I just added a patch to my fairy changelings mod to make it compatible with triplets and quads, and now there's three files that all have to be loaded in a particular order. In order to make things hopefully more comprehensible about the conflicts and load order stuff when it comes to the birth mods, I made this visual representation of what code is in each mod:



I thought I would ask here in the general forums, for people who aren't modders/don't have technical knowledge about how mod conflicts work, is this visualization useful/comprehensible and help you understand what order things should load in and which things are compatible?

I don't really get that, but usually there will be a list of the mods that conflict?

Yes, there is that as well. I just want to know if this is a helpful visualization.

I am a modder, and do have some technical knowledge, so I'm not exactly your target audience - but it does look useful to me and I can see how to use it, though it took a bit of thinking about.

To make it easier for a general audience, I recommend an example or two afterwards. Such as:

For example, if you want to have Name the Father (purple), Baby Last Name Chooser (green) and Baby Personality (yellow), you'll have a conflict in the third column - "Have Baby - Prepare New Baby". So you'll need to make sure that the mod that loads last has a purple, green and yellow X in the third column, i.e. Baby Personality. Put a "z" at the beginning of it's name to make sure it loads last.

Thanks, that's probably a good idea.

I don't understand that at all lol.

Some of these mods seem simple and not patentable, like putting up a dialog for a name. You could roll the smaller mods into your mod. I suspect that triplets and quads can be done always. Not the part that creates them, but where you check how many babies have been chosen. For extra dialogs you can create sub and put it in a "flavor pack" that people can add if they want to, and have the sub do nothing in the main mod.

That's not remotely what this thread is about.

@Charity, can you highlight which parts of the text you quoted don't make sense to you?

If you just list the load order, would it be the same order if a player doesn't have all the mods listed? Even if the load order could be altered if one or more mods were missing, would it matter? Could you just list the load order as if all mods are installed, and say this is the load order?

As someone who doesn't use any of those, I'd look at that list and be confused.

Pretty much the mod that loads last needing to have a purple, yellow and green X in the third column.

@HugeLunatic, the overall order would mostly be the order these are listed in here, except that some mods are not compatible with each other yet. Although, looking it up, it looks like there is a triplets and quads compatible version of birth options now, so it's just triplets and quads/surrogate hack that are not compatible still.

@Charity, the colored Xs correspond to what mod functionality is included in each file. Purple is for Name the Father, Yellow is for Baby Personality, and Green is Baby Last Name Chooser, so if you want all three of those you need all of those functionalities.

So, that means that the surrogate hack, for example, has the functionality for everything else included in it and you would only need that one hack to get everything?

I don't know that it's helpful, but I don't understand any of it. It makes my brain fog glaze over immediately. I tried a few times to force my brain to pay attention and try to understand, but the fog wins this battle. Whether that says anything about the general public though I don't really know, but I feel bad that you haven't had more replies I relate to the struggle, it's always a challenge to try and explain things like this in a concise way that makes sense to other people. Write too much and nobody reads, write too little and you leave out information. It's a pain.

It doesn't have Triplets and Quads or Fairy Changelings in it, but other than that, yes. The Baby Personality hack is still needed since it has a function in it that isn't one of these three, but surrogate hack is compatible with it.

Me second. My eyes glazed over and my brain went to fog.

If it doesn't have triplets and quads then why does it have a blue X?

It doesn't. There's only a blue X in the third column, but not in the other two.

One thing this thread is revealing is that there's lots of misunderstanding about mod conflicts and load order and how it all works. Is there a page about it on the wiki somewhere? Can we make one/ add to one/ make it more visible?

If I have a go at writing a more detailed explanation here, can everyone who's been confused let me know what makes sense and what's still confusing? And anyone who does understand this, feel free to use this as a first draft and have another go. I'll refer to kestrellyn's table.

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I want to install two/three/many mods that all conflict, what do I do?

Don't stress! Many mods have been adjusted to make them compatible with each other. You just need to make sure the game loads them in the right order.

Right order?

Yes. Each time the game opens, it loads up all the mods you have installed in alphabetical order, from a to z. If it comes across a different version of something it's already got, it replaces the earlier version with the later version - so we need to make sure nothing important is being replaced.

Why can't it just load all the mods? Why does it replace things?

It's actually a good thing - global mods wouldn't work if it didn't! To make a global mod, its creator will take a piece of the Sims 2 code, and write a modified version (hence the name). Because the game loads the original EA code first, and then mods, the game will replace the EA code with the mod's code, and do what the mod tells it to do.

So if I install a different mod that also changes the same piece of Sims 2 code, it replaces the first mod?

Precisely. That's what a mod conflict is.

So if I want both mods to work I need someone to make me a mod that is ... both mods put together?

Well yes... and no.

A very simple global mod might just edit the EA code and leave it at that - I've seen a mod to let women get alien pregnant that just takes the EA code, deletes the "am I male?" check, and does nothing else (there's nothing else to do). But most global mods will actually include several pieces of code all packaged up together - one (or sometimes more than one) piece of EA code that the mod is replacing, and some more pieces that are entirely new. The replacement piece will at some point say "follow the new code and do something" before returning to whatever EA was originally doing. So to make the first mod and the second mod both work, you just need to make sure that the second mod's replacement code also includes the instructions to go follow the first mod's new code.

Uh... that's still confusing. Can you give me an example?

Suppose you want to install Baby Last Name Chooser and Name the Father. Both of those mods replace a piece of EA code called "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby". If you just install both of those as they are, the game will choose Name the Father's version of "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby" instead of Baby Last Name Chooser's (because N comes after B in the alphabet), and so Baby Last Name Chooser won't work.

