More Awesome Than You!

Ok everyone how many downloads do you have file size wise? I am bordering on 5gb after my recent cleaning spree. I only cleaned because i started seeing a slight lag. My game takes roughly 6 1/2 minutes to load from start to playing a family. I have all settings on high. Here are a few of my numbers: hair recolors 1299; hair meshes 453; Clothing meshes 6867; Clothing 14324; Object recolors  6071; Object meshes 607; walls/floors 3886; groundcovers 202 ; Makeup 1432; and every hack known to man that is compatible with NL. lol So anyone else addicted. Also what method do you use to clean out your downloads.

Yeah, I'd say you have too much.  Unless you want your game to explode, I would start culling it back a little.  ;)

I have all of my downloads sorted into different sections, and then use the MTS2 Clean Installer to start removing some of it.

I only have 7.69mb-just some makeup and freckles/beauty spots I downloaded :) I have no space on my hard-drive for anything more than that really :( Mind you I am just downloading Motoki's clothes hack thingy, I don't know how much space that will take up.

Ye Gods! 5 GB AFTER the cleaning?! Wow, that sure is a LOT! I haven't checked it out to be honest, but I must have a giga or so. Hmm...maybe I should check it out today.

5 GB is practically more downloads than game!  ;D  I only have 700MB worth of stuff, and I can't even come near to using it all.

819 MB, and don't download anymore...).

Oops, I guess my 6 gigs is kind of bad, huh?  :o

I have "only" 500 MB, with 1633 files. And I thought that it was too much! 5 GB!!!! 6 GB!!! Wow!!!

Just under a gigabyte, which is my entire downloads folder including hacks.  I did have more, but I do regular cleanouts.  One thing I did notice when I first installed NL and played without my downloads folder, was how amazingly quickly the game saved and went back to my desktop.  Normally it takes ages, but without my downloads it was almost instant.  Not sure why it should affect saving, though.

I have a silly question re. downloads.  If I delete a custom hairstyle I don't want anymore, or an item of clothing, will the mesh automatically be deleted as well?

Oh it doesn't take up much space it all. 470kb. The nice part about it is it uses the existing Maxis clothing meshes and textures and just recategorizes them so elders can use them.

As for how much is too much? I would say too much is when the load time gets so long you can't stand it. lol

I'm addicted to downloading but at the same time I'm irritated that the file management portion of this game is such a long and tedious process. It would help enormously for one in thing if we could delete clothes in the buy menu and hair and makeup in the mirror. :P

I've been wondering this also as I have recently went through a "fall" cleaning and deleted tons of hairstyles I didn't want.  Now I don't know which mesh belongs to what in order to delete the unwanted ones.  It's the same thing with custom clothes meshes.  I deleted the outfits but don't know which meshes belonged to them.  Sucky.

I only have 365 files and 80 MB.  And I actually thought I had a lot until I read this thread.

Over the weekend I thought I would get rid of some hairstyles I don't use.  I opened Body Shop and went through the process of deleting the unwanted.  Then I opened my game and discovered I had only 5 custom styles left, even though there were 3 pages of them when I left Body Shop.  What happened?   I had to go and re-download my favorites and  I still have one bald Sim running around town.  And let's not talk about how I no doubt downloaded even more than I had to begin with 'cause I found more I liked!

Yes, that is a huge problem in that if you delete a texture that goes with a custom mesh the mesh does not get deleted and is near impossible to find and vice versa is true too if you went into downloads and deleted the mesh.

The best thing to do when downloading, although it is a bit of a pain in the ass, is to have the custom mesh and textures in its own subfolder and label the folder something descriptive that tells you what the file is and who made it, something like 'Peggygirl short and Shaggy hair' etc. It helps tremendously when you go to delete a file.

eeek 5GB is bigger than my entire Sims2 folder which is  currently 1.4GB and that is with my downloads folder and all games including nightlife my Downloads folder is at 836MB and I dont come any where near using it all. I would have to have literally a thousand  Playable sims to put my downloads into constant use .I weed out  downloads I dont use at all constantly .and if I could weed out an overload of meg hair I would.for what ever reason a glitch has spawned meg hair by the truck load.Iunfortunately meghair is a maxis Item so I cant delete the quadruples of the meg hair.

I agree with Motoki, too much is when you can't stand the loading.

My game will load in under 2 minutes with up to 20,000 files, but at 30,000 it will take over 20 minutes. I don't know what the deal is. Must be an exponential increase or something.

I keep it under 10,000 files at all times. I manage my downloads by creating more than one game set, and letting each one have its own custom content. This way, I can have as many different items as I want, but don't have to deal with the resulting loading times. For example, I have one all-alien neighborhood, and all the weird, crazy, and alien-like skins and objects go in there (example: Weird Zone from MTS2). Then, those same items do not go into any of my other game sets, because the other neighborhoods are not alien-related and I would never use the alien stuff in them, so why should they clutter up the catalog?

