Wanting to Re-Generate my Townies.

[Solowren]

I've decided that I want more interesting Townies. Mine are boring.

So I'm going to download some new face Templates. What I want to do is find a way to wipe all of the Townies that are in my neighborhood already and then make new ones. I know how I would go about making the new ones, but it's the nuking of the current ones that gets me.

Would it be safe/possible for me to move all of my playable Sims to my desktop or something, load the game, DeleteAllCharacters, spawn new Townies/NPCs, quit game, move playables back in? Or would this create a BFBVFS?

I've read quite a few of the tuts out there for creating complete custom neighborhoods, but I haven't seen any that involve already existing neighborhoods. Can anyone more awesome than me give me some input?

EDIT: Just learned that all Sims are kept in the same file, correct? So I guess I can't just move my playable Sims out. Does anyone know how I could just get rid of my Townies then? Well, I could just kill them all....

[angelyne]

ack.  No.  Put that mouse down and step away from the computer s-l-o-w-l-y.


For one, deleteallcharacter has officially been stamped as a very-bad-thing TM.  For two there is no way to prevent your characters from getting nuked.  You cannot put them on your desktop and put them back.  Well you could, but that would be even worse than a deleteallcharacter.  I won't even mention it, in case you get ideas.

You have two options here.

one)  Kill all the towniesk individually.  There are about a million and a half ways of doing that. Might be slow. But then again you might enjoy it, who knows.  Let the inner psycho come out.  ALthough that is not going to improve neighbourdhood bloat

two) A better, sneakier, solution would be this.  Keep your townies, but spruce them up.  Use  Inge's teleport bush to drop them into your secret laboratory and use DMA's "thingie" to perform surgery on them.  You can also use it to change their appearance, buy and change their clothing.  Voila.  New and improved townies, without increasing the bloat in your neighbourdhood. 

If you're a perfectionist, you might also fix up their genetics in SimsPE to be sure that they pass off their good looks to their kids.  Or not.  that might make for interesting stories lol.

[Solowren]

I knew it was a good idea to ask here first. D:

I'm actually thinking of just getting rid of the Townies for good. I don't really use them ever. I have JM's No Townie Respawn hack, so I think I'll just kill them all.

[Weaver]

Deleted 2: Electric Boogaloo or Sim Deleter Tool.

Grab new face templates, generate townies, tweak and enjoy. This can help with townie re-population phase.

[Solowren]

Deleted 2: Electric Boogaloo or Sim Deleter Tool.

Grab new face templates, generate townies, tweak and enjoy. This can help with townie re-population phase.

Yay!

I shall enjoy this.

[J. M. Pescado]

Not OR. If the TheoTool does the steps performed in SimPE as recommended by Deleted 2, then you can use that instead. However, it is unknown how good a job that does. You cannot, however, just go about deleting sims without performing the in-game steps of Deleted 2 first.

[STLBailey]

ack.  No.  Put that mouse down and step away from the computer s-l-o-w-l-y.
two) A better, sneakier, solution would be this.  Keep your townies, but spruce them up.  Use  Inge's teleport bush to drop them into your secret laboratory and use DMA's "thingie" to perform surgery on them.  You can also use it to change their appearance, buy and change their clothing.  Voila.  New and improved townies, without increasing the bloat in your neighbourdhood. 

If you're a perfectionist, you might also fix up their genetics in SimsPE to be sure that they pass off their good looks to their kids.  Or not.  that might make for interesting stories lol.

Hey!!! I want to do this!! 

What is the " Inge's teleport bush " and where can I find it?  And what is DMA's "thingie" and where do I find that?  What ever the "thingie" is,  I hope it is clean. 

I have been wanting to do this for a while now.   This is a good topic!


 

[angelyne]

Well the "thingie" in question perfectly clean.   However the set it comes is could be considered questionable, by some.  Anyway, its called the Appearance and Outfit Changer or COA object and is part of the woohoo set made by DMA sims.  It works a treat though.  Allows you to change the appearance of any NPC on the lot, change their face (same as the surgery machine), and change their clothing. 

The teleport bush is made by Inge at simlogical.   However there is an updated version in peasantry which I can't seem to find and I'm getting a headache trying to.

bah.  Here's the darn COA thingie.  If anyone freaks I'll just remove it.  It looks like a red security alarm, found under miscellaneous

PS this is the pets version.  Also works in Seasons

[Solowren]

Not OR. If the TheoTool does the steps performed in SimPE as recommended by Deleted 2, then you can use that instead. However, it is unknown how good a job that does. You cannot, however, just go about deleting sims without performing the in-game steps of Deleted 2 first.

