Sunday 27 February 2005

Pic of the day: The greatest of miracles is love, but "boolprop TestingCheatsEnabled true" can also help out in a pinch.

Sims2 miracle mode

The new, generational neighborhood is certainly taking its time. For someone with a job and various other hobbies, I can easily see it taking months or a year or more. Not that I am likely to stick with any one project for that long. (Apart from eating, drinking, journaling and other essentials.)

One of the first roadblocks came already with the first child of the second generation. The plan was to marry off the kids to "townies", the system-generated Sims that don't live in any of the neighborhoods but wander through them looking for company or take a job at the local shops. Presumably the system would generate new townies when an old one dies, if not already when they marry. Having played various neighborhoods on various computers, I am starting to know the townies pretty well, so I should be able to notice the newcomers easily and see if they are randomly generated or reprints of the old ones. Well, my Sims also have an opinion on this. It is their lives, after all!

So as a teen, Desiree brought home a classmate. He was cute, polite, and the two of them got along right well. So I thought, why can't Sims marry their high school sweethearts too? The problem is that Sims grow up to adults, townie teens don't. Like some kind of Peter Pan, they remain fixed at their present age while generations pass by. So I looked for a way to free them from their limbo, take them in from the cold, you name it. I found a forum where this topic was discussed, and there was a way I could do it without downloading any extra software. The way to do this was using the cheat "boolprop TestingCheatsEnabled true".

A word of warning: Testing cheats are very powerful, you are basically in sandbox mode, able to create and delete at will. Normally you play as a kind of guardian angel, pushing your Sims around. You don't mess with the very fabric of reality, except when you create a new Sim. Here you do. Want the babies to grow up NOW? No problem. But this not only totally ruins the fun of the game, it also makes it unstable. So exercise great caution. I only keep the cheat enabled for the seconds it takes to make the necessary changes, then turn it false again.

***

Anyway, I invited Aksel (the young boy) over, enabled testing cheats and shift-clicked on Desiree, and chose "spawn tombstone of L&D". Then clicking on the tombstone, I chose "add Aksel to family". That was it. Normally you cannot invite teens to join a family, much less townie teens. But it worked. I turned off the cheat, saved the game, and moved the family to a larger house.

Aksel fit right in. With an excessively high neatness, he actually enjoys cleaning – you could see his fun meter slowly improving as he trawled the house cleaning toilets and tabletops. And Desiree was the light of his life, the object of all his wishes most of the time, so he was easy to keep happy. Sim teens cannot woohoo, which is a welcome change from the real world, so basically I let the two of them share a room and do whatever they wanted.

But as time passed, a new problem arose. Aksel was still immune to aging. Desiree was almost grown-up, and he was still at the beginning of his teen. This was getting awkward. Each afternoon at 18:00, the rest of the family would age one day, but not he. In fact, he risked being overtaken by the next sister (there are three so far), who was slated to become a teen the same evening that Desiree grew up.

More studying of testing cheats. There turned out to be one shift-click option for aging up to birthday. So just before his beloved was about to level up, I aged him as well. They still don't level up automatically like other Sims, I had to click on him and choose "grow up". (You can do that after turning off cheat mode.) Their romance flag was reset when they grew up, but he must somehow have retained the memories, because the next morning he wished to flirt with her. (They were still best friend.) And soon things were back to normal between them, with one exception: The woohoo wish was in! Success! I moved them out and they got their own little home. No kids yet, but I don't doubt that will work as well. And time has started to move for him as well. He now ages automatically like any other Sim.

I think mortality is worth it. At least for a Sim. ^_^