I hate landlines. They annoy my sims. None of my lots have them by default. All sims carry cell phones instead. The game insists that the publisher's call be received on a landline (something I didn't know at the time). My sim was waiting for a call that never came.

<rant>
If townies and whohaveyou can reach me on my cell phone, why the fuck can't the publisher do the same? Writer sims lots are easily recognizable in my neighborhood cause they are the only ones with landlines for the specific purpose of receiving publisher calls. EAxis's retarded idea was made worse by poor coding in the form of other sims picking up the publisher's call and getting all the credit which JM fixed with the no plagarism hack.
</rant>


From my own game play, all those cookbooks used the same 5 icons (the bowl with the brown sludge). Whenever a sim read one of the cookbooks, the thought balloon was pretty much static showing the bowl icon. At the end, these plot icons mean whatever you want them to mean. The sims creative level definitly has a huge bearing on whether the book is a success or not.

My fubar book was a romance and I remember the "plot" went Money - Cruise Ship - Sunshine - Airplane - Question Mark. But herein lay a bigger question. In my game, whenever I mouse-over the icons, I don't see any tooltip explaining WTF the icons mean. Some of the icons are seriously cryptic. Do these plot icons even have any meaning? Could I shut my eyes and randomly pick 5 icons and still get a best seller? For all I know, I could be doing that already 


When I was trying to find a solution to my problem, I kept thinking that in the 4 months that FT has been out, there MUST be lots of players having issues with titles for one reason or another. There MUST be an easier way to alter titles. You are dead right that the title screen should be part of the initial plot screen. When the novel is done, a popup should appear informing you of that and to also expect a phone call on your HOME PHONE from the publisher. The first time I wrote a novel, I thought the publisher would call my cell phone. But no!!! It had to be a landline and I didn't get my royalties  Now I keep a phone next to all my writer sims computers.

The character limit imbalance is simple PHAIL!!! And don't get me started on the complete uselessness of book description. I give my sims novels simple, to the point titles which also act as desciptors. My current sim has an entire series of "The Art of..." cookbooks (Fine Cuisne, Dessert, Grilling Fish, Juice Making, etc).

Peace

Right after opening this thread, I sent the family on vacation. None of the bookcases at their vacation home contained any of her previously written novels. Logically it would make sense that the data would be located in the lots file. In my case, I haven't "fused" the novel into the lot as yet. It's in her inventory.

I opened up her character file, looked through the inventory items and found the reference to her book. Sadly, the book title is not saved as plain text but rather hexcode. ARGHHH!!!! I had to take my new title and convert each ascii character into hex and then manually input them one at a time. What a royal pain in the ass!!!

Here's the lesson for all you kiddies out there: Make sure your title and description are spot on. Correcting them later is a pain in......

Peace

I accidentily hit the check button when my sim completed her novel and now its stuck with the default "Book Title". Is there a way to change the title now that the novel has been delivered to me?

I searched through the files in my docs using simpe to see if any fields contained the novel title. No luck The title must be stored somewhere if I only knew where it was.

Now I seek the help of you more awesome ones.

Thanks.

(I have FT so the novel was written using the new system)

EAxis is so full of shit it ain't even funny 

My first reaction when I saw MaxoidShannon's posting earlier in the week was "jeez, these guys are really clutching at straws". Here's my take on the whole situation from a post I made here at MATY last October:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8993.msg277139.html#msg277139

To quote myself:

"The logical conclusion is that the EAxis development team screwed up some of the DirectX code in BV. How can the game, which was working fine in Seasons + 162.18, suddenly get broken with the release of BV just 2 months later???"

I use Norton AV and have it on at all times even while gaming and it has never caused any issues. The bottom line is that the Sims 2 game code is fubar (Nvidia has told Eaxis that also). On a side note, ATI card owners are now experiencing gfx issues coming out of FT (not as severe as us Nvidia owners, but problems nonetheless).

The only way this issue will be resolved is if EAxis stands up and admits their game is borked instead of passing the buck to someone else (first they blamed Nvidia, now Symantec). I've resigned myself to the fact that a fix for this long running problem will probably never happen. The only saving grace is "boolprop useShaders false" (which is in my UserStartup.cheat file). This stops the BSOD for me at the cost of degraded gfx quality.


