More Awesome Than You!

Alright, let me try this again. I know there are answers all over the place for this, but I don't seem to be able to sort them right.

1. Sim neighborhoods can accumulate too many files because nothing ever gets subtracted, only added. That is, dead sims still retain their files, newborns get added to it.

2. It's the actual character files that cause 'burnination' or 'implosion' of a neighborhood, not the actual number of visible/playable/NPC pixel people.

3. As soon as a neighborhood file hits critical mass, its doomed, with no way to fix it, even if you never, ever, lot-binned, deleted binned sims that have been played, or imported occupied houses.

4. What IS the critical mass? Some say 300+ some say 500+, some (like me) say ??

5. One of the signs that your neighborhood is sliding into irreparable screwiness due to too many files is the disappearance of CAS sims and newborns after saving and quitting, true or false?

6. A neighborhood and its attached University count as one neighborhood, so all the NPC's (including the stupid secret society NPC's) get added to the neighborhood file. Thank goodness for the no respawn townies/dormies/secsoc hack.

7. Unless you are very SimPe literal and can delete memories/characters/etc. manually, you might as well put the flag on half-mast, play the funeral march and bid your neighborhood goodbye.

8. JM's and TJ's critical fixes stave this off for a time, but it is inevitable, since, as mentioned before, there is no subtraction, only addition.

9. Deleting tombstones/urns only affects the size of the file, the file itself stays. The size of the file is of little matter, since it is the actual number of files that will cause 'burnination'.

10. EA/Maxis has a limit of sims in a neighborhood induced into the game-files; once reached, the neighborhood is doomed, true or false?

I know these are a lot of questions. I try to read everything here and everywhere else I can, but instead of clearing things up they further confuse the issue for me. I also know that for some people these questions are extremely silly, but they are not for me. I see little point in playing a game that is doomed from the outset. A lot of time gets invested into those neighborhoods, at least by me, and I am an opponent of wasted time. I already use the deleteAll cheat, the noregen mods, the critical fixes, etc. I try to limit the number of NPC's I use, I haven't used any kind of Maid/Gardener/Nanny lately. I don't use dorms, just so I don't have those idiotic cooks come around, because more than once two came, one did the appointed tasks, the other one just hung around, showered, slept, played, and never showed any inclination to leave.

So bear with me even if those question sound silly to you, they don't to me. I don't, as a rule, ask many questions, but on these I could not find any clear, decisive answers.
Thanks for your time,

Gabriele

I also feel, like you, angry with Maxis for making this limit!  But I feel angry with Maxis for a lot of the stupid errors they made as well! 

One thing you can do though is to use SimPE to delete every townie with no relationships.  Then you can renumber the files at the end so they fill in the gaps.  That way, if the game does decide to respawn anything, they'll be at the end, and therefore easy to find!

Right. Dead sims must retain their files, since they're still referred to in memory and ancestry....usually. It's possible for a dead sim to become completely "disconnected", but the game doesn't detect this case, and so you never lose files: If a sim were to be dead and deleted (no tombstone), everyone who knew him were to also be dead and deleted, and everyone who had ever HEARD of him was dead and deleted, this would mean that sim was completely orphaned and could be cleaned. But the game doesn't scan for this case, and it's somewhat gruelling to do so manually, especially since the dead can be talked about for generations to come.

Right.

Not entirely true. The Critical Fixes existing can keep a neighborhood chugging for quite a good while longer, but obviously, this doesn't account for any undiscovered bugs, or any new bugs of this nature (too many iterations is generally most visible sign) introduced in future expansions. If Maxis never wises up, this is going to require future critical fixes.

Early errors begin to set in around 800-ish. All known problems of this nature are resolved by Critical Fixes. Advanced errors can set in around 1000+. These are also resolved by Critical Fix hacks. Obviously, once you have to resort to hacks just to keep going, you've crossed the Rubicon already. How long you can keep going after that depends on how long it takes you to be assassinated. This point is unknown.

Unknown. This should not be occurring under any normal or abnormal in-game condition. This sounds more like failure to commit file changes to disk, which is a more serious problem. Causes include "locked files" due to being open in SimPE or "dead" instances of TS2 (even if they appears closed, they may not have terminated cleanly: Check your ALT-CRTL-DEL).

Correct. Attached subneighborhoods share their populations with "main" neighborhoods, but not lots. No doubt Maxis will love to flood your neighborhood with yet more garbage sims, as well as new NPCs.

Pretty much. Once you've passed the Critical Fix point, you're doomed. However, this point is very far away, as Critical Fixes have been able to repair neighborhoods in the 2000s. This is all assuming you're salvaging NATURAL populations, and not garbage bloat. Let us figure, as a reasonable number, you have approximately 40 families. That's about how many are in my neighborhood right now, although some are "crunchy" and will eventually be compacted together (college students, soon-to-die relatives living in small houses with no burial grounds, immortals, etc.). If your neighborhood is bloated because of *GARBAGE*, you're best off starting over.

In theory, a meticulously maintained neighborhood can avoid a potential explosion on these grounds for the duration of TS2, assuming critical fixes are made for any such problem.

