I hope that they either find a way to make the feature more than a mildly interesting novelty, or leave it out altogether. In SC4 the feature sounded useful, but when I tried it I found that my sim was just as stupid as she was in her home game.  I did get a giggle out of having a sim hop to work on a pogo stick, true, but mostly I found the constant spamming of her opinions annoying, and not very useful for keeping track of possible problems in the city. 

6 mb of eyes?  How many eyes is that?  Are there any eyes that you do NOT have?

I dunno, the other small dogs I've lived with have been like that, yeah, but in the poms all the psycho traits were magnified about 10 times.

My mom has a dachsund now.  She's great, not really psychotic at all(**), but she rivals the yard beagles when it comes to being stubborn.  She was also really tough to housebreak, comparitively--but she's in my mom's house, not mine, so it's all good.


(**I'm talking about the dachsund here, not my mom. Mom's great too, but a bit psychotic.)

Poms are cute, but they are the weirdest dogs personality-wise I've ever encountered.  My mom's had four of them, and three of the four (the three females) attached themselves obsessively to my mom and pretty much despised every other living creature in the world. 

The fourth, the male, wasn't obsessively attached to anything or anyone except a stuffed pink bear he stole from my little brother.  The dog actually broke a tooth attacking the vacuum cleaner because my mom vacuumed too close to Pinky Bear.

None of the poms ever realized that they were *small* dogs, and would growl at and/or bite anyone who annoyed them.  This led to the death of the first one, when she attacked a big dog and got her skull crushed in return.  The male was no smarter, just luckier--he attacked my stepfather's deer hounds on a fairly regular basis.  Then again, maybe he was smarter.  Those deer hounds are so mild-mannered they'd always either run away from the pom, or else stand there and stare at him in complete bewilderment.

My mom still loves pomeranians, but they are at the very bottom of my "dogs I'd like to own" list.

Will they behave the way the Hillary and Jeanette faces do--meaning, will they show up in randomly generate CAS sims and townies?  That's really all I'm hoping for, although it would be nice to be able to choose them specifically as well.

Theo, I'm clueless about stuff like this, or nearly so (plus I typed your name as "Thoe" three times before I got it right, so obviously cannot be trusted,) but I was just wondering--have you looked at the files included with the Hilary Duff sim? 

The Hilary Duff files are packed a little differently from the Jeanette files, and Hilary showed up in my CAS random faces with no editing, whereas I had to tweak Jeanette's face a bit to get it to show up  (and now having seen it, am thinking of un-tweaking lol.)

I was thinking that maybe the differences/similarities in how the two sims were packed might provide some sort of help.  If not, feel free to point and laugh. 

Well at least they are available in CAS if you've got the patience to sit there and click the random sim dice until they turn up.  That's better than nothing, I suppose. 

I reinstalled Jeanette Beiderman.  At first her face shape did NOT turn up in randomly generated sims, but this was easily fixed by changing the flag.  So if nothing else, I've at least now got townies spawning with Jeanette or Hilary face shapes.  In the case of Jeanette in particular, I'm not sure this is a good thing.   

Fantastic, Morague.     As much as anything else, I'm glad to get some confirmation from someone else that new faces ARE added with some Maxis-made sims. Just so I don't seem quite so off-my-rocker.

And that's what I figured, also--if the files to add a face are already in my downloads folder, it should be possible to make more of 'em.  I haven't really done any modding though, so I'm glad someone with some actual know-how is interested in tackling the mystery.

I was wondering last night if the Jeanette sim also brought a new face to the mix.  I had the sim installed a while back, but only for a very short time, and then lost her to a hard drive reformat.   Danton, I got the jeanette sim at Spiffy Sims--their search function should find her for you. I think the download link really just mentions the hair mesh, but it's the entire sim.

And I have no clue about Hilary Duff OR Jeanette Beiderman in "real life."  At least if someone made a Dan Tyminsky sim I'd know who that was.   

Marhis:  I'm not really concerned with the CAS head (unless there's some reason I should be?) I'm not trying to get rid of anything, but rather trying to find out how Hilary added herself to the game-generated random faces.

Shivani: Yes, I'm hoping there is a way--it seems like there ought to be a way. 

Also wondering if anyone else has noticed this happening after installing the Hilary Duff sim?  It has definitely happened in my own game, and believe me, at first I wondered if there was any way I could be imagining it--my eyes aren't what they used to be.  But generally, if I generate a random sim in CAS, and then go to make adjustments to the sim's faccial structure, the template face that the sim is using is highlighted in green unless/until I change something.  When the "hilary" face turns up, none of the faces are highlighted.

