Normally speaking, the proposee takes on the proposer's last name.  Nice and egalitarian, but a little out of place for those of us with real-world expectations.

The lot debugger has a feature to modify a sim's last name, although I suggest you have a pencil and paper handy while you do so.  (You have to change a sim's first name to the desired last name, use the option to have their last name be the same as their first name, and then change their first name back.)  For future reference, marriagetraditional(?) makes sure that she picks up his last name, just like we real-worlders expect.

Attraction is actually based on turn ons/offs, aspiration, personality and zodiac sign.  But more directly to your question, unless you have something to override the Maxian standard, scope room will only notice sims of the desired sex(es).  Romantic interactions (which in this case includes "check sim out") determine just who your sim goes for, and you need to do at least one before scope room becomes available at all.

IIRC, someone asked about this a little while back, and the day/night switch hour was set.  The duration of the sunset/sunrise lightshow has been hacked, but not the time either begins.

IANAM, but it might be possible to hack the daytime brightness, temperature, and/or vampire-friendliness to have the daytime be effective nighttime.  OTOH, as anti-daylight as Pescado is, I'd expect he'd have tried such a thing before.  Its non-existence might well speak to its current impossibility.

Don't they only happen if the sim died of old age?  I've drowned my share of platinum sims and only gotten the regular style.

And since you're a newbie, take this as an addendum to Pes' advice, not a contradiction.  Old age and platinum, not either/or.

So a party is only a party if you're shitfaced?

I wonder how easy it would be to rig bars so that a sim who has a drink treats their relationships with everyone else as a few points higher or lower than they actually are.  This would cause sims who were either too friendly, too sullen, or occasionally two sims drink and get along better than they would have otherwise.  Anything more than that would be either hacked together like the above mentioned kegs, or else way more overhead than is practical to ask of a modder.

If the Maxian slang of "juice" bothers you so much, text hacks are also relatively simple.  The wink-and-nod euphemism never really upset my suspension of disbelief, but if "juice" and "bubble blowers" feel more out of place than spin-changes and the reanimated dead, at least that little bit is easy to change.

I find this funny on a sims site.  Not the assumption that everyone here can handle the link, but the number who will wonder when they became men.

Got your fantasy games right here.  And that's not even counting the obvious ripoffs like the singles.  No, they're not the simming experience we already know and love, but they illustrate a point rather nicely.  If knockoffs that have a more first person style don't mesh with the community that well, that might be a sign that going that route with this game would be a bad idea.  The best we can hope for is a loosening of the scripting for the stories line, which might or might not be to your liking; from what I heard, the only real difficulty to them came from wondering whether or not a bug would hit.

You want one of two things, and I can't really tell which at the moment.  It sounds mostly like you'd be happiest if the dominant social strategy were tweaked, but that would only last until you worked out the new dominant social strategy for the new numbers.  Most puzzle style games have a very limited shelf life due to that.  The other would involve completely overhauling the socialization system for one in which every value would have some random modifier go at it, and as Pes pointed out we already have that.  If you keep using interactions with low rejection thresholds, of course they're going to succeed.  You're ultimately complaining that there are low-risk interactions in the game (I'd be upset if there weren't any), and that you can come in with perfect knowledge to make the most of them.

Really, I guess that's what it comes down to.  If you want this to be a "challenge", that's easy enough to cover too.  Have your don juan sim only romance townies (so you don't know their turn ons/offs), don't check the relationship panel, and don't go overboard with safe interactions before going after the riskier ones.  Otherwise you're effectively powerleveling and then complaining why early game monsters are so weak.

(I guess if one wanted to, it would be best to have a limit as to just how high a given social interaction could push relationships.  Chatting could only go so far before you'd need a riskier interaction to get along better, and the chat cutoff could be low enough that the other interactions could have a chance of failure.  This would be a huge project even if I'm not missing any complicating factors, however, and it still depends on the attraction system with its relatively high granularity.)


And on that note, need I remind you what the original working title for the game was?

Rather than just saying "it'd be swell if personality had more of an impact", I'm curious how you would apply these influences and caps based on what traits.  Just give benchmark figures, see how the community takes to them, and you'll see why a mod like this wouldn't really take off even if it were created.  Things that sound good in the vaguest terms can become clearer with specifics, so let's hear some of your specifics.  Not to mention the fact that once said specifics are known, you'll be back to your regular formulaic style of play.

More to the point, PCSims might not be the platform you're happiest with.  The lack of difficulty is partly due to Maxian expectations of your average simmer, and partly due to the fact that the game does as well as it does by covering so many bases.  First-person style playing has to be simple; to keep the storytellers from having to spend too much of their time on maintainence, to let hands-off style players enjoy their game, not to mention that if a single sim is challenging you've made families significantly more so.  If you're looking for a game based around challenging your skills as a single character throughout the game, you might be happier with a console game or a sims knockoff game.

These also fail to exist.  In the case of the sand pails you don't even have proper beaches, and for the others I wonder how much player enjoyment could be derived per programmer hour, especially compared to other options.  It's kind of like how pets was expected to be everything a simmer could expect, and ended up being a big letdown in reality.

Don't get me wrong.  I'd like more toddler interactions in the house, even though the same opportunity cost thing mentioned above probably applies.  (Designing and programming a toddler interaction enhances four days of a sim's life, adult/elder ones can enhance 60-ish for a similar investment.)  But, especially given their inability to do much on their own, allowing them to appear on non-home lots would require a lot of overhead to make sure it works right.  This might be one spot where EA sees a load of bugs waiting to happen, and has actually decided it's not worth letting them come to fruition in play.