Correct. However, the actual number of files needed to bring about irrevocable collapse is unknown. Unfortunately, each new expansion pack brings about more potential sources of error. As the hackers familiar with this particular class of problem tend to keep meticulously clean neighborhoods as a result, these errors will be slow to be identified.

If you consider "32767" or "65535" as a limit, yes. Instance numbers are 16-bit variables. It is unknown whether they are signed or not, but both of these numbers are fairly large. My neighborhood has been played now for what will soon be a year, and I'm around the 500 mark. Calculating that maybe 300-450 of these files are NPCs, built-in ancestors, and other such, and it has taken this long to generate 50-200 sims naturally, (if not less - I know everyone in my neighborhood by name, an impressive feat for a man my age, and I'm pretty sure there ain't that many!), you can see that it would take years and years and years to hit the hard-mathematical limit. As to what point the game will be rendered unplayable and beyond recovery of any mortal agency? Beats me. I do know that it's theoretically possible to trim a LOT of debris if the right primitives were added (NID iteration by family!). If they were to, say, create a primitive iterating first through families, then through NIDs in families, you'd have a much lower instruction count bounded not by "number of sims living and dead", but only by "number of sims living", a far smaller number bounded by the user's patience, which is typically quite small.

Thank you JM, that clears up a lot of things. I've been playing for a long time too, but not being a modder, I've lost plenty of neighborhoods due to Maxis' incompetence starting with the jump-bug way back when. I want to eliminate chances of losing another neighborhood; I wish I had the knowledge to keep a neighborhood immaculate, but since that is not feasable, at least I can collect enough information to ward off the evil maxis bugs as long as possible. That's one of the main reasons I've been following you around like a faithful old dog :D

My complete loss of faith in maxis' programming abilities is responsible for my paranoia that arises whenever I encounter game-silliness. I've seen small little bugs grow into neighborhood devouring monsters, I've even had one neighborhood completely disappear without a trace.


Thanks ZZ, I'll keep that in mind. I have not played any of my other neighborhoods, and I'm considering just exporting the sims in those neighborhoods with SimPe and then just make use of the trashcan. With all the noregeneration fixes in place, I'll just start out with a completely clean neighborhood and go from there. If I had another computer at my disposal, I would love to install TS2 and SimPe and experiment to my hearts content, but I only have this one and I can't clutter it up with too much stuff. I need it for work and study. It's coughing and wheezing as it is.

Besides, can you really see me re-numbering/re-doing/manipulating files in SimPe without either extremely comical or disasterous results; even though you have been very kind and I'm much more comfortable with the older version of SimPe for now :D

G.

I have a neighborhood with 952 characters (alive, deads, deleted, townies and NPCs). Surely I use all Pescado's critical fixes and I'm able to play quite peacefully. But now I'm beginning to feel a little worried about these crowded village of mine... Gess I'll not be able to go on with this for too long :'(

Try it this way:   1. copy your character folder to the desktop.
                        2. open SimPE.   
                        3. make a simPE backup, then open SimBrowser.
                        4. start going through till you find a sim townie you don't want.
                        5. open the duplicate file on your desktop, find that file and 
                             move it to a deleted sims folder on your desktop. 
                        6. when you have deleted a fair number of files, start renumbering
                            the ones at the end to fill in gaps in the numbers at the beginning.

                         7. close SimPE, remove the existing character folder and replace with
                             the one on your desktop.  (Don't get rid of the old one, just put
                             it somewhere safe.)

                         8. try your game again.  If it works fine, throw away the deleted
                             sims folder after exclaiming "Oh my, what a lot of useless sims!" 

                         9. any problems, just replace the original folder.  If you've gone and
                             lost it, never mind, you still have the SimPE Backup!

Do not do this! Renumbering the files can severely bugger your game as the instance numbers are also used for NIDs, and changing these in mid-game will confuse the game.

Mine's working fine!

Hey I just wanna say, we should be knowledgeable about what can hose up our games but why do we play?  We play for fun.  If you want to do the have 10 children want, do it!  Play the way that makes you happy, extract your fave sims with SimPE and try not to stress too much over it.  Make backups daily just in case but don't let all of these errors keep you from playing as you want (unless you do something very stupid).  This is your free time for enjoyment when you play, not tedious task.

All true, but if you've played for a while and suddenly everything starts going bonkers it makes me angry. I feel like I've wasted precious time and I don't have too much free time. Plus, there is one neighborhood specifically that is near and dear to my heart and not just for relaxation purposes. It's a replica of my home, and helps me over the homesickness spells :D

I do make back-ups, I even make back-ups of back-ups, but I want a game that lets me enjoy playing without bugs continuously crawling out of the woodwork so to speak.

What do you mean "unless I do something stupid". Have we met? You seem to know me. :D

G.

Well, just remember: Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Stick with this rule, and you'll be fine. Ignore it, and you're going to bugger your files.

Yeah I wasn't pointing finger at you, this is for all of us.  We get attached to our characters and yeah who wants to waste time putting into a project we love only to find someone else's incompetence has ruined our work and wasted our time.

