More Awesome Than You!

(VERY LATE) MAJOR UPDATE!

In case someone follows a link to this thread and haven't seen Tarlia's Uberhood, I strongly suggest you go get hers! (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,18253.0.html) Mine has issues and is unsupported. Carry on reading this only if you want the megahood without townies (but trust me - you'll want townies...). I will personally use hers over mine.

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X-posted to my Livejournal (http://mixreality.livejournal.com/8522.html)

UPDATE 03/21 - Updated Installation Instructions and Known Issues sections.
UPDATE 04/07 - Updated Known Issues section.
UPDATE 04/14 - Updated Known Issues section.
UPDATE 10/16 - Updated Known Issues section.

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One last time, this is a clean and fixed HystericalParoxysm's Uber-Megahood (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=301194). I'm not going to keep updating it, I promise, even if there's something horribly wrong with it. As far as I'm concerned, it's as perfect as it gets. Above all, this is the only Megahood without corrupt memories (except the ones corrupted "by default").

Unfortunately, M&G STUFF PACK IS REQUIRED! If you don't have it, the hood just won't show up. I'm very sorry about that, but I haven't thought about sharing when I first started cleaning it.
Also, REQUIRES ALL EPS EXCEPT UNI AND NL! That means Pets and BV are required, as the bin families from those packs are included too* (Kat and Kim families from Occupied Lot Bin are NOT included, so you can add them yourself where you want them).  There's a possibility you could safely play this hood without those two EPs, I'm still in the process of testing it.
*You won't get any duplicate bin families no matter what templates you have installed.

No fiddling with SimPE this time, just extract the file to Neighborhoods folder and start playing!

Download:

Cleanerhood.part1.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?2xndhyg2fef)

Cleanerhood.part2.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?nlkk1wk1gfz)

Cleanerhood.part3.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?dc245kw0vyg)

Installation instructions:

If you already have a N001 folder in C:\Documents and Settings\<your name here>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods, move it somewhere safe, if you need it. If you don't, delete it.

Once you got all 3 parts downloaded, open Cleanerhood.part1.rar and extract it to C:\Documents and Settings\<your name here>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods. (All 3 parts will automatically extract there).

If you have trouble extracting the files, it's probably because you were using an extracting utility other than WinRar or 7-Zip. Get WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/) or Get 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/), they're both free.

Changes made to HP's original hood:

While your files download, you can take the time to read what you're getting.

- Neighborhood is renamed back to N001, because Pescado says that cloning a neighborhood is a VBT (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13364.0.html). If you wish to play original Pleasantview and this hood at the same time, you can rename it to whatever you want (using a batch-rename utility). See Tips at the end of post.

- Around 360 random townies and NPCs are Deleted 2 (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6205.0.html), along with their orphaned family instances and clothing collections! I also deleted broken duplicates of Skip Broke, Darleen Dreamer, Michael Bachelor and Nervous Subject. The only trace of unplayables left are townies/NPCs known by playable sims (Crystal Vu, Abhijeet Cho, Kaylynn Langerak, Gordon King, Meredith Lillard, Phoebe Adams and Frances McCullough). Strangetown Bella "The Clone" Goth and 5 Bluewater employees are NOT included, but I have them all extracted if anyone wants to add them. The real Bella Goth is in the sim bin, see below. All the ancestors are untouched (except above mentioned duplicates).

- All memories fixed! If you ever attempted to wipe corrupt memories with Lot Debugger in ANY Megahood, you certainly noticed that almost all of sims' memories get wiped. This is the consequence of merging process itself - somehow, characters' GUIDs change which results in wrong Memory $Subjects. In other words, the memory looks just fine (it points to right name) but in fact it isn't (it points to wrong number). In this hood, "default" corrupted memories are still present in 3 base hoods - usually 5 per adult sim (pointing to dead broken relatives - 3 toddler skills, 2 deaths). You can easily wipe them with Lot Debugger if you wish. In short, in this hood, you can wipe corrupt memories without fear that entire sim lives will get erased.
While doing all this, I figured I might as well fix the maxian stupid along the way. The examples are too numerous to list. Some well known examples would be the Broke family remembering Skip died before Beau was born, yet Skip's the father of Brandi's unborn child. Or all death memories in Riverblossom Hills are green. Or all Desideratians have one memory too much - a memory of growing up to toddler. All these are fixed, and much much more! My personal favorite are the new job memories in Desiderata Valley and Belladonna - they now correctly show career icon (instead of memory owner's picture), just like in all other hoods.

- All existing pregnancies "refreshed", because Pescado says that mega-merging hoods results in invalid pregnancy tokens (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13479.msg383659.html#msg383659) (I suspect, for the same reason memories get corrupt). You won't even notice that the pregnancies has been fiddled with (unlike the previous version, preggos now have correct job levels). Additionally, you won't get the Brandi clone, cause she's really pregnant with Skip now!

- Broken Family Ties in Desiderata Valley and Belladonna Cove have been reattached! (I haven't noticed anything else wrong with Family Ties, but if you do, let me know. It can be easily fixed without me uploading the whole hood again.)

- Bella Goth is in the sim bin now, 35000$ and an extra cheesy description included. As a townie she suffers from a rather nasty memory loss (she doesn't loose all of her memories like a normal townie). I made her not remember anything after the abduction. If you don't like it, I'm sorry. The "real" Pleasantview Bella doesn't even have memories, and I believe Megahood Bella's memories are the work of SaraMK.

- All the neighborhood and family albums fixed. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they will work for you, so far it seems random. At the very least, you should get working individual family albums in 3 base hoods, which were not present in HP's hood.

- Various other small changes, not particularly important. I will make a full list of it eventually and attach it to this post...

Known Issues:
(possibly critical ones in cursive)

- If you have original Belladonna in your game, you must remove it prior to installing this hood. Otherwise you might encounter missing/misplaced lots problem, such as this one (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,14537.msg420099.html#msg420099). I have no idea why this happens. :(

- Multiple PT Hacks with custom skintones DO NOT WORK in this hood. They DO work in HP's original hood. I have absolutely no clue what happened here. So, if you can't part with your colorful aliens, this hood may not be for you. Regular Multiple PT hacks do work though. If anyone has any idea what could be the problem here, please let me know. Tarlia has found the solution, which might theoretically work for this hood too.  See the solution! (http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/29848.html)

- Tessa Ramirez and Oberon Gossamer have blank wants and fears. Also, Tessa has no DNA to start with. I tested extensivelly and lurked around MATY and it doesn't seem critical. Correct DNA generated for Tessa and she spawned normally. Wants and fears appear over time, as those two sims start doing things. You can accelerate this process by using Lot Debugger's "Wants > Reroll". Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.

- Sarah Crittur (the dog) delivers immediately when you move her in somewhere. This is due to the way pregnancy tokens are set up (or my inability to understand how pregnancy tokens are set up :) ) - when I changed the token's raw data numbers to match the original, the pregnancy token turned into a gossip about a dead Veronavillian. So I figured it's best to leave it as is. She'll still have 3 puppies with Danny as the father as expected.

- Denise Jacquet doesn't know her husband died. Teleport Xavier Jacquet to her home (you'll get "Xavier died on another lot" message, and he'll dissapear, problem solved) and/or use Lot Debugger's 'Fix > Dead romances'. If you don't do that she might throw errors at you under certain circumstances.

- Jill Smith and Bianca Monty (maybe more?) don't know that they're in their everyday wear. When you first load their lots, change them to Everyday (even though they already are in everyday, you'll have the option), or they might throw errors at you under certain circumstances.

(Other issues from previous versions have been fixed. Please report any weirdness you might encounter. As I said, I'm NOT going to deal with this hood any more but I do mean to play it eventually and I'd like to hear your experiences, for my own sake, and for the sake of downloaders).

Some tips:

- Do not attempt to add another shopping district to this hood, EVER! You may however delete shopping districts if you want - sims living in them will appear in the bin. The lots are what actually makes this hood so big, so it might be a good idea to do this if you're on a low-end machine or you lack disk space. From what I gathered it's still best to leave at least one shopping district. Besides, where else would you move all those families. Again, you cannot add a shopping district even if you delete some. You can safely add downtowns, universities and vacation destinations, but do use empty/clean templates, 'cause hood is already huge as it is.

- I named the hood N001 on purpose. You shouldn't have cloned hoods in your Neighborhoods folder at the same time. That means, having Pleasantview and HP's Megahoods in your Neighborhoods folder simultaneously is a potential VBT. If you play original Pleasantview, or any clone of Pleasantview, (or any other hood named N001 perhaps?), but you still want this hood, I suggest getting AnyGameStarter, or playing on a different Windows account, or simply switching the folders in and out of your documents/EA Games/Neighborhoods. But it's your game and all, and if you think this is just paranoid, use a batch-renaming utility to rename N001 to a higher number (for batch-renaming I simply use Windows Commander's "File > Multi-Rename Tool"). Remember, you don't rename just the folder, but also everything in it.

- You don't really need many townies with this much playables, but some will simply have to generate. Use norespawn hacks to control the population.

Thank yous (in chronological order, I guess):

- SaraMK, who wrote the hood-merging tutorial and started the whole trend.

- HystericalParoxysm, whose hood I shamelessly stole and edited.

- My LJ friends for checking things out for me, letting me know about things I didn't know, asking me to upload this and overall being awesome. Special thanks to phoenix-daisy/Tamha and engram_au. Thank you both for providing tons of feedback and information. Bit of Tamha's work is actually included in this hood, 'cause I was unable to do it myself.

- Lots of baaas to MATYians who know all the answers and did not poke me with pointy sticks! :D Special thanks (and apologies) to Mootilda who I bugged for nothing, and Kalina who saved the day by discovering and resolving yet another Bella problem. The first thing I'll do when I start playing is killing the bitch. [/oscar mode]

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The original first post is removed, as leaving it in would make the post too long. Messages following this post refer to the outdated version of this neighborhood. The actual feedback on the finished hood starts from this post (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,14537.msg419283.html#msg419283).

Couldn't the lot have been saved with free will on before upload?  I would have preferred that.

I think this is a worthwhile project.  Unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable enough to help.

Of course it could, but I have forgotten about that. It's easy to set it back on in Game Options panel, so I don't see it as a really big problem, but I'll definitely set it to 'On' if I upload the complete fixed hood. I find this fixes system easy for in-between versions but I'll certainly fix the small stupidies (Don's free will and Head "Warlocks") in final version.

(LJ user Phoenixdaisy, had the dumb Caliente problem that ended up being tight pants.)

Good to see you're still working on this project. If I have some time later I may see about installing this updated version and playing with it a bit to see how things work. (Last time I started having problems related to my vid drivers, then I was on to a different project, and totally forgot to play CU-MH more.)

Also, more than willing to muck in the SimPE if you want me to have a look at Tessa, though I've never tried to fix these before apart from deleting dangling SWAF's. I had this happen to Lucy Burb in Pleasantview once, I think it fixed itself finally , but I don't remember if it was after a few restarts and batbox resets or just when she turned teen, as this was like 2 years ago, lol. Also, curious about the extra LTA tokens, so if I do mess with those I'll post back.

Have you looked inside Bennie Monty's character file to see if there is anything weird looking in it, or is it just inexplicably massive? Might be a good opportunity to test how Compressorized character files function in game, hmmm....

Oh hai :D I appreciate it. What I'm most interested in is this:
That would seal the deal whether the GUID numbers are unique for me and other people, and whether the entire memory fix works as intended (I know for certain that it fixes my own personal mess).

I haven't look at Tessa or Benedick problem at all, 'cause I'm still waiting for some directions. I only played with Tessa for like 2 days. Rerolling wants with bat box doesn't give her all wants and fears. She had them all only when I force-aged her to teen. I gathered from here that this thing is possibly not dangerous at all, so for now I'll just wait... If you do some experimenting please post back! Thank you!

Heh, I got so into playing the Brokes today I didn't even get around to Tessa.   Much less SimPE poking past the initial fixes. Nice change for me actually, been a long time since I've just sat down and played one family for a whole night. 


ETA: Ok, so my Tessa was also still without wants or fears. I figured that Lucy Burb is a fine example of the average female 6 (they even wear the same dress in different colors). So, I extracted Lucy's SWAF to my desktop, and replaced Tessa's with it, ensuring that the instance was the same  and it still was linked to Tessa before saving and quitting SimPE. No idea how dangerous this is, but so far Tessa has wants of her own, and Lucy still has her wants, and after loading both households I ensured at least that the wants are not clones and neither house is crashing. Before doing all this I noticed that Checo threw an error the very first time I loaded the Ramierez, but he seems fine. Can't really be sure though, I've never played the Bluewater families before.

Crap crap crap crap crap!

It never occured to me to replace her SWAF with a healthy one, so I extracted Tessa's SWAF from original B001 that came with the game with an intention of replacing Megahood Tessa SWAF (just to see what would happen). And guess what - there isn't any SWAF of Tessa's in a Megahood! I could swear that I did look in her SWAF but apparently it was after loading Ramirez lot (during some previous poking couple of weeks ago). So (I think) the good news is that SWAF does generate and it behaves pretty nicely - there was a blank fear slot after like 2 days of playing, but the type of wants and fears was normal for a kid and there were no errors. I'll finish the original Tessa SWAF test tomorrow.

Now the REALLY bad news is that she doesn't have a DNA!  >:( I don't think that DNA generates. Just checked in HP's original uber-megahood and she doesn't have SWAF or SDNA there either. While it's a bit comforting to know I didn't mess it up myself, I feel bad for not noticing it before and scared that there might be more sims with missing DNA. I'm not talking DNA lines, but entire DNA resources. Total number of SDSC compared to total number of SDNA (630 vs. 613) does NOT sound good at all!

I guess that Tessa could be fixed by cloning someone else's DNA (like her mom's), correcting it if needed and setting Tessa's instance number, then growing her up, knocking her up and seeing what happens. Or - adding her own healthy DNA from B001. Will try both.

Thank you for your help! I really need it, this whole thing is a mess.

Ugh, what a mess. You know, if you do find more like this (and I'm going to look to) I may just make a brand new Clean Uber-Megahood and have you help me test it, instead!  ::) Before I found your version I had already done a lot of the prep work, I just would have to go back and re-fix my PV and ST as I still have the dupes in my version. And I may have dumped Abjeet and the Meredith, as for some reason they knew her but she wasn't showing any relation to them anyway from SimPE, so I may need to just redo ST anyway.....

ETA: She has her DNA in my game, so it must have generated. Here it is so you can compare it to her original DNA.

ETA2: I'm showing 641 SDSC to 987 SDNA, so they must regenerate somehow, but that means that less than a half of the Sims have DNA to start with (641-630=11, 987-11=976, 976-613=363, 630-363=267)

ETA3: Since I was in SimPE anyway, I had a look at Phoebe the Witch, and she wasn't showing Samantha in Relations/[All Households]. So I opened Samantha and removed then added the relation from her end, and now she is showing in Phoebe's relations. Heading into game now to see if I can make a witch. ;)

ETA4: That seemed to work, I called up Phoebe and then asked to be a witch. And she made Sam into a witch, no hesitation or anything. So a similar approach would probably work for Meredith and Circe.

Well, shit, of course! All the DNAs of the 360 something deleted townies are in those 613 too. I just opened HP's hood and it has 970 DNAs prior to loading the hood (and 997 SDSC). WTF?!  ??? I haven't touched DNAs while deleting.

Oh dear, I was actually looking at SWAFs yestersday; there are no 613 DNAs but 613 SWAFs, and 983 DNAs. Silly me. All is good in the world. And Tessa's DNA generated, good, wonderfull. I'm dealing with a toothache from hell and can't think straight right now, so I'll compare it later.


