More Awesome Than You!

Update (3/7/09) - New links, but the program has not actually changed.

This isn't a mod.  I hope that doesn't make it too off-topic here.

Basically, this is a stand-alone program I'm writing for my own use, and I hope that maybe it'll be useful for other people who need a somewhat automated way of keeping notes on their sims.  Originally, I would use excell sheets (hence the name of the program) but usually I would just wind up accidentally deleting something, or losing track of where I was in my rotation, or miss someone in the update, or something like that.  The idea behind this program is that you play through your rotation, and keep some temporary notes as you go.  When you're done for the day, you open the program and enter in updates for the significant events that you want to record.  The updates are not applied until you finish your rotation and click the "apply updates" button.  Before you do that, you're free to review all the updates and delete some if you made any mistakes, without applying anything.  After you apply the updates, all the sims are aged the appropriate amount based on your rotation time and their being (or not being) vampires/zombies/etc.  You can also use the program to keep track of which houses you've already played, which sims have been taken by the social worker and are now in the adoption queue, which teens/pets have run away and have yet to return, and so forth.

Here are some screenshots:
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/simlist.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/editsim.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/settings.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/listmanagement.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/households.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/updates1.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/updatedialog.JPG)
(http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/achievements.JPG)

Get version 0.5, now without having to wait 10 seconds for 4shared!
Download:  http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/SimSheet.zip (http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/SimSheet.zip)
Source:  http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/SimSheet-src.zip (http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/SimSheet-src.zip)

Edit 3/21/09:  Because the dlls are fucking huge, I have moved them to a separate zipfile.  If you simply want to download the latest version, just get it from the above (now refreshingly smaller) links.  If you are downloading this program for the first time, you will also need the Qt Libraries:
Get them here (http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/QtLibraries-Windows.zip) (4.4 MB)
Put them in the same directory as the executable.
Edit:  Changed the link so that it went to the Windows libraries instead of the Linux ones.  Durrr.

The source is provided for if you don't use Windows and/or just want to compile it on your own machine.  The program was made with Qt 4.3, so you'll need to install Qt 4.3+ from www.trolltech.com in order to compile it.

Stuff that Doesn't Work (Yet):
1.  There is a small but annoying graphical bug on the achievements page where filtering by a single sim causes the entries to be very spaced out.  I don't know what causes this.  Clicking on the filter button again should fix it.
2.  Images don't show up.  I'm not sure why - I can't seem to figure out how to get the plugins to work. We can has images!
3.  The middle two tabs are blank.  Yes, I know.  I getting to that.
4.  There is a bug with the filtering caused by an apparently unfortunate intersection of Qt with Windoze whereby data corruption occurs in a Qt class I make much use of, resulting in insta-crash when you try to add a sim or load a savefile.  However, I wrote all the filter code in linux, where it worked just fine, and it never occurred to me that it wouldn't work in Windoze.  So, the code is still there, it's just all commented out.  If you want to compile the program in an OS other than Windoze, let me know and I'll include an altered version of the source code that will include the filter when compiled on a non-Windoze OS. Shiny filters are shiny.

I'd really appreciate feedback on this, even if it's negative.  I don't have BV or FT, so I have only limited information about what kind of BV/FT-related stuff should be tracked here - if you have ideas, let me know.  If there's something else you'd like to see, let me know.

This is great! I'd always kept track of my Sims with spreadsheets. Thanks a lot for this. You could add a "Hobby" and "Career" field.

Looks interesting.  I'm still struggling along with Sims2DB, which was last updated pre-Pets.

Did you know that SimPE can export neighbourhood character data in CSV format?  Would it be possible for you to incorporate an "import from CSV" function, so that the SimPE data could be imported, to reduce the manual data entry?

The other feature from Sims2DB that I like is the ability to print out household sheets.  I put them in rotation order, make notes all over them (of plans for individual sims), and I find it handy in my larger neighbourhoods to have a paper copy as I don't have to alt-tab to another program to work out which household I want to play next and what I was planning to do with them.

Richief - there's actually a whole career tab, which I intend to also include businesses and basically a career history for whichever sim is selected on the first tab.  But that's not to come for a while, unfortunately.  Hobbies and secondary Aspirations (I know it's in the dialog, but it doesn't really work yet) are due for being added pretty soon, if I can remember to.

Kyna - I've been told that yes, but I looked at some of those outputs and there seems to be a lot of stuff in there that SimSheet just doesn't care about, and it looked like a bit of work to go through and figure out where the stuff that would be useful actually is.  If you've got some kind of schema for how SimPE organizes these outputs, I might be able to do that, though.  My SimPE unfortunately hasn't worked since I installed Seasons, so I can't do experiments with it.

You could try asking Quaxi or Inge how the CSV output is organised.

I know when Pegasys was developing Sims2DB she discussed the CSV output with Quaxi.  IIRC, he added the CSV output to SimPE at her request, so that she could use it for Sims2DB.

What are you writing SimSheet in, rufio?  Last I checked, CSV does give the data a "tag" which should allow your program to search and find it.  It shouldn't be too hard to write a CSV-searching method and then use it to import the CSV's usable data.  Then again, it was a long time since I've looked at the CSV sheet and I may be talking through my ass.

ETA: I've actually been thinking a lot about this, too.  What if one were to write a program that reads the character files and updates automatically, instead of you feeding it CSV files?  It'd only be a matter of decoding the character files, but if SimPE can do it, then so can you.  Naturally, you'd want to keep the character files read-only (or would you?) and only display the new data.  It'd probably be not too hard to have it automatically find important data, too.  Searching for changes, and what not.

Kyna - yeah, that would be cool.  I'm not really that involved in this community, though - how do I get in touch with them?

Brudder - it's in C++.  I'm not sure what you mean about the CSV, though - CSV is formatted like "Field One,Field Two,Field Three" etc.  If I don't know what the fields are supposed to be, it's hard to extract and use them.

Yep, they changed it.  But anyway, the fields probably stay the same for each sim.  The easiest way I found to figure out what CSV fields meant was just exporting the sim data to CSV and reading it, applying what I knew to what it said.  It'd probably involve you running back and forth between the game and excel to figure it out, but it's certainly plausible.

Also, to make the program compatible for others without EPs, you could have them check a box for which EPs they have and then have it search for those fields which were added with certain EPs, specifically.

You might want to talk to jfade about this, too.  He's currently away, but he knows all sorts of stuff about how to handle TS2 files.

To contact Quaxi or Inge, you could try http://sims.ambertation.de/ which is the SimPE home page.  Ask on the forum over there, or send a PM.

Or you could send Inge a PM here at MATY.

BTW, if SimPE hasn't worked for you since Seasons and you've updated to the most recent version, you can report your issues with SimPE at the SimPE forum.

EDIT: to add to what Li'l Brudder said about EP compatibility, I believe that one of the fields exported in SimPE's CSV is a field that states which EP the sim was last saved in (i.e. which format that particular sim's character file is in).  Each EP adds new data fields to the sim's character file - which is one of the reasons why SimPE is updated after each EP.

That might be an interesting idea, too.  I've looked at some of the package file formats on the wiki, and they seem fairly straightforward, but I don't know anything about the compression algorithms so I'm not sure I could actually do that.  Jfade is working on some sort of package editor though (he actually asked if I would help out with it when I posted an earlier version of this on another forum, but I've been so busy trying to figure out that filter issue that I haven't done much for it) so maybe it could leach off of that code a bit.  Java's slightly different, but not that different.


Yeah, that's kind of on my list too, but I want to wait until I get most of the EP-specific stuff into it so that I can do that whole system at once and not have to keep adding little bits of stuff as I go.  Since my next planned big update is not going to be EP-specific stuff, I'll probably do that then.

Kyna, thanks for the info.


Thanks, I'll try that.  I'm not sure how helpful it will be to them though, since my issue is basically "it crashes on startup".

That is partially why I suggested you talk to jfade.  :)

This is the sort of thing that ambivalently could be a good SimPE plugin.  Pro - the data can be read directly.  Con - one more thing you can't do without taking a holiday while SimPE loads lol!

I am not really sure how to make things into plugins, and as SimPE doesn't work for me, I would not personally find it very helpful.  And if we can get it to read data directly from the package files by frankensteining together some code from actual package editors, it would be the same thing, right?  I sent a PM to quaxi to ask about the CSV file format, though, unless you know how it works, Inge?

How are you obtaining the data currently?

CSV isn't a "format", it's just a text file with entries seperated by commas.

Inge, currently you have to enter the data for individual sims using the Add Sim dialog (there's a picture of the Edit Sim dialog above, it's essentially the same).  There's no way (yet) to import a list of sims from a neighborhood package or anything like that.

JM, I know what CSV is.  What I mean by "format" is that it matters if the CSV file is written as "Name,Age,Aspiration,Career" or "Name,Aspiration,Age,Career" or any one of the other bazillion possibilities.

I'll see if Peter can find out where it's done and publish the list of columns.

Rufio:  I have just looked at the CSV output and the labels are included in each field - eg ;voicetype=2;doofus=false; (not the way it's usually done, but there is no excuse for complaining you can't tell what the data represents)

Rufio, I would love to use this; however, I have TwoJeffs' Age Duration Hack in my game. There are other age-adjusting hacks out there, like Inge's Age Group Tweak. The problem for me is that the age/life stage fields are hard-coded in your program, and I need flexibility. My sims don't always have 29 days as adults; they usually have over 30, but their elder life stage is shorter.

I like the way age auto-advances in your program, but would it be possible to make it adjustable per sim? Off the top of my head (and I'm not a programmer, so bear with me), I'm thinking that the life stage and age fields could be separated. Then have each life stage default to the Eaxis default number of days left upon transition, but allow the user to change that value if needed. What do you think?

Inge - that's great, but it doesn't really help me, since I don't have access to any of those CSV files or any means to generate them - I won't know, for example, if it's going to be "aspiration=fortune" or "Aspiration=fortune" or "aspiration=2" or "aspiration=ft" or what.  I'd have to guess, and then the program would be filled with all kinds of bugs that I can't test.

Roux - I can definitely put in user-configurable lifestage lengths.  If you don't mind compiling the program from scratch, you can actually do it without that though - in the source, go to the const.h file, you can change the values of the group that begins with "// Age Transitions" - for example, if you want elderhood to begin 10 days after it does in the game, change "const int ELDER = 58" to "const int ELDER = 68".  Then compile the program and it'll have your specifications.

Here is the CSV output from one of my hoods.

I am a bit worried that you're not able to run SimPE though.  Have you got the latest version?  Has .Net 2 stopped running on your system?

Thanks, Inge.  I'll see what I can do with that.  It seems to be counting the age differently from me, though - the first sim is an adult at age 24, but I'm pretty sure the age transition happens at 29.  Or is that counting the actual days played, and (for example) not the days skipped from Elixer use, or days skipped because they went to college early?

ETA: Oh I see, it's actually a small dog.  I'll just presuppose that the age number works the same way and see how it goes.

Roux - actually, I can only let you change the lifestage lengths globally - keeping track of individual age transition times for different sims (if that's what you're asking about?) would be kind of nightmarish.  Would changing things globally help any?

The number of days old they are is not directly related to lifestage.  That's an arbitrary number in a special field.

Ages (Persondata 3A)
Baby      1      Constant Value 0x0110:0x05
Todd      2      Constant Value 0x0110:0x00
Child      3      Constant Value 0x0110:0x01
Teen      10      Constant Value 0x0110:0x02
YA      13      Constant Value 0x0110:0x03 (and   my persondata 0x00AF Equals? Literal Value 0x0001)
Adult      13      Constant Value 0x0110:0x03
Elder      33      Constant Value 0x0110:0x04

Ages are tested as "equals" these values

Ok, but where is the information about how many days away from transition they are, etc.?  I'm looking at where it says "LifeSection=Adult;Age=24;"

There is another field for that: Stack Object's person data 0x005B (Age Days Left).  Is the CSV not offering that to you?  Unfortunately that's the only field that is aware of how the user has set their ageing BCONs or whether the sim had some elixir.

Yeah, I'm not seeing that anywhere.  Do you have any examples from ordinary playable sims though, with the information from the game of what their age actually is?

I'm not sure what you mean or how you want to express age?  It's not as simple as in a human where age=years since being delivered from mother.  If you need days left in agestage which is not related to how old the sim is (ie how many days he has lived) then I am going to have to ask Peter if he can add a field to the output (assuming he can find where it's coded which he hadn't done after spending an hour looking this morning).  And we have to check with the authors of the other database that it won't break their tool.

The way I measure the age in my program is the traditional years-since-birth method, but the age of a sim can get subtracted and added to depending on when they grow up and whether they drink elixer, etc.  So it's not literally the number of days they've been played, but the "place" they are on their own internal timeline.  So a teen can go to college at 19 sim days and immediately being 29 sim days old.  Or someone can drink elixer at 40 days old and go back to being 37.  Since the age transitions happen at particular places in the timeline, the "days until transition" would give me that information, but there might be something else that would work too.

Those Sim Days ages don't really mean anything to anyone with a customised game.  There are all manner of hacks that make lifestages longer or shorter, and what about people who play with ageing off?   I think the only useful information other than lifestage is days left - which is when they would definitely go up to the next stage unless the player does something about it (like using the aging off cheat, or getting a reward, or using a hack).   We'll have to try and get it for you in a form you can use.  But first, can you use what I already gave you to populate your database?  Because if not, then I am reluctant to ask Peter to waste time.

Also I was getting errors having the CSV produced from an entire hood - not sure if it ran out of memory or max filesize or what.  So I would appreciate knowing if any other reader here is using the CSV ok with the other Sims database tool?

Well, it's pretty easy to manipulate the numbers to make lifestages different lengths and represent aging off and so forth.  It's just easier to keep track of it as a single int, just in my program.  I can probably/definitely use what you gave me to get the rest of the info, and if there's no number for days until the end of the lifestage, I can just set it to the first day of the lifestage given in any case.

Or let the user edit it manually for now.

Well, they can already do that after the list is loaded.

One question, though - do you think this should be a full import of absolutely everyone in the neighborhood, or just playables, or a user-selected list?  I could do the first just to test it out, but for later I'm thinking some more elaborate interface where you could select just the sims you want.  At least, that's what I'd want.

I'll let everyone else answer that as I am unlikely to use this - I rarely play :(

Ooh, which other database?

If you mean Sims2DB, then it's SimPE import function hasn't worked since SimPE for Pets came out.  Pegasys stopped updating it before Pets.  Is there another database, and if so, WCIF?

No that's the one I meant.  So it was the exporting of the data from SimPE that broke was it?   And that's why she stopped doing Sims2DB?

No.  She stopped playing sims.  Apparently she went over to Second Life or something.  Since she no longer plays the sims, she has no reason to update the database, which needs updating every time there's a new EP (with it's consequence of an updated SimPE).

SimPE didn't break Sims2DB, and that isn't why she stopped updating it.  It's the other way around.  The data import no longer functions for Sims2DB because she hasn't updated it.  The DB doesn't know what to do with all the new fields that came with Pets & later.

Before she locked her forum, but after she said she'd stopped updating, I asked her "if I load the SimPE CSV output into a spreadsheet, which fields would I need to delete to make it readable by Sims2DB".  She said it was far too complicated for a layperson to understand as apparently the fields in the CSV are all over the place (depending on which EP each character was last updated by), and refused to provide an answer.

In that case *assuming* that Peter can actually find the place in the source(!) we'll have to work with Rufio to provide to order the data he needs (I hope I have Rufio's gender correct).  So in that respect we would not be pro-active but only output the fields requested.  May be able to do something interactive - the database outputs a file and that contains the requests.  May be able to specify only certain sims in that case.

Clearly, Pegasys has failed us. You must not!

Skirting the technobabble, since it's over my head. :) A global change wouldn't work for me, because the number of days they have as an adult is variable. As Inge said, what matters (at least in my customized game) is the life stage and the number of days they have in that stage. Age is just a number.


I'd only want to track playables, but I could see scenarios where someone might want their townies as well. A selection interface would be ideal. What would be awesome would be to select playable/townie/NPC first (like with little checkboxes), then be presented with the list of sims, grouped by family or something. That way you wouldn't have to pick through a list of hundreds of characters to get the few dozen you want.

That's a good idea about the importing, Roux.  I don't think I could really do what you want with the differing lifestage lengths without having to rewrite how age is stored.  I guess you could always change the ages so that they are the right number of days away from Elderhood?

Inge, I'm not sure it'll be necessary to rewrite the CSV-making code to seriously change th order, etc., because after all, the data is tagged - I can just use Qt RegExps to match, say, "*Aspiration=(w*);*"  and extract the parenthesized text as the aspiration.  I just want to make sure that the data really is what I think it is.

And I actually am female, but I think it's probably my own damn fault for using a nick that ends in o.

But the CSV output is massively bloated (for a start labels should only be in the first row!) and is failing to finish without erroring even on my small test hood.  It needs rewriting anyway.  It's going to be faster and more reliable if it only outputs data that will be actually used.  Also there are loads of fields missing as it's not been updated for the last several EPs.  What's more it doesn't give you DaysLeft which all your potential users are going to want.

Well in that case, rewrite away.

My program currently needs this information:
1. Name
2. Age (days until age transition + lifestage would work fine)
3. Human/dog/cat etc
4. Vampire/zombie/etc
5. Aspiration (and now secondary asp for FT)
6. Alive/dead, and ghost color if applicable
7. Household (I might put this into the importing interface though, since all the different households need to be different strings and in the game they often aren't).
8. Townie/NPC status and/or presence in the adoption queue or being runaways.
9. Uni information (whether they are a YA, major, etc)

In the future, I'll also need information about Careers, Hobbies, and parents and children.  I don't know what the best way to make references to other sims in the list in a text file it - in my save files I just use the number of the other sim's position in the list as it appears in the file, but putting references to other sims in information having to do with sims at least means I'd have to run through the list a second time to connect up sims that came later in the list (if that makes any sense?).  Maybe the family information should come afterwards and be unassociated with the information for individual sims.

There's a new "version" up, the main difference in which is that you can specify which EPs you have.  The savefile is a slightly different format now; see the ETA in the first post.

NeighborID is probably the most reliable cross-reference to an individual Sim.

Then it'll have to include the NeighborIDs too.  I don't see any reason to use them beyond importing from the CSV, though, especially since the sims that aren't imported won't have them.

Well, that depends on whether users of your program want to import SimPE data simply to add the sims, or if they also want to import to update the information on sims they have already added.

Personally, I'd like it if the data could be updated by the CSV.

Not sure if the following links will be useful for you or not.  I don't want to keep harping on Sims2DB, as I know you are not writing Sims2DB, you are writing something that suits your playing style.  But on the off chance these links are useful ...

Pegasys had several threads here about successive versions of Sims2DB.  Here's the second one (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,1083.0.html).  I'm linking this one as it contains a lot of input from MATYzens regarding what we'd like to see in such a database.  This was before data could be imported from SimPE. 

After this thread the "what would you like to see" discussions took place at her forum which no longer exists.

Sims2DB is still available at MTS2 (http://sumomo.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=107994), although I haven't read the discussion there.  Wow, I hadn't realised it had been 2 years since it was last updated.

Alright, since people seem to want that or at least be used to that from Sims2DB.  None of this will get written anyway, though, until I can see what the new CSV is going to look like.

I already told you - you spec it.  It's for *your* tool so you say how you need it.  Make yourself a test one, and when it works, pass it to me as the template.

Hey, Inge, I think I might take the character file reader idea farther.  How is the character file data structured?

Ok, well, this is how I would do it, more or less:


The first quoted section is the full name.
NID is where you put the NeighborID.
"Adult,5" means "adult, 5 days until elder".  This can of course be replaced with "53" which is the actual number of days old as I track it.
The "None" is where the secondary Aspiration goes.
The "White" is the ghost color.  It's irrelevant for living sims, so some kind of default value can go there for them.
Human = Human/Small Dog/Large Dog/Cat
Normal is the set of paranormal qualities.  So you could have "Alien" or "Vampire-Alien-Zombie", etc.  I use a single integer for all those flags in my savefiles, but I think this should be more human-readable.
The next quoted section is the household name.  Different households should have different names.
Playable = Playable/Townie/NPC
The last quoted section is the past or present major.

I don't have a test function to parse this, but it's based off my own function for reading sim data in from the CSV format in the savefiles, so it should work just fine on my end.  Would this work for you?

Rufio, best to start with the NID as that would be the unique identifier.  If you want the other values translated before they reach you, that can be done, but of course it will lead to a much bigger file and be slower to read and write.  Ideally your tool would take care of its own translation - and then it can be adapted for other languages more easily.  The sim's name of course obviously stored as a string, but the problem with the CVS passing you that string, is that it will be the American name, and not necessarily the name your user knows the sim by.  You might be better off just taking the NID and opening the character file yourself to get the right name out - unless the initial query does take language as a parameter of course.

Lil'Brudder, as far as I know the only relevant info in the character file is the name - for the purposes of this database.  (The rest of the stuff is mainly genetic details).  All the stuff about their aspirations and skill levels etc is in the neighborhood file.

