom 3x over in my game -- she had triple-bolts with Dustin Broke, so she joined him in college and they got married right after graduation.  Dustin is already an elder, and she's near, and their kids are pretty good looking (especially their oldest daughter).

Ivy gets 3 bolts for Alvin!  And Sophie and Nolan roll 3 once you get rid of their vampiric turn-ons!

Yeah I sent Ivy, Meadow and Sophie off to college.  One of my born in-game Sims has 3 lightening bolts for Sophie, though his personality is just as nasty as hers.  Go figure.   ;D  As for Ivy, she became attracted to Pascal's alien son.   And Meadow?  Pascal's alien son and Edward Elric.   ::)

How did they get to Strangetown?  Or how did Pascal get to Pleasantview?

That last one I've married into a family before....don't do it! His kids are really ugly :D

Which one, Emma?  Edward Elric?

The one with blue hair....his name was something really funky in my game, can't remember it now. I'm not sure if he just appears in ALT. I tend to use the SSU template for my uni and I haven't seen him there.

Oh, I don't even recognise him, but if he's a dormie that probably explains it, I don't look very closely at them most of the time!

*giggles* Unless that's just a happy coincidence of random naming, I'm pretty sure that the abovementioned Edward Elric is a CAS, because that's the name of an anime character.

The next lot debugger and clothing tool will let you regenerate a sim's portraiture, so you can flip through their poses for portraiture.

Hey, now that's a REALLY neat idea!

My daughter changes the sims appearance until she gets a portrait pose she likes :D I don't care how they are posed.

Annoying, though, when a previously intelligent-looking sim (for a sim) looks like a real wally just because you've changed his eye-liner!

1 isn't actually half bad, considering that he's a townie.  Then again, I don't hate townie looks as much as most people.  Then again, I nuked said townies because I just plain don't like townies.

If I remember correctly, pretty much anything is illegal in a Legacy challenge except for using Elixirs of Life.

Well, get a sim in platinum and they can live forever then!

Well, I have an easier posing facility to be made available soon. Instant-pose-switch, instead of the lengthy "game freezes, mirror dialog interrupts everything, sim claps at mirror and ugly pose results". Real helpful with vampires, where some sims just look HORRIBLE in certain poses.

Plus with some sims, certain poses result in them glaring balefully or grimacing menacingly. A very nice pose.

Nah, the Legacy challenge isn't quite that strict.  I even got the OK from Pinstar to use Macrotastics!  Anyway, I sent her off to a community lot (a butt-ugly one) and she met and started chatting up a cutie, so that's who I am going to shanghai to take back home with her.

(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d108/BlueSoupForYou/Sims%202/snapshot_11853877_7185aebd.jpg)

BlueSoup, please buy a lamp post!

(Hey, you can see the face clearly when you reply, but on the actual page it's very dark.  Strange!)

Hope she's turned on by beards and glasses!

ooooo he's a keeper Blue!  Your sim is gorgeous by the way :D

He reminds me of someone!  Can't think who, though!

Nah, I realized it was really dark, so I moved him and took another one lol.  She's turned on by black hair and fitness, I think.

Just make sure he works out then!  You must have changed the pic just as I went into Reply mode!  I thought it was odd the pic suddenly improved like that!  By the way, how exactly do you upload a pic here?  Do you have to rename them or something?

And I think I've found who he reminds me of.  Search your game for:

snapshot_00000006_aecf5b56

and tell me they arent't related!

No, you have to use a photo hosting site, like www.photobucket.com and then link the IMG tag line (found under the picture).

Also, they're now engaged!

But I have a question for the Uni-ignorant.  I made him selectable for a minute to see what his stats were, and it says he's a Freshman.  How do I make sure he graduates?  Can she go back to the dorm and ask him to move in?  Or do I have to move her to a private house and then ask?  I've never played Greek or Secret Society houses, so I also have no idea how they work either.

