My only problem with low active sims is that they still gorge themselves, as noeatcrap only stomps that for the active sims.  High Outgoing isn't a huge annoyance to me, because there are ridiculously easy ways to raise social, like toddler baths (for both bather and bathee), and phonehack's ability to call-->friends keeps relationships and social up.  Sadorandomness has dictated most of those really outgoing ones have ended up as Popularity or Romance sims, anyway, so that's easy--they want to do these things and do quite a bit autonomously, outside of the phone macro.  (It's also dictated some of the really Shy ones to become Romance Sims of Fail, for many funtimes.)  I dislike really Messy sims' bad habits and really Neat sims' cleaning obsessions.

I really don't think mood or anything during pregnancy affects the resulting baby's personality, though.  Just the same slightly randomness that leaves me with sims that had equally happy lives dying from about 78-83.  I have another legacy that started with a Messy founder and so far, the descendents have all tended towards Messy, as well.  But they're now living in a house that's just as nice as the family with the OCD streak--so the environment is probably not influencing that stat.

I would've picked different windows, too--windows are one of my big weaknesses when adding CC to houses I make.  That and walls.  There wasn't a good Maxis stucco that matched with the other exterior walls, so I just went with the siding again because, while the brick generally doesn't show the wall warp as badly, I didn't think the brick fit for that part of the building.

SimBliss:  Just between you and me, the roof bothers me too.  The problem was that I had the right combination of tiles on that back portion that needed to be roofed that would not let me place the half roof in the right direction.  So I finally just gave up and gave the roof I could get up there a really low slope.

I dug the lot file out of my N001 directory in program files, renamed it to cx_0000nextconsecutivenumber and put it in my Lot Bin folder in My Documents.  Ah, the trials of those of us who don't use all the EPs and are too lazy to install Base Game Starter...

Did a quickie sort of renovation, and I didn't furnish it.  But I have good news to report!  It seems like the lot itself is level, and if you can wrangle around with constrain lot cheats a bit, you can get the entire lot flattened beneath the house so there's no more stupidness.  (Building around slopes can be cool in a hilly hood.  Adding random dirt piles around the house really isn't.)

Since keeping the balcony was "optional," I ditched it.  And yes, I do have a compulsion to add attached garages to nearly every house I make.

Front:


Back:


First Floor:


Second Floor:


It's not Awesomespec, but it's easily converted to be.  Stairs and kitchen are easily shut off, there's room in the front room for a One Desk, etc, etc.  Four beds and four baths, though one of the lower rooms could be used for sleeping if the house got crowded.  Two of the upstairs rooms will fit double beds now!

The house is just over 41,000.

Download Link.
Built with Uni/NL/OfB/Seasons

Have a sample size of 88.  Every born-in sim in my legacy hood that's on Generation 11.  The "Played" column indicates whether or not I played through the pregnancy or just basically spawned some kids for the parents.  Special parentage (alien abduction, grim reaper) is noted, as well as which sims were born as multiples and which were singles (plus who they shared the womb with).  Lucky you, catching me when I decided to input all my sims into a geneology program, mainly to keep track of custom genetics.  I had all the info collected pretty much already.

I'd say my quads with totals of 35, 35, 28, and 25 are pretty good indicators of general trends, however, at least for total points.  I seem to have an excessive amount of sims with 10 neat points on the dot.  I've often wondered if birth traits are influenced by their parents.  But then again, I've had instances like a sim with 2 outgoing points born to parents with 10 and 7 outgoing points, which makes it seem more likely to be random.  To have THAT many maxed Neat sims, though...

A decent proportion of my sims are 30+.  I don't necessarily see more points as "more better," but I've got a pretty big neat and outgoing streak running through the one family.  (I have a fondness for the occasional mean or shy sim--so I'd stop breeding my sims if I thought that would keep me from getting one of those again.)  Looking through my oldest hood, it seems like they top out at 35.

If you wanted to test your theory, the easiest thing would probably be to look at the quantity of points natural (tokened at conception) twins get, and see if they're identical.  Over the course of multiple sets.

My twins haven't always had identical numbers of points, just so you know.

I prefer using SimPE to determine the identity of files, because I can look at the texture, text entries, etc, etc.  Full textures are much better to look at than the thumbnail from Clean Installer.  (I just bit the bullet and went through all my old walls and floors the other day...or so I thought.  There are still people uploading wall files with their wall_hexgibberish filenames.    )

Of course, I did have everything narrowed down before that.  I used Delphy's Download Organizer to do mass file moving of various categories.  I think that recognizes more categories of files than Clean Installer.  Though there's a little wonkiness with compressorized stuff, I haven't had huge troubles using the thing after compressorizing everything in my downloads.

Some of the holiday crap was originally available on the Exchange first.  I have quite a bit of it still, actually.  So maybe you had the original downloadables at some point?

I've only played Sims 2 on a laptop.  I pretty much use the keyboard shortcuts exclusively to control the camera.  If I'm not cycling through sims to just see how they're doing, I'm usually trying to fine-tune my angle to get a good shot.

I've never been a big fan of mouse control in games, though.  I'll plug in a USB game pad if I can before I'll resort to using a mouse.  So I'm sure it's very much a matter of preference.  The touchpad scroll functions on my current laptop are way better than my first, so it's probably feasible to almost scroll with it in game like a mouse wheel.

Are the ceilings just repeats of the textures of the floor above?  Because it's very rare cases where I wouldn't want white ceilings everywhere.  I'm asking because it appears to be that way in most of the pictures I've seen.