Then you'll end up with wrong memory $Subject GUIDs again, and that memory fix took me weeks to finish it. But it was kind of fun, so if you have time, then by all means make a fresh one, and I'll help you test it and stuff. I also accidentaly deleted Abhi..., Meredith and the witches, but instead of starting all over I cloned them and made them townies/head witches (and some of the relationship settings just wouldn't stick, hence the current problems with them). Anyway, you don't have to redo ST, just dump those two in and make them townies.

Yeah, the memories and pregnancies would be the biggest complications to fix, but if the regenerated SDNA is the same as the original that's good enough for me, especially with the adjustment I just tried for Phoebe working out.

I compared it and the newly generated DNA is the same as the original. Double checked. Wonderful. I love when stuff fix themselves :D It could be because both of Tessa's parents have same genes as her, though. Newly generated DNA, or more specificaly, recessive genes might not be correct for sims whose parents have different traits, but that's ok with me. Checking 600+ sims for missing DNA, just in order not to get homozygous sims, is not on my to-do list.

Ok, one more thing left to do with Tessa is growing her up and breeding her. If all goes well, I'll leave her as is, 'cause that would definitely mean SWAF and SDNA generate as needed.

Now, dangling family instances and orphaned clothing collections... I'll add links later to some scattered posts about that, but I'm definitely gonna need some help with it. I'm lost at step 1, and if I skip it, I'm lost at step 2... And Benedick Monty's file - well, I opened it but it's all giberish to me, I'll have to lurk moar.

I really should take the time to have a look at him at least once I shut my game down. While it's mostly imposing gibberish to me as well, I'm hoping that I've looked at enough character files to be able to spot glaring irregularities.  :P

Ok, I managed to clear the extra family informations, orphaned clothing collections and stuff. Here's what I did (if I did something horribly wrong, please, anyone, let me know before I upload the new version):

- Used Theo's Wardrobe Cleaner on all non-playable families that no longer exist and on townie and npc families that once had crapload of members but now only have several. Number of BINX and 3IDR resources went down by about a 1000.
- Deleted empty families.
- Deleted text lists, collections, BINX and 3IDR resources with same instance numbers as deleted empty families.
- Renamed townie and npc families to "Townies" and "NPC" instead of some random generated names.
- Tested briefly. Nobody showed up nekkid or dressed weird. New apartment residents generated in correct clothing (I moved Bella in that crappy apartment building near the trailer park, and bohos generated as expected). Bella (who was still in the townie family during cleaning) had her gray PJs like she's supposed to (I think).

* * *

Tested breeding DNA-less Tessa. Everything was fine. So I'll leave her as is and wont look for other sims with no DNA.

* * *

Fixed my previous stupidies (Don's Free Will,  preggos' jobs, witches' titles, Phoebe and Meredith missing from Samantha Cordial's and Circe's relationship panel).

* * *

Stuff yet to be looked into:

- Benedick Monty (huge character file, around 1200 kb). I've opened his character file and it has 32 geometric data containers (GMDC). Opened Buck Grunt and Alexander Goth and they have 8 and 10 GMDC respectively. So the number varies. Still must lurk around to find out more about this. Done! Thank you Tamha!

- Oberon Gossamer (Summerdream) also has blank wants but not all of them  >:( He's unable to propose marriage to Tit but she's able to propose to him. What does all this mean? I've read somewhere around here that bunch of Capps are unable to propose to Montys and vice versa, and that EA says it's by design. Anyway, I'm contemplating deleting Oberon's SWAF 'cause I somehow think that SWAF-less Tessa behaves better (can't really put my finger on why I think so). Must test. ETA - He doesn't have SWAF either.

- Fix job-related memories in Desiderata and Belladonna (currently show memory owner's picture instead of career icon, for most sims in these 2 hoods). This is merely cosmetic.

- I've messed with Sarah Crittur's pregnancy token to "refresh" it, like all other existing pregnancies. She gives birth to three puppies (as expected) and Danny is the father (as expected) but as soon as you move her in somewhere, she delivers (not as expected, some time should pass). When I attempt to set raw data in her token to completely match the original, her token turns into a gossip about a dead Veronavillian guy, so I left it as is (she delivers immediately). Is this ok?

- Check how hood behaves in non-Pets, non-BV game ('cause user reported that it behaves pretty nicely. Game informs that those two EPs are "uninstalled" and that all sims who were on vacation are brought back etc. Cyd Roseland's in the bin but without the dog).

- Can someone who played HP's Uber-Megahood before inform me of problems they encountered, please? I've only played briefly. Uber-Megahood only (one with Belladonna Cove).
ETA - After some lurking around, here's what needs to be checked:
-Behaviour of hood with entire awesomeware installed, specifically Jill Smith, Bianca Monthy, warmthfixes, macro launcher...
-Send Cass and Don on honeymoon in Takemizu.

I was just looking at Benedick, he should have 8 GMDC, same as the number of GMND he has. I removed the ones that were alone (not connected to any GMND's, CRES's or Shapes) and did a quick and dirty aging test with the Blender, and he seemed fine. Need to make sure he doesn't crash at a mirror, changing or breeding still, but attaching cleaner version so you can test it as well.

(I messed with these in a non-game sim once trying to fix a broken BS sim I had on my machine, also these are the resources that are attached to meshes.)

ETA: If you go into the Sim Descriptions and then the Relations panel and have it show all households, pretty much everyone is marked as being related to everyone else in the neighborhood they are from. This is most prevalent in Veronaville, Riverblossom and Desiderata, though there are instances in all the neighborhoods. This is why the Capp's and Monty's can't get married to each other and Oberon can't propose to Titania.

ETA2: If you have trouble fixing it yourself, I can do it later. I have done this a few times, though it's easier with the individual hoods than this one. Be best to do with your most updated Neighborhood package, since almost all Sim descriptions and relations have to be altered.

Do you mean related/unrelated tick boxes on the upper-left of the plugin window where you get to filter relationships? I think it's supposed to do that, as "related" basically come down to "known sims". Or do you mean that the "Family" check-box is ticked for non-relatives? Now, about that, I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it's actually alright. Game doesn't really consider such sims as relatives if you don't set the "Type of family relationship" from the drop-down menu. On top of that, family box actually *needs* to be ticked or relationship setting doesn't stick. Of course, that's just me thinking out loud, I have yet to actually look into it.

ETA - Ah, I just noticed that you already did it before, so it actually is needed. Crap...

ETA 2 - Just checked Oberon and Titania. Their relationship settings are identical. They're both set as Known, Friends, Buddies, Love, Family (undefined relation type), with over 80 points in daily and lifetime relationships. Yet she's able to propose and he's not. Btw, I haven't mentioned that Oberon could propose engagement, just not marriage. Also, I opened up couple of random sims from other hoods and they're all set as Family too. Like, Ophelia and Johnny Smith of which I'm sure many people married without a hitch. So something tells me that this particular mess-up is somewhere other than relationship settings.


Ah, so that's it. Groovy, thank you! Off to test.

I played with Benedick a bit more, that does seem to help.

As for the family settings, I don't have any idea why it messes up some sims and not others, but whenever I do make those changes I stop having those particular problems. *shrug* But, as Vv is the worst (as I mentioned before) and I actually almost never play it, I can only vouch for it definitely fixing Oberon and Titania for me for some strange reason. Already made the alterations in my playtesting CUMH so I'll pop it open and check how they are working for me really quick.

My Oberon had no problems starting the marriage vows to Titania. However, I transported in Antonio Monty and Miranda Capp, made her an adult, set their relationships to max and love, and they could get engaged but neither could propose marriage. So while that that fixed the Summerdream issue, it doesn't fix the Capps and Montys, I guess. Which means that the problems must not be related, my "fix" works for the Summerdreams, but not for allowing Capps and Montys to intermix.

ETA: I am guessing that the Summerdreams are an actual bug while the Monty/Capp thing is a "feature", so if a particular EAxis couple has problems getting married, removing the family tie in their sim description in SimPE will probably fix it, but not if they're Capps or Montys?

Since not all couples have the problem it's hard to be sure. In the case of a couple like Johnny Smith and Ophelia Nigmos, them aging to adults may prevent the invisible tie to be a problem. Or Oberon and Titania are an exception because they already have children (though adopted) together and are therefore already linked in the actual family tree as well. The dual tie in the tree and the relation resource combining to prevent the union, somehow.

Ugh, seems to me to be flaky like in-laws, step-family and distant cousins. Sometimes they can engage in love and marriage and sometimes they can't.

Current progress time:

- Deleted excess LTA - Inited tokens of Pauline Aspir, Etsu Cho and Marcus Baldwin. Tested Pauline only (extensively). Nothing blew up.

- Fixed Benedick. Ok, I lied. Didn't quite know what I was doing so I plopped Tamha's file in. Tested extensively. Works like a charm.

- Set Oberon and Tit as non-family. Both are able to propose, but the Summerdream kids will get some memories that "Titania joined the family". I'm not quite sure I like it. Because Tamha says that unticking family boxes did NOT fix random Monty/Capp couple, I'm leaving everyone else as they were, 'cause the numbers of potential couples to check (even in Veronaville only) is absolutely insane.

- While Meredith the bartender now IS on Circe's relationship panel, she's not listed in Circe's phonebook. Silly workaround is calling Service > Bartender. Meredith will arrive, nag that the Beakers don't even have a bar, than ask Circe would she like to hang out now that her "work" is done. She'll also take 10$ for arriving :) Now, after they spend some time together and Meredith leaves, Circe is STILL not able to call her. WTF? Tamha, is your Circe able to call Meredith? Other NPCs are fine (I tested Kaylin and both witches, Phoebe is definitely fixed).

- Now, those goddamn job memories. In two latest hoods (Desiderata and Belladonna), EAxis messed something up. Memory owner shows up as memory subject too (and in previous hoods there is no memory subject at all). This results in memory owner's picture showing in job-related memory (instead of career icon) in those two hoods. I still can't for the life of me figure out how to remove memory subject in SimPE. So I resorted to messing with raw data, but again, all giberish to me. I did a little test in game - got Victor Aspir promoted and compared the new, normal memory to one of the old, non-normal ones. Still giberish, so... here:

(http://i447.photobucket.com/albums/qq199/mixreality/Random/wrongmemory.jpg)

This is the old memory, showing Victor's picture.


(http://i447.photobucket.com/albums/qq199/mixreality/Random/rightmemory.jpg)

This is the new memory showing (medical) career icon.

They're more different than I thought. I only managed to identify line 04 (0x035a) and that's Victor's instance number. Removing that line will remove him as memory owner (VBT), and NOT as memory subject.
Hm, just checked Circe Beaker who's also in medical and she has lines 05 and 06 same as Victor. So that makes 61fd0c77 the instance number for medical. (Or is it 0c7761fd?) Anyway, I'll check whether fixing just those two lines does something or not. ETA - It does, so I'll start the fixing, unless someone tells me not to.
I suppose that removing memory subject, if possible, wouldn't really do any good, 'cause lines 05&06 are incorrect. But the big question is - is this only a cosmetic fix? I fear that it actually isn't 'cause raw data of the right and wrong memory differ so much. But then again, I have no idea what I'm talking about. If it really is cosmetic only, I'm leaving it as is. It's too much of a hassle for something that people don't even look at anyway.

- And after that, testing and uploading. I'll try compressorizing the files, but before I do that, I'd appreciate if someone tells me that it's a VBT to do.
ETA - Compresorrized hood works just fine, but the difference is so minimal that it's not worth imposing unknown risk to downloaders. So, no compressorizing.
Again, stuff I particularly need to test are:
-How hood behaves with entire awesomeware installed and controllers present on lot. Specifficaly Jill Smith and Bianca Monty.
-Cass and Don, honeymoon in Takemizu, with and without norespawn hacks.

I've been following your thread because uberhoods interest me.  Anyway, wanted to comment on Meredith Lillard, the bartender.  In my last incarnation of Strangetown, someone set Nervous Subject up with Meredith Lillard as a blind date (networking interaction).  They totally fell for each other.  However, when Nervous tried to call her to ask her out, she was not in his phonebook.  I've played Strangetown many times and know that, at least before Freetime and Apartment Life, Meredith did used to be in Circe's phone book, so I went over there to look; nope, she wasn't in Circe's book, either.  Anyway, since I was not playing an uber-hood, I wanted to let you know that this seems to be either Freetime or AL borkage and nothing that you've done. (I was late getting both expansions, got them at the same time a few months ago).

Yeah it was Free Time that stupidly removed NPCs from the phone book. Paladin has a fix for it over at Sim Wardrobe (http://www.simwardrobe.com/).

Ah, thank you both, that's good to know. I'll test the Beakers with that Paladin's hack installed. ETA - Well, of course it works!

Now about that job memories - I finally figured it out and it's really easy  ::) It's all about entering career GUID in lines 05 and 06, and career GUIDs are right there in SDSC. The only thing is, some sims are unemployed so I don't know which career they were in. I'm hoping I can find out in game, but I'll do all already-employed sims first. I realize it's a crazy thing to do, but I guess I need distractions.

Ack, didn't even think to check everyone's memories when I was testing before. May also help to check Tit and Oberon without the relations removed (so she must be the proposer) and see if the kids still get the memories for Oberon joining the family that way.

I'll unzip my backup of the neighborhood from before I started messing with it and see what happens there, too.

Ok, weird, my Oberon still had no problem starting the marriage vows without removing the family ties (although I know I did have that not work in the past in Vv). What happened is whoever started the vows didn't get extra memories, but the other person "joined the family". So if Oberon starts the marriage, Titania "joins", but if Tit starts then Oberon "joins".

I don't know, weirdness again.

Now when I actually thought of it, it was supposed to be like it was in the first place - if Oberon could propose marriage, then they would be Gossamers and the kids would still be Summerdreams. Although, Oberon's last name is Summerdream too in the original Veronaville out of the box, but eh, who would ever understand maxoids. My heads gonna explode... Anyway, I set them back to family, but both are able to propose again. And then there all those 'joined family' memories (proposed sim, say Oberon, will get "Tit...", "Puck..." and "Bottom joined family" memories). Crap. If I go back to particular backup where Summerdreams were untouched, I'll have to redo some changes I rather wouldn't. And I'm not even sure which backup contains which particular changes, I lack labelling skills. Double crap. So that particular mess of mine will remain present. Well, nobody even looks at memories, right? Right. Besides, if I understood it correctly, you used a backup without family box unticked and it behaved just the same as if they were unticked??? WTH? It's getting curiouser and curioser! Head goes boom. Let's just pretend nothing ever happened, heh?
I don't even know how to describe this in the "Known issues" section of the final version, without making it too long and confusing. Perhaps I'll just keep my mouth shut and see if anyone will notice and report :D

Job memories - it was much, much easier and quicker to do than I thought. So yay, it's fixed! Except Isabel Baldwin and Timoty Rilley - they have job memories, but are unemployed and I have no idea what career they were supposedly in, so I left them as they were. Also Sophia Jocque had a job prior to her current one and I don't know which. Most likely it's a maxoid mistake (another 'got a job' instead of another 'got promoted' memory), but again, as it was. I changed one thing not related to Desiderata/Belladonna though - Trent Traveller bio says he was in Law career then decided to quit it and travel the world with his family. His memories point to Law Enforcement (naturally, so the Traveller family is only TS2/BV compatible). Well, because Megahood requires Free Time anyway, I changed it to Law. You don't get bored and travel-crazy from being a cop, but you do from being a lawyer, right? Right, again.

