I mean in the cut scene where the parent is with their child on the university lot that you move into and they age up and everything. I like that cut scene, but the problem is, sometimes the game picks the parent that doesn't make any sense, like they have no relationship with their child and aren't even playable because they were just a townie sperm donor or their mom's one-night fling, or something. Is there a mod that does something like always pick the parent the child has the best relationship with, or never pick a non-playable parent, or something?

The parent selected is always the one with the lower ID number; and if that parent is alive, but not available (is a PT, as the most common example), you just get no one in the cut scene, as if the student were an orphan.

Since this is the same mechanic that has vacation towies coming home from school with children, and that's been modded, it may be possible to mod this, but I don't know of one.

...Can you change a sim's ID?

If you move your student into a dorm that already has another playable you won't get a cutscene at all. or you can turn cutscenes off.

Yes, I know, but a) I like the cut scene, and b) I usually try to merge all my college-age sims together in a Greek house, and I can't very well move new YAs into a Greek house directly.

Peni Griffin, what do you mean? That's surely not the same function, and I already have a hack that changes who children bring home from school.

Rosebine, I really doubt it, since the neighbor ID is part of the name of the character file.

I said that as I doubt it can be modded out. It certainly hasn't been done as far as I know.

Well, I think I found the place where this is decided, so I may just mod it myself. Testing it will probably be a pain in the ass, but oh well.

Sorry not to be clear - I'm not a programmer, but I'm married to one, and have gotten pretty good at asking the right kinds of stupid questions when he's griping about something that's not working, so I sometimes both come across as more techie than I am, and say completely off-the-wall and misleading things, at the same time. By "same mechanic," I meant that, when bringing friends home from school, the game is more likely to choose from lower ID numbers. That's a random chance, not an either/or choice, so it's clearly not the same code. But I was thinking that if both processes refer to the ID numbers, and if the mod for one redirects that reference to another criterion, then it might theoretically be possible to redirect the choice of which parent drops the kid off. You'd have to both redirect the choice from the ID number to the relationship score, and reverse the criterion, so that the higher number is chosen.

I have no idea whether it's possible or not, and was in "helpful stupid questions" mode when I said that, which is the wrong mode to be in here.

For my own part, I had to deal with this continually during my Uberhood Challenge, since every babymama but one had a lower ID number than my protagonist, but I just made story out of it. In some Widespot games, this is where some of the Widespot Four find out who their biological fathers are.

Ahh, I see. Well, it doesn't quite work that way, there is no universal sim-choosing function. The reason the parent with the lowest ID is chosen is because in order to find the parents the game iterates over the entire hood in order of ID and uses the first suitable parent returned for the cinematic. The choice of children to bring home from school might also involve iterating over the hood, I don't actually know, but no one can change how the game iterates over sims because that's a hard coded primitive function.

Huzzah!

http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=612211

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Hurray!!!! That's fantastic.