Warning: This post contains Way More About My Sims Than Anyone Wants To Know.  You've been warned.  There's also a Too Long; Didn't Read version at the bottom.

Anyway, since I started getting nerdy in another thread, I'll finish here.  I write stupid little vaguely sci-fi stories as I play the game, most likely as an offshoot of some D&D-related tendency.  It's a sort of tattered patchwork, cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things, but it makes playing the game more fun.  Here it is in a nutshell.  (A giant, hellishly verbose nutshell.  I'm bored at work and feel like typing a lot, apparently.)

The general consensus among researchers is that some twenty-odd years ago, a great event known as the Convergence occurred: three little-known astrological stars lined up in perfect occlusive harmony, and the world as Sims knew it ceased to be.  The new world has been folded together with the Otherworld, a domain of strange fey Sims and mysterious beasts, the Elemental Planes, and a shadowy realm known as Nevermore, inhabited by all kinds of vampires, werewolves, and in fact pretty much anything that's ever been in a scary movie.  To make matters worse, the Convergence flung an Antaran Hive Ship light-years across the galaxy into neat geosynchronous orbit with Sim-Earth.  Unfortunately, the celestial forces were not kind to the ship, an ailing model of suspect provenance in the first place.  Mere days after they arrived, the Warpspace Transubstantiator blew out, nearly causing a catastrophic hull breach.  Antaran escape craft have been crashlanding into the surface like clockwork ever since, bringing the prolific greenskins and their robotic servants down planetside.

The modern world is a fair sight different than it was a mere 30 years ago.  The Convergence completely rewrote the surface geography of the planet, completely upended almost every Earthling governmental structure and, perhaps most tellingly, stranded untold thousands of faeries, elves, beastlings, elementals, aliens and robots on the planet.  To make matters worse, the years following - known as the Collapse - were scarred by mortal wars and marked by the emergence of a zombie-creating plague, shadowy incursions by vampires and spectral beings, and scattered but rising reports of werewolves stalking the countryside, savaging all they came across.  Slowly, and in spite of the doomsayers' predictions, order has begun to take hold once again: Earthlings, long numbed to the strangeness in their daily lives, have begun to rebuild their shattered world with the aid of their new neighbors.  Emeraldvale, a small town in what was once California, is the site of one such reconstruction effort; unhindered by such concerns as government and moral authorities, the shell-shocked citizens have begun building anew, slowly assembling a motley collection of houses for themselves that bear a sad similarity to their previous suburban dwellings.  Their fertile soil - and a little elven knowhow - have enabled them to become a nearly self-sufficient town, lacking only in high-tech facilities and raw materials for manufacturing.

Another nearby town, Viper Canyon, found itself almost a ghost town before the Convergence, but in the years following the Collapse, the new inhabitants of the town decided to make the best of a bad situation and converted the now-deserted factory floors that once lined the canyon walls into living spaces and greenhouses. These days, Viper Canyon has become a thriving city, having reopened many of their discarded manufacturing facilities and boasting of an active civil defense unit, the Pit Vipers.  Travel is still something of an impossibility for many, but the Pit Vipers have managed to root out enough of the bandits and monsters in the nearby area, creating enough security for the citizens of Emeraldvale lucky enough to own biofuel-burning cars - or repaired Antarian skimmer vehicles - to visit the Canyon, whether to seek employment or simply wander around, remembering what it was like to live in a real city.

No one knows what the future portends, not even Faerie royalty or the most astute Antarian scientists, but local prospects are looking up, for the first time in twenty years.  Two brothers recently reopened the once-dead Rattlegulch Mine outside of Viper Canyon, taking out fresh veins of iron, copper and Adamantium, a metal long absent from the Earth.  There's even been talk in the Viper Canyon assemblyhouse of forming a new government, a New California Republic, as it were, guarded by the Vipers' growing security force and fed by the lush fields in Emeraldvale and the surroundings.  The few that remember the horror of waking up in the Convergence, finding the world an entirely different place, and those who listen to the far-off rumblings of war and plague still fret over the coming years, but for many life as normal has returned.


