William just released a Toddler Character Changes mod for this on Pick'N'Mix Mods. And it is completely customizable too.

Thanks @Corax I already had the link from William, but haven't had chance to test it yet due to being away from home for the day. Very exciting, how marvellous that someone can code something like that just from a conversation we had on here! :lovestruc

I did another tv channel test for the sims, this time they turned out great and they look really good on our sims tvs.
Although this is still a test, since I did not get the volume right. (Many clips require a higher volume.) I guess I'll edit it another day. xD
I also want to make my own videos, but at the moment I'm only editing trailers, since I always thought they had a lot of footage that was ideal for our sims' TVs. (Though I did one about Dina shooting Bella and another about a pregnant sim working out xD).
In this version I have not included trailers with the logo of the game, since I wanted to think of something to cover them, I suppose a logo in simlish or something like that. (They already have low quality to reduce it more xD).
I leave the links in case you want to try them, they work very well in Commercials folder, but you can also distribute them in other channels. I'm waiting to have more to start putting them in different folders.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/oysg...2%2529.rar/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/4tfs...2%2529.rar/file

@Corax i just spent some time customizing my copy of ToddlerCharacterChanges and loading game to test. Really cool!

@Sokisoms Downloading these, excellent!

Thanks @simsample :lovestruc !! I've seen that there are some clips that aren't completely cut, but I'm on the right track, I hope to upload the good version soon. ^^ I love the sony vegas radio effect for the audio, it's quite similar to the original channels of the game. Hopefully more people make custom channels!!

@simsample That's awesome! What different kind of drawbacks did you go for when sims don't learn the different toddler skills?

@Corax I have neatness personality and bladder motive penalty for not potty training, and active personality and energy motive penalty for not learning to walk. Talking gives charisma skill and social motive boost for learning, and learning the nursery rhyme gives creativity skill and playfulness personality gains for learning. All relative, so I think that means they get proportional loss/gain for partial learning. Have it in-game but haven't reached the household with toddler yet. Are you playing with it, and if so, what tuning are you using?

@simsample Woah, you went all in with two changes per skill! In your game the stakes are quite high now for learning those skills.
I haven't played with it yet but I'm planning to. The way I understood it, correct me if I'm wrong, the mod comes pre-tuned with William's settings. In that case I would just use the mod with his settings for a while and go from there to figure out what penalties/rewards work best for me. Because I know I'd have a really hard time figuring out what to tune beforehand. I'm especially wary of personality changes because so far I tended to teach most toddlers walking, talking, and potty. So I think I definitely won't add a personality point gain for learning one of these skills anytime soon. Not unless I start to teach toddler skills only when a household member rolls the want to teach a specific skill.

@Corax Yes if I remember correctly from when I was editing the file, it's set up as per the example on the download page. I'm going to have my sims teach the one toddler I currently have some skills, to see if it all works correctly, but I usually only teach them if they roll wants (and I always used to prioritise potty training, as it was the one which helped with day-to-day living!).

@simsample When you say you usually only teach them if they roll wants do you mean everyone except the toddler?
Because in my game the toddlers always roll wants for all four skills. And as soon as learn one they roll for the next one. And since I usually play wants-based, almost all my toddlers end up learning everything.

@Corax Yes, I usually wait until both participants have rolled the want, otherwise I leave them on freewill! So if toddler rolls want to learn nursery rhyme, I'll usually lock it and wait to see if anyone in the family has the want to teach it. It's my new playing style with my new hood, with my old hood I did what I felt like at the time!

@simsample That actually sounds like a great way to do it! I think I'll try that as well, the ultimate wants-based gameplay. And if that works for me, I can even start considering personality changes as a reward for learning these skills. Thanks!

@Corax With my old hood, everyone had secondary aspirations, everyone had all the lifetime aspiration perks, everyone had the best beds and the best stoves. It meant that all sims were permanently happy, well rested and with slow motive decay, and permaplat. It was fine, but a tad boring, so I decided that the secondary aspirations were out, and so were the lifetime aspiration benefits. If sims have a want, such as get a promotion, then I can have them skill or make friends to fulfill that, but otherwise I only skill them if they want it, and sims only have babies if both parties want one. I did have two sims try out kestrellyn's surrogacy mod when they both wished to adopt, though!
They start off with the basic houses I build, and then it's up to the sim to want a better bed or a bubble blower or whatever. I see a lot more 'constructive' autonomous behaviour like cooking or painting, rather than constant annoying each other or fighting like I had in my old hood. It seems to be only the really grouchy sims who pick fights now! So it's a lot more interesting to watch- when sims were always all in the green, they just did trifling things like congratulating each other or smelling the flowers all the time!
So having a permanent motive penalty for not learning to walk or potty train sounds interesting, I'm just not sure if I've done the rate too high! I might be breeding a neighbourhood of incontinents.

@simsample Wow, that is really interesting! I know Maxis probably didn't intend to make a social commentary with this game. But after hearing an account like this, it almost feels like they did.
I'm especially tempted to try out starting off with a basic house and then let their wants take the reins for further upgrades. On that note, do you see a trend in your hood that fortune sims have better houses/furniture than sims with other aspirations?