I always load newly downloaded items into an empty game to see what they actually look like. A lot of stuff looks good in pictures or in Bodyshop but is hideous in the game, but if your catalog is already bulging you might not see all the new stuff and it might clutter up your game for ages before you finally get a good look at it and realize it's crap and you don't want it.

I also always customize the things I download. A lot of clothing is in the wrong categories, and most hair is not genetically correct. I fix up all of that. It makes using the items much more appealing, and the catalogs load faster if there are no dresses in the swimwear section.

I also put everything in collections. It helps me locate the right stuff quickly. I actually have collections based on color of clothing. Special body meshes (fat lady, bodybuilder, etc) go into their own collections. If some clothing is a set (pants and top separate, for example), then those go into a collection as well. I even have collections for stuff from particularly good sites. I almost never use the actual catalog to rumage for clothing. Takes way too long to find the right stuff that way.

I find that the added "trouble" of looking carefully at each item and fixing it if necessary, results in me having only the very best stuff in my game.

What can I say, I'm an organization maniac. Probably because I'm a download maniac, too. I download so much that if I put it all in one game set, it would take hours for the game to load. I have, currently, 11 game sets. Each has about 10,000 files, mostly with very little overlap. Do the math.

Motoki where can I get your hack? :)

Oh sorry, I posted it in Darkstormeye's thread here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1196.0

215 megabytes here.

And I thought I was addicted!

Thank you Motoki. :)

Sara,  do you categorize clothing into collections that you can then pull up in the game?  How do you do this?  I haven't used the game's "collection" mode at all for objects, but I didn't even know it was available for clothing.

Or are you rather talking about grouping them in collections in your download folder?

I have about a gig's worth of downloads right now, but a lot of that is junk.  I have NO IDEA how to sort through it all as the preview image option in the clean installer doesn't really give me a good idea of what the package is.  Every once in a while I'll go through the in-game catalog mode or Body Shop to sift through objects, clothes, hair, etc and delete ones I'm not interested in anymore.  Does this actually remove the file from the downloads folder, or am I just wasting my time deleting packages this way?

For those super-organized, how EXACTLY do you manage everything?

I don't know how many items I have right now, but I know I have 200-300 MBs worth, including hacks. I try to keep it organized, since my game loads slowly due to my computer. Hopefully, I'll be able to upgrade it soon.

what I do is right click once I enter the dowloads folder andclik arrang by name and type

3,91 GB (4'203'947'060 bytes).

That is after pruning half my clothes, recolours, objects, and hairstyles.

2.85GB... It's the damn plants I tell you!  ::)

Hmmm...

Bodyshop stuff: 9.600 objects, 4,81 GB
Objects and Recolors: 10.000 objects, 2,8 GB
And Hacks, Careers and Walls/Floors, but they take up nearly nothing in comparison.

Mind you, this is after reinstalling prior to NL, where I drastically weeded out objects.

Granted, the game lags when I start it up (~15 mins), and it takes ~4 mins when I load the first family, but all other families after that load quickly. And since I always have Firefox running the background, I just surf around a bit while the game loads. From what I've noticed, it seems it's the new meshed stuff that ups the load time: before new meshes came out, I had tons of Bodyshop objects and recolors, and hardly had any additional loadtime.

After reinstalling, nearly all of the objects I kept are new meshes, and I also have a lot of hairmeshes. I've thought about going back to mostly only recolors for objects, but I don't want to go back to the boring Maxis stuff. I mind the load-time less than I mind having all houses look alike.

I have mostly stopped downloading, tho. I have enough furniture for all the houses I play (and I am working on making my neighborhood smaller, so I'm unlikely to need more). I do still download some newly meshed stuffed, but it's mostly new decorative objects, just things to make the lots more lived-in and realistic. With Bodyshop, I only get new clothes if they're either ethnic stuff, Victorian/old-fashioned stuff, or new hair.

I could probably weed out the Bodyshop stuff, but it's so *tedious* and takes forever.

Just in CAS. For buying clothes you still have to suffer. My collections are helpful to me because I build my own custom townies, meaning that I create dozens of sims in each neighborhood.


It removes them.


Be organized BEFORE you install anything into the game. If you have Nightlife, use subfolders religiously. Always download pictures along with anything you download, and keep the picture inside the folder with the item. Folder names should be descriptive. I use the following format for my sub-folders:

Type of Item (objects, clothing, makeup, etc) > Site Name > Description

So if I download a hair mesh from Peggy, it will end up in Hair > Peggy > Name of Mesh

If I download any recolors, even if they are by other people, they go into that folder. Inside that folder will also be a picture of each item, and a text file that tells me where the items came from (in case of recolors that are not from the original site).

Once junk accumulates, it is very hard to get rid of, as you are finding out. At some point you just have to sit down a weed through it. Or, start over. Starting over is actually a pretty good thing to do when things have gotten out of hand. It's almost impossible to get completely organized once things are out of hand. It's one of those things you have to do from the start.

You're probably deleting recolours of objects which have multiple "recolour slots". If you have a recolour package which recolours both parts, by deleting only one part the other part will either also disappear, or the original deleted part will reappear on next load as the download was not actually removed.