When she graduates and moves to a residential lot that isn't connected to the University, Move In/Marry the Uni Sim.  He'll go through the YA -> A transition, but he'll be listed as dropping out.  If you want to graduate him, you're going to have to move him into a University Residential lot by using Propose.../Move In and play him through.

yup, he's a cutie ( for maxis anyhow! lol)

Okay, I'm excited about being able to change the poses more easily because I'm one of those people who will keep "changing appearance" until I get one that doesn't look right up the guy's nose or make the girl look like a monkey.  :P

Considering how long we have to keep staring at them it's only reasonable to have something acceptable to look at!

I make them selectable, and use TJ's college thing (the phone books) and finish each semester at the same time as my legacy sim (probably against the rules, but I don't like having dropouts)
then, after they graduate, I move them out first, into the simbin, then I move my legacy sim out, and have them move into the legacy house together, then I have them get married

Most of my sims start living together while they're still at Uni.  Ricky Cormier has just moved back to Pleasantview, and he's waiting for Lucy Burb to join him ( I decided Lucy Cormier sound a whole lot better than Ricky Burb!) - he changed his aspiration to Popularity through normal Uni channels, and now they have three bolts, and she doesn't seem to mind that he's a slob!

Number three's eyes are so far apart, they're about to fall off his head. I've had experience with big-nose Sim genetics, and they can be overcome. And actually, as Sim male noses go, neither one nor two are that bad. #4 is definitely the winner though.

For dormies, I force semester parity with twojeffs' phonebook, and move them into a separate lot after graduating. Then my Sim calls them to move in. If you do have a Greek House, you can ask the guy to move in after he's a full member, and he'll become playable.

Wow he's cute. Definitely a keeper. But do my eyes deceive me or is he the spitting image of Mitch Indie?  :-\ I think Mitch is a playable sim that lives with roomie Max Flexor at Academie LeTour in one of the student houses. Or I've got their names reversed, I can never remember which one is which. It's been a while since I played my neighborhood with that college.

That is Mitch Indie.  And if he's a playable, well, I didn't know and I'm using him anyway.  :P

Excellent idea! He's delicious. Your sim's babies are bound to be gorgeous.

Yeah, he's pretty cute.  And for once, I like a Sim better with glasses than without.

Don't let him near a shower - it's Mitch I was thinking of, just couldn't think of his name!  And bear in mind, he's bone idle (even my sim Bone Idle is less bone idle than Mitch!)

That would be useful because you have to change appearance a couple of times for the pose to change if you keep doing it without changing anything about their appearance.

Max Flexor makes pretty babies with even the most average Sim.  Mitch Indie is my 2nd fav.  But why oh why do my sims keep going for that Woolsenko (sp) guy?  *sigh*

Oh, and Marsha Bruenig grows up pretty nicely too. 

Mitch is one of the "Abeledabijhay! romance Leos - they all go for them!  Most of my sims can't keep their hands off Keanu Broke (the youngest Broke is always that in my game) if I make him a leo, which he always used to be!  and sims are only affected by virtual pheromones, not looks!

Mitch is a nice Family Sim in my game.

Mitch Indie is, but Mitch Wolosenko has been romance in every install I've ever had!  And like friend Goopy, one wonders how they have the cheek!

Oh, Mitch Wolosenko...

Seriously, Maxis needs a new name database!  Mitch is not that common a name - there is no reason to have more than one!  I have 396 character files in this neighbourhood, is it too much to ask to have only one Mitch???

Far too much!  And the most annoying thing of all is, if you don't have notownieregeneration, and you move a townie into your game, and you have any sims with really unusual names, they nick those names for future townies!

Yeah I probably should've explained that I cloned a bunch of Maxis people and put them in a custom, then made game/anime characters and plopped them in too.  Hehe.   ;D

I recently downloaded the townie namce change thingy I saw a MTS2 and I am very happy that I no longer have any Abhijeets or Woolsenkos to worry about (geez, I'm usually a really good speller but I just can't ever remember where to put the vowels in some of the Maxis names).  Has anyone else used this:  http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=110889&highlight=townie  (it's pretty old).

