Duplicate character files in SimPE?

[Sivany]

Back when I first got TS2 I created a couple of families in Strangetown. Shortly after I created a new custom hood and decided I wanted those families to live there instead. Recklessly I yanked them from their old homes and plonked them in my new neighbourhood. Of course this is now known to be a VBT but at the time I was young and naive.

I played the neighbourhood for months without any problems, then abandoned it and have recently come back to it. It's been running fine so far but now I'm more knowledgeable I fear that those moved families are an accident waiting to happen. Today I finallly got round to downloading the new seasons SimPE and looked at the character files. All those family members that moved from Strangetown have duplicate character files. One for as they are now and another (with the blue background to their picture that means they don't really exist in game) as they were when they were yanked from Strangetown. They didn't live in Strangetown long and between them I don't think they met more than 5 or 6 sims. If I go through and delete all the relationships and memories of characters met in Strangetown will it be safe to delete the old duplicate character files? Also the sims they met in Strangetown have character files, once the relationships and memories are gone can I delete them too? Is there anything else I should be deleting at the same time?

From reading other threads it seems like this is the way to go, but I just want to be 100% sure before hacking away at my neighbourhood files. Obviously I plan to backup first but the fewer problems the better!

[J. M. Pescado]

If you use "Deleted 2" on the UNLINKED files, you should be able to purge them cleanly from your neighborhood.

[notveryawesome]

I have a similar problem. There are duplicate dead sims in my merged Pleasantview (I've never moved sims as the OP did -- the duplicates have been there from the beginning, AFAICT). How do I go about safely deleting them? They don't seem to have any relationships, but I don't know how to check for dangling SWAFS, etc (yes, I've done searches, but the info doesn't match my exact scenario). Any help would be much appreciated.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have a similar problem. There are duplicate dead sims in my merged Pleasantview (I've never moved sims as the OP did -- the duplicates have been there from the beginning, AFAICT). How do I go about safely deleting them? They don't seem to have any relationships, but I don't know how to check for dangling SWAFS, etc (yes, I've done searches, but the info doesn't match my exact scenario). Any help would be much appreciated.

Deleted II: Electric Boogaloo. You don't need to worry about relationships or SWAFs with Deleted II: Relationships, memories, and SWAFs are all ritually cleansed by fire if you follow procedures as documented.

[notveryawesome]

Yes, but these are DEAD sims. I assume I would need to resurrect them in order to process them for deletion? What a pain.

[ZephyrZodiac]

The ones you are talking about cannot be resurrected, if you look in your characters folder you'll see they are tiny files.  Trying to resurrect them will actually cause problems in your game. 

When you have loaded your hood in SimPE, load the sim description of the sim you want to delete and go to the More option at the end.  You will see a list of files you can open.  Open SWAFs, and you will have the SWAF for that sim.  Click on commit, and the SWAF for that sim in the list will appear in italics, right-click on that and choose delete, then in the File Menu at the top left click on Save.  That SWAF will now be deleted.  You can do the same for the DNA.

[notveryawesome]

Well, that seems easy enough. Thanks, ZZ! Do you happen to know if it's safe to delete 'Unknown toward Unknown' relationships in SimPE? I've seen a few of these in my neighbourhood relationships, and am not sure whether it's a good idea to just delete them, or not. If not, how do I go about getting rid of them?

[jrd]

Unknown to Unknown are usually the robots or birds. Quaxi just doesn't seem to want to add identification for these like he has for the Reaper etc..

[jsalemi]

Do you happen to know if it's safe to delete 'Unknown toward Unknown' relationships in SimPE?

I clean them up on occasion, and haven't had a problem.  They do tend to gather over the sim-years, where you end up with dozens of them after 2 or 3 generations.  As Jordi said, they're not important relationships, so it does no harm to get rid of them.

[ZephyrZodiac]

They just reform anyway.  I think that womrats must be included, since I had a sim best friends with her womrat.......If you find unknowns  lurking in your simdescriptions, which they will, always check like I explained before deleting them (if they are necessary, they'll just come back again) as you may at some point have deleted a townie whose DNA and SWAFs are still hanging around.

[notveryawesome]

I haven't deleted any sims (yet), but I'll keep that in mind. Thanks, everybody, for the advice.

[Sivany]

The ones you are talking about cannot be resurrected, if you look in your characters folder you'll see they are tiny files.  Trying to resurrect them will actually cause problems in your game. 

When you have loaded your hood in SimPE, load the sim description of the sim you want to delete and go to the More option at the end.  You will see a list of files you can open.  Open SWAFs, and you will have the SWAF for that sim.  Click on commit, and the SWAF for that sim in the list will appear in italics, right-click on that and choose delete, then in the File Menu at the top left click on Save.  That SWAF will now be deleted.  You can do the same for the DNA.

I didn't know you could do this, I always end up noting their file number and looking trough the SWAFs manually to delete them. Sometimes I've found sims with a blue background in SimPE don't appear on the lot debugger so I have to delete them entirely through SimPE. You mention Sim DNA but I thought deleting that, even for sims you wanted to delete from the game, was considered a VBT?

[ZephyrZodiac]

I always understood that you need to delete it - maybe things have changed, but if you are deleting townies, basically I think you should, if you are deleting duplicates I think you shouldn't, if you are deleting an ancestor (not advisable) then you shouldn't.  The point about the duplicates is that only one is the parent (in the case of Skip and Darleen, and since you don't know which one (the resurrectable or the duplicate) is actually the parent, then it's probably safer to leave the DNA alone.

From what I can see, duplicates were created by EAxis when they created PV etc., but how they did it is a mystery, although if one did as they then recommended you to do (ie move inhabited lots in and out of the lot bin) the same kind of thing happened.

[Sivany]

I reckon EAxis might have moved some of the pre-made families between neighbourhoods when they first made the game. Probably they first planned one pre-made neighbourhood with a few different family situations (like aliens etc.) but then that evolved into 3 seperate neighbourhoods and they just moved the sims around.

On another note I carefully went through and deleted all my duplicate sims using SimPE to remove all memories, gossip tokens, relationships, SWAFs and finally character files. This was before I installed BV. The other day I was looking at my neighbourhood using the QA version of SimPe and noticed that some of the duplicate character files have come back!  Is this because I didn't delete them properly and what is it that might not have been deleted that could cause them to reappear (relationships, memories, SWAFs)?