Actually I am selecting the item, not even opening the options on it and then deleting it. Its too risky to try and determine which recolor is the one to the mesh and which is not, its usually black or white but not always.  So I just select the whole thing and can it. Or so I think...

If you do it in game, and the files are read only, they will never disappear.  Tried that one time, spent probably 3 hours going thru all the objects and clothes, and there they were the next time I loaded the game.... What a waste of good playing time.

OK I'm about to make a drastic move: I will either get rid of all Downloads minus hacks and start over to make a effort to delete atleast 2gb more. *CRIES***** Or i could attempt to upgrade computer.  It is a athlon 64 3800 with 1 gb ram and a geforce 5200fx. i know i need to upgrade the card. lol So what do you think is my solution.

Five gigs? After a cleaning spree? :o Whoa, that's a lot.

After reading this thread I am happy to say that I don't have that much. I only have 1.46 GB. Of that 23.1 MB is the Saved Sims folder which is just things made by me or things by other people that I've converted to other ages or the other gender. 76.2 MB is most of the clothing, body, or hair meshes (a few of them have their own folders) and 7.13 MB is hacks and hacked objects. 7.35 MB is walls, floors, and terrain paint. And 72.0 MB is most of the object meshes. The rest is everything else I've downloaded. Some of them have subfolders, some of them don't. I'm not a very organized person, unfortunately.

When I clean out my downloads I do one of two things: look for the subfolder or copy of the download in my seperate Downloads folder in the desktop and copy it over and delete it. Or I use Clean Installer to weed out everything and Bodyshop or Cas to make sure I didn't miss anything.

te easiest way to  thin dow is first look at what every single down load is  and then delete every single download that you have collecting dust. thats what .since this morning  i have dumped over 75MB of downloads into the recycle bin

Making the effort to selectively clean out the downloads was worth it to me.  One good place to start with objects is to get rid of any recolors of the furniture you will never use.  I hate the Lap of Luxury sofa, will never use it; but still had 47 recolors of it.  Is that crazy or just addicted?  Starting there made it easy to keep going.

I am working on cleaning out some of my stuff

Right now my folder is 2.35 GB which isn't really that terrible (could certainly be worse, especially if I hadn't stopped downloading clothing recently) 

I have almost 9,000 files eeps!

That makes me laugh though that I can even have 2 gigs of downloads b/c back in my pre sims day I had a crappy computer and the entire hard drive was only 7 gigs.  (Yes I already said it was a crappy computer...no need to point and laugh)

I'm cleaning out a lot of custom hair.  So much of it I never use and I just hafta wade through them all to find one that I want.

Need to do the same with objects soon..I have so many that I downloaded just to have but they have yet to make an appearance in any of my sim houses.

A part of me just wants to trash my download folder and start over but I don't have the heart.

Ok So here is what i'm doing. Clothing first. Then Hair. Then objects. OMG i never realized how much ugly clothes i have.**DELETE*** DELETE**. Ok that should clear up a easy 300mg. lol I have a love hate relationship with custom hair. I love then but hate the organization. I am  trying to find only ones that have been put in the color bins. I might get brave and try to use datgen to organize them.

That's where I'm at.  I only started downloading content when NL came out and now I don't know how I'll ever live without custom content!

I do have my downloads organized by type (recolors, objects, meshes, clothes, etc, etc) so I might just try deleting a folder at a time and slowly redownloading items I like using SaraMK's method of putting each package in its own descriptive folder with a screenshot.  Then again, I'm not sure I can take the time as I usually download a couple hunred items every time I go on a downloading spree.

Edited to Add (x2): Asked a stupid question and after Googling around for a while, I found the answer myself.  To anyone who might be as stupid as me, datgen can be downloaded here (http://www.datgen.info/)

lalala...

http://www.datgen.info/

Hmm, long as I'm here, I have about 29 MB of custom stuff (all hacks, though).

Thanks anyway, stick.    :)

I've learned I should just stop asking questions that have specific answers because 8 times out of 10, I figure out the answer before anyone can respond.  For some reason, I just can't stop asking these questions though.

I trashed all my stuff and started over and I while I do miss a few things, I did manage to get most of them back and I don't regret it. I would literally spend days on file management and pruning and never play the damned game and I got tired of it.

One thing to consider when downloading and chosing what to delete is the file size. A lot of recolors are small files. Many are under 100k, some well under. That's really not so much. But skins, a lot of clothes, most hair etc are HUGE files most times so I am far more selective about them and quicker to get rid of them. They are also more of a pain in the ass to delete since you have to go into the CAS or bodyshop to do it and it takes forever. :P

Hmm, I just noticed another sign of my addiction. I downloaded a whole mess of Halloween crap and have not even gotten around to using it and don't really have time to mess with the game tonight. Luckily I put it all in its own halloween subdirectory so it's going right in the trash!

