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More rights for children

The biggest problem all-child Sim households face is a Simkid's unability to pay bills. Money can be had through the money cheat, Servo can provide all the services Simkids can't get over the phone, but the only two ways of dealing with bills is the unreliable move_objects cheat (unreliable meaning: you don't know what else it deletes), and waiting for the repo man to come and vapourize some possession. And it takes just one tick in a box to introduce Simkids to the wonderful world of bill-paying.

This is how it's done: extract "bills.iff" from GameData/Objects/Objects.far, open it in IFF Pencil and click on TTAB to get only the resources connected with the menu options, then on "Bills tree table" for the possible interactions. As can be seen, the box for "Child" is unticked, so that this menu option will not appear for children. Click it to tick it, and children will henceforth be allowed the action "Pay Bills".


This version of Bills.iff from Deluxe has Unleashed pet support built in.

In this case, a tick is enough, because a look in the STR# block shows me that for every adult animation with this object, there is a child animation.


Fortunately, all necessary animations are supplied.

The adult-only phone options in "Phones.iff" can be made available to Simkids in the same way, although plugins, like that for calling the pest control people in Unleashed, can be a bit tricky, because the menu items aren't exactly where one expects them. Still, children can now employ a maid and gardener and call a repairman; and even a cab, if Unleashed has been installed. NB.: "Phones.iff" is one of those IFFs best taken and hacked from the Sims version you have installed - the hacked "Phones.iff" from Unleashed, when put in an LL installation, will crash the game!

There are other object interactions that can be made available to children - entering the hot tub, carving the turkey - but as there are no animations to go with it, the result will be as if the action was carried out, but rather than visually interact with the object, the child will jump up and down with a "Missing animation" balloon over its head until the code has finished.


The turkey does get carved, though.

That is a purely aesthetic problem, solved only by making and adding the necessary animations oneself - which is beyond the scope of simple hacking. Still within that scope is tackling the checks which can stop the menu option from appearing for children even when the interaction box has been ticked: the menu tests.

The place to look for such checks is the BHAV block. Menu tests are easy to find. Each menu option in the TTAB block refers to two instructions in the BHAV block: one to carry out the interaction, and one to check if the interaction should appear as a menu option. The test instruction below is #4128, which can be looked up in the BHAV block.

In this case, the menu test code was child-check-free, but here's what I found when going through the "call cab" plugin of Unleashed, "NeighborhoodPhonePlugin.iff":

The highlighted line, and the rectangle with the two fields outlined in red, is what stops children being able to call cabs. The line says: "If the person calling is an adult, continue with line 8. Else abort." I can change that, of course, to "If the person calling is an adult, continue with line 8; if not, ditto." I simply enter an 8 in the second "go to" box, too. Provided the "Call Cab" option has been made available to children in the Unleashed version of "Phones.iff", cabs are now available for children. That is, to transport them to community lots. Once they're on a community lot, they can't call a cab to go back, because the only telephones available are payphones, and these are in a different IFF file: "PhonePayNeighborhood.iff". Open this IFF and make "Call Cab" available to children in the same way as in "Phones.iff", and they can also call a cab to take them home. (Note: "PayPhoneNeighborhood.iff" and "NeighborhoodPhonePlugin.iff" are from ExpansionPack5/ExpansionPack5.far, and that's the folder where they should be put. Don't put them in GameData/Objects, or they won't be loaded.)

And that, I'm afraid, is where simple editing ends, because I can't give a simple list of where and how each set of routines in an IFF file does the child check. But this should provide the information needed to make most simple adult-only activities available to children. Unfortunately, that excludes the basic activity of cooking a meal, because this is not a simple interaction. Children can, however, be made able to ask adults (or other children) to move in with them: see the "Gay marriage hack".





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