notownieregen -working right or not?

[Magicmoon]

I have only one neighborhood, custom made. I started with deleteallcharacters, then added a downtown and a college. I wanted dormies to keep my sims entertained, and I wanted the Grand Vampires so that some sims may get bitten. But I did NOT want any other townie types except NPCs. (notownieregen is installed.)

So then I went to SimPe to delete any remaining townies. I created my own Sims and started playing. Things went fine for awhile until I noticed that my kids wanted to bring home townie children from school. They shouldn't exist should they?

Checked SimPe and there are townies again! Especially confusing is this tricou family that as far as I can see are mostly dead.(they are in the unknown Family). I do not have gravestones so I don't know where they came from. I keep deleting (mostly Garths) using Simpe and the game keeps recreating people. I also delete memories of sims meeting these people at the same time.

So what am I doing wrong? Do these townies need to be killed in game to keep them from coming back?

I never see any of these newly created characters walking past the house or on any community lot except for downtown and maybe college lots. But the children must be in the regular neighborhood or my kids wouldn't ask if they can bring them home from school. (I have the bring friend dialog installed).

So what am I doing wrong? How do I get rid of these people and keep them from coming back? If the answer is that they must be killed in-game, then how do I kill the downtownies?

Also, which names are for which characters? What I mean is that I know that Baena is mostly npcs or service personel. It appears that Cho might be the college students. What about Garth? It seems most, if not all, of the ones being recreated are Garth, with the exception of the tricou family which is of the unknown family. (I have never actually seen any of these tricou people in game).

Right now Simpe shows 35 people listed as Garth. Last night I deleted every Garth with SimPe, so all of these have been recreated when I ran the game. I also notice that these newly created Garths are listed as lifestage unknown even though I can clearly see that 6 are children. I don't know for sure, but I also think that the names being used are also the same as the ones I deleted.

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out where this should go.

[toriamos]

You have to kill them off children and teenagers.  They are nomads.  I have used a few hacks to kill them off.  Since nightlife the little ones don't come around unless you have children sims.  The hack does work but you have to first get rid of them. Then new townies will not regenerate. 

 I got rid of my downtown townies by using my vampire with the Shaklin hack put the headstones into the vamp's inventory and deleted them at his house he made money, but when he went to another community lot the headstones were outside his house deleted them again and made addition 150.00  so each townies made him 300.00 bucks.   I couldn't get most of the teens because of the time thing. There is a hack that you vamps can go out in the day.   As for the children townies I used Inge jones teleporter bush bring them to the vamps house grew them up with her hack cake to teenagers and then have my vamp's do they jobs.  I'm sure there is probably a easier way, but this give the vampires a purpose.

[Magicmoon]

I'm not familiar with the hack you describe, but basically are you are saying that they must be killed in-game?

So I can use the bush to teleport these Garths to my house then kill them, sell the tombstones,  then they won't come back?

I guess I will try a big Garth party, teleporting them all to a house then kill them in the pool or something.  It's worth a shot.

[ZephyrZodiac]

If you don't want them take them out of the characters file using simPE to find the file numbers.  However, you need to do this before you start to play the hood at all, otherwise you will also have to remove all memories of your playable sims having met them.

The Tricou family are the family who lived at the House of Fallen Trees.  Some of their tombstones are there, and some in the Cemetery. 

[Magicmoon]

I did take them out using SimPe and then deleted memories of them from all other sims. But the Garths get recreated every time I restart the game. All the others that I deleted stay gone. But it recreates Garths.

Thanks to your explanation, I understand now why the Tricous are generated, and that is fine. But why does it keep recreating Garths?

[ZephyrZodiac]

I've really no idea, notownieregeneration always prevented downtownie regeneration too, so something is obviously wrong.  Do you have the latest version installed?  Or maybe something is conflicting with it?

[Renatus]

Are you sure that the Garth family isn't the NPC family? The base game creates two pools - townies and NPCs - and I have seen the last name of Garth attached to the NPC pool.

Also, if you have any downtownie files at all it will have a family pool for them - this includes the dead Tricous.

[Lythdan]

See, when you add the downtown, the downtownies aren't generated then, they come with the addition of the hood. If you were to kill them off/delete them/move them in it would stop them from replenishing. I've seen vampires get generated anyway even with a deleteallcharacters and notownie regen. What you should have done is add the base hood and the downtown, deletedallcharacters and then added the dorm.

[DrBeast]

I've seen vampires get generated anyway even with a deleteallcharacters and notownie regen.

Vampires are counted as NPCs, not townies.

[Renatus]

Indeed. Counts and Countesses (vampires), the Diva, Mr. Big, and the slobs are all NPCs. Deleting them is pointless because they'll regenerate - they're supposed to.

[Lythdan]

Yes. I believe the first poster only wanted to add the downtown for the vampires.

[ZephyrZodiac]

The downtownie family name can vary, though Garth is the most common.  NPCs won't be Garth, I don't think, as the name would have been selected before, although in a new hood opened after NL it might be different.

The Tricous are't part of the garth family, or any downtownie family by another name - they are Unknowns, since they are ghosts.  (At least, they were when I checked them out in SimPE!)

