Editing seems to be just fine, at least in my experience.  E.g., I had to edit the DNA to get it back to what it was supposed to be in the first place, and since then it's been just fine.

Actually, Rainbow, I have the problem you describe when I DO delete SDNA entries.  I haven't had a problem since I stopped.

To reply to the OP:

Generated sims, like townies or anyone produced by the CAS randomizer, have access to all properly-binned hair as Blue Soup mentioned.  To my knowledge -- and I have not done extensive testing, but report only the mass of my observations -- they do not have access to any skintones but the default four, although of course they will pick up custom replacements.

When I was using the fwiffo's hack (with OFBp2) I had the same "problem".  Heaven knows what the actual issue is, as I don't believe the hack has been re-written since Uni or so; that was the only part that didn't "work" for me, though.  Having no alien parent fulfills the "allow alien spawn to marry" aim of the original hack as well as having different alien parents, I suppose.

For hacks, I favored Inge's stuff (now archived at The Laden Swallow, I believe) and C & C Enterprises.

Heck, you could try just teleporting the (down)townie kid in and putting it up for adoption with the shrub.  You may or may not have to move it in first, but that's doable with the shrub as well.

That's more-or-less how I populate my adoption pool with created kids, anyway.

This does look like the bed-in-inventory problem, but that is usually resolved when the bed is deleted.  Are there any other beds on the lot?  Try deleting them and re-buying them.

I'd have to see an error log to be sure, but I'm willing to bet it's an Attraction Token problem.

See http://www.moreawesomethanyou.net/smf/index.php?topic=3911.msg111258#msg111258

Thanks for the ideas, guys.

CuriousSpurious, your idea about the game regenerating professors seemed like a good one, as it's certainly possible I'd deleted one at some point.  However, I've just gone and counted the professors in the original-Uni-spawn ID range, and there are 24, 2 per major including undeclared.

All the professors that I'm spammed with have "Unknown" majors, which may be an extra clue... to something.  Who knows what.


I've only got 459 SimDescription entries at the moment, have probably created ~700 Sims in this neighborhood including ones later deleted, but the constant Unknown Sim spam means my instance numbers are up to 0x417 (decimal 1047!)  It's crazy stuff.

I've been having these problems for a few weeks and left it in the hope that it would disappear as mysteriously as it appeared, but no such luck.  Here we go, then.

I'm running NLp2.

Problem #1: Every time I play the game and come back out again, 2-8 (usually "Unknown" Sim Descriptions appear in SimPE.  They have new instance numbers, so I don't *think* they're artifacts of previously deleted sims, but it's possible.
Normally they do not create relationship, memory, DNA, or Wants&Fears entries.

I have been doing neighborhood cleanup in SimPE for quite a while now, deleting townies and Sims I messed up with before I knew which actions would lead to firey balls visable from space.  (Fortunately I'd never lotbinned anything occupied...)  I'm using the method discussed in the SimPE forums and elsewhere (which means I have to periodically re-correct recessive DNA, but that's an entirely different problem).

Problem #2: I think this is unrelated, but it presents similarly.  Any time I play a Uni dorm (all my students are in dorms, so I never play other lots at Uni), two new professors are created.  It's not two professors per dorm, though; it's two professors per play session including any visit to Uni.  They are complete with DNA and Wants&Fears, have no relations, and have only the [invisible] Token - Sim - Initialized "memory".

I suspect this dates to long before my Unknown spam started, since I see pairs of professors unconnected to the Uni install all through the subsequent Sim Descriptions.

I have Twojeffs' "No Meeting Professors", which I suppose may be connected.  However, even short visits to a dorm to re-outfit a newly-arrived student (which don't include anyone going to class or finals) produce this spam, so I'm doubtful.

Has anyone else got any similar issues?  Has anyone got any clue as to what is causing this?  It's not a huge deal as the spam takes perhaps 5 minutes to clean up in SimPE every time I exit the game, but I'd very much like to know.

As to 1, everything I know points to "I'm pretty sure that should be relatively safe".

In other words, back up the file and give it a try.