Aaand, just when I thought this whole thing is complete, I had to discover yet another quirk :( Patels (politician and his pregnant wife in Belladonna) have punks as neighbors! Their apartment lot value is set to 'Low' and I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be that way. I played them once before in original Belladonna and they had sporty people as neighbors. Baldwins' lot is 'Middle' (I think it's supposed to be 'High'). One of the really nice looking apartment building near the beach is set as 'Low'. Btw, I checked the newly generated social groups and they're dressed correctly, as much as I can see with all the missing thumbnails in SimPe. So, my guess is that groups go where they're supposed to, but the lot values are not set correctly. I never really played much with social groups and apartments, so... back to lurking. But I'll ask some quick questions anyway, just in case someone reads this and is in a good mood. What determines lot value? Which social groups inhabit which areas (exactly)? Do Jocks normaly generate in that stupid painted torso 'outfit'? I moved a sim in middle value lot, he had 3 neighbors from 3 different groups - jock, bohemian, techie. Is this normal?

I believe that the lot class value is determined by:

1) an override value which exists in the lot package (EA sets these override values before shipping the neighborhood, but the game doesn't allow us to set them ourselves)
2) OR the actual price of the lot modified by:
- the type of lot (it's easier to get a high-class residential lot than a high-class apartment building)
- the surrounding lot class values (for about 6 tiles in each direction)

In spite of any rumors you may have heard, the lot class value is not affected by any neighborhood decorations.

EA provides 3 cheats related to the lot class values:  one to display the current value, one to clear the override flag (option 1) which forces the value to be recalculated (option 2), and one to set the value temporarily (since we can't set the override flag, the value is lost as soon as you exit the lot).

Many thanks!

I'll try that recalculating thing and see what happens, but I'm not very optimistic. If that fails, looks like the only thing I can do is yet another 'Known Issues' item in the hood's description. Sigh. And I'll include the instructions on how to temporary set the lot value. I suppose temporarily setting, for example, the Patels' lot value to 'Middle' for the first time someone loads their lot will get middle class neighbors to generate. Of course, I'm only thinking out loud here, I have to actually test if it works that way and find those cheats... I've been slackin'.

ETA - Reread. Looks like the lot values had already been recalculated, huh? I might try replacing megahood lot packages with original ones...

I should have mentioned that I've added code to the LotAdjuster to allow you to set the lot class value and corresponding override flag.  So, you should be able to set the values yourself.  As well, you should be able to change them using SimPE, although maybe not using the lot description plugin (ie, hex-edit only).  I could look into this if you don't want to install the LA.

The hard part is determining what the values should be.  Every kind of lot seems to require a different value range for High, Middle, and Low.  I have a few notes from my testing, but they are incomplete.  If you're interested, I could try to find them.  Alternatively, I have a program which will print out the lot class values, so I could get you a list of the original values, if you like.

Awesome! I'm guilty of not using LotAdjuster :| but I definitely want to install it after reading all those great stuff about it. No time like the present!


Wouldn't checking the values in original Belladonna do? I could do that when I get out of slacking mode, but if you already have notes I'd like to have them, thanks! If you can't find it, that's ok.


What do you mean by 'kind of lot'? Like, 'apartment' and 'residential' and 'community'...or?

I suppose ALL lots in megahood (cleaned, at least, not sure about HP's, will have to check) got messed up lot value, but what difference does it actually make in non-apartment lots? In other words, is resetting ALL lot values actually needed? If that is the case, I could certainly use a list of original values, thank you :)

ETA - Hm, I checked original Belladonna (copied original E001 to documents) and HP's hood - Patels' lot is low and Baldwins' is middle in both (and mine too). I'm (almost) sure that's not supposed to be like that. Generating fresh hoods (with original templates in) is the actual way to check if I'm halucinating. If I am, I'm really sorry, Mootilda, for causing you so much trouble for nothing...

Yes, restoring the original Belladonna should restore the original values.  I just didn't know whether it would be too much work, given what you've done so far.  Since I already have a program which will print all of the lot class values and their corresponding override flags, I thought that I'd offer, in case you wanted to edit the individual lot descriptions instead.


Yes, as far as I can tell, each type of lot (apartment, residential, community, dorm, greek, hotel, ...)  has a separate range of values which are considered to be high, middle, and low class.  For example, apartments need a value which is about 3 times the value of a residential lot to be considered high class.  In general, this scheme doesn't actually work very well; I've seen a really low-value house which was considered high-class because it was surrounded by low-class apartment buildings (the higher relative value of the apartments made the house high-class).  I don't think that this was EA's intention.


Good question.  I don't know whether the lot class values actually affect non-apartment lots (type of visitors), but the value definitely affects all apartments within a 6-tile radius of each lot.  I was researching this for someone who just wanted to set the value on various lots, so I didn't do any testing on visitors.

My memory is that most lots don't have the override flag set, so you probably don't have to edit too many lot descriptions.


No problem.  Let me print off those values for you, so you can see what's set.

Quick test with original Belladonna (freshly generated with original templates) proves that I was talking out of my ass. Lot values are the same as in Megahoods. Sorry, Mootilda :|

So, I'll rar it up and start uploading before I make even bigger mess. I guess there's nothing else to do with it.

So mixreality, is this as done (and uploaded) as its going to be? I'm excited to get it, you've fixed all the things that bugged me about that hood.

It's done, but not uploaded yet. It would take a while, I'll leave it uploading overnight and hope that my connection wont snap. So, if all goes well it should be up in about 12 hours.

Okay, I'll wait it out, thanks :)

Noob alert, heh.

Uhm, I think I'm having a bit of problem with Megaupload - the upload is actually finished within seconds. That shouldn't be possible at all, shouldn't it? The upload of the first version lasted for ages, as normal :) Between the first version and this one, Megaupload revamped the site and all, but anyway, this should not be possible. I don't know what else to do at this point except offer you a download link:

*snipped link that is no more*

So, can someone tell me what's going on?

Is it named the same as the previous file you had there?

Also, you may know this.  If I move the Sims from the subhoods to the main hood, can I then safely delete all the extra shopping districts?

It has a new name, a new description and a new date. But how can 230 MB be uploaded in 20 seconds? It does have the N001 in archive in both cases and they're pretty similar in size, so I'm kind of afraid that it just 'updated' the name, description and date of the old file.

So, the upload finished, I figured that it actually only 'updated' the name, so I deleted the old file just in case, uploaded new file again and it was completed in a matter of seconds again. I started downloading it but will probably go to bed before it finishes and I get to check what hood is actually inside.

If anyone does that before me, the most notable difference between this one and the old one (with all the applied fixes) is the job memories in Desiderata and Belladonna - they show career icon in new version and sims' pictures in old version (except for Timoty Rilley and Isabel Baldwin). Also Bella Goth comes in the bin with extra cheesy description (not the old "ZOMG you found Bella!!11 You can has benes!" or something like that).

ETA - Ah sorry. There was a thread around here just recently that stated that deleting subhoods is safe. You shouldn't even have to evict them from their houses, they'll magically show up in the bin when their subhood is deleted. Off to look for a link. ETA - Here it is. (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9861.0.html) Deleting subhoods info is scattered all over page 3. I have no idea what would happen if you delete merged hood subhoods though, but I suppose it should be the same as in non-merged hoods.

I played the Megahood with your fixes this weekend. Thanks!
I have a question though - I moved Bella Goth in with the Goth family. The relationship panel for both, Mortimer and Bella, showed that they are married, but they still had the option to Propose -> Marriage. Is this supposed to happen?

Crap, it shouldn't. Did you do the "Bella fix"? I suppose you did. It should take care about that little mess too. I'll check it out now with that version and with final version and get back to you.

ETA - Thanks Kalina, they do indeed have the option to propose to one another in both the old version and the supposed 'final' version which I'm uploading (downloading?) now. Back to drawing board...

I'm pretty sure the file currently on MegaUpload is still the old version. I downloaded it and looked in the archive, and the most recently updated files inside are from Feb 6th.

Edit: Also now I see that the download link is no longer valid. Did you delete the file to try and re-upload it again?

Yep, I got the file first :D and saw that it's old so I took it down. Plus there's this Bella problem which I'm looking into now.

ETA - Ok, I don't know what to do with Bella. They weren't set as spouses in sim relationships in SimPE, so I set them. No go. Then I did the random thing that usually works when it comes to maxian things - removed all existing relationships and family ties and made new, exact same ones  ::) (except set as spouses) No go... I ran out of ideas. To recap, their family tree is correct, they're set as married/joined in relationship panel as Kalina said, memories are correct, but the option to propose is still there for both of them. If it makes any difference, they can't use the arch. I'm lost and I'm off to bed definitely.

OK, I went back into SimPE, opened Sim Relations on the left and found the relationship of Mortimer Goth towards Bella Goth to the right. I set the Relation Type to "Spouses" and unchecked Engaged and Steady. Then I found the relationship of Bella Goth towards Mortimer Goth and did the same. The option to Propose -> Marriage went away, however now Mortimer can Encourage Bella...
I rarely open SimPE and if I do I always follow instructions, so I am not sure what any of this means. I suspect that the option to Propose -> Marriage was present because the Engaged flag was on. Initially I only set the Relation Type to "Spouses" and this did not help.

Edit: Also, I deleted all business districts and the Sims from them ended up in the Bin as described earlier in the thread.

I checked a random couple, aged one spouse to elder, he could encourage his wife, so I figured it's normal behaviour, huh? So I did the same thing you did as it's apparently normal. And that's it. Thanks for reporting and solving the problem!

Megaupload is still giving me 'upload finished' within seconds even though there's not a single file up there. I have no idea what that stupid thing does. So I resorted to splitting files and upping it to Mediafire. Will bump the thread later with a link (links?). Thanks all for your patience  ::)


From what I gathered, perhaps it would still be safest to leave at least one shopping district attached. But maybe that's just me being paranoid.

From what HP said in her thread, you shouldn't add any more shopping districts.  I'm not quite sure if that would change in your cleaned up version or not, but I'd leave one just to be safe as well.

Yes, I don't see why would it change in this one. I suppose it's the merging process that makes it so - adding another district would mess up some id numbers of existing districts. Or something.

Aaand here it is!

*snipped links to avoid confussion*

Once you download all 3 parts, open part1 and extract it to your documents/EA Games/Neighborhoods. (Check if you already have N001 in it, if you do move it somewhere safe if needed).

No fanfare or big anouncements yet, I can't write up the full description right now. I believe people who were following this thread know what's been changed and all. Please report any weirdness you might notice.

Double posting on purpose. I take that the lack of comments since yesterday means that nobody's game blew up :D

Uber-Mega Description:

One last time, this is a clean and fixed HystericalParoxysm's Uber-Megahood (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=301194). I'm not going to keep updating it, I promise, even if there's something horribly wrong with it. As far as I'm concerned, it's as perfect as it gets. Above all, this is the only Megahood without corrupt memories (except the ones corrupted "by default").

Unfortunately, M&G STUFF PACK IS REQUIRED! If you don't have it, the hood just won't show up. I'm very sorry about that, but I haven't thought about sharing when I first started cleaning it.
Also, REQUIRES ALL EPS EXCEPT UNI AND NL! That means Pets and BV are required, as the bin families from those packs are included too* (Kat and Kim families from Occupied Lot Bin are NOT included, so you can add them yourself where you want them).  There's a possibility you could safely play this hood without those two EPs, I'm still in the process of testing it.
*You won't get any duplicate bin families no matter what templates you have installed.

No fiddling with SimPE this time, just extract the file to Neighborhoods folder and start playing!

Download:

Cleanerhood.part1.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?2xndhyg2fef)

Cleanerhood.part2.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?nlkk1wk1gfz)

Cleanerhood.part3.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/?dc245kw0vyg)

Installation instructions:

If you already have a N001 folder in C:\Documents and Settings\<your name here>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods, move it somewhere safe, if you need it. If you don't, delete it.

Once you got all 3 parts downloaded, open Cleanerhood.part1.rar and extract it to C:\Documents and Settings\<your name here>\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods. (All 3 parts will automatically extract there).

Changes made to HP's original hood:

While your files download, you can take the time to read what you're getting.

- Neighborhood is renamed back to N001, because Pescado says that cloning a neighborhood is a VBT (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13364.0.html). If you wish to play original Pleasantview and this hood at the same time, you can rename it to whatever you want (using a batch-rename utility). See Tips at the end of post.

- Around 360 random townies and NPCs are Deleted 2 (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6205.0.html), along with their orphaned family instances and clothing collections! I also deleted broken duplicates of Skip Broke, Darleen Dreamer, Michael Bachelor and Nervous Subject. The only trace of unplayables left are townies/NPCs known by playable sims (Crystal Vu, Abhijeet Cho, Kaylynn Langerak, Gordon King, Meredith Lillard, Phoebe Adams and Frances McCullough). Strangetown Bella "The Clone" Goth and 5 Bluewater employees are NOT included, but I have them all extracted if anyone wants to add them. The real Bella Goth is in the sim bin, see below. All the ancestors are untouched (except above mentioned duplicates).

- All memories fixed! If you ever attempted to wipe corrupt memories with Lot Debugger in ANY Megahood, you certainly noticed that almost all of sims' memories get wiped. This is the consequence of merging process itself - somehow, characters' GUIDs change which results in wrong Memory $Subjects. In other words, the memory looks just fine (it points to right name) but in fact it isn't (it points to wrong number). In this hood, "default" corrupted memories are still present in 3 base hoods - usually 5 per adult sim (pointing to dead broken relatives - 3 toddler skills, 2 deaths). You can easily wipe them with Lot Debugger if you wish. In short, in this hood, you can wipe corrupt memories without fear that entire sim lives will get erased.
While doing all this, I figured I might as well fix the maxian stupid along the way. The examples are too numerous to list. Some well known examples would be the Broke family remembering Skip died before Beau was born, yet Skip's the father of Brandi's unborn child. Or all death memories in Riverblossom Hills are green. Or all Desideratians have one memory too much - a memory of growing up to toddler. All these are fixed, and much much more! My personal favorite are the new job memories in Desiderata Valley and Belladonna - they now correctly show career icon (instead of memory owner's picture), just like in all other hoods.

- All existing pregnancies "refreshed", because Pescado says that mega-merging hoods results in invalid pregnancy tokens (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,13479.msg383659.html#msg383659) (I suspect, for the same reason memories get corrupt). You won't even notice that the pregnancies has been fiddled with (unlike the previous version, preggos now have correct job levels). Additionally, you won't get the Brandi clone, cause she's really pregnant with Skip now!

- Broken Family Ties in Desiderata Valley and Belladonna Cove have been reattached! (I haven't noticed anything else wrong with Family Ties, but if you do, let me know. It can be easily fixed without me uploading the whole hood again.)

- Bella Goth is in the sim bin now, 35000$ and an extra cheesy description included. As a townie she suffers from a rather nasty memory loss (she doesn't loose all of her memories like a normal townie). I made her not remember anything after the abduction. If you don't like it, I'm sorry. The "real" Pleasantview Bella doesn't even have memories, and I believe Megahood Bella's memories are the work of SaraMK.

- All the neighborhood and family albums fixed. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they will work for you, so far it seems random. At the very least, you should get working individual family albums in 3 base hoods, which were not present in HP's hood.

- Various other small changes, not particularly important. I will make a full list of it eventually and attach it to this post...

Known Issues:
(critical ones in cursive, none so far)

- Tessa Ramirez and Oberon Gossamer have blank wants and fears. Also, Tessa has no DNA to start with. I tested extensivelly and lurked around MATY and it doesn't seem critical. Correct DNA generated for Tessa and she spawned normally. Wants and fears appear over time, as those two sims start doing things. You can accelerate this process by using Lot Debugger's "Wants > Reroll". Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.

- Sarah Crittur (the dog) delivers immediately when you move her in somewhere. This is due to the way pregnancy tokens are set up (or my inability to understand how pregnancy tokens are set up :) ) - when I changed the token's raw data numbers to match the original, the pregnancy token turned into a gossip about a dead Veronavillian. So I figured it's best to leave it as is. She'll still have 3 puppies with Danny as the father as expected.