Other thing, anyone else annoyed that in SimPE, the # of files no longer is displayed under Sim Description.  Counting files in characters folder is not accurate as it doesn't include NPC's and others.

Oopsi-diddly  ...

It all seems very confusing. Since re-installing my game last month, I am very aware of not having my sims meet any townies. I also have JMP's No Regen mod. I write down the names of those who get brought over after school and work. I had thought that I could just delete the character file in my Maxis Character File folder and leave it at that. Yes, identify them through SimPE but basically thats the only role SimPE would play.

This is a very useful thread.  I wonder if I could ask a more specific question?

I stupidly added a second university to my Pleasantville.  I haven't visited this new university yet.  Has it generated Townies?

If it has, can they safely be deleted?  I've heard Townies visit from one university to another.  In this case, Townies from the new university may have interacted with my sims.

Yup.

Townies are not specific to any university. So if you've been playing, they're likely to have possibly visited, in which case you are buggered.

Thanks for the fast reply.  Even with the second university, I have less than 500 files, so I'm ok for now.

I think when the new EP comes out, I may play a new neighborhood for a while.  I'll wait to play my main neighborhood when the dozens of critical fixes have been made.

Veilchen, thanks for putting all these questions together for us! I'm glad I'm not the only one confused. As I mentioned in another thread, I am in the process of cloning and reproducing all characters. I have the physical characters in the game and have been working for hours creating family ties in my main family alone. And since my family has offspring related to the Goths and Brokes, I had to clone those characters and recreated them in the game, as well. Which led me to the realization that I would pretty much ave to recreate all the original Pleasantville families because of their ties with each other (Cassandra and Don Lothario, Dina and Mortimer, etc.). I'm trying to be as faithful to the original story lines as I can. Maybe it's my perfectionism that's forcing me to do it, but I feel I must recreate every ancestor to these families, for their historical value. I am seeing now that the neighborhood will not be usable for quite some time, because, well, talk about tedious!

My point is, I am doing all this because I have only played Pleasantville, and I've been playing it since I got the game which would be since not long after the game came out.
I had pared my neighborhood down from close to 500 character files down to about 350. Then I removed a few cellphone tokens, found out that was the wrong thing to do, went out and got some Rogaine for my game-induced hair loss, and decided that, instead of reverting to my backup I would start clean. Which would probably still be the safest solution. But since I now have a better understanding about the "critical mass" problem, thanks to everyone here, and actually want to play this game, I may go back to my backup and remove the extra files again (and leave all cellphone tokens!) and play the game.

Here's a hypothetical question for you, J.M. What exactly does happen if a character is deleted, and one or two memories are inadvertently left in the game (say they were missed during the memory-wipe comb-through). Obviously whatever sim carried that memory will have "subject" in place of the deleted sim's name, but how does this impact the health of the game. If I play the game, notice that a sim does have "subject" memories, will all be "okay" if I just go back through and delete the passed-over memories in Simpe? Or does it cause problems much deeper than that? I'm still a little confused about the deleting of character files. I know my way around simpe at a beginner/low-intermediate level, but am not a modder or a simpe expert by any means. I can follow directions, though, if someone would be able to explain what needs to be done to fix it. I'm asking because I have had a few townies that have appeared on my lots, and I killed them. I deleted all the memories of any sim that had contact with him, but I missed one or two. I then deleted those memories in simpe. I'm not talking about main characters or townies that had relationships with any of my sims; the memories I missed were from sims that were present on the lot when the deaths occured, and their only memory of the deceased sim is that he "died".

I apologize if that was confusing.

Is this with or without Sim State? Pleasantview ships with 170 files. I know at least one of them is redundant (clone of Skip Broke, referenced in a few Broke family memories). And did you make sure not to MISS anyone?

If caught quickly, it shouldn't be a problem. If counting-codes start scanning those tokens and trying to actually validate the NID referenced, well, you're going to start seeing godknowswhat errors. So try to nuke them quickly, preferrably along with all "invisible" memories. If you're trying to "clean" your neighborhood, you're best off destroying all "invisible" memories (NOT unknowns or tokens!). That cleans up a lot of debris right there. Full destruction of any invisible "gossip" memories will make it much less likely you missed anything. Your sims will briefly have less to gossip about, but that'll quickly rectify itself.

Several of the ghosts are duplicated.  Darleen Dreamer and Michael, I think, as well as Skip, as you said.

It's with Sim State. I deleted a "few" NPC's and professors, but in my backup those files are still intact. I didn't realize when I deleted those files that there were supposed to be three of every npc. I deleted professors that my sims had not met. However, if I go back to my backup (my alternative is to keep working on the brand new hood, not to continue playing with the hood that I screwed to hell), I won't touch the npcs or professors, which will obviously make my character file count higher. I can live with that, though, because I still have plenty of useless townies to get rid of, again.

Thanks for the quick reply!

I will have to bookmark this page, it's full of lots of useful info.

