As everyone already knows, my game is insane. But this is beyond the point of normal madness.

Situation one: Two adult Sims and their teen daughters. One of the adults had recently rerolled her aspiration, and come up Romance, so I decided to move her partner and the kids out so she could party by herself for a while. The move-out worked; partner and kids in the Sim Bin ready for a new home. But somehow during it, her younger sister ended up in her house, instead of in the main family home where she should have been. I am fairly sure she was not on the lot at the time of being randomly moved in.

Two: Same family, different branch. The younger sister of the now-Romance Sim was moving to college with her brother. They got there fine, but upon being placed in the house, their toddler sibling was there as well. He had definitely not been moved out with them; I sent them to uni via the bring-students-to-the-Uni-Sim-Bin option thing. Sorry, not very coherent right now.

In case it makes any difference: the neighbourhood is pretty much brand new, has one Uni and one Downtown, both Maxis standards. Anyone know what's doing this? I've been moving people back to the right places via the teleporter painting, but it's becoming annoying.

Edit: And now the two college kids are meeting three professors when they go to class instead of two.

I think you're safe as long as they remain within the same neighbourhood - you'd only have a problem if you moved someone from, say, Pleasantview to Strangetown, not from Pleasantview to Pleasantview Downtown.

As I understand it, the alpha tells the game which parts of the bitmap file associated with a piece of clothing/accessory/whatever else are going to show up, and which parts are not. It's basically a big black-and-white image file; anything in white shows, anything in black doesn't. If you change the alpha, some bits of the clothing, say, will not be seen on your Sim. Or other bits will show up, depending on what you're doing.

Not sure what 'alphable' means, though.

I can give some of them a shot for you...have you tried MTS2? They have a good requests forum for Sims and many, many other things. 

Don't you want to see the kids as teens, especially Alia's great cannibal expression? 

Poor little Sim-boy.

You do realize this means I'm going to have to put up pictures of him and his sister when they become teens, don't you? 

His mouth in-game actually is not too bad. And he has a sort of normal nose, compared to his sister's. And when I zoomed in to check (because I'm playing waaaaaaay zoomed out so I can pretend they're not monsters from the dungeon dimensions)...this is why I don't zoom in.

That was the problem, rainbow - even opening the house to take those screenies made me cringe a bit.   Lesson for everyone: never, ever let your brothers play with the sliders in CAS.

My avatar Sim, on the other hand, is my self-Sim   so I'm glad you like him. I can't have made him right if people think he's cute...

Edit: The toddler just grew up. I may never sleep again. Is that...light coming through the top of his nose...? 

Since we're discussing ugly Sims and genetics, has anyone heard of and/or tried the Dilution Challenge?

For those who haven't: the idea is to start with the most terrifyingly ugly Sim you can possibly create, and try to breed the ugly out. Obviously an extremely optimistic challenge, since you can only use Maxis townies/NPCs/etc.

I'm afraid I gave up shortly after the second child in the second generation became a toddler - he and his sister (Bonus side view!) were so ugly I could hardly bear to look at them. Their mother was reasonably pretty, their father was my terrifying founder. Perhaps if facial features are bred out rapidly, I might try playing until the kids spawn their own kids...

resin, does he have the option to influence her to bite him? I have a hazy memory of doing something along those lines to get my first vamp Sim...

angelyne, I believe that a dark (4) and light (1) skin can have children that range anywhere over the spectrum, with the game choosing any skintone between and including their parents'. Pretty sure that's how it's meant to work for any two skintones, assuming neither is dominant - so a (1) and (2) could only have (1) or (2)-skinned children, two (3)s could only have (3)-skinned children, and so on.

Flowerchile: click here

Already been well and truly discussed 

Somehow I've managed to screw up inTeen so teens don't have the option to try for baby, don't ask me how, but it's still adding a wonderful element of surprise to the game. It's my favourite non-MATY hack.

My poor little Fortune Sim got hit by inTeen again and miscarried the baby in the second trimester. Her boyfriend's been trailing around trying to comfort her with 'Punch you, punch me'. She's on birth control now! No more oopsies!

diamonde, allow me to point you to Gunmod's defaults made from Helaene's realistic eyes. They're gorgeous in-game, and might be what you're after...

First woohoo for my two as well. I should've remembered the birth control option, but no, I thought once would be safe...

...this is so much like the safe woohoo classes at school, isn't it? Remember kids - it only takes one mistake!

sagana, if you feel brave enough to install the inTeenimator, you can have families at uni. It requires a bit more fiddling around to get people into lots, but it's quite do-able.