I think part of my problem is a lot of times I don't get just get things I know I will use but I grab all sorts of stuff just in case I might want to use it at some point.  ::) I need to get better about really truthfully asking myself if I will have a definitely use for something before I download it or I'll end up with another 9 GB again and have to trash it all over again. :(

what I hate is when a certain hair type suddenly decideds to multiply and its a Maxis shipped hair so you cant delete it . the hair I have multipling of is own accord is the Meg hair any clue How I can get rid of all the excess meg hair?

More than likely that is actually a hair texture that you don't have the mesh for or vice versa. Also there was an issue with older versions of SimPE where if you made a new clothing or hair mesh and made recolors for it, the recolors would not work unless you also had the original texture for that hair in your downloads.

What the game does in these instances when it can't find a piece it needs is to substitute a default Maxis item instead. For women's clothes it's usually that damned frumpy red shirt that's not tucked in with the white capri pants and red cheap sneakers. I guess for women's hair it the meg do. You can safely delete them, but I'm not sure if it it will leave residual files. It probably will.  ::)

how do I delete them

ONE BY FREAKING ONE

Ok does anyone know of a way to match meshes with there Skins/hai/objects etc. I have been deleting clothes all day and while i have reduced my file size by nearly a 1 gb i still have the same number of meshes.

that's not what I meant .Iwant to know how to find which ones are spawning the icky meg do

I know that I have a problem... EDD - Excessive Download Disorder.  I have 1.65 GB of downloads.  And that's after doing clean up prior to installing NL.  And I have items to add to the game when I log out.  I keep saying I'm going to change my ways, but I don't...  ???

only way i've found to download those is to go into game and delete them. I would advice loading up the game with only your hair and meshes that way it will be a quick load. Also one time saver i've found is to turn the settings down to low low low on everything and the deleting goes quicker if you know what you are after.

I don't really know of a good way to be honest with you. If I just put a new hair or clothing in and get that then I know which one it is, otherwise it's near impossible to track down. :(

I suppose you could try doing boolprop testingcheatsenabled true then shift N and then hover over it. That should give an internal name of the file which might help track it down but good luck. :P

CleanPack did show me four hair dos thaat obviously were missing somthing one in each color as iinstead of showing hair I got a fuzzed picture .and definitely no hair as hair that includes the proper mesh actually resembles hair in the preview screen. so I removed the packages now I have SimPE doing a  full package scan that includes looking for base meshes

ok so can simpe find out if a mesh is missing from a skin or vice versa?

yes

know of a tutorial or would you mind explaining?

go to Sim Pe and open it go to tools and click scan files at the bottom it has several options for Scanning simply tick off which actions you want sim pe to perform . if you  want it to be recursive tick off that box and click scan

Hmm, I feel a little greedy now... my download folder (encompassing bodyshop items, objects, hacks, careers, and walls/floors) currently totals 11 GB. I need a 12-step program. Honestly though, I'm happy with how my game plays (approx. 15 minute load time, another 2-3 minutes to get into the neighborhood, then it's smooth sailing from there) so I figure I won't worry about it. If it blows up in the proverbial visible-from-space fireball... well, I had a lot of fun getting it there. On another note, what does checking the recursive box in SimPe's scan folders do exactly? ~KG

Well, KLGFCG - I can only say I better put my sunglasses on now, since I will probably see the flames from here.  ;)

LOL-- get out the flame retardant suits... I'm fixing to blow up the planet with my downloads. It should be a pretty show. ~KG

How could anyone be happy with 15min load times? Gack, I would go insane and never get anything done.

Recursive: include subfolders of the selected folder in the scan.

I know, mine are about 1.5 minutes, and I am impatient.

Lol I would go insane too. My game takes about a minute and a half  to get started and another minute into the neighbourhood and 30 seconds into a house. That's better then it used to be because I upgraded to 768 megabytes of RAM.

Too bad, there is www.civanon.org but no www.sims2anon.org.

I did and found bad files and duplicates which I diabled then went into Down loads and left another %Omb in the recycle bin which I emptied. rerunning the scan in case Imissed any thing. I like the way it highlights recolors of maxis objects in red and then gives you a thumbnail of the item in question.found two hair files with no mesh got rid of them since I have the multiplying Meg Hair  problem.

Anyone planning to use DatGen to categorize hair should make sure to get the debug version.  It fixes many many problems which were in the plain .0.7.13 version -- in fact, at least in the hair-categorizing aspect, it works perfectly.

my load time is about  2 minutes  to get in the  game but once the neighbor hood is loading about a minute to get the neighborhood screen up  from there load tims are btween thirt seconds for a rinky dink house with one sim in it to a minute to a minute and a half for  6x5 lot with a huge house and 8 sims living in it

Im sitting on the edge of  700mb and busily disabling more so I can delete quicker what I never use

Ok i'm down to 2.10 gb after killing all my customer hair. I was getting so sick of trying to delete and get it organized i just hit that big delete button and then emptied the trash can before i could stop myself. I will redownload and be starter next time. *cries* BTW anyone know of any good hair sites lol. that have their hair put in the right color bins etc?

