So a sim wanted to see a ghost, so I decided to pack her up and visit a cemetery.  Once there, I discovered one of the tombstones was missing, the one the cemetery was named after, no less.  I went looking for ways to respawn the tombstone and discovered the method using the teleporter and the debugger.  Sadly, this did not work, as he was not available in the default character menu, or any other menu.

So I checked him on SimPE and discovered he was listed as unlinked, with no character data.  I have no idea what happened to cause this, but I digress.

Anyway, I looked some more and discovered that it's pretty hopeless bringing him back as is, but I just thought I'd make one last attempt.

I have a couple backups from the various expansion packs that have him character file in them.  If I overwrite the current file with one of the old files, would that bring him back without causing some nasty side effects?  Even if I use one of the backups from when he was still alive?  I'm assuming he'd be alive when I loaded the game, but would that completely screw up something that would be better left alone?  I'd try to bring him back dead, but I'm not sure when the character file got shredded, so I may have to go further back.  Does anyone know of any unpleasant circumstances that could arise from doing this?

That's why I'm lukewarm at best about buying TS3.  All the other content and comparisons between the two games really make TS3 look a lot more impressive than TS2, and then I see the sims themselves...

They don't have any personality.  The faces don't have any character.  They're just spheroids with faces stamped on them.  There's no distinct definition to any of them.

Curious if this is just a very rare case of bad luck, or if something a little more nefarious is going on.

Since buying Seasons, I've probably checked jobs on the computer 15-20 times for my sims, and I've never had the Adventurer career offered.  I've had the other Seasons careers offered, many times, in fact, but never the Adventurer career.

Is there a bug that's preventing it from showing, or am I simply getting a weird RNG?

I haven't noticed any difference in my game.  I have noticed along similar lines though that as my sims age it becomes more difficult for them to conceive.  Sims with 23 days left usually have no problem getting it in one.  Sims with 5-6 days left frequently take 4-5 tries.

None of the sims in either of the two polls have had children.  Of the girls in this poll, the two oldest are teens now so it hasn't even been an issue.

However, I sort of had a notion of what I was getting into when I had these two breed:



And sure enough, those two are the parents of Nene, Marj and Terrell, three of the four ugliest children in Veronaville.

And then miss out on the magical moment when you suddenly realize that all your attractive female sims want to bump uglies (when has that expression been more appropriate?) with these guys?





Besides, if I went about knocking off all my ugly sims, I'd still be doing it well into next year.

I do find myself missing things from House Party moreso these days than any other expansion pack from the Sims 1 (although the spa items from Superstar would be nice for spa businesses in OFB).  The dance cage, the mechanical bull, the parties that weren't timed and scored, the cake, and one thing that annoys me with their absence in the Sims 2: different dance styles for different types of music.  Christ, they dance the same way for techno that they do for jazz, and classical, and hip hop, and metal, it's just silly.

The first one is Fred, with the ponytail.  The girl to her left is her teenage sister who was holding her in the first picture.  The second one is Marj.

And it did occur to me that that may not be the best picture of Marj, but I tend to think it goes both ways, since her scariest feature, her eyes, actually looked better in that picture.  Here's another one that I hope is large enough to show her in her "at rest" state.



EDIT: and of course it is, I'm so foolish.

Pay me and I'll package them all for you.  I'll even throw in their parents at no extra charge! :p

My experience suggested that all genetic code was similarly miswired to produce identical features, so that both appearance and personality was thus affected.

Here's an example:



These guys also have two sisters that appear to be no different save from the basic structural changes that occur when you change a male sim into a female sim.

I actually did state in my first post that some of the girls did grow up to be, if not pretty, at least not horrifying, which was why I chose toddlers.  Originally I had planned on using the child age, but even then some of them weren't horrible looking.  (I just wish that I could have used Marj's "I WILL EAT YOUR BRAIN" shot, but unfortunately after resizing the picture, it really wasn't large enough to see properly.  I don't doubt that that's why Bing is lagging so far behind.)

Here are shots of two of them further along in their lifestages.  I won't mention who they are, but there are clues in their two screenshots.



and

With the success of my last poll, I present a new poll concerning female toddlers:

I chose toddlers because, amazingly enough, some of these girls grew up to be not terribly bad looking teens/children.  Granted, none of them are winning beauty contests any time soon, but I digress.

First up is the oldest of the bunch.  I'll call her Fred, but she generally went by "My God, what is that thing?" in my game:


Next comes Nene, who, unlike her older brother Terrell (who was featured in the first edition), actually got *all* of the worst genes her parents had to offer:


Next comes Jo, who, if there was ever a casting call for a supervillain named Mottled Babyface, would win in a landslide:


Fourth is a little girl simply called Bing.  I gave up on this family having children after this one.  The parents are good looking, but they've overpopulated Veronaville with a whole sea of uglies:


Lastly, there's Marj, who didn't strike me as ugly as much as scary.  Whenever I had her go over to her toy rabbit head, or something, when her face would come up I would find myself horrified anew.  If ever there was a kid who would look as if she could latch onto your face and chew your eyeball out, it's her:


Again, the winner will get plastic surgery ASAP, if I'm feeling charitable.  Thanks for your consideration.

That's very strange, because I had been getting a string of identical looking children (with identical personalities, across many families) until I found out about the firstborn effect from you, and once I started avoiding it by following your instructions, not only were the kids no longer identical personality-wise, they also stopped being identical looking.  Yes, the kids now look similar, but they aren't clones of one another, which had been the case previously.