One artifact that you're probably going to get is this:
Let's say you've deleted all the male Texture Overlay XMLs from an eyebrow file.  In bodyshop or CAS, if you create a female with these eyebrows and then switch to male, you'll get either no eyebrows at all or possibly a random assignment.
Likewise, if you delete everything except for elder TOXMLs, create a Sim and age it down, you'll get some weirdness.

Seeing as these are rather unlikely and more or less what you'd expect, I'd say go for it.

Yah, I get this all the time now.

It's a problem with Attraction Tokens or somesuch.  Fortunately, it's pretty easy to fix.  Just remove any [invisible] Attraction Token
memories from that sim and you're good to go.

Looks like one of Janna's hairs (Sims Connection).  Is this happening with the default bald, or just with the bald set melodie9 just posted over at MST2?  I know I'm getting the same textures hijacking melodie9's version; I haven't bothered to page through to checking the default bald.

Well, you don't want to use 6.  That's for "custom hair that only shows up in Change Appearance, not CAS", as far as I can tell.

Anything not marked 1/2/3/4/5 is going to show up as custom, and anything marked 5 but with age flags not set to elder won't show up at all.

Which is to say: I'm pretty sure hair isn't as flexible as skin, although I dearly wish it was.  I generally categorize normal-colored hair (platinum, light brown, mouse, etc.) in whichever bin it is nearest to -- platinum goes in Blonde, light brown in with the Brown, etc.

Is your bathroomusesyou the very latest (3/9/2006) from the nl/hacks directory?  The 3/6, 3/7, and 3/8 versions were causing crashes for some of us.  At least for me, the 3/9 fixed that.

I dropped back to the 3/4/06 version and the problems have ceased.  The 3/6/06, 3/7/06, and this newest all cause the crash for me.

Sadly, doesn't fix it for me.

Edit: I do appear to have a bunch stuff in the Logs directory caused by the crashes.  Would any of that be helpful for you to see?

This is happening for me, too.  NL with patch 2.

The neighborhood is long-established.  The family has just moved into a new house.  Family members are able to use/be used by the bathroom controller with no problems.  However, as soon as a family member greets someone (walkby, invited over, whatever), the game crashes as soon as the greeting animation completes.

This occurred with old TP rolls transported via inventory into the new house, so I thought that might be the problem.  I removed bathroomusesyou altogether, loaded up the house, and saved.  Reintroduced bathroomusesyou, placed new TP rolls (no change to default configuration), and the problem persisted.

Ugh.  Just ran into this problem myself.  No-one was jumping on the beds when they were moved; the whole household consists of an elder couple who were in the living room when I left the lot.  I did have them move their non-Maxis beds into the new house via inventory, though, so I'm guessing that's at least part of the problem.

Nasty, nasty jumping, but as myskaal said it was cleared up by just replacing the bed (although not by resetting it).

I'm glad I remembered this thread; I would have been completely lost otherwise.

There is a tutorial further down the tutorial page.  Direct link: http://www.datgen.info/tutorials/sm_hairtone.aspx

Make sure you have the latest debug version; the 0.7.13 version had plenty of bugs.

Excellent summary, Syera!

Darn that tiny decimal point!
.09 or 0.09 is a bit lighter than .1 or .10 or 0.10, which is S1
.90 or 0.90 is S4.  The darkest would presumably be 1.00, although I use .99.

Yep.  For just a tad lighter I would go with .09 or maybe .08.

Precisely.  You're not limited to .10 etc., though: anything from 0 to 1 is fine, though I don't think it will take anything with more than 2 figures after the decimal.


This is why I leave all my "weird" skins -- colors, fur, robots, etc. as 0.  It's the only way I can think of to stop them "blending" into the normal colors.  Unfortunately this means they are completely dominant; in your example, the child would have dark blue skin.

The 1/2/3/4 values are for the "skintone" field - essentially, one of the names the game uses to refer to a particular skin.  I've never messed with the skintone value, so I have no idea what it would do.
The decimal values are for the "genetic" field.  Skintone 1 has genetic .1, 2 has .3, 3 has .6 and 4 has .9.  I'm pretty sure skintone doesn't place the skin in any continuum of light-to-dark; the genetic field does.

It's nice that the skintones have this continuum; I wish the eyes, hair, etc. had something like it.