I only pretty much play Veronaville and gutted the entire cast of shameless Shakespeare rip-offs, deleting them and their character files.  I did so out of my own laziness of not wanting to scroll through a bunch of useless dead and unwanted icons when loading Sim Brower or Sim Surgery rather than a fear of my game "exploding into a fiery ball".  I actually just recently created a second college town in Veronaville (a less prestigious institution than Academie le Tour, I felt was necessary for my more mundane looking Sim kids) and I believe I have the no townie regen mod and most of the new dormies that moved in are actually just the dormies from AlT so I'm not too worried about Sim overload as I'm only on my 3rd generation anyway.  After spending a good half hour in Sim Pe last night, changing the names of all the duplicate townies, I saw that I had a lot of Sims, wasting my precious scrolling time, who have no character data because they are Sim Surgery archetypes that I make in CAS, use to replace ugly townies/dormies and then delete.  As they never see their way out of the Family/Student Bin, I'm assuming its safe to delete their character files.  Right?  ???

Isn't the Shakespeare crowd the entire point of Veronaville? If you wanted the neighborhood with nobody in it, wouldn't you have been better off just using the terrain in a custom neighborhood?

this has scared me so much...i don't want to play and worry about crashing the whole neighbourhood that i've played for eons at the same time...where can i find TJ and JM's critical fixes in case the worst really does happen?

The critical fixes are here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=10.0

http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=806

You might want to go ahead and install them now, to avoid problems later.

oh thank you thank you! you and the creators are like my gods!! kiss your sweet feet!

It seems as though the behaviors permit far too many disorganized searches into the neighbor list. What they should have done from the start of this project is designed some objects that are used for searching, and that only permit family-oriented neighbor tree-style searching.

Plus, they need to toss out the whole design for "townies," "NPCs", adoptees, etc. This flat-list-biased way of thinking has got to go.

Have you tried telling them that?  I and a lot of others would agree with you, but I don't somehow think the people at EA/Maxis are listening!  And I think they enjoy creating ugly and often nasty townies just to annoy us!

I doubt this is news to them. In fact, I'll bet they have fixes that are ready to go but just have not been debugged.

As a coder, I can tell you from experience that you spend 1% of your time designing, coding, and revising. The other 99% of the time is debugging.

I second this completely. As an experiement, I removed all of those disconnected townies and other characters. The result was that anytime an NPC came on the lot, it crashed or froze for a long time.

So it is a searching thing . . . JMPescado's comments have pointed in that direction, but I'm not entirely sure what the exact mechanism of the error is . . .

Fundamentally, anything in this game that wasn't in the original is going to be deeply screwy. The mood system works, the socials work, most objects work. The memory system is screwy (death memory! argh!), mobile objects are screwy, parties and age transitions can be screwy. Most of the "new" stuff is rather tacked on and hasn't had the kinks totally worked out. Also, the mood system is a combination of extreme object oriented code. (the objects themselves) and algorithms. (Mood adjustments and decay.) This is what the system can handle. The new bits really should have been designed with this in mind, but this wasn't done very well.

Having multiple different varieties of sims (NPCs, Townies, etc.) was probably a bad idea, as dizzy-two pointed out. The more exceptions, ie, forced modifications to the way the game handles stuff for specific things, the more problems you're going to have and the less flexible the game is.

I don't recall specifically what has been said, so I guess I'll ask this, although I'm sure it's already been brought up previously:

Is it a bad idea to have more than one Uni attached to your neighborhood? I thought it's a neat idea because it would give the illusion that there is more than one choice for university and that my sims wouldn't all necessarily go to the same "community" college. Is there anything especially dangerous about having more than one Uni, or is it just the fact that it adds to same issue of the ever-building, ever-increasing size of neighborhoods and number of files leading to your game blowing up in a big fiery ball visible from outerspace problem?

I've started to take measures as far as exporting my CAS made sims and documenting their zodiac signs/personality point distribution so, if need be, I can recreate them should my game blow up and I have to start from scratch. :p But for now, I'm willing to take my chances, especially since I have all the critical fixes so far. I don't want to start from scratch now as it is, since I've put in so much play time. I don't know what's worse, just playing now as is until it 'splodes or having to start over fresh now. I guess I'm just in denial and trying to avoid the inevitible, but I really don't want to start over now if I don't really have to. :p

I wonder, did the first Sims have any of these sort of problems? I've practically new to the whole Sims modding community since I never used any hacks for the first Sims. Heck, I wasn't even aware that there were such things. I pretty much stuck to only using "official" new objects from the EA/Maxis official Sims site. And I didn't really care that much to go searching for new objects or even new skins really for the first Sims.

Oh well. I guess I'll just trudge along desperately hoping to avoid the fateful fiery ball for now. I just don't have the heart or energy to give up on my sims as they currently exist. :p

Ste

Have you made back-ups?  If you have, at leasdt if your neighbourhood does explode into a bfbvfos, you can have a try at fixing it, then play it again.

