best way to make them know they're family?

[Sleepycat]

JeanMaas, Do you have Nightlife?

I ask because I use to use a hack for multi-pollitechs made by fwiffo on mts2, not sure if it works with NL (I know it does work with Uni)

[JeanMaas]

sleepycat, no i have no ep's yet. i'm about camping next to my mailbox because nl is on the way. i won it on al local forum, could take some time, so i problaby have to wait a bit more. thanks a lot. i'm sure going to look there, maybe it's updated. would that be something, a hood with only aliëns. oh my imaginatoin makes overtime. need to go to bed, my husband is about to get up for work.

thanks
jean

[Sleepycat]

JeanMaas - If you get tired of the green skintone for aliens you can try out the default replacement files I made

http://www.insimenator.net/forumdisplay.php?f=80 
their on page 2, I got tired of green aliens so now I switch colors every so often *laughs* 

[ZephyrZodiac]

There may be four PTs but I think there's one for each hood, plus PT9 and that's how they reach the count.  I know that I have one neighbourhood with quite a large number of alien children, and all of them have the same blood line and are all siblings.  I do have an alien who was abducted and had twins, so I'd have to load that hood to check everything out (don't want to close my game just yet and look in SimPE)  but I'll see what the family tree looks like in the game!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I loaded my old hood and tried to load the house, but it froze so I had to reboot (this may simply be that it's a Uni hood and I need to move families out and put them in new houses - hope that's all it is) so I went into SimPE and checked the Whyte family tree.

Well, Zack Whyte has two alien boys, Zen and Zeb.  Zen and Ianthe Blues had a daughter Iona who has a pale skin and is (one assumes) one quarter alien. 

Now comes the interesting part.  Zen goes and gets himself abducted twice and ends up with twin daughters, Zoe and Zena (I think) who are still kids. Now when I checked in Family Ties, they are both shown as siblings to Zen (along with all the other alien children in the hood) and in the Relationships panel they are checked as family and siblings again, so although Zack is recognised as Parent B of Zen, Zen is not recognised as Parent B of Zoe and Zena.

So much easier to make all aliens siblings than to put in a code to prevent children of the PT getting pregnant by him in the first place!  However, at another level I know the game recognises him as the parent, he's a knowledge sim and had all the usual knowledge sim wants about the twins, Teach to Talk, Walk  etc., I definitely remember that.

I actually only let him get abducted because (a) he was desperate to meet aliens and (b) I wanted to find out what would happen!

                             
                                                                         

[JeanMaas]

sleepycat - love what you made, i'm going to down the lot. i think in my story my aliëns wil get a rare dissease, turn white like micheal jackson and after that... btw, that make-up overthere is just what i was looking for    i'll post overthere. many thanks.

zz - that must be it, one PT for every hood. ha, you have it too. hum, probably it wil go on like that in every generation. grandparents wil be the siblings of their grandchildren. on the other hand, you could create an aliën thats about to be a clone of PT. don't think there wil be birthdefects due to inbreading.

hum, fun to try out, but i think maxis better go and think about this family-relation-stuf. well, if they can put in that females can't get pregnant, they would be able to put in that aliëns can't either. that can be done in the same routine. in fact i was very surprised that starman game back pregnant. nice though, but i didn't expect it. there is no diffence in the abdoctions at all, i think it would be nice if there was.

starman is a knowledge sim too, he looked as if he was in heaven when he game back, that was really great to see. don't know about his wants, i let veron grow up very fast, again, for my story. he is a child now. joy and stan are still baby's. all 3 are about to grow up again. then i will watch their wants closly. one strange thing is that the 3 adults don't realy are building up a relation with stan. hum, maybe it had something to do with his personality, oh dear.

thanks,
jean

[ZephyrZodiac]

well, if they can put in that females can't get pregnant, they would be able to put in that aliëns can't either. that can be done in the same routine.

Also teens and YSs of either sex can't get pregnant by abduction, so it really couldn't be that difficult to prevent the Pollination Technician committing incest!

[J. M. Pescado]

I suspect the PT code is bugged, if pollinatees are not properly displaying the PT anymore. I'll schedule an investigation.

[JeanMaas]

that would be great. i was just wondering why they don't use the routine that checks for family-relations. if this was ment to be, just because they are aliëns, it still sounds very strange to me.

jean

edit:
was looking at the hack sleepycat pointed out:
http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=71852&page=4&pp=25
they where talking about this one-parent-thing too, back in oct.
reading the threat they found that in simpe the missing parent isn't forgotten.
and that it even has happend where PT wassn't involved

[ZephyrZodiac]

JM, it would be great if you could find the problem and put it right!  (I know you will, of course!)

Well, I managed to find a working copy of the game my alien twins were in, (a back-up from before the hood became a bfbvfs) and I shall edit them so they know who their birth parent is!  Instead of loads of brothers and sisters, they can have loads of uncles and aunts, and just one big sister!  Since I know who's related to who, it doesn't really matter, I just shan't let my aliens intermarry anyway, even if they have a great-great uncle who's the same age!

[Oddysey]

I suspect the PT code is bugged, if pollinatees are not properly displaying the PT anymore. I'll schedule an investigation.

Yeah. I used to use that hack, the multi-PT thing, and really liked it, but something in NL sort of FUBAR'd it. Not nice. Don't know what, though, because the pre and post NL code in that section looks exactly the same. I could very easily be missing something, though.

