More Awesome Than You!

OK. I know that the mod to allow more than eight Sims in a family made bad, bad, bad things happen. My questions is threefold.

a. Is it possible to make a mod that simply bypasses the number of Sims limit when considering if a Sim can get pregant?
b. Would bad, bad, bad things also happen in this mod?
c. If the answers to above are a-yes and b-no can I convince you to make such a mod?

MM

So what bad, bad, bad things are supposed to happen?   

The InSIMenator hack allows pregnancy when you already have 8 sims in the house.  I have households with as many as 12 sims using that hack.  The only problem I have had from it is there is not enough room along the side of the screen for all the pictures. 

Can you scroll up and down to click on the pictures still, or do you have to use other means to select the sims?

Also, how can you keep track of that many sims?  :o I get stressed out just keeping track of 6.

As I understand it the bad, bad, bad things were the same eventual corruptions you get from transferring Sims between neighbourhoods.

As for why I don't use inSiminator - the main reason is I want to use this potential mod in conjunction with Risky WooHoo (and I just don't use inSiminator). I don't want to go around breeding large families on purpose, but I do want my consequences to keep occuring no matter how many Sims are in the household.

As for how you see them all, it depends on your screen resolution how many Sim thumbnails you can fit on your screen, then some of them tend to dissapear before appearing in a second column. You can cycle through your Sims using the space bar, though, so it doesn't matter if you can see them all or not.

MM

Surely by the time you've got around to baby number seven at least one teen is ready to go to college?

I have one Romance Sim who has three wives (not to mention the fact that sometimes I wish to have several generations in the same household), plus I run the quads mod and wish to run the both sexes can get pregnant mod (if the initiator is made the impregnated rather than the impregnator).

Normally the eight Sims limit is no great difficulty, but sometimes I run up against it and it's just plain annoying.

What complicated lives some sims lead!  I hope you have another romance sim (female) who is allowed three husbands!!!!!!

I have to use the space bar to cycle through them or else click on them in the house if I can see them without having to hunt for them.   

As for keeping track of them,  I pause a lot.  LOL   Pause, telll everyone what to do, unpause, let them do it.  Repeat as needed. 

I wanted to do a historical neighborhood, tracing from pioneer days to modern.  So to start I used census records.  Many people back then had huge families.  And close together in age too. Every two years was most common but every year for some.   So waiting for the older ones to grow up and move out wasn't an option for me.  So  I have several with 10 children in the home at once.   They also got married quite young back then,  so I do let some of them move out while teens. 

In the name of historical accuracy, I commend you!  Can you imagine trying to recreate a castle household, though?  Up to 5 generations, all under the one roof!  Your pause button would almost never be off!

You'd definitely need Macrotastic Power Idle. :P

But really, emulating the old days and huge families is not really a tenable affair, simply because the population growth will be so rapid that the game will become unplayable from the sheer number of sims.

Inge Jones mentioned to me that you can just teleport them to the lot.  This is how they set up the prisons and other communal arrangements.  Have you tried allowing them to breed on another lot (think of it as a home for wayward Sims) and then transferring them back to your lot to play?  I was also told by an EA tech-no-go, that it also depended on the capabilities of your computer.  As far as I can tell - I can't tell this makes a difference at all.

I love the multi-generations, too, but I have to agree with the others - you are to be commended for actually wanting that many Sims.  I think it would be fun to do that, but I know I would go mad (or rather more so) before it was over.

Machine capabiliity does make a huge difference.  Especially memory.  When I first got the game,  I only had 256 mb of RAM.  Large families were very slow.  Once I got more than a certain number of people on the lot it would take forever to move from one part of the lot to another.  It would be a bit like the slowdown bug though not as severe. 

After adding another 512 of RAM,  the game just zips along.  Sometimes  faster than I want. And I can have large families plus many visitors on the lot without any decrease.  When the slowdown bug hits it takes about a hundred npcs on the lot to cause the slowdown effect. 