Oh. I constantly do backups. Usually after a major update of some major hacks, just in case something unexpected happens. :p So yeah, I usually backup the entire The Sims 2 folder, if not just the Downloads, Neighborhoods, and SavedSims folders. But my neighborhood is actually buggered as it is, because I made the terrible mistake of importing two lotbinned families. This was done before it was none that doing so buggers your game. :p

I attempted to look through my neighborhood and see if I could clean things up and delete files and what not, but there were just far too many clones and junk that I didn't want to deal with it. It is probably more trouble that it's worth and I'm afraid I would either delete the wrong files or that it would still get even more buggered than it was in the first place.  ::) Just thinking about it all gave me a headache, so I've decided to opt for living in denial and turning a blind eye or whatever. I'll just play this game until it bursts into a bfbvfos and I'll have to start over. Pretty much the way that I'll have to drive my car into the ground before I even think about getting a new one. :p

Ste

I wanted to keep the houses, just not the people. 

I've never had any problems when deleting the files of unlinked Sims with no character data but aside from the entire Vernonaville cast and CAS sims that never see their way out of the Family/Student bin, I've never deleted any Sims' character file so that's probably why. I'm skittish about continuing to do so now however.  If only there was a way to do Sim Sugery without having to make an archetype first.

Ok,  I have the ultimate stupid question -- or rather 2, or 3 or even 4. 

Please don't rip off my lips,  I need them to suck on my cigarettes.

1 -- what is SimPE
2--where are the character files
3--how do I get all those stupid dormies out of my sims memories.
4--is there a way to lobotomize Mortimer Goth.  I changed his name and turned him into a teenager,  also did some plastic surgery on him. (don't ask me why -- I was playing). 

On a separate note, I noticed yesterday that my level 6 greek house has room for 32,000 pledges.  Does that mean what I think it means?  Can TS2 really handle that many sims?

No, but 32k is a nice integer.

32000 is basically the approximation of 32767, the largest signed 16-bit integer. In programmer-speak, using values like that tends to mean "infinitely large for all practical and functional purposes", since these are not values that should occur naturally. In this case, NIDs are signed 16-bit integers, so if every single possible sim the game could tolerate sitting down was in the game, all but the last 767 could join your Greek house.

Of course, your game would also overrun your hard drive and explode in a big fiery ball that is visible from space well before THAT ever happened. So basically, that's a programmerese way of saying "infinite for all practical purposes". Non-programmers obviously would not understand the relevance of 32767 or 32000. They're not trying to say that your game can actually have that many sims, they're trying to say there's no way in hell your game can have that many sims, and so the value is infinite for all practical purposes.

In practice, the level of Greek house is pretty much irrelevant since all levels will permit the maximum-allowed value of 8 sims, and graduated sims do not count against this value.

If they'd been allowed to spend a little more time coding Uni, they probably would've replaced it with ∞. At least that's what I'd have done.

Well, after the delays with Sims 2, that wasn't on the cards, unfortunately!

I think the main advantage to having a level 6 is that you can have a never ending stream of pledges. Theoretically, anyway, if influence weren't ridiculously easy to come by.

So, after reading this thread I guess it would be ok to just go delete those annoying Maxis families Livingston and Baena? IS that the right spelling? I never play them, talk to them, look at them. I hate them. The families are extremely large and useless.

So is it safe to delete them, JM?

You mean if influence wasn't both ridiculously easy to come by and nearly entirely useless?

I'm not sure what the Livingston and Baena families are, but if their families IDs begin with 0x7FFF, do not delete them, they're the "townie" and "NPC" families, and deleting them can cause your game to behave strangely.

As far as influence is concerned, right on both accounts JM. I don't think I've ever used it. Maybe, if I get a brain spasm, I will decide to play Uni through in the regular way and use it there, meanwhile, I am perfectly happy with the noinfluenceobsession.

Livingston and Baena sound like the names of the families that are indeed either townies or dormies, I forget which, since I always deleteAllCharacters on both, the neighborhood and the sub-neighborhood before I play. I use my own townies/dormies.

In Pleasantville, the Livingstons are the townies (Goopy, Komei, etc ) and the Thomasons are the NPCs (Kaylynn, Remington...) if you have Uni. Or vice versa. I guess Baena is the equivalent from one of the other neighborhoods, perhaps?

In my Pleasantview they're Gilscarbo!  I wonder if they're named after the first Townie to make an appearance in the game?  In another version of Pleasantview, they were named Livingston, so there does appear to be some flexibility.

Baena is 7FFF, damn it, but Livingston is 7FFE--can I dump them?

No, you cannot dump them. One is the NPC family, the other is the townie family. A third family can also appear, the orphan family. Don't bother destroying these, they're required for the game.

Well shucky darn. I would really like to get rid of them, they have about a hundred family members each, maybe more! They are the bulk of the files in my hood.

After reading this thread, I had the chance to ask a maxiod if Maxis had set upper limits on the number of sims one can have in a hood. He said nope, they set no such limit. That the game can have ...oh gosh I think he quoted 4ooo sims the game does start to act up a nd do weird things, but anything like a thousand sims should play just fine.

Since this will be acute again with the coming of NL I will give it a nice friendly bump. I read somewhere here that ea/maxis has fixed the 'too many iterations'. I would really like to know some specifics, and also how many new NPC's the new ep will throw at the game itself. With its theme being a night out in the town, there must be plenty of new service NPC's. I wonder how they will behave; remember the endless spawning of baristas?