Backstory crap out of the way, my actual playstyle is pretty random.  I hate loading screens, so Emeraldvale sims are basically stuck in their lot unless I feel especially frisky or am allowing them their one ceremonial pilgrimage to the Town Square (my one community lot :p ), where they hang out (and have their needs cheatingly refilled) until they've met a suitable number of their neighbors that I suspect they'll find at least one two- or three-bolt sim in another house to get their romance on with (and sufficient friends if they get a city-slicker career, of course).  All sims are bisexual until they settle down preferring one gender via repeated romantic actions, so I do have quite a bit higher precedence of gay sims than would be realistic.  My sims are also largely female, mostly for convenience purposes; I like boobies, I guess.    A standard household is usually two girl-sims with a token male thrown in*.  Generally speaking, sims do not breed, because children are icky and bothersome; the youngest sims that exist are Teens and I am generally loath to let my actual sims age into elders.  Created elders are not allowed to die, generally speaking, unless I've decided I hate them or feel like trying for a ghost.  There are currently three pets in the entire neighborhood.  EV sims generally make shit with the various hobby items and stations (no robots, though; those are solely the domain of the Antarans.) and farm the hell out of their backyards, because I rarely bother buying them food.  Four sims own cars, all fortune sims of varying degrees of richness - which explains a bit of why all the carpool cars look the same, neh?  Several tinker sims have recently converted pre-Collapse junk vehicles to the new biofuel standard, though, so the mobile, city-job-having population is on the rise.

Viper Canyon is the Downtown, the sole sub-hood I have set up.  I tend to divide my playing time between the two 'hoods fairly regularly.  It's named after the preset map, fairly obviously, and populated with factory-looking lots I downloaded off of MTS2 a long time ago.  (Emeraldvale is populated with my abortive efforts at house design.  I blame my sims, of course.  They're a lazy bunch, with nary an Architect among them.)  They're played in much the same way, though they mostly have ordinary sim jobs (with a lot of Military and Police careers) and have the option of buying stuff.  They also have their choice of several comm-lots for their pilgrimage, from an exciting work-study trip to the Rattlegulch Mines to an equally informative visit to the City Hall... or even a shopping trip to the Bazaar, where sims can get their largely barter-based economy on.

In general, all the townies are Earthlings (and indeed they are most of the actual Earthlings in my game... who wants to play a boring human?), though I added a few prototypes of the major races when I nuked Goopy and his ilk.

*(I actually have backstory reasons for this, too, but like the rest they're pretty wacky. Elementals are genderless but adopt a favorite shape for convenience purposes; it'd be pretty pointless to attempt to breed with a being that is pretty much made up of fire/air/water/etc.  Sounds painful.  They can breed amongst themselves, but given that they are immortal, they rarely feel the need to do so.
Antarians have a gender system similar to honeybees: the vast majority of them are neuter female workers, followed by occasional male drones (who do most of the research and childrearing, having no other purpose in life than sitting around looking pretty for the Queen) and one or two Queens per colony shard.  Drones occasionally harvest DNA from workers who have caught their eye, largely for excelling in a particular skill or trade, but don't worry about the poor workers; most of them find the harvesting procedure to be quite enjoyable.  Queens, who are activated females, take recombinant genetic material from the drones (which they in turn enjoy quite a bit), merge it with the colony's reference pattern (the Queen's own genes), and produce eggs that they can either incubate and birth themselves or implant in practically any sim, from a willing Antarian worker to a human male.  Hence, pollination.  (The egg induces a special nutritive cyst to form if it isn't somewhere it can implant neatly, such as a worker's uterus, so the process is eminently survivable for males... but wholly unpleasant, from most accounts.  They are Ceasarian births by necessity, though lately the elves have shown some promise with their largely painless aetheric translocation techniques.  One or two babies and/or parents lost to the aether per year is still a fair sight better than the current success ratios on medically-assisted birth procedures.))

Anyway, I'll quit rambling now. At this point, I'll be surprised if anyone actually reads this.

TL;DR version: In order to retcon in all my crazy faerie/alien/beast/robot sims, I have constructed an over-elaborate backstory for my neighborhoods.  I play in a very lazy fashion that aims to minimize time spent at load screens while maximizing my enjoyment in making sims reach their little minuscule goals over and over again. 

Awesome, thanks.  I've already done the "Randomize Sim Generation" deal from the Lot Debugger, so I assume that will avert the whole firstborn thing?  Assuming I understand the purpose of that function, of course.

