Where are all the townies?

[Regina]

You need to have 'EnableDebugCommands' enabled in the awesomemod configuration to be able to access runstoryaction.

This is clearly where we've gone wrong on our end. I'll see if I can get that to work tomorrow. Thank you for the information.

I had used familyfunds to give all those homeless Sims money with which to move in then made sure I had at least four houses that would fit some of the families.  No one moved in on their own, and now when I run the homeless check for some strange reason most of them are showing 0 for the amount of their money.  I would just love it if Pescado would just make the default method optional for those of us who don't want to go to this extra work to fill our towns.

[eevilcat]

The familyFunds command appears to have changed in functionality as it now simply sets the family funds to the amount you specify regardless of existing funds. Using +/- before the amount is now setting the fund total to zero. It also doesn't appear to distinguish between families with the same surname as my legacy family had their funds reduced to 40k in the course of fixing some of their homeless rejects.

[J. M. Pescado]

Now if only there is a macro to get them all jobs as well...

Oh, the game will gleefully assign them jobs at random the moment they are needed.

[chaos]

Zazazu's instructions worked perfectly for placing homeless bums, but familyFunds still doesn't work from neighborhood view with newly created households. In order to actually use the cheat for a new fambly, I have to briefly play an existing fambly, and THEN use familyFunds to give money to the new fambly. This is very cumbersome. Can it be changed, so that the cheat works from the neighborhood, like it did in TS2?

[Marhis]

Wait, I just used it in neighborhood view, and it worked.

[Skadi]

I tried this with the 7 homeless families I had, worked wonderfully and also got rid of my 1am lag. I was playing an existing family, went to edit town and could use familyfunds cheats without issue.

[chaos]

I've never gotten it to work in my game. Testing cheats and debugging are both enabled. This makes no sense.

[Regina]

The familyFunds command appears to have changed in functionality as it now simply sets the family funds to the amount you specify regardless of existing funds. Using +/- before the amount is now setting the fund total to zero.

That would explain it then.  It makes sense to code it that way, dumbs it down a lot more for sure.   Now I need to see if I can successfully turn on debugging and get some of them moved in.

[Zazazu]

I've never gotten it to work in my game. Testing cheats and debugging are both enabled. This makes no sense.

It hates you, probably.

[GayJohnScarritt]

I tried this with the 7 homeless families I had, worked wonderfully and also got rid of my 1am lag.

I totally concur.  After I FamilyFunds/runstoryaction the 17 (yes, you read right, SEVENTEEN) homeless families to their own homes (most of whom seemed to be single parents with little children), my 1 AM pauses went from 20-30 seconds per, down to about a second.  It was such a relief to see it zip thru those pauses.  

I've never gotten it to work in my game. Testing cheats and debugging are both enabled. This makes no sense.

Make sure you're typing those phrases correctly.  FamilyFunds will show up in the console box (type help) if you've enabled it correctly.  'FamilyFunds TheFamilyName amount' and 'runstoryaction Move In Household'.  If there's not an eligible home, the runstoryaction check box will have a 'move in where??' response, then you know you'll need to adjust either the homes (add beds) or make cheaper homes or set the family funds higher.

[Regina]

This is utter insanity.  Last night my game recognized familyfunds just fine. This morning it doesn't again.  I'm off to see if I have a mod conflict because I can't figure out what else it could possibly be.

ETA:  This is beyond insanity now.  I took out every mod with the exception of awesomemod and the game is still refusing to acknowledge familyfunds.  When it does this, the game also doesn't acknowledge at least part of awesomemod because it also doesn't recognize editsim.   I'm thinking perhaps a fresh installation may be in order.

[Regina]

I feel stupider than all get-out now.  Since I'm not in the habit of using cheats, I had no idea testingcheats actually have to be enabled for familyfunds to work!

[chaos]

I've never gotten it to work in my game. Testing cheats and debugging are both enabled. This makes no sense.

It hates you, probably.

Actually, it was the first sign of my game becoming a BFBVFS. The apocalypse is nigh.

Make sure you're typing those phrases correctly.  FamilyFunds will show up in the console box (type help) if you've enabled it correctly.  'FamilyFunds TheFamilyName amount' and 'runstoryaction Move In Household'.  If there's not an eligible home, the runstoryaction check box will have a 'move in where??' response, then you know you'll need to adjust either the homes (add beds) or make cheaper homes or set the family funds higher.

That's what I did. I stated clearly in a prior post to the one you quoted that Zazazu's instructions worked just fine. It's using the familyFunds cheat on a newly created household from the neighborhood that I can't get to work. My syntax is correct. For some reason that I have yet to figure out, I can only use familyFunds from inside a lot, but not in neighborhood view.

Edit to fix typo.

[Franc Kaos]

... I now only have 37 homeless bums in my town, but they are all in one Household listed as NPC. Hopefully this should mostly do away with my 1am laginess as well....

Hi, thanks for the guide, but like the above, I have a homeless family titled Npc, only there are 60 characters in it. Is there any way of splitting this group up, or deleting them from the game world?

Many thanks. Franc Kaos.

Imagination is Everything.

[Regina]

Is there any way of splitting this group up, or deleting them from the game world?