Actually, Maxis should just toss the iteration tracker, and process objects preemptively. Then, if an object gets stuck active for too many slices, make note of it in a log file somewhere.  Problem solved. ;D

I actually can't see why they ever needed to make more than one nanny, one repairperson, one burglar, one gardener per neighbourhood.  Maids, I can understand, I like having the male maids as well as the females - my present game has two male ones.  But if they'd stuck to one of each of the others, that would be 8 files saved for starters!  Then add the cook in the uni dorms, the various other uni NPCs and the savings really add up - and also, with only one of each, we ight actually want to play them instead of zapping them all!  And only one professor per major instead of two!  Obviously, you need several shop assistants, but that's really the only NPC which does need more than one!

If your Sim declares Philosophy the first day, his first class he meets FOUR professors.  I assume this is two for undeclared and two for philosophy.

Having that many professors means you hardly ever need to attend class, as simply making friends with all four of them fills your grade meter quickly.

Making friends with drama professors doesn't give you a grade boost. I assume you have to flirt with these.  But they're a pain in the butt.

Hook

They're ALL a pain in the butt!  There's one female Prof in my current neighbourhood who keeps trying to call on my sims even though all professors are banned, she clearly hates her job as all her wants are to "get a job in such and such", can't remember what her LTW was, but it was ridiculous since she's about 104! 

I'm afraid I'm mean to my sims, I make them work for their degree - like they HAVE to write term papers and do assignments!  (I had to work for my degree, I don't see why they should get away with just socializing!)

Is a neighborhood safe at a character count of 600+ ?  I'm giving my Sims game a break at the moment, so I was wondering whether or not to keep playing or start from scratch and see if I can get a safe notownie hack (though I could put the notownieregen into my current neighborhood, is it compatible w/ NL yet?)

The "Too Many Iterations" error has been bumped up to 100,000 in Nightlife, so you should be okay until you start hitting 5,000 to 10,000 sims in your neighborhood.

Expect serious lag on certain things (like the College Phone Directory) if you do have thousands of sims, though.

Prior to discovering through this board that it was dangerous to delete sims from the characters folder, that's what I did to get rid of unwanted ones.  And I deleted a lot!  In Pleasantview I don't have a single remaining original character or their dead relatives with the exception of Daniel Pleasant and Nina Caliente. (Both are retained as ghosts.) I have also deleted tons of nannies, maids, repairmen, townies -- many of these having interacted with my playable sims and thus generating "met so and so" and "made friends with" memories for them.

But despite all this, my game has hummed along without a hitch.  The vast majority of this clean-up occurred in the early part of this year, and I've played all the residences in my neighborhood many many times since with no adverse effects.  My character folder currently lists 335 sim files.  I've easily nuked ~70-80 since I began playing.

I guess I've been lucky.  ???

I have stopped deleting them completely now and opted to just kill/delete in-game and retain the character files in order to prevent future problems.  One thing I will note is that I've never nuked a character file for any sim I've created and played in the game.  All those (dead included) have been kept.  So I'd say the majority of the nuked ones were largely townies and NPCs with no relationships.  When the game regenerated new ones, it used the old character numbering to fill in from the smallest unused number it could find.  However, SimPE sorts on instance number I think so they are organized in order of creation when I view them in the Sim Browser.

One thing you can do with any annoying townie with too many memories to delete is to turn them into babies.  Since they still exist, the game doesn't seem to replace them.  However, not recommended for nannies, although it works great for burglars!  Won't work for repomen, though, unfortunately!

Here's another question everybody except me probably knows the answer to, cos I can't find the answer with search:
Why do you get 3 character files for the same sim?
Iis it a problem or a sign of a problem? - Other than the obvious bloating -
Can you combine them into one? - I know not to delete them!

I was thinking that if you knew when and why it happened, you could catch the duplicate early enough to fix it relatively easily in SimPE  - if you knew what you were doing.....!

You get them when you move an occupied house into the houses bin.  The sims lose their relationships with others sims outside the house, but somehow the game turns those relationships into unlinked sims.  If you look in simPE you'll find those sims have no relationships, and are only about 30 kb in size.  since they aren't the sim that is in your game, but a clone, you can safely delete them, just make a note of their file numbers (the user nos.) and delete them from the characters folder in Neighbourhoods.

3 files of the same sim is generally the impending sign of a Big Fiery Ball That Is Visible From Space.

It is also a problem that can be sorted - I've had it happen, done just what I said, and the game has played fine afterwards.  As you yourself have pointed out, JM, it's generally caused by moving occupied houses into the lots and houses bin.  What I have discovered is that they are, in actual fact, the "lost relationships" - somehow the game turns them from relationships into clones!  But since they too have no relationships, they can be deleted.

It's still better to avoid all that mess in the first place and not move sims living in houses between neighborhoods. It's much cleaner to export that sim's template in sim surgery and recreate a new sim with their stats in the CAS.

I know you know all this ZZ, but just mentioning it again for those who might be thinking in the future of moving occupied houses between neighborhoods. DON'T DO IT!!  :P

It happens if you move them in the same neighbourhood too.  Just NOT A GOOD IDEA!  But, if someone has done it, it can be sorted before the BFBVFS occurs!

