I had a "shower thought" (Grr at work for making me be up this early on a Saturday) and was wondering how many other players have a naming tradition based on the circumstances of the Sim's birth. I personally use Constellation names for Sims born from alien abduction, and recently started using flower names for plant babies born from the "grow a plantbaby" option.

Anyone else do something similar?

I like to use heirloom names. I also use holidays and family birthdays. In addition, the first births of each months carry, in order, the month, the flower of the month, the birthstone of the month, the season, and what book in the Bible I'm studying as the month begins.

I LOVE the constellation idea for alien babies, though. I might just steal that one.

In my medieval hood I use elven names for my princes, princesses, lords and ladies, since they come from elven heritage. (So do the merchants and peasants, but they are in closer relations with them.) The peasants and merchants use medieval swedish names. In my old legacy family I reversed the genders, so boys had girls names and vice versa. In another legacy I used names from TV shows. I have a sim named Ellinor Vihdri (a misspelling of the word "disgusting" in Swedish) who tries to have a baby with every guy she meets (she shoots those who refuse with an assault rifle) and then have the babies taken away by the social worker. The babies are named different words for "unwanted", birth defects and abortion methods. I could go on. It's fun to have different "naming traditions", although that may not be what you had in mind.

I also use constellation names for alien babies. With my plantsims, I name females after flowers and males after trees.

Forgot I meant to respond to this, until I opened up my phone and saw a half written reply! Don't feel bad asking about my game--what are the forums for, if not to talk about our games?


As for baby names, I don't always have a particular convention, but sometimes, especially for premades, I like to look at their family tree and rename the newer generations after their ancestors. Like Brandi Broke named one of her younger sons Bobby after her dad and Angela Pleasant named her son Jeff after her grandfather. And when Malcolm Landgraab IV finally had a son a little while ago, of course he named him Malcolm, too, to keep the family tradition going. Though I think I might call him Col for short. But other than that, I don't have a particular name scheme--I just try to make sure no sim has the same name as another.

My aliens are usually named after famous scientists, sci-fi characters, or green (as in Hunter, Kelly, Olive etc.). Plant babies get plant names.

My plant babies also get plant names. Aliens usuall get named after constellations, famous scientists, planets/stars/moons or "Fetusoid" (a name I made up for alien sims when I was 9)

TS2 devs apparently never heard of ice fishing.

I quite often change toddlers' clothes, but I very rarely change anything else. When they grow up to child, I might change their hair, and I'll sometimes put glasses on children who seem destined for the Knowledge aspiration, but that's about it. As for make-up, pretty much the only Sims with make-up in my hoods are criminals, who have some kind of face make-up as an identifying tattoo - the style of 'tattoo' denotes the nature of the crime. I did recently discover the 'make-up' that allows elders to look older, though, so I might use that if I remember.

Its a pain in the butt to try to look for something you don't know if there is an official name for, and what you call it to yourself is not getting the Sims 2 CC results you want.

That's why you post pics on WCIF.

NAMES: Have to add my 2cents...I have a note pad of names; some SOUND like names, some are "appropriate", some are just wood-play. Used to make green-skinned frogs (Tad Soggybottom), aliens (stars, constellations,etc), CARS (Bently,etc), states, wine, food, plants. Actual Oriental, Indian, Jewish, & Italien names. Names for upper-crust & the opposite (I actually knew a Weems and a Waldo). Some last names just REQUIRE a first name that matches: Lake, River, and Ray Fisher. My "Back" family, Stan, Helen, and Hunch. My "Cheese" family, Kareem & Jack. Walter Mellon, Hedda Lettuce. hahaha

I put the CH adjustable canvas on my simsfileshare. Could someone please check and make sure it's okay?
http://simfileshare.net/folder/67039/

It's okey! (Opened in SimPE )

Whenever I compare the sims 2 with 1,3 and 4 I always reach the conclusion that the sims 2 is the best game. The reason for this is mainly because of the ways that neighbourhoods are managed because the game doesn't require one save game where you only play as one household all the time, this allows you to play all your other sims whenever you want. But I think the reason why I keep coming back to the TS2 is because the neighbourhood creator is better than CAW in TS3. TS3's CAW isn't user friendly and on top of that, story progression is broken and open world doesn't always feel the best. This is why I prefer the second game the most, it's about the creativity and interactivity especially for players that just want to make their own neighbourhoods and stories in a simple fashion

Someday I will be able to keep up with my legacies and uberhoods projects. Someday...

I use plant names for plantbabies, but regular Sims are either named for a grandparent or get the next name from my name list (or almost the next name; sometimes I might skip one or two, if there's another name near the top that fits better with the surname). The name list is just authors of books I've been reading, so when I cross one name off, I add another according to what I'm reading. Sometimes this means a name enjoys a brief surge of popularity, if I'm using a textbook on and off over four months.