I also use the CSV-export-function regularly to update the database (sharepoint list) on my Windlebridge-website. What I do is that I open the csv-file with a selection of sims (the most recently created in game) with excel and edit it, to take away all the unneeded data. I am attaching the latest version of the file to show what fields I am using. Then I just paste the data into my database.

Sure, that's not a problem.


So the CSV is exported in the language the game is configured in, and so I'd have to keep the translations of various fields available to the code so that the program could still interpret it?  Ok.  We can pass a language code or something along, and that shouldn't be too annoying.  What do you mean by "American names," though?  Do you mean the townies' names, or...?

Well that's the problem.  Sims made by players or in the game only have their name stored in the string for their location, they don't walys even have an american name.  So we're probably going to have to pass the region to Simpe unless you want to open the character files yourself.  One benefit if you did, is you might be able to allow your users to change the Sims' names that way.  Also they should be able to store some notes, possible as a string resource in the character file.  Though it could just as easily be local to your database.

I think rather than you have the hassle of parsing package files, we'd take language as a parameter and give you back the right name.

Ok, so I need to make a setting for language, and somehow have my program communicate this setting to SimPE?  Or can you make it a setting in SimPE when the user goes to generate the CSV?  Am I understanding this right?

There is already a way to store and view notes on specific sims in SimSheet, but this is, of course, only in the program and nothing to do with outside files.

It would be a good idea to get a dialog going between the programs so that you can request specific sims' data.  The language reqyest could be in that.  However don't get too exited till Peter finds where it's done or designs it from scratch.  And don't forget we have AL coming out any moment now - the priority will to be to update SimPe for that.

Sure.  And I'm working on the family ties tab for SimSheet, which promises to take a while and be very confusing, so it will probably not be updated again for a while in any case.

hmmm ... don´t know if this is any help, but my Windows is installed with danish as the default language, and every time I have updated SimPE I have to set SimPE´s default language to english, to avoid having all the danish names of the pre made sims, NPC´s and Townies listed ... but as I recall all my own sims have their correct names.

*shrug*

Anyway ... I´m so excited to read all this, it was such a loss to me when SimsDB wasn´t updated anymore ... this is great news :D

Rose

Ok I will double check - but it might be something that changed after a particular EP or patch.  I feel sure at one time the name was only added to the string for your locale if the sim was created in game.

Progress so far...  Run SimPE with the -rufio switch (which means it can all be done from within the new DB) and the splash screen will come up while it outputs a semicolon seperated file into a directory called rufio, and SimPE then closes itself.  Some of the fields are not working right yet, and we haven't got the images being output yet.   The file includes characters from all hoods in one file (obviously the hood number is part of the line).   I pulled a face when Peter said it would do all hoods at once, but in fact it was very fast!

Cool.  I'm not real knowledgeable about Windows inter-process whatsit though.  How would I have to set things up to run that from SimSheet?

Well you're doing it in C++ aren't you?  I don't know how to make a system call with that.

Ok, well I've done some google research, and I think I know how to do it now - I'll have to try it out.  Sorry, I just haven't done this kind of thing before and I usually don't work in Windows.

Ok, that took a lot less time than I thought, partly because I've busted my knee and don't have a lot to do other than sit on my ass and play the sims, browse the net, and program.

Version 0.4 is available from the links in the first post, now featuring family connections between sims and a family ties tab that will show how the sim selected in the main tab is related to every other sim that they are related to.  This includes distantly-related cousins, although eventually the program gives up and says "Distant Cousin, Many Times Removed".  I'm not sure if it's actually possible to get to that point without having your neighborhood explode from too many sims, though.  I'm pretty sure the algorithm for figuring out family relationships is working right, but I'd appreciate someone with a huger family tree than I currently have seeing just how robust it is.  You still have to manually enter everything, but that shouldn't be too painful, right?

If you don't know what first/second/etc cousins once/twice/etc removed are, wikipedia has a nice chart here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin).

A picture of the new tab is here (http://www.snapdrive.net/files/541103/SimSheet/familyties.JPG).

ETA: Forgot to mention - I changed the age transitions slightly after discovering that there is some inconsistency in the game, so your sims might be a day or two off now.  The ## days old setting shows the age as calculated by my program now, and the ## days until lifestage shows the age as your game knows it.

Hey, you know the download link on the first page is broken, right? From what I can see of it though, it looks like a handy program.

Yeah, for some reason, snapdrive took down all my files.  >:(  I'm trying to figure out what happened.  I'll reupload them in a minute and hopefully they won't disappear again.

ETA: Links should work now.

I love the program, but I have problem on a new neighborhood.   I've added a pair of sisters and I can't seem to get the "full siblings" dropdown to "take" the relationship.  That is I chose Linnea McGill as Cremorna McGill full sibling, click on Add full sibling and it doesn't update--Full Siblings remain none. 

It also doesn't work if I click on Add Full Sibling and chose Linnea McGill.  Don't know if it's my mistake or a bug.

The Add parent and child relationship seems to work fine.  I don't currently have any married families in this neighborhood to check the other settings.

BTW, didn't I just assassinate you in Oblivion?

I'm guessing they are only siblings because you made them that way in CAS, and their parents don't actually exist in your game.  Basically, the program doesn't really keep track of siblings, just parents and children; it figures out that two people are siblings because they share parents, and causes sims to become siblings by making their parents the same.  If there are no parents to share, they can't be siblings.  You can always add their parents as ghosts first, and then set it up so that both sims are children of the parents.


Buh?  If you mean "are you the same person who has the username rufio on another site I frequent", the answer is probably no.  As Rufio is the name of a character in Hook and a pop-punk band, there are probably approximately 3242352 people using it as a username somewhere.  The only non-sims-related site I've used this nick on is one I haven't logged onto in years.

OK I'll just make a couple of dummy parents.

Oops.  Sorry.  In the game Oblivion if you kill someone who hasn't attacked you the next time you go to sleep a cool guy in a black robe shows up beside your bed and invites you to join the Dark Brotherhood.   To pass the "initiation" you have to kill some old guy named Rufio....

SimPE work on this has now restarted, since the frequency of useless whinges at SimPE for the missing thumbnails has reduced, and the development team again have time to think.

That's good to know - I'd love to start using it but the sheer number of Sims I'd have to enter makes me run screaming in the other direction.  Is there anywhere on the SimPE site or forums that deals with this (or anywhere else, come to that) or is it just this thread for now? 

Just this I think :D

Update:  Peter completed this work a few days ago and gave Rufio a test version to see if he's getting the output he needs.  We're just waiting for him to find out how to start SimPE now.  Not much else we can do before we have his feedback.

Have to ask ... how do you make SimSheets work ?

I downloaded the file from the first post, hoping that there were a explanation in the readme ... I can´t find anywhere in the thread that says anything about what to do after downloading and unzipping the pack ...

Am I completely blind ?

I assume that I need the csv file, and I know how to make one ... I just don´t know where to put it afterwards or how to import it to the program.

Rose

If you mean, how do you import your sims from SimPE, you don't, not yet.  Inge and I are working on getting that set up now.  As of v. 0.4 (in the first post) you have to enter your sims manually using the Add Sims button in the first tab.  You run the program by running the executable (SimSheet.exe).

Oh my ... well that explain a lot  ::)

It just sounded like you had it up and running, from the posts above ... guess that I need to have a bit more patience.

Rose

It's best not to fill your head with all that supernatural nonsense.  You can get hacks to stop plantsims occurring.

You need to go to the Settings and check next to all the EPs you have - the options for EP-specific events/etc. don't show up otherwise.  If check next to Seasons, there is a plantbaby event, provided you have plantsims to spawn from.


Since a lot of people use TJ's hacks, I intend to make options to make the program cooperate with PregnanyForAll, etc, but I'm working on other stuff at the moment and it's not there yet.  You can always type in the second mother's name in the dialog in the appropriate place - the baby will have someone else listed as a parent, but the event will say the right thing and you can change the baby's parents in the family tab.


It actually doesn't matter when they grow up in the rotation as far as the calculation is concerned - they still age 5 days in the five-day rotation whether they grow up during that time or not.  The only thing is whether they grow up before six PM or not; it the former case they just lose a day.  If you want to specify the exact day for aesthetic purposes and keeping the events in order, though, I can do that after I get done with the rest of the tabs (and the importing from SimPE stuff I'm doing now).

Yeah, if you have Seasons checked there should be a "new plantbaby" (or something along those lines) even in the New Sims and Pets category on the update page.  I'm in the wrong OS right now, but I'll reboot to verify that it's there. [ETA: Just checked, and the event is there.]


Yeah, you're right about that.  I use a one-day rotation, so I don't notice stuff like this.   :-[  I'll fix it for the next update; for now you can just adjust their ages manually.

At long last, I come bearing an update.  However, this one should be considered to be in testing, for a variety of reasons:
- I added some major new features, over a long period of time and I'm sure there are things I forgot to fix in the mean time.
- I changed some old code, and I've probably forgotten enough about how it works that I may have accidentally broken something.
- The Aspiration Tab is still under construction, and I don't feel that should really go in a "polished" release.
- The new SimPE import feature requires a version of SimPE that has not been publicly released.
- There are still some minor issues I have to work out with Inge.

Anyway, what this means is that if you want to download SimSheet (savefile version 0.5) and the new un-released version of SimPE that it needs in order to import sims, you'll have to send me a message or email me (email might work better, since I have a pretty small inbox here).  In spite of what I said above, I really don't believe that the program is more likely to contain errors than the previous versions, but it doesn't hurt to be careful anyway.  The worst thing that will happen is that your data will get lost, but probably not much of it as the program automagically makes a backup whenever you open a file, and as long as you save periodically it shouldn't be a problem.

Some notes about this new version of SimPE:  Inge has strongly advised me that I (and anyone else who downloads it) should under no circumstances use it for anything other than testing SimSheet.  In the event, you won't even have to start it yourself; you just need to tell SimSheet where to find it on your disk and it should do the rest.  When you import, you will also be given a choice of neighborhood by the name of the subfolder of the Neighborhoods folder (e.g. N001, N002, etc.)  Inge says that Castaway Stories and whatnot also have N001s, so you should probably only load a neighborhood that is unique to your TS2 (at least until the issue is sorted) or SimPE might get confused.

Anyway, there are two main new features in 0.5:

#1: Importing sims from SimPE
There is now an option on the List Management Dialog to import from the TS2 neighborhood files via SimPE.  You must have the correct version of SimPE installed for this to work (I will give you a link).  You will have to specify where on your disk the SimPE.exe file is located, and a neighborhood to import from, and click "Import".  (The default location is "C:\Program Files\SimPE\" but you can set it to something else in Settings.)  There will then be a few minutes while SimPE compiles a list of the data for all the sims in that neighborhood, then a few popups from SimSheet telling you how many sims there were, and then you will get a dialog which lists all of your sims next to little check marks, at five sims a page, divided into Playable, Townie and NPC sections.  Because it would be a royal pain to get the information for which sims are paranormal creatures out of SimPE, you'll have to specify it yourself, in the dialog.  You also get the option to change the name of the household, because SimSheet considers sims that live in households with the same name to be living in the same household and you might want to change that.  After you've checked off all the sims you want to import and set their additional information correctly, click on the "Import" button, and there will be a brief pause while the program imports all the sims.  I would recommend importing dead sims and townie/npc sims who have contributed genes to playables, as otherwise the family trees will not be intact.  ETA: Another issue with the importing is that Inge has not yet figured out how it is that the game calculates the ages of Elders, so for now SimSheet assumes that your Elders are slated to die at 84 days (IIRC, the oldest possible age) so your imported Elders might be slightly older than they are in your game and you'll have to fix them manually if it bothers you.

#2: Filters!
Once upon a time I tried to make it possible to filter sims, but because of Windoze phail I had to take it out.  It finally annoyed me enough not having the filters than I reimplemented them.  The way I did it is something of a hack, and it causes a half second or so of lag when updating the display, but hopefully it's not too bad.  If you click on the Filter button, you'll get a dialog with a lot of checkboxes, which are all checked by default.  Unchecking a box will block all sims with that characteristic from being displayed.  Checking a box does not necessarily mean that all sims with that characteristic will be displayed, as they may be blocked by other characteristics whose boxes are unchecked.

#3: Miscellaneous Other Crap
Including, (but I'm probably forgetting something) witches and their alignments, fixing the bug that alegria found, adding some new events on the update page.  It does not include hobbies.  Hobbies will come when I get the GUI on the Aspiration Tab to stop driving up the wall.

I'm especially interested to see how well the Family Tab handles very large families, so if someone wants to import their gigantic hood and take a shot of the family tab for me, I'd appreciate it.  If you want to help me test, or just want to use the new import feature, send me a message or an email and I'll get you the links.

Lol!!!  You'll have people buying popcorn...

I will certainly test, I would also love for the possibility to export selected data from SimPE to other databases (for me its my SharePointServerList/Access DB).

Actually it might be useful to air the "issue" here as we reached a stalemate.

SimPE provides Rufio with "days left in current lifestage".  She wants actual days old either instead or as well.  We did actually discuss this earlier in the thread, and we persuaded Rufio that days left in current age were more importand than actual life duration.

Now, it's not that Peter minds also supplying total days old, but neither of us know how to find that information.  Any ideas?

As I see it, if there isn't a field in the simdata that records how many days they've lived, then you don't export it.
I wouldn't expect an export function in SimPE to make stuff like that up, or guess.

Bob becomes an elder in 7 days means everything to anyone that plays.
We all know the if we keep Bob happy he can pull magic juice from his butt and put off becoming an elder indefinately.

The specific issue is the age of elders - because there are different numbers of days in the elder stage for different sims, "X days until death" does not give a universal single age.  That's also not how it's displayed in the game - if you hover over an elder's age bar, it'll show "70 days old" or something along those lines.  I don't have a problem using days until transition for the other age groups; I just want to be able to get that "70 days old" number that the game has come up with somehow.

Why do you think the value is relevant to anything though?  It doesn't tell you their actual age in days does it?  I think it's just calculated at runtime based on the age in days at which elder usually starts, plus the length in days it usually lasts, minus days left.

I'd imagine it's relevant to people who want to keep track of how long their elders live, and to people like me who get OCD over how old all of their sims are.  (Why do you think I made this program?)  It's not a big deal, it just feels incomplete without it.  If the game calculates this at runtime, what numbers does it use?  It can't be the same for every sim, since they all die at different ages.

Presumably you have researched this in-game as thoroughly as you can, so you can probably throw more light on it than I can, as it's not something I have taken much interest in.  What age in days is an elder reported as being when they first age up?  Or if they are all different ages, then what age range have you seen, for the day of becoming an elder?

I never remember to check when the adults I actually play age into elders, but I did go into a test neighborhood and age up a sim from toddler to elder with debug cheats to verify the number of days to transition, etc.  The sim was reported as being "54 days old" when it transitioned to elder.  If you add up the number of days in all the transitions to that point (i.e. 3 + 4 + 8 + 14 + 29) you actually get 58, which makes me think that the game somehow does not count the three days of babyhood in the sim's age.  (Now that I look at my program, though, there seems to be an off-by-one error here as it lists a game-age of 54 to be equivalent to 59 days.  Will look into it.  ETA: Fixed.)  As I said, I haven't paid much attention when my playable adults age to elder, but I seem to recall similar numbers.  I've seen elders die at anywhere from 74 to 84 days old.

ETA: Actually they seem to be missing 4 days, so that's either babyhood + 1 day, or they started counting at 1 instead of 0.  My math skillz, let me show you them. :P

So what about Sims who have had extra days in normal adulthood due to elixir etc, or sims in games where the player has had a hack to alter the relative lengths of each age?  I don't think days since birth are stored anywhere in the game, I think it is stored as days left like in all the other ages, but calculated to be expressed as age so that the death will not be so predictable in the game.

In order for you to perform the same calculation, you will need to ask the player to input the number of days in each age stage that they are playing with (you can store some internal defaults for the convenience of those players who are not using a hacked agecons).   You can do that for them then.

I don't know; I didn't think elixer would have any effect on the number days at which someone becomes an elder, but clearly I am not on the same wavelength as the game when it comes to aging.  I'll do some more experiments.  As for the aging hacks, I don't have any so I'm just assuming that they work as expected (and the sim winds up elderfying at Toddler Stage + Child Stage + Teen Stage + Adult Stage + 1 as in the default).

ETA:  Just did an experiment with 4 adult sims.  Aged them up five days using insim, then had two of them drink Elixer.  Then used insim to age them all up to Elder.  They were all listed as 54 days old.  Did the experiment again with no Elixer and everyone in low green aspiration (I put everyone in platinum for the first experiment so the Elixer would work).  Same result.


Right now I just have the defaults.  I do plan to give an option to configure the number of days in each lifestage (or set different lengths for different sims) but that's going to involve many complicated and no doubt frustrating GUI objects so I'm putting it off for the moment.

Have you thought about a config file for these constants?
If you don't have one yet then that may be just as much work as GUI, but you can probably think of more to put in there.
I'm sure that the people that edit their BCON's to change the defaults wouldn't mind editing a textfile.

Each drink of elixir adds up to 3 days to the 'days left' field, but won't age them down a level.  I don't think there's a way to track that automatically.
From what I remember, the time until death for elders varies dependant on how they lived their life.  I think the constants for these bonus days are in the same BCON that controls the span of each lifestage.

Looking forward to playing with this program when I have more time :)

Not really, to be honest.  I complain about making GUIs, but the truth is that I love making stuff that looks cute and user-friendly.  Besides, if I make config files, then I have to use them when I do testing and as it is I'm already building up 10-15+ text files open simultaneously and forgetting which ones are which and accidentally opening ones that I already have open getting complaints from gvim.


I don't use a lot of elixer in my game so I haven't wound up testing it very much, but I know that and the program should be able figure it out.


Thanks. :)  I seem to only do updates when something else big is going on, don't I?  The last one came out the day AL came out, and this one is on election day.  Everyone's probably watching the news. :P

Can't believe I didn't notice this was updated yet (..never can that notify function to work correctly).  I'd love to test it out, I'm dropping you an email to get it, rufio. 

Edited to add:  Got it now, but whenever I try to import, I get an error message that says "cannot find output file.  Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE" - I'm using the one included in the email.  Presumably I'm being dense and have missed a step somewhere along the line.  I went into settings in SimSheet and changed the location of SimPE to the location where I've got the test version installed, and ticked the expansion packs that I have (which is all of them).  My understanding of rufio's post was that I wouldn't need to load SimPE at all, simply tell it to import, so that was what I did next, but all I get is the error message.  Suggestions?   

Is your game installed on the C drive?  SimSheet looks for C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Rufio\ExportedSims.txt, which is the file that SimPE is supposed to create.  If it doesn't find it, you get that error.  Either that, or you've directed SimSheet to the wrong version of SimPE, which didn't know to create the file.  If SimPE created the file, but put it somewhere SimSheet didn't know to look for it, then just create the path above and move it there.  I'll try to fix it so that in the future it knows to look on other drives, too.

If SimPE created the output file you should find a folder called My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Rufio and there should be a couple of other folders and a text file under it.  Are those there?

Okay, sorted.  The game is on the C: drive - however, because it was only a test version of SimPE, I installed *that* in the EA Games folder under My Documents, which is where I run a few other Sims programs from.  I didn't realise it would cause an issue, but what happened was that it created the list in My Documents/EA Games/SimPETEST/Rufio instead of in the TS2 folder (which would be My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/).  Moving the folder manually seems to have worked so far; the character list has come up and it's time to wade through the list.  So in summary, not having it in a top level folder seems to have been the problem.  Thank you both for your help. :)

Ok, newly update version of SimSheet should be able to detect ouput files on whatever drive, as long as they're in the EA Games\The Sims 2\ directory.  Testers, please redownload.

Yep, that's sorted it.  Also, behold my twisted family:

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties.jpg (http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties.jpg)

Actually, having just looked at one of his children's family ties page I think I have spotted a problem - unfortunately due to some sloppiness I have two Sims called "Alice Marener" and two called "Martin Marener".  Instead of reporting two Alices and two Martins in the family ties, it *seems* to be counting the two Sims as one.  Not sure if this is a known problem yet. 

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-bon.jpg (http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-bon.jpg)

http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-leo.jpg (http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/familyties-leo.jpg)

Leo (the second example) was the son of the first Martin Marener and the father of the second one.  SimSheet reports him as both Father/Son.  The less said about poor Bonnie's family ties the better, I suppose, but if you look at Martin's line, it's reporting four different relationships, whereas most of the rest of her relatives have only two.  I think. (Except Casey, whose existence is partially responsible for the fuckery in the first place since he was the product of an irresponsible fling between two first cousins once removed... the rest is due to her father, who is Casey's half-brother, marrying his second cousin Jemma, who, incidentially, is Casey's first cousin.. and second cousin once removed.) Bonnie's ties are a thing of.. perverse beauty.  I can't stop staring.   

(Moral of the story: stop making cousins breed, idiot!)