(Having said that, I just did it in a last ditch attempt to save Liz Young, and found that, even with NL, the same thing happens.  It also caused the game to hang when I tried to replace the house, because she knew almost every playable sim in the game, plus several NPCs!  And the game was obviously trying to move every single one of the clones with her!  You really would think that, since this problem has known about since before Uni, they would have got it sorted by now!)

Anyway, Liz has now gone for good (although I still have copies of her file for old time's sake! and her clone has just been updated with her memories, and her family now have memories of the clone instead.  Shame, but there you have it!

Yep. I accidentally clicked move house to bin on an occupied house once when I meant to do move family to bin and ended up with dupes.  >:(

Easily sorted, though, it just takes ages finding all those file numbers so you can delete them.  (I found that, although SimPE apparently deletes files from the game, it doesn't seem to delete them from the Characters folder, so I would assume that, rather than deleting them it actually just disables them some how.)

But imagine having TWO Mortimer Goths!!!!  (Not to mention two Don Lotharios!)

Yeah I've done it before when I had to, but it would be nice if the game put up a confirmation box or something. Heh, that Harrassment is bad Mmkay? pop up on the phone hack has saved my butt from having a relationship go down many time. Sometimes I am just ditzy and forget and do something I didn't meant to. :P

I'm one of the few that likes having more than one university attached to a neighborhood.  Back before NL came out I had all three attached to Pleasentview, and things started getting screwy around the mid 700 character files mark.  One of my uni graduates lost her extra wants slots, one of my uni students got the "its high time to move back to the real world" message when she was in her first semester, and when Dina Goth finally died her picture was still in the family picture thing when you clicked on the Goth lot just once.  And this was all before I discovered these critical fix hacks.

Now that NL has bumped the iterations up to 100,000 and I have those critical fixes, can I throw caution to the wind and reattach all three of the universities and Downtown to my new Pleasentview without it blowing up anytime soon?

Out of curiosity, has anyone actually experienced the dreaded Sims Apocalypse?

Or is this the early warning system?

I might have. It may have been the second or third run-through of Strangetown. First run-through was on 98, where the Reaper became completely invisible and her scythe clipped to the floor, third run-through was quite recent. (I just got bored of the place. Deleted!)

Yah, must've been 2nd time. I've learnt to never ever go on a mad CAS! rampage again.

Well, I think it's happening to my game now, and I only have about 300 character files.  But something has definitely gone screwy, as I now have another sim with the jump bug!  and I can't move HIM out either!  And I just reinstalled NL, just in case that might put things right, only of course, if anything it's made them worse!  I'm going to try one last ditch attempt, reinstall the EP but NOT the patch and take out all my hacks, and see if that fixes it.

If not, I shall just give up playing the Sims at all I think, or go back to sims1!!!!

Oh rats! and here I thought I understood something at last!  "Deleting sims is bad" was such a nice golden rule.  I found 3 of the same sim at least 6 months ago when I first got SimPE and could have tackled it then.  :(  So instead of preventing the fiery ball, failing to delete them has hastened it's arrival!  :'(  I only ever downloaded 1 lot with a family (in month 1 of owning the game), never moved lots with sims between 'hoods, I've hardly let any sims move house and the only time I've moved Sims in houses to the lot bin was while I rearranged the 'hood to fit more into the space available and one or two might have gone into the bin temporarily....  wish I'd known

I've backed up and deleted  about 130 of 440 grey files with simenhancer - which DOES delete the character files.  Unfortunately dead sims are grey too, so it's easy to delete a dead sim by accident.  There are about 60 of them - mostly the maxis made ancestors. 

I thought sorting the character files by size would give me a good handle on the number dud files and their character numbers.  I have 130 character files under 30k, another 60 between 30k and 50k, 5 between 50 and 100k and 3 between 100 and 200.  The other 250 are all over 200k.  Anything under 200k seems to be a dead sim or junk

Thanks JM, ZZ and Motoki.

Be careful, some ghosts are very small in file size.  Best to put them in alphabetical and look for doubles. (or trebles).  Then check to make sure they don't have any relationships before you delete them.

yup -did that after the first 5 times I messed up and had to reload the backup - 4am by then! - thanks for the warning though - it might save someone else.  In that spirit here's more info on veronaville.  By my count Veronaville has 67 dead sims who came with the game (could be 1 or 2 out here).  Some of them have normal sized files and others are under 50k.  Their user numbers are all over the place - I'm guessing the number gets allocated when you play the lot, so next time I start a pre-made hood I might make things tidy by visiting all the pre-made families briefly and saving..

The file numbers are allocated in order of the sim being generated.  So if you have number 00053 missing, and you create a sim in CAS, they will get that number.  If you don't do that, the next townie or NPC that the game generates will get that number.  Unless one of your sims gives birth before another NPC gets generated.