(Other issues from previous versions have been fixed. Please report any weirdness you might encounter. As I said, I'm NOT going to deal with this hood any more but I do mean to play it eventually and I'd like to hear your experiences, for my own sake, and for the sake of downloaders).

Some tips:

- Do not attempt to add another shopping district to this hood, EVER! You may however delete shopping districts if you want - sims living in them will appear in the bin. The lots are what actually makes this hood so big, so it might be a good idea to do this if you're on a low-end machine or you lack disk space. From what I gathered it's still best to leave at least one shopping district. Besides, where else would you move all those families. Again, you cannot add a shopping district even if you delete some. You can safely add downtowns, universities and vacation destinations, but do use empty/clean templates, 'cause hood is already huge as it is.

- I named the hood N001 on purpose. You shouldn't have cloned hoods in your Neighborhoods folder at the same time. That means, having Pleasantview and HP's Megahoods in your Neighborhoods folder simultaneously is a potential VBT. If you play original Pleasantview, or any clone of Pleasantview, (or any other hood named N001 perhaps?), but you still want this hood, I suggest getting AnyGameStarter, or playing on a different Windows account, or simply switching the folders in and out of your documents/EA Games/Neighborhoods. But it's your game and all, and if you think this is just paranoid, use a batch-renaming utility to rename N001 to a higher number (for batch-renaming I simply use Windows Commander's "File > Multi-Rename Tool"). Remember, you don't rename just the folder, but also everything in it.

- You don't really need many townies with this much playables, but some will simply have to generate. Use norespawn hacks to control the population.

Thank yous (in chronological order, I guess):

- SaraMK, who wrote the hood-merging tutorial and started the whole trend.

- HystericalParoxysm, whose hood I shamelessly stole and edited.

- My LJ friends for checking things out for me, letting me know about things I didn't know, asking me to upload this and overall being awesome. Special thanks to phoenix-daisy/Tamha and engram_au. Thank you both for providing tons of feedback and information. Bit of Tamha's work is actually included in this hood, 'cause I was unable to do it myself.

- Lots of baaas to MATYians who know all the answers and did not poke me with pointy sticks! :D Special thanks (and apologies) to Mootilda who I bugged for nothing, and Kalina who saved the day by discovering and resolving yet another Bella problem. The first thing I'll do when I start playing is killing the bitch. [/oscar mode]

Baaaa.

No seriously, the hood is working good for me so far :)

I'm glad this is finished and ready to go! Thanks for the nod, too, Mix. You did put a lot of work into this before I even heard of it (and you saved me from making my own!), so I'm glad I was able to help some towards making this cleaner and work better.  ;D

Going to download this one last time, and start moving some stuff around for my personal backup (mostly removing some of the shopping districts, lol).

Been nice working with you on finishing this up.  :)

Thanks a lot for the hood!
Oberon's wants appeared when I sent him on a date (I tried the Lot Debugger, but for some reason it did not work). Everything else works really well.  :)

Yay, that's very good to hear! Thanks for the feedback and for the support, all. This is a sort of thing where stuff are likely to go wrong much afterwards, so do report any kind of bork, whenever. Hope you have fun!

MixReality, you ought to copy-pasta the post with the hood download in to the first post. And thanks for your hard work, although I've already told ya that  :-*

I was trying to install this, and the second part gave an error. I did try redownloading, got the same one.

Extracting N001\Lots\N001_Lot124.package    Error: CRC mismatch in file "N001\Lots\N001_Lot124.package" in the archive "C:\Users\Public\Downloads\sims\Cleanerhood_Final.part2.rar"


Help, please?

I'm sorry, I can't suggest anything other than redownloading again :| This time try deleting every trace of part2.rar you've downloaded previously. The only other thing that comes to mind is that it could be a Vista problem, of which I know nothing about. It's probably nothing anyway, 'cause nobody reported any problem with the download. Also, did you use WinRar, or 7z, or? Did you attempt to extract part1.rar only, or other parts as well?

I just downloaded all three parts from here first and used Izarc to extract them. The extraction failed on Part 2 with the corruption of Lot 24.

So, I deleted all three parts I downloaded from here and went to your site to download the other set of three parts and encountered the same problem with Lot 24. It is just that lot that's become corrupted.

I've tried several times with no success. The Part 2 file is corrupted.

I can only hazard a guess that they had no problems because they already have all three parts from before this set was uploaded in the post a few posts above and not in the OP.

Thank you and Tamha (and others involved) for doing this fantastic job with the project. Really appreciate the time, patience and effort put into this idea similar to HP's. I only hope that the Lot 24 issue can be resolved if somebody is able to. I am not sure what Lot 24 is exactly.

I downloaded the Megahood this evening and installed it.  The extraction seemed to work fine and I was able to load the neighborhood and attach the UNIs, downtown and vacation districts just fine. 

I did notice that Jessica Peterson and her trailer park (from BDC) lot was placed behind the Goth house in the Pleasantview neighborhood and behind the lot was a light blue square.  I attempted to add the lot back to the Bin and the game hung.  Was Jessica placed there for a reason and I should have left her there?  I reviewed the thread and didn't see any mention of her.

Here's a picture of the lot and the blue square, if it helps.

(http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv204/catbatsimsthings2/petersonbluesquare.jpg)

Thank you for doing this.  I sure it was/has been a lot of work for you.

Woow, and here I was thinking everything is working smoothly!


It's the same three parts, same links. The finished version only comes in those same three parts linked both here and on my LJ (previous versions were in a single big fat file). So it's not that, I haven't updated the three-part file, ever. When Tansi reported a problem today, I downloaded part2 to check it out. Hood installed without problem (with WinRar).

Anyway, because there are multiple reports of the same mess, I'll reupload the part2, but not untill this time tomorrow 'cause I'm in a bit of a rush. You might try extracting with WinRar to see if it works.

Also, Tansi reported Lot124 is corrupted, and you that it's Lot24. Could either of you check it out again (maybe someone made a typo, maybe it's the same lot).


Now, that's really worrying! I didn't move any lots, so the trailer park should not be there, with or without the blue square, heh. Again, it'll have to wait a bit, currently I have no idea how could that happen. Only thing that comes to mind is that lot numbers got mixed up upon adding colleges and such (which of course, shouldn't happen). Or it's the dreaded lot 24/124...

Is it possible that the part2 file got corrupted after the uploading and after being fine online for some time? Do these things happen? If so, a simple reupload will do, but if not... there'll be more of me asking for some awesome help.

If you mean when I added the other districts, then no...the lot was there when I first loaded the neighborhood up and before I added anything.  I hope that makes sense and/or is helpful for you.

Yes, that's what I meant. Well, that's good, I suppose. Of course, I still have no idea what the problem is, but adding other subhoods is ruled out. Thanks!

Also, the trailer park is NOT Lot24 or Lot124. So, that's ruled out too  ::)

ETA - I loaded the game (with the hood freshly installed earlier today, with the freshly downloaded part2) and there's nothing behind the Goth's house, and the trailer park is where it should be. So I can't reproduce the problem. I haven't check all the subhoods for missplaced lots, though (tomorrow...).

I don't even know what additional info should I ask for, really. There's a massive LotAdjuster related thread on MTS2 regarding Lot placement and such, so I'll be heading over there, but it will have to wait, I *really* should be studying right now. Or sleeping. But this is so much fun! *sigh*

By the way, Lot24 is a Pleasantview lot that looks like Calliente and Lothario's house*, and Lot124 is a Riverblossom lot, so it's definitely unrelated.

*those houses are in front of Goth house, not behind it.

Izarc reported Lot 24 as corrupted and gave me the option to exit the procedure to extract the file.

That's no problem waiting until Part 2 is re-uploaded because I think it is worth the wait to get this gem.

Looking at that picture, looks like 2 or three lots were squashed together behind the Goths' house AND facing the wrong direction with the mailbox and garbage can away from the street, and I thought the Goths' house (if left intact and not moved elsewhere in PV) was sitting in the middle of a large block in PV with no streets on either side.

Winzip actually. I know, I know.. it's just I've had it since it first came out many years back :)

I'll make sure all traces are gone and try it with WinRAR then. The first one did install fine, it seems to be just the second. Thanks!

ChaavikYes, I believe the Goth house sits in a large block without streets on the sides of the house.  There is normally only one other Maxis premade house next door to the Goth's and that is it.

I will delete the Megahood and redownload and check out the Calliente and Lothario lots, Riverblossom, and the Peterson trailor.  I will post what I find tonight.

(Good point Chaavik - the trailer park in Catbat's pic does face the wrong direction which I suspect is extremely Bad. The Goth house seems to be correctly placed as far as I remember, though).

Just a quickie solution for Catbat and anyone else having missplaced lots (God, I hope it's not a common problem). Apparently something very similar happened to HP's first merged hood (prior to AL) - a community lot in Desiderata (Gustav's Grocery) was missing (the actual structure was missing but the description was there) and there was a blue square involved. The solution was buldozing the lot and replacing it with a copy of original Gustav's Grocery.

In this particular case:
- Evict Jessica Peterson
- Buldoze the damned trailer park in Pleasantview
- The trailer park is already located in the lot bin (as are all AL apartment lots) so just put it where it's supposed to be (crappy part of Belladonna - those crappy lots and deco around it are tightly placed so I guess there's only one possible place where the trailer park can fit, I'll provide pics if needed).
- Move Jessica in (pink trailer at the back, facing the street). Use 'rent furnished' option, either with the cheat or Pescado's hack.

That should cover it. If you already deleted Maxis-made lots from the lot bin, move entire LotCatalog folder from My Documents\Ea Games\The Sims 2 to desktop. Load the game and those lots will regenerate. Once you've done with placing the trailer park, delete the newly generated LotCatalog folder and move your LotCatalog folder back in.

Or, just try reinstalling the hood? If you haven't played much, that is. I'm very curious if something perhaps went wrong with the installation. Does anyone else have problems with missplaced lots?

Oh and part2 is not reuploaded yet.

-----

ETA:


Just to get this out of the way. You only extract part1.rar - stuff from all 3 parts will be automatically extracted then. And I suppose all 3 parts should be in same location while extracting (like, your desktop).

Just poking my nose in to say I think this may be their problem. I didn't realize that I only had to extract part1 at first and tried to
extract all three. You end up with multiple copies of stuff. I always extract to some alternate location before I place things into
my game, and when I looked at what had been extracted, I knew I had done it wrong. I deleted those extracted files and extracted
part1 only. Everything extracted fine then and I just moved the neighborhood into my game.

ETA: Oh, and it works really well, btw. I have been enjoying playing this with clean templates installed. I made several of the simbin and
Maxis families into townies :)

Oh I sincerelly hope it's just that. It could also be that archiving utilities other than WinRar don't handle files split with WinRar very well. I downloaded part2 yesterday, used part1 and part3 from my hard drive to install the hood. It worked. Today I downloaded part1 and used part2 and part3f from my hard drive. It worked again.

I also don't have their problems, but I use WinRAR.  There was no problem with Lot 24/124 being extracted, and Jessica Peterson's trailer is exactly where it should be, in BellaDonna Cove, and not behind the Goth House.

Unhelpful I know, but at least it works for some people...

The hood worked perfectly for me - though I didn't keep all the sub-hoods, I never had a problem before I got rid of them.

Actually theangelofdarkness, it's really helpful, both your reply and BattyCoda's and BlueSoups! This is starting to look more and more like an archiving utility problem to me.

Question time:

BattyCoda:


What's your extracting utility of choice? :) I couldn't even replicate the same thing with WinRar. I tried installing all 3 parts at once (with WinRar, again) and everything was fine again - no errors, no missplaced lots.

Catbat:

Perhaps your problem too could be due to extraction utility. What were you using to extract the files?

- - - - -

I didn't test other extracting programs, as I'd like to avoid installing more software. If there are some that run straight from .exe file, feel free to suggest and I'll give it a try.

If the problem's really what I think it is, then reuploading part2 wouldn't do any good for non-WinRar users. I could use something else to split the file, and upload the new set of parts, but what should I use exactly? Or you guys could get WinRar, it's a good thing :) (especially compared to WinZip, and I must admit I never heard of Izarc).

I used WinRAR to extract the files.

I redownloaded the Megahood this afternoon, extracted it without issue, and found the same Peterson lot broken.  So, I evicted Jessica (which was successful) and then attempted to bulldoze the lot.  The game hung and I exited the game.  I then removed all neighborhoods, except for the Megahood out of my neighborhoods folder, including the Maxis EP 'hoods.  I then loaded the Megahood and the trailer park and blue square were gone.  I then went to BDC and saw that the trailer park was there, but it was unoccupied.  So, I moved that lot to the Bin and attempted to place the occupied lot and found this:

(http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv204/catbatsimsthings2/borkedlotpeterson.jpg)

This seems to be the only problem that I've found, so far.  Could this lot just be deleted and Jessica written off as a loss?

ETA:

Nevermind...I am blind.

I suggest trying to load the neighborhood with all other neighborhoods removed to start with, so that there isn't any potential conflict with the real Belladonna Cove or other pre-made EAxis hoods.

I'll go load mine up, I used 7zip without errors, but I got on a different project and haven't loaded it up yet.

Yeah, that might be it. In the process of making this hood there were no maxis hoods in my game, so if there are some conflicts with the originals (btw, how could there be?, except with renamed Pleasantview) I'm not aware of any.

Tamha, yeah I suck.  I was only thinking of other Megahoods, not the individual ones.  I own that stupidity.

Anyway, evicted Jessica, bulldozed and put the lot and Jessica back in and it seems to work just fine so far.

I was just guessing that if the neighborhoods weren't there during the creation process, they may conflict. Besides, CU-MH is so big that I can't imagine wanting to even look at another 'hood while you're playing it!

But what is to tell the game to not use GUID x if the premade hood it's already used in isn't there when it's made?

Mine loaded up fine, nothing misplaced, even all the stories are intact!

ETA: even before I read about the problems with cloning I took to only loading one hood in my game at a time, so it's a habit I'm already in. Still have them all renamed to different numbers so I can store them all in the same folder when I'm not playing them.

It's not a stupidity actually, and if it is, I own that same stupidity. Megahood shouldn't conflict with other original hoods as long as they are subhoods of a megahood. My sentences suck. Real Belladonna shouldn't conflict with Megahood Belladonna, because Megahood Belladonna is just a subhood. A fake one, but still a subhood. But Megahood itself (a Pleasantview with bunch of subhoods really) WILL conflict with original Pleasantview, even if either of the two Pleasantviews is renamed (which is why I renamed it back to N001 and not a higher number). That's my understanding of that neighborhood cloning thread linked in the OP, but I'm still a noob after all. You (Catbat) didn't do anything stupid, 'cause there's nothing in the OP about removing original hoods prior to installing.

Glad you got it sorted out (again, thank you Tamha! :D) So, the conclusion is, this hood might not work well with any original hood. I shall update the OP with that piece of info.

You are so sweet, Mixreality.  You have way too much patience.

Thank you for all you work in this Megahood and to everyone else who posted help and suggestions.

Can't wait to see how this plays tonight.

Okay, I downloaded and installed WinRAR to try extracting all 3 Parts. I messed around with the functions and realized it was the wizard tool that automatically installed all three into the same folder. So far, with WinRAR, no errors popped up during the extraction.

Izarc doesn't have a wizard tool that would do what WinRAR does with the wizard tool. I always install manually, so that may be what happened when I attempted to do with all 3 Parts.

I will post anything if the neighborhood looks fine later tonight.