First, the question: Are babies determined at conception, or at birth?  (ie. gender, combination of parental "genes", etc)

Background info: I generally play with all kinds of naughty shit installed, so frankly the idea of sims breeding makes me a little bit uncomfortable.  However, for some unfathomable reason I have decided to have a couple of recent households actually spawn on occasion, largely due to my accidentally making one a family sim and the other where a married couple of non-fambly sims spontaneously decided they wanted to fulfill their biological imperative.  So far it seems I have very little patience for child-sims, which is perhaps telling insofar as I have very little patience for real children.  Pescado's Baby Controller is very useful, but apart from that... meh.  I've mostly been force-fulfilling their wants and cheating their motive bars up, in the absence of the (surprisingly unlikely) situation that their parents actually desire to do anything with them.

Deep, nerdy background: I was hoping the genders were random because one of the households is, in fact, a shard of an Antaran Hive, a race of humanoid aliens that have a gender orientation similar to Earthly honeybees (they (coincidentally, like most sims) are largely females, although the vast majority of the reproduction is done by active female Queens and whatever drones the colony is privileged to have.)  When the Queen suddenly started spawning twin drones, I started getting a little bit concerned.  Add to that a healthy dose of "fugly baby disorder" and I decided to quit out of the lot without saving.  So if I go back and play again, will both babies be the same once they are born, or will the genetic dice get another toss?  For that matter, is there any way to force the gender of a spawn?  My general method of introducing new genetic material to a population is via the CAS screen... :p

(and yes, I do spend too much time thinking about this crap, because otherwise the game gets a tad bit dull.)

This may be a stupid question, but how many faces have you done altogether?  I mean, I see the seven in the links on the 1st post, but are there more? :p

I ask this because I seem to have downloaded a lot of them in the past and am interested in making sure I have the newest and theoretically most shiny versions (I'm ransacking my download folder in hopes of fixing some Seasons-based conflicts, so I figured I'd try to do some other mod housekeeping/updating at the same time).  Is there a way to, say, download them all at once?

Actually, I think I'm having this problem too.  Do they throw constant errors with debug mode on?  Because that's what Rose and her delightful little clonespawn* do in my game.

*What, do you think that Darren or whatever his name is pollinated her or something?  It's gotta be mostly clonelike if not all the way. :p

I'm in the process of flogging my hack directory of all old, stupid, and especially Non-Awesome crap.  I don't expect to find an exact culprit, but maybe I will.

Yeah, I figured something like that.  I was just hoping someone had written some amazing "Error-Causing File Discoverer!" for TS2.  Kind of like a debugger, except slightly more user-friendly.

I guess I'll just pull out all the hacks and put them back in one by one until I figure out the problem.

Hmm... so, it seems Seasons disagrees somewhat violently with my collection of Awesome hacks, non-awesome crap, and smutty clothing.  (Hey, I only tend to download things that catch my eye... and those are pretty eyecatching, yeah?  And then I wonder why I have no new men's clothes...)

Anyway, Seasons is basically giving me nonstop errors whenever I use a Plantsim.  Other crap doesn't work, of course, but has failed thus far to consume my game in fire or inundate it with error messages.  I could just, you know, turn the debug mode off, but playing the Sims 2 without cheating is like a day without really really convenient sunshine.  (You're tired?  You want to sleep?  Fuck that!  Here, have a full Energy bar.  Go work out more, pansy.)

Anyway, is there any way to see what file is causing the constant barrage of "abort, retry, fail?" messages?  I have several error logs, which show basically this:
Object id: 131
name: G001_User00002 - Rose
Stack size: 6
Error: Invalid constant.
Iterations: 605
...

If the full things would help, I can post them.  There's an assload of variables and suchlike in there that I am feebly incapable of deciphering and no big, red, blinking message saying "HEY, DELETE SmutHax.package YOU GIANT TOOL! Or at least get the new version. I hear it has extra boobs, even.", which would really be helpful.

So... apart from taking out every game-modifying item I have, is there any way to do this?  I don't have a lot riding on this installation... I was just intrigued by botanical sims and the potential to freeze people to death.  So, if you can help me, great.  If I wind up having to re-populate my downloads folder... well, no big loss, I suppose.

Edit:  Durrr... I guess this should probably be in the It's Teh B0rken! sub-forum up there... I am not known for my reading comprehension, it seems.  Oh well... respond how you will, I suppose.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

Is the version from his Testing Grounds thread the most recent one?  I don't seem to see any full thread devoted to it, but it's possible that it's 2 am and/or I am dumb.

So, uh, I see that Inge's Reservable Bed Hack - which I've gotten so used to I forgot wasn't default game behavior - is not updated for OFB, let alone OMGWTFBBQPETZ!!1!one!! (in regular and extra-crispy).  Does it still work?  I seem to recall using it (with OFB installed) when I played sims last, sometime about six months ago... but then again, I'm not particularly picky and may have simply missed some massive sim sleep priority conflagration or some such.