You can also curse the @*&$^# risky woohoo (I love it, really I do, just...!) when it hits a pair of Fortune Sims you were planning on keeping childless. During their first semester. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Psst. For any Australians out there, it's quite possible that some stores (EB Games in particular) will have 'pre-order' sets for normal sale, if you get the game in the first few days. I got the Hot Rod for Nightlife because they had more pre-ordered games than, in fact, had actually been ordered. It makes no sense, but hey, new stuff!

When OFB comes out here, I shall be right back to that store looking cute and eager. 

Ancient Sim, I know there's a 'no bogarting swings' hack somewhere around here...ah, here.

Thanks Ste! What was happening was no options at all for Nero and his coffin, but options for his non-vamp daughter. Which was annoying. I don't have any coffin hacks, but I'm not sure if hacks were responsible anyway.

Long story short, I 'fixed' it by moving Nero and Aria out and bulldozing the lot, cursing at the computer all the while. Whacked them in another lot, bang, he can sleep in any coffin I want to give him.

Eeeeeexcellent.

If it happens again, I'll definitely be going through hacks and then weeping and watching the BFBVFS. But for now, all's well. Until next time, when something else is bound to go wrong...on a side note, anyone experienced a just-transitioned teen having the aspiration level and title of an aspiration, before theirs is picked? When I accidentally looked at Aria's aspiration pop-up thingie before the aspiration chooser came up, it said she was Romance...

I suspect something's gone freaky-weird with this house. Now my poor Nero can't sleep in his coffin. It says there are no possible actions, or whatever it is along those lines when you can't do anything with an object.

Since he was, indeed, in the Sim bin, I moved him back in, and moved Reed and Marisa out. He can interact with everything except the coffin. Of course. Aaagh!

The coffin has been sold, a new one's been bought, it's had errors forced, and it just will. Not. Let. Him. In. Still insanely attractive to non-vampire daughter Aria, of course.  Help. Someone tell me why it hates me so.

Man, that's tricky. And yet this is the first time in my many happy couple-wrecking moments that either broken-up person has become unselectable or tried to leave, so obviously something's been going wrong before. Evil, evil thing.

I'll move Nero back in and then toss the other two out. Homewrecking fiends!

Thanks, rainbow!

My game has once again gone mildly insane.

In house: four Sims, plus one townie visitor. Vampire Nero, his wife Marisa, her new boyfriend Reed, and Marisa and Nero's daughter Aria. Checking out the romance mod, I got Marisa to kiss Reed in front of (Romance Sim) Nero, with no reaction. Since I wanted them to break up, I made Nero check out the townie. Boing, crossed-out hearts everywhere, slapping, enemies, the works. Break up option appears and is used. For some reason Marisa got a good memory of having broken up with Nero...

Anyway, having wrecked that marriage, I wanted Marisa and Reed to move out alone. When I tried to move them out with the paper, the message 'What are you doing? You can't leave a child alone!' popped up. Uhhhh...but Aria's father Nero is still there. He turned out to be unselectable, for some reason. Marisa and Reed can't move out because the game is absolutely positive there's no other adult on the lot.

Is this romance mod hijinks, and I somehow missed the RTFM? Or, more likely, is my game being spectacularly non-awesome again?

Adult Sims have to start with a 'committed relationship', then engagement. And yes, they can break up with anyone they've entered into a committed relationship or higher with.

I'd also love to see ways to have amicable break-ups in the game, and a smarter 'cheating' system...honestly, some of us flirt with our friends all the time, and don't fall instantly in love with accompanying insane jealousy when they kiss their boyfriend/girlfriend/etc.

When I did a Grim Reaper's Kids experiment, the kids all looked rather similar (the mothers looked very different), and all had black hair, blue eyes and light skin. There were both boys and girls. This was done with inSim so the experiment may have been flawed, but the DNA being drawn on was definitely very consistent...a couple of the kids looked absolutely nothing like their mother, just lots of tiny near-clones of each other, even grown up. It was quite odd. They were all rather cute.

For my game, and possibly my game only:

-Making a pair of foolish teen lovers who think it's oh-so-romantic to have a little baybee and find out that actually, with school and trying to hold down jobs and look after the child, it's not so easy or romantic after all...that amuses me greatly.
-Personally, I dislike Elixir of Life. But I enjoy trying to fulfil the ten kids want for a Family Sim. Thus, any Family Sims who I'm planning to give ten kids to can start young, try to make their way through uni with children in tow (this is the hellish bit), and generally fulfil the want before they're elders if they just keep poppin' them out.
-Not pregnant teens for this point, but the inTeen allows teenage love to persist into YA and Adult years. I've never noticed love just stopping, bang, when someone grows up, so I like the realism of this.

  Brilliant rant, Jase, but that was the best bit.

I just tested the woohoo menu + Debugger with birth control on, and nothing's weird in my game...