And my machine is only an Athlon 1800,  not lowend but certainly far from top of the line.

Inge also said something about the Sims2 code being much better able to handle massive amounts of sims in a family, and they stop doing interesting stuff after a while as visitors, so in Sims2 you should move them in to do prison type things.

On the population growth side of it, if you start with one sim couple, and they have ten kids, and all their kids get married to non relatives and they all have ten kids, and so on . . .

2
10 (20)
100 (200)

Okay, yeah. In about four generations, you have massive explosions in your neighborhood. In the Sims, you can have either a very wide family tree (lots of kids) or a very deep family tree (lots of generations) but not both. Your game explodes.

We keep hearing prophets of doom saying these things will happen, but how many people have actually lost a neighbourhood this way?

Hands up - me!

Sorry to hear that!  Did you actually see the bfbvfos?

Did your mini universe end with a bang or a whimper?

Babies vanished everywhere, even after uninstalling and reinstalling.  I had to do a manual uninstall and start all over again.  I had played all 3 neighbourhoods from Sept to March, every household in turn.  The storylines were all interwoven; it was like running 3 soap operas at once.  Plus I had my legacy neighbourhood and a small Eden neighbourhood.  The only plumes of smoke visible were coming out of my ears as I tried to find answers that could first explain what was wrong and secondly save my game.

I'm a 'born again' simmer now.  I have glazed eyes and speak in a monotone voice when I repeat my mantra, 'They are only sims. Don't get too attached. I will have to start all over again with Nightlife anyway.' 

Speaking of Nightlife, I play with so many fixes that I'm addicted to that I actually don't want it yet; so I'm happy to wait until the Stand Alone Patch emerges before I purchase it from the post Christmas discount basket.

The Stand Alone Patch - is it fact or fiction?  And will it work?

So if I have a baby vanish, then I should stop my sims having more babies if I want to keep my neighbourhood?

ZZ, you could continue to play your neighbourhood. Losing a baby could be a simple glitch or as I've read over at The Insimenator, an issue to do with using SIMPE. Being unable to save babies indicates that you've used up all the character files available, so all you could do is play your neighbourhood until ever dies, or keep everyone alive using the Elixir, (or the Insimenator) forever.  I found it too frustrating to continue playing like that, because it was reminiscent of The Sims (1). I paid for the generations feature, so why play without it?

As for the Stand Alone Patch...mmm.   It's been promised and as such advertised, so EA have an obligation to fulfill, but they've added enough clauses to make it possible for the patch to appear anytime they feel like, any year they feel like, and for the patch to fix just one thing, or hundreds!  My money's not burning my hand, so I'm happy to wait for them to sort themselves out.  Besides, I've set my heart on getting The Godfather when it comes out next year.  That I can't wait for!

Sandy,

That sounds like a plague of unearthly proportions for certain - too bad you didn't have Pescado's blood to smear across you doorway back then, as you do now.  Remember to reapply occasionally for continued protection and as a bonus, he's apparently also a weather-beater!

I second the no purchase of Night Life, in fact I have gone back to the base game anyway.

Well, I don't think it's right that the stand-alone patch should cost money, when what it's doing is putting right their errors!

Did this occur in all your neighborhoods at the same time?   Or just in the ones who had reached population maximum?   And what is that maximum?    How many character files did you have in each of the neighborhoods?    Were there any other effects besides disappearing babies? 

See the big thread on Population Explosion here for the answers to alot of your questions. 

Babies vanished in my legacy neighbourhood, so I tested it in Pleasantview and the same happened.  I had approx 350 playable character files, but I had loads of NPCs and townies on top of that.  I had also had problems due to using the electric toy car (blank icons/career bug) but I had fixed that by replacing the objects package.

Even when you click uninstall in your My Programs section, that won't remove the character files.  That's why I ended up doing EA's favourite cureall - the Manual Uninstall.  I reloaded my games and installed JM's fixes and I haven't had any problems since.  I did not try to reuse my old game, because that would simply have brought all the problems back with it.