One thing I've noticed is if you want to find out what the sim's actual schoolwork progress is, take the sim to a community lot (the Secret Society lot works as well) and the bar is as it should be, showing where the actual progress is.  It goes back to the broken bar once the sim returns home, but it will give you an idea of where that sim is gradewise for the semester and what you may need to do to get to the grade level you want.

I never did check to see if doing any work on the community lot might have fixed the problem.  I doubt that it would, but it can't hurt to try, I suppose.

I was getting this issue with all of the new OFB characters.  It didn't seem to matter which new hairstyle I had selected, custom or regular, although usually the bald and mohawk were the only styles that showed the problem because the style didn't cover up the glitch.  Occasionally I'd see it with other shorter hairstyles or different colors, so it looks like a wig with a black baldcap underneath.  It's freaky.

I think you're assuming something from rainbow's post that isn't actually happening.

The university sims who are getting calls at their parents' house for a followup outing are moved into lots, and I have played them for quite a while in some cases (six semesters).

Is there a solution in this item to one of the problems I'm having?

When I have a kid about to go to college, and he's lagging behind badly in aspiration score, one completely reliable method of getting him to platinum before his birthday is to send him out on a date.  I used to do this regularly, until I realized the problem it was causing.  I used to send them out to college almost immediately after getting back from their date, so the sim was no longer living at the house.  The problem came when the programmed in follow-up outing invitation with one of the dated sim's friends came with a phone call.  Since the collegebound sim's no longer living in the house, essentially you get a phone call every single day from the same sim, with the message that since the sim isn't at home, he'll just call back.

Any way to disable this or reset it so I can avoid these useless phone calls?

Yeah, looking at Rod again that's not a very good picture of showing off his ugliness (although I did expect him to be, I suppose the correct word is, trounced in this competition).  You know your sim's got problems when you can look at them in profile from the left and the only thing keeping you from seeing his right eye is, in fact, his left eye.  It's very grotesque.

I'm surprised that Terrell isn't giving Apollo a closer race.

His eyes bulge out about an inch (2.5 cm) beyond everything else on his face except that ample schnozz.

Edit:
And to tell you the truth I wanted a third that was at least a little distinctive compared to the others.  I have a lot of ugly sims but a vast majority of them look like the first two and I wanted some variety.  All three of these sims are cousins, in fact.

And trust me, if I changed Rod's hair to an ugly hairstyle and made sure to get a screenshot that emphasized his exaggerated qualities, I don't think you'd be calling him attractive.  It might take two shots though.

Inspired by the earlier thread about ugly sims, I've decided to take a poll about which of my Veronaville boys is the ugliest of them all.  I've searched through my neighborhood high and low and narrowed the search down to three.  I decided to choose only boys for now simply to avoid having the poll skewed by the gender of the sim in question.  If the response is positive, I'll consider another poll for the ugliest girls.  With that out of the way, here are our contestants:

First up is Apollo.  I think my decision to name all the children of this household after ancient Gods may have cursed all the kids to look something like this.  I give you, Teen #1:



Next up, I was watching the NFL Network earlier in the day when this sim was born, watching Terrell Davis talk about Terrell Owens, which gave me the inspiration for this sim's name.  He resembles TO's personality, turned inside out.  I give you, Terrell!



Last but not least, there's Rod, as in, he'll only be bashing his...  His only consolation is that he didn't inherit all of his parents' ugly genes:



After the poll finishes, I may award the winner complimentary plastic surgery.

Thanks for your participation.

Weird.  What's the likelihood of getting human eyes?  This first kid with human eyes in my game is the tenth alien child born.

I've had one alien kid in my game since installing NL, and she's considerably different from the other alien kids, and I'm wondering if this is a function of something included with NL, or if it's something I've downloaded.

The most recent alien kid differs from other aliens in that she has human eyes and she does not have Pollination Tech as a parent.  Her father is the only parent on her family tree.  I downloaded the Multiple Pollination Techs hack from MTS2, and I removed it when I installed NL.  I did not put it back (I didn't bother to check to see if it was NL compatible).  Also, this alien child was a product of the Dance Sphere rather than the telescope.  She also has DNA coming from somewhere else as her lower jaw not only is different from her father's, it almost could be diametrically opposed (she has a very thin, tapered chin; he's got jowls)

I read rumors that there was something that changed with NL with regards to alien children, involving making them no longer relatives, but I never saw that confirmed by a Maxis source.  Is that the case here, or is something else going on here?  I sort of miss making pure alien kids, and was wondering if there's something I could do to restore that ability.

Patrizio died in my game, and though he was raised, his wife had already married a younger townie man, so he was free to diddle.  I had no idea at first that it was going to turn out so scary.  He's got a thing for university girls, and now anytime a girl becomes an attractive teen (and yes, I know their attractiveness is merely a coincidental occurrence) she can expect a blind phone call from Patrizio wanting to become friends.

He's a dirty, dirty man.

FWIW, it was intentional.  I thought it appropriate considering that they were ugly and that it was custom brown eyes that made them so.

Not that I expect anyone to believe me

Are you considering Miranda when you make this assertion?  She was the first sim to go into the Plastic Surgery Station, and keep in mind that I don't usually do that even for my ugliest sims.

But I do agree that Ariel and Desdemona turned out nicely.  Hal didn't look bad as a teenager but as a young adult someone seems to have smushed his nose.