Actually, looking back over this, I'm frankly amazed the program coped with this on *any* level.  My brain certainly can't.  But I *think* the double name thing is a problem.  I've tried manually editting the names on the first list-of-sims tab and it doesn't seem to have made a difference.  Off to fiddle more.. I've just had an idea.

Thanks for posting that.  It is gloriously twisted, and also I can see some bugs in there - his wife should be at the top of the list and instead she is at the bottom, and the Great-Great Grandfather relationship (with Martin Marener) should be listed before First Cousin, Twice Removed.


Yeah, the family tab just sets up the chart with names and corresponding relationships, not references to sims.  I was kind of hoping it wouldn't be an issue, but I probably should fix it.  I don't think it'll be very hard to change; it's just that I had to write four inter-recursive functions for that page and I wanted to make the easy parts easier on me at the time.


Yeah, it's definitely not possible to be someone's Great-Great-Grandfather and their Great-Great-Great-Grandfather at the same time, to say nothing of the First Cousins varying times removed.  Actually, it is possible, if she was descended from him multiple ways.... oh jesus.   :o

Interestingly, are there two Auryns too, or is that just a really strange relationship?  She would have to be directly descended from both Auryn herself and one of Auryn's siblings.  There are a few others on there that look suspect to me (Curtis?  I don't know what to think of Casey, who in any case should be listed as Uncle before Cousin.) and there's definitely some generation-hopping going on in there.  Beautiful.  My family trees are disappointingly boring in comparison.
 

Yeah, those shouldn't be editable - it's just a display.  Have to fix that too.

And thanks for the compliment.  You should see the inter-recursive functions I had to write (in the familypage.cpp source file, if you're initerested).  It took a while for my brain to get around those too.

You need to always handle the sims through their NID, only looking up name for display purposes.  The NID is always unique.

Sims that are entered by hand do not have an NID, so that doesn't work except when importing from SimPE.  Anyway, the table on the family tab is for display purposes.  Sims with the same name are not actually listed as having the same relationships in the actual data - it's just wrongly displayed that way.

ETA: New version uploaded, which should fix the problem of sims with the same name being displayed as having the same relationships.  Since this is just a display issue, you don't have to reimport anything.

..I could have sworn I made an edit to my original post, but apparently I didn't, saying that once I altered the names slightly using the actual "Edit This Sim" button the changes took and they separated out.  (I did once try to make a tribalpages family tree, and in that case differentiated between them by appending "II" to the younger Martin and the married-in Alice acquired her maiden name in brackets, so I simply did the same here.)  I'm about to head out to work so I'll get the new version and test once I get back.  Those screenshots were also taken before I went back and fixed all the spouses of deceased Sims, so it's possible it looks marginally crazier now. 

Rufio!  I am shocked!  Any respectable database application has to have some sort of UID system.  They were only entering Sims by hand because SimPE didn't have suitable output at the time.  Even then they should always have had some UID system applied even if it was transparent to the user. You need to find a way of updating the manually entered Sims with the NID you can now find in the output, and from that time on indexing them by their NID.

It will also make your application faster to process.  Looking up a number and only using the name for display purposes is much more efficient than a string search.

..not sure if this is just me or not, and I hope I can explain it properly.. I haven't reimported the list, simply opened my saved list.  When I select a Sim, and go to family ties, their list appears.  If I uncheck the "Show only living Sims" box, it seems to add a few more Sims in.  If I recheck the box, however, their entire list disappears, and unchecking it doesn't seem to bring it back (or only brings back one or two Sims, instead of the full list).  Even if I then go back to the main list, and select another Sim, when I go back to the family ties window the list remains empty.  The only thing that brings a list up again after that is reloading the sim list, and it only works until I check and recheck the box.  Fiddling around, it seems it even loads some Sims with blank or partial lists initially, although I'm not currently seeing any pattern about which it'll give a list to and which it won't.  I'm about to create a new list for my other large family so I'll see if the issue comes up again there or not.  The only thing I can guess at, given that I know very little about coding and programming, is that the checkbox hasn't picked up the changes you made to the way that family ties are found, so the search isn't running correctly? 

ETA:  Tried with a newly imported list, same problem I'm afraid. 

Within the application I use pointers, which is quicker than either a string search or a number search, with the added benefit that I don't have to pass the master list of sims around to all the tabs.  In the save file, the sims are output in a big list, and references to sims are made using the position of the sim in the list.  I do save NIDs that are imported from SimPE, in anticipation of an "Update from SimPE" function in the future, but sims entered by hand will still not have NIDs and I have no way of knowing that NIDs I randomly assign to them do not belong to some other sim that was/will be imported from SimPE, and I am not going to knowingly break that functionality just because most people are going to be importing from SimPE.

coralleane - yes, I realized this this morning: In the process of fixing a slight annoyance I completely broke the family tab display.  This is why we are in testing, I guess.  It has been fixed; redownload it.

You can look the NID up for the manually entered Sims.  Do you even need to support manual entry any more?

Not in any 100% reliable way.  I can associate manually entered sims with SimPE sims by their names, but some sims could have the same names.  I could test every single variable associated with the sim, but those might have changed slightly in the game since they were entered. 


Yes.  If someone starts a new neighborhood with one playable sim, they are not going to want to wait for SimPE to load in order to import that one sim.  When I want to test my program, I do not want to be forced to go into the game and create actual sims that fit exactly the template I am looking for.  For example, there is an option to load a "debug list" containing one sim of each type which I used for testing the filters and event dialogs on the update tab.  Going into the game to create one sim of every type just so I can import them for testing purposes is ridiculous.

For a manually entered sim, can you assign an 'obviously fake' nID?
AFAIK, the nID's start at the the bottom.  Not sure what the maximum value is.
If you use a larger integer.  Fake nID's will be out of the normal range.

All manually-entered sims are assigned an NID of -1, which, as long as legal NIDs start at 0 will be out of range no matter how many sims there are.

At the risk of being the bearer of annoying news yet again.. having downloaded the new version, clicking on a Sim in the main list brings up a dialog box that lists a relative and their relationship to the Sim.  Then moves onto the next relative, then the next, etc.  And cycles back to the beginning after getting to the end.  I couldn't find any way out of the loop short of closing the program with Task Manager.  Screenshot of the dialog box:

(http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/dialog.jpg)

Clicking okay simply moves onto the next relative, as does trying to close the dialog. 

A config that doesn't seem to work

Installed to these folders...
C:/Documents and Settings/Linda/Desktop/SimData/SimSheet
C:/Documents and Settings/Linda/Desktop/SimData/SimPe_0_73_08-RufioTest

I ran SimSheet and used the browse option to locate the rufioTest SimPE.

I get the same error message about the missing file.
I've searched C: for 'exportedSims.txt' and 'rufio' and found nothing (apart from rufio in the SimPE folder name and downloaded zip).

ETA: Moved SimPe to C:\Program Files\SimPe_0_73_08-RufioTest
Same error message about missing file.
BTW, when no data is loaded pressing the 'Filter List...' button causes a crash.

Ack, thought I axed all of the debug messages, but I guess the wrong version of the executable got uploaded instead.  I'm not doing well, am I?  I would make less annoying debug messages, but MinGW seems to have a problem with stdout.  Non-debug-message version should be up now.

Found what the problem was.
The browse button returns the folder name without the trailing '/'.
You need to check for this before appending SimPE.exe to it.
Adding it manually works.

Was a PITA to find as the cmd.exe DOS box didn't hang around long enough to see the error message.

It's now importing all sims, townies and NPC's

Thanks, will fix.  ETA:  I cannot reproduce this issue.  Are you sure?


Thanks for pointing it out, I've been typing it manually and did not realize that.


ETA: New version is up.  I have fixed the trailing / issue, an obscure issue with importing just sims from the very first page, and the sorting on the family page now works as intended, even if you marry your third cousin.

Prepare to be worshipped!  ;) *worship worship*  Seriously, this is great.  I have spent countless hours trying to create my own database, spending more time doing that than actually playing.  This is absolutely fantastic!  Thank you!  *worship*

*does not know how to feel about being worshipped*

Do you want links to the test version?  The one in the first post does not have the new import feature.

That was happening in the debug version you posted... latest download is fine :)

Like the way you've done it too.  If I don't want to rerun SimPE as I know the data hasn't changed, I can delete the trailing slash to reread the existing txt file.
Will save some time while testing.
Maybe at a later stage you can make the 'import' and 'update txt file with SimPE' different processes.

The path to SimPE is saved with the data?  Strange way of doing it  :-\

The Newson family doesn't show as siblings... but this is because they have no parents and the sibling data is not in the txt file.
Not many families will be like that I guess.  I tried adding them as siblings but couldn't work out how to do it.
Being as you've had to reconstruct the family ties from just the parent links. Excellent job :)

I've got some problems trying to import all NPC's or townies.
I've tried using the 'select all' buttons with these.  Don't know if the program is still doing anything but after 20 mins I kill it.
I can add a random single sim from these groups, but it fails or hangs when selelcting all.
I can mail you the txt file if you can't reproduce this.

In Households, Firstborn Patel and all the sims in his dorm are showing living with his parents.  Using Family Instance should fix this.
Firstborn is also showing as a Freshman.  He's just graduated.  The data in the txt file shows semester '1' again.  Not sure if there's some other field to read to fix that.

Not sure if the Aspiration, Achievements and Careers tabs are meant to do anything yet.
Do you keep a changelog and know issues file?  Would help testers know what we're looking for :)

The data backend.
I know that you started this project as a manual entry program, but now that we can import the 'live' data via SimPE, the backend may need a rethink.
The nID's should not change, so each time an import is done the live data should overwrite what's there already for each sim.
If you keep the user-added data (notes, images and paranormals) in a separate record by nID.  It will streamline the update procedure and that import sheet won't look so daunting.

Requests:
In the 'days until lifestage' display, can you show Elders as days left to live?
Can you add Playables, NPC and Townies to the filter?
The 'At Large' family.  Would love these in their proper families so we can find all the dormies, jocks etc.

You've done an excellent job here so far.  I hope you can keep this up.

Ahh.  Can't think of why that would have happened, but it's all good I guess.


Probably a good idea - I'll stick it into the next update.


The default location (i.e. the location that is there when you open the LM dialog for the first time in a session) is stored as a setting so that when you want to run SimPE from somewhere other than Program Files\SimPE\ you don't have to type it in again/browse again every time.


There is actually no field for "sibling" in the data - just for parents and children.  Sims are determined to be siblings if they share parents.  If there are no parents to share, they won't be listed as siblings.  Having a separate field seemed redundant and liable to cause problems - I'm imagining a situation where a sim has another sim listed as a sibling, while having different parents.  Different family-related algorithms would use different ways of determining siblinghood, thus resulting in inconsistent and unexpected results.  If you want the Newsons to be siblings, create one or two parents for them and just flag them as ghosts.


Does selecting all playables and importing work?  It could just be the large number of sims, as in most of my hoods there seem to be a much larger number of townies than playables.  The only thing the select all buttons do is check all the boxes automatically; if importing a single sim works, than importing more should too.  I'll see if I can figure out how to put in a progress bar or something else to let you know that something is happening.


But all the sims in the same dorm age at the same rate, so that should be right, right?  If you want sims to wind up in different households, you can also edit the household name before importing.


Is this in the text file generated by SimPE, or in the SimSheet savefile?  If the former, talk to Inge.  Does the import dialog say he is a Young Adult, or an Adult?


Aspiration tab is under construction, Career tab is still to come, and Achievements tab will display the text of all events you add in the Update tab, after you've updated there.


I am sadly very unorganized about this.  I'm also not bothering with version numbers unless the savefile format changes.  Now that I am getting more testers, maybe I should think about it...


That's another thing I have in mind to do.  Images will actually not be necessarily user-added - if you look in the Rufio folder there is actually a subfolder containing images for all the sims by NID.  I have just been having a hell of a time figuring out how to get Qt's image plugins to actually work, and so images have been on the back burner for a long while now.


There's no way to know that unless the sim is imported from SimPE, so that would be kind of meaningless with manually-entered sims.  I could add that as a setting, but then I would have to save that data from the SimPE import, which doesn't currently happen (ages are stored as a single number, not as a lifestage and days until transition).  That means you'd have to reimport sims for it to be available, and there would need to be a new savefile format.  So, it's possible but I wouldn't want to do that until I have enough new stuff to justify another +0.1 and make everyone reimport their neighborhood.


SimSheet doesn't distinguish between Townies and NPCs, but I can definitely add a Playable/Non-Playable filter.  (Townies and NPCs are sims that are in the At Large household, which doesn't age and has special rules about what events they can take part in on the Update tab.)


As mentioned above, the At Large family is there so that the program can figure out which sims not to age, and the update page uses it to figure out which sims are not playable.  I suppose it would be possible to flag certain households as non-aging, though.  Keep in mind that households are essentially just strings and not actual objects, so if you want to track non-aging dormies at the same time as playables that live in the dorm, you'll have to change the dormies' household to a special non-aging one, or else you'd either get aging dormies or non-aging playables.  That also goes for townies whose "Household" happens to have the same name as one of the playable households.


Thanks!  You've given me a lot of ideas - this is excellent feedback!  If you're interested in how the guts of the program work (as it seems you might be) you can also download the source and have a look.  Hopefully the GUI stuff is not to alien.

The 'Filter List...' crash came back after I moved the folder from C:\SimSheet back to
C:\Documents and Settings\Linda\Desktop\SimData\SimSheet
The 'no data' loaded was a red herring... At the time I saw the crash I was still trying to work out why SimPE would not run.
It crashes regardless of data loaded when in the longer path.

I've put it back in root and it's working fine again.

got to feed my daughter now so I'll ETA later.

That is really weird.  The only thing I can think of is it might be a Windows issue - an awful lot of signals get connected up when that's created, but that's all that really happens.  Maybe the combination of the long path and that many signals is too much for it?  Really, the filter dialog is just a frontend for letting the user directly set flags in the main GUI class.  It has nothing to do with the filesystem whatsoever.

Checkbox working again, and identically named Sims differentiated between in the family ties list.  Woo!  I assumed that to add a new household, I should use the "Add Household" button, but it doesn't seem to do anything when I click it.  I've found that I can force the creation of a new one by editing a Sim directly, so it's not a huge problem, but I'm not sure if it's intended to not work yet, or if it's broken, or if I'm flat out doing it wrong..!  Also, adding Sims to a different household at the moment, unless I'm doing it wrong, seems to require you to edit each Sim and enter the household name as a text field.  It would be useful to have some way to either select multiple Sims and do a mass add-to-household, or to be able to choose the Household from a drop down list when editing a Sim - I'm cheating at the moment and using Copy/Paste rather than retyping it for each one.  It's a bit of a limited-use feature though, I suppose - I need it because I have a lot of Sims with the same family name spread out over lots of different households, but others may not.  

Would it be possible to add some sort of confirmation that the file has saved once you press Save As?  

I assume you're aware of this already, but the thumbnail images generated have a .png extension, and SimSheet only gives an option for .bmp or .jpg when you try to use the Add Image button... additionally, I tried opening a couple of the thumbnails in PaintShop Pro and got a error message that they weren't valid .png files.  

(Incidentially, I've got the Program in C:\Documents and Settings\coralleane\EA Games\SimSheet-test\ and am not having trouble with the Filter list at the moment...)

Yeah, I, uh, forgot to implement that.  I stuck it up there because I assumed that I would want that functionality later, but in the event it doesn't really make much sense - households are just strings, and so "creating" them doesn't really make sense.  If some sim has a certain string in their household field, it'll show up on the list; otherwise it won't.  I will remove that button when I update.


That is the way to do it.


Definitely possible.  Will add.


When you import, you can also change the household name to something more distinctive.  Actually, what I did for my hood was to change the household names in SimPE (a non-QA version) and then when I imported them they were all distinct.


Sure.  I'd actually been thinking about that before.


I assume you're referring to the pngs in the Rufio folder?  Images are actually kind of broken at the moment, since I haven't been able to figure out how to get Qt plugins to work and haven't really been working on it lately.  Once I get the jpg plugin to work, png should not be an issue, though.  Also, those pngs seem to work fine for me, though I certainly haven't viewed them all.


Does it happen when you put it into the same folder that tuna did (well, the corresponding one with your username)?  It crashed for me there, too.  I'm currently trying to figure out what's going on from people more knowledgeable than me about Qt and its signals.

Ah, I didn't think about editing them at the time of import.  As it is the drop down field ought to make it fairly simple to do it after import, the main problem is that going in and typing them repeatedly would get annoying and that it opens up the possibility of typos as well. 


They show up as thumbnails when I'm looking at the folder with them in.  However, I was thinking I'd open some in PSP, resave them as .jpg or .bmp, and try adding them that way - but no dice.  PSP wouldn't open them at all and it's normally pretty good with weirdly/slightly incorrectly saved stuff. 


I'll give it a shot later.  Maybe due to being presumably "lower" down the system than the game?  With me, The Sims 2 folder is on a level with the SimSheet one - ie My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet-test and My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 are at the same level, C:\SimSheet would be "higher", but presumably the Simdata option is "lower" and so it's having trouble?  No idea. 

Edited to add: misunderstood the filepath slightly.  Tuna's running it from the desktop, correct?  If I move it to the desktop it also fails when I select filter.. but as I general rule I'd never install a program on the desktop normally anyway; I use it for shortcuts only.  It does *not* fail if the program is directly on the desktop, but as soon as you put it in anyfolder (even Desktop/SimSheet), it will crash when the filter is used. 

It's easy.  You offer an interactive dialog that shows the manually entered sims along with the proposed merge, and if you display the picture of the sim the user can accept or reject the merge in an informed way.   Also you can add a facility for a use-initiated merge, for those the app has not automatically detected.   Surely the user would *want* a way of allowing the program to take over maintenance of a sim they had previously had to maintain manually?

I would love a link to the new version, but I don't think I would be much help in testing.  I don't know anything about programming and whatnot.  I can certainly try though!   :)

Apparently this may just be an issue of time.  I tried importing all my NPC's (..about 50 pages worth, apparently), and the first time I thought it had crashed.  However, I set it up to try again, walked away and watched an episode of Futurama, and when I was finished with that, came back to the computer and found it was done.  As such, rufio's suggestion of including a progress bar ought to do it - and, when the program does have some documentation written up, a note in there that large numbers of Sims do take a long time for the list to compile. 

Ok, new version uploaded incorporating various suggestions, including the changelog suggestion, so I don't have to describe them all here.

On the filter dialog issue:  I normally run the program from C:\REM\SimSheet\release;  running it from C:\REM\SimSheet\release\Folder1\Folder2 works fine but C:\REM\SimSheet\release\Folder1\Folder2\Folder3 causes the crash.  That's six folders deep, which is more than tuna's path (only five).  I've got no idea what's happening. 

Having a seperate copy of the changelog textfile with a link to it would be good please - save me downloading the zip just to find out what's going on.

Sorry.  This is what it says:

Excellent, will download today.

The trailing '/' issue was fixed for the 'manage sim lists' dialog, but it still happens in the 'settings' dialog.

I moved the install to My Documents\Simsheet, but *still* had the crash with the filter :/
'My Documents' is one of those magic folders that varies with user login.  So although it looks short the internals might use a longer path.
Confusing bug.
It's now living happily in c:\Program Files\SimSheet

The combining the Patel households thing.
Yes, renaming one of the households would fix this problem. It would also fix the problem with the EA cheat of altering the family funds by name too.
The aging of my playable students in the dorms doesn't bother me though.  I've not really looked at the 'update' tab and all the aging code and options.
This isn't needed when the import will automagically do that for me.

Images
Yep, there are images in the SimPE export.  You may want to hang on to the option of assigning one manually though.
Those images are often out of date.  eg my graduated Firstborn Patel still shows as a toddler.
And there are several missing, hence the 'Mr. Potatoeheads' that show when in SimPE.

Importing a Full Hood.
The 'At Large' family only showed the first 5 members.  Doesn't bother me as the actual list would be 600+ and I wouldn't want to view them all anyway.
Just reporting this in case there are no hard limits in the code, and this is evidence of a broken array or something.

@coralleane, yes you're right I was being too impatient.  I imported *every* sim from my hood, ~830 of them.  The list updated after about 45 minutes.
This list saves and opens fine :)

At some point I plan to do my whole neighbourhood, but apparently the current count is a rather depressing 1209 sims.  Clearly I'm going to have to set it to run at some point where I'm going to be out of the house for an hour or two. *g*  (I had it down to just under a thousand before installing AL, after going through and manually deleting over 100 gardeners caused by the gardner-spawning bug in the early base-game only days, as well as extra tour guides and charlatans..)

The new SimPE QA is published, which includes support for SimSheet.

Well, I finally did try to list the whole neighbourhood, and it's looking as though I should have taken my own advice and gone out - I think I started around 1:30 and it's nearly 5 now!  Apparently I'm down to the last 120 or so sims.  It looks like the further down the list it gets, the longer it takes to process each sim - when I first set it off, it was taking about a second between each one, then at about the 600 mark it was taking about fifteen seconds for the counter to move up one, and now it's taking about 25 seconds.  I don't know if this is related to the way the search is done, or if it's a problem elsewhere (or a problem on my computer). 