My daughter was experiencing severe BSOD's on her Castaway. From the readme file:

PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.

Since her comp uses Core 2 Duo, I told her to use Task Manager and set the affinty of the game to 1 single core instead of using both. This solved the issue and Castaway is running quite stable for her. If you are using a multi-core cpu, give this a shot, may help.

After seeing this thread, I went by Game Copy World and there was a no-cd/dvd exe available for this new BV patch. Hatred (the group which released the exe) are not gonna waste their time releasing a crack for a non-existant patch. Searching the various EA sites, the patch is available here:

http://www.electronicarts.co.uk/downloads/4639/

As you can see, its from EA's UK site (why the patch is not on EA's US site is a good question...maybe it will appear there soon). The patch is very much real and upgrades BV from v1.10.0.122 (Patch #1) to v1.10.0.130 (Patch #2).

WOOHOO!!! "Force Errors...On All" did the trick!!!

Thanks!!!

I've run into an unrelated problem and thought I would ask for help in this thread.

Before messing with all the DNA, I made a backup of my saved game. I restored this backup and when I fired up the game, the female was no longer at work but at home. Her car is now trapped in some temporal nexus. I tried using the awesome lot degugger to fix her work state but her car is still missing. I tried fast forwarding time and reissuing the fix state but no luck. Each day the carpool comes to pick her up.

Anyone know how I can get her car back to the home lot?

What you are suggesting is that hair genetics mimick how skin genetics is done. Hair would be allocated gradients of 0.1 to 0.9. If a sim with 0.3 mates with a sim having 0.6, the resulting offspring would have a gradient between 0.3 and 0.6. Not a crazy idea since it makes alot of sense especially if the parents have gradients close to each other. If one parent is 0.1 and the other is 0.9, then the offspring will have all the possibilities (which wouldn't be too realistic unless the game is smart enough to realize the large discrepency). Maybe EAxis will look into it for TS3 (although I wouldn't hold my breath for that to happen 

YES!!! Exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks to all of you, I know fully understand what is going on. I had no idea that the lighter colors were considered recessive within the game and thus why every offspring had the darker colors.


For me, always spawning dark haired / dark eyed offspring got old very fast. I get bored rather quickly looking at the same sim features all the time and regularly "Change Appearance" to alter their hair styles, hair colors, and eye colors even though it won't be passed down genetically.


I've seen the name Enayla mentioned in numerous threads here on MATY and almost all of them speak very highly of her work. I've seen her non-geneticized eyes and skins at MTS2 but have never personally used them.

I searched through Peasantry and I found a thread where dewshine geneticized her stuff.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7230.0.html

Just to be absolutely sure, is that the correct thread you and LordDarcy mentioned? Some of her eyes look fantastic and would work well with my many sims.

Because blonde is considered recessive, you will never see a blonde child as long as the other sim has a black or brown dominant gene (this is the "color bias" I mentioned earlier). Blonde hair will start appearing from the grandchildren onwards since their parents have the blonde recessive. This is why I asked earlier if adding blonde to the sim dna recessive line would possibly alter the outcome.

All this is rather moot now since I can use SleepyCat's hack instead of messing around with the sim dna just to get some expressed appearance diversity.

During my research of this DNA issue, I downloaded your files but haven't used them as yet. Will try them out as soon as I finish this post



As you had read in my previous posts in this thread, its quite obvious the game has a bias towards darker colors. In your case, black haired coupled with blonde haired led to always black haired. In my case, brown + blonde always had brown hair. A couple of hours ago, I redid my Insim test 25 times. All 25 offsprings had brown hair and brown hairs. This is why, just like you, I asked if changing the recessive line would make any difference in influencing the outcome of the genes.

Quoting El Presidente in an earlier post to this thread:

"If a sim inherits two DIFFERENT dominant characteristics, one is randomly chosen."

Father has dominant brown, mother has dominant blonde, the offspring should have a 50/50 probabilty of being either brown or blonde. But this is clearly not what is happening in the game and what throughly confused me and one of the reasons I started this thread.