Is there any other replacement?  I'm not terribly excited about the thought of having to download hacked versions of, say, all the beds in the game, but... oh well.

Hi, I decided to attempt to get a home business up and running, but I've been somewhat stymied by the fact that most of the cool businessy things are community-lot only.  Who says that my sims can't have a restaurant and live upstairs?  Hmmph.  I've downloaded a "use community items on residential lots" thing, and I'm hoping that this will solve my problem.

My thought was that the family who owned it would be the main employees, like many small restaurants you see.  Dad cooks, mom is a hostess and the kids help out after school.  The question is, though, will placing the various restaurant doohickeys attract random NPCs to run them automatically?  Can I have the business owner fire them and such?

If not, maybe I'll just have to run it as a takeout place and put plates of food on sale trays. Time to bust out the heat-lamps, I guess...

Wow, I had no idea the term had such... rich cultural meaning to it.

Thanks for the info and the hack, it has solved my problems for the most part. :p

So, I recently decided to make my own neighborhood from scratch for the first time... Previously, I'd just modified Strangetown or Pleasantville to suit my (highly evil) needs, but since I reinstalled with OFB I figured I'd make a go of it.  I downloaded a bunch of houses, made a few more for good measure, set the whole thing up with a crop of sims, and it was looking good, until I bought one of my sims a telescope.  Delighted, she immediately began looking through it, apparently scoping out the neighbors, which I more or less didn't think about.

Two minutes and one logic point later, her best friend suddenly shows up on the lot and slaps her for peeping, or whatever the point of that ridiculous interaction is supposed to be.  I guess I just got used to there being a given slapper in a neighborhood that was that one sim that literally nobody likes, but having to deal with this situation is a little bit irksome.  It does make sense that the sim in question would be slappy- she's pretty dominant and has a nice score of 2, but... still. ;p

Any way I can force this role onto some ugly hermit-like sim that nobody cares about anyway?  It's kind of nice having someone to sneer at in community lots, after all. =p

I've seen a "no slapping from look-through" hack around somewhere, but now that I'm looking for it I can't seem to locate it.  Plus, I have no idea if it works on OFB, so... help me out here. 

Err... well, I guess I'm alone with this issue.  It's not that the sims won't stop using the computers, it's that they will literally jump-bug out of another interaction, slide across the room and buggedly sit there clicking while, say, the shower is still running or the person they intended to smooch is left hanging.

I'll probably just wind up nuking my installation and restarting, again.  It's always worked in the past. ;p

I know for a fact that one of my sims is reading this on the Simternet and thinking "Robot woohoo?  Yes!  I can check that one off the Personal To-Do Before I Die List!".  I can't say I blame them, somehow... better than being experimented on by aliens or sleeping with a zombie.

I mean, who wouldn't want a personal android/cyborg sex device? 

Hmm... my game is beginning to exhibit strange things again, as it does every so often because I am a compulsive downloader person and have waaay too many files in at any given point.

Currently, my sims seem bizarrely obsessed with Moneywell computers.  If I attempt to have a sim do something (talk to another sim, take a shower in the bathroom next door, etc) in or near a room with a computer in it, a debug error will pop up and the sim will instead immediately sit down and do some sort of computer function.  (Play a game, I think.)  This is, of course, unacceptable.  They do not seem to exhibit the same attraction to the expensive computer, of which I cannot remember the name at the moment, so that's not a problem, but...

The only computer-affecting hack I can find I have at the moment is an old "study computer" hack that allows you to gain skills with the high-priced computer.  Previously to, say, last week I guess this arrangement worked fine.  But now... weirdness ensues.  Anyone ever had this happen before?

Oops, nevermind- I figured it out.  The interface is kind of confusing. 

The exportation process seemed to work, though.  I'm about to load up the actual game and test to see if it did.

Hmm... how do I use the surgery thing to export?  I must admit I have no idea how that particular plugin actually works.

Thanks for the ideas, by the way.

So, I have this thing where I'm far too lazy to make my own specific custom faces for every sim (and not skilled enough with the creator to duplicate some of the nicer random/premade ones).  So, I wind up choosing faces out of the "heads" box fairly commonly.  Two of the faces I like the most are YA only.  Now, this worked out fine when I decided to make some random CAS students one day and play around with them, but now I've got a bizarre urge to run a quasi-lifecycle mode with them.  (It started when two of the sims moved in together after graduation, and I realized they had no actual parents, and thus they couldn't have irritating inlaws if they got married, and, uh... yeah.)