Shit, I was uploading part2 (just in case) to a subfolder on my Mediafire and only when it finished (after like couple of hours) it reported that the file already exists on my account and removed the new part2. I didn't want to remove the old part2.rar because I'm convinced it's not corrupted, and that there's a greater possibility that it'll get corrupt on my questionable hard drive than online. If the file does need to be reuploaded, it will be tomorrow, again  ::)


Hee, thanks! :D I wouldn't call it patience though, but rather taking every opportunity to leave my studying aside. It's horribly boring.

Chaavik, wonderful! I hope everything goes well. Btw, I never actually used the Wizard, just opening the archive (part1.rar in this case) and clicking 'Extract to'. There's also a simple right-click > 'extract to' (or something) but I removed the context menus so I'm not sure of the exact wording of the function. Attempting to extract all 3 at once with WinRar still works. Even extracting all 3 one by one works too (it just prompts you to overwrite the files).

In my case, when I extracted Part 1, it was just Part 1. The other two Parts weren't automatically extracted. But the Wizard does solve that problem by extracting all 3 Parts and putting them into the same folder almost like what was described in your post with the files and information about installing them. There was some overwriting, but not a lot.

At least, it works for me now using WinRAR.

I'm backing up my Neighborhoods folder as we speak.

Once again, many thanks to you and others for doing this project.

I played with Lothario and Caliente for a while and there were no issues.  I did notice after taking Lothario to a community lot in Belladonna Cove (the art museum)  there was a gravestone next to the pay phone.  The name the grave gave was Olivia Reilly.  I can't remember a family with this person, but I haven't played BDC much.

Sorry to be so late replying, but I use 7zip for all types of compressed files.

Glad everyone is getting this to work for them. ;)

She was from BDC. I heard she was from one of the families who lived in an apartment, and that I heard her tombstone was found on a random community lot.

I am curious about which Sim knew her well enough to revive her from the grave.

Anyways, I am back to say that WinRAR did the trick by extracting all three parts and putting them together as N001 via the wizard tool. I installed the new neighborhood and checked each 'hood out carefully. No lots were misplaced, no families were missing and no odd object placements were found. The new 'hood looked fine. And Gustav's Grocery is where it should be and is not blue like in HP's version.

Thumbs up for the great job.

Really?  That was Maxis' doing?  I have had AL for a while, but never really looked at all the goings-on at BDC.  Seems weird to dump a random gravestone on a random community lot.   

Yay, I'm glad it was just the archiving utility! Chaavik, that Wizard thing is quite strange, I never even used it, and I haven't changed any WinRar settings (except for context menus), but I'm glad you got that sorted out. Thank you all for the feedback you provided! So I guess WinRar is not that perfect after all, but at least it (and 7-Zip) work.

(Btw, Gustav's Grocery always worked in this hood, I didn't fix anything. It was blue in HP's previous hood, without Belladonna attached)

Olivia Riley - that sounds strange, but I don't think it's dangerous. There's her family (husband Timothy and little daughter Sally) in one of the apartment buildings. Cho family lives in the same building (another widow, Vivian, and her daughter Etsu) and Timothy Riley and Vivian Cho usually hook up immediately. I must admit I never really played, and I don't know does Olivia Riley's gravestone even exist in original Belladonna. But I do know that when a sim dies in appartment, their gravestone is automatically teleported to a random community lot. There's a hack at MTS2 that lets you choose the community lot in which you'd like a gravestone to appear (here (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=316426)).
If there is no Olivia gravestone in original Belladonna, perhaps fixing bad apartment residences with Lot Debugger 'produced' her gravestone, which was then teleported to a random lot, in your case the Museum. I don't think that should cause problems.

Gustav's Grocery was blue in HP's 'hood, and I had to copy that lot from my partner's computer (she has up to FT) over to mine when I used HP's 'hood in the past.

I played the 'hood the other day and thought it was a well-done job. ;)

No, I meant it was blue in HP's Megahood (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=278072), but it always worked ok in HP's UBER-Megahood (http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?t=301194). Not of particular importance, yes, I just didn't want to take credit for something I had nothing to do with.

Glad to hear it's working properly!

Oh, and Olivia Riley's thombstone is at the museum by default, apparently. Proof (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,12828.msg370457.html#msg370457). Weird.

I've been playing the Megahood for maybe 6 days now, and I haven't run across any problems.  I've spent a lot of time on the UNI areas, and no problems.  For some reason, Sim State seems emptier than I remember, but I couldn't remember who I thought was missing. 

Quick question...should I be able to resurrect Michael or Skip?   Or should they be left dead?  I didn't see anything in this thread about rather or not to leave them dead.

Either way, thank you again for this.  It's really nice to have been playing the hood for so long and to ONLY have 988 character files!

Ah, that's very good to hear! Sim State (or any other college, downtown or vacation dest) doesn't have anything to do with this. Actually, on second thought, the vacation stealth hood is probably affected - you won't get any tourist families (not locals but tourists) if you don't make them yourself. Which is a good thing IMO. But anyway, Sim State is deffinitely not affected. Just in case, here's a list of Sim State Students (http://www.geocities.com/saramkirk/maxis_sims/index.html) (and other colleges and base hoods).

Now, about resurrecting. I'd strongly suggest not to, but it's your game and all. Everything might be just fine, but it also might not be, I really don't know. I glanced at Skip, Michael and Darleen's character in SimPE. Skip looks just fine to me. Darleen seems fine but she's missing a DNA instance (which might be fine too, little Tessa Ramirez also doesn't have a DNA and she breeds just fine).
Michael seems messy. First of all, he's unlinked. You'll have to relink him prior to resurrecting, I think (there are threads around here that deal specifficaly with raising the unlinked dead). Relinking is easy - open his char file in SimPE. On the 'Other' tab, there's a little 'Misc' section. Change 'Unlinked' value from 0x0001 to 0x0000. That should do it. BUT he doesn't have memories, he's an elder with 100 days more to live and he also doesn't have a DNA.
Whatever you decide to do, you should back up than test if something will blow up after resurrection.

Nah, I am not anywhere near awesome enough to trust my skills, or lack there of, in SimPE.  But thank you for the info either way.  The dead will remain dead.

One last thank you for all this.  It has been really fun to play.

I have downloaded and played the clean and fixed Uber-Megahood.  I have had no problems playing it and don't expect too.  It's great no complaints here. :)

That's very good to hear!

But, uhm, I just discovered something, nothing critical though.

In previous megahoods there was a problem with 'Crappy GUID' error message. Well, it's present here too. Yes, I made a couple of notes for myself in this thread to test that specifficaly, but I kind of didn't :D Until now. Two sims that were reported to be affected are Bianca Monty and Jill Smith, and yes, they're affected in this hood too (and there could be more). I believe from what I read the problem will only show if you have 'warmthfixes' in your downloads and you put a macrotacticts box on an affected lot (but the problem is not caused by those, those stuff just show it).

The problem is - you get the Crappy GUID error message when you hover over affected sim or any of Pescado's controllers on lot. (Don't know what happens if you play with testing cheats off).

To solve it - direct your sim to change to Everyday (even though he/she already is in everyday; the game doesn't think so). Simple as that.

Don't know if this has already been  said but I have been trying to resurrect people like Nestor Caliente and Nicolo Lothario and although their family tree is still intact their entry in the neighbourhood isn't showing up?.
Is this intentional?

Vincent

What exactly do you mean by 'their entry in the neighborhood isn't showing up'?

In any case, the dead should be left alone. They're made broken and I didn't do anything to fix them because in a lot of cases it is impossible, and there's no point in fixing some and not fixing everything.

Those two dead guys that you wanted to resurrect are missing character data, they cannot be fixed, resurrected or exported in any way. Trust me, I've searched all over the place, 'cause I really wanted to export some of the premade dead. Sims that have no character data actually do not exist at all. There's only an avatar, there is no sim. There's a whole lot of dead sims without character data in 3 base game hoods. Maxis made it that way, and I nobody can do anything about it.

Even if you're able to resurrect a sim, they'll most likely be a mess. For instance, sims from Olive Specter's graveyard - I read that there were females in male bodies, children in adult bodies and so on... Your best bet is to leave everyone to rest in peace :)

My problem is that I resurrected these sims in the basegame neighbourhoods. but I can't in the megahood
There are heaps with this problem
all the EP neighborhoods after basegame their isn't a problem.
Any ideas?,
Vincent

Could you share how on earth did you manage to do that and how did those sim behaved? I checked out original Pleasantview template in SimPE. Nestor Caliente and Nicolo Lothario don't have character data. Pretty much all the dead don't have character data. They practically do not exist.

I can't be bothered to actually test the resurrection thing in game, 'cause I really don't think such a thing is possible.

I'm having problems with part2 and part3 I used 7zip (but so far everything else is great)

in part 1 Lot124 and Lot93 are fine
in part 2 Lot124 and Lot93 are bad/broken files (won't extract) (when I opened them in simPE they were empty)
in part 3 Lot93 is bad/broken file (won't extract) (when I opened this lot in simPE it was empty)

Lot124 is an empty lot in Veronaville
Lot93 is Wan family lot in Riverblossom Hills (when I loaded Riverblossom Hills the Wan family lot is empty and the sims are on the lot (I went in and exited without saving)
I just replaced the bad files with the good files and i'm going to check if it helped or broke the game

Edit: I just loaded the game and the Wan family seems finr and the house showed up in the neighbohood view

Where you extracting all 3 parts one by one, or only the part1? Seems that different users have different experiences using the same extracting techniques, which is weird. I'm trying to figure out what's the best possible way of extracting the files.

Just a quick note and i'm not sure if this has been mentioned before but have you noticed that the megahood lacks those little popup bubbles that appear at the very beginning of a premade sims story eg. The game suggesting Tank Grunt should get a military job when you go into the grunt house for the first time
Its a non issue and I just wanted to point it out

Vincent

I am pretty sure that all megahoods are like that, probably a side affect of the merging process.

No one ever reversed the popup script format, and besides, they are useless. Anyone who has the level of understanding needed to install and use a megahood doesn't need to be told what to do. :P

The script remains intact for whatever 'hood you use as the base (usually Pleasantview, but I've made one with Strangetown, too), but disappear for all the ones added as downtowns/shopping districts. This means events like Vidcund's abduction or the burglary at the Caliente house won't happen, either.

I believe the little scenarios don't work in Cleanerhood's Pview either. They probably worked in original HP's hood, but I killed them somehow :) By now, we all know what's supposed to happen anyway.

There's this hood (http://n99forumpaks.djssims.com/index.php?category=2&subcat=31) at Neighborhood 99. I'm not really sure if it's the same thing at all, but it does look like it's possible to create custom scenarios.

I have some kind of problem. I don't know if it's because of me or not.
I started to play your hood and wanted to resurrect the Tricous from downtown. I used insim to do it. I got them resurrected, but when checking their memories, I noticed they all got memories of the other family members dying and getting an inheritance from little Beau Broke (I didn't play the Brokes before). I tried to remove those memoires using the lotdebugger but for some reason they stayed.
I've started over because I didn't really know what problems would come from it. I just thought you'd like to know.
Thanks for all the work you have done on this hood, you totally rock!

It's unrelated, I had the exact same thing happened years ago. Their death tokens are broken.

I started working on a downtown template with the Tricous and Rainelle Neengia living and in the sim bin. It never got finished. If I do finish it eventually, those sims would have blank wants and fears (they'll appear eventually) and there would be no family descriptions 'cause I can't think of anything witty enough. Would you be interested in it? It's not a whole lot of work at all, but I'm lazy.

Ok, now, some problems started creeping out:

1. The Crappy GUID error message, described in post #85. I'm curious is this a Bad Thing.

2. Denise Jacquet threw a bunch of atraction related errors. Fix > Dead Romances with Lot Debugger solves the problem. I have a crapload of hacks, awesome and non-awesome alike, kitten killer included. I'm not sure if one of the hacks causes the errors or simply shows them. I'd like to know are 'Dead Romances' a Bad Thing.

3. User reported a problem with Johnny Smith getting married. Quote:

Johnny Smith was sent to college where he fell in love and got engaged to a girl there.  Well, he graduates gets to his new house and he can't marry his girl LOL nothing I did helped, propose marriage didn't even pop up.  So finally after enough tinkering with it I went through SimPE and changed it so he (and the girl) aren't engaged anymore.
She isn't playable she is just a random dormie.  When he had moved into his home and invited her over there was no option for Propose- Move in at all neither was there an option for marriage.

Has anyone else had something like this? It sounds vaguely familiar, I'll do some searching, but I'd like to know if anyone else had this sort of problem with this hood.

Very much so.  I was looking for this type of repacement a few days ago.

I'll try to have it up in a day or two.

crunk - It could be that. I can't answer the question, but I hope the user with the problem is following the thread.

I've had a similar issue with another dormie. Vidcund got his perfect match from the gypsy matchmaker, a YA the lucky old man. There was no move in option even after getting them in love and the relationship high. So I used Inges teleporter to move her in. She did not transition to adult. Even getting her a job and having her leave for work did not change her. As far as the info panel was concerned she was still a freshman. I just did not save, not knowing how to fix this. I probably should have played her for a few days to see if the issue would self correct, but didn't.
Vidcund gets to live without love......sad but that's life  ;)
I have yet to play anyone through Uni to see if this dormie issue is widespread or not.

If you don't have the option to ask a YA to move into the main hood, I would suggest going to your University and moving them into a lot there, making them a playable character. At that point you can choose to either have them finish college or drop out. :)

Yep, use Inge's cat teleporter, make the dormie selectable, then get her/him to drop out. When you get back to the main hood she/he will be waiting in the sim bin.

I am playing everyone in Uni at the moment (I merged all 3 unis so I have all the playables from each in SSU), getting them into the main hood, before I start playing in proper rotation. I have had no issues with move-out as yet. Mind you I haven't tried moving any dormies in with my freshly graduated sims yet and I won't find out for a while.

My personal experience is that any time someone reports inability to get a dormie to marry or move in, the first thing the troubleshooter should do is ask the name of the dormie.

Well, yeah. What was her name?

Why the name of the dormie?

Uhm, I don't know what's her name. I asked the poster was Johnny's giirl a playable, and he/she said she was just a random dormie.

Anette's problem tells me that even if the dormie was a playable, the dormie can't grow up.

But how could this be a Megahood problem. I pretty much did the thing in an AnyGame without UNI. If it only happens in this hood than it's obviously related, but I can't seem to figure out what could be the problem. I'll try to do some testing today and try to reproduce it.

Because it might not be a dormie. It could be a playable from the bin or anything.

I would be interesting if you or anyone fixed it, but I really don't want to bug anyone. I've started over and I will just let the Tricous and Rainelle rest in peace for now. I was thinking about removing the memories with Simpe, but I was afraid that my game would become a BFBVFS (or something like that). If you ever have the time and feel the need to fix the template, I will be downloading it  ;D

About that dormie that can't be married. Are there hacks involved? I've had the problem myself a while ago and I remember it was because of some outdated hacks.

With my problem.....I have no idea what the dormies name was, but she was just a random dormie not a playable. If I had done as Emma suggested and made her drop out and then moved her in it may have worked. We can assume I fail at useing the teleporter 'sigh'.
I have just run Jimmy Phoenix through Uni. He was able to move a dormie girlfriend in with him successfully back in Pleasantview. She dropped out and transitioned no problem. This was in my test account with only some hacks and cc, so perhaps Samethana is right and the issue is outdated hacks.
So don't worry about this on my account Mixreality, the Megahood is awesome and I'm very happy with it. I seldom have my sims marry dormies anyway. I just felt sorry for lonely old Vidcund. I should have known he'd be more trouble than he is worth!

The reason to ask the name of the dormie is to make sure it's not a Maxis-made playable YA, because a great many people seem to be unable to successfully identify them.

I'd like to move all my families to the main hood.  My ideal goal would be to move their houses as well.  Is there a way to safely do this, or should I just give up my dream and leave the houses behind?

