Okay, I can't beat that.  Have you changed the eyes to see what that kid would look like without the aggressively pink peepers?  I've noticed that some custom eye colors can really screw up the appearance of kids born in the game.  In my case, what looked good in CAS (with its closeups) hasn't always looked good ingame.

But then for one family that was constantly pooping out ugly kids with these nasty brown custom eyes, I changed the eye color with contacts and... they're still butt ugly.

Anyway, here's one of a ugly sim and his gosh darn ugly toddler.  Understand that his parents dropped 6 kids that looked like him before I learned of the firstborn effect and how to avoid it:



Not to say that it was the firstborn effect that cursed all the progeny of his two (fairly attractive) parents, as his younger brother shows:



But here's the piece-de-resistance:



Notice how she has a sister who looks JUST LIKE HER.

Oh wow, you guys are appalled by THAT?

I'd post a whole bunch of shots of my ugliest sims, but I'd probably crash the server.  Rest assured, though, that they're truly hideous, not like these sims you guys have posted.

Anyway, here's what one family sort of looks like:

http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/images/promos/blog_sleestak.jpg

(edited to avoid hotlinks)

As I said, that was my impression.  I don't understand what the mechanism would be that would disable them, and why it would be there, in the original, unpatched game.  Perhaps it's a file corruption that occurs at some undetermined point, similar to the issue that prevented Bella Goth from showing up in Strangetown until the patch was applied.

Well, that's your opinion.  Obviously some people are going to find expansion ideas painfully dull, while others will enjoy them.  Still, for the Sims games particularly, some expansions are well suited for some people's playstyles, while being completely useless to how others enjoy their gameplay.  That's been the case with every Sims 1 and Sims 2 expansion, and no doubt that's going to be the case with every future expansion as well.

As for University, I think the issue with the grades comes from the fact that achieving a high GPA is fairly incongruous with the way the Sims 2 has worked.  In this expansion, you had a very specific goal to achieve, with clear guidelines and progress bars, with real (or merely perceived) consequences should you fail to achieve the requisite goals.  I don't consider your sims flunking out after two semesters really "playing" University.  There definitely is an incentive to get high grades.  And the only thing in the original game and Nightlife like it are the party scores and date/outing scores, which really don't punish in the same manner for failure.  (In fact, intending on failing them can be a perfectly legitimate way to play!)  This historically hasn't been the case with the Sims games before.  Sure, you could simply decide to never have your sims gain skill points, so they're always stuck at entry level jobs, and instead concentrate your gameplan on something completely different, like a "battle royale" simulation or trying to woohoo as many sims as possible, or even simply making beautiful houses.  The number of ways you could play the game was limitless.  But the important thing was that there was no overriding "right way" to play.

But that's not really the case with University, as the "right way", or at least the way that allows you to get the most out of the expansion, is to have your sims study the required amount each semester.  The problem is is that there's no countervailing method or methods of playing that would achieve essentially the same thing in a different manner.  (I suppose seducing the professors might be one such way, but I personally would find that even more tiresome (and appalling, considering how hideous most of them are) than the regular way to a 4.0)  If there could be more than one way to "succeed" at University, there may very well be the necessary disincentive to always get your sim students A+'s every semester.  One such way, for example, would be the "Big Wo/Man on Campus" achievement (which isn't that difficult to achieve even maintaining a 4.0 currently).  If achieving that allows interesting gameplay that wouldn't necessarily be allowed with a Summa Cum Laude sim, (and achieving them both would be exceptionally difficult) that could be a good way to get players away from the feeling that studying is the only important thing for your students to do in this expansion.  Or even if that ultimately allows your sims to achieve the same ends, for example, Summa Cum Laude gives good benefits in careers, give Big Wo/Men on Campus those same benefits.  And it could be anything, hustling pool in a certain number of locations, or making a certain amount of money on a certain number of workstations on campus, or making a certain amount of money from multiple locations playing instruments.  If any of these things would allow a player to achieve something similar to what a 4.0 does now, the expansion could very easily be more interesting, especially if Maxis underscores that it's perfectly all right for your sims to graduate with a 3.0, if they manage to excel in other areas.

But in the actual game, there is no countervailing desire to achieve anything but perfect grades.  Yes, you could achieve aspirations, especially the more difficult ones, but that's not the same thing.  The game doesn't really punish you all that much for ignoring them most of the time.  There really isn't anything to compete with grades.

My thought, and this is just pure speculation on my part (as per usual), is that they were removed when University added the Sports channel, if for no other reason than to keep the number of movies your computer needed quick access to to a set level to avoid slowing the game to a crawl.

I have no concrete evidence of course, but it certainly seemed to me that when I added movies and mp3s to my movies and music folders that my game took a noticeable performance hit.  Perhaps this was done for a similar reason.