I'm very very guilty of this. I think I need to put another folder in my downloads folder that is the "stuff I want to download but probably won't ever use" folder lol

I weeded through my buy mode objects tonight.  Took me down to a while 2.21 gb  ::)

I'm thinking about trashing my hair folder and starting over..I'm getting sick messing with it.  It takes far to long to delete the stuff and I want to kick whoever's genius idea it was that once you click "delete" the thumbnails go alllllllllllllllllll the way back to the beginning.

Once, I just deleted the entire Downloads folder (right before Nighlife), specifically so I could start over and properly organise them into sections. 

It's sad that I got up to 900MB so fast.  :P

*points and laughs at everyone who has over a gig in downloads*  ;)

I couldn't stand to have such a mess of downloads. I only download things that are easy to delete, and I only keep things I use constantly. My pickiness has earned me a neat 230MB. I do frequent cleanings to be sure things come no where near out of control. It's not exactly easy when there's so much amazing stuff out there, but I'd rather have my game run more smoothly. My game takes well under a minute to load. My biggest word of advice is to stay away from bodyshop meshes, as there is no way to delete them from within the game, and that makes things tricksy. I also look for well organized objects that are easy and safe to delete, mesh and all, from within the game. WellDressedSim is a prime example of that.

Well, I have just under a Gig. One thing I noticed when I was going through things is that I seem to have lost the Maxis recolors of the Moroccan couch. The loveseat is fine, but the couch only shows the red one. Grr. I promised my self that when I installed NL that I would be extremely picky.....and then I got on a clothes downloading jag.

I've learned to be choosie about what I download and I tend to get rid of things I find myself not using.
I've noticed that I have incredably few new hair meshes because I get rid of the ones that end up looking like plastic in my game. I'd rather have a few Maxis hair meshes with some movement to them than a bunch of cute dos that seem cemented in place. And I do love that their hair changes when they're in pajammas now even if it looks like they had to take out extensions...

And I try to avoid having too many recolors of new objects though I'm bad about having loads of furnisher meshes.

But I have to check the folder sizes later to find out how much stuff I have now.

There are very few people who do this still. Unfortunately, you will have to do it yourself each time you get hair. Datgen is probably the easiest way to do it and as someone mentioned, be sure and get the debug version.

Also, whenever you download hairs, try to put the mesh and all the hair colors for that style in its own subdirectory.

I dumped all my downloads after NL came out.
I'm keeping a tight rein on new mesh objects and downloading Maxis recolors now for the most part. ATS, Holy Simoly, WDS and Windkeeper are the only ones I get pretty much anything they release. Otherwise I have to really adore it, and if poly/vertex count isn't posted I won't touch it. 
Skins, I don't have THAT many--300 MB of my total.  I categorize hairs into their proper Maxis genetic as I get them. (I use SimPe; it's pretty easy.)

I'm back up to 1.1GB again and am satisfied with that. My game loads in about a minute, and it's about 20 seconds into a lot.  ;D

How exactly do you categorize the hairs in SimPE? Do you have to manually set all the flags? I know Pinhead wrote a long tutorial for it some time ago but it kind of just made me go  ???

I have no idea why I can script in various programming languages just fine, but I can't figure out the simplest SIM program...

So I downloaded the developmental release.  The hair toner plugin isn't there, I can't figure out where to find it, and by this thread (http://forums.thesimsresource.com/showthread.php?t=296263&highlight=hair+toner+plugin) on TSR, it seems that hair toner has been dropped.

I'm just a flipping idiot, right?  Do I need to use skin toner to categorize my hair, or is the hair toner plugin available somewhere?

ETA: I think I give up.  The tutorials don't go over how to categorize hair with the skin manager.  I load some files, but have no way of knowing what COLOR it is (unless the filename gives a clue)....  It seems like skin manager then auto categorizes hair, all on its own SOMEHOW because after loading some files, if I go to skin manager, they've assigned themselves to a category.  It seems like it all conflicts though because filenames indicating "blond" are assigning themselves to "black". 

I followed an excellent simplified tutorial by buffysmg81 at N99.
I take no credit for this! The original post can be found here: http://p218.ezboard.com/fstarlightsimsfrm62.showMessage?topicID=631.topic (http://p218.ezboard.com/fstarlightsimsfrm62.showMessage?topicID=631.topic).

They haven't actually been categorized. It's just a display issue. You are right that there is no way to know what color a hair is, unless the filename tells you. The program can't know either. What it's showing you is the color of the hair that was cloned. So if someone clones black hair and then makes all the other colors from it, then the program will show it as black. I use SimPE to open the files to see what color they are, if the filename gives no clues.

I have just over 3GB total in my \Downloads and \Saved Sims folders. I'll reduce that by a few MB when I removed the Halloween decorations, but will probably replace them with even more Christmas stuff.

That 3GB is a lot when you consider that I only have a 40GB hard drive.  :P Where's the 12-Step Group?

Using SimPE or DatGen to manually categorize hairs is indeed possible and VERY tedious.

The HairToner plugin was indeed dropped in favor of Skin Manager.