...Oops. 

[Solowren]

.....SHIT.

Um. Well my game crashed during the neighborhood load. And. Well.

This kind of sucks.

I had gotten about 1/5th of the way through deleting the Townies with Theo's tool when I saw JM's post, so I closed SimPE and tried to load the game. Uh.

...Dammit.

Four year old neighborhood up in flames!! D':

[angelyne]

dumb question, but did you make a backup before butchering your neighbourhood with a large knife?

[witch]

You didn't backup?!?

[Solowren]

The one time I decide not to backup.

I'M SO STUPIDDDDD

I tried a System Restore. Didn't work of course, because Windows is a bitch.
.....

....Well, I have been wanting to start a new neighborhood.....

EDIT:

I'm going to try and see if I can create a new neighborhood and just copy the files from my old hood into the clean one.

Long shot. But it's all I've got left. 

[witch]

The one time I decide not to backup.

So restore one of your older backups.

[J. M. Pescado]

* J. M. Pescado points and laughs.

[SaraMK]

This thread is such a good illustration of how in spite of our best intentions and best efforts, it is often best not to attempt to educate some people....

And I'm not saying this to be mean. I'm just saying this thread is perfect proof that it's not always a good idea to tell people how to do stuff that shouldn't really be attempted by anyone who hasn't received at least an "acceptable" on a test of common sense. "Common sense" being the little voice inside your head that should have told you that backing up your neighborhood before ripping it to shreds with 3rd party tools is a good idea.

Oh, wait... that did kind of sound mean.

People on this forum do tend to assume that others have already mastered the basic concepts, so things like "make a backup" are often omitted from tutorials and other bits of advice. And they will  point and laugh if their advice causes a catastrophe.



I do hope you have a backup, Solowren, even if it's an older one.




Now let us all sit back and wait for STLBailey, with her bright red font, to come crying about her neighborhood exploding. If she doesn't, we can assume she gets a "passing" on the common sense test. However, the fact that she neither knows who Inge is or what a "teleporter bush" is  (perhaps one of the most commonly and widely used hacks), does not bode well as far as her ability to successfully use a complicated tool that shreds critical neighborhood files....

[BeckerCheez]

If one is unhappy with the townies he has, take the ugly ones and start a community cemetary.  The cute ones can be made over.  You can also go into SimPE and change their names.  It may not be a total fix of getting rid of townies, but it's better than making the neighborhood go explodey.  Sorry you lost your neighborhood but it's a risk to go into the game and fiddle with integral files like that.   

[angelyne]

Good point Sara. 

However my advice was pretty safe.  I told him to simply kill off his townies.  Not delete them.  All in game stuff.  You can't really go massively wrong from within the game, so long as you don't start using the more powerful cheats. ( Or use some of Maxis completely fubared options, like family binning, which I didn't even mention).  And my advice to makeover the townies was safe too.  Can't really go wrong with Inge's teleport bush.  And the DMA is even safer.

Being in tech support, I'm used to dealing with all sort of levels of competency. Rule one.  Don't treat your customer like idiots, but never assume they are computer savy, unless they show you they are.  And it was clear from Solowren  questions that he fell in the category of "knows just enough to be dangerous".

BTW Solowren, system restore only restores changes made to system files, such as the operating system or program files. It's best used when a newly installed program, or driver, or malware/virus borked your system.  It does not affect data.  Neither should it, or it would wipe all recent changes made to your data. 

[SaraMK]

Good point Sara. 

However my advice was pretty safe.  I told him to simply kill off his townies.  Not delete them.  All in game stuff.  You can't really go massively wrong from within the game, so long as you don't start using the more powerful cheats. ( Or use some of Maxis completely fubared options, like family binning, which I didn't even mention).  And my advice to makeover the townies was safe too.  Can't really go wrong with Inge's teleport bush.  And the DMA is even safer.

I know. 

Actually, this thread greatly amused me for no less than 5 reasons:

1. It had a newbie who at first glance appeared to be of above-average intelligence (note the lack of horrific mangling of the English language in the first post), and yet turned out to be a BBS escapee after all.