[jennydeenyc]

I dunno if its the Multi PT hack that made the PTs disappear from family trees in NL, because I didn't have it installed when Christina was conceived and born, and she only shows Riley as her parent, no 2nd parent at all. I haven't checked her info in SimPE.

[JeanMaas]

on mts2 there was a discusion about it. they thought it wasn't. well, i don't have the hack.
well, today i downed it, but it is still zipped.

jean

[ZephyrZodiac]

I wouldn't mind so much if the PT was missing - I mean, it's fairly obvious anyway! But it's annoying when the one who goes through the birth (and just happens to be an alien/sim) is shown only as a sibling!

I also think an adoption hack where the spouse of the birth parent could adopt the child would be good!  (There probably is one already, but if so I haven't found it yet.)

[jennydeenyc]

That's a good idea ZZ! Hey, maybe they could tie it in with the Make Me Family With... one I requested, like a catch-all hacked object that deals with familial relationships without having to resort to InSim or SimPE 

[ZephyrZodiac]

Yes, something like a nice plant which is also decorative would be good!

[jennydeenyc]

Or a painting. I was thinking it could even feature a family-portrait-type image. As for the actual hacking, I'll leave that up to the experts!

[Sleepycat]

sleepycat - love what you made, i'm going to down the lot. i think in my story my aliëns wil get a rare dissease, turn white like micheal jackson and after that... btw, that make-up overthere is just what i was looking for    i'll post overthere. many thanks.

lol I just switched back to my white file too, if you want one of the better looking pollitech files you can grab it here http://mercury.walagata.com/w/sleepycat/newpollinationtechnician.zip  (I've gotten some really beautiful alien kids with it)
I couldn't find the thread for them at mts2, there was a couple posted in 1 thread and I only downloaded this one. I think it still works with NL (I know it worked with just TS2 and TS2/Uni) I haven't had a chance to try it out (my one sim to be abducted since I installed NL was to close to aging to elder to get pregnant)

I spent all day yesterday getting my new neighborhood started (decided to start fresh), just need to add a couple male knowledge sims so they can get abducted 

Edit - just found another nice PT at laverwinklesims
http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=17.0

[JeanMaas]

sleepycat - love the white one, somehow it does look different, most white skins i have seen are goth-like. i don't know excatly to put it into words. thank you for the new tp's, wonder how they look like, hopefully i can see them in cas. the tp on laverwinklesims looks realy nice. now i can make a hole lot of different aliëns. love to mix them with the 6 i have.

on mts2 they talked about it. some did have no problem after installing nl, some did. they reiinstalled the hack, after that it workt fine. well, that's what i understood.

i have to go back to my game, reorganise some things, test some things and install a lot new stuf. but for days i'm reading here, there is so many info. really great.

jean

[Sleepycat]

JeanMaas - after reading that multi-pollitech thread on mts2, I also got the impression that the multi-pollitech hack still works, you just don't see the "family" tie in the family tree anymore and the alien "siblings" are no longer related like they used to be, due to the changes in NL. 
I understand about my white skintone being different, not sure myself why, but I am pleased with how it looks in-game   

I really should go back to bed, only got a few hours of sleep *sigh*

[Oddysey]

It doesn't work last time I checked. First, it caused major issues involving a refusal to allow any sims to give birth, abducting the baby at birth, that sort of thing. Lately it just means that sims don't get pollinated when abducted.

If the no family tie thing was on purpose, to allow abducted sims to breed with each other, then I am seriously ticked off because I'd already had that problem fixed in my game, with eight pollination technicians (made some modifications to fwiffo's hack) and each one was different so I had a lot more variety in my alien populations. And it was actually kind of neat to have neighborhoods where most alien sims were unrelated, but occasionally one or two would have the same alien parent.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Stops all that clogging up of the memories for those sims too!  I might try it sometime.

[baratron]

Hey, just something else I noticed today, and I dunno if its the camera mod or not, or something about my resolution (1280x720), but I find that when I frame a snapshot in Camera Mode, the resulting picture generally has a good deal more vertical image captured than I see with what I'm framing. How much more seems to vary with the level of zoom I use. Lately I've started purposely correcting for this in my snapshot framing and its doing a world of good for my picture composition. Just thought I'd pass the info along...

Yep, I have that problem too. (My standard is 1280 x 800 on the laptop's own monitor, and 1280 x 768 on the external monitor). Basically, the camera only takes 4 x 3 shots, so if you use a widescreen setup, it'll never be right.

The video camera is even worse. If you use widescreen, what it does is compress your picture to 4 x 3, so the aspect ratio is wrong and it looks TERRIBLE. I find I have to switch to 1024 x 800 and select "Use square pixels" to get watchable videos.

[JeanMaas]

comming back on my 6 aliens we talked about. today i had my first session with simpe. tryed to gave two of them their second parent, because it was not in simpe visable eihter. messed up, put the backup back. tryed again with a little less complicated situation. the two in my avatar are added to my family with tombstone l and d, so they don't have family at all. now they are father and son, that's what they are supposed to be. i gave him also a teen-mum, created the same way.

tested in the game and now i can see in their relation-pic's that they are related. but it does not show up in their family-tree-thing. seems i can not change that with simpe. is there a way to do that or do i just have to wait until the thing refresses, due to aging or birth or something.

btw. with the aliens i tryed to set uncle and aunt, but that option was not there. go and try tomorow again. if possible i want them to have their birth-parent inthere. well, with two of them, one is suppost to be a clone of pt.

jean

[ZephyrZodiac]

You need to open the Family Ties menu, then it's quite easy to add the family ties that you want, and then the family tree should appear.