You can delete just the NPCs from a neighborhood.  With awesomemod installed, run help in the cheat command line and it will show the proper syntax (you may need to enable testing cheats for this--I don't remember for sure), which is something akin to destroyallnpcs but I can't remember it exactly.  Just keep in mind, though, that some of these NPCs could be partners at your Sims' work places that they have developed relationships with and the game will generate replacements.  NPCs are everywhere in TS3.  They aren't just service workers any more, and it really increases their numbers.

[Silverdrake]

I think FamilyFunds only works when sims are placed on a lot, because they haven't been initialized when they're sitting in the bin. I just stick mine on an empty lot, fund them, and move them from there.

I have not tried it on the Townie families though.

[chaos]

Alas, I can't seem to place a household on an empty lot. I have to go put a bush on it, or something, so that the game sees it as being habitable. Stupid EA.

[Silverdrake]

TS3 is full of little quirks! and not the same quirks for each person, either - maybe it's a "feature?"

[Kiirkas]

I was able to place all the homeless households in my 'hood with the instructions provided.  For some reason or another, within one in-game week, half of the families I placed had moved out again during story mode updates done by the game engine.  Do sims like being homeless, or might there be a bug in play, or does the game's decision-making process just suck that much?

It's not a huge deal at the moment.  I think I'll try another route around this issue: moving in homeless sims with which my one fambly has high enough relationship scores, then moving them out again to new abodes in the town.  At the very least I can control the flow of money with the familyfunds command so as to not bork my fambly.

ETA: Using the above solution I went from ~20 homeless families to less than 10, and they're all staying in their houses after two in-game weeks.  This is probably a better way to go to avoid borking.

[GayJohnScarritt]

A word of warning:

From the Bug Reporting thread -

I'm having a couple of glitches with the newest available awesomemod*. One is that when I use the runstoryaction Move In Family, families are moved in correctly but seem to move out within a day or two. The other glitch is that my sims, after I used the runstoryaction cheat, now are both displaying a red box in the relationship panel.

Runstoryaction was intended for my personal debugging use only and is not meant to be used by the hoi polloi, so any problems you cause with it are your own fault.

I too am getting red boxes in relationship panels/all household members sharing the same relationship panels/Reward Points showing up on the wrong members/etc.  Hopefully, re-doing the Awesomeconfig to turn the 'testing cheats' and 'debugging' back to disabled might fix the problem.  (At least, that is what i'm going to try - if not, looks like i'll have a BFBVFS on my hands. 

[Franc Kaos]

You can delete just the NPCs from a neighborhood.  With awesomemod installed, run help in the cheat command line and it will show the proper syntax (you may need to enable testing cheats for this--I don't remember for sure), which is something akin to destroyallnpcs but I can't remember it exactly.  Just keep in mind, though, that some of these NPCs could be partners at your Sims' work places that they have developed relationships with and the game will generate replacements.  NPCs are everywhere in TS3.  They aren't just service workers any more, and it really increases their numbers.

Thanks for the help, I'd seen the destroyallnpcs but have been worried about using it, but I've a feeling this 'Npc' family is starting to bork the game world anyway. One of my sims has just befriended an npc and any interaction with this npc grinds the system down, with a message that can't fully display, but looks to be full of ... ... ...'s - I get the impression it's trying to display all his family members.

This game is so enjoyable and annoying in equal measures, but I'll try it tonight and see how I get on.

Franc Kaos ~
'Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?' 'William Blake'

[Anach]

I thought I should try this in an attempt to clear up my save issues. However, I get a fail each time, even if I bump up family funds to 500k on all homeless bums. I have 6 homeless families and 59 NPCs homeless. Each time I runstoryaction on them, it says "FAIL" and tells me the action could not be vailidated.

Anything more I can try here?

[caitlyn]

Thanks for the help, I'd seen the destroyallnpcs but have been worried about using it, but I've a feeling this 'Npc' family is starting to bork the game world anyway. One of my sims has just befriended an npc and any interaction with this npc grinds the system down, with a message that can't fully display, but looks to be full of ... ... ...'s - I get the impression it's trying to display all his family members.

The "star people" are a bug that happened several versions of awesomemod ago.  I just got rid of one yesterday.  They have nothing to do with NPC's specifically.  Mine was a townie.  If you look in another thread for "Baby Name from Hell" (I can't remember where it is off the top of my head), you'll see talk about it.

[Zazazu]

I thought I should try this in an attempt to clear up my save issues. However, I get a fail each time, even if I bump up family funds to 500k on all homeless bums. I have 6 homeless families and 59 NPCs homeless. Each time I runstoryaction on them, it says "FAIL" and tells me the action could not be vailidated.

Anything more I can try here?

Make sure there are enough beds in available homes for your families. A shocking number of homes in both neighborhoods only have one double bed, meaning that families over 2 members might not have any valid choices regardless of funds.

[Silverdrake]

I'm not getting it to work, either, but I'm sure I'm missing something. The homeless families have plenty of money, and most of the houses in town are empty, with plenty of beds. I had taken the IS mod out, and the game decided to evict almost all the townies 

Do you do the runstoryaction from the Edit Town screen? Do you put the family name after the command? (neither works for me!) I do have Testingcheatsenabled.