I understood it would only work on new townies, but I imagine you put it in before you loaded the hood for the first time?

However, a Goopy by any other name is still a Goopy!

Yeah, I started a fresh neighborhood.  I also have new CAS default faces so the townies actually look... almost normal.

But there DNA must still be ........abnormal!

Of course or it wouldn't be the sims now would it?   :P

I've been using the betternames mod for a long time :) love it.

Well, I'll definitely stick it in if I decide to add a Downtown!

I'm still using it. Works like a charm. It works for all new Sims with one exception: the initial townies and service NPCs in a new neighbourhood, these will always be Abhijeet Cho, Marsha Brünig  etc.. This because they're pulled from a template with names intact.

IIRC you'd have to wipe out C:\Games\Sims2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods\N001\Characters to stop this from happening (and destroy N001 in the process)—a better way may be to use the Delete all characters cheat in new 'hoods.

Dormies, downtownies, and shoppers (townies) will use the new names, as will service NPCs for the expansion packs.

Sounds fine for a custom hood - I would normally deleteallcharacters in such a case, but if you want to play Pleasantview etc., you would need to get rid of the whole lot manually with SimPE or simEnhancer and then let the game generate a new set - and then you would still need to do something about the uglymugs!

don't know if you can use it in a Legacy game, but I use TJ's College Adjuster to fix them.

dac isn't really enough though, you also have to remember to wipe the DNA and SWAFs before starting a new hood.

Well, true, but I was tired when I wrote (typed) that.

I was using the College Adjuster, that's why the game kept crashing.  I eventually got it sorted out, also with the Adjuster.  :)

Didn't you post all that in your other thread, though, Blue?

Yep, that's why I didn't go into details.

How precisely does one do that? I'm assuming this is a SimPe process, but I've never bothered with SimPe because the idea of installing the .net framework makes me very unhappy.

I'm one of those people that ALWAYS uses DAC and imagine my alarm when I read three separate threads in one day about the dangers of DAC and SWAFS.

I think it's a case of "first find your SWAF" but what comes next I'd also appreciate some clarity about.

Step-by-step:
1) Create a new neighbourhood
2) Once it's loaded, do the delete all characters cheat
3) Exit TS2 and open the neighbourhood in SimPE
4) Delete all remaining sim descriptions (SDSCs) — the default NPCs will be recreated anyway
5) Delete all Sim DNA entries (SDNA)
6) Delete all Sim Wants and Fears (SWAF)

Optionally, also clean out all Sim Relations (should be empty) and Neighbourhood/Memory (NGBH). Do not touch anything else!

Safe and exit SimPE, and restart TS2. Now your neighbourhood is clean and safe to play.

Thanks Jordi, but what do I do if Marsha Bruenig left something behind after I manually took her out of my game?

Oh, in that case you'll need to somehow find her SWAF files. The extra SDNA won't be much of a problem so forget about it.
If you've already deleted her character file (SDSC) finding the right SWAF will be hell to do… check each and everyone and delete the ones for ‘unknown’. Any valid SWAF will report a Sim name, Marsha Bruenig's will not find one and say ‘unknown’.
You should have at least one extra unknown in NL (remote control car) and two unknowns in OFB/FFS (rc car and the robots), deleting them is safe though since their wants are not used anyway.

Well, I'm hoping she didn't leave anything, but I shan't know till I go back into SimPE.  (I hadn't loaded a Downtown, and had a surplus of about 100 or so SWAFs, but I think they were nearly all blank and had no LTW in the frame.  I think they are all the new NPCs and Downtownies and ghosts for Nightlife - at least, fingers crossed!)

SWAFs can't be deleted in normal ways. DAC leaves them behind, as does deleting the character directly. So it's a good bet it is still around and waiting to do damage (which will begin the moment a new Sim gets Masha's old ID).

So how the hell do I fix that?  I probably have about half a dozen sims with the problem (however many townie kids there are in Pleasantview, as I got rid of them all!)

