I've been searching everywhere but I can not find the thread that I KNOW exists on how to do this, I know it exists as I referenced it 3 years ago when I had to do this to a previous custom hood of mine, but now I can't find it, and I don't remember how to do it off the top of my head. I need to make consistent sim names across all languages for my custom hood, so if anyone who's playing in another language (or even just US english vs UK english) downloads it, it won't be randomized in their game. Could anyone either direct me to the thread about this, or if it's gone missing entirely, remind me how to do it? Thank you!

Just delete the names in the other languages in the CTSS in the character file.

Wouldn't that cause the opposite (the unwanted randomization) to happen since the game has nothing to reference now for the languages? I'm confused, could you elaborate why this would work?

https://modthesims.info/d/673111/re...ighbohoods.html

I think this is it?

The creator of the hood could open each character file in SimPE Go to Catalogue Description
And click US English only

It definitely does work.

Checking with a downloaded neighborhood that I know has this problem, the sim I looked at has random names filled in all languages. Amanda Gervasoni, Christel Gier, Celia Carron, Carole Desmarais, ... So the randomized names are already in the files before you load the neighborhood in your game. I pulled this from a backup copy of the unplayed downloaded neighborhood, exactly as I got it from MTS2. Presumably any German player downloading this neighborhood would have a sim named Christel Gier in their game instead of what they're actually supposed to be called.

Meanwhile, in a neighborhood I'm currently playing, the downloaded sims have only the English text string and everything else is empty, which is why their names display properly in my German game. A born in game sim in the same neighborhood has two text strings filled in, English and German, anything else is empty. Both the English and German texts are identical.

Checking a neighborhood I created ingame, my sim looks like the first example. Poor Laurent is also named Konrad, Coen, Cosme, Conrad, etc.

This part is just me theorizing, but I think this is related to the thing where a sim is already given a name during creation in CAS. You can see this when forcing an error on them with testing cheats enabled. So the sim I named Laurent was given a randomized default name (presumably Konrad) for every language the game exists in, then I changed it to Laurent during character creation. If anybody were to download this neighborhood and play in a different language, their sim would have one of the randomized names.

That also explains why sometimes the names don't match the sim's gender, in this case the randomized initial sim was of a different gender than the finalized sim.

If a string is empty for a given language, the game just uses the English string instead. So yes, deleting all of the other language strings will result in the sim using the same name in every language. For some reason, when you create sims in CAS, the game gives them completely random names in all of the other languages. I don't know why it does this.

I think this is the method I was looking for, thank you!

So... actually I have a new issue related to this, I'm not able to open any sims character files in SimPE for this hood, I think it might have to do with being a university subhood, but every time I try to open a character file for it, I get an error pop up that says "could not find file" and then the SimPE\Data\hoods.xml file path. Is there a way to fix this, or is it just broken due to being set as a subhood type?

Aaaand never mind, it was an issue with my version of SimPE missing the hoods.xml file, downloading a copy of that file and adding it to my SimPE download makes the character files work, nothing to do with the subhood type