Skin Manager cannot tell you what color something ought to be.  If you are lucky, the creator was kind enough to put the color in the filename.  Otherwise, once you have the Hairtone Category Editor open, you can drill down into the files and see textures, which should allow you to decide on your own.  Generally I rename all hairs to something meaningful as a sort of set-up step before going into DatGen.

There is a tutorial for categorizing hairs on the DatGen site which is pretty good.  If any of you are interested in a text-only bare-bones tutorial of how I personally go about it, I can probably work one up.

Goddess only knows, because I get sidetracked all the time from what I'm supposed to be doing by the download crazies... Aaarrgggghhh, do...not...need...more...hair...  :P

I had a special folder in my favourites that I had a long list of free sites in, and I finally had to delete the list, since I couldn't take the pressure.

MUST. NOT. DOWNLOAD.  ;)

ah, but you know I have a copy of that list, so there's your safety net should you decide to jump off the wagon...

You'd be a great one to take out on the lash, eh? No point in refusing a drink...er...list helping hand when it's offered, because a certain person wouldn't take no for an answer! So gimme the goddamn list. NOW!  ;D

Well I have a copy of the list at Posie's as well, and I posted it on the BBS.

Funny story with that.  I posted it on the BBS under my original name (gilmorefan) and then the other night I was on the other account (StupidityLeak) and someone asked for a list of download sites.  Not thinking about the different names, I just copy-and-pasted the list, and then got called a plagiarist for it!  :D

I did some pruning and got it down to 778mb. Go me! Still have more pruning to do and I should try to organize it.  :-\

here's a bit of good news for all of us downloadaholics. I am getting ready to get a bigger hard drive for my  computer and I was taling to guy who puts hard drives in and sells them etc  and he told me that until the drive drops down to  10% percent of its capacity available ie 4 gig in a 40 gig hard drive the computer will act normally he said in that neighborhood the pc starts doing odd things.  Iam going from a 40 gig to a 160 gig hard drive

CRIES*** well i did it. I deleted nearly the whole damn thing. I killed objects, object recolors, hair, meshes and clothes. *CRIESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS** now i need to download more. I downloaded for mts2 and pronupsims and a few others for hair so for. I am organizing them as followed all the sub hair colors in the same folder as the mesh and the folder is titled the mesh name. now that folder is in a folder with the name of the arthor or site they came from or both.

Now i need to know more really great quality free sites.

So, the point of deleting it all, then re-downloading everything was just to get it organised?  If that's what makes you happy, I guess more power to you.

If you want some download sites, here are some:

Index Sites

http://www.strategyplanet.com/thesims/simsshowcase/ - index
http://www.thesimsurfer.com/ - index

Both clothes and objects

http://simfantasy.free.fr/Sims2/sims2 - very nice furniture
http://www.aroundthesims2.com/ - gorgeous furniture
http://www.simplystyling.de/homesims2.html - nice clothes and objects
http://www.modthesims2.com/
http://www.parsimonious.org/ - Sims and lots are the best thing about this site
http://www.spiffysims.com/ - really nice clothes and a lot of content in general
http://mangosims2.free.fr/
http://www.peggysims2.net/ - has some nice stuff
http://www.romancesims.com/
http://www.serasims.de.vu/ - a really nice site
http://www.simsquirts.com/ - for all of your Sim children
http://www.sims2luxe.com/
http://www.simsconnection.com/
http://www.sunairsims.net/ - very nice furniture and accessories/clothes
http://www.welldressedsim.com/
http://www.simslice.com
http://sims2sisters.sme.sk/
http://www.simchic.com/ - objects, clothes, makeup, and accessories.
http://tarox.sx.am/
http://www.simgedoehns2.de/eng/index.htm - modern furniture, some skins
http://www.vitasims.com/sims2.htm
http://www.simplyelau.it/index.htm
http://www.mmo-town.com/viewforum.php?f=15&sid=b9bb7017cb3289a06c1f623ccbcf97b5
http://www.2-for-u.de.vu/
http://69.50.240.194/~bellamob/
http://sims2.beewitched.com/
http://forwardmotionis.net/
http://gameisland.ru/TheSims2/eng/main.html
http://fashion-show.org/
http://www.simulatedliving.com/
http://www.thesimsresource.com - Not free, but a rotational 3% is free and changed every 3 days.
http://www.pixelsims.com/ - nice windows and doors. Some clothes here as well, but not much of that.
http://www.coolbits.com/sims/
http://www.xmsims.com/
http://moonsims.asi.org/simlove/Sims2/
http://simsid.com/sims2_index.html
http://www.simenapule.it/

Clothes

http://all-about-style.com/index.html - a Victorian section
http://www.pronupsims.net/ - a lot of hairstyles and wedding themes
http://77simlane.angeltowns.com/77simlane2/ - more gothic and dark-style clothes, piercings and hair
http://www.alicefashion.com/index.htm
http://www.getskintight.net/
http://sims.varotica.de/ - gothic style clothes and underwear.
http://www.simsboutique.com/index.php
http://www.ikkerinas-pages.tk/
http://www.sims2paradise.com/
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Style2ForSeniors/
http://www.helaene.com/ 
www.hairfish.com/mermaidcove/