2. It had another newbie, who definitely had a BBS aura around her, and who was apparently suicidal... that's really the only reason someone who doesn't seem to have ever downloaded a hack for the game before would want to go poking into the game files with one of Pescado's advanced tools.

3. At least one of the newbies was twirled around and given a shove in the general direction of a cliff.

4. It had high drama, punctuated by frequent use of multiple exclamation and question marks ("You didn't backup?!?") and CAPS LOCK freaking out.

5. It was the middle of the night, and I was hopped up on coffee and feeling very mean for some reason.


And of course Pescado pointing and laughing is always funny.




All that said, I do feel sorry for anyone who loses a neighborhood, because that truly sucks to have happen.

[Theo]

.....SHIT.

Um. Well my game crashed during the neighborhood load. And. Well.

This kind of sucks.

I had gotten about 1/5th of the way through deleting the Townies with Theo's tool when I saw JM's post, so I closed SimPE and tried to load the game. Uh.

...Dammit.

Four year old neighborhood up in flames!! D':

The tool deletes the sim character files immediately, but doesn't commit the neighborhood package unless you do it explicitly (clicking on the 'Save' button in T.A.T).
Since you didn't do the last step, the game still tries to load the SDSC resources but is unable to load the sim packages, which is an exception it can't cope with.
It may be a bit belated, but I will add this warning to the tool's description

You may have a chance of getting the neighborhood to load, if you open the neighborhood again, and delete the SDSC resources of the sims you had deleted. Look for sim descriptions with 'Unknown', and delete them before committing your changes.


I must say the deletion of a sim from the database is so quirky and troublesome, that I only do it when I want to shrink the neighborhood 'weight'. On other cases, simple facial surgery is enough to give a new look to the townies.

[Solowren]

Good point Sara. 

However my advice was pretty safe.  I told him to simply kill off his townies.  Not delete them.  All in game stuff.  You can't really go massively wrong from within the game, so long as you don't start using the more powerful cheats. ( Or use some of Maxis completely fubared options, like family binning, which I didn't even mention).  And my advice to makeover the townies was safe too.  Can't really go wrong with Inge's teleport bush.  And the DMA is even safer.

I know. 

Actually, this thread greatly amused me for no less than 5 reasons:

1. It had a newbie who at first glance appeared to be of above-average intelligence (note the lack of horrific mangling of the English language in the first post), and yet turned out to be a BBS escapee after all.

2. It had another newbie, who definitely had a BBS aura around her, and who was apparently suicidal... that's really the only reason someone who doesn't seem to have ever downloaded a hack for the game before would want to go poking into the game files with one of Pescado's advanced tools.

3. At least one of the newbies was twirled around and given a shove in the general direction of a cliff.

4. It had high drama, punctuated by frequent use of multiple exclamation and question marks ("You didn't backup?!?") and CAPS LOCK freaking out.

5. It was the middle of the night, and I was hopped up on coffee and feeling very mean for some reason.


And of course Pescado pointing and laughing is always funny.




All that said, I do feel sorry for anyone who loses a neighborhood, because that truly sucks to have happen.

I admit not backing up was a bad idea. It was an extremely bad idea. And I probably deserve every bit of assholery you guys can throw at me.

I also admit that I am new to SimPE. I'm trying to learn how to use it properly so I don't always have to request things of other people. Trial and error is how I learn best, which is slightly unfortunate. D:

And Theo, thank you for adding your advice. When I get home I'll be sure to try that.

[neriana]

Doing stupid shit, or at least watching other people do stupid shit, is how people learn "common" sense in the first place.

I really wish someone would create a tool that would allow old townies to use new face templates genetically. I don't know if this would even be possible, though.

[angelyne]

You can use SimPE to do that.  It's not push-a-button easy, but it's not difficult either.  All you do is perform a sim surgery on a townie.  From within the surgery, you should have access to whatever templates you have installed ( I think, I'm not 100% sure).  Then once you have closed the game, you can go to SimPE and fix the genetics so that the new face will be passed to the kids.  It's just a 2 step operation.   If you also want to change the skin color or eye color that's more steps.  So to keep it simple it's best to just stick to the face.

Hmmm maybe I should write a tutorial.  I wonder if anyone would be interested.

[cyperangel]

i would!

[SaraMK]

Hmmm maybe I should write a tutorial. 

Step 1: Make a backup.

 


Actually, it probably would help people to have a tutorial. Maybe they'd quit trying to delete sims just because they don't like how they look.