ETA: Well, it finally got done.  And, uh, trying to filter the Sims crashed it. 

Does the SimPE output phase appear to complete ok?

In what sense?  The whole process runs through as normal, it just takes an exceedingly long time, getting noticably slower as time goes by.  When it comes to the actual data, as far as I can tell at a quick glance of 1210 sims, no-one is missing or has any obvious inaccuracies.  In the rufio folder there is a 403kb exportedsims.txt file.  920 files are in the SimImage folder; there are no potatoheads so I'm assuming those account for the 'missing' pictures given that I imported every single sim, including NPC's and townies.  I didn't get very far with actually looking at the data; I did notice one Sim's father and son weren't showing in the family ties (and as a result, none of her grandchildren or other relatives by her son's marriage, either) - but she was created, and died, in the days of the basegame, and I know the lot that she died on had some problems with buggy graves in the dim and very distant past, so I put it down to that.  No one else who I've looked at yet appears to have missing relatives (again, bearing in mind I've not comprehensively gone through everyone).

That's odd, thought I got that.  In any case it works in mine, so it must have just not got the right version up.  I'll reupload.


Yeah, the absolute path to My Documents is actually C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents.  I think it must have to do with the length of the path string rather than the number of folders deep.


Maybe when I get images working I'll put smaller pictures in the import dialog and let the use choose whether or not to use those images.


Interesting.  There actually isn't any limit on that - when I made the At Large household I imagined it'd just be used for townies who'd contributed genetic material but never moved in.  I never considered importing the whole neighborhood...


It seems to be taking longer to import sims depending on the length of the current simList, so it's probably an issue with the container class - I'll try changing it to something faster and see if that helps.  In any case, it will be worse now, since it has to check the existing simList for sims with matching NIDs.

ETA: Just tested this, and using a different kind of list is hugely extremely much more faster.  Unfortunately the interfacing is different, so I have a lot of code to edit.


Is this the same starting-the-filter-dialog crash, or is it crashing when you check and uncheck the boxes?

I was importing with an empty Sim list (ie, no previous saves loaded), so that shouldn't have been an issue this time if I understand you correctly. 


Starting the filter again. 

It is, though - it'll be pretty quick at the beginning because there's no sims in the list; as it adds more sims to the list and the process gets slower.  If you'd started with sims in the list the rate would just have been slower at the outset.


Starting the filter again. 
[/quote]

Ahh, ok, nothing new for me to fix then.

Got the newest version now.. 4shared was being mean to me yesterday for some reason.

Inge,
Importing from the new QA SimPE.  No probs.  Pass Peter a tinny :)

rufio,
Yep. '/' now fixed in settings, and I love the new progress bar :D

I think the importing slowdown is a sign of the algorithm, not the container class.
Are you loading the sims one by one into the list?
If so, are there any triggers that can be turned off? (the recalc of family ties for instance)

Loading a saved fullhood of ~850 sims is very fast at the moment.
Importing the same 850 sims into a clean simsheet should be able to happen in a similar time.

Alright, I understand now - I thought you meant an already existing and loaded list rather than the one it was compiling at the time.  Beyond as an experiment to test it, I won't usually be loading all townies and NPC's normally, although now I've actually *done* it, it has been quite interesting to scroll through and be able to see at a glance which townies are at which life stages. 

Yeah, I was updating the displays after each sim - didn'y realize how long that took (the family page does not actually calculate the family ties until you click on a sim, though.  I changed the container class anyway, because it's probably a good thing to do in any case.  New version should be up.

Wow, just a slight increase in speed there ;)
Hardly had time to look at the progress bar at all, great work.

Well, if I hadn't been idiotic about where I put stuff in the first place it would have been like that originally.  :-\

On the dialog where you choose which Sims to import, would it be possible to give an option to *deselect* all townies/NPCs/playables as well as the select all option?  Or even just a "clear all selected Sims" if breaking it down by group isn't possible?   

..and yeah, that is *much* quicker now.  *blink blink!*

Yes; I'd thought about doing it and then forgot.  Will do.

Okay, it seems likely that I'm just a moron, but I'm not importing successfully. It does generate the exportedsims text file, plus images, and it says it's generated a list of sims and located data for 502 sims. Then it hangs. The longest I've let it sit so far before I got impatient was 45 minutes. Am I correct in understanding that there should be a progress bar in the current version while it is importing from SimPE? I'm not seeing any progress bar. Sorry, this must be the most useless kind of feedback, wish I had anything more useful to say... :-\

That's not where the progress bar is - it should not hang there at all.  What are the general demographics of the hood you're importing?

ETA:  The current version now has "Deselect All" buttons on the Import Dialog.

ETA 2: Inge, I have a child who (in-game) is shown as being 1 day away from being a teen, but who in SimPE (and in the output) is shown as having 0 days remaining.  Is this standard, or is the days remaining field supposed to match what it says in-game?

OK, I tried importing with the debug version, and before it hangs I get "Generated list of sims", "Loaded data for 502 sims", "Created pageData", and "Set epFlags". When I click OK on that last is when it hangs. No error messages or anything. As for demographics of the hood--I have only around 40 playable sims--what matters in sim demographics besides playable/non-playable? My last computer and its un-backed-up hood was stolen 3 months ago, so this is a pretty young neighborhood with a only a few sims who have died of old age.

Edit: I have no idea if it matters, but I have all EPs except AL.

OK, maybe it's jet lag, but I'm missing something.

I tell it how to find the Test SimPE version.  But there is no way to specify a neighborhood.  The drop down in blank and I don't seem to be able to type into it.  My game is on the F: drive.  I don't know if that has something to do with it or not.

When I hit import I get an error rufio {outpath} {-hood hood) {-group group}  Which is, I assume telling me that I haven't specified a neighborhood.

I'm lost.

That's the value in the sim's data field, but as users of my shrub know, the value is out by one in terms of how a human thinks of having a day left.  You can adjust in your display, if you think it will make it more intuitive for the users.

Is there any way you can make the expansion pack settings stick (even if the default behaviour is to clear the settings each time you load the program, it would useful to have a 'save these settings' button as an option if it can be done)?  I'm not 100% positive, but having created a new list of all playables/townies/NPC's, it seems that if I try to load it without the correct EP's checked, it hangs.  If I remember to check them before loading, it loads okay.  I tried the same with a slightly smaller sample (playables only, about 440 sims) and got the same results: if I remember to check the expansions before loading, the list opens in a few seconds.  If I don't, it doesn't load.  I know the Any Game Starter is out there to allow different EP's, but I expect the vast majority of people use the same EP's for all their hoods. 

I am not sure from your post if you know that this has to be done in SimPE itself?  Assuming you do:

Yes, just open SimPE and check the ticks in Extra/Preferences/Filetable.  When you close it, it should save them.  But this can't be anything to do with SimSheet, can it?  Unless you have both X Stories and The Sims 2, in which case you will have duplicate hood numbers and will definitiely need to make sure you have the right ticks in SimPE.

Inge, if that was directed at me, I wasn't aware that it could be set in SimPE - however, having gone in and looked where you suggested, those boxes are correctly ticked for the expansions I have.  The settings option on SimSheet, however, always comes up with the expansions unchecked when I open the program.  I cannot recall if initially it would load a list regardless of whether or not the expansions were correctly set to match with the saved list, but whether or not it was, it doesn't seem to be now. 

Oh sorry, I didn't know there were ticks in SimSheet too.

Well, I reread some of my old code today, and found out why the filter dialog kept crashing - I forgot to initialize the pointer.  Durrrr.  You'd think I was a Java programmer or something.  I think I would have figured it out sooner if I hadn't become convinced that it had something to do with the path.  Anyway, new crashless version is up.

Katemonster, I've done a bit of housekeeping in importdialog.cpp; could you try to import with the new non-debug version and see if that works?


Yes, it is to do with having the game installed on another drive.  I'll fix that in the next upload.


Yeah, the point of the "days until age" display is to mimic what is seen in the game.  Will fix.


You should be able to load previously saved files and have the settings that you set for those hoods show up; you should also be able to import hoods that have a different set of EPs than you've specified - the EP checkboxes are really just to hide the EP-related stuff from people who don't have those EPs and don't want to see it.  Is it hanging when you try to load a file, or when you try to import?  I can try to have it auto-detect which EPs you have too.

ETA: New version is up, with Lerf's issue fixed as well as the off-by-one age problem.

Is it the Simsheet-test file that is now at the URL you sent me yesterday?  If so it doesn't have an .exe file in it.

That's odd.  I reuploaded; is it there now?

The exe is there now :)

The At large family is now showing ~600 sims, so this appears fine now too.

I had noticed that in an older version you had split the townies & NPC's into the family names given by the SimPE output.
Could this be an option?
Reason:  I used SimPE to change the useless names for the all the special townie/downtownie/NPC's to their 'functional' names (see here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9932.0.html).

That was a bug that happened when you selected them using the select all buttons.  The problem with putting townies etc. in non-At Large households is that SimSheet will think they are playables and will have them age along with the playables.  If Inge will tell me how to distinguish between Townies, Downtownies, special Townies, etc., though, I can have SimSheet automatically stick them into appropriate special households.  There are actually already special households for sims/pets in the adoption queue and sims/pets that have run away, and it would be nice to assign those automatically too.

That thread Tuna linked to should have all the info you need for that.

Now that we can import the 'live' data simply and quickly, is the aging option now redundent?
Using the live data also accounts for againg mods that the user may be using.


That would be brilliant :)
The output from SimPE lists these fields under 'FamilyInstance'.

Oh, I see.  "Orphan" means in the adoption queue, right?  And Tourists/Asia/Mountains/Tropics are BV groups?  What are "Display Pets"?  What is "Bob the Builder"?  What are the family instances for the AL social group townies?  Do Grand Vampires/Head Witches/Landlords/Hobby Mavens/Special BV NPCs/Pack Leaders/etc. count as Service NPCs?


I wouldn't think so - at least, I'd prefer to just add updates rather than importing the entire hood again, but I suppose you can use it that way.  And the next savefile is going to have support for aging hacks.

I'm going to lose power any minute now.  The power company are replacing some poles.
All the info is in that thread but I'll mail you a completed list later when the power comes back up.
Some of the special NPC's are in the downtownies group.  I don't have a list of all these, but they'll have the NPC flag set.
In fact your program will make finding info like this much easier :)

For aging, you could skip all the groups above 0x7f?? (will check later)

From my notes, yes Tourists etc are BV groups:

0x7FF1 = Tropics locals
0x7FF2 = Mountains locals
0x7FF3 = Asia locals

Tourists are in 12 families: from 0x7FE5 to 0x7FF0

Display Pets are those available in cages, in pet shops, ready to be bought; Bob the Builder is probably something unrelated left behind by Maxis, it does not pertain anything in game.

Head Witches, Landlords, special BV NPCs, wolves and pack leaders are all Service NPCs (family 0x7FFF), while Hobby Mavens have their own family (0x7FF4 0x7FE4), and Grand Vampires (and Diva, Mr. Big and Slobs) are in Downtownies family (0x7FFC)

AL Social groups are:

0x7FDF = Socialites
0x7FE0 = Techies
0x7FE1 = Jocks
0x7FE2 = Bohemians
0x7FE3 = Gearheads

The other families (to summarize) are:

0x7FF6 = Garden Club
0x7FF7 = Display pets - in use
0x7FF8 = Display pets - available (not currently shown in cage, maybe)
0x7FF9 = pets adoption pool
0x7FFA = strays
0x7FFB = (Bob the Builder - ignore it)
0x7FFC = Downtownies
0x7FFD = sim adoption pool
0x7FFE = Townies
0x7FFF = Service NPCs

EDIT: Fixed the family number for Hobby Mavens; thanks tunaisafish for the finding!  ;)

Ok, cool.  I will start working on this tomorrow.  How does the game keep track of teens and pets that have run away, by the way?

 :( Same crash. I wish I could give you more useful information, but I have no idea what could even matter.

That's ok - I'd rearranged some of the code and just wanted to check that I hadn't accidentally fixed it before testing for real.  Download the latest SimSheet-debug and try importing with that, and tell me what messages you see.

Well, with the new debug program I get the same crash after the same messages. If this helps any, when I run SimSheet on my old laptop running WinXP there is no crash and I actually see the import screen (the one that presumably precedes the progress bar)...my real computer has Vista. I may actually consider just syncing my sims files from my real computer to my old laptop, just so that I can update things on the laptop with the game running on the real machine, in which case I won't have this problem anymore. But surely I'm not the only tester running Vista, and no one else seems to have this weird crash...?

I haven't looked into this specifically, but going by how these things are normally managed, they are probably still on the lot, hidden, and they may have a hidden inventory token that times out or a controller is taking care of it.  It's highly unlikely there is an actual data item with a value for "run away" that we could output.

Okay, tried again with three different length of lists: one of all 1210 Sims, one of 400~ playables and one of 20 playables.  The first two wouldn't load even after being left for several minutes (with the expansions checked, the longest list loads in about 30 seconds when I time it).  The list of 20 sims will load, and the settings are imported with it.  Either it is hanging on trying to change the settings, or it will take an obscenely long time to load the settings for large lists; either way it would seem that the simplest way to minimise the problem for most is making the EP options stick, unless you can find a way to bring the option-loading time down.  It might be relevant to note that a couple of days ago I forgot to check the EP's before I imported a large list of Sims.  When I went into settings to do it manually, it took about thirty seconds (towards the end I was timing them) to apply each EP before the program would let me check the next box. 

katemonster - download the latest SimSheet-debug, import, and tell me what the last debug message you see is.

coralleane - this is loading using "Open" from the LM dialog?  I can load a list of ~800 sims in a second or two without having any EPs checked.  Can I verify that at least some sims in the list have households listed?  Are you opening it in the right savefile version?  I guess this could be partly due to redoing the container class, but I'm not getting anything like this.

Still nothing showing up in the neighborhoods drop down under import files in the manage sim lists window.   My game is still on the F: drive.   :)

Okay, after "Set epFlags" I see "Loop 0 begin", "Loop 0 middle" and then the crash. Hope this is helpful.

Lerf, can you just verify that a folder called F:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\ exists?  And has some folders in it called N001, etc?

Kate, can you redownload SimSheet-debug and try it again for me?

Opening from the Manage Sims List dialog.  I've only ever used the 0.5 version for saving and opening, the files open fine with the EP's set, and when I do so there are Households listed under the Household tabs, a quick sampling of which seems to be accurate.  It will open a small list fine without settings, just not a large one.  Bearing in mind I don't really know how it's programmed, would the existence of large numbers of EP-specific Sims (ie, pets, plantsims, servos, etc) have any effect or not? 

It should not have any effect; those are just flags that the program understands regardless of whatever is checked in settings.  Can I see the savefile?

I'll drop you a couple in an email shortly. 

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v487/Lerf1950/folder.jpg)

However, please note that the path is not quite the same as it would be on my C:drive

Same messages--"Loop 0 begin", "Loop 0 middle", crash.

Would it be a good idea if the user could type in the full path to their savegame folder?  You do know that SimPE will accept an argument for where to create the sims csv output though don't you?  Why not force it into the SimSheet data folder?

I think that would be a good idea - I now understand why it couldn't find mine, which on the test machine are on the d-drive.

Here are the commandline details, in case they got lost:

Coralleane - your problem has nothing to do with the EP flags; the family info in the savefile is messed up.  I'm guessing this was a list imported from SimPE, right?  Reimport it and check that the family ties are correct - if they aren't, attach the output file that SimPE made here.

Lerf - the difference in the path would be why it's not finding them.  Is that the typical install path when the game is installed on other drives?

katemonster - redownload SimSheet-debug and try again.

Inge - I think that's probably the best thing for it, too.

I'll finish with the special households and update again later today.

Okay, this time it goes through the usual stuff with SimPE (and the splash screen shows that it's the QA version), then I get a message saying "Error: -rufio -out {outpath} {-hood hood} {-group group}. Then "cannot find output file; check that you are using the AL version of SimPE." When I tell it to import from previously exported output (I thought this might work since I still have the exportedsims.txt file from the last time I ran this sitting in my Sims folder) it still says it can't find the output file.

Ok, I think that's probably an issue with my attempt to incorporate Inge's suggestion.  For now I'll put it back the way it was an reupload.

ETA: Try again now.

Pleh...same. Loop 0 begin, Loop 0 middle, crash.  :-\

Believe it or not, you are actually giving me useful information.  I think this may wind up being another uninitialized variable problem.  I thought these particular variables would initialize themselves since they are Qt objects, but perhaps not.  Try the latest debug and see if that fixes it.

I'll try to have to a look at it tomorrow.  The one that was working that I sent you was imported from SimPE at a later date than the others so perhaps it was simply a glitch with a few imports?  I'm pretty much reimporting on a regular basis and discarding old ones since I'm using it for testing at the moment, rather than 'proper' maintaining.

Dammit  >:( Still the same errors, same crash. I don't suppose the operating system is likely to be relevant (works on XP machine, not on Vista machine)?

Could be, kate, I don't know a lot about Windows or what Vista changed.  I'm out of ideas for this particular bork though - it's crashing during a function whose only purpose is to assign variables which are now properly initialized and everything. ???

Anyway, I have another version up now, which divides the townies into households as per Marhis' post.  I did combine the adoption pools, and the strays with the normal townies, and put the display pets in with the adoption pool, though.

Hmm...looks like the Vista thing was a red herring. I decided I was going to use my old laptop to keep track of my sims since it worked the time I tried to import on that machine--so I tried to import the files from my real neighborhood, and lo and behold, the same crash. Then I had the brilliant idea to try to import a *different* neighborhood on my real machine, and kaboom, no crash! (Except I had to click through twelve million debug messages, because the current non-debug version errors when it tries to generate the output file.) So presumably it must have something to do with my actual neighborhood. If I were you I'd never want to hear anything from me again, but in the event that this gives you any ideas, I thought I'd post it anyway. (My neighborhood is not huge--503 sims, and my computer is only a few months old, not a dinosaur--and anyway the neighborhood that did work had 356 sims. Could there be one broken sim breaking the whole neighborhood? Should I start deleting people from the exportedsims file till I find the culprits?)

Really?  I tested for that and everything.  Maybe the wrong exe got uploaded again.  I guess I'll reupload.


Sounds like it might be an issue with the SimPE output, then, although I don't know what it might be.  Post the output file and see if Inge can figure out what happened.

ETA: The problem is with aspiration and secondary aspiration - I am using the second aspiration field rather than the first.

Probably.  When you install on another drive you're prompted for a folder to put them in and that's the one I chose as there wasn't any point to putting in a "Documents and Settings" and a <my name> folder.

Well, in case this is any use, here's my output file. Do you still need this or is the problem with secondary aspirations?

That was just extra information about when the program is crashing to help Inge figure out what's going wrong in the output.  Do you know the name of the playable whose name comes first alphabetically in the hood?  That's the first one that gets loaded into the dialog, and that was where it was failing.

Sorry?  Was there meant to be something wrong with the output?  What sort of something?

Something in this particular neighborhood that causes my program to crash when the text for the aspiration and/or secondary aspiration are put into string variables in the display class.  I don't know what kind of problem would cause this, but since it is apparently unique to this neighborhood, it's got to be a problem with the output.

The first playable alphabetically is Andre Alvarez.

So analyse it and let me know in what way the output doesn't meet your spec.

There is no Andre Alvarez in that list.  Are you sure it's the right neighborhood?

ETA: I just loaded that list and it worked fine.

OK, I don't know how the hell I ended up with that list. I'm pretty sure that's from whatever Maxis neighborhood I imported without any problems. I hope this one is right.

ETA this appears to be my actual neighborhood. Hope it's more useful than uploading never-played, never-modified Pleasantville.

Hi, new tester here. I have been fooling around with this tonight and I have a question and a problem.

Am I supposed to have to rename the Rufio folder for each neighborhood? That was the only way I could get
it to do another neighborhood and save the data.

I loaded up my really old neighborhood, 1214 sims. The Rufio folder was created and the ExportedSims.txt file is there,
but when I tell it to Import Sims, it crashes with the SimSheet has encountered a problem and needs to close message.

Btw, the Rufio folder is being created in the SimSheet folder.

SimSheet:
C:\SimSheet-test

SimPE:
C:\ProgramFiles\SimPE\

No; the Rufio folder is only a temporary holding place for whatever neighborhood is being imported.  You can save via the LM dialog, which will create a <filename>.sls file in the SimSheet directory that can be loaded again.


What happens before it crashes?  Any message boxes?

ETA: Kate, there appears to be a sim without a name in your neighborhood.  I can't see how that by itself would cause a crash, but after all it is crashing on the aspiration anyway.  I suspect there is something else wrong with the sim which is causing the crash; since "" come alphabetically before everything it gets loaded first.  I'm not real interested in looking through the entire output file to find out what's wrong though.  Inge, under what circumstances would the sim be output without a name?  Ok, I got the program to output - some of the lot descriptions have newlines in them, which causes the program to think that there are two different sims - one corresponding to the data before the newline, the other corresponding to the data after, and since the data is shorter than it should be for both sims it crashes trying to access things at the end of the list.  So what needs to be done to make the output digestible by SimSheet, Inge, is to have SimPE avoid outputting newlines in the actual data.