Manually delete all SWAFs for ‘unknown’.

And that will take them from the new character's file? Great!  That should solve the problem, but can I do that from within SimPE?  Or do I have to open up the character file?

Well, I added a downtown, and gained even more SWAFs, so that wasn't the problem.  So, I have about 100 SWAFs that don't belong to anything, I found (I think and hope) five of the townie kids' SWAF that were in the right place in the list in amongst all the other original townies, but none of them were listed as Unknown.  All were simply nameless.  I have a few other nameless SWAFS, but somehow finding 100 which don't belong to anyone seems a daunting task, and since also some of the Wants of my existing sims are not appearing correctly (ie missing date such as icons), and also a lot of townie and dormie wants  are showing incorrectly, I'm beginning to wonder if the real problem is the new version of SimPE which decided to go and update itself.  I think I might uninstall it and go back to the previous one and see if the problem persists - I backed up before I started all this, but of course, it was this version of SimPE that made the backups!  I honestly can't see how half-a-dozen townie kids could have turned into about 100!

Unless it's all the munchiebots sitting in my sims' inventories?

At the moment I have 4 Alon - even worse than Mitch >:( but thankfully only 2 Brandi wandering around - in a previous incarnation of Pleasantview I had 5 of them.

I have 8 Marylenas. This is rather overmuch, considering I've never heard of even one.

And that's why I made my name mod… I have some dupes but far less than with the default and obscure mix. I have no Goopy Jitsumakolwhatevers at least.

Jordi, I have done a complete reinstall of SimPE and gone back to 0.56, and everything is identical.  the interesting thing is I started out after adding the downtown with 602 SWAFs, and there are still 602 SWAFs listed, even though I removed 5 of them.   I also have an enormous number of almost totally blank files in the SWAFs, with no name, not even Unknown.  I have one or two sims who have 8 wants shown, and deleting the 5 I did has made no difference at all to any of my sims.  I think something else is going on here!

Deleting the SWAFs of the unknown has no effect, other than to prevent it from happening to other sims. In order to clear up errors on existing sims, you have to delete the SWAFs corresponding to them, Otherwise, they continue to use the corrupted SWAF they inherited.

So I delete their SWAFs, and then they generate new ones when I play them again?  That sounds a whole lot easier (if I've understood you correctly) than trying to hunt down the original SWAFs.

Yes. Although they lose their extra want slots and locks, and who knows what else might be important in there? If you CAN restore them from non-damaged SWAFs, this is best, but failing that, I've had to delete a few corrupted SWAFs before....they SEEMED to be OK, but there's no guarantee it will work perfectly.

Well, when you start with something imperfect, the best you can hope for is to make it less imperfect than it was!

I still wonder what all these blank files are, though, it's very odd!  The only thing that did occur to me was to wonder if, when you upgrade a pre-uni sim, if the old SWAFs are wiped and a new set made, creating two files, an old, blank one and a new one.  If so, the number of blanks I have would probably roughly correspond with the number of sims I've upgraded.!

Well, it's a good thing I have a back up, because Sigrid Schilling now has only one want, and it isn't one she's likely to fulfil in the future! All the others were locked, unfortunately.  Still, I have a backup, which I'll have to use, and I can make sure all the want slots are unlocked before I try any more manipulations in SimPE!

Well, I've finally managed to get Sigrid back to her original 6 wants in game, and I'll have to check what's happening in SimPE.  At least if it's worked, I can go ahead with the other sims with similar problems!  But it's going to take ages, as I feel that it's a lot safer to deal with them one at a time!

Rather off topic but curious minds wish to know - which uni does Mitch Indie pop up in?

La Tour, I think.

Yes, and I think he's in the student housing titled "Friends".  His buddy Max is cool too. 

Well, they're both slobs, but Mitch is worse than Max!

Ta muchly  ;D

I guess my comment about them being cool should have been clarified - it's a relative term (relative to other uni towniestudents, I mean)   :P