As I mentioned in my 1st post, this was the very first time I touched custom skins. Over the past 4 years of playing TS2, I only use maxis defaults. Next time I use CC skins, you can bet your life I will test the f**k out of it to make sure I don't ever experience this again

EDIT: I just ran 11 Insim pregnancy tests using SleepyCat's genetic hack. Of the 4 possible genetic combos, I saw brown/brown 3x, brown/blue 3x, blonde/brown 2x, blonde/blue 3x. Excellent hack!!!

JM...your last post had the answers I was looking for Thank you very much for taking the time to help me understand how the game interprets genetics.

To those of you reading this thread, please post your experiences with genetics in-game (especially involving CC). I, along with many others I'm sure, would like to know more so we don't inadvertantly walk straight into a disaster like I did with my two custom sims.

I graduated from Uni almost 20 years ago with double majors in Biology and Comp Sci so, no offense intended, I know more about Mendel's Laws than you do. I should have worded my question better. What I am interested in knowing is, using my example, how does the game itself intrept Mendel's Laws. The game itself does not neccessarily equate itself to real life and I have no idea how EAxis coded the game to refelct genetics.

Also, one of my assumptions of the game is based on this post,

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2966.msg86361.html#msg86361

"Actually Maxis had it right, if simplified.  On order of dominance it goes Black>Brown>Blond>Red."

Accroding to this poster, and my own in-game testing, there seems to be some color bias. I'm essentially trying to see if there is a way to level the playing field to remove the bias by altering the combinations in "Sim DNA".

After researching the whole Sim DNA issue, one of the first things I did was correctly color bin all CC hair and eyes I have. As for CC skin, having gone through what I am witnessing now, I don't want to touch another one unless I am absolutely certain it was created properly and won't f**k with the genetic line.

Thanks for the quick reply JM


I find it rather odd that EAxis would make eyes and hair two separate fields, yet skintone is essentially one field no mater what you change. This explains why my two sims lost their custom skintones.


I completely agree with you here. I curse the two creators of these sims for designing such an abomination with absolutely no forsight what-so-ever that the player may actually what to spawn offsprings. My two sims are now, for all intent and purposes, neutered and spayed with no possibilty of reproducing offsprings.

My options are now bolied down to two possibilities. I can either run them both through Sim Surgery and completely change their appearance to all default Maxis features or I can remove all reference to custom features in "Age Data" and then from within the game, use makeup to try and get them to look as close as possible to the original.


If I were to set the male "Sim DNA" to brown/brown dominant, blonde/blue recessive (with the female "Sim DNA" the exact oppsite), would the probablity be closer to 50/50 now?


Probably wouldn't be too hard to do this but I have already spent time on this DNA issue that I would rather spend playing the game

Background Information:

I started a new family recently (male + female) but for the first time ever, I decided to use custom created sims which I had grabbed from MTS2. These sims included custom skin, eyes, hair, etc. Within the game they looked fantastic. A couple of days ago, I got the female pregnant. When she gave birth, my horror story started. The male baby had eye shadow, pink lipstick and 4 eyebrows!!! Something was definitely not right here. To test what might be going on, I used Insimenator to make the female pregnant, give immidiate birth, and then age the offspring to adulthood. In all six tests, the resulting offspring was a mess. After further research, I realized the offending culprit were the custom skin packages, especially the female's. Her skin package had eyebrows, eyeshadow, and lipstick "embedded" into it. I have attached to this post the skin image which I extrated using SimPE.

Now I was in a dilema. I wanted the two custom sims to retain all their custom features but not be able to pass them on to their offsprings. I spent quite a few hours researching the issue of Sim DNA here on MATY and on MTS2. From what I had gathered, a sim's expressed appearance, as shown within the game, is stored in "Age Data" while what is passed to their offspring is stored in "Sim DNA". Using SimPE, I left the "Age Data" untouched but altered their "Sim DNA" to remove all reference to custom features and replace them with default Maxis values.