It'd be interesting, story-wise, to have some of my teens sneak out late to a lot on one of my Unis.  They could have some fun, pretend not to be underage.  Though in some hoods, the Uni is definitely too far away from the main hood plot-wise for that to be possible.

If you made, say, a community lot in the main hood or a downtown type subhood, you could use the visitor controller to set it to YAs only, I guess and emulate the place.  Or even copy a couple Uni lots over to another subhood so it looks exactly the same.  It could be an easier workaround, if you were story-telling, than getting a YA to invite a non-Uni student to the lot.

I did debate using one of the outfit meshes for my picture, but, in this case, I really wanted to showcase the horrible initial anatomy.

I don't think this person has ever seen the shape of a pelvis.

I'll have my teens date YA's.  That's not so weird to me.  But I also let their turn-ons/turn-offs help dictate their sexuality, even if the majority of sims in my game are straight.  Gen 5 guy rolls a turn-on of facial hair?  He's gay.  (Sure, there MAY be women out their with beards, but there aren't any in MY game, so he'd die alone if he wasn't gay.  XD)

Well, it doesn't have to be heritable or anything.  Realistic disease was just a pipe dream, anyway.    Hell, even something that just randomized up my lifespans a bit would make things interesting.  Maybe Mom just had a kid, Dad brings home the bacon, but Dad's life ended at 32 days.  What will they do now?

Something outside of my control and the sims' control (aka stupidity).

I had no uni protect in for awhile, but I just had passed out, stinking dormies.  ONE died.  So they're still boring and even more annoying.

I've always hated Grizzelda's meshes for kids:


I mean, unless you remove ribs from YOUR little girls, no human actually looks like this.

That would be great if you wanted to simulate a disaster, but a really good overarching death mod that would change lifespans, or assign chronic diseases is definitely not going to even feel the same.  Decimate works instantly, after all.  I want sims dropping dead at middle age (sudden heart attack or similar), or accidentally getting killed in car crashes, or even dying in childbirth.

And one with adjustable odds would be perfect for people playing period hoods.  I don't play them myself, but I can understand how cool it would be to set accurate percentages for infant death or death in childbirth.

I'd do a double-check to make sure you don't have some other default replacement hanging about.  Make sure you check other places in your My Documents\The Sims 2\ directory, not just downloads.  Like SavedSims and the like.

I'd suggest scanning the entire My Documents\The Sims 2 folder with Delphy's Download Organizer (get it at ModtheSims2), if nothing else works.  Default replacements are categorized as such in the program...so if you sort by download type, any that you have should be easily identifiable.

I want the random death that was being talked about in the lifespan changey thread, and I also wouldn't mind random disease-y type death and yeah.  Sort of like Autonomous Casual Romance, with adjustable odds and stuff, but for death.  And perhaps it could even modify entire lifespans based on something more random than Eaxis's way, or even deal out chronic, lifespan shortening diseases.

I WANT DEATH.

I'm running Seasons and I don't get any Maxis recolors (with a couple odd exceptions like the recolorable modular stairs), but I generally get all of a custom object's recolors when I pack a lot.

It ought to be able to handle custom colors in the same family as the other ones.  I haven't had a problem in the past, and I binned tons of hairs when I originally found out about Theo's plug-in.

I hope not, I'd say at least half the time my sims have multiples, they don't queue a human to hand the first baby to.

Well, I downloaded something to do it for me, but it's the same difference. 

The file is here.  It increases the slope value you can place a lot at.  Since I'm currently building up a custom island hood, I'm using a lot of flooded lots, so I finally broke down and grabbed the one with the value of 50.  (I don't have BV or FT, so I don't know how beach lots change these things, plus I can't modify my terrain.)  Before, it took very specific circumstances for me to plunk down a sloped lot to flood it, but now I can pretty much do it up and down the coastline--I just can't put anything down close to something I've already built.  I'm going for things that look like this up and down the coastline of the hood, with most of the normal community lots further inland on flat land.

Obviously, if you place things willy-nilly with the change in values, stuff will get even more deformed than it usually can.  Though I suppose it makes it a little easier to fix the deformation with the ol' placing more flat lots trick.

This one looks interesting, too...though I'm trying to make lots that are still playable, so I haven't needed anything that extreme.

The couple times it happened to me, I kept playing around with blank lots and such until I got it back.  I do have the lot placement hacked a bit, and I was using a lowered terrain neighborhood, though, so it wasn't as hard as it could be.  The only annoying thing is it completely ruined my community dock and I had to move the lot.

Flooded lots can look nice, but they are such a pain in the ass sometimes.

I would definitely try any way you can think of to use blank lots to raise the terrain back up the old level before messing around with outside programs, just because that could potentially make your hood look odd in other ways.

After several generations of inbreeding, there is an increased occurance of traits caused by recessive genes, which may or may not be deterimental.  While inbreeding is a universal cultural taboo for good reasons, one occurance of incestuous reproduction isn't going to net anyone a three eyed baby or anything.

I've started to use the mortgage shrubs as a general rule to get all the available lots in a neighborhood under 20k.  That way, I can move in whomever I choose, easy-peasy.  If they've got the cash, they can sell some of the shrubs...if they want to furnish more/remodel, they can get a larger mortgage with more shrubs.

However, I've also been trying my hands at building some actual starter homes.  And I'm getting better at it.  I'm avoiding things that annoy ME in starters I've downloaded in the past.  I'm making houses on foundations, with separated spaces (e.g., no open loft bedrooms, actual living and kitchen space, room for a tub in the bathroom).  Because not all of my families are going to be living in giant houses filled with expensive everything, nor should they.