I've had the blue face problem when I've used the sim surgery option in SimPE to export my made-in-game sims into premade sims that I could select again when I was using CAS.  (That's really not clear, so here's the explanation:  I wanted to make movies with some of the sims I already had, who had been born into my game, but I knew that trying to do it on the lots where the sims lived wasn't feasible, especially since all of the sims I wanted to use in movies did not live on the same lot.  So I used sim surgery to export them so I could create exact clones in a different neighborhood to make movies with them)

It was an old version of SimPE, and it really ended up causing problems for my game, since the Saved Sim files became corrupt (or something) and it ended up really screwing up the actual sims I had used, as well as making CAS and Body Shop crash upon loading.

If you've used SimPE in such a manner, I'd advise removing all those files from your Saved Sims folder and rechecking all the sims you used to see if they suffered any problems.  I don't know if a more recent version of this corrected this problem.

You have to go into the games queue instead of the electronics queue.  It's the same menu where you buy a chess board.

Kind of annoying when you get the $3000 game want, because the only thing that satisfies that is the $5500 bowling alley.  (Although when you get the $3000 and $5000 game wants, the bowling alley fulfills both.  Too bad there's rarely ever a non-ridiculous place on a lot to put it.

I can't speak to your situation, since you transition them almost immediately, but in my game I get negative interactions and relationship points between babies/toddlers and other family members when said family members wake up a sleeping baby/toddler.  I don't actually see the minus signs above their heads, but I notice an effect in the relationship panel.

In my experience, it's not a matter of what the astrological sign is.  My sims who have been affected by the firstborn effect don't all have the same sign across different families.  That's always determined by the individual personalities of the parents.  The children within a family all have the same personality, however, if randomizing hadn't happened, so they'll all get the same sign, be it Pisces or Gemini or whatever.  I do know that "Randomize" isn't random in CAS, however, and the first sim you get when you do that will always be an Aries. (And the second will always be a Capricorn or something (don't remember which but it's always the same) and the third will always be a Virgo (or something), it's never random)   Perhaps that's what people are referrring to.

That said, it's not all that different from appearance genetics.  My firstborn kids inherited personality traits from their parents rather than being random.  Perhaps they got Dad's niceness personality and Mom's neatness personality, or what have you, but they were always the same between siblings.  Now that I randomize them they still show some inheritance, but it's not identical.  Maybe they get Mom's niceness and Dad's neatness, or some combination of the two parents' traits.

I don't think they're necessarily talking about completely randomizing their newborn sims more than making the newborns inherit different traits than the family's previous newborns.

Without randomizing the genetic inheritance logarithm, sim children in one family will always have the same features.  Their noses will always be the same.  The eyes will be the same, the cheekbones, the mouth, etc.  The only way two kids will look different is if they're different genders (and if you export, say, the brother to CAS and then change his gender, he'll look exactly like his sister).  Randomizing sims will still result in your sims inheriting traits from their parents, but they won't be exactly the same traits as their siblings.  You can still see the resemblance between family members, but they won't be twins.

So technically it's not totally random.  The kids are still influenced by the parents' genetics, but it's random within the range of their parents' genetics.

I may not have the order in which these circumstances occurred exactly right, but nevertheless it was a nightmare.

Two sims had just gotten married, and they had a little house that had on the second floor, their main bedroom and a small second bedroom that was hardly large enough to serve as a nursery.  The husband was in the culinary career and the wife was in the business career.  She was pregnant and he had the skills needed to gain a promotion from his job as an Executive Chef, and I was saving up their cash so they could move into a bigger house and start a larger family.  Their current house really wasn't big enough for even one child past the toddler stage, so two children were totally out of the question.

Bad things started happening when the husband decided to go get the bills right before his carpool arrived, and once it did, I instructed him to put the bills down and go to work, only instead of him putting the bills down on the floor, he set them down on the stoop leading up to the front door and they vanished.  (At this point I had none of the "Kill Stuck Bills" fixes nor was I aware of the "Force Bill Delivery" option in BoolProp)  So the guy went to work while his wife stayed in bed pregnant.  I had already set up the second bedroom in preparation for the baby, with a crib, diaper changer and some toys.

The husband got a chance card, and I remembered the Sporks of Steel choice had worked before for this particular chance card, so that's what I selected.  Unfortunately, it didn't work this time and he got fired.  So he came home and moped for a bit.  After he cheered up a little bit I was able to get him back on the Culinary career at the position just below Executive Chef.  After a day or two at work he was able to get back up to Executive Chef so things were back where they had been.  The child had been born and things seemed to be getting back to normal.  One problem had been that  I had timed the birth badly so that in the days following the baby's arrival the wife did not have work, so she was not making any money, much less obtaining the promotion(s) she was ready for.  At this point they were receiving nasty phone calls about the missing bills, but I couldn't do anything about it except hope that they could make it to Tuesday.  They had enough money, as I had been saving and saving so that they could afford a larger house, and they had something like 19,000 simoleons in their account to be used toward that goal.