Honestly I figured when I posted this that someone would say "yes this is supposed to happen when you add a Maxis-made sim, and no, you can't add other faces yourself or modify the maxis one," and point and laugh at me.  Or something.  I'll poke into it more myself when I have some time when I know I won't be constantly interrupted, because the curiosity is killing me.

(I don't know if this matters or not, but I only have the base game.)

I figure if anyone in the world knows how to help me with what I'm trying to do here it will be you all.  (And if it can't be done, y'all will know that, too.)

I downloaded and installed the Hilary Duff sim from the official site (mainly because I wanted the hair.)  Now, when I go into CAS and roll random females, once in a while the random sim has the (awful) Hilary Duff face shape (or misshape, depending on how you look at it.) 

I have two (probably dumb) questions about this:
1. Does this mean that townies will sometimes spawn with that face shape as well?

2. Since the face shape only appears on randomly generated sims, but didn't add or replace a face in the usual list of CAS faces, does this mean that there is a way to add other new faces --without-- replacing the defaults?  That is, other faces that can be rolled randomly but can't be chosen manually? 

Updated and edited to add:
Since I had nothing better to do tonight (sad huh?) I did do two things to try and answer these questions for myself.

Question 1--will townies spawn with the Hilary face shape?  Yeah.  I made a new neighborhood, deleted all characters, forced new townies, and got a "hilary" on the first try.

Question 2-- Can other faces be added to the possible pool of random sims and townies? I still don't know, but I did open up the file "afarch_Hilary.package" in SimPe, and in the "Face Arch XML" section, changed the flag to "0x00000000", per advice from this thread: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,1250.100.html.  The Hilary face now shows in Bodyshop but not CAS. (Disclaimer: It might have shown up in Bodyshop anyways--I never used it and hadn't checked before. I'm a bad tester. )

So my real question remains basically the same: since installing Hilary Duff apparently installs all the files needed to generate a new random/townie sim, shouldn't it be possible to clone/modify her files to make other new (better!) random sims/townies?  And if so, how the heck do I do it?

Well, currently:
Bella's abduction was no "surprise" to Mortimer--he planned the entire thing to get rid of her. He WAS a mad scientist after all.  Having rid himself of what he considered to be an overly flirtatious and generally silly excuse for a first wife, he knocked up Dina and married her.  Dina desperately wanted to hatch out at least one Goth boy--and wound up with 3 daughters, Gretel, Genevieve, and Gina (really, it was my fault--before my last reset, Mortimer and Dina had a son, Gonzo, who I liked a lot. I was hoping to sort-of recreat him.  Oh well, next time.)

Brandi Broke married Brandon Lillard, even though all three of her boys preferred Goopy.  Brandi and Brandon had one child (Angus) of their own, another boy, figures.  Brandon cheats every chance he gets, and Brandi cries for a while and then forgives him.  She never was lucky in love, was she?

Dustin married Angela, and they are expecting their second child.  They are bored silly (and boring) but that's what you get for marrying the childhood sweetheart without shopping around a bit first.  Their parents could have told them that.

Beau is married to Meadow Thayer and altho they are currently really living up to the "Broke" name, they seem happy enough.  Meadow has a perfectly awful haircut, but Beau seems to think she's cute anyway.

The third Broke boy, the one Brandi was carrying at the beginning, is Rocky.  He's busy making money and being friends with pretty much everyone, and has no time at all, apparently, for romance.  Growing up around a dysfunctional marriage like Brandi's to Brandon will do that to ya, I guess.

Angus Lillard (son of Brandi and Brandon) seems to have a goal of relaxing in every bed in Pleasantview at least once.  He's well on his way.

Lucy Burb married Orlando Bertino.  He's really crazy about her--when they were teens, he asked her to go steady and she refused, and he actually attacked poor old Coral Oldie and beat the crap out of her.  That's love.  Unfortunately for Orlando, Lucy has a roving eye.  She wants to have sex in public--and not with Orlando.  I foresee Orlando having reason to beat the crap out of some other unlucky elderly female sometime in the near future.

Nina Caliente is cheerfully living in sin--and luxury--with Don Lothario.  It's a funny thing; they are the most in-love couple I've ever seen (in the sims, anyways) and can't keep their hands off one another--but twin boys were recently born and they bear a really amazing likeness to Brandi Broke's husband.  Damn, how'd that happen?