Thanks Rufio, I'll ask Peter to do a substitution with a normal unprintable character.

Having consulted, how about you get the strings enclosed in quotes?   We'll change the CSV to a fully conventional one with comma seperators.  I asked for the semicolons at the time as no one uses them in strings these days, but I forgot the newlines!! 

See, this is why you need to escape all your strings. Even unprintables isn't safe, because you just know some weirdo is going to name a sim or a lot with a non-printable character, possibly one of the ones you use.

SimPE does its thing.

Generated list of sims.

Loaded data for 1214 sims.


SimSheet.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
We are sorry for the inconvenience.


ETA: This may be the newline problem. Here is a section of text that looks suspect:

N001;Pleasantview;314;Kiernan;19;Tricou;Tricou;21;House of Fallen Trees
;Y;N;;;316;16;0;Unknown;Unknown;51;Athletic;5;Aquarius;Romance;Male;Adult;14;864;80;37150;500;300;600;500;600;500;300;600;500;600;316;24;578;276;656;827;39;767;280;-27;953;409;418;175;478;921;400;400;295;755;606;455;171;294;285;0;706;135;0;N;;;;;;;Human;0;Romance;Nothing;Arts;12050
N001;Pleasantview;315;Fricorith;44;Tricou;Temptress;172;Sim State Dormitory (14 Rooms);Y;N;319;317;;Unknown;0;PrivateSchool;APlus;0;Unemployed;0;Capricorn;Reputation;Male;Adult;28;931;84;67450;300;700;600;300;600;300;700;600;300;600;400;998;400;1000;182;970;0;335;296;0;715;438;807;500;615;973;400;428;41;118;131;114;328;524;330;494;647;192;0;Y;0;1000;61;2;8000;Philosophy;Human;0;Reputation;Nothing;Film;8753
N001;Pleasantview;316;Nylissit;19;Tricou;Tricou;21;House of Fallen Trees
;Y;N;320;318;314;Unknown;0;Unknown;Unknown;0;Medical;6;Scorpio;Reputation;Female;Adult;14;732;71;20950;500;800;300;500;400;500;800;300;500;400;308;887;101;469;738;934;-28;442;231;39;573;447;837;400;500;823;400;963;135;295;0;0;702;436;301;500;803;524;0;N;;;;;;;Human;0;Reputation;Nothing;Science;11655
N001;Pleasantview;317;Kvornan;19;Tricou;Tricou;21;House of Fallen Trees
;Y;N;;;319;16;0;Unknown;Unknown;0;LawEnforcement;7;Cancer;Fun;Male;Adult;14;684;67;32750;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;373;705;890;420;673;413;33;1000;237;-23;326;767;985;14;493;615;400;896;140;102;492;0;606;204;324;0;987;76;0;N;;;;;;;Human;0;Fun;Nothing;Cuisine;10935
N001;Pleasantview;318;Jon Smith;19;Tricou;Tricou;21;House of Fallen Trees
;Y;N;;;320;16;0;Unknown;Unknown;36;Unemployed;0;Aquarius;Family;Male;Elder;2;900;70;7150;500;200;700;500;600;500;200;700;500;600;400;624;600;737;150;632;44;659;110;-29;347;873;71;400;400;168;400;973;510;399;506;0;81;177;654;0;678;417;0;N;;;;;;;Human;0;Family;Nothing;Arts;15434
N001;Pleasantview;319;Jennail;19;Tricou;Tricou;21;House of Fallen Trees
;Y;N;320;318;317;6;0;Unknown;Unknown;24;Medical;6;Cancer;Fortune;Female;Adult;14;964;86;52350;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;500;400;523;419;743;669;12;-23;678;270;27;669;350;148;400;418;804;400;330;762;357;0;0;702;403;0;500;600;709;0;N;;;;;;;Human;0;Fortune;Nothing;Sport;11990

Edit 2: Yep, that was it. I went into the .txt file and removed the newlines from the suspect lines and the neighborhood imported properly.

Fix is in progress.  Output will adhere more strictly to CSV format in future.  Strings quoted with quote-escaped embedded quotes, and commas instead of semicolons.

Man, I was hoping to avoid the text strings enclosed in quotes thing.  I've always had a heck of a time trying to get Windows to read newlines even if they were enclosed in quotes.  Sigh.  I don't even use the lot description in the program (nor do I have any plans to) and there should be no reason why any of the other fields would have newlines.  Can we just delete the newlines and forget about reformatting?

So you are unable to parse standard csv?

I'm sure I could find a way, but in Windows it seems to be too much of a pain.  In linux, my usual methods work fne.

Remind me what language you are using?

Wait... maybe a stupid idea, but could it be because in unix and windows lines ends with different characters? IIRC in Windows are both "new line" and "carriage return" (\n and \r), while in unix there is only one? (or perhaps it's the vice versa, I really didn't remember well).

It's probably to do with the more powerful commandline file management utils Linux tends to have.

I see rufio's point.... but it seems a shame to have the output *only* of use to this one util.

Could be, Marhis.

Inge, I am using C++; in linux I would use cin.getline to get in everything up to the next comma, which would even get in newline characters, including \rs that I had added to the output in anticipation for use in Windows.  In Windows, if there is a newline before the next comma, getline will stop at the newline.  I don't know how to tell if getline stopped because of a comma, or because of a newline.  I have better I/O with Qt, so I'm sure I could hack together something, but it would be a pain and there is no reason to preserve newlines when I am not going to use them.  I don't think it would be a tragedy for excel either, if every single newline a creator put in the lot description was not preserved.

Newlines were the problem before, but there could also easily have been embedded commas in the strings (or semicolons as we were using).  It was really a mistake to ever have thought we could put out freely user-entered strings without protecting them in quotes.

As the output table has a fixed number of fields per record, could you not read in a count of fields?  The benefit of that is you don;t even have to parse the fields you don't want to deal with.

I am fine with parsing fields within quotes, as long as they do not contain newlines; I do that with the savefiles anyway.  What I do for those is use Qt I/O functions to break up the line into a list of strings as delineated by semicolons/commas, and combine any that appear to have quotes on the edges.  I get the info out of that list using indexes.  I don't think that counting semicolons until the right index is reached would work, because there could be semicolons in the output (encased in quotes) that would throw it off, and I would still have to go through and combine those to get the right index.  If that makes sense.

Yes it makes sense, but the same problem can arise if you *do* get a comma (or whatever the current seperator is) in a string field, mid-record.  It would still throw your fields off.

I am just not sure it should be SimPE's job to edit these user-entered fields though.  It means the output is sort of inaccurate.  It's not as if the commas or newlines got in there by error - they are actually valid content in those fields.  While empathising with your position, it feels to me as if it should be more of your tool's responsibility how it wants to display the data rather than the data's responsibility to pervert itself to fit - if you see what I mean?

Yep, DOS uses CR+LF where linux would just use the NL.
Excel *does* handle the embedded line breaks fine, both importing and exporting them.
*The* spec to look for CSV's is rfc4180 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt).
You should be able to find a CSV library to do the parsing for you for most languages.
I know that Perl Text::CSV took care of all the parsing and escaping headaches for me :)

I agree that it should be SimPE's job to just make the data available unaltered.
Then if somebody needs access to the information not used by SimSheet, they can easily use Excel, Perl etc...

If SimPE is going to destroy data for the transfer, then that should be a '-simsheetformat' option IMO.
I don't know what the ultimate goal of SimSheet is.  The next version may use more fields that it is using now?

I still say the solution is just to escape any characters that are a not A-Za-z0-9

How would that help?  If she's splitting records on newline at first pass, and can't vary that action on the basis of the nl being within quotes, how is it going to be easier to detect an escape character preceding the newline?

A couple of months ago I was trying to convert an Access output (csv indeed) in SQL, and it was a PITA, because of one text  field pretty much filled with carriage returns and various escape characters; in the end I found a program on Sourceforge which handled the conversion perfectly. Now, I don't remember what it was - I tried many other, first  - but having a look at the source of those kind of programs maybe could help.

Maybe this?


Or, you could simply use \n to represent the newline, and to hell with the actual newline character.

Escaping things would be simpler than messing around with quotes.  Even if you used quotes, you still have to escape the combination of "; as that could be mistaken for the end of quoted field if it occurred inside a quotation.

Now the \n substitution would come at a high cost in large hoods.

The quotes round strings comes at a small cost of the output file increasing in size by the number of " characters.   But because Peter already knows the data type of each field, there is no testing - certain fields always get "".

But if he had to test each character of the file to see if it was a newline you would be looking at a very significant slowdown in the output process.  People are already talking of "going out for the afternoon" while the sims are transferred from SimPE to your program - I am worried that would turn into "going for their vacation"

I'm probably doing something very simple wrong here, but having downloaded the newest version, whenever I try to import sims, this is what I get after SimPE has run through its bit:

(http://www.coralleane.co.uk/images/errormessage2.jpg)

Clicking OK then brings up a message saying "Cannot find output file.  Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE" or words to that effect.  I see in the changelog that the output is now supposed to be going to the SimSheet folder, but it's not there - I went and checked the rufio folder in the main Sims folder that had been created previously, but it hadn't put it there either, it's still got the previous modified date on it.  I ran a search for "exportedsims.txt" on the whole computer just in case it had squirreled it away somewhere bizarre, but it only returned the afore-mentioned one in The Sims 2\Rufio folder.

ETA: Inge, the incredibly long loading time (which was with a hood of over 1,200 Sims) was only in a previous version - new versions have sped it up considerably, to the point where it only takes a few minutes to import a list that size for me now, compared to the hours it was taking before.  I don't know how much difference what you're discussing would make to that, though. 

Rufio, any field with a \ before the NL in the original data would break the code you suggested.

Orig field
"/\/\ () /\/\
\/\/ () \/\/"

SimPE output would then have to be...
"/\\/\\ () /\\/\\\
\\/\\/ () \//\//"

I don't see what benefit there is to invent a new data standard, especially if in the process you corrupt the data and make it less readable.

There's C++ and .NET support listed here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSV_application_support (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSV_application_support)

Inge, Peter will still need to scan all characters to escape existing quotes with a quote.
The slowdown of testing every character shouldn't be noticeable.
Also Rufio fixed the problem with the long transfer time.  Now if you blink you almost miss it :)

Inge - could he just automagically replace all newlines with \n right before writing the data to file?  That's what I do when I output non-newlines in place of newlines.  I'm using a Qt function, so I don't know exactly how it works, but I have seen no difference in the time it takes to output.

Cora, I'm not getting that problem, but I'll put up a debug version that will show the exact command it's executing.

tunafish - That's why it checks for \ as the last character and \ as the second-to-last.  Naturally, any \ in the data itself would be escaped with another \.

Also, I think I've probably gotten spoiled with Qt's I/O classes, but I would really prefer not to have to go back to using C I/O.  I've forgotten a lot of those functions and never really learned printf/scanf anyway.  And then I'd have to do a lot of messy conversion from character arrays to std::strings to QStrings and back again.  I understand the merits of using a "standard" file format, but CSV is not exactly a universal standard anymore, is it?  And it would be simple to add an option to SimPE to make it output in 100% standard CSV, I'm sure.

And what about embedded commas?  Some users may be in the habit of using commas in housenames, sim descriptions etc (I noticed the sim description wasn't being put out and asked Peter to add it)

http://www.wheresjames.com/rulib/class_c_csv_file.html

Inge - so just replace all commas, \s and newlines with \, \\ and \n.

I'll send you a link to SimSheet-debug.  Download, run, and screencap the latest debug message, please.

I am not writing, designing or testing your application.  This is an exercise in API - in managing an interface.

Also try http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx

I thought we were talking about having SimPE output things?  Anyway, it was just a suggestion Pescado made, and I was only thinking out how it might work.  We've agreed that something has to change in the output.  What would you prefer to do?  I've already been over what would be easiest for me, but I'm sure I can work around whatever you decide to do, without needing to learn some whole new API.

Pfah! C I/O offers tighter control and is superior to wussy lesser I/Os! The fact that you speak of going BACK to it proves its superiority to lesser, wussier I/Os! Return to the truth path or burn forever in the fires of HELL and DAMNATION! REPENT, SINNER!

Rufio, we continue to negotiate SimPE output.  My comment was in response to you giving me a link to download your program.

Oh, sorry, that should have been directed a coral.   :-[

JMP - Yes, I know, in your days they had to do it all with null-terminated arrays and structs and functions with irritating numbers of underscores in their names and they liked it.  Unfortunately I like my new toys too much to repent.  I will be sure to stay off of your lawn, though.

So did you have a look at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx ?   I feel I would like you to at least have a try at reading full CSV before we give up.

Yes.  That's where your code fails. You backtrack -2 to test '!='.  So as -2 held a '\' too, you'd need an 'else if' to go back to -3... etc.
I was just trying to show you how escaping characters will add more complexities.
It's actually tricky to do properly without a backtracking regex engine.
So while you invent a new standard to fix a bug, you'll have all the bugs that come with reading this new standard too.

CSV has some flavours sure, but the libraries I've seen allow you to choose the ruleset.
That's why I suggested 'text/csv' and the link to the rfc :)

Any standard is good, CSV seems the logical choice here, with XML coming a distant second.
CSV will also cope with the non-ascii charsets.

Pete says xml would be create too huge a file for this purpose.

I see what you mean, tunafish.

Inge, that looks nice, but I don't use .NET.  (I learned C++ in linux using vi and the command line, and now I'm just using gvim for Windows.)  Do I need .NET to make this work?

Probably for that one, but Peter found it by a simple Google search on "csv C++".  Maybe you could try that and find a library function more suited to your development environment?

Er, well, my "development environment" is basically a text editor, so ideally it would just be a header file with a class definition in it.  I guess I'll make an account on that site and see what's in their zip.

ETA:  Apparently by "C++" they mean C#.  Or maybe it's all the same thing when you use .NET?  Who knows.

Like I said above, though, I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to read enquoted fields containing newlines if that's how we decide to do it.

I found a situation even Excel can't cope with.  On one of the Gavigan family - the father I think - there is a linefeed without a CR.  Excel splits the record on it, even though it was enclosed in quotes :)   That's an excel bug.  A quote is a quote is a quote and if it's not closed the stuff is NOT THE END OF RECORD, INNIT?

I've downloaded the debug version and when I click on import Sims, it brings this up:

"C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPE.exe" -rufio -hood N001 -out C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet-debug

The paths are both correct.  Once I click on OK, everything proceeds exactly as it did on the previous attempt; SimPE runs through its bit, then I get exactly the same messages as before.

I will soon be putting up another QA of SimPE on the ambertation site.  This is advance warning, because it has the proper CSV output for SimSheet.

Now, Rufio has not yet updated SimSheet to accept this format, and we don't know for sure she will do so.

So, SimSheet users must KEEP A SIMSHEET-COMPATIBLE VERSION OF SIMPE ON YOUR SYSTEM if downloading the new QA.

Coral - which messages are those again?  I thought you were having trouble getting SimPE to use the command line arguments.

Inge, I will need to see a sample output so I know which fields you have enquoted before I can update and test.

Yes, I assume you have access to the QA?

Did you make any progress with finding out how to handle standard CSV?  Obviously there is still an option to revert to or add the output you preferred, but I am keen to make a distinction between "can't be parsed in my version of C++" and "can be done but I need time to learn how"

All I'm doing is going in, setting up the settings, then going into Manage Sim Lists.  When I click on import it does the first bit correctly, then once SimPE seems to have done its bit, instead of saying it's generated a list of however many Sims, it instead gives me the "-rufio -out {outpath} {hood hood} {group group}" dialog.  Only option is "OK".  Clicking that then generates the "Cannot find output file.  Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE" error message.  Using the debug version, once I tell it to import it brings up a dialog that says: "C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPE.exe" -rufio -hood N001 -out C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet-debug, which is the path of SimPE and SimSheet, then runs through the SimPE step before giving me the two error messages again.  The list of exported Sims is not generated in the SimSheet folder, the TS2 folder, or anywhere else I can find on the computer. 

Inge, I just have the version you sent me a link to in email.  Don't I have to sign up for a list somewhere to get access to the QA?

RE: CSV - it doesn't have to do with my "version" of C++ so much as that all of the CSV-parsing stuff that I can find has IDE crap in it that I don't know what to do with because I don't know how it's supposed to work.  What I can do, as I said before, is to parse it out manually, which may not work perfectly in obscure instances of people putting weird shit in their sims' names, but I think I should be able to deal with newlines.  Alternatively, we can leave it exactly the same but kill the newlines.

Do you recognize Coral's error message?  It's not from SimSheet, at any rate.  Is there anything wrong with the command she posted?

It seems strange that SimPE is putting out a message saying ""Cannot find output file.  Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE""

a) Why would SimPE even be looking for the output file?  It would be complaining instead that it could not create it.
b) Surely SimPE would know which version it was?

Coralleane, make a shortcut to Simpe, and then edit the shortcut properties so that after the string already in Target, you add just -rufio

Run it.  The output folder should be in your My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 folder

If it got there ok, then edit the shortcut once again to add -out <pathtotestfoldersomewhere>

See if that works too.

If you like you can add -hood N00x (where x is a number) to both those tests to limit the output to one hood.

Firstly, the target precisely as formatted in the shortcut properties, just in case I've made an error somewhere like not using " when I should or vice versa:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPe.exe" -rufio -out C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet-debug -hood N001

Your first suggestion, Inge, with it outputting into the Sims 2 folder, worked fine.  Once I added the specific path and narrowed down the neighbourhood, I got the first message again (the -rufio -out {outpath} etc... one), but not the one about it being an incorrect version of SimPE.  As well as the version above, I tried using:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPe.exe" -rufio -out C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet

"C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPe.exe" -rufio -out C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet\ -hood N001

"C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPe.exe" -rufio -out C:\SimSheet -hood N001

..and various other similar combinations. 

I manually moved the list generated following Inge's first suggestion, by cutting and pasting it into the SimSheet folder.  Once I'd done that, I tried to create a list by telling it to use the previously generated data, and it picked up the list alright in the SimSheet folder.  So from what I can tell, the problem is that for some reason, SimPE is not creating the output into the SimSheet folder and is giving the first dialog instead.  SimSheet then presumably looks for the exported sims list, can't find it, and gives out the message about not having a current version of SimPE. 

If you have a path with spaces - like "My Documents" then the whole path needs to be in quotes.  Just put them round the path one quote before C: and its partner after SimSheet-debug

Okay, running it through with the quotemarks now and so far it seems to be working.  Possibly this is the problem in the program itself as well, the existence of the spaces in the output path?  I have to head for work now but I'll try moving SimSheet to a space-less path either when I get back or tomorrow if the solution hasn't already been found.  Using the debug version of SimSheet, when I told it to import, it brought up:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimPE-test\SimPE-test\SimPE.exe" -rufio -hood N001 -out C:\Documents and Settings\Coral\My Documents\EA Games\SimSheet-debug

...with no quote marks.  So is it just a case of forcing SimSheet to include quotes around the output path?

It could be... Rufio doesn't like quotes round strings :D

Ooops.  Actually, what I don't like is spaces in folder names (too used to having to escape them in linux) so I never realized.  I'll reupload.

ETA:  Forgot to add, I did reupload and the output path should now have quotes around it.

*whimper*  Redownloaded, and although the first dialog doesn't show, it seems to not be calling SimPE at all now - the cmd.exe window flashes up briefly and goes away before I can even attempt to read it (it *looks* like it has a file path in it but I'm not sure) and then I get the message about checking I have the correct SimPE version.  I'm off to bed now (anything I try and do to test will just result in stupidity at the moment because I'm exhausted), but in the morning I'll try to remember to give it a shot by moving it into a different folder or anything else anyone can think of.  This was with the 'regular' version, btw, not debug, since it looks like that file wasn't changed - at least, when I went to unzip it, WinRAR reported identical file sizes and modify dates. 

"It's just ten characters of code," the demon of laziness said.  "You don't need to test it," she said.

Inge?  The only change to the command is the quotes around the second url.

I'm getting the same as Coral :(
Any chance you can leave the cmd.exe box up after execution until we get it working on everybodies machines?
Either by a switch or a 'press any key to close' prompt.

I don't remember how to do that in Windows. :(  Some call to system (), right?  I'll try manually entering it and see what comes up.

ETA: It works just fine when I get up the command line and do it by hand, but not when SimSheet calls it with system ().  Is this more Windoze fuckery?

The 'pause' command gives the 'press any key' prompt.
Just tried these below in a command prompt and they work just like they'd do in bash.

echo foo || pause
echo foo && pause

Well, calling system ("pause") right after the other system call just shows "press any key" and nothing else - no error messages, or anything.  Am I doing it right?

Lack of error messages probably means there was no error.  Lack of anything means you didn't use "echo" lines

Ok.  I am a Windows noob.  How does echo work?  Is foo a string, or something else?