Can't you use the stay-things shrub by Inge to keep the decor and furnishings as-is, then move the family out, move the lot to the bin, then place it in the main hood and move the family back in? I dunno if that would work.

I thought about that, but I'm too scared to put a home in the bin and reuse it.  So many rules and regulations to follow when it comes to keeping your game tidy.  I wish I lived in sim ignorance...then I could just PLAY instead of wondering if I'm doing things correctly.

Yeah, but look at it this way, if you know what borks stuff you can avoid it and not have to restart hoods unless you want to. ;)

Very true!  Less asplode = good.

It takes ages for me to reply, sorry about that  ::)

I wasn't able to reproduce the dormie problem. Johhny Smith went to La Fiesta Tech, found a girl, got engaged in junior year, graduated, moved to Pleasantview, and invited the girl - there were both 'Move in' and 'Marriage' option. I tested in a game with a shitload of hacks. Yes, not the right way to test stuff, but it was just a quickie, and it kind of convinced me that it is indeed a hack problem for you guys. Anette's test account experiment confirms it, thanks Anette!

Just to make sure - when you say a moved-in dormie drops out, you're actually saying he/she graduates, right? Johnny's girl had a graduation memory and I believe it has always been like that.

I did have a quirk which is related to inteen, I believe. I tried the marriage option first, they married allright, but the girl didn't move in and didn't grow up. Looks like a YA family feature of inteen to me, or a feature of god-knows-what hack I have inside. I reloaded without saving, picked the move-in option and everything was as expected - the girl moved in and grew up. They married afterwards fine.

Also, there was another known inteen issue - when I tried to send Johnny to college, he declared that he can't leave the little ones home alone. Sigh. Spawning entire household's biological clocks solves it.

This was probably the worst case of testing an issue, ever. I'm not very keen on playing through college in an unhacked game.


Try this tutorial (http://community.livejournal.com/thesims2/6049797.html). Basically, the builders use this technique to preserve otherwise unpreservable stuff (like magic ingredients) on a lot. It only saves the lot to the lot bin, remember to move out the families afterwards, then move them back in when you place the houses. How on earth are you going to cram all those houses in a single hood? :D You might want to leave at least one shopping district, just in case.

Samethana - I was going to do it for myself anyway, when I actually start playing this bloody hood :) It will be up by tomorrow definitely.

I'll be downloading then, so thanks in advance  ;D
I know what you mean about actually starting to play. I'm so anal about everything, every single house and sim must be made-over before I can start to play, and there's a lot of houses and sims in this hood  ::)

  Where there's a will, there's a way.  Actually, I planned on keeping Bluewater attached.  I ran across that tutorial yesterday and thought it looked like too damn much work, so I squashed my plans entirely.  Initially, I had thought that deleting the extra subhoods would cut down loading time on my individual lots, but a quick test run showed otherwise.  I might as well keep them and avoid the chaos.

On another note, I'm anxiously awaiting your new downtown template!  After I get that bugger attached I can finally start playing..very exciting.  I'm such a nerd.     

that is caused by her not knowing her husband is dead. In the normal Bluewater, if you teleport her dead husband to the Lot so you get the 'so and so died on another lot' message, it'll fix the problem. If I remember correctly, Denise and her son will also then get the memory of him dying.


---

For those people that love the idea of playing a Uber-Megahood but want to pick and choose what pre-mades are in it (a Mini-Megahood lol) - I packaged and cleaned every single pre-made family from all the Maxis/EAxis hoods.
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showtopic=1472

My friend Trif did all the 'extra pre-made bin families' and also teenified all the pre-made Uni students (handy if you want them but use clean Uni templates)
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showforum=193

---

I dislike how all the pre-mades look but still wanted the families so I gave them all plastic surgery and made it genetic.
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showtopic=1483

including all the 'extra bin pre-mades'
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showtopic=1501

 :)

Thanks Sleepycat! Yes, I noticed she had a fear of the dead husband cheating in every single incarnation of Bluewater I had. Senile old bag :D

And woow, that looks like a huge job and very useful! I never got far with playing the megahoods either, so I might help myself with some families if I fail at playing again!

I posted that half-assed Downtown attempt at the empty templates thread. Testers wanted! :)

  You are insane.  I'm so jealous!

Off to test the downtown..yay.  :)

your welcome  :)

yes, it was a huge job but I felt it was worth it, specially since I'd be sharing them with others. ;D  My versions that I gave plastic surgery to are being enjoyed more then the originals. ;) 

I tried playing HP's Megahood but couldn't stand the fugly!  I thought it'd be really nice to be able to have the pre-mades I liked, in any hood I wanted. Which led to me finally doing something about it.



LOL

Could you please explain to me how I can get rid of Bella Goth from Pleasantview without ruining any memories in your Uber-Megahood? I want to have Dina marry Mortimer before he dies and I noticed he is still married to Bella. I like keeping to Bella's story of disappearance. Can I just delete her, or do I need to fix some memories in SimPE? I have deleted Strangetown from the megahood, because I like to play that separately.

This doesn't have anything to do with your 'hood, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to make the Strangetown Bella have the same facial DNA as the Pleasantview Bella. (She just looks so generic in Strangetown.) As I said, my Pleasantview 'hood and Strangetown hood are separate.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Kill her or have them break up. Don't delete her.

Yep, just kill her off. Morty will perhaps get a little desperate, but he'll get over it :) Btw, when you delete Strangetown from a Megahood, the Strangetowners are not gone for good. They'll remain in the sim bin, as you've probably noticed. Don't delete them either. Kill them, townify them, whatever, just don't delete them.

As for your other question - the best way would probably be extracting Pleasantview Bella and copying her features to Strangetown Bella with Theo's Sim Surgery plugin for SimPE. It's on MATY somewhere, but I can't provide a link just now and I'm not really sure if it still works as intended (would like to know that too).

Good thing I didn't delete anyone.  :o  Thanks, guys.

I'm busy this weekend, but I'll let you know how it goes with Bella's surgery. I was under the impression that the sims had to be in the same neighborhood in order to use the sim surgery plugin. Maybe I overlooked something...It's been a long time.

Normally they do, but with this plugin, you can clone a sim straight from the package (so the archetype sim may simply be in your body shop bin). And here's the link! (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,3563.0.html) I guess it's outdated but it may work.

Okay. I have to get these kids to bed, but I plan to do this tomorrow. I went into SimPE and extracted the Pleasantview Bella with the sim surgery plugin. It went into the SavedSims folder just as it is supposed to and, theoretically, it should work.

I plan on making my own combined neighborhood, because I don't like Strangetown, Veronaville, Bella, or any other stray sims caused by deleting the neighborhoods. Has anyone shared any problems that need cleaned up in Pleasantview? I know Strangetown was pretty bad, but I'm probably only going to clean Pleasantview and use other's templates for my neighborhood. No sense in doing all that work again!

If you could warn me of any potential problems in Pleasantview, it would be most appreciated. Of course, I don't expect you to do it for me, so don't go to any trouble if you don't already have a list. I just thought you might have kept a record of changes.

Thanks! I'll try Bella tomorrow and share her if it works.

I hope I won't sound like "Don't do another megahood 'cause mine is so goddamn awesome!!!111". BUT - the merging process itself has some kind of flaw. You will end up with corrupt memories, no matter what. Every single merged hood has corrupt memories, even SaraMK's compact one (and I'm not talking about the 'default' corrupt memories of dead, unlinked relatives, but the memories of very much alive, perfectly unbroken sims). It *could* be just my unquestioned faith in Lot Debugger. So I wish someone would explain to me, please - why does Lot Debugger wipes memories that look perfectly fine? I'll provide SimPe screens of a corrupt and non-corrupt memory, if needed, 'cause I don't speak technical. I'd really like to know that, because I can't figure out how to make a Downtown template with living Tricous without corrupt memories (read more here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg423921.html#msg423921)).

Long story short - I took the time to un-corrupt all the memories that are not corrupt by default. You might as well take advantage of that. If I were you, I'd Delete 2 (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6205.0.html) all the unwanted sims out of this hood. If you've never done it before, it might sound scary, but it's not, really. It's even easier now when the batbox is updated to automatically kill all the relations of the sim-to-be-deleted, and you don't need to switch back and forth between the two versions of SimPe.

If you do decide to merge the hoods, unfortunately I never made a full list of changes. I keep everything in my head, which is incredibly stupid. Using clean templates should cover all the major maxian stupidities. The only thing I can remember was not cleaned, are the duplicates of Skip Broke, Michael Bachelor, Darleene Dreamer (and Nervous Subject in ST), which you'd need to Delete 2 (or not - they shouldn't cause any problems if left alone) and adjust their relatives' memories. Pleasantview Bella is also included and alive in cleaned Pleasantview template so you'd might want to delete her too. If I think of anything else, I'll nudge you.

Thanks! I'll just Delete 2 the ones I don't want then. I don't see any reason to go through all the trouble of joining a neighborhood, if I'm going to end up with more problems. I don't have enough knowledge to think I can clean it any better than you have. I'd probably drive myself crazy trying to make everything perfect.

The sims surgery tool works just fine and I have all expansions and stuff packs. Maybe it isn't outdated, after all. It's really easy to do if you care. There's not that much difference in her appearance. I just don't like her to look like other default sims. You just load the neighborhood that contains the Bella sim you wish to use. The Pleasantview Bella looks a bit different, while the Strangetown Bella has a default face.
1)  Open SimPE
2)  Load Pleasantview using the Neighborhood Browser.
3)  Go to the Tools menu and select Sim Surgery.
4)  Make sure the Uneditable box is checked, so that Bella is in the list. Pleasantview Bella is an uneditable sim apparently.
5)  Select Bella Goth from the list and load her into the Patient Sim box.
6)  Click Export at the top of the dialog box and save Bella Goth into the SavedSims folder by default.
7)  Start Sims 2.
8)  Load the neighborhood which contains the Bella Goth that you want to change.
9)  Go to Create Family and choose the cloned Bella Goth from the sim bin. It would be a good idea to name her something different so that you can tell them apart in SimPE. For example, I named my clone "Bella_face Goth".
10) You can leave her in the family bin and close the game.
11) Load your Bella neighborhood in SimPE.
12) Open the sim surgery plugin again.
13) Load Bella Goth as the Patient Sim and check Face only. The makeup and eyes are already the same. (I don't know if it is just a coincidence, but my test Bella had eyes that kept spinning upward every couple of seconds in game after I used the surgery plugin on her with both Face and Eyes options checked.)
14) Load Bella_face Goth as your archetype sim and hit [Surgery].
I think anyone can manage this if desired. The Pleasantview Bella looks similar to Cassandra. I don't know why they gave her a default face in Strangetown...
It appeared as if your Bella Goth already had the Pleasantview face, but the pictures in SimPE are small so I may be wrong. Did you resurrect the Pleasantview Bella, or did you put her in the family bin from the Strangetown townie pool? I was already in SimPE and ready to do the surgery and was too lazy to load the game and see if they already looked the same.

If you haven't noticed, I am a perfectionist...It's equally (or more) annoying to me! I hope I didn't seem ungrateful! Thank you so much for sharing your hard work and taking time to answer questions!

So you do infact need an extra Bella (archetype) in Strangetown  ??? Than the plugin doesn't work, its purpose is to avoid having dummy sims in neighborhoods. Oh well...


I suppose it's part of the 'ZOMG-aliens-took-Bella-and-cloned-her!!!' storyline  ::) Or a simple Maxis laziness, who knows...


Yes, she's the Pleasantview Bella. She's a living townie in clean Pleasantview template that HP used to make her Uber-Megahood (which I stole). I didn't want to leave her as a townie because of the stupid townie memory loss and other bugginess. I accidentally deleted Strangetown Bella and never bothered to get her back 'cause she's a stupid face 1 sim with nothing spectacular about her. She's easy to be added if one wants her, and I think most people don't want two Bellas running around. That would be incredibly annoying in this particular hood which has, like, 5 townies total, 2 of them would be Bellas.


No of course not! People have different plans for their games. I personally don't want any Bella in my hood and the first thing I'll do when I start playing (no, I didn't start yet...) is to plant her in Olive's garden :D

As it turns out, your Bella was already the Pleasantview one, so I didn't need the surgery. I just assumed that she would be the Strangetown Bella since that is the one that is already alive in the game, but I really just wasted my time.

You don't need to keep two Bellas. I just need the Bella that's already in Strangetown and the Pleasantview Bella to copy genetics from. After that, I should be able to dispose of the copy of Pleasantview Bella, right? She is just a body shop sim, hasn't moved into a household, and hasn't met anyone. The plugin extracted her correctly and can perform surgery, as long as the Patient sim and the Archetype sim are in the Sim Browser list. I don't see how the plugin could avoid this, since she has to be in the body shop bin to be editable in SimPE. If she's not in the bin or the neighborhood, then she can't be accessed in the sim browser. It's been that way as far back as I can remember. I like the export plugin! That's a nice addition. I don't understand why Pescado was complaining about it. He is obviously more awesome than me, so it might be safer to take his word for it.

Ah, ok.


It's this part that got me all confused (especially the bold part). :)


I thought you wanted to change the face of Bella in your original, separate Strangetown. Otherwise I would have told that Megahood Bella is the "real" Bella. Apparently I'm all confused :D Sorry about that, and the late reply. It's great that the plugin is working!

I think we were both confused.  ;D

You only have to use a clone if you want to use the looks of a sim that isn't already in the neighborhood of your Patient sim. The export plugin just takes their genetics, clothing, and makeup, and saves a copy of the sim in the sim bin for you. It seems like a good way to take your favorite spawn and start their lives over in a new neighborhood.

*bump* ;)

There's a new problem with this hood, and this is the only place where I can ask for help.

The problem is - multiple PT hacks with custom skintones do not work (custom skintones don't show up and the alien babies are the clones of human parents). The same particular hack DOES work in HP's original hood, so I messed it up myself somehow. The trouble is I don't have TS2 anymore and I can't check out anything myself. And another trouble is I haven't even touched anything genetic while "cleaning" the hood up. I have absolutely no idea what could possibly go wrong. I read a tutorial on making multiple PT hack and it did not help. The one and only thing I did that could be even remotely related to this problem is messing with family instance numbers (in order to clean up empty families and put Bella in the bin).

More details:

- The problem is reported by more than one person (two, to be precise :) );

- It was well tested, on new CAS sims and on existing sims, and with more than one multi-PT hacks (neither worked);

- Custom skintones in general (non-alien) are working fine; (The geneticized custom skintones were not specifically tested, though. The multiple PT hack with custom skintones does not work when the custom skintones are geneticized. Did anyone have problems with normal geneticized skintones in this hood?)

- I repeat, the hack works fine in other hoods, and in HP's original hood.

- Here's a link to LJ entry where problem is reported. (http://community.livejournal.com/thesims2/6602882.html)
 
My main question is - what could possibly go wrong? I'm fully aware that I am the one who should know the exact steps I took with this hood, but I'm not exactly sure anymore. Again, the possibly related thing is deleting family instances. Another possibly related thing is aborting existing pregnancies and making them from scratch. (But how could a pregnancy of a sim A affect the pregnancy of a sim Z?) So, does anyone awesome have any idea? Yeah, I tried to provide support for the thing I shared, but I can't. Um, halp?!

Well, I'd downloaded and installed Hysterical Paroxism's version, and started messing with it.  (Not really playing--getting tombstones put away properly in a community graveyard instead of scattered at private residences, evicting lazy sims who need to learn parenting skills from their opulent housing to get them ready for the 'refuge camps'.)  Then I see this thread after I found all these pesky toddlers and kids with LTWs.
Could someone please tell me how do I delete the SWAFs I need to in SimPE?  I can find them (at least I think it's them) from the window that shows the sim's stats but I don't see a 'delete' button.  I think I also need to fix the pregnancies, but I don't know if I'm up to that--I might just tolerate weird parentage stuff. 
Also, is it safe to delete all the 'unknown' sims?  I really don't care about the Maxis memories that are corrupt--I just want to be able to use the sims for my own purposes.