So far yes, but it's early days for this hood, my founder sims are still having kids!

That's the way I'm playing my game now-if one or the other does not actively want one, the birth control (ACR) stays on and the possibility is 30% (default) for pregnancy.

It keeps down the numbers of children, and I only go for 2 at the most in most families-however, in my medieval hood, I've had to make sure each family has a boy and maybe a 'spare' for the family name to be carried on. I do have the "Triplets and Quads" hack so one family had plenty of both sexes at the same time.

Then the birth control stayed on and no more babies for that family!

The number of kids discussion is interesting because I've been experimenting/playing with the ACR settings.



In general, I enjoy mods that allow for spontaneous variety in sim behaviour. I do not like all my sims to behave the same. It's interesting to watch when they are all different. I tend to play a combination of wants, my own idea of what the story for them is, and lots of mini-challenges!

In terms of toddler skills, my toddlers get 8 days so they can have a maximum of 0-8 days until the next age up, but personality has 0-10 points, so I use this. Personality (Outgoing/Active) value [-2] means "At this many days left, you may start teaching this skill" and personality value +2 means "At this many days left, the toddler MUST be taught this skill" By must, I mean, if there is a teen or older on the lot who is not passing out, starving etc they may only teach the toddler instead of doing anything else. Having a RL toddler right now who constantly wants to work on walking instead of doing more reasonable things, like eating or sleeping, I find this to be realistic (ish. Ideally they would learn to walk and talk by themselves.) Potty training is half neat points +1, so they can never be taught potty training before being 2 years old, but there's no max on it since I tend to do that more slowly. I don't use smart milk.

This has the dual effect of varying the speed and whether or not toddlers get taught the skills, and also making toddlers more challenging, since you can usually neglect them in game with absolutely no consequences at all, as long as you throw a bottle at them occasionally.

Once they have their skills I dress them more like toddlers than babies, and they are allowed to graduate to a toddler bed that they can get in and out of by themselves.

I wonder if there's any of the sets or filming locations from Scorsese's film "Goncharov" (1973) that would work well recreated for TS2...

Go for it, Zarathustra! If anybody can recreate that villa, with all its weird nooks and secret passages, you can!

I have a sim who's had children twice with two different mothers, both time resulting in twins. I thought it made perfect sense since he's a twin himself, as is his father and aunt, until I realized that since they're Strangetown-sims recreated in CAS from old Pleasantview-sims, the game doesn't actually know that twins run in that family. But I looked in SimPE and the mother of his second two children has a pregnancy modifier token, while in the case of the first birth, I accidentally had the mother of those children eat cheesecake while she was pregnant. So it's just one big coincidence.

Keep thinking that...but pixels have a way of knowing better...

Taking over Strangetown one, I mean two, twins at a time.

Inspiration struck me yesterday for another medieval fantasy location comprising part of the same world as my Westfall/Stormwall locations. These lots usually don't do too well compared to my more contemporary locations (Stormwall's featured status notwithstanding), but I love figuring out the shared fantasy universe (I want to eventually be able to use it as a setting for D&D campaigns as well) and this one will let me start officially figuring out some of the cultural and aesthetic elements of the Adev south of Westfall which is so far still only in my head, so my inner world-building nerd is happy even if my download statistics nerd isn't!

I've been adding historical content and defaults to make my game match the time period of my Pleasantview town how it was on being originally founded back in the turn of the 17th century.I've got Pleasantview ancestors coming to live as coloonial settlers in Pleasant Valley which was Pleasantview's original name for it's first 320 years of history.One of the sets of ancestors for the Goth family arrived and taken their homestead.

Well, today's the day! It's ten years ago today since I started to play The Sims 2 for the first time. I had spent a few weeks reading the little manual that came with my copy of Double Deluxe, and I had played the Tutorial with Tutorial Joe, but this was the first time I was playing "for real". I opened Veronaville, went into CAS and made a teenage boy and called him Andrew. And, when the game wouldn't let me save him on his own, I made a mother for him and called her Gloria. Then I moved them into a little house at the end of Chorus Court. . .

. . . And they blew me away. I think I was in love with both of them within minutes. I had fairly high expectations of this game I had bought, but the reality of it far exceeded all I had imagined. These were real characters with real personalities, and I just couldn't help caring about them, as they obviously cared for each other. . .

So today I'm celebrating ten years of life in Veronaville. Ten years in which I have somehow kept all my Sims with me. I don't know we managed it in the early days, when I still had so much to learn about this game, but somehow we came through it, and I've never seen a Sim die in my game. The Grim Reaper has never made an appearance. I grew very close to Andrew as I felt we were learning how to play this game together. Of course he was in it even more than me -- it was his whole life. . .

I've got some Real Life things to do at my church this morning, but I plan to spend the afternoon and evening with Andrew and Gloria, and their respective husbands as they're both married now. They'll have their Thanksgiving Meal, no doubt cooked by Andrew. Ten years of peace and relative prosperity is a lot to give thanks for. I'm sure we'll have a great time together. :lovestruc