[Magicmoon]

I *might* have found the problem, but if so, I don't know how to fix it. Here are my clues:

1.    I tried summoning the recreated Garths with the Simlogical teleport bush to kill them off, but they all lay on the ground and make infant noises. Most of them have the standard memories of "met mystery sim", etc, but they behave like infants.

2.    I *think* the same names are being recreated over and over...which is odd in itself. There are 35 Garths that keep showing back up in Simpe after I delete them and then run the game again.

3.    Looking in the lot Catalog folder I see not only the house files, but character files. These all have names like "cx_Character_cx_00000044_f0a59016.package" There are 312 similarly named files in this folder.

4.    In SimPe, there are 61 Sims that are mine, 106 Baena, 55 Cho, 1 O'Feefe, 16 unknown, 36 Garth. This =259

5. So, if the character files in the lot catalog folder are representative of the characters showing in SimPe, it still leaves 53 characters unaccounted for.

Before I started this clean neighborhood, I had to reinstall Sims2 because some of the original files became corrupted after I did some computer updates. Since I wanted to keep some houses that I made, I backed up the lot catalog folder and then of course used that with the new neighborhood.

So is it possible that these people keep returning to the game because they are in this folder? Is the lot catalog the place where character files are stored? If so, then why are they not deleted permanently when I delete them with SimPe?

Am I barking up the wrong tree? If not, then how do I tell which character files are which in this folder so that I can get rid of the ones I don't want?

Thank you to everyone who has tried to help with my problem.

[MutantBunny]

yes, ther are char files that don't show in the Sim browser. they will show in the sim description, but you can't really do anything with them from there. I explained how I IDed them and got rid of them in this thread--which no one cared about, but you might  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4392.0

After I got rid of the wnted guys, take note of how many are in your folder and make a copy of it. I started the game and it made memories of those missing sims turn to 'unknowns' and thereby easy to delete.

Starting the game also generated a few files, but nothing not easy to get rid of again. These files seemed to be generated because the sim name was still in the game (for instance: I had 3 general Buzz Grunts, but only one had any relationship data. I deleted the others. These files each had their own ...instance number? Anyway whatever the number is that follows the names in the memories editor--each of the files had their own one of those. I IDed which General I had and what his ID number was and then deleted all memories that had the numbers of the others (Is that clear at all...? if not hollar and I'll try again). That stopped those cahr files from being regenerated.)

I edited everyones memories (not to hard to do when only the sims you want are in there) and got rid of all unknowns (and any of those that had dup char files with several 'instance' numbers, like General Grunts.)

My hood is playing smoothly. However, the notowniereg hack isn't working so I'm getting GD townies. But these can be somewhat controlled by looking at the file creation dates in the char folder and then delete them. Then the memories have to be edited again....

Why did Maxis make it like this why..why isn't there an option to play with townies or not --an option in the UI panel--that way the ones you need could be generated simply by turning the option on for a day?

Save us JM, save us. Make the hack work right, please.

[Magicmoon]

Thank you. I did actually find that answer awhile back and did exactly what you said in the linked thread.

I ended up starting a new neighborhood with my notownieregen and nodormie hacks in place. Then I quit the game and opened up SimPe AND the character folder at the same time. (First making appropriate backups).

I then used SimPe to find all the characters that I actually wanted to keep in the game and made backups of their character file. The ones I wanted were the burgler, grand vampires, and a few others. I found cops, social bunnies, downtown workers, newspaper and mailmen, and maybe a few others, make themselves when needed, but burglers do not.

Then reran the game and used "deleteallcharacters". Quit the game and put the backed-up characters that I wanted to keep in my game back into the character folder. Then I ran the game making the playable Sims that I wanted.

Everything has been exactly like I want it since then. The only thing I think I have missing is the social worker. I once got a warning because both parents were at work when the kids got home from school. But no social worker ever showed up and I am no longer even getting warnings when kids hunger levels are at dangerously low levels. But I long ago deleted those backup folders since I thought I had covered everything. It's really no big deal for me anyway.

I should have thanked you back when I found your thread explaining how to do it, but had trouble finding that thread again. So I will thank you now. Hopefully others that are following the same path as us will find these threads in the future so they can fix their own games.

Oh, to let everyone know, both the notownie regen and nodormie regen mods are working perfectly. It's just a matter of getting your game clean BEFORE these mods kick in to keep everything sane.

[MutantBunny]

I think that the way you did it, starting with a new hood , is by far the better way.

I could have just binned my sims and started over with them in a new hood, it can be done and if you move them a few at a time --don't crowd the bin--and do not enter the homes before all are moved they even retain most of their relationships. Some editing has to be done but not much. Not as much as I have had to do doing it the way I have! lol

However, I want to clean up my larger hood and do not want them to 'move' I want the houses laid out like they are, the same neighbors etc. But I have so maNY THERE i'D NEVER BE ABLE TO REMEMBER WHO WENT WHERE. sOOOO i AM LEARNING TO CLEANUP EXISITNG HOODS. (Oops Damn lock..sorry. Type watching  my fingers, not the screen.) And with Zephyr's help finding a version of the notownieregen that works with OFB, I think I have one now anyway, I think I've got a handle on it. I'll play for a week or so and see how it does before I know for sure.