Aliens born to regular Sims are named in the same way, but when the dice finally allow a new alien colony to arrive they will take their names from sci-fi TV shows, with ships' names as surnames. This is because they are usually designated by rank and number on their homeworld, and don't really know many human names or how human names work. So the captain of the first ship to arrive will be Supreme Commander Servalan Liberator, and hir crew and passengers (they're all hermaphrodites) will all have the same last name, whether or not they're related. No doubt they will eventually get the hang of it and start selecting from a wider range of names, unless they revert to alphanumeric designations, but the first generation or two will be named this way.

I sometimes name my alien sims after characters from science fiction shows like Babylon 5 or Star Trek.

Aliens born to regular Sims are named in the same way, but when the dice finally allow a new alien colony to arrive they will take their names from sci-fi TV shows, with ships' names as surnames. This is because they are usually designated by rank and number on their homeworld, and don't really know many human names or how human names work. So the captain of the first ship to arrive will be Supreme Commander Servalan Liberator, and hir crew and passengers (they're all hermaphrodites) will all have the same last name, whether or not they're related. No doubt they will eventually get the hang of it and start selecting from a wider range of names, unless they revert to alphanumeric designations, but the first generation or two will be named this way.[/QUOTE]

Obviously, you are required to tell me about the alien colony thing. :3 It sounds like a lot of fun. Do you actually create the group of aliens and stick them on a lot?

That's the plan, yes, using the CAS alien skins. I'm currently playing Sims and PlantSims as two different species with different cultures and roles to play in their merged society. There are also aliens 'out there', trying to find a safe place to live as their home planet is becoming uninhabitable. The Sim king is naturally very worried about their incursions (he doesn't know they're fleeing certain death and assumes they're planning an invasion), and Sims who have been abducted are exiled to the Sedona desert as traitors. Eventually, the aliens will successfully land a ship and the PlantSim Matriarchs, hearing their story, will persuade the king to let them stay in Sedona, where the PlantSims will keep an eye on them. What neither race knows is that PlantSim and alien were originally one species, who came to their two different planets during a much earlier diaspora. They think their cultures are very different, but there are underlying similarities, too.

Of course, all this supposes that I'm actually able to keep the game going for several years, which I've never managed before!

Wow! Sounds great. I don't think it would work in my hoods, but man that does sound like fun.

The last time my hood went kablooey, I took all my notes and index cards and recreated all the sims in a new hood. The story was that they had a nuclear attack from another hood, and the people were refugeed to some land their country had already conquered. The radiation explained why I was not able to recreate their appearance. I didn't even try to do that. I was able to get most of my families back together, though, and I picked right back up where I was.

@ BlueAlien

Best of Luck in having a long lived Neighborhood. Your set up has some similarities to my own game. I created several different Aien groups in CAS and I have a Story Line in which the various Alien groups came here as Colonists, intending to slowly take over by Interbreeding, first Strangetown and then all of the other 'hoods eventually is their aim.

I don't have but one PlantSim at this point, but I figure I might eventually have some more PlantSims, as I do like the one that comes with the game.

Anyway I like your story line.

I've been putting it off for a while since I haven't been played a modern, non-fantasy, non-themed hood for about a year or so, but I think I managed to edit everything required to put those economies to my scale. The last time I played one, a sim in an NPC career had a salary that surpassed a university graduate's EAxis career pay in a way that didn't make sense because I edited the EAxis careers and forgot to do the same with the other money-making activities. I don't mind hardworking sims getting more money than a slacker university graduate, yet the scale was seriously off to me. I like the more reasonable changes so far, at least.

In other news, my friend wondered why my game had much less lag than his and asked me to check his out. Well, besides the sheer amount of CC which resulted in us waiting 30 minutes for his heavy-duty computer to even load to the neighborhood selection screen, he had numerous hairs that were nearly 45, 000-poly with 45 different textures and tops and bottoms that were around 10, 000-poly each. I told him that if he wanted to have a non-stop-motion live mode again, he was going to have to do some serious clean-up.

That was how we spent the first time we met up in ages overhauling his downloads folder, in which there were several, "Dude, you can't delete that hair!", "What are these number strings?", "Woah, I didn't know I even had that!", "What are these invalid shortcut files doing inside your folder?" and "These are recolors for an item you don't have a mesh for."

Ah, the trials and tribulations of cleaning up CC folders.

Did you use Delphy's Organizer? I found that super helpful for this, because I sorted by size. Then, it became clear which files were so huge and I could tell what type they were so it made deleting them easy. I was shocked to find that the largest file I had was, literally, a pile of manure - for a farm set. Needless to say, I did not need a super poly pile of cr@p in my game... DELETE!

Unfortunately, we couldn't since we didn't have access to the internet at the time and couldn't download it, so you can imagine us manually and painstakingly going through every single folder! I'm just glad that he had SimPE at the very least. He said I was absolutely brutal too, yet we had no choice if we wanted more than what felt like 1/2 FPS.

I remember when I had to cull my folders the first time; it was especially painful with the male CAS items because they don't have as much to begin with and many of the new ones I wanted were too high-poly to survive the cut. I'm sorry, Amazingly High Poly Short Hair #5, it just wasn't mean to be. I'll keep you in my storage for the impossible possibility that I will one day learn to lower poly counts and maybe, one day, we can be together again.