More Awesome Than You!

Can anyone recommend something to visually represent sims family trees? I'm trying to get my neighbourhood organised and would like any easy way of figuring out who is related to whom, what generation I'm up to etc. The 'hood was originally used for a very successful black widow challenge so there were a lot (20+) of first generation siblings and I reckon I'm on 5th generation now. Numbers have been reduced a bit with the introduction of zombie apocalypse/assault rifles but this is balanced by the triplets/quads mod. At the moment I've got a roughly drawn chart that completely fills a piece A4 paper and I'm loathe to try an redraw it by hand if I can do it on the computer. I did have a look at Sims2DB which looks great but doesn't seem to play with Petz yet.

You could try a genealogy program.  Many of those have the option to display different charts on screen or print them.

My ex was into genealogy, and he used a shareware program called Brother's Keeper, but there are probably other shareware or freeware programs available.

I personally use Microsofts Visio (flow chart diagram), but that's because I never could find a good free geneology program. I'm now off to do a search for this 'brother's keeper' to see if it's better than Visio - thankyou for the search words

 ;D

I just make them in Photoshop. I can't track family trees unless the whole thing is laid out clearly in front of me in picture form, and I have not found any program that adequately draws a family tree for me. Since the game already provides basically everything I need to create the tree, I just use that. I've become so good at doing these that it takes less than ten minutes now to make a family tree, even if it's very complicated.

Here's one I made for the Monty family in Veronaville. Usually I put the sims' names under the pictures.

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/scraps/montyfamilytree.jpg)

 :o Teach me, o'sensei.. lol
I have PSP 8 and Photoshop somethingorothernumber.

I use SmartDraw for flowcharts, etc, though I like SaraMK's Photoshop chart better. I was going to recommend Gimp, as it does basically the same thing as Photoshop, but is free, only now the site is gone, and when I Google 'Think All Publishing' all I see is a bunch of bad reports from the Better Business Bureau. Personally, I did not have any problems with them, but obviously others did. :-\

How do you extract the thumbnails of the sims? I have found the jpg/tga/png image under Character File but it doesn't have the background greyed out nor does it have the border or the rounded edges?

The problem with genealogy programs is that you will need to connect all the families at some point...if the families never intermarried then you can't usually represent them in the same chart.

I believe (correct me if I am wrong, SaraMK) that she just uses Print Screen.  This is only a guess based on how the bg color of the tree matches the game's tree bg color.

You can use any program that allows the basic operations of Select (part of an image), Copy, and Paste, and which supports layers. Paintshop, Photoshop, Gimp (free -- http://www.gimp.org/), PaintNet (free -- http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html), and I'm sure tons of other programs all do that.

You also need a screen capture program like Gadwin PrintScreen or YFF Screen (both free).

It also helps to run the game in windowed mode while you do this.

What you do is:

Open the game and find the sim who is on the family tree that you want to make. Open the family tree. Select each of the sims on the family tree and take a screenshot each time. You end up with as many screenshots as there are sims on the family tree.

Then it's just a matter of copy/pasting them together in the image editing program. Start with the first screenshot and work your way through the rest of them.

The first time is hard, but once you understand the idea, it's fast and easy. Eventually you realize that you don't need to get a picture of every sim on the family tree. For example, here's the Broke family tree, step by step. You'll see that all I needed was two screenshots to start with.

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/famtree/famtreestep1.jpg)

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/famtree/famtreestep2.jpg)

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/famtree/famtreestep3.jpg)

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/famtree/famtreestep4.jpg)

Aha, now I understand. I thought you had to extract the thumbnails via SimPe but printing screens and then cut/paste/edit job is all good. Ta muchly

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to try the Photoshop option first as I already use that to modify screengrabs of the neighbourhood view in order to track my lots and who's living in them. I'll also take a look at that Brother's Keeper software as it says you can enter at least 100 marriages for each person and at least 75 children for each marriage which means it can probably cope with Sims2 woohoo madness. I did try some other genealogy software before but it couldn't handle the convoluted sim relationships.

I made some just using print screen and put it together in MS paint :D Worked just as well. I don't have it anymore due to a complete pc reinstall, but I am planning on making some more. I have Pixia (http://park18.wakwak.com/~pixia/index.html) now, but I haven't tried out that program just yet. It is free which is a bonus ;)

The website for Gimp is http://www.gimp.org/windows/

Yes, Think All Publishing is just the company that *I* got my free copy of Gimp from, as well as other free softwares. If you don't use Windows, there is also a Mac version of Gimp, and I think a Linux version, as well.

Edited to add: the Linux version is only for Lindows/Linspire, not Fedora, etc.

Impossible, GIMP is born on linux, so to speak. Maybe from that company, but Gimp  is a free GNU project.

Found: http://www.gimp.org/unix/