How to Fix Cheerleaders

[Greg]

How to Fix Cheerleaders Who Been Converted to Playable Characters

I can attest that cheerleaders who have been converted to playable sims do tend to go back to their bizarre personalities and animal costumes. The allegation that they run around cheering after they grow up to be adults appears to be a complete fabrication, however; I cannot duplicate the phenomenon.

Edit: Bad news. The easy approach of just changing the character's age twice might not work. There may not be any way around having to use SimPE to change the NPC type to 0x0000. (See my note #8 below.)


The good news is that it's mind-bogglingly easy to fix:

1. Without having to quit your game, use the Insimenator to change the sim to a child or toddler, then immediately back to adult. (Just spawn the Temoral Adjuster and use it to select the sim's age, twice.) The sim should be a regular playable sim after that.
2. Check the sim's personality and adjust as required. (You can do this with the Insimenator's Personality Adjuster or use the Testing Cheats.)
3. Check the sim's college progress meter. If you see it as red but the sim has all the required skills, just have the sim Declare Major. That will fix it.
4. Change your sim back to the normal clothes you want.

Total time for this procedure: About 1 minute per sim.


Or, if for some unfathomable reason you don't yet have the Insimenator:

1. Download the Insimenator.
2. Install it.
3. Remove the bazillions of buggy, game-crashing hacks that the Insimenator replaces.
4. Restart your game.
5. Go back to the above procedure and take a minute to fix your sim.

Total time for this procedure: About 20 minutes, one time, to install the Insimenator. Hunting down all those other hacks depends on how big of a mess you've made of your game.


Or, if for even more unfathomable reason you don't want to install the Insimenator and really enjoy suffering, you can use SimPE to do it hard way:

1. Quit your game.
2. Start SimPE.
3. Back up your neighborhood.
4. Open the character file.
5. Change Sim Description > Other > NPC type to 0x0000. (Makes it a regular playable sim.)
6. Delete all extra BHAV's except init, main and load.
7. Save the character file.
8. Quit SimPE.
9. Restart your game.
10. Check your character as above.
11. Thoroughly test all sim behaviors in your game to make sure you didn't make a mess.

Total time for the SimPE method: About two hours per sim.

[shorty943]

Duly copied and saved. Thank you.

[Miros1]

You might also want to drag their Outgoing down a bit. I'm pretty sure that's what lets them (and any other Sim with astronomical Outgoing) run into people's houses and make themselves at home.

[Greg]

Yeah, that's what Step 2 was about--check the sim's personality. The cows have 10 outgoing and 10 playful, and zero in everything else. It's just the opposite of almost all the other characters in my game.

While I was testing things I found a college professor who falls in love with everybody he meets. He apparently is designed to be an obnoxious jerk. I might have tuned him up in SimPE but I introduced him to Greaper instead. Happy Valley University would not tolerate a creep like that; neither would the city. Unfortunately there's no way to move a jerk out of town short of the boneyard.

[Miros1]

Yeah, that's one of the drama profs. He likes to knock on people's doors. My Sims ignore him; fortunately, his Outgoing isn't high enough to allow him to walk in.

One of my Sims accidentally got romantically involved with the female version. Took her home to meet the parents and she jumped into Dad's (Castor Nova) arms! Much slapping and poking ensued and I had to move them into their own house to get their relationship back where it needed to be to get married.

If you're using this procedure on other NPC Sims, such as drivers, you may also need to copy the Init, Main, and Load routines from a CAS or born-in-game Sim.

[Zirconia Wolf]

Just out of the old curiousity...how do you get drivers "into" the game as playable?

[Miros1]

You zoom in on them in the car and find out what their names are. Then you use the Teleporter to get them to visit so you can make friends. Then you marry them and discover you don't have any interactions with them.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Zirconia Wolf

Just out of the old curiousity...how do you get drivers "into" the game as playable?

Teleport them into the lot so that your sims can meet them. I use Inge Jones's Teleporter Painting from SimLogical out of habit but the Insimenator's "The Summoner" works just as well.

I have only converted one driver to playable by inviting her to join the household. She got married and almost everything worked, but her husband could not initiate any romantic interactions with her. They have a happy life because she is always wanting to do things with him, but his desire to give her a backrub goes unsatisfied to this day.

Some even worse news: I thought I had fixed the cheerleaders, but when I went to visit another lot, Melanie (Kody) Thayer showed up in her cow costume. Her personality was messed up, too. She was just a regular visitor, not doing Contentious Cow pranks.

She did walk in uninvited but I had neglected to turn off Auto-Invite on the DMA Sims controller so that wasn't a good test of Rose's theory about sims with a high outgoing score.

I used the DMA Sims controller to change her outfit to "Everyday" and that worked. She switched from the cow costume to her regular clothes.

All this means that there might be no solution short of SimPE, at least until someone writes an NPC-fixer hack. It appears that you do have to get rid of the extra BHAV functions, and might have to copy the Init, Main, and Load from a regular playable sim. Darn, darn, darn!

[Miros1]

<suppresses the urge to snicker loudly>

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Miros1

<suppresses the urge to snicker loudly>

What is there to snicker about?

[Miros1]

That was my indelicate way of saying Told ya!

[Greg]

Oh. I must have missed it when it went past.

I'm thinking that there is probably no possible hack that could fix these characters with the game running because it would require deleting the BHAV code.

[Zirconia Wolf]

Oh fiddlefaddle!!

I'm currently stuck in "SimPE Limbo" as it's not compatable with H&M Fashions & I'm 99% sure there won't be an update untill Bon Voyage (which I will of course snap up) is released.

So my current plans for Sim tweaking & object cloneing are on hold for the time being.

(Note to self: do not let any college kids mary the cheerleader yet!)

[Miros1]

1) The NPCs you'll be using this on are screwy anyhow. What's to lose?
2) BACKUP.
3) Open the neighborhood browser to find out what User_xxx.package file the Sim is in. Write this down, especially if working on multiple Sims. Also write down the filename of a playable Sim.
4) Close the hood, although you can open the Sim from the neighborhood screen. We're doing this S/W-Engineer-way.
5) BACKUP the Sim's file (User_xxx.package).
6) Open the playable's file with SimPE.
7) Extract the 3 BHAVs.
8) Close the file.
9) Open the NPC's file.
10) Delete all BHAVs.
11) Import the BHAVs from #7.
12) You backed up, didn't you? If not, this is your last chance.
13) Click Commit if necessary, then Save.

Or you could zip up the NPC Sim after step 4 and ship it to me...

Well, I'm off to re-dress all the gardner girls in overalls without shirts...

[Zirconia Wolf]

Does this work with Drivers too or only Cheerleaders??

(You're right: they're already defective so I think I'll give it a go...)

[Greg]

The ultimate solution is probably to copy a bunch of stuff from a real character over the existing character's stuff. We need a detailed procedure for this. Anybody feeling like writing an illustrated tutorial?

[Miros1]

That's something to work on tomorrow when I'm awake...

[Greg]

I was awake once. It was unpleasant. I don't recommend it.