For the male, I set the eye color to 32dee745-b6ce-419f-9e86-ae93802d2682 (brown), skintone to 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (light), hair color to 00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (brown).

For the female, eyes are e43f3360-3a08-4755-8b83-a0d37a6c424b (light blue), skintone is 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (light), hair color is 00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (blonde).

Once these changes were in place, I fired up the game and immidiately noticed that my two sims looked distinctly "bland" and lost all their "vibrance". A closer look at the female showed that she no longer had eyebrows, lipstick, or eyeshadow. It was quite clear that the game was no longer using their custom skin. It seems changing their "Sim DNA" has also changed their expressed appearance (which is completly opposite to what I had researched).

Since I was already in the game, I decided to do some gene testing on my altered sims to see what the results would be. Using Insim again, I did 10 test cases. In all 10 cases, the resulting offspring had default Maxis features which is great.

Now for my questions...

Question #1: Is it possible to have the parent sims use custom features but not pass them to their offspring? If it can be done, how since my method resulted in the parents losing "customness" yet having offspring the way I want them.

Question #2: In my 2nd Insim test, all 10 offsprings had brown hair / brown eyes (inherited from the father). None of them had blonde hair / blue eyes. Looking at the 10 DNA profiles, all had brown / brown as dominant and blonde / blue as reccessive. Do certain colors have a higher genetic probabilty ie. brown hair > blonde hair and brown eyes > blue eyes?

Question #3: Under "Sim DNA" there is something called "Facial Features". This determines what characteristics can be passed down like mouth, chin, cheek, etc. Does anyone have a complete listing of all the parameters for this field? This is handy so that certain unwanted features don't get passed down the genetic line.

My apologies for the rather long post here but I feel the more info I give, the better the advice I will receive.

Thanks in advance.

I read that thread and agree with ReneeFox 100%. The problem is of EAxis's making.

I have an Nvidia 7900GT 256MB card which was purchased in July 2006. For a year, I suffered through the "Infinite Loop BSOD". The game would randomly crash. Sometimes just minutes after starting the game. But it was guarunteed to crash within 45 minutes. I just didn't know when.

In early July of this year, I saw posted on the front page of The Sims 2 home site that the 162.18 beta driver would solve this. Lo and behold, I was now able to play the game for hours and hours on end without a single problem Talking about being overjoyed. This all changed with the release of BV. The dreaded BSOD has reared its ugly head again. The strange thing is that the game would crash after exactly 45-60 minutes of gameplay (a couple of times sonner). Like clockwork. I just make sure I do a save game after every 10 minutes of gameplay so I don't lose much.

I have tried EVERY driver released by Nvidia since July and none of them worked. Here is the list:

162.18 Beta
162.18 WHQL
163.44 Beta
163.67 Beta
163.69 Beta
163.71 Beta
163.71 WHQL
163.75 Beta
169.01 Beta (came out a few days ago)

The logical conclusion is that the EAxis development team screwed up some of the DirectX code in BV. How can the game, which was working fine in Seasons + 162.18, suddenly get broken with the release of BV just 2 months later???

I have the base game + all EP's + all SP's which I paid alot of money for. The EAxis coders need to put down the crack pipe and fix this shit once and for all. One of the greatest games ever created is being ruined by inept coding

Using ProtectionID, I can confirm that the orginal exe uses v7.33 and that the BV patch updates the exe to v7.34. This new version has indeed blacklisted YASU/DT/Alcohol. I prefer using images to run games and keeping the original dvd in a safe place so this new version of securom has screwed me, and lots of other gamers, over. Since I can't use an image, I have no choice but to insert the original dvd (or use the no cd exe). This segues nicely to a question I want to ask. I have read all the posts in this thread and a number of users have reported that they have been able to play the patched BV using the no cd exe. Have any of you more technical folks (Pescado, etc) tried decompiling the original exe and patched exe and comparing the two to see what changes have been made? If the patched exe only updates securom and nothing else, then the no cd exe should work just fine. But if there are other substantial changes, then running the no cd exe on a patched BV installation might cause the game to BFBVFS. I could do the decompiling myself but could save ALOT of time if someone else has already done it.

Peace...