Well, there always comes a time when you are bored with a neighbourhood and are ready to start another (even if it's still Pleasantview, you can play it differently)!

I've read the Population Explosion thread but have gotten very little info from it.  Appears that problems can occur anywhere from 500 character files up with 2000 being maximum mentioned.  Seems like the solution to that is to prune the character files now and then.  

I have only done uninstall once.  Don't remember what method I used.  What is the My Programs section?   And what is a manual uninstall?  

Lazy typist me; My Programs is actually All Programs found from the Start button at the bottom left (usually) of your pc.  From there you can access EA's programs from TS2.  If you uninstall from that route it doesn't remove everything.  To do a proper uninstall ie a manual uninstall, you also have to go into START/edreg/RUN and delete a string of numbers.  EA's technical help board on the TS2 website contains all the details.

I'm not a techie, so talking to me about SIMPE is like talking to a bowl of spaghetti.  Even so, I did learn new things from that population explosion thread.  The first being not to get too attached to my game, because I'd be damned if I'm going to spend my time going through character files and memory tokens to delete them.  I just want fun, not tedium.  If the game becomes  a chore, then it's not a game anymore.  So why play it?

As to starting all over again, well it's only a game, and unlike real life, you can go back in time to when the Maxis Sims were just starting out and make it better than it ever was.

Well, we all have our likes and dislikes, I guess. I quite like tinkering about for a while when I have to close my game anyway.  It's got so that I start running short of RAM when I've been playing  for a while, and I have to close and reboot.  Also if I want my new downloads in the game!

My computer usually fix the game for me...   :o

Its also known as Format c:\

For some reason my comp seems to like a clean install of winsows every 1 month or so, which means that I have to reinstall sims quite often. Im getting quite good at doing backups hehe

Sounds like you have a lot of unnecessary stuff lurking in caches etc.  Mine's been going about 12 months since it was rebuilt, and I've never had to reinstall Windows.  However, I do use WindowWasher to clean up the PC.

Actually, it is a faulty gfx driver, that my windows dont like. Either that, or my gfx card.

If my computer crashes for whatever reason, I get difficulties rebooting it, and after a week or so, those have scalated to a point where I need to reinstall windows to fix the problem.

Sadly my monetary situation at the moment dont allow me to buy a new gfx card, and the driver ignores all attemtps at fixing it, so I am kind of stuck doing the reinstall routine. Which I am getting pretty good at :P

Man I wish i could Motherlode myself sometimes....

Don't we all!  I rather think my last upgrade will be my last upgrade!

I used to do this back when I was trying to get Brandi Broke to her 10 children, but what I am looking for here is something to work in conjunction with Risky WooHoo. I don't go about making enormous families on purpose but something that enabled pregnancy to occur no matter how many people were in the impregnated family would bypass the problems of townies being unable to become pregnant until you move them in and also allow 'consequences' to keep occuring no matter how many Sims are in a family.

It's the same reason I run the Sims2Living teen pregnancy mod, not because I have large amounts of sexually active teen Sims (they have no 'wants' in that area so I don't bother getting them into bed with each other) but because it enables Uni student pregnancy where apon the Sim has to find a family member to mind the baby or drop out. I keep the odds for RW set very low (5%) but it's enough that it happens sometimes.

I really enjoy that risky woohoo hack.   I have one romance sim that has wound up pregnant three times with it.  And has four children as a result. 

I had read that if they have a baby while in Uni that they lose it when they move back to the neighborhood.   Have you found a way around that?   

Leave it behind with someone else still in the house, put moveinall in your game, then when it's a child, invite it over and ask to move in.  Would that work?  After all, I know you can't invite students to move in, but the kid wouldn't be a student.

I arrange for them to give birth at the home of the family member who is to care for it (through use of the mind control mirror), but if they can actually give birth in your Uni (the pregnancy mod I use doesn't allow  pregnancies to advance), you ould always use the teleporter shrub plus to summon and then move in the baby.