Well, yes, but moviemakers quickly learn how to stage a shot to imply things that can't actually happen.  They also tend to be bright enough to see when other people are trying to do the same.  (See: EA screenshots.)  That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to implement the actual action.

Most requests for commlot toddlers arise from a mistaking of the game and the real world.  Humans have unified time, and can enjoy just walking around for no reason.  Neither of these applies to the sims.  Sims gain neither relationship nor motive benefits from just walking from one place to another (excepting environment, and even a sim who walked through a high-environment museum will be entirely unaffected when he gets to the low-environment exit), and a sim who spends all day at a commlot will come back at the same time.  A sim who spends a whole day on another sim's lot, even if you save while the visitor is on-lot, will show no change where they are or what they're doing when you load their lot again.  So barring a massive overhaul of the engine you can't engage in silly bonding rituals or foist your spawn off on other people, which are the main reasons people send them elsewhere in the real world.

If you muck about with core game files, there's a good chance of the patch not finding what it needs to and choking.  This is most often a problem when people try to patch after replacing the game's inherent templates with one of the empty ones.  Especially if they're not the sorts to keep backups.

This has nothing to do, however, with neighborhoods that exist in the game.  Worst case scenario something in the neighborhood itself will break, but that's what backups are for.  Nothing in any playable neighborhood will prevent the patch from doing its job of updating what needs to be updated.

Only thing I can think of involves self-pollination and sim surgery, ideally in a throwaway neighborhood.  DNA information is stored in a different way than face information, and I don't think there's any way to have the former map directly to the latter.

Challenging, no.  But Pes' romancemod and noinstantloves and TJ's ACR can allow you to fine-tune romantic interaction throughout your 'hood.  The former two cover for the fact that the romance engine in the game sucks as-is, and the latter is for those who like romance in the euphemistic sense rather than the hearts and flowers BS.

Sims who already have bad relationships are less likely to accept social interactions, although again as shipped the thresholds are rather low, and LTR already somewhat covers the case of "we had one great conversation and now we're bestest buds".  I'd be wary of a mod that capped LTR and/or STR on any personality criteria, however, as it would put someone else's perspective as to what gets along in a higher priority than my own storytelling urge.

Not on the cleric list anymore, although if the petrifier's level isn't too high Break Enchantment is a more cost-effective option.  And Morriganrane, I highly doubt that being born metamorphic rock would count as being "turned into a statue".

Lazy sims are more prone to sedentary activities like chess, but have no direct bonus to their learn rate.  Still, as logic is one of the skills they'll autonomously work at, lazy sims will likely have higher logic scores if left alone due to aforementioned preference.

There are parts of seasons that are as yet unpatched by EA, but it's doubtful that they'll put out a fourth patch for it.  The third patch has been out for long enough that all requisite hacks have been updated.  (At least MATY ones.  I make no claim for the entirety of modderhood.)  Hacks will continue to be updated, but the current crop should be more than serviceable 'till the next EP is out.

If you reload N times for each birth, where N is the number of children already in the family, then yes you'll get a different result for each child.  You also have to watch the loading screen 2N times, once each reload to go to neighborhood and another time each reload to go to the house.  People who are fond of this method usually create their N random sims by going into CAS and clicking the dice button however many times.

Having just tried my hand, I'm unhappy to say that the n'hood screen bugs are still alive and well.  At least things became a lot calmer as soon as I loaded a lot, but I haven't gone specifically looking for odd combinations either.

If the Ottomas' have already been added to your neighborhood but the twins haven't been born yet, it's possible to hack the pregnancy controller to point to the right father.  This was possible even pre-patch.  It does require some tedious mucking about in SimPE, however.

I was unaware that there would be a need for different male and female last names.  Is this just my anglocentricism showing through, or is there much need for different surnames by sex?

One of the unfortunate things about about the engine is that skin tone and first name are often correlated in real life, while there's no system in place to simulate that in the game.  (And in all fairness, I could see such a system getting uglier than it's worth for EA to include.)  I guess in the game's colorblind utopia it won't matter, but as a player it'd be interesting to see how the "ethnic" names get mismatched every which way.

KoW, afraid I can't help much.  I run in circles with some interesting first names, but last names seem to be pretty run of the mill.  It might help to bone up on some etymology, though, as certain last names have interesting antecedents even if they're not as directly suggestive as you'd like.  Just a way to pad your list and all...

If you're talking about the default townies dumped into every 'hood, changing the default name list won't do anything to Goopy and the other pleasantview regulars.  You seem like the sort who already knows this, so I'm expecting you mean something different.

If you're talking about generating townies via the townie tree or something similar, I wouldn't expect it to call on any different routines than what happens when a townie is normally replaced.  If you're set to make a custom 'hood already, it might be quicker to generate one with a "test" live.package - one with no names in common with the regular Maxian one - than to wait for someone with more code-fu to come across this topic.

What's fun about these is that the corrections now need beta testers.  Who's brave enough to find out what's broken here now?

If you have music you'd rather listen to while you sim, it should be a simple enough matter of loading that to the appropriate files and clicking off the ones that come with the game.  If you'd rather have silence, you can mute the music and other sound effects by X'ing a check box at the top of the audio options.

And count me in the Orkies club while we're at it.  Some Simlish tunes get under my skin, especially the teenybopper tracks that came with pets, but for the most part I think they're catchy and worth keeping around.

What's elaborate is requiring a special status and getting pre-adult sims caught up in the mix.  A hack or object that allowed forced/arranged marriages regardless of the relationship levels of the soon-to-be couple would probably cover everything you want, while being easier for an interested party to program and more broadly applicable to boot.  Inflicting a special "promised" status or allowing toddlers to get engageds seems like it would have its finger in too many pies and border on un-awesomeness.