Then, the husband, who was all set skill-wise and work quality-wise to get a promotion,  got the chance card for Executive Chef again, and I decided that since Sporks of Steel did not work before, I would choose Blend N' Send instead.  Well, this one didn't work either, so he lost two logic points, which he needed for promotion, and also lost 20k simoleons.  There went their entire nest egg for the new house.  The family felt the full effect of that penalty, as they had close to 20k simoleons, but not more, so their bank account dropped down to nothing.  It was a pretty devastating development.

Since the husband had lost logic points that he needed for a promotion (and they now really needed the bonus money that came with promotions, being broke and all), I sent him out back that night to use the expensive telescope.  That was when I suffered one of only three legitimate alien abductions I've had since I've had the game.  While he was flying around being anally probed, the repo man came and took the child's toys in retribution for their unpaid bills. 

So the husband came back, and was now pregnant with an alien baby.  They did not have space in the house for a second child, and had no money.  Since he still needed two logic points to gain a promotion, which they desperately needed, he was not able to get a promotion before his belly grew and he was forced to stay home on paternity leave.  Fortunately by the time that had happened his wife had gotten back to work and had been able to get a promotion, thus starting the slow road to the financial recovery they needed to support their growing family.  It was hellish for a while, especially since I needed to turn their family room into a makeshift nursery for the new green kid.  Fortunately it didn't last long as the wife got not only promotions but also a chance card that resulted in a financial windfall.  If that hadn't happened, I probably would have had her leave him. (And wouldn't you have if you were her?)

I had another nightmare scenario in the Sims 1 that was more amusing than nightmarish.  I had downloaded Flaming Moe from either Sims on a Stick or Simstitution (I'm not sure which site had this item), which was a defaced flamingo that would catch any sim who interacted with it on fire.  I tossed Flaming Moe in the backyard of a family (that had been created for no purpose other than to torment and harass the rest of the neighborhood: not one nice point among five of them!) and left it there, sitting.... waiting.... like undetonated ordinance or something.

Anyway, the family was asleep one night (technically they weren't a family at all, as none of them liked each other or even looked like each other, especially the child, who had in his biography that none of the adults in the house had any idea whose kid he was) so I was off looking at their badly furnished living room or something when I heard activity going on in the kitchen.  The child, Tommy, had gotten up at 3:30 AM and was helping himself to snacks from the fridge despite the fact that there had been a perfectly good meal on the counter he needed to bypass to get to the refrigerator.  That annoyed me, but what could I do?

So I go back to the sleeping sims to see if any of them were ready to wake up, which none of them were.  Then I noticed that Tommy had left the kitchen.  I checked him out to see what he was doing, and to my horror he was going out into the backyard to STARE at Flaming Moe!  Since he did it autonomously, I let it go, and just as it advertised, Flaming Moe lit Tommy up.  Much shrieking ensued as the flames comsumed this mean, mean child.

I got right on it, and forced the green-haired Timmy (the patriarch of the family, if indeed anyone could possibly have that title) to wake up and race into the backyard to hose down the flaming child.  Sadly, he was not in time, and Tommy had perished.  Timmy probably should have been worried about the now-violent-and-widespread forest fire tearing through his backyard, but instead he was pleading with the Grim Reaper to spare Tommy's sad, sad life.  It was terrible!  A child!  Burned to death without pity!  Completely oblivious to the conflagration going on around them, Timmy and the Grim Reaper played Rock-Paper-Scissors for Tommy's life.  Timmy won and the Grim Reaper agreed to resurrect Tommy.  Unfortunately he wasn't very observant and brought Tommy back right into the middle of the fire, so Tommy promptly burned to death again.  This brought a second Grim Reaper onto the scene, and Timmy confronted him about sparing Tommy's life.  Fortunately or un, when Timmy beat this Grim Reaper in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, everything in the backyard, including Flaming Moe, had been burned to the ground. So Tommy wasn't going to catch fire again.

He did, however, have to go to school immediately thereafter, and needless to say his grade point average didn't fare too well that day.

Some of my sim families are so widespread, that if said sibling, cousin or in-law came over to say "hi", my sim wouldn't have any idea who just said hi to him.

Although for most of them, it'd be as simple as "God damn, you're ugly.  You must be one of Grandpa's kids."

As well it should!

I've had kids go crazy at seeing their parents act romantically when one of the parents was cheating with an in-law.  Since any romantic interaction of either parent or the in-law would be viewed as betraying a relative, the kids got upset no matter the marital state of any of the participants.