ETA:  Ok, I see - still no error messages, though.

I could write a batch file that you could call with the 2 arguents if you like?
batch files are windows answer to shell scripts.
I could add some sanity checking that the directories and files exist etc,
and end with a pause so we can debug.

The only 2 args you'd need to supply would be the "SimPE.exe path" and the "output folder".

ETA, make that 3 args.  Forgot the hood.

Sure.  This is a file that I put in the SimSheet directory and invoke with system (), right?  Should the paths be absolute or relative to the location of the batch file?

Check your email to sort out the details :)

Ok, finally managed to get tunafish's batch file (it was eated by gmail) and ran it.  What happens is that SimPE runs for a while, and then pops up an error saying "Use -out specify an existing folder".  Is the commandline argument parser unable to deal with quotes?

Does the output path have a trailing '/'?

Yes, because you included one in the example you sent me.  I can try taking it out.

ETA: Ok, that worked with the batch file, although directly invoking the command still doesn't seem to.  Guess I'll package tuna's file into the zips reupload, then.

Yeah, my fault you didn't read the last email that contained the attachement ;)

BTW, this tool helped me find out why one of my sims was broken, and highlighted another broken EA-made sim :)

Chastity Gere looked like she was stuck in permiplat, and she should not have been as I'd not played her that much.
Her 'real mood' was hidden, she was actually heading for aspiration failure.  I put the thinking cap on her and she lost skill points and had her energy drain to zero.
Sorting my playables in SimSheet showed her aspiration was set to 'Nothing', although in game all indications said she was a romance sim.
There was another child set to Knowledge instead of grow-up.

Easily fixed in SimPE, but much easier to actually locate the problem aspirations using SimSheet :)

Ok, I've updated - tuna's batch file is in the zip, and you'll need to put that in the SimSheet directory too.

Loads OK again :)

Full hood.  All sims were loaded, as their names appeared in the right 'Households'.

Problems
1/ Quiet a big bug with the 'List of Sims'.
I found a workaround to stop it crashing.  Hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

At first, only playables were listed in the 'List of Sims' window.
Had to toggle the townies off&on to get them to display.

Opening from a savefile, then trying to sort on any field causes simsheet to just disappear.
 - think this is related to townies not showing.  It sorts OK after toggling the townies off&on in the filter.

No 'Adoptables' showing until you toggle the Filter off&on.
I think there are more like this not showing until you toggle the filter off&on.
The list of names starting with A was 1 page to begin with, and grew up to 5 pages after I'd cycled through all the family-filter options.

Not sure if you've implemented these 2 yet...
2/ Pressing 'Add Notes' causes a crash (with MS send report dialog).
3/ Cancelling the 'Add Image' causes a crash (with MS send report dialog).

Suggestions
1/ 'At Large' is confusing, can this be 'Townies/Dormies'?
2/ Some way to filter/sort on family?
  We can easily filter most of the special families through the Filter checkboxes.
  Maybe add a dropdown to filter a specific playable household.
  Maybe add a surname or household column to the list for sorting on.

Thanks for the update :)

Rufio did you get the latest QA?  It has more output fields and some changed headers so you need to update for those.  We got some more age fields one of which might be the one you wanted.

Yeah, I forgot to set all the filter flags to on at the start.


I'm not sure how that would have to do with the filter flags, but I'm not seeing it after fixing them, so I guess it must have.


Noted.  The first probably has to do with my changing the way the list was stored.


Probably, yes.


Surname is not stored as a separate field, but the simplest way to do this would be to add a household column to the List of Sims.  Will do.

Inge, I do not have the new QA - how do I get it?

Surname is output as a seperate field however.  Also household name.

Are you a member of the SimPE forums?  If so, tell me your username and I will add you to the QA group.  If not, join, then go back to step 1 :)

I think I may have signed up as rufio once.

Well go and find out if you still have an account and it is still working.  You'll have to hurry if you want me to sign you up for QA before I go into my nightly downtime! :P

Yep, still works.

ETA:  New version up, tuna's bugs are fixed.

Ok then I added you to the group.  You should be able to see the QA forum next time you log in.

Don't know if the changes in the latest version are addressing whatever output problems are causing my crash, but I'm still getting the same crash.

No, we're still figuring that out.  Actually, it would really help if you (or the other person who was having this crash) could get the QA, generate the output file with it, and post it here.  You'll need to find a command line (I believe going to Run and typing cmd.exe does it), and then type:

cd C:\path\to\new\QA\
SimPe.exe -rufio -hood NXXX

where NXXX is the name of the folder of the neighborhood.  The output file will be in the Rufio folder in your Sims 2 folder.

I need the newest QA for this? I'm not on the SimPE QA list (I am a member of the forums however, same username). Do I need Inge to add me?

I'll send it to you if you don't want to go through all that.  (I assume it's ok for me to distribute this for testing purposes?)

I can't get this command to work  :-\ Are you sure this is the right path for a Windows machine? I get "The system cannot find the path specified." Sorry, I feel like a moron...

You need to replace the \path\to\new\QA part with the actual path (e.g. C:\Program Files\SimPE or something like that).

*weeps* Wow, that was dumb. The backslashes threw me off and made me think this was a real path for some reason. I'm really an intelligent person, I swear. Sort of computer literate, even. WTF is wrong with me? Sorry.

Anyway, here's the output.

Yes once a QA is published certainly neither Peter nor I mind how it is shared (and Quaxi isn't saying).  Just when you get a private version I will say what restrictions there should be on sharing (usually for technical reasons rather than preciousness).  But of course QAs should be expected to contain bugs, so use your last public version for editing live game data.

Sorry, Inge, you're going have to explain how the "days until lifestage" field corresponds to the number of days until lifestage in the game.  With playables, at any rate, it seems to be one less, so that someone who is "1 day until teen" in the game will show up as "0 days until teen" in the output.  Yet, (down)townie teens, who should be "14 days to adult" in the game are also "14 days to adult" in the output, not 13 as expected.  Does this work differently for different classes of sim, or something?

I am sorry but I can't explain it as we have no idea what those fields mean.  You will need to see if you can make them correspond to what you were talking about to do with the elders' age, by any formula, or whether they are useless to you.  I already told you everything I know about the age-related fields I know about.

Well, where do you get these fields from/how do you calculate them?  That might help, at least.

He's not calculating them, they're in variables SimPE already had, at the point it opens the SCSD editor.

Ok, the off-by-one error seems to have been my bad.  Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't just be better to completely overhaul the aging system and set it up the way the game does it.  :P

Inge, in the latest output, did you get rid of the lot description (or whatever was causing the newlines)?  I can't find any problem newlines in kate's output.

ETA: New version is up:


Note that the other QA and the version of SimPE I was initially giving out don't work with this anymore, since the format has changed slightly.  If you don't have the 0.73.18 version, let me know and I'll send you a link.  This should, however, fix all newline issues people were having.

ETA2:  I'm getting tried of clandestinely giving out links in pms and email, so the link to SimSheet is now in the first post.

Success!  ;D

Man, I missed Sims2DB. This makes me happy  ;D

I will probably have umpteen feature requests but I'll give you a rest for now...

Well, if you want something soon, you should get it out pretty quick; as soon as I rewrite the aspiration page GUI and get that working, I'm going to start working on savefile 0.6 (with career tracking and age duration hack support) and there won't be updates for a long while.

Okay--this is probably something for a future update, but I like to keep track of my sims' genetics, personalities, and turnons/turnoffs. It doesn't look like genetics and turnons/turnoffs are in the current SimPE output, so that's probably a major change, but I'd be happy with being able to enter those manually.

ETA: I've already demonstrated that I'm a total bleeding idiot, so I might as well just roll with it. I can't figure out how to delete a sim I've entered. (I entered some dummy sims I didn't need.) Is this not possible or am I just, as proven earlier, a moron?

Are they not?  Oh I'll see if Peter can get those then.  Personality is already output by SimPE, but I think you're right about the Turnons.

Rufio, no he just stuck quotes round all the strings like I said.  So if your program is now coping with quotes and newlines that's a success.   There will be new fields in the new QA -  someone requested filenumber for the sims in order to cross-reference with SimEnhancer.

In order to ensure SimSheet is not broken by future additions or rearrangements to the output, can I suggest you read the headings explicitly rather than just taking the fields in the order they come.

I was actually thinking about genetics too, since I like to keep track of them as well.  That would have to be for the new savefile, though, since it's going to add more information to the records that has to be saved and read.  I don't think importing it from SimPE would be a good idea; alien skin tone and eye colors in general seem to be represented as a big long sequence of numbers and letters, and I imagine it's worse if you have a lot of custom genetics.

What I can add before the new savefile is stuff to do with displays (like adding Households to the list of sims) and filters and whatnot, or stuff to make it more user-friendly/easier to navigate/more convenient/etc.


Yeah, probably a good idea - will get that in before 0.6.

OK, another probably-stupid thing--I converted the pngs in the SimImages folder to jpgs, but when I try to add an image to a sim, it crashes the program. Not sure if this is just because images are generally borked or an actual issue.

Oh.  I fixed it so that it wouldn't crash when the explorer was closed, but forgot to check what happened if you actually tried to set the image.  :D  I'll get that, and see if I can't figure out how to make the images work as well.

Then you will appreciate the proposed addition of the sim's character file number, as then you can read the genetics directly from the file?

If anything is coming in through character files, it's going to have to be through SimPE, since I don't know how to decompress DBPFs and find information in them.  I just don't know how useful the information I'd be able to get out of SimPE would be.  Would it be convertible into something human-readable?  What about custom genetics?

No, I can't see any value at all in trying to read the genetics, but I didn't want to poopoo anyone who thinks they *can* use them in some way.

Ok, just checking.  I imagine it would probably just be something that the user could enter by hand if they wanted.

ETA:  Well, I figured the images out - I just had to put the plugins into the right magic subfolder.   :P  New version up.

I am having problems with family ties. For whatever reason, the first sim alphabetically in my list (who happens to be a cat) gets listed as the child of about 14 different sims, and I have to find all of them and remove him as a child. Bigger problem is that all my manual changes to family ties disappear every time I close and re-open the program. Other changes (added sims, added images) are saved when I save the list, but family ties don't seem to be.

Oh damn.  That was what was happening to someone else earlier when they were having trouble loading savefiles.  Is this a neighborhood you imported?  Were the family ties correct when you first imported (before you saved)?  Is there at least one sim in the list who has a household name listed?

ETA:  Never mind, found the problem (not enough curly braces).  When I finish what I'm doing I'll reupload.

ETA2: New version up, incorporating Inge's suggestion and fixing the family ties problem.

Hey! I was one of the more obsessive users of the late Sims2DB, until I got a new computer and carefully backupped and moved everything else TS2-related except my precious database. D: So this is fantastic news! ;D I play in a fairly strict rotation and generally like to be a big control freak with my game, but this notebook hell that I've been running lately isn't really cutting it.

I wouldn't mind the link to the 0.73 QA, unless you need to be super computer savvy to be of any real use in this project? My neighbourhood consists of ~600 slightly incestuous and ACR-ridden sims; I've been playing it for about three years and it's bound to have some interesting quirks. :)

Very cool little program rufio, thanks for making it.  :-*

I guess it's not possible to make the ages import "custom compatible"? Since I use an agecon override of 3-6-6-44 insted of 3-7-14-29 the life stages are all wonky. For example my adult Sims with 31 days left until elder are shown as teens with two days left until adult.

Other than that I have no complains and will go play around with it some more now.

Surely Rufio has started using just the lifestage and daysleft fields already?  We have all tried to tell her it's the only way that the tool can accurately reflect where our sims are at in our individual games.

I believe that's one of the changes she's doing now :)
I've lost the post now but it's the one in this threadexplaining where she's going to be saving more fields, and therefore changing the savefile version.
V0.5 only has one field for age, which worked fine for the original manual entry and default age lengths.

It isn't now, but this will be a feature of the next savefile.  Reworking everything to do it the way the game does it is possible, but would involve major rewriting of code, so I am doing it differently; every sim will have values that modify the age transitions + or - some number of days; you can set these globally or for each sim individually, so every sim will be able to have their own aging paradigm.  Since this involves more fields in the sim records, it's going to need a new savefile, which is the only reason I haven't done it already.

Doesn't SimPE export the numbers required for this to happen automagically?

If you mean that it exports lifestage and days until transition, it does.  However, if I store it that way in my program, then it would be more difficult to calculate the exact number of days old.  There is still the matter of how the game figures out the age of elders, which no one has yet clarified.

My way, we just keep age as a simple integer (which is much easier to do operations on) and have the age transition points be mobile.  Problem solved, without losing the "days old" calculation.

Alright, new version up, this time with a working aspiration tab.  (Arrgh, that GUI was more annoying than all the GUI parts of the whole rest of the program!)  Unless there is some kind of hideous bug in it, I won't be updating it again until v0.6 is finished.

Rufio, I am sure most of your users would find it more useful to know days left than days lived.  Why can't you display *actual* days left as a seperate field, as an alternative for those players who would prefer it?  You don't have to do any calcs on it just display it as SimPE gives it to you.  It's all very well getting them to tediously enter these individual global variables, but they also have to remember who has had elixir, who has used SimBlender or Merola etc etc. 

I wouldn't count sims that use elixer as having gained 3 days so much as moved backwards 3 days.  My program already displays days left if you prefer, anyway, and I think it actually does it by default.  Keeping a whole separate variable just for the days left of elders imported from SimPE doesn't seem worth it - you wouldn't have that information for non-imported elders, anyway.  The purpose behind the "days left" display is to match what it says in game, which, in the case of elders, is in fact "days old".  So that's what's displayed.

Oh I didn't know you also display daysleft in the raw. Fair enough.

I should really not say things like that - it just invites something to go wrong.

A new version is up; I fixed a problem with the percents not displaying right in some cases, and made it so that if you don't have FT, you don't see the secondary aspirations.  I thought about making it so that if you don't have Uni you don't see the LTWs, but since the whole point of this page is (mostly) the LTWs, I figured there was no point, really.  I also noticed some crashing that happened semi-randomly after deleting an aspiration, and as in hindsight I'm not convinced they should be deletable anyway, I've taken the lazy man's way out and disabled the delete button.

Rufio, I was under the impression that your program displayed data from the game.
To follow up directly after Inge's post and not say anything about the issue appears 'dishonest'.


Life stage and days left are the key values.  If you store nothing else for age, you store these.
Otherwise you end up with bugs like...
(emphasis mine)

Doing it properly will also handle the different pets properly using the same code.
You could then also include the days until death for elders.


Your way is akin to training a guarddog and then barking yourself.
Of the people that I've spoken to about SimSheet, their interest is fueled by that fact that they can import the data via SimPE.
I don't know anyone that wants to play the SimSheet game.


No it isn't.  It's your interpretation of Days old.  Will your code spot buggy elders that say they are 5 days old?  No.
How can you say this as fact, when you state above that noone has clarified this for you?
Here's the clarification you need.  It's PrevAgeDays + AgeDuration - AgeDaysLeft

There are also some bugs in your attempted CSV handling code.  That was expected though.  We all knew it was a hard thing to get right.
There are enough links in this thread already pointing the way to clean and tested code in that area.

While you are rewriting the savefile version, have you considered that you already have it in the form of the SimPE output?

It does - that is, if you import from SimPE.  It just stores the information slightly differently, but ideally that shouldn't affect what is displayed.


I will consider it - the problem is that I have no way to predict when elders will die and the days until death for them will always (or nearly always) be wrong.  Also, I will have to rewrite a lot of old code, which is not usually a good thing.


I understand - but as I said, if it is working properly it should display ages the same way the game does, even if it stores information somewhat differently.


Yes, but the problem is that this age duration is not always the same for elders, and while there may be some field in the SimPE output that has it, it's not possible to determine it from non-imported elders or elders that age up from being adults at all.


What bugs are you having?  If I don't know what they are, I can't fix them.  If there were an easily usable CSV library that I could use, I would use it, but I have not found any such thing that does not require that I use as MS product.


My program does not use all the information in the SimPE output, and it has to store lots of other information too, like the settings, and it stores things in different ways than the SimPE output does.

I will look things over and see if it's more feasible to change the way ages are stored or keep it the same.  Some of this information you could find out for yourself, as you have access to the code and I think you know enough to understand it.

I think the main problem here is having both the manual and live data entry.
It's probably not possible to keep both without compromising the data.

You did a great job with the manual data entry before the SimPE data was available.
You now have easy access to the real game data.  It seems a pity to waste that.

Elders get a visit from Grimmy when the AgeDaysLeft reaches zero.  Easy to predict.
Although they may get an extra day or more from the genie wish.  There's randomness involved, so impossible to predict that.

Did you try libcsv?  That's LGPL code.
The csv bugs were related to a double quotation not being reduced to a single quotation on input,
and a comma following a quotation within a data field.
The first is minor, the latter causes a crash.

The advantage of using the SimPE output as a starting point for the next savefile would be that it will be the last ever time you need to do it.
Add all the features to SimSheet you want and noone needs to start fresh because of a savefile version.
Add extra 'simsheet_*' headers for your extra data.
Add an extra row on the first line for a dummy_sim to contain settings if you must.  Although program settings should really be in a config file.

I'll pass on the opportunity to look at your code :)  I've enough projects on the go of my own that already stretch my free time.

Before you start writing the new savefile, it's probably worth taking some time out to reflect what it is you want SimSheet to be.
The Who What Why When of SimSheet, then the How will be more obvious.

Well, part of the idea I had with the manual data entry is that you could keep track of things as they happened over time.  I don't want to lose that, but I suppose there could be some compromise.


Thanks, I will look that up.  I am self-taught, so I sometimes wind up not knowing things I should, like STL classes and whatnot.


Why does the double quote need to be changed to a single quote?  Or did you mean the other way around?  I don't know all of the csv conventions, but I also don't know that Inge is following them either.
With the ", there is no way for the program to tell that that is meant to be inside a field instead of denoting the end of it.  I'm not sure why it would cause a crash, but it definitely wouldn't parse correctly.


No one needs to start afresh now - I keep the code for parsing the old savefiles and you can always load files as a previous format instead.


There's also all the extra stuff from the tabs that has to be kept track of.


I wanted it to be a way to keep track of sims, their stats, what they did, the order they did it in, and the general state of the neighborhood.  I think some people want slightly different things out of it than I do, which is ok, since it can do multiple things.

Peter is outputting correct csv through SimPE, and Excel is loading it just fine.
Sorry about that explanation, an example would be clearer.
I did post a link to the rfc previously so that should clear up any confusion.

Below is a single field...
"The guy who writes SimPe is ""Peter"", Inge's hubby"
As that contains quotes, they have been escaped with a quote.

Ahh, I see.  I'll fix that before I start on the new savefile.

The days left for elders is as accurate and predictive as days left in any other age stage.  The player or the game can always intervene and add or subtract days - for example by simply forgetting to put a fridge in the house.   daysleft is a data field not a prediction.  But it's the only real one we have - the only real one the game has - so you might as well let your users know the deal.

What I would suggest is that the fields provided by SimPE are displayed as is (those that are of interest), and *additionally* provide several fields per sim for the player to make notes in, which are not touched by the importing of data.  If you are able to use colour in your display fields you could use that to make it clear which are the hard-imported fields, which you are calculating, and which are player-input fields that will not be changed by your processes.

What I mean is that unless the elder is imported as an elder from SimPE, I won't have that.  If I create them manually, I won't have that.  If I import them as an adult, I won't have that when they transition.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with color coding.  The fields in the savefile correspond to various different variables in SimSheet, which appear in different tabs in different ways.  Only the ones that are actually relevant to the game data are changed when importing, but if, say, you wanted to keep track of when two sims got married with SimSheet, you would have to enter that manually, on the update tab; if you just reimported everything from SimPE so that now they were marked as being married (or changed it in the family tab) then that record wouldn't be there.

But wouldn't that be updated the next time you did a SimPE import?

With Sims2DB, every time I imported data from SimPE (which I did after each play session), the relevant data for each sim would update.  I believe it matched the sims using the unique identifier for each sim already mentioned by Inge in this thread.  The first time you did an import, it would attempt to match any manually entered sims to the imported data and if it couldn't do so, it would ask you to match them.

If you continually update, yes.

Well surely the whole point is that people who want a sim tracker *would* want to update between each sims2 and simsheet session?  Why would they bother to use simsheet otherwise?

Well, the original intent was to keep track of changes by hand, so that you could keep a chronological record.  But as I said, different people would have different uses for it.

It sounds very confusing, and as if you are not totally respecting user-maintained data anyway.  I have  children in the game who in my imagination, for the sake of my story, are 12 or 4 etc - I have used the skeleton data to show them that way.  But the game doesn't know that, and by the time you have finished calculating your fields it doesn't sound like simsheet will make them 12 and 4 either.   Wouldn't it be better for the user to have seperate manual fields for "treat as" type data while still always having the game data, as output, available?  That gives them the opportunity to edit the sim to line up actual and desired data so the game is more likely to treat their sim as they want it for their story.