Objects/Build Mode

http://www.holysimoly.com/ - fabulous modern furniture
http://www.casa-darte.de/ - art and decorative objects, as well as extensive walls and floors
http://m-sim-o.com/ - very nice, modern furniture
http://www.simcrow.com/
http://sterlingsims2.com/ - large selection of walls and flooring, as well as lots and a forum
http://reflexsims.de/index1.htm - very nice site
http://www.simlogical.com/ - hacked objects, etc.
http://www.eternal-echo.net/sims/ - awesome meshes for rugs (recolourable) and kids stuff

That was the point in my case. It may sound crazy, but I got so tired of spending all my free time in file management because of the way the game is and the lack of decent tools for it. I found it easier to start from scratch and be more selective and also be better about categorizing and using subdirectories.

Motoki, it's not so crazy.  I know, I have done that too.  When I reinstalled the game right before I installed NL, I started all over with new downloads, and spent forever organising it into sub-sections.  It was a lot easier than trying to figure out what everything was and moving it over.  Now I have a system that works pretty well.  Plus, it's easy to take out a certain component (like hacks, for instance) if I want to upload a lot.

I only have less than a gig of CC, and it took forever, I can't imagine rebuilding 5!

Ifinally got rid of the truckload of meg hair marked as CC in my game it took forever but Iffigured out that either the hair itself was missing  leaving a meesh and no hair and some had hair with no mesh. after going one by one in Simpe and disabling the truck loaoad of meg hair .I exited Sim Pe andwent to body shop and deleted them 1 by 1..I now have exactly 4 meg hairs in my game 1 blonde ,1 red.1 brown,and 1 black all  maxix made

I have 4.6GB's in my download folder.   Most of mine are clothes and hair, and clothes and hair meshes.   I only have 3 objects meshes and those are beds. 

  I would love to delete some of mine too but I don't know which mesh goes with what clothes. 

  I would pay anything to get a program where we could see the clothes and it would point to the meshes that go with them,   something like the simenhancer we had for sims 1.

Motoki, I just downloaded your elder fix, so I am going to delete all of my saggy, baggy elder ladies outfits,  that will clean out my download folder a little bit and thanks for the fix.   :)

You're not alone. I was inspired by this thread to do just that. I had over 6gig and even though I had subfolders, it was hard knowing what was the mesh and what was a recolor. I've used some of the suggestions from this thread to better organize the folders. I have subfolders under subfolders under subfolders now with a picture in each subfolder of just what the item is so I know which files to delete in the future if I want to get rid of something.

That's part of the reason why I made that file. By recategorizing the Maxis clothing, I was able to get a lot more outfits for elders and for the workout category without needing any meshes or textures at all.

I had previously created copies of those sweats in the bodyshop and recategorized them as workout, but that was a terrible waste of space as each one of them had a copy of the textures files which are large and which already exist in the game files, so I was able to get rid of them and save at least a little space in my downloads folder.

Isaved space  in mydownlaos folder thanks to your mod and myelders are alot more stylish now

I need to clean mine out too and I am trying to deceide between datgen and simPe,  so I have two questions.

the last version of SimPe that I read about there was an issue with the program being too big for the screen or something like that, was that issue resolved?

and about datgen,  I would download it but I do not know how to install the april05 update to directx, if you double click it you get a bunch of files and then I don't know what to do next as it is not self installing can anyone help me please?   thanks

sorry to be so dense.   ;D

Don't feel bad, we all gotta start somewhere. At least you're trying to learn. :)

re: SimPE

I think it's running okay now. I haven't had any problems with it lately.

re: DirectX

Which files are you trying to get and from where? I'm not quite sure which ones you mean.

it is directx_9c_Apr05sdk
win32 Cabinet Self-extractor
microsoft Corporation

I already downloaded but have not installed it,  Dark Matter says in all his posts about DatGen that you must have the update for your directx or some of the plug ins will not show up.

  :o6 GB!!! :o
I too have little under 1 GB :o I checked 3 times! Couldn't belive it myself. I have little more than 3000 files, including everything.

Impressed with self-control... Wish I'd got me some of that, but the mouse buttons click too easy.  ;)

The SDK is the Software Developer Kit and is usually HUGE and full of stuff you will never use. It's generally not something regular end users should get or ever need as it's tools for game developers. If there's a specific portion of it Dark Matter is saying is needed to run Datgen but he should have just yanked it out and redistributed it or otherwise found a way so that people don't have to download the whole darned SDK.

I've run Datgen without that file, but then again it also does tend to give me a lot of errors so I'm not sure if that's why or not. :P

That's intersting to me...I finally just checked last night and found I have 1 GB in downloads (hacks included) and I "only" have around 2,400. I wonder what is hogging up so much space? Time to get out the pruning sheers. :(

I have Just under 5000 files taking up 768MB of space

I've got 1.4mb.... I guess it'll still be easy for me to organise before I go on a downloading spree, eh?

I dont know I have trouble organizing with Just under 800mb :-\

I had 6 files :P I really need to get all my fixes and stuff back :P

6 files ??? is that after killing your downloads folder?

