Getting the husband to take his wife's name

[eamethyst]

I was under the impression that it was possible to get your male Sims to take their wife's last name when they married.  Is this incorrect?  I have tried it at least three times, having the woman propose marriage to both resident and non resident male sims, yet they always take their husbands name.

Especially in the case of legacy type founders, I'd really like the family to keep the name I gave the female founder.

[jrd]

The game uses the last name of the active Sim when you propose a marriage. So if you want him to take her name, let her do the propose - get married.

Pescado has a mod which overrides this and always has the male last name take preference (marriage-traditional).

[wishy-washy]

There's a traditional marriage FFS hack. I'm willing to bet that you have it in your downloads folder. It will give the male last name always. If you take it out, then the sim who proposed marriage will give their last name to the other sim.

[ElviraGoth]

I had Cassandra Goth marry Darren Dreaner when I first started playing.  She proposed, he took her last name.  In my custom hood not too long ago I had a female sim propose to a male townie and he took her last name.

Both of these were at the female sims' residences.  I don't know if that makes a difference or not, but I thought it might be worth mentioning - if you haven't had them propose at the female's house so the male gets the "Sims moving in with..." screen.

[PlaidSquirrel]

It's surely the hack. I had it in my folder by accident once even though I try to always de-select it when installing the directors cut.

[eamethyst]

It must be the marriage-traditional hack.  Because it has always been a playable female sim asking a NPC or former NPC male to marry her.

Thanks for the help.  I guess that hack will be coming out of my download folder.

[Sagana]

Both of these were at the female sims' residences.

If you want to move to the male residence, but take the female name, have her move-in, then let her propose. He'll still take her last name. Actually I ended up changing the whole family's last name this way - not what I intended, but so be it.

[ZephyrZodiac]

It always annoys me, though, that you move a sim into a house, but the house still has the name of the last house he lived in.  This happened with Max and Cassandra in one of my games - although she took his name because he proposed, The house they moved to was still the Goth Family!  After he threw her out and he met someone else, I had to get him to move out and into HER house so the family could at least stop being the Goth Family, which out of them all, only Cassandra and Max's daughter actually was part of!  At least in Uni, if you move Jack Jones out of the Brown household and move him into an empty house, he becomes the Jones Family!

[Paperbladder]

As stated many times in this thread, it's Pescado's hack forcing your sim to take the husband's name.  There's a way around this even with the hack installed, but it involves SimPE.  I'll explain the steps real quick on how to change a last name and the lot name.  It should work wit any recent version.

1)Open SimPE Classic.  You can use the other one, but if you do that you're on your own.
2)Plugins -> Neighborhood Browser.  Select your neighborhood from the popup.
3)Plugins -> Sim Browser.  This is a very useful feature in SimPE which was added quite a bit ago, but it makes this process quicker.  Instead of blindly searching every Sim Description file you can find your sim by Name and Family.
4)Now that Sim Browser is open, Find the sim whose last nime you want to edit.  Double-Click on it.
5)Go to Plugin View if you aren't there already.  There's a few options here but all you need to do is select the current last name of the sim and change it to what you want.  Commit changes.
6)Repeat 3-5 for any other sim you need to change the name.  If they took the wrong name, you'll need to do this to the other spouse and any children.
7)After all the names are changed, the Lot will still be under the old name.  We need to fix this.  Under Filetypes select "Family Information".
8)Select the first value under packed Files.  It should be something like "Family Information (FAMI, 0x4....)"
9)If that isn't the family you want to edit, press the down arrow key.  If that's not it, press down again.  Keep going till you get to the family that you want to edit the household name of.
10)Change the Name field to whatever you want it to be changed to.  Preferably the last name that you put for the other sims.  Anything is fine, but make sure you Commit changes.
11)Save.

Yeah, I know.  A bunch of you already know how to do this.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I know now, but back when I created Max, I didn't, and it just seems a bit stupid anyway!  Like, if you create two friends in CAS, they have to have the same last name, except in Uni they can have their own last name - so why on earth when they did that coding for Uni didn't they extend it to all unrelated sims?

[J. M. Pescado]

Laziness, probably. That, and they'd have to alter the existing GUI for CAS, but those files appear to be embedded in the original datafiles.

[idtaminger]

I'd like a hack to have Sims marry, but still retain their own last names. When my parents married, for example, neither changed last names. Do you think you could make such a hack, Pescado? Pretty please? 

[J. M. Pescado]

That moves into the territory of "What do we name the baby?". Right now, the baby automatically takes the former host's name. It gets complicated when the names are never changed. Marriage-traditional leaves the names in place for same-sex couples because, traditionally, these pairs will never actually breed. It gets more complicated when this method is applied to breeding couples, since now we need to start hacking the baby-name-o-tron.