However, the creator of Baby Last Name Chooser realised that people will also want to use Name the Father, and so included the necessary changes to "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby". If you haven't got Name the Father installed, the game will look for its new code, find it's not there, and carry on. If you have got Name the Father installed, then the game can look for the rest of its code successfully and both mods can do their jobs.

What about if I have lots of mods that all change the same piece of EA code?

You need the same solution you had for two mods - whichever mod is last needs to include all the changes to the replacement code.

If we wanted to add Baby Personality to our previous example, we can do that as long as Baby Personality goes last (the order of the other two doesn't matter), because Baby Personality includes instructions to look for Baby Last Name Chooser new code and Name the Father new code.

You still need to install all three mods, because Baby Personality doesn't include all of the other two mods - just enough to get them working.

Awesome. So, I'm all set?

Not quite. Some mods (Name the Father is an example) change more that one piece of EA code. And for each piece of EA code that's been modified, you need to make sure that the last mod that changes it does all the changes you need. This gets confusing, so we'll use the table kestrellyn made.

Have a look at kestrellyn's table. Each row is a mod that changes something to do with birth, and each column is a piece of EA code to do with birth that is changed by more than one mod. If a mod doesn't replace that piece of EA code, there's nothing in that column for that mod's row. But if it does, there'll be an X in the same colour as the mod's name. If the mod also contains instructions to look for another mod's new code, there will also be another colour X. If the standard mod doesn't contain another mod's instructions, but there is a separate version that does, there will be [X] in that colour.

The third column has the examples we were just doing, I think?

Yes. The third column is "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby" that I was discussing earlier. Name the Father only makes its own changes to "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby", although there's a version that also includes changes for Triplets and Quads. Baby Last Name Chooser includes a purple X, so it also has the Name the Father changes. Baby Personality makes its own changes, and some for Baby Last Name Chooser, and for Name the Father.

If we also wanted to include something from another column, what would we do?

Let's add Birth Options, which changes the first piece of EA code, "Interaction - Home Birth". Name the Father also changes that one, so we need to make sure that both of them work. Birth Options has a purple X in the first column as well as its orange X, so it makes the necessary changes for Name the Father as well as itself. So we need to make sure Birth Options loads after Name the Father.

With all four mods, we have to make sure Birth Options is later in the alphabet than Name the Father (maybe add a z to the start of its name), and that Baby Personality is later in the alphabet than both Name the Father and Baby Last Name Chooser. As they change different things, it doesn't matter whether Birth Options loads after Baby Personality or the other way around.

What about if I want ALL the birth mods?

At the moment it doesn't look like you can have all of the birth mods, because there isn't a mod or a version of a mod that includes the changes to "Interaction - Home Birth" for Triplets and Quads with Surrogate Hack and Birth Options.

If you want everything except for Triplets and Quads, you'll need Fairy Changelings last, the Baby Personality-compatible version, to get the right versions of "Home Birth - Make Baby(ies)" and "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby", and Surrogate Hack second last to get the right version of "Interaction - Home Birth".

Alternatively, if you want Triplets and Quads and so want everything except for Surrogate Hack and Birth Options, you'll need fairychangelings_tnq_compatibility last to get the right version of "Home Birth - Make Baby(ies)", and Fairy Changelings (the Baby Personality-compatible version) second last, to get the right version of "Home Birth - Prepare New Baby". Then you'll need to make sure that the Triplets and Quads-compatible version of Name the Father is after the original Triplets and Quads mod so you get the right version of "Interaction - Home Birth".

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All suggestions for improvement and where to put this welcome. There are probably some other groups of mods that could do with this sort of table as well if we can get this fairly user-friendly.

Thanks, that's great! I'm not great at explaining things. I don't know if you think it would be confusing, and it's kind of outside the scope of my chart, but there's also a difference between mods that add extra code and mods that only override EA code, and some overrides will work without the extra code and some won't. Name the Father only overrides EA code, so you don't actually need the Name the Father hack if you have other mods that add the same code to the same EA functions (and there are a number of different options for that now), and also just having these overrides doesn't change how your game works if you don't have the rest of the mod. On the other hand, Baby Personality defines a new function, and its EA override calls that new function, so if you have the override you need the rest of the Baby Personality mod or you'll get errors. Triplets and Quads' Prepare New Baby override doesn't require the new code defined in Tripets and Quads, but the other overrides do, which is why they're included in fewer mods. The only extra code that Baby Last Name Chooser has is, I believe, dialog strings, so as long as you have another mod that also includes those dialog strings as well as the override code, you don't need that package. Actually, I probably should have included the dialog strings as a column in this chart, since so many of these mods also override them.

I didn't make a distinction between the two in my explanation, because I was aiming this at non-modders and didn't want to add more complications. It's useful information for others making mods, but less important for the casual user who just needs to pay attention to which version of something they're getting.



Dialog strings is a big one that causes conflicts, so it probably is worth including that.

Here's an updated image with the dialog strings:

Nope. I still don't understand it. I'll just stick to downloading simple mods that my brain can handle. XD

Okay, now I'm second guessing myself.

If I have extendedfamilypartial and found familyglobal+extendedfamilypartial, in that order, is that all I need (plus foundfamilysocialplugin, but I didn't think that was a conflict)?

If someone needs to write a wall of text to explain your table, I think you can pretty much deduce the answer to your original question ... "is this visualization useful/comprehensible and help you understand what order things should load in and which things are compatible?"

Yes, just like it says on the mod description.



Yes, I figured that out a long time ago. We're now just spitballing about how to inform people about how mod conflicts work better.