In my game, Paulie and Billy are brothers, and Billy is married to Ophelia, who got a bit frisky with Paulie one day when the two of them were home alone.  Because of this, none of them can have any romantic interactions in front of Ophelia's and Billy's children or Billy and Paulie's sister.  If Ophelia kisses Billy, her sister-in-law and children view her and Billy as betraying Paulie.  If she kisses Paulie, they view her as betraying Billy.  If they see Paulie kissing his wife, they view him as betraying Ophelia.  Incredibly, even Billy joins in on this one.

Paulie's wedding was quite a blast.

I will report that happening to me.  I initially thought the EDS was bugged.  The sim vanished, but was still shown as using the EDS.   The EDS was idle, as if no one was using it.  After a while, he came back, and I think he showed up next to the EDS instead of actually in it, but I can't be sure.  Shortly thereafter, he was pregnant with an alien baby.

He had been abducted by aliens when he was a teen.

Just wanted to mention that for some reason my game doesn't recognize that cheat unless it's typed as "AgeSimsCheat".  In other words, it's case sensitive.

Either that or I was screwing something else up while typing in the cheat, which is always a possibility.

Use AgeSimsCheat On in your cheat box and then you can click on your sims and set them to any life stage you want.  (I don't remember if they can make themselves infants)  This cheat is new with Nightlife.

If by bad candidates for breeding, you mean their children would likely be ugly, they'd fit right in with the other kids born in my game.

On the plus side, it seems as if my recent sims have reversed the earlier trend I had.  Until recently, my sims would get uglier with each age transition, but now they start off fairly ugly and manage to become better looking with each birthday.  You can't imagine my relief when that happened to a girl with a big-ass nose and cheekbones sharp enough to slice cheese.

I do feel like putting together an "Ugliness through the Ages" story on my simpage.

Oh, and I haven't seen it in this thread or any of the linked threads, and in fact it was contradicted in some of the other threads, but I managed to revive Andromache Thebe in my game without using any external programs or hacks (beyond using the reward collection, of course).  I believe it was Contessa who was able to bring her back, but I had brought back Cordelia and Contessa before I brought Andromache, so add those two to the possible candidates.

To my understanding, you can randomly get skillups from either an outing or a date, and from my experience, the particular skill was determined by what skills your sim's date/outing partner had that were higher than your sim's.  It's a comparison of skills rather than personality traits.  If that's the case, that would help avoid going over 10 in any skill.

I don't think it's a hack conflict.  I think it's a bug.  She was a University NPC who moved in with one of my graduates and her major was not automatically set, which it has been for other Uni NPCs I've moved in.  This meant that even though she had 6 want slots and could lock two wants/fears, she couldn't get any of the University careers to show up either in the newspaper or on the computer.  When I used SimPE to change her major, that ability was restored.

Weirdly, I had a boy wearing the child's Harry Potter round glasses grow up to a teen and while he kept the glasses, they appeared to have melted into a weird wiggly oval shape.  It looked freaky and I changed them before I thought to take a screenshot.

Was this in response to my posting stating that my sim wasn't getting five job prospects from the computer?  I believe it was part of the bug issue I was discussing.  This is how it worked:

Sim A: College graduate with a named major
Sim B: Bugged college graduate with "Undeclared" major

If Sim B is the first sim checking for jobs that day, she gets five jobs offered, all of them pre-University careers.  However, if Sim A first checks the job offers on the computer and gets five, two of which are University careers, Sim B will only get three job offers when she looks for a job on the computer, the three pre-University career jobs.  She'll still get the icon for the last job of the five offered in the pop-up informing that no more jobs are available though.  For instance, if it's Business, Politics, Medicine, Show Business, Paranormal, she'll stop getting jobs after Medicine, but the icon in the pop-up will be Paranormal.

Yes, this fix works.  Thank you for your help.

However, the diploma doesn't have the major updated, and for some reason putting the thing back into her inventory didn't fix it.  I was able to get a new diploma with the major after deleting her first one and purchasing a second (when I had her selected) through a hacked career rewards collection.

I don't believe that the diploma reading improperly had any effect on her ability to get the new jobs, however, after I had set the major.

Is it only if the mother has the token that this can happen, or can two sims have twins if the father is the only sim to have said token?

Getting back to the original issue, I have a sim who was initially a University NPC student who moved in with her boyfriend, who had graduated from University.  She has all the bonuses of a regular graduate, the extra want slots and the ability to lock two, but she's not able to get any of the University careers.  I haven't been able to use the college adjuster or the lot debugger, and I assume this is because she has the extra slots and the ability to lock two wants.  She also has "Undeclared" as her major listed on her diploma, whereas the other few University NPC students I've moved in with adults have had majors assigned to them.

Does anyone know a fix that would enable her to browse the University careers?  I'm not looking for a hack that allows me to choose careers individually, instead just a fix that enables her to get them when she's searching for a job.  Oddly, when she looks for a job on the computer, she does not get five options when a graduate has already searched for jobs and discovered some of the University careers offered.