Lilith married Dirk, as expected, and everything seems fine, but, they haven't so far been able to have a child, and Lilith has somehow become close friends with Don Lothario.  They really are just friends so far, but Don seems to enjoy the fact that Nina and Lilith get into a knock-down-drag-out catfight every time they come near one another, and as soon as he figures out that he's NOT the reason Nina's kids are ugly, he just might make a move on Nina's arch-enemy.

Darren married Cassandra. They are dull, their kids are dull, and most of the town wishes Cassandra had been abducted with her mother.

Mary-Sue and Daniel just managed to have a baby son before time ran out on 'em, and named him Jeffrey.  He's now married to an incredibly beautiful, and somewhat slutty lady--the daughter of a pair of CAS sims. 

Alexander is married to a CAS sim named Violet, but he's lately realized that he should have married Marisa Bendett.  Violet may to get "abducted."  Like father, like son.

John and Jennifer are still John and Jennifer.  They are trying for a new baby before it's Too Late, now that they've realized that Lucy is utterly worthless.

Coral and Herb adopted a daughter (Rose) on day one, and Coral just managed to live long enough to see Rose become a teenager.  Now Rose is a pretty redhaired orphaned teen with a respectable inheritance, and don't you know that every man in Pleasantview is thinking THAT over?

hehe, I have no idea why I named the poor guy Kato. Most of my sims have disgustingly normal names because i tend to name 'em whatever name I heard last on tv.  I liked him though, he was fun--a very neat sim with a complete slob for a mom, he spent most of his childhood cleaning the shower doing the dishes--it was fun to feel sorry for him.

I only have the base game--my computer is a P3 500mhz, I'm fairly amazed the base game runs, and haven't had the nerve to tempt fate with an EP.  And yeah, I'm pretty sure the sim had no other custom content that other sims aren't successfully using--I don't use make-up on any of my guy sims, and he was wearing the maxis clothes that he transformed into when he grew up from a child.  The only other thing he <i>might</i> have had were custom eyes, but I don't think so.

Yes, I did give the dearly departed a dead token and checked Is Ghost, so that's all good.

I DO have Insim--I like to sim dangerously and all that--but what can you do with Insim to set a sim as properly dead when the sim is stuck in the sim bin and can't be loaded into a house Kato was?  If there was something more simple I could have done I'd love to know about it, because whatever happens to me once will no doubt happen to me on a semi-regular basis, especially if it's annoying.

I dunno, maybe I can export what's left of him with SimPE and try to open him with BodyShop and see what happens---if that crashes, would that prove that it's some custom content, or would a generally corrupt sim crash BodyShop in some way also?

My mom recently took a "nibble" at a doggie treat because, she said, she wanted to know why her normally finicky dachsund is so crazy about the things.

All I can say is that I'm glad they don't have a cat with a litter box in the house. 

(Her verdict on the doggie treat, "Nothing to write home about, but I've probably had worse.")

I attempted to load one of my regular lots, and the game crashed.  I tried again, and it crashed again.  This has happened before--lots gone bad for no apparent reason, so I did what I normally do--I moved the family out of the lot, bulldozed it, and attempted to move them into another lot.  However, the new lot also crashed.  I tried this several times, with no luck.

I'd already had reason to suspect that I had a "bad" sim in that neighborhood someplace, due to recent random crashes that I believed might be caused by the "bad" sim being about to do a walkby, so I thought "okay, maybe I've found my culprit."

The problem was, I now had a family of three sims in the sim bin, and I couldn't move them out of the sim bin, and didn't want to just delete them, because I know that doing this is a Very Bad Thing.

My solution (it was 3 in the morning and I was getting over the flu) was this: Since I needed to know which sim was "bad" (or if none of them were)  I loaded up another lot and used the handy dandy teleporter shrub to attempt to teleport each one over for a visit.  The two adult parent sims teleported in just fine, but when I attempted to teleport in the teenage son, the game crashed.  I tried this once more, just for the helluvit, and it crashed again.  I then went into SimPE and turned the teenager (poor Kato) into a -dead- sim.

I was then able to move the parent sims out of the sim bin and into a nice new house with no problems.  Kato (poor kid) now shows up on their family tree as dead, and everything seems okay--but I'm paranoid, cuz I basically have no clue what I just did. 

Is this as "fixed" as it seems, or did I mess things up even worse? Is there anything else I need to do? FWIW, the sim in question was using custom hair and skin, but other sims are using the same hair or the same skin and seem fine.  The game hasn't crashed since I killed poor Kato.   

(Poor guy, since the last time I'd played him, his girlfriend had grown up and married his best friend--I guess I can't blame him for losing the will to live, but damn, he didn't have to try to take the rest of the neighborhood with him when he went.)