Update 4/30/09: Improved efficiency, and had the family reunion check tree bypass the extended family algorithms because it was taking too long and causing "Too Many Iterations" errors.Get them here:
ExtendedFamily:
http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/extendedfamily.packageExtendedFamilyPartial:
http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/extendedfamilypartial.packageInlawsFixMaxis:
http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/inlawsfixmaxis.packageInlawsFixNew:
http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/inlawsfixnew.packageI consider my first cousins once removed and second cousins (hence referred to as FCOR&SC) to be family, if only just, so it has always bothered me that sims don't. I kind of taught myself to mod over the weekend by reading some tutorials and browsing objects.package in SimPE, and made this mod which causes them to be recognized as family in most cases. While I'm reasonably certain that this will not explode your game, I'd still feel a little better if some more experienced modder can look it over and make sure I haven't committed any cardinal sins.
For those who aren't as fascinated by genealogy as I am, first cousins once removed are either a) your parent's first cousins or b) your first cousin's child. Second cousins are the children of your parent's first cousin, or, in other words, someone of the same generation with whom you share great-grandparents.
I couldn't figure out how to do
everything I wanted to, but here are the things that work:
- No romantic interactions are possible between FCOR&SC. ACR play nicely with this - the "Casual" menu does not appear, which I'm guessing means that those interactions are not available autonomously either. Autosoc still allows Romanticate, but they only do the platonic interactions (Admire, Gossip, Bust-a-Move, etc.).
- Family Kiss is available for FCOR&SC,
as is Fight -> Torment for children and teens with the right relationship scores. On second thought, I think I'll leave that one as it is.
EDIT: Forgot to point this out as I never use it, but children/teens can also be Encouraged by their FCOR&SC.
Stuff that doesn't work:
- FCOR&SC are not marked as family in the Relationship panel. The more I go looking for ways to fix this, the more I begin to suspect that that's hard-coded.
- FCOR&SC dying does not satisfy the "relative dies" fear, which I'm guessing means that their getting married or engaged doesn't satisfy those wants either. Also, talking and playing with them does not satisfy the talk/play with relative want. I've looked around, but I can't find anything else to mod that might make this work. Help?
- FCOR&SC do not show up in the directory spawned by autoyak Call -> Family.
Installing this mod causes a reset. Someone downthread has reported that it is incompatible with Inteen.
Any help/feedback/etc. is much appreciated.
EDIT: Fixed some of the logic for determining SCness.
EDIT 2: For consistency's sake, I've made great-grandparents, great-grandchildren, great-aunts/uncles and grandnieces/nephews behave the same way as FCOR&SC, since they are just as closely related (although less likely to occur).
EDIT 3: Rearranged the code to be more legible, fixed some minor bugs, and added a new flavor - extendedfamily.package works the same way as advertised above, and extendedfamilypartial.package causes great-grandparents, great-grandchildren, great-aunts/uncles and grand-nieces/nephews to be recognized as family, but not FCOR&SC. Install only one of these! I also made some minor tweaks to both of these packages - if two sims who would be considered family because of this mod get married, (e.g. with
this mod or something like it, or if they were married before you installed this) they will have romantic interactions available as long as they are actually married. They will also still have Family Kiss.
New 2/25/09: In-laws FixMaxis was incredibly lazy about writing a function to determine whether or not two sims should be considered in-laws; they made it so that sims would consider the relatives of their spouses (e.g., parents-in-law) as family, but not the spouses of their relatives (e.g. children-in-law). The only thing they
did get right was the relationship between step-children and step-parents (and presumably between step-siblings, but I wasn't able to test that as I don't have any). I fixed this; there are actually two versions of this hack, because I wrote one, then rethought some things, and then wrote a completely different one. In the unmodded game, sims consider
all relatives of their spouses to be relatives, and that includes cousins, aunts/uncles, grandparents, etc. Also, the method that Maxis used will not work at all for multiple spouses' families, if you use the marriage of convenience arch. So, if you want to preserve the Maxis intention of considering extended family in-laws as family, and
don't use the marriage of convenience arch, download inlawsfixmaxis.package. If you don't care about/don't want in-laws other than mother/father/sister/brother/children being recognized, or you
do use the marriage of convenience arch, download inlawsfixnew.package. Note that cousins-in-law, etc. may still not
accept romantic interactions if they are married to other sims and you have romancemod installed.
Note that there is an oddity in in-laws relationships that I have not changed - if the two in-laws have crush/love flags set, they will be able to interact romantically regardless. However, the only way to achieve that situation with this hack installed is to have two sims who were previously involved get married to other people and become in-laws, in which case you are clearly reinacting some kind of soap-opera and probably want that to happen anyway.
This is a stand-alone hack - it does not require, is not required by, is not contained in, and does not conflict with the extendedfamily hacks. I'm putting it here because I eventually intend to make an extendedfamily hack whereby you can individually choose which psuedo-family relationships you want to be recognized, and inlawsfixnew will probably be bundled into that.