So, is it possible to take a YA face out of the special "Make YAs" creator and use it on an adult, which would then be aged down to a teen?  I just like the combinations of facial features and I can't seem to replicate them by normal means.  I do want those specific faces because I'm trying to make "the same" sims as I had before- they should hopefully look the same.  I tried sticking the YA-only faces in a collection, but it doesn't work- the folder appears empty as far as the regular CAS is concerned.

Anyway, if it is possible, I gather that whatever I may have to do will be extremely technical.  I have SimPE and stuff, but I'm pretty oblivious to the, ah, more hexadecimal-flavored end of Sims mods... so if it gets complicated, please explain slowly.

It's in the Adult section, under Hacks.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=90796 for the nightlife version.

So, as it turns out, two of my sims sound rather similar.  They both have a sort of husky voice, and it is inconvenient because they wound up falling in love, etc.  I'd prefer to have them at least sound different for the most part.  So, as I was flipping through things in SimPE, I notice the Voice Type field under Misc Sim Properties.  Both sims actually have different numbers, which shoots down my theory that they'd somehow rolled the same voices, but this leaves me back at square one.  I don't exactly want to go around randomly changing things- last time I did that I wound up having to restore some backup data since I somehow duplicated a sim and managed to hose my entire neighborhood- but I do want to decipher these voice codes.

They seem to be four digit hexes.  I wonder if they're global IDs for specific voices (all sound samples for a particular set) or perhaps each digit refers to a specific "chunk" of voices.  Sims that were made in the CAS at similar times have similar voice types: for instance, all the sims in one family are 0x0***.  I would have assumed their prefix digit was related to the sim's instance number, but a few instances later it started jumping from 0x0*** to 0xD*** to 0x5***, so the only explanation I can think of making sense is it is either tied to the family or the CAS batch they were made in.  I'm guessing that the three latter digits represent the specific voice details for a given sim, though I have no idea what they mean...

Anyone know more about this?  Maybe someone could write a SimPE voice analyzer plugin.  If you could figure out what files the number refers to, it might be possible to call them... oh well.  I think I've rambled on for long enough.

JMs Stereo Hack.  It prevents naughty sims from randomly turning the stereo off, turning it back on, deciding to take a nap spontaneously, being awoken by the music and pitching a fit, then turning it off again, all the while another poor sim is trying to get their groove on with their special someone.

What it does is stop them from autonomously turning it off altogether.  I haven't known sims to turn it on autonomously, so it works well.  If it were possible to actually cancel out of the autonomous "Turn Stereo Off" action, it wouldn't be so bad, but once a sim has decided to do so they will from whatever range they may be, regardless of how I feel about it.

Preliminary testing (ie. using the old version and playing vaguely normally) indicates that the Stereo Hack is working in terms of making the sims slightly less neurotic in their music hardware power choices.  If anything weird starts happening (that isn't a result of me being a dork and messing with things in SimPE), I'll let you know.

Hmm... anyone know if the StereoHack works?  When I deign to let my sims listen to (the same, old) music, I'd at least prefer to have my say in when it gets turned off and on.  I'm gonna throw it in and see if it causes the good old Fiery Ball Visible From Space, but oh well.

You know, now that they have this whole chemistry thing... is the swooning really necessary?  I mean, I get that the sims of the appropriate preference think the Romance sim is hot, but here we have this nifty little system for actually identifying what a given sim actually thinks is hot.  And yet they still swoon over Major Turn-Off himself, which really doesn't make any sense.

Admittedly, the only real reason I don't like it is because the Attraction action tends to muck up queued actions, but that's mostly tolerable.  Except, well, when you're playing one house with six romance sims (for no good reason) and one of them accidentally gets turned gay and spends the rest of her entire existence swooning about her five housemates...

Maybe I'll introduce her to the all-consuming Importance of Grilled Cheese.

Well, obviously they were calling back to see if you could find their hat/glasses/phone/coat/panties/etc they left behind in some incriminating location, and also ask for the recipe for that wonderful Baked Alaska you served. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a fan of the melted-cheesy-toasty as the lot of you, but what's with the big fuss about this particular sandwich lately?  Can someone explain to me the Importance of Grilled Cheese?