Gah, I was hoping for some help  ::)

This comes from my rather poor memory (don't have simpe anymore), so back up everything first. I think there is no delete button. You must right click and delete the SWAF you want in the resource window (or whatever it's called, the big window in the upper-right that lists... stuff). Make sure you use the filter function to delete the appropriate SWAF: find out the instance number of your sim (you'll see it in the first tab of plugin view of SDSC, the one with the sim's thumbnail), then use the filter function of simpe to list only the resources that are attached to the sim in question, then delete the SWAF from the upper-right window. I hope this made some sense.

As for the pregnancies, I must admit I haven't noticed any weirdness with the non-fixed pregnancies. You might just want to abort Samantha Ottomas pregnancy, as people generally do have problems with her spawn. Then give her twins again. You can do this ingame easily.

I think I have a different version of SimPE than you did, or I may be totally confused, because when I look at the SWAF it has the sim's name and pic that it belongs to, and also it stretches across the bottom half of the screen.  I'm good at being totally confused.

Oh, well, if I break it, I can always start over, and I'll have learned something.  Sorry I can't help you with your problem.  I appreciate your advice on mine.

It's probably not a different version. Hazy memory or my inability to form an understandable sentence is more likely. I'll try again.

You don't need to open or look at the SWAF at all (the bottom half of the screen). All the resources are listed in the upper-left, SWAFs are among them. Click on the SWAF entry on the upper-left and a list of all the SWAFs in the hood will show up in the upper-right. Now you need to find the offending SWAF. The safest way is to filter by instance number of the sim whose SWAF you want to delete. Once you find it, right-click on it and delete it. Repeat for all SWAFs you want deleted. I'm pretty sure it's done like that.

There's probably more information about it but I failed at google.

Hello. I'm currently working on my own set of cleaned/fixed EAxis neighbourhoods, and there's a couple of things I've been unable to figure out. I was wondering how you switched the negative memories in Riverblossom Hills from green to red, and how you set the career memories to point at the correct job instead of the sim? I've been looking for options to do this in SimPE but I can't find anything, and my searches on the Intarwebs hasn't given me anything either. Much thanks in advance.

Yay, I actually know that! :D

For the job memory: open the SDSC of the sim with the wrong memory and check his job. I think it's on the first tab. The instance number of the career is shown right there. Write it down. Now open the memory and open its Raw Data. Write the first half of career instance number in Line 6, and the second half in line 5, after the 0x. Example: medical career number is 0x0c7761fd. You need to write 0x61fd in Line 5 and 0x0c77 in Line 6. There's a picture on page 1 of this thread. That's how I remembered it. :)

The red vs. green is even easier, but I can't remember how it's done. I do know you only need to change one number in the raw data tab. I suggest you compare a red death memory to the green death memory raw data, and see what number differs.

:D Thank you! I somehow missed that whole post on the first page, even though I was looking through this thread before I posted. I blame it on spending all day fixing memories in Riverblossom Hills.

Now off to experiment with this and satisfy my OCD.

Edit: found out what sets the memories as red - it's the first line in the raw data, it has to be set to 4 instead of 0. :)

Yes, that certainly rings a bell. Have fun fixing!

I'm back with another question: You say that when merging the 'hoods, some memories become corrupt because the GUIDs change. Now, I've had this happen with some stealth hood families (Ottomas etc) and Bluewater Village families while testing, especially with the BV dead relatives. However, when I look in the memory tab, the GUIDs shown there on the memories that were corrupt match the ones of the characters they belong to. I was wondering what you did to fix these?

Also, I think I figured out what's wrong with Sarah Crittur that you mention on the first page. I believe it's a bug in SimPE. Her original pregnancy token is listed as a gossip about another random pet (cat named Felix). When I Theo-deleted Felix, her pregnancy token vanished too. In the raw data there's a line called "Speed Up" or something, in it is the value 39. SimPE seems to link this to the character instance 39 for some reason. I set it to 0, deleted Felix, and set it back to 39, and all was well. I guess this same thing linked it to your random Veronaville dude. I don't think the gossip thing does any harm, though, it really seems to be a SimPE bug. The 39 value is probably a countdown to when the character will give birth, and when set to 0 she'll give birth instantly.

I don't get it, you'll have to explain it all over again. If the GUIDs are correct (if that's what you mean by matching the character they belong to), than what's there to fix? Mine didn't match. Let's say, Loki Beaker has a memory of marrying Circe. Loki's GUID was correct, the marriage memory GUID was correct, but Circe's GUID wasn't. The memory looks perfectly fine though (Circe's name and picture show up), but the Lot Debugger's wipes this memory as corrupt. And every other Loki's memory that point to Circe. So, poor Loki now only remembers stuff about Nervous, because it just so happened that Nervous's GUID in Loki's memory matched the actual Nervous's GUID. The number of memories with this kind of corruption is huge. This only happens in a merged hood (I checked SaraMK's hood, and HP's, so I assumed every merged hood suffers from this problem), but not in any single hood (that have the "usual" corrupt memories). Are you talking about the merged hood or the "normal" one?

What I did to fix it? Well, it's kind of embarrassing. I loaded a lot, summoned all sims (in groups) and wiped all of their corrupt memories (sometimes that would leave a sim without any memory). Then I made new memories entirely from scratch (by looking at original hood memory in another instance of SimPE, for reference). It took weeks  ::) The embarrassing thing is that I never got an answer whether these memories were actually corrupt or the Lot Debugger got confused or something. Loads of this (possibly useless) work did actually made a difference, i.e. Loki's memory about Circe wouldn't get wiped. His memories about his dead parents (which I remade too, just because) would get wiped though, but that's because (most of) the dead are broken, it has nothing to do with the merged hood, and they're irreparable, for all I know.  

Of course, Loki, Circe, Nervous and Loki's dead parents are just examples. Which particular character will get wrong GUIDs differs from one merged hood to another. I could have spare you from the sad, sad, Loki's story, by just saying that it's the Memory Subject* GUID (and not the Memory Owner GUID), that gets changed when merging a hood. But it's too late now. :P

Sarah Crittur - that's most likely it. I didn't think of such a neat workaround, so I convinced myself I don't care about it.

(Also, are you by any chance meetme2theriver? She's also doing a cleaning of her own, and mentioned Felix the Cat. Yes, I lurk a lot. )

*ETA - Actually it's more likely that the GUIDs of the sims themselves change (e.g. Circe's), but the Memory Subject doesn't which results in them not matching.

Yep, you caught me - I'm meetme2theriver. :) Actually I originally shared the journal with my SO but I've sort of taken it over, that's partially why it's got a different username.

Sorry for not being very coherent about my explanation. Basically, I have not merged anything yet, but I was testing Riverblossom Hills with all the stealth hood/"suburb" families in and Bluewater Village as well, which is pretty much the same process as merging, isn't it? Merging is just adding other 'hoods as a shopping district (like Bluewater Village) or a downtown. So I tried the FFS debugger on various characters to see what would happen.

For the residents of Riverblossom Hills - the base hood - all memories were fine and the option to wipe corrupt was not present. This included memories that I'd constructed myself in SimPE, since a number of memories are missing for premades. But then I tried the Ottomas family, and they all lost memories relating to Dora and Sharla, some constructed by me, some created by EAxis. Same thing happened to some of the other stealth hood families. Then I tried the sims in Bluewater Village, where I've constructed almost all the memories myself since the sims really don't come with any, and they all lost the memories of their dead relatives and of a couple of the townies which they know. This could be due to bugginess in the dead characters, I'm not sure. No one seemed to lose memories about themselves, so it's all problems with the memory subject, as you said.

So I figured it might be due to wrong GUIDs, like you experienced, but when I went into SimPE, all memories match the correct GUID of the character they link to... so that's not it, it seems. Maybe this is a different problem? Maybe I'll get the same problem as you when I do the merging? Granted, you didn't do the merging yourself, so you might have gotten a buggy template to work off of to begin with - that's part of the reason I'm doing this myself now, 'cause I want the templates to be all fixed before I merge them together (and I'm kinda enjoying all this anyway, because I'm a nerd).

I guess we really need an explanation from Pescado about what exactly makes a memory corrupt, and what difference it makes to wipe it or leave it in. I can't imagine they do any harm, though, and they do work (the ones that have a proper function) in that if a sim has a corrupt memory of a first kiss, they won't get a new first kiss memory, etc.

Ha, got you! Now I feel like the creepiest of stalkers.

First let's get this little bit out of the way:


Such memories where the memory owner is the same sim as memory subject (like "Grew Up Well") would get wiped too if the memory subject problem occurs. So, back in the Beakers example, Circe would lose all memories of growing up or being an overachiever. So, I guess it's not the same problem as you experienced.

But, it actually might be, because IIRC, in some later hoods, such memories don't have a memory subject at all. Now, it's going to become very confusing. I managed to confuse myself.


It's supposed to be like that, yes. You trick the game to think that it adds just another, regular subhood. Now, something just crossed my mind. I've edited a Downtown template so that it has living Tricous. When I add such a downtown, the Tricous' memories get this dreaded wrong memory subject number. It never occurred to me to do what you did - to check what happens when any old regular subhood gets added. Now, this is where it becomes a bit of a stretch - I'm starting to suspect the very same thing happens. I suppose you fixed, say, the Bluewater template (by adding your own memories that are not corrupt) and the Riverblossom. Separately. At that point you made a backup of both templates. You did all that prior to loading Riverblossom (which also adds a bunch of your fixed stealth hoods) and adding Bluewater to it. Did you make a backup at that point too? Then, you wiped the corrupt memories with the LB. Then, you opened the backup in SimPE, and saw that all the GUIDs of the wiped memories were actually correct. Now, the main question is, which backup did you check? And here's a little test you can do to see if I'm definitely on the wrong track with all this nonsense. After the wiping of corrupt memories, go and remake a set of such memories all over again. I'd go with Tommy's (or whoever) memories of Sharla, in an already loaded Riverblossom with the Bluewater added (cause I came up with this crazy theory that the corruption takes place as soon as you load the hood). Then wipe Tommy's memories again. If his memories of Sharla stick, then I'm right and that's a horrible, horrible thing. I hope that I'm just wrong and simply drawn a wrong conclusion from your post. OR it could be that such memories are actually just fine, they were never supposed to be wiped, and it's the Lot Debugger's fault it just wipes stuff ruthlessly.

That was a desperate attempt to try and prove that the thing that happened to you is the very same memory subject problem that I go on and on about. I could be just plain wrong, in which case I have no idea what happened.


Oh, I wish someone would tell me what does all this mean already. Like you said, they do work (and look) just fine. The only thing that bothered me (enough to spend weeks working on it) is that, unless made from scratch in an already loaded hood, that damn debugger thing would just wipe them all. And I only want the broken dead wiped, and that's what I get from having undivided faith in Pescado's stuff. I'll stop now, before I cause this thread's death by LOLcats.

No worries. The LJ community isn't THAT big and I sometimes watch people outside my friends' list too.


Yep, all of this is exactly what I did.


Actually, what I did was load the separate lots, wipe memories with the lot debugger, but then exit the lot without saving, so that the memories remained intact. When I checked in SimPE, the wiped memories were pointing at the right GUIDs.


I'll still try this out, see what happens. Will double-check that everyone in Riverblossom Hills really is fine, too.


I'm kinda hoping the lot debugger is just overly paranoid, too, but I suppose one should not question Pescado. :P Either way, it would be immensely useful to know what does trigger the memory wipe, because I suspect it's a number of different things, and that what I'm running into is a separate problem.

I kind of suspected I'm totally wrong. So the wiped memory has correct numbers, looks fine and behaves fine. I guess it could only mean one thing - it shouldn't have been wiped at all, and it was all Lot Debugger's fault. Can we say that out loud here? :)


Actually, I suspect that the remade memories would stick, but that wouldn't prove anything, because we had separate problems which may not be problems at all. You will probably get the wrong memory subjects after merging, but that might be just fine too.


Please? Anyone?

Aaanyway, now I'm under the impression that there never was a memory problem. When you finish your hood (and I got my TS2 games installed), I'll take yours. I love that you left some of the original townies and especially that you want Belladonna as the main hood. And that you made memories that never where there in the first place (Bluewaterers). It all sounds awesome!

Yeah, if no one can tell us what might be wrong and how to fix it, I suppose I'll just recommend that people simply... don't wipe the memories. :) I do think broken gossip tokens are what generally causes trouble, rather than the regular memories, so I think it'll be fine. I got rid of all the garbage like that anyway.

Aw, I feel all flattered now. :) I'm doing this with the mindset that I'm going to make it as perfect as I possibly can, and then never touch it again. My first uberhood had some problems with it and things I just didn't bother to/know how to fix (but now I know more things thanks to you!), and I've done some mini-projects after that with just some of the hoods, so this time I just want to do it proper and be done with it and have an uberhood template I can use again in the future if I feel like starting over. (Last time I think I forgot to/lost the backup of the unplayed, finished one, and also Belladonna Cove was added in after I'd been playing it after a while, since I made it before AL came out.)

I'm taking very special care with the memories. That really is the hardest part, keeping track of them all and matching the events correctly with their family members' memories, etc. So it was kinda annoying when half my hard work just vanished with the wipe option. :P

It's a deal! Oh, and please keep the separate templates, I'd like those too. All of them! :) The ones available here don't have important townies, and the important townies are important!

Oh yeah, I am keeping the separate templates. Thought I'd offer those all up for download too, I'm just holding off now until I know I'm totally done with them.

I hope I won't delete anyone's favourite townie. :) I'm keeping all the townies/NPCs that have some sort of relationship with a playable, of course. Also the garden club from Seasons stealth hood, the strays and adoptables from Pets stealth hood, the townies in Bluewater Village that are either employed in or a customer of the existing businesses (according to Pescado it's a VBT to delete these), fake Strangetown Bella Goth (in addition to the "real" one in PV), and all the original Pleasantview townies and NPCs (except the ones you can't interact with, like Repo Man, drivers etc). Anything you miss?

I might be alone in this but the first sim I created picked to move in was the service NPC Remington (Harris?) he was the male maid with blue (I think) eyes and the brown pompadour so if you could include him I'd err... pray for your karma and award +10 internetz.

There is more to identifying a corrupt memory than just an apparently correct GUID. In order to be a correct memory, IIRC, there is also a subject NID reference, as well as the GUID. If the value does not point to a valid target/subject NID, then the memory is deemed to be corrupt. Any legally formed memory in an actual neighborhood will have a valid Sim Object GUID, AND a corresponding NID. If these values aren't consistent, or point to invalid things, your neighborhood has been fatally damaged by botched deletions or your forgery was performed improperly, and the data contained on these memory tokens is incorrect.

haifen: Remington Harris is one of the original Pleasantview NPCs, so he'll be included. :)

Pescado: Hm, that would explain things. I don't think it was anything I did, really, but rather a result of the merging (I don't think it matters whether this is the automatic merging of stealthhoods into the main hood, or the merging of adding any subhood), since it was not only my forged memories that were wiped, but also ones left there by EAxis. Specifically the Ottomas family lost all memories of Sharla. I'll make sure to check the NID in my testhood. Thank you.

So, does that NiD thing occurs every time a subhood gets added to the main hood, and every time a stealth hood attaches itself to the main hood (or in other words, as soon as the hood is loaded for the first time)? If so, does that happen with the default templates installed or is the problem within the clean templates?

It is a known behavior that the EAxian add-on famblies are frequently corrupt in many ways.

