Solved the 'hood start up problems

[Ness]

woo!

I'm not going to write this up into a tutorial (because I suck at writing stuff), but after hours upon hours of testing things out, I believe I've finally come up with a way to start a custom hood that is free of excess townies and NPCs, but will generate townies & NPCs as required.  It also bypasses the problem of the game being unable to generate strays/pets (could be due to the nostrayrespawn hack, but I'm over the testing and can't be bothered checking things without it).

Process involved backing up the hood templates from the program files directory
renaming the N001 template as per Jordi's instructions
deleting all character files from the sub hood templates (U001, D001, B001, etc)

When creating the initial custom hood, the hood is generated without townies as it can't find the characters in the N001 template, but it does go through the process of creating pets.  There doesn't seem to be any safe or reliable way of creating pets after character files have been deleted from the hood.

Each sub hood went in cleanly, with buildings but without sims.  This process gives you 67 character files, and I've tested enough to know that service NPCs can be hired over the phone with no worries, and that pets can be adopted over the phone with no worries - both of which were causing extreme problems for me yesterday and earlier today.

It already appears that townies can be mass-generated again using either the dead tree thingy, or the testingcheats options on the letter box so you can still have your townies made all at once if you wish, otherwise they appear to be generated on demand quite successfully.

If someone wants to test this out and write up a proper tutorial, feel free.

[Li'l Brudder]

* Lil Brudder shrieks

AUUUGHHHH!

Just after I've got my custom hood in too!

Ah well.  THanks Ness. 

[Ness]

At least you'll know now for next time.

Pescado assures me that the problems I was having with no stray respawn are now fixed, but I was too impatient to wait, so figured out a way around it all.

[CrabOfDoom]

Pardon me being dense, but do you delete the character files in the My Documents subhood folders, or still in the Program Files folders?

Sounds like a lot of work and thought on the matter, either way. Thanks for all the effort!

[Ness]

I deleted them from program files directories.

It was time consuming, but I seem to end up going through all of this every time a new ep comes out and changes stuff. grrr!

[CrabOfDoom]

Oh, good, that's where I backed up from. Thanks again!

edit: I tried this out, and when I went back to Windows and checked the character files, the folder was empty. I had to go back and forth along the path a couple times to make sure I was looking at the right one. So it seems it did indeed work! Sweet!