[Ancient Sim]

What I wish is that when the box comes up to name the baby, we can choose the surname as well as the forename.  I tend to forget to do it in SimPE and I get really irritated by it.  I nearly always forget to marry my couples before they have kids (probably subconscious, as I've never really seen the point of marriage) and they're all going around with the mother's surname when I'd rather they had the father's or a combined one. 

Maxis really ought to have offered this option, simply because (in the UK at any rate), 43% of births (at last count) are out of wedlock, which is near enough half.  I do wish Maxis would move with the times.  They're so puritan when it comes to sex.

[Inge]

I'd like the name we chose for the lot to remain the name of that household.  That would be the best way of telling the difference between one family and another in menus.  I mean seeing as the "family" name are nothing to do with their surnames anyway, by the time a couple of generations have got married, the family name is just a meaningless bit of confuscation.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Problem is, of course, that WE don't CHOOSE the name for the lot (Family) only the address.  In Max's case, he moved into the Goth House and married Cassandra.  The whole caboodle of goths then moved to another house, which was the The Goth Family.  Fine, Mortimer was still living there, it was his money etc.  But the house I moved them to I'd made far too big, and my game just didn't like it, so in the end I moved Mortimer and Alex out, leaving Max, Cass and the baby.   Lot still didn't work well, so I moved them out and into a smaller house, which although on marriage Cass took Max's name, was still called the Goth Family!   But, when Cassandra and Max split up, and I moved her into the little cottage in the woods - that house was given HIS name!!!!  Now, is the game befuddled on this issue or not?

So, at this point, I had three houses.  One, the home of Mortimer and Alexander, called The Goth Family. Two, the home of Max and baby Durham, called the Goth Family, and three, the home of Cassandra Durham, called the Durham Family!  Plus two more houses which I stuck in the bin.

[Inge]

Problem is, of course, that WE don't CHOOSE the name for the lot (Family) only the address.

That's what I meant.  I want the lot to keep the address you gave it as the name of the household.  In The Sims, family means household - and includes non-related lodgers, prisoners etc.   I remember who's in what house a lot better than what family name they might have been given and changed to for unfathomable reasons.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Yes, but confusing if more than one house is called The Goth Family!  And since Cassandra took Max's name, why on earth couldn't the house that they lived in together have been The Durham Family?   And why, when he'd kicked her out for cheating on him, did she have the gall to name her new home The Durham Family?  Me, I'd have named it Chicken Ranch!

[Inge]

Lol I'm not entirely sure we're having the same conversation here   I wouldn't call a lot a family, and you're not allowed two lots with the same address in one neighbourhood, so I would call them something like Goth House for one and Goth Lodge for the other, if they absolutely had to be named after a family.   But more likely I would call them 1, Simmie Street, or Rose Cottage, or The Lighthouse.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I think you're righ, Inge, we're talking at cross-purposes.  I think you mean that the address of the house, if it reflects the inhabitants' name, as Goth House, Goth Lodge, etc., is useful for remembering who lives there.  However, although I did call Max and Cassandra's house Durham Manor, the game still insisted that it was home to The Goth Family!  And that is what annoys me!  And Max still can't live in a family with his own name!  I had to move him in with his wife-to-be, whose surname was Mitcham, then move them back.  He still lives at Durham Manor, but the family is now The Mitcham Family!  How can a fortune sim with the desire to found a dynasty do so if the family is called something else?

[eaglezero]

How can a fortune sim with the desire to found a dynasty do so if the family is called something else?

Sadly, the only way I can see doing that is waiting until the baby grows up, moving the kid out, moving Max in with the kid, and then whatever after that. All that moving around just gave me a headache!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, she's at Uni now and in a relationship, so I don't know if I want to go that road.  But he could have another kid.  Or, his son Dorian could move his dad in to his house.  Maybe that would work, but whichever way, I'd have to return all his hard earned (nicked) goth money to him!

[eaglezero]

Well, she's at Uni now and in a relationship, so I don't know if I want to go that road.  But he could have another kid.  Or, his son Dorian could move his dad in to his house.  Maybe that would work, but whichever way, I'd have to return all his hard earned (nicked) goth money to him!

When I think about all the moving around you'd have to do just to change this guy's house name, it makes me wonder if this is all some sort of horrible nightmare or if that sim is being cursed for evils in a past life, or something.

[ZephyrZodiac]

  He's a CAS sim without a past life and he's a well-behaved Fortune sim who loves his family!  But of course, he did the unacceptable thing - he married a goth and then had the nerve to throw her out when she behaved like a slut!

[eaglezero]

He's a CAS sim without a past life and he's a well-behaved Fortune sim who loves his family!  But of course, he did the unacceptable thing - he married a goth and then had the nerve to throw her out when she behaved like a slut!

*cracks up*

That reminds me that in my new Pleasantview I've never played the Goths, even though most of the other starter sims are in their elders. I guess I should rectify that, hmm.