So, are we starting a 12-step program?  I'll bring the coffee and donuts.  ;)

I trashed my downloads in August and started over because of the insane load times.  (It's bad when I can boot up the game, go do a load of laundry, including folding, and then come back to watch the game scroll through the little "loading grill cheese, meticulating splines, etc." dialouge)  And then, feeling free to download anything and everything, I have now run it up to 1.09 GB, 3,965 total files in 16 subfolders.  :(

I'd never get anything done without the insane loading times!

I have 786mb and 5,000 files but a lot of my files are  pretty tiny . can Ijoin the 12 step program

Well, every once in a while, I go on a downloading spree. =) Tonight's big stop was www.simlogical.com

And alot of clothes, mainly formal. I use TwoJeff's Formal Wedding, and, considering Gen 2 Heir in my legacy will soon be going off to college, I'd needed outfits. ^^ I have to attempt to find him a wife (he's a pleasure seeker, with the life time want of 'Become Professional Party Guest'. Easy enough. =P).

I <3 Pleasure sims. Hell, but them in their PJ's, and they are in platinum! It's WICKED. So easy!

My download folder now tops 616 MB's. ^^ My game runs BEAUTIFULLY, with not too horribly bad loading times. From the time I boot up the game, til the time I'm in the neighbourhood, it takes just under five minutes. My house itself (on a six by five lot, Extreme Legacy Challenge) is about two minutes. =)


Know those links posted in this post? -POINT- THAT SENT ME ON A DOWNLOADING SPREE! -Sob- T.T

Interesting about load times. I have about 1.5Gb downloads & saved sims, it takes my game well under 2 minutes to load. I don't have a high spec machine but it is an AMD 64bit chip (2000 series). I know windoze doesn't use 64Bit but I wondered if performance could be improved anyway. Or is it because it's an AMD?  :P I do have a gig of RAM.

Well, I don't feel quite so bad about my 2.49 gigs!  I did delete all my downloads before NL and then redownloaded and sorted into subfolders.  Took a while, but I'm happy with the organization, and it makes life easier if I want to get rid of something.

I just reinstalled, and I forgot to remove the downloads folder, so now I have none.  I did have some hacks that were still in the recycle bin, so I restored and reinstalled those.

*sniff*

Maxis content is so fugly!

Your downloads folder shouldn't have been deleted. Have you enabled custom content? Then you have to exit and restart the game before you see your stuff.

No, it's completely gone.  I uninstalled the game manually, and reinstalled.

Umm, a comment here-- or more likely a question-- Did you have or do you have random hairstyle changes when a sim transitions from, say, Teen to Adult? 

I did using this method.  I think that changing the "family" value is the cause.  Changing the "Hairtone" value is enough to place the new color in the correct color bin. 

I can say that I have 2.7GB in my downloads folder.  That includes everything except the complete sims (which are in my saved sims folder).

I'm wondering if one of the resident experts here could point out which files can be deleted out of a package to trim it down for hair files.  If I delete a texture what else should be tossed? Or should I just start pulling stuff out and see if my game implodes?

That's kind of what I did, experiment with seeing what happens when certain things were yanked out. ;) It's not so bad if you temporarily stash you downloads and savedsims somewhere else and then make a new downloads directory with just a copy of the file you are working on and keep checking back in the bodyshop. Without all your other downloads it should work very fast. :)

Thank you Motoki.

I'm working on one color of hair at a time, and the idea to only have what I'm working on in downloads is exactly my plan.

So what I'll do when I get to those files that are messed up (meaning that they don't have a complete color range or mesh change) I'll only have those files to worry about. 

This site is more awesome than me...  ;D

Wow, I guess I'm more impatient than I thought.  My game takes about a min or less to load, and while I wait I tap my fingers constantly and complain about how slow it is :P

I have about 450MB of downloads, which isn't too bad.  I recently downloaded a few things and noticed that loading into house/community lots now is alot slower(probably like 20-30 more) maybe not much for some who wait 15 mins(insane!) but when you're not used to it, seems like a lifetime. 

Corrrect.  It is not necessary to change the family value to get the hair to show up in the right bin.  And changing family values for a bunch of different hairstyles to the same thing will give you random hairstyle changes on transition, since the hair chosen on transition is "something from the right age group in this family".

What good's the family value, then?

Well, if you've chosen a Maxis hair in CAS and change to a different color bin, you get the same style in a new color.  If you change your family values so that each color of a style has the same family value, correctly-binned custom hairs will do this too.

A reminder that it's not necessary to do all this stuff manually in SimPE as DatGen has a much more automated way of doing it.  In my veiw, the less copy-and-paste I have to do, the better.

I've tried DatGen before.  The only time I've successfully used it was when I wanted to update my adult clothing to work with young adults.  I am hoping that by doing some files in SimPE and thereby knowing exactly what is being changed I'll be able to use the hair sorting tool with some success.   So far I've had no luck getting the tools to load,  but I was not trying the debug version either.  Thanks to everyone for all the helpful info.