But these are supposed to be the fixed families. I gave all of this a lot of thought but I just don't know what to say anymore. Having TS2 and SimPe installed could have helped me maybe. I'll try to install SimPe in order to properly follow this conversation.

I am back with new learnings after doing some testing:

- Memory subject NIDs do get screwed during the merging process (when you first load a base hood and stealth hoods get added, or when you add a subhood). As far as I can tell it will happen no matter what, default template, cleaned template, doesn't matter. They remain the same as they were in the hood that they're merged from. In stealthhood, Sharla had NID 1A, and in the memories regarding her in my test RBH, it was still 1A, although her new NID is FF.
- ALL memories from merged hoods get screwed in this same way, including the ones about the sim themselves (owner and subject is the same), but...
- ...the FFS debugger only picks up on some of them, for some reason. And it seems more or less random which ones get wiped and which don't.
- It is, however, very easy to fix. Don't wipe the memories, but go through each memory in SimPE and just click on the name in the subject list, which makes SimPE set the subject anew and thus the correct NID. I tested this, fixing some which I knew were previously wiped and leaving others as they were, and the fixed ones did not get wiped.

So, in conclusion, while I'm not sure what the FFS debugger does, it seems I can very easily (although somewhat tediously, but no more than fixing all those goddamn family relations) fix it in the finished merged hood.

I was afraid of that, it all sounds very scary. This means that every hood out there, that didn't use completely empty templates, suffers from this NID problem, 'cause EAxis did a terrible job with the merging. That's just... too much. :)

Unsurprising, really. :P

I don't think it's really a very big deal, I mean, people have played these hoods without them blowing up in their faces. But I'll fix it anyway. (For any non-EAxian hoods I always use completely clean templates.)

I know the pattern, yes. The ones that get wiped are ones that now point to NIDs that don't exist at all. If they point to a valid, but incorrect, NID, they won't be wiped outright, because I didn't make it cross-check the GUID with the NID. I probably will in the next version, though, now that it is known exactly what the data is (this wasn't clear at the time it was made, so only NID validity was checked, GUID wasn't looked at).

Cool. That makes sense. I added in Bluewater Village after testing the stealthhood families, so while some of the Ottomi's former NIDs didn't exist before that, they must now belong to someone in BV and didn't get wiped. Thanks, Pescado.

Thank you very much for the info!

I have a bit of a question/request/suggestion for (you) Tarlia. What kind of downtown template will you make? Could you make such a downtown where the Tricous and Rainelle are dead, but can be properly resurrected if one choses so. Or in other words, can the corrupted dead tokens be fixed? Some cool extra memories would be a great bonus. And John Smith's children. I foresee a whole new bucket of problems with this one, so it's totally fine if you choose not to bother with this.

Are you gonna share your hood with the Downtown and the Unis attached? What about vacation destinations (though I suppose these will be completely empty)? If not, will adding a downtown and/or unis to the hood cause this NID problem only for sims in those subhoods or the entire megahood? It doesn't really matter, 'cause it can be easily fixed (thank you for figuring out the easy way  ::) ), but I'm just curious.

Ah, I already mostly cleaned the downtown template, actually. But I don't actually know how to fix the dead tokens or what's wrong with them, I was hoping I might find some information. Maybe you know or can point me towards some info? :) I wasn't planning on resurrecting any of the other dead or giving them any sort of memories, they're just there for the family tree, but the Tricous are interesting and I'd love to make them resurrectable.

I did add memories to the Tricous, with a bit of my own spin on them, as well as tying in Rainelle with them all...

I deleted all downtownies, though, including the six teens that are linked to John Smith. As far as I could tell from the data, they weren't really meant to be his children, it looks more like they were made in CAS or something and they used him as the adult? I dunno. All had the last name "Teens" in the template and they're all generated from the downtownie templates, so it's fully possible to get lookalikes by making new downtownies with the townie creator. They're linked to each other and to John Smith Tricou, but he's not linked to them, and it's only in the family tree and not in the relationships. So. I got rid of them. The goth kid has one of those broken face templates that changes into something else when he grows up, anyway.

Initially I thought I'd offer downtown and unis separately, but since adding them will screw up the memories, I will at least do a version with them added in and the memories fixed. Maybe I'll just offer both, it's no big deal. I'm not gonna add the vacation hoods, though, since as you said there's no sims in them worth keeping and no playables - I'll point towards some empty templates instead.

Oh, and adding a new subhood only messes up that subhood, not any of the existing stuff.

Edit:

Hrm, well, I did a great deal of searching around, both on MATY and elsewhere, and while I found mention of the Tricous' dead tokens being corrupt and needing to be removed and the Tricous needing to be resurrected to avoid bugs (specifically inheritances from random sims) in threads about SaraMK's megahood, I found no real explanation of what really is wrong with them or how, if possible, it can be fixed. So I did some testing. Initially, all the Tricous had two sets of memories of their relatives dying - one that looked normal, and one that was set invisible and had no owner. There was also a few inheritance memories from Jon Smith. I deleted the inheritance memories and the invisible death memories, but did nothing to the proper death memories or the 'I am dead' tokens.

Then I loaded up a fresh neighbourhood, added my edited downtown, had Julien Cooke resurrect one of them with the help of the sim blender and the Paranormal career reward, and then had that one resurrect the rest of them, including Rainelle Neengia. They all seemed to work fine, all my edited memories were in place (though with wrong NIDs of course, but that's besides the point), there was no inheritances from a dog (or any at all) or anything like that. Looking at them in SimPE afterwards, all seemed well too, the 'I am dead' tokens were gone.

So... Did I fix it, or is there something else hidden I should be looking out for? I suspect those invisible death memories might've been the cause of the trouble. I don't see how the 'I am dead' token relates to inheritances of others, since it only relates to the sim itself.

That's totally fine. I don't know anything about death tokens, and can't help with anything (as if I did so far :P ). The only thing I did to them, ever, is deleting. To me, it sounds like you fixed them.

The new memories are what I wanted the most! Can't wait to see what you came up with.


That's great to hear. So, to fix it, we only need to re-pick the subject's name from the dropdown list, if I understood correctly?

Yep, it's quite easy, though I'm not looking forward to doing it on every single memory for hundreds of sims. :P

I'm working on Veronaville now... it's such a MESS.

So I've been reading all of the posts and replies on here and most of this stuff is WAYYY over my head lol I downloaded this hood and I absolutely LOVE it :) I was going to dl HPs version but when I was reading about the memory fixes and all I felt as tho this would be my best option. The only problem I'm running into is.. when i add new lots my game crashes.. when I take them out.. my game is fine. I have one community lot and one apartment lot installed now and my game is running fine.. so I'm just confused ??? Now I have some packaged lots that I made a long time ago and I have mixed them in with other creators lots that I really liked to add to my hood.. So I'm just wondering.. is it something with my hood? Like do I have something corrupted or is this an issue? The only other thing I can think of is that one of the lots I'm importing seems to be ok but its truly the culprit in this situation..

I was just wondering if anyone else had any other problems with this and if so, if someone could please give me some suggestions :)

Thank youuuu

If anyone's interested, I finished my merged neighbourhood, and it can be found here (http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/29134.html).

Very well done.

One question, is there anyway for me to import the townies and npcs of Strangetown and Veronaville into this hood?  I'm ocd and really feel the need to have every maxis created character in my game.  Insane? Ya, that's me.

You could try SleepyCat's cleaned and packaged Maxis-made families:
http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?showtopic=1472&pid=15872&st=0&#entry15872

I'm downloading your version right now :) I just had a quick question.. in your uberhood can you use other skins? for example, using christianlovs skin changer? and have the skins stay once you exit the game and return (with saving of course) I know that this hood that I downloaded from this post wouldnt for some reason let you keep the skins that you change. :)

ohh! and one more thing.. can you have two mega-hoods installed at once? like i see that this one by mixreality uses Pleasantview as the main hood and the one I just downloaded from Tarlia uses Belladonna cove as the main hood.. I would like to have both :) I just want to make sure my game wont turn into a BFBVFS :)

thanks Tarlia for all of your hard work! What a great Christmas present :)

If you know how to use SimPE, you can use the regular templates and clone all the townies from it, recreate them in the 'hood in CAS and make them into townies with Inge's teleport cat or similar. There's many tutorials out there on how to do this. I'm not sure if you can do the same with the various NPCs, though. I don't know how to set them to be functioning maids, mailmen, etc, but I'm sure it can be done. Try digging through the threads here or on MTS2.


I think those are only the playables, not the townies and NPCs?


Hm, I haven't tested it, but my merged neighbourhood shouldn't work any different from any other neighbourhood, so I don't see why it wouldn't work. I've gotten the question about the multiple PT hack and whether it works properly too, though, since that seemed to be a problem as well in this/HP's neighbourhood (Mixreality's 'hood is a cleaned version of HP's hood). Perhaps HP did something funny when she merged hers? Try it out and let me know if you have any problems.

Edit: I tested and confirmed that multiple-PT hacks work as they should. I've never used the skin changer, but like I said, if there's any problems, let me know.


I'm not sure about this one, I know for a fact it's bad to have two of the same neighbourhood in at the same time (such as Pleasantview + a megahood Pleasantview), but I'm not sure if the merged subhoods will cause the same problem. To be on the safe side you should probably only have one in your game at the same time, but there's nothing stopping you from moving one out of the Neighbourhoods folder before you start the game, and then just switch them when you want to play the other one.

You're welcome, hope you'll enjoy. :)

(PS: Edit your posts instead of double posting.)

Found the tut, gracias.

Thank you Tarlia for getting back to me so quickly ;D and next time I'll make sure to edit my posts ;) I just actually got into writing in the forums.. before I used to just read everyone's posts so thanks for the tip since I'm new at this :)

I sort of added the vacation destinations without rereading this thread first.  :-\  If I'm understanding correctly, I made a mistake because doing this may have caused broken memories?  Who gets the broken memories, and is there a way to fix them?

Oh, no worries, there's no sims in the vacation destinations (except locals, if you didn't use clean templates). The broken memories only happen when you add subhoods with playable sims in them, and then only for those playables. :) It's also not harmful or anything, just irritating if you care to have completely clean and correct memories.

Great news. Phew!

This is even better than what I saw on MTS2.

Unfortunately I'm blonde and blue-eyed (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,17858.msg515743.html#msg515743), so you probably don't want it.

I can't download the part 2 rar for some reason. It keeps saying this:

"NOTICE: No servers are currently available with the requested data on them. Please retry your request in a moment"

Mixreality is on a bit of an Internet/simming break, last I heard from her, so she probably won't respond for a while. In the meantime, you might be interested in trying out my uberhood (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,14537.msg510342.html#msg510342).

Spent the last week RL playing with this - but it's broken. Pity, it's a great idea, but maybe just too complicated to be properly implemented? There seem to be several versions out there.

Going back to playing with one of the set Hoods... at least there are Sims there with stories, that have lots that do not crash as soon as I load them. So tired of crashing. And I've tried everything, downloads, hacks removed, it has to be the megahood itself.

Which version are you talking about, Mixreality's or mine?

Mine has been played by several people since Christmas without any reported problems.

(New download link here: http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/36433.html)

The one referenced in the first post here - because it is not clear which one to use, I assumed that was the right one... are you now telling me that is known not to work cos I coulda saved myself a great deal of frustration if I'd known... I did read right through the thread though.

Yours works? hmmm... do I want to start yet again? (of course I do - downloading :) )

I am grateful for all the work folk are doing on this but a bit more clarity for us poor downloaders might help....

Sorry about that - this is not actually my thread, it's Mixreality's, and my megahood is not the same as hers. I joined this thread to get advice on how to fix some things, and since Mixreality and others were enthusiastic about it, it just sort of ended up with me linking to my finished project in this thread. I suppose I should make my own thread on it...

The main difference between our 'hoods is this: Mixreality has cleaned up HP's merged neighbourhood, while I went the other way around, cleaning each individual neighbourhood before merging them all together myself.

Therefore it's possible that Mixreality's version contains more "garbage" from the various 'hoods than mine does. I've heard of others having problems with crashing lots and other minor issues in it. I haven't played with it or HP's version myself, though.

Mine has a known issue with Multi-PT hacks, but that's not related to the merging itself but rather to the Multi-PT hacks not always overwriting garbage DNA properly. There's a post about it and how to fix it on my LJ (under tag: clean uberhood).

Well thanks anyhow, Tarlia, your mega-hood is working fine for me. Mixreality's one was indeed crashing for me, not on EVERY Lot, but about one in every 2 :( with little rhyme or reason as to which. In fact it could crash on a Lot I had already played, not only a "new-to-play-this install" one, where you might expect there to be more wear and tear. Odd thing was, on the crashing lots, it was ALWAYS as the family was loading, when there are four squares lit up on the loading screen. At that point it would just hang eternally or simply crash - sometimes it locked up computer to the point of having to do a switch-off restart, but mostly just an error message that this application has crashed...
And yes, I think it would help if you were to make a new thread.... or just write in BIG LETTERS for the forum illiterates like me who expect things to be spelled out and are not used to trolling all the way through looong threads as MATY seems to expect.

I like this forum, there are so many clever folks here - but it seems to do things very differently from the rest of the Interwebs. (NOT a complaint, but a comment - maybe some here should be a leeetle more tolerant toward those of us used to the other style.)

See, that's where you're wrong.  When you go to visit a foreign country, you don't all expect the citizens to start speaking your language and adhering to your native culture.  It's the same for a forum you've never been to or been a part of.

No use complaining to me, I have no power here, I just lurk around and join in here and there. Posting about my uberhood in this thread was not meant to make things difficult for people. My "home base" is on LJ and that's where I made my announcements. Joining in in this thread sort of happened along the way.

I do agree with airilina, the people here are under no obligation to change their ways for the foreigners, but that still has very little to do with this specific case.

I'm glad the uberhood works for you.

/me shrugs. So I'm a foreigner, no biggie, been one all my life.

I do appreciate the work that has gone into these Hoods, and specially Tarlia... the thing is, I would never have found your LJ without the link from here. And it was not clear (at least to me, but then I must speak a foreign language as well) from the discussion that the OP one was broken. At least it is clear now to anyone reading here after me, IF they read through this whole 8 pages...  :(

While I VEHEMENTLY disagree with you, Sita, about thinking we should cater to YOU, I do agree that Tarlia should have created her own thread as opposed to hijacking mixreality's.

Perhaps hijack isn't an appropriate word since it appears she helped you out/y'all were on topic etc blah - whatever. The point is it seemed established towards the END of this thread that the DL was borked (after SO MUCH zomgifixedit's by mixreality) and instead of sensibly making a new thread, perhaps summing up the headaches here, you leave the alternative (of which you promote on this site enough) at the end of this thread which leaves n00bs and regulars alike frustrated. I understand your "base" is on teh Urinalz but if you're going to post it on MATY, you really should make your own thread, ESPECIALLY if you're going to recommend it so much.

Point well taken. I'll make a separate thread, and yes, I should have done that in the first place.

Sita, I didn't mean to offend, I was just sort of amused that I was suddenly a "scary MATY-ian" making things difficult for people. That was never my intention (and I've always been able to find things fine here).

I speak Internet, obviously that isn't what is spoken hereabouts. I already said sorry for being a foreigner. Odd thing about MATY, everyone here has time to read through many many pages; not always an attractive option specially when a lot of it is insults. Not scarey, but silly and a little sad.

Tarlia I do appreciate your making a new thread. Much easier. And no you aren't a scary MATYer. there are plenty of those. And your Mega-Hood is working beautifully. I'm glad you did plug it.

Haifen, Urinalz? name of a mountain? Check Google Earth, I think you spelled it wrong. Mind you, you obviously don't see very well - are you aware that is a sheep on your lap?