Let me see if I understand you - you want to have a different view mode where you can enter ages like 12 and 4 years old, and keep track of the ages your sims are in your head, and then a different view mode where it keeps track of how old they are in the game?  The thing is that there has to be a limit somewhere on how much user-entered data there is; and in any case, there is always the option to add custom events where you can say, "<Some Sim> turns 4." or something like that, which get kept along with all the other chronological data.

Well no, I would probably have done it so that the simsheet works entirely off exported game data and did not use user input at all - apart from I would have provided a couple of note-type fields for users.  Somewhere to write themselves a reminder that they are saving Marsha for Alex and that sort of stuff.   I was only trying to think of a way to reconcile your desire to have your program accommodate both user input and SimPe input, without the SimPE input risking stomping all over the user-provided input.

Ahh.  Well, it does that now; the ability to edit game-related data is kept on from when that was the only way to do it, and I see no reason to remove it - it's not accessible enough that you'll edit it by mistake, and there's always a chance that something will mess up and get it wrong.  The unique user-entered info (e.g. the chronological events) is not affected by importing from SimPE.  If you are still talking about having SimPE generate "savefiles," then no, that will not work.

Side questions, that I've possibly missed the answer to:

a) any chance of giving us an option to save our settings in this version or the next?
b) when I go to try to add images, it still only allows me to look for .bmp and .jpg (I think), and the pulled images are in .png.  Is there a way to change that so it'll either allow .png as well, or allow looking for *any* file type? (I'm still getting a "This is not a valid .png file" error when trying to open them in PSP.)
c) extracting Sims from SimPE is giving me numbers as the LTW's, which I know was mentioned before.  Is there already a list somewhere of which numbers correspond to which, or does it still need finding out?  Nevermind, just went back and reread the relevant post.

Settings should save with your savefile, or do you mean saving them so that the same options are checked before you even open a file?  I think I have to do a config file for this to work, which I've never done; I understand the concept, though, and will try adding it.


It's actually .gif and .jpg now, because those are the only Qt plugins I've managed to locate.  If I find a png plugin somewhere, I will definitely make use of it and load in the pngs from the SimPE output.  In theory, it does exist.  Looking for any file type will not be helpful unless I have the plugins to display all file types, which I don't think will happen, but I can try to add more of the common image formats.

As for your PSP problem, it sounds like either the image is borked or your PSP is borked; if the image is the problem, SimSheet is not going to be any more helpful.

So are you saying you can't display the sims' portraits SimPE is outputting for you?

Not yet, anyway. :P

Yes, before - I'm useless and keep forgetting to do so, and even if it doesn't always end in a hang, it does take an *awful* lot of time to load a long list if I haven't checked the settings in advance.  And if I manage to be stupid enough to import a long list without having first selected EP's, applying the EP's afterwards takes several seconds per EP.  If you can figure out a config file for it, that would be appreciated.   



I knew it was something and .jpg, anyway! 

Inge, not sure if that was directed at me or rufio - in short, SimSheet gives me a choice to look for .jpg or .gif, but the SimPE output is in .png files.  I can see these as thumbnails and using image preview when I'm browsing through the files on my computer, but opening them in Paint Shop Pro doesn't work, I merely get an error message.  Ordinarily with corrupt/incorrectly saved files, I have the opposite problem - Windows won't preview it but PSP will quite often manage to open it.

That said, I just remembered I've got The GIMP on this computer and, having tried it, that will open them.  So maybe it is just my copy of PSP, who knows, or a problem with PSP in general? 8/ 

I still think this must be some other problem - I have no issues loading a list without setting the settings versus doing it.  The bug you had before where the list would hang has been fixed, but you'll have to reimport your hood, since the problem is in the savefile.  I think the settings issue is just a coincidence.

That is odd. I have Paint Shop Pro 8 and I have no problems with opening, editing and saving png files, no problems at all.

I can't open them in Paintshop Pro either 7 or 9, but I can see them as thumbnails in my folder and open them in MSPaint and HP Image Zone, and MS Photo Editor and Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

hmmm ... when I come to think about it. I think that I might manually have set PSP to open all kind of image files ... it is under Perferences ... File Association or something like that, I´m at work so I can´t check it right now.

Oh btw ... is it possible to get that QA version, to test this out. I were at the SimPE site, but as always, I couldn´t ffind what I was looking for. I´m blind

I did - when putting in the new test version of SimSheet this time I simply deleted the entire contents of the previous folder before installing, to start afresh - therefore, brand new list.  It might be (and probably is) a coincidence, but so far it's being a very consistent coincidence for me. 

http://simpeforum.ambertation.de/forum/viewforum/14 for the QA - there should be only one thread open at a time, it's that one, and the download is in the first post.   Unzip it to its own fresh folder, run it by double clicking SimPE.exe inside that folder, and keep your normal SimPe installation for your normal work.  Remember to edit SimSheet so that it uses the QA SimPE.

If you can't get into that link above, you need: http://simpeforum.ambertation.de/forum/viewgroup - use the pulldown to select QA and then go through the "apply for membership" process.  Needless to say you will have to be registered at the forum in the first place.

I just re-imported my sim list, overwriting old entries, and noticed that this deletes all my family ties. I am hoping to keep track of this mostly by re-importing from SimPE (especially if things that change regularly are included in the import, like job levels and skills), so I'd want minimal zapping of manually entered data. Are family ties supposed to be this fragile? (And is there any way they could be imported from SimPE too?)

ETA: Never mind, it doesn't actually delete all my family ties, but it does bork them. Some were deleted entirely and some were just scrambled around to the point where a sim was her own half-sister and when I clicked "view sibling" it exploded. Which just meant when I re-opened it I got back my old saved list, with family ties intact, and only imported new sims and updated existing ones manually. But I'd still like to be able to re-import everybody without borking things.

ETA 2: I'm trying to get all my sims into their correct lifestages now (a challenge because I use twojeffs's age duration hack) and I can't seem to get sims who have gone to college to stick as adults. I update them as "grew up well, went to college", "grew up well, graduated from college", and then it calls them adults, but any time I go in to edit them, they revert back to freshmen.

They should be importing.  What version of SimPE is this?  Could I see the SimPE output file?

It's 73-18-QA. Here's the output file. It's in my SimSheet folder, not in the EA Games/The Sims 2 folder where the older one is--is that where it's supposed to be?

As to the college problem, I'm going to presume I should quit messing with it, since the age duration hack seems to screw up all the life stage stuff.

The family ties seem to be loading for me.  I have changed some things in my working version since I last updated, but not so much in the import dialog.  Remember that sims won't show up if the are dead and/or townies and you have those boxes checked.

ETA:  Actually, I think I do know what's going on.  I'll fix it next update.

Alright, I uploaded a new version that fixes kate's problem and stores the settings in a config file.  Whenever you start the program, the settings should go back to whatever they were the last time you set them.  You can also edit it by hand if you want (there are instructions in the file).

The CSV issues are still not fixed, because the code I wrote to fix them is crashing for some unknown reason and debugginig it is kind of hellish.  I'll see if I can't figure it out tomorrow.

I'm having problems getting this program to save my info so I know that I am doing something wrong and I can't figure it out.  I need help.


EDIT:  Never mind.  I think I got it.  Slow brain cells. lol

At long last, I have uploaded a new version, which uses libcsv to read the CSV files.  It took a while, because I had to relearn how to use elements of C that I haven't used in, well, ever.  FILEs, structs, and underscores, oh my!  Anyway, it should work and not crash now.

I'm probably not going to work on this much over the holidays, but feel free to put in suggestions for 0.6, including (or especially) changes that would result in new fields and other savefile-breaking stuff.  My plans so far are:
- Change the aging system so that it works the way it actually does in TS2
- Implement the Careers tab
- Possibly add a Genetics tab, where you can keep track of sim genetics and calculate possible results from breeding two sims.  This would all have to be user-entered, since it doesn't seem possible to get this information out of SimPE.

And let me know if there are problems, of course.

Rufio, did you choose that avatar or is that your punishment one?

Inge, if you have being paying attention to the senate, you would know it's his punishment avatar. However, he might have implmented it himself, seeing as Trixie still has her old avatar and lacks her custom title.

Yes, that's why I asked.

I didn't implement it; it just appeared.  I never cared enough about avatars to upload one in the first place, so I wasn't about to proactively upload the punishment avatar when I was sure Pescado would get around to it eventually.

I've been testing the 'On day 1' function to the New Sims and Pets section and have a few notes. When adding a new sim (from CAS) if I have a 7 day cycle and add a toddler on day 5 the toddler is added fine but has not aged along with the rest of the household. i.e. in the household if a toddler is added on day 3 of a cycle by day 7 it will have aged to child, instead it is shown as 4 days to child as if it were added on day 7 of the cycle. So 'on day 1' isn't actually making that much difference - although it's nice to have a record of it in the achievements I suppose

Second note If this function starts working can I request it be added to some of the aging functions, particularly the going to/graduating from College functions (If I send a sim to College mid way through my 5 day cycle I like to continue the cycle for them there at university so it would be great if I could say 'On day 2 of the cycle Jodie went to College' and have the rest of the days age her through the semesters - although now I come to think about it this might not work since not everyone has an equal number of days to number of semesters in a cycle... But for graduate it might be good.

Third note. While testing this function I added an ordinary baby to a family and if I added it on any day other than day 1 the program crashed (Have never done error logs before but have attached the files the computer wanted to send microsoft if they make any sense to you)

Fourth Note. While testing this function I added a baby by townie to two households, one on day 1 and one on day 2 and neither baby actually showed up on the sim list. The same thing happened when I tried exactly the same (two babies, one on day 1 one on day 2) with alien babies. However, when I tried adding some normal babies again the alien babies (but not the babies by townie) appeared, the alien baby born on ay 1 of the rotation was the correct age by the baby born on day 2 was a rotation behind. Similarly the ordinary babies, the one born on day 1 had aged to toddler, as they should have through the rest of the rotation, whereas the baby born on day 2 was the age it would be if it was born on day 5 of the rotation. I applied updates again and all four babies (the ones from the townies never appeared) aged up 5 days as normal. Also this time I was able to click on the day 2 ordinarily created baby (now toddler) without a crash so I conclude its only babies that clicking on causes a crash.

Sorry, I know that's a lot to throw at you, results of just one test session - I now have a lot of non-existent babies in my neighbourhood called alan... Hope I've been helpful in some tiny way. If I'm not clear just ask and I'll have another go at explaining

Thanks for testing this out - I'll take a look and find out what's going wrong.  Did the crash happen when you applied the updates, or when you clicked on the baby in the list of sims tab?

That reminds me, too - I should probably add a way to delete sims other than going through the savefile.  Cross your fingers and hope that Qt's so-called "safe" pointers really work as advertised.

When I tried to click on the baby in the list of sims tab

I'm glad I could help

Latest weird import issue...SimPE generates this output file (attached) and when I try to import from it I get "Generated list of sims", "-1", then "Imported 0 sims". Any idea what's wrong with this file?

Well, the -1 error message is coming from something other than the latest version, so you should update.  That's not the problem with that file, though; the key for which field is where is missing from the top of it.  Usually they start with something like this:


In other words, you should complain to Inge.

As I have said on the SimPE forum, Rufio, if you can't be bothered to keep up to date with the latest SimPE to let us know if it is still working for your SimSheet, why should we bother to keep track of the development of your tool?  I think it is unacceptable that you haven't bothered to download anything since 0.73.18.  How can you possibly know what your users are experiencing these days?

From now on, the output will concentrate on supporting people who wish to open it in spreadsheets, and if SimSheet happens to be able to use it too, then fine.

People wishing to use the data in a spreadsheet are invited to report directly to the SimPE development team with requests or problem reports regarding the output.



Now you know how frustrating it can be when users don't update, maybe you can take your own advice?  :)

I'm sorry, Inge - I just thought you might recognize what the problem might be and be able to fix it.  The SimPE site is not something I check daily anyway, since I don't really use SimPE for anything more complicated than checking sims' DNA and occasionally renaming households, so I don't get every update.  In any case, I have not really been working on SimSheet during the holidays.  I have now downloaded the latest QA.  In future, I will download the latest version before complaining about something.

But....  you've been supposedly making a tool, a major feature of which could be thought of as a plugin to SimPE.  I am astounded that you have attempted to do so with so little interest in what input it is receiving.  You should have been right up there at the front giving us immediate notification if something wasn't right with the data.  Preferably long before *your* poor testers were bothered by it.  You should be the person to first try out each new SimPE before giving your users the headsup it is ok for use with your tool.  You're supposed to be the techie, not them.

It's not an apology I am after, just something to stop my head shaking in disbelief.   It's the person you told to "complain to Inge" who deserves the apology, really.  It put them in a very difficult position.

I thought we'd been over the fact that I don't really see it as a plugin for SimPE, and that I don't use it that way, and also that development has been put on hold for the last couple weeks.  I am not doing this professionally, have never done any software professionally, and started this project as something for me to use; I don't know everything that's expected of me, in all probability.  To be honest, it kind of frustrates me a little that there is this other program that SimSheet depends on for input that I have no control over, and whose workings I don't understand - not that I don't appreciate what you've done, but it feels weird to me.  All I could do in this case was to download the latest QA; if I saw the problem, I'd scratch my head and complain to you.  If I didn't see the problem, I'd scratch my head and tell the tester to run it again or report it as a bug.  No matter what the case is, I can't do anything about it.

Anyway, I have run the output command with the latest QA, and there seem to be no problems with it.  So either it was a bug that was fixed between 0.73.18 and 0.73.33 or it's bug that only happens sometimes.

Well I take exception to this.  The commandline switch is -rufio.  Your name.  Now you want to make out Peter just happened by coincidence to be adding some csv output that was nothing to do with you and not developed with your input or views being taken into account in any way? 

What you can *do* about it is what you are quite happy telling your own users to do - download the latest version and report when something is not right.

If I am not experiencing the bug (which seems to be the case) I can't do that, though.  It may be something to do with that particular neighborhood.  It may be something else.  I have no idea, because I don't know how SimPE works.

My point is that by the time Katemonster had posted, you should have either already been in a position to say "That's odd, simpe output is fine for me" or have quickly gone to check it out *before* saying "Go and complain to Inge".  You're meant to triage your own users' reports, not just pass them on to someone else.

Okay, this is what I know:

1. The version I'm using is timestamped 12/21. If there was a more recent one, I missed it.
2. The link in post #1 currently goes to a version with the same timestamp.
3. When I paste the headings into my output file, save it, then try to import from that file ("Import from previously generated output"), I get the same error.
4. When I then re-open that output file, the headings are gone and the timestamp on the output file has been updated to the time at which I tried to import it.

This puzzles me, as do whatever politics surround SimPE, but whatever. Do what you will with it.

The zipfile was last updated on the 22nd, according the 4shared when I go to look at my files at least.  Iit is possible that I just took out a debug message during the last two weeks some time and forgot about it, though.


It sounds like it's generating a new file.  Are you sure you checked the box?  Are you sure that it's really the latest version?  Does the SimPE script run (it pops up a little terminal)?

ETA:  In the interests of being a conscientious programmer who is nice to her testers, I downloaded the latest upload at 4shared and ran it with the latest (well, second-to-latest now, I guess) version of SimPE, and everything seems to work as it should.  There is an extraneous debug pop-up in there, which appears to show the position in the list of fields of the family instance.  It should be 7.  The -1 is due to the lack of header.

katemonster, the file you posted is not in csv format.  So you are using an older version of SimPE than the current SimSheet expects.
Rufio will now be able to advise.

How did I manage to miss that?  Yes, you need to use a later QA.

OK, I just ran it again (this time just re-generating the output instead of trying to use the old output) and instead of "-1" I got "6", and it did actually import a list this time, although my output file is again missing the headings. I've not downloaded either a new version of SimSheet or a new version of SimPE, so I remain puzzled, but I'd rather go play Sims than fuss about it, so that is what I shall do. I'm sure someone will figure out what idiotic thing I did to cause this to happen. Feel free to point and laugh.

I'm using SimPE 0.73.18.whatever QA. If a newer one is required I missed that too.

Can I see the new output file?  Inge did rearrange the fields a bit since then, but 18 did have a header for me, and if it didn't it wouldn't have loaded.

Here's the output. There probably really is a header that I just can't see somehow. Seriously.

That file will not load for me.  Are you sure it's loading that one?  The output that it reads is going to be (Path to SimSheet.exe)\Rufio\ExportedSims.txt.  If you tested an older version, it was in your Sims 2 folder in My Documents, but it has changed and no longer uses that location.  Also, did you give SimSheet the directory for your latest version of SimPE?  I've got a couple different ones myself, and have to remember to change the location to the latest.

Can someone explain what Bliz Lifeline Points are please? Also, what are the three 'traits' that are being tracked?

I searched, but can't find any information.

The traits are to do with the attraction system.
They're flags for hair color, fitness, skills etc. and they match the turn on/off fields.

They're screwed up of course.  Such as EAxis thinking that wearing jewelry makes your sim a werewolf.

Dunno what the blized thing is.

I'd really like to test this, but I'm apparently having a problem finding the right version of SimPe.  I have 0.72.01 and that is the newest version I can find anywhere, and I literally looked all over the place.

You probably need to sign up for the debug version of SimPE in the ambertation forum.  This version isn't available without a specific request to access the Development / QA forum at http://simpeforum.ambertation.de/forum/  Just follow the instructions.

Yes, what Mootilda said is correct.

Anyway, my break from this project was a little longer than I expected it to be, but it was good to spend a month or so doing actual modding, as it has given me some important perspective - even though C++ can be a pain sometimes, it is a breath of fresh air compared to the language that EA decided to write TS2 in!

I have returned bearing some minor but important bugfixes, and this really is the last time I am going to update before revamping the aging system.

Changelog:

Please redownload from the original link in the first post.  I am leaving the "On day X" feature broken, because it will need to be redone when I redo aging anyway and it is not a show-stopping problem.

Avalikia, I have just approved you to the QA group.

How do you install this program?

And how do you find sims? Do you have to manually put the information in?

Just download from the link that mentions the executable, and unzip the zipfile into a subfolder somewhere on your computer.  There will be a .exe file in there, which you just run like any other executable file.


You'll need to install the latest SimPE QA (you can get it from the QA forum at http://simpeforum.ambertation.de/forum/ after requesting access there).  This will install in the same way as SimSheet.  All you have to do then is start SimSheet, enter the path to where you installed the SimPE QA in settings, and then go to Manage Sim Lists -> (select your neighborhood) -> Import Sims.

Rufio, thank you for making the source for this project available, especially since it's in C++.  I know there are other sim package processing code tarballs out there, but most are in tcl or C# or something else I'm too lazy to port or learn.  I know, that's not how I should be making design decisions, but I do. ;)  I am curious, now that you've spent much time on this project, what you think of the decision to write it in C++?  Would you go that route again, or would you try to use some existing tcl or C# libraries?  For apps such as this, that don't do lots of involved computations, does it matter much whether you make something that's compiled or interpreted?

This app is far preferable to my current system of covering my desk with scribbled sim geneologies, histories, plans, and rotation charts.  It also has the added bonus that it can't be eaten by my cats and dogs, or destroyed by spilled tea.  If I get through my RL and Sims2 projects and actually play the game again, I'll use this and let you know if I run into any problems.  However, I will probably hold out for the version that can handle variable life stage lengths (from platinum aspiration, elixir of life, etc.)  I've read the app description and several pages of discussion, and I don't think that's out yet.  If it is, clearly, I don't read carefully enough.

Well, first of all, this program does not actually read package files - that is why I had to have it run SimPE and generate an output file.

I wrote this in C++ because it was the first computer language I learned, and the one I was most familiar with.  I've also done a lot of work with Qt (which is a C++ API) and felt pretty comfortable working with it.  I really don't know much about C#, or the relative efficiency of interpreted vs. compiled languages when it comes to the kinds of things SimSheet does, which is largely array-based list management, with some more complicated recursive functions in the family tab.  A lot of it is actually GUI, which is taken care of by Qt classes, and I don't know the nitty gritty details of that.

The only variable life stage lengths SimSheet can't handle now are the ones induced by hacks - there are events for having sims drink elixer, cowplant milk, kibble of life, etc., and there is no set length for the Elder lifestage - the sim will just keep getting older until you tell the program that it has died.  You can also set ages manually if something gets messed up for some reason.

Thanks for testing this out. :)

Yay!  Bad Cat, read more carefully next time!  No biscuit!

Your app reads CSV spreadsheet data generated by the SimPE QA, if I understand correctly?  Had there been a C++ library that lets you read package files and spits out sim objects would that have been useful to you?  Something with a sim class with get* functions that give you age, lifetime want, etc?  Or do you prefer CSV data?  Would a standalone app that reads sim packages and spits out CSV been useful to you?  So that you wouldn't need to rely on SimPE?  You used Windows, but I'm thinking that might have been handy for Mac developers.  Not that I have anything like that, but I am curious if there's a need / desire for it.

You asked a while back if people want this just for PCs or for all sims, so if you still want input, I just care about PCs.  I have so many of them that they and their descendants usually take over most of the 'hood.

Yes.


Yes; but if its only purpose was to read packages and create sim objects, then there wouldn't be much use for it outside of SimSheet, which means I would probably wind up writing it myself.  I'm going to be gutsy and say that I probably could do it, with the information online about the format of the character files packages and some experimenting, but it would be a lot of work and SimPE already exists.  You're right that not relying on SimPE would be better for Mac users, but I believe that jfade is also working on a cross-platform package editor in Java.  Making a complete package-editor that can open all kinds of packages and deal with all kinds of resources still seems to be a better option and designing a character-file-reading program that is only useful with SimSheet.

There's a C++ DBPF package library (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8279.0.html) over in Bowels of Trogdor. Don't know if there are any package format changes since the last time this was updated. There's also a set of tools for command-line modders (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6992.0.html) (dz utils) which will let you list or extract data from a package. Those might be useful for you.

I'm familiar with that C++ code, I should have linked to it.  I use the compress / decompress routines from it, they're full of win.  However, it does not do a lot of resource parsing.  For example, given a TXTR resource, it will not tell you the image format or size.  Given a TXMT, it will not tell you what properties are in it.  Given a sim, it won't tell you their name, age, gender, etc.  So if you're writing an app that needs such details (or an app that changes them), that library is not quite as useful as it could be.  It leaves byte soup level parsing up to the programmer.  The C# code that SimPE's made of does that kind of resource parsing, but it's C#, not C++.  (rufio - I have TXTR and TXMT resource parsing C++ code, but not anything that deals with sims.)

Yes, I have used that first for compression/decompression, but like Cat said it is not very helpful for higher-level stuff.


jfade may be interested in that, as he still seems to need handlers for those in his project (http://code.google.com/p/stapes/).  It's Java, but Java is very similar to C++.

Baaaa!!  Thanks for this; I like to have huge, complicated(family-wise) neighborhoods and also like to keep track of everything.  You've no idea how much time I've wasted using outliner to organize my sims... nevermind family trees!!

I'm also horrible at programming....

I'll try it out on my PC.  Thanks again. 

No problem - could you post a picture of your family tab and let me know how accurate it is?

I'll do that.  ;D  I'm only on the third generation, though.. but I have about to seven planned.  ::)

I downloaded the two archives and extracted them to the same folder. When I try to start the exe, it says application cannot start because QtCore4.dll cannot be located. Where do I get that, or what else am I missing?

Yeah, a little bit ago I changed the way the zips were organized to save space.  If you're downloading for the first time, you also need the Qt Libraries zipfile, which is now a separate download so that people who are just updating don't have to redownload all the libraries.  In the first post it says:


Click on the link that says "Get them here".

I should have said not only that I downloaded the TWO archives but also that I downloaded BOTH zips like three times. The QT libraries zip has 3 files (executablename.sh, libQtCore.so.4, libQtGui.so.4).  The program demands a QtCore4.dll from me.

Oops, I seem to have mixed up the Windows and Linux libraries.  Try this (http://faiuwle.pbwiki.com/f/QtLibraries-Windows.zip) instead. 

Tiny thing I came across: The 'new sim by ex townie feature' when you select an ex townie becoming a new sim by marriage to an old sim it doesn't actually marry the two sims. The new sim is created fine and in the right household but they don't show up as being related in the relationships tab

Thanks for reporting it - I'll check it out when I'm in the right OS again.

ETA:  You're right, I wrote that event a long time ago, before I actually implemented the family ties, so the "got married to" text is just decorative.  The program isn't really in a state where it can be compiled right now, though, so it'll have to wait until 0.6.

will this work on mac? i have a pc which i play on and then a mac which i would prefer to use if possible and enter the data myself doe it have to use sim pe?? so many questions??


thanks charlotte

I have installed and tested and played with this now. Thank you for making it so far, as I read the thread, I could see it was not easy.
I understand you are working on a major upgrade.
Hopefully, it will move away from rotation-based updates to updating directly from SimPE's CSV file (especially showing age data without any user input).
This being the case, user-defined comment fields, which don't get updated automatically, seem really important. Maybe there could be more of them, and made more prominent. They could be used to jot down things like Day Born, Marriage on 2nd Sunday, etc.
It would also be nice if these notes, as well as other data (e.g. aspiration, LTW, highest traits, highest skills, OTH, job...) could be set to appear in the master list of sims in the first tab. A print-out of this tab would be the most useful reference during play.

On your specific plans:
"- Possibly add a Genetics tab, where you can keep track of sim genetics and calculate possible results from breeding two sims.  This would all have to be user-entered, since it doesn't seem possible to get this information out of SimPE."

It would be a shame if SimPE could not export sims' DNA information, which it certainly has. Have you asked? Of course it could still only export family numbers, not names like 'Enayla's dark skin'. But it would still be better to have that and to make our own lists of CC family numbers than having to type all genetic data for all sims. In the distant future, maybe users could even teach the program what each family number corresponds to?

Issues with the current version: 
Unchecking Townies in the filter table does not remove them from the list of sims.
Unchecking any option in the filter table sets the list of sims back to be alphabetically sorted by Sim name.
Clicking on Update adds a new entry to sims' Aspiration tab (but Update would be obsolete anyway).

And since you asked for requests... Well. It would be cool to include all the rest of sim data as well. That is, personality traits, skills, badges, interests, hobbies, hobby club memberships.

As a first-time user, I think the layout could be more intuitive, like grouping tabs according to whether they pertain to the sim selected in the first tab. Also, the Achievement+Update=Events tab could be pre-sorted to show only the selected sim's data.

Sorry for being long, and thank you all the work you did on this so far.

There is currently no executable file for mac, but if you are willing to download and install a bunch more stuff and familiar with command lines and how to work stuff on macs, you could make one from the source code.  Are you interested in doing that?


I am not planning on getting rid of updates, but it is already possible to re-import from SimPE.  If something's not working with that, let me know and I'll fix it.


What do you mean?  Importing should result in correct age data, except in the case of elders, but this is an issue with SimPE not providing all the information, and there is nothing I can do about it.


I think updating should update the comment fields from individual sims in-game to "notes" for the sims in the first tab, although I don't use the in-game comment fields, so it might be broken without my knowing it.  Are you saying you want more specific fields for Day Born, Date Married, etc.?  I could probably add something where you can specify what fields you want in Settings.


The problem is that it will start to get pretty cluttered if I try to add everything into the first tab.  If what you really want is a print-out, though, I can add a feature that will export a more detailed report to CSV, which can then be opened in excell and printed.


I have asked, and Inge has said it would not be possible.  Even if it did export the numbers, I don't think it would know if the genes were dominant or recessive, which means you would have to enter that information manually in order to correctly generate possible results.  I think this may be an issue of efficiency; you'll notice that SimPE also does not export paranormal flags, and that you have to enter them yourself on the import dialog - this is because (Inge says) it is way too much work for SimPE to delve into the individual tokens and get at that data, and it is simply much more efficient for the user to enter them.  I am probably paraphrasing this badly, since I don't know a lot about how character files are actually formatted.


Thanks for letting me know. :)


Noted; will fix.


This is because refiltering the list means that it has to be completely erased and recompiled, due to the fact that Qt apparently fails at making their (much nicer) filtering feature incompatible with Windoze.  I might be able to get the list to remember how it was sorted before it does that though.


Yeah, I think the Aspiration tab is a little borked in 0.5, although I think it should only add extraneous aspiration entries when applying related updates (e.g. changing aspirations, moving in a sim and assigning them an aspiration, etc.)  I originally did this so that you could track a sim's aspiration over time, but I'm beginning to think that having multiple aspirations per sim is just introducing more borkage than it's worth, so it might just get axed.


Personality traits was something I was thinking might go on the new Genetics tab, actually.  Skills and badges change frequently, though, and would be kind of a pain to track, at least if you were doing it manually, but SimPE does export skills at least, so it would be possible - I'll think about it.  I never really look at interests, to be honest (:P), but those could probably get recorded somewhere as well.  I don't have FT and don't know much about how hobbies work, but they would probably go with Aspirations.  What would you want to see in terms of hobby-tracking?


Well, I put them in an order that made sense to me - it might be possible to allow you to rearrange them, though.


Good idea, although there is still that bug where filtering that tab doesn't update the layout properly and there is a huge amount of blank space.


No problem; thanks for the input. :D

I can't figure it out.   I can't figure out how to tell simsheet to get the sims from SimPE.  I got the Q&A version.  Ran it under -rufio.  SimPE saved files.  Now how to I tell simsheet to get those files?

Nevermind.  I figured it out.


Edit:  My error messages, let me show you them.

(http://i688.photobucket.com/albums/vv246/FourKittehs/rufioerror.jpg?t=1239904948)

(http://i688.photobucket.com/albums/vv246/FourKittehs/rufioerror2.jpg?t=1239905646)


Edit again:
So I manually entered a sim family.  Closed SimSheet.  Opened SimSheet and the family was gone.  How do I save the info I enter?

It looks like you somehow managed to import without specifying a hood to import from.  Where is your game installed?  Does the combo box in the "Import Sims from SimPE" section of the dialog show the names of hood folders (e.g. N001, N002, etc.)?  Also, if for some reason it isn't working from SimSheet, you can do it manually - you figured out how to get SimPE to generate the files (they should be under a folder called Rufio, and there should be a file called ExportedSims.txt).  Move the Rufio folder into the same directory where SimSheet is installed.  Run SimSheet, and go to import Sims, but check "Import from previously created output" before doing so.  It should find the files and import the sims without running SimPE.

To save the current list, you have to go to "Manage Sim Lists" again, enter some text in the box in the "Save Current List" section, and then hit "Save As".  You can then bring the list back up again by choosing it from the combo box in the "Open a List" section and clicking "Open".

I got it working now.  Thanks.  My game is installed in the default location.  SimSheet didn't have a drop down list of neighborhoods.  But when I typed N001 into the space it did the work.

Interesting.  "Default location" meaning C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\EA Games\The Sims 2\?  Although, from your screenshots, it looks like your username has a . in it - that might be the problem.

Yeah.  I just let the game install I didn't change anything.  I don't see a . in my user name.  You mean the sign on name with windows right?   We do have 2 administrative accounts on this computer, used to have 3 when the game was installed.

I mean in the Julie.PRIMA-SHUTTLE thing.

yeah, that's my name and the name of my computer.  dunno why there is a dot there.

Because you can has random punctuation, as demonstrated by your posts? Just sayin'.

Windows usually creates a fresh profile in the format <username>.<computername> if the original local profile is damaged. The dot is actually in your profile path, so rufio thinks this may be causing the program error. The dot may not display on your profile name, though.

Hey I like the program but I cant use it for more than  few minutes at a time it stops responding all the time. I have windows vista ultimate and I also have the same windows on my laptop and it does the same thing. I just thought it was a problems with my desktop but maybe not now that it does the same thing on 2 types of computers, the problem I have been having it does matter whether I am entering data in add new sims or edit sim or even when I go to family ties and enter data there. Maybe that the program that u are using for the sim sheet is not compatable with vista I dont know. So for now I will stick to Sims2 Db even though I cant update my sims any more which I would like to but i can still have most of the info that I need.

Could you be more specific about what is going wrong and what you are doing when it goes wrong?  Examples of specific instances would be best.

Do you just kill the program after it stops responding? It always does it on mine, but if I wait a few minutes it works perfectly, the only downside is that it has "not responding" written in the bar at the top despite the fact that it is responding.

Does that happen when you do things that cause the List of Sims tab to have to update its display (like changing information that is displayed in the LoS, changing filters, sorting by a column, etc.)?  It might just be the inefficiency of my homemade filter system.   :P  It only lags for about a second on my machine, but I have heard Vista is generally a piece of crap, so it may be longer in your case.

If that was aimed at me, I don't have vista and the program does it usually after I ask it to load one of my saved lists. I just assumed it was my computer rather than your program.

When I enter any type of data in the add sim or edit sim and click add/edit sim or are adding the family data like i try to give a person a spouse or a child click close and up date records it freeze and vista say program has stopped working and needs to close, get no choice to wait for it to respond.

Budcot:  How long are your lists, usually?

Meek, that's a crash.  Can you tell me specific details, like "This is such-and-such a sim, with details that are so-and-so, and when I try to edit this, it crashes"?

Well I just went to click on a specific sim in the sim list to edit him as i forgot to select his aspiration  and the program went into not responding then when white that was about 10 minutes ago and it is has not closed i will have to start task manger to end the program   

There was actually a bug a little bit ago where clicking on a sim with None/Unknown for an aspiration caused an infinite loop, but that was fixed.  Do you have to latest version?

Yes I think so .5 or something like that, I working on the the sim list was editing another sim add info for her and clicked edit and went back to the sim list again and went to click on another sim it froze, I have noticed that when u add info and then click the button to tell the program to add or edit and goes back to the list of sims and or the family ties list if that is the place u are working where the info is not added properly and then hangs.

The version number only changes when there is a new savefile that is incompatible with previous versions.  Please do the following, or I'm not sure I'll be able to help you.

1.  Download the latest version.
2.  Give me specific information about exactly what data you are trying to edit in a specific instance that caused a crash.  Screenshots are acceptable.
3.  Please try to post in more or less grammatical English so that I can understand the information you give in #2.

I downloaded the sim sheet yesterday and the QT files as well, I have noticed that the normal buttons like close minimize i am still able to use.

Open Sim Sheet
Click Manage Sim list
loaded strangetown
click add new Sim
entered data click add Sim
click the new Sim, then it froze

What data did you add for this sim?

Name Peter Curious, Age 2 days till toddler, Household Pascal Curious, ticked Alien and pressed button for Add Sim

Found this when the vista asked me what i would like to do close program

escription:
  A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:   AppHangB1
  Application Name:   SimSheet.exe
  Application Version:   0.0.0.0
  Application Timestamp:   494f2dbf
  Hang Signature:   bd87
  Hang Type:   0
  OS Version:   6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
  Locale ID:   3081
  Additional Hang Signature 1:   71ba4b0baa043292adba853a8c2bbb0b
  Additional Hang Signature 2:   b67e
  Additional Hang Signature 3:   7b6bd95270ffd84523ef44d07939a2fb
  Additional Hang Signature 4:   bd87
  Additional Hang Signature 5:   71ba4b0baa043292adba853a8c2bbb0b
  Additional Hang Signature 6:   b67e
  Additional Hang Signature 7:   7b6bd95270ffd84523ef44d07939a2fb


I hope it helps more

A couple of hundred sims but it happens even with my new list which has 17 sims on it. It doesn't really bother me because it still works, unless it means something is up with the computer. That would be annoying considering the upgrade I did recently.

Meek - so you enter that info, and then click on the new sim, and it crashes?  I'm sorry for asking this over and over, but are you sure you're using the latest version?

just to make sure that i am using the lastest version i will re download it again but i know it not going to make much difference i only downloaded it a few days ago

Well, I cannot reproduce this error, so I have no idea why it's happening.

well dont worry for now as I have re downloaded sim sheet on my laptop and so far it seems alright i must of got a bad download or something as i sometime have to download some custom content a second time and its fine I will download sim sheet on my desktop and see how it goes sorry for the hassle and thank you for your time. ??? :-[

I was Using version 0.5 before I downloaded I dont know what was wrong now it fixed which is good

Just discovered this. Sounds nice after doing this all in excel.
But I'm a blond and I can't figure out how to import sim lists from SimPE. I get the same "Cannot find output file. Check that you are using the AL version of SimPE." that was posted here a while ago. I read what was written about it here but I honestly haven't understood a thing what to do with this.

Where is SimPE installed?  Where is SimSheet installed?  Do you get any other error messages?  Are you in fact using the latest SimPE QA?

Sorry, I thought M&G patch was the latest version of SimPE. Just downloaded the newest. Still the same. But now I'm getting an error when running SimPE so I think I have to figure that one out first... SimPE is installed by default in C:\Program Files\SimPE\ and SimSheet is also in C:\Program Files

This is the QA version, though, right?  In order to get the QA you have to get Inge to sign you up for the QA group on the SimPE forums, and then download it from the QA forum.

Not any longer, the QA is now available to all.
SimPE Homepage (http://sims.ambertation.de/)

Uninstalled SimPE at all, deleted all "leftovers" of it, installed QA version and it's now working perfectly fine and import also works!
And this thing looks amazing so far. And much better/easier than using excel for this.

I have a question already. How can I delete a household or a sim from the list? And delete images?

Households only show up if there are sims actually in them, so just removing all sims from the household will make it disappear.  There is currently no way to delete sims, unfortunately.  The only way to get rid of an image is to replace it with another one, but if you really want it gone, you can edit the savefile by hand like so:  Find the line that begins with the sim's name; on that line is the path to the image encased in double-quotes - delete the path so that it simply reads "".  You can't remove sims by simply deleting their lines, though - this will cause problems with family ties information, which relies on the order and number of the lines.

I think I will then just delete the lists and import them again from simpe, but this time I won't be lazy and not just check all playables but actually check that it doesn't import the households that are just sitting in the sim bin.
As for images I just found it a little annoying that if you're for example currently viewing Brandi Broke and she has an image, then you click on Mortimer Goth, who doesn't have an image, it will still be showing Brandi Broke's image.
My Belladonna Cove and Desiderata Valley (I haven't yet played either of them) had social bunnies included as playables! (I'm not complaining, just stating the fact)

Ok, those are bugs - I'll fix them for the next version.  Thanks for letting me know.

I think I need a walk through for this *blonde and airheaded*

I have Simsheet in one file on my desk top (that is where I have the files all stored)
Then I have SimPE installed on my C drive in program files

When I go to import a neighborhood it brings up the Black Loader exe thing, it opens SimPE - but then does nothing after that.

Am I required to do anything further at this point? I have no idea how to use this program but I would LOVE to use it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also thank you for the program, I just can't wait to use it :)

It sounds like you do not have the right version of SimPE.  You need the latest QA, which can be found here (http://sims.ambertation.de/en/2009/04/11/simpe-07344-qa-for-everyone/).

Ok I just installed the new version but I did get an error that said no output.

So do the DLL files go with SimSheet or do I stick them in the SimPE program somewhere?

I think I need a break down of how to install it & how to import families.

I'm usually pretty good at figuring things out but I would rather not break it LOL.

The dlls that you downloaded from this thread go with SimSheet; anything that was in the SimPE 7zip file goes with SimPE.  If both programs run, you did it right.

There is not much you can do to break it, to be honest - this isn't TS2, after all.  Did you change the "path to SimPE" in SimSheet to match where you installed the QA?

I am actually gradually accruing a documentation page here (http://faiuwle.pbworks.com/SimSheetDocumentation), which is still incomplete, though it does have instructions on importing.

What is the QA?
Do I need to create this or will it be in SimPE or will it be in the SimSheet?

Ok I just read through your linked document, it was very helpful and as far as I can tell I have followed those instructions though I still get the "No Output" error.
I will try doing this again just to make sure I did not miss anything.

"QA" is the version of SimPE that I linked above.  Basically, you download the 7zip file, unzip it into somewhere (like, say, C:\Program Files\SimPE_QA\ or something) and then in the SimSheet settings set the "default path to SimPE" field to "C:\Program Files\SimPE_QA\" or wherever you put the 7zip.

I wasn't reading this very carefully so I don't know if I just misunderstood, but just in case. It's better to uninstall SimPE completely and then install the QA version. It worked for me, solved all the errors.

I downloaded this today for the first time.  The ready made list of sims will be really useful and the sorting works well.  I'm thinking about trying a rotation, so again this will really help.  Thanks!

Had you thought about adding the zodiac sign to that front page?  It would be really nice to be able to plan how to pair sims up outside the game and zodiac sign is pretty important for a 3 bolt match.  If I remember right, matchmaking was one of the useful things you could do in sims2db.

It took me a while to get my 717 sims imported, but I got there.  Still not sure what I was doing wrong.  I kept putting filepaths in the fields and closing the window because I didn't see a "Go" button.  Eventually I got it right and the "import" button became selectable.  That's when I realised that this is the "Go" button.  The filter hung a lot and boxes didn't uncheck, so I guess I'll filter before I make the next list and use sort instead.  I'm running Windoze 7 btw & am getting a regular C++ error, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was me.

Does zodiac really have an effect in TS2?  I remember it being a big thing in TS1, but I was under the impression that in TS2 aspiration and turn ons pretty much subsumed everything else.  I'll put it on my to-do list, though, for when I get back to working on 0.6.


Well, I tried to make it straighforward, but it's probably less so for some than others.  Where were you looking for the button?  The Import button will become enabled when you navigate to a folder than has a "SimPE.exe" - otherwise, the import won't work.


It might be Windoze 7 - I downloaded it and ran it just now on this XP computer, and there's no real noticeable delay and the filter dialog definitely works.  What does the error say?  Is it a crash, or something different?

If Windows 7 is the problem, it might be fixable by downloading the source and installing Qt and MinGW and then just recompiling it on Windows 7 - the problem then is finding someone with Windows 7 who's willing to do all of that.  I wouldn't have thought Windows would have this particular problem, to be honest, though.