Wow, how have I missed this thread??

cwkeys:  I had the same problem once upon a time.  Yes, I packaged occupied, played lots and moved them from one UNI to another.  My count went from a managable 400+ files to 1,000 or so, and the game just kindof quit.  It started loosing family trees and relationships.  Then it stoped loading lots.  Finally it would just crash when I tried to open a lot, like the computer was saying, "What, are you kidding me?"  I opened up SimsPE and saw the duplicate files.  It looked like this:

 (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v252/kristalrose/SimsPEGoneWild.jpg)

I am not a modder.  I have very little computer knowledge past the basics.  So, I wound up doing a clean install.  (WAAAAAAAA!)  Since then I have not deleted sims, I have not packaged any occupied played lots, and I have my simmies on birth control.  LOL

Now, a few questions for those more awesome than me. 

1)  Since NL came out, I had taken out all the No____ regeneration hacks.  I'm assuming those are now safe?  Because the completely pristine neighborhood I started with this time is again overrun with Downtownies and dormies.

2)  If I am understanding right, Maxis is saying that we can now have over 10,000 sims in a neighborhood?  How about all those out there who's opinions I really trust (the modders)?  Do YOU say it's safe.  Can I allow my family sims finally throw away their diaphrams?   ;)

3)  Are the critical fixes still necessary now that NL and the patch is out?  I thought that NL made them redundant or obsolete.

The final exam bug has been nixed with the recent patch so if you have the lastest patch you don't need it (it may have been fixed with the base NL expansion but I don't know, you are probably better to install the patch if you haven't already) so you don't need the fix for that. Some of the others haven't been fixed though.

Notownieregeneration and nodormieregeneration work fine.  However, before you go on a mad wipeout of all existing townies and downtownies, can I just say, try the downtownies before you decide to write them off!  They are far better thought out than the original uglybugs!

As to other hacks, there is a list posted by Dr. Boris of those of Pescado's which should still work in NL etc.  Still, I'd recommend adding them slowly, just to be sure they still work the way you want them to.

Thanks ZZ.  No, I do not plan on a mad wipe-out of sims.  My plan was just to download the no____regen hacks and then, as they die off of (kindof) natrual causes, more won't be born to take their place.  :)

I've moved almost all the downtownies into the game, and they are really quite interesting to play.  And the uglier ones can be altered with the plastic surgery table!

I agree.  The downtownies are far more superior to the regular old townies.  And my sims have married quite a few of them so far.

I'm planning on making Mr. Big and the Diva playable in Pleasentview so I can start a family with them and make them more filthy stinking rich than the Goths.  Just got to figure out a quick way to make them playable and send them to the family bin.  Not sure how I'm gonna do that yet, but it'll most likely involve Inge's teleporter shrub. 

Lucy Burb makes a very good looking adult, so does the Wilsonoff girl. The males have disappointed me so far. Val is my only hope, her males are simply smashing :D

I have been keeping track of this thread for some time because one of my hoods (before I reinstalled for NL) was getting buggy.  I installed all the fixes as they came out, but I think that the one hood was just too far gone before the fixes came out.

That hood is gone now in my new install.  However, I did package some of the families before I reinstalled, and now have them off in a folder on my desktop. Originally, I was planning on installing them into a new hood.

However, soon after I packaged those houses and families, I thought I read somewhere around here that it was a bad thing to transfer played sims out of one hood into another, because they would carry with them a bunch of memories and friends that would create garbage in the new hood.

I also thought I read somewhere that it was a really bad idea to move Bella Goth out of Strangetown and in with the Goth family in Pleasantview.

Is this all still true?

Thanks for any assistance.

I'm still a learner on this, but not quite a novice any more.  Here goes:

Sims you package take with them dummy files for all the people they knew or are related to alive AND dead and all the custom content in their house and a whole load of other hack and custom content tiles. Their memories are connected to the dummy sims. 

What I'm doing is using clean installer to delete all the crap and then using SimPE to clean up the memories
Stage 1 (optional), open the package with clean installer, choose lot and family only to unselect all the custom content. Then save with a new file name.  This content is already in my game in sub folders  and I don't want it dumped in the downloads folder in one big mess).  File will now be a sensible size.
Stage 2a,  go through the sims included in the lot and uncheck all the friends of the family except anyone critical like former lover who dumped someone at the altar... (Better to delete the lot),
Stage 2b work out which relations and dead sims you still want around as ghosts or named memories  Delete the rest and SAVE with a new file name
Stage 3 put them in the hood or even better a completely empty hood so you don't get confused
Stage 4.  Open the 'hood in simPE (make a backup first)  Edit the memories.  Delete every memory owned by "unknown"  Weed some of the others too.  I don't think you have to delete every "met unknown".  I haven't anyway.  I think the game copes with that

Greatful for further education if this isn't enough....

In addition to some of the above Bella doesn't have any memories of her family and if they do remember Bella - the memories are linked to some other bella so if you move her you have to do a big job on her memory and her families...

^  Thanks alot!  That is about what I thought, but I wanted to reverify it.

I remembered reading here that moving sims between hoods is not a good plan if you can avoid it - sounds like this is still true...although you *can* make it work without messing up your game if you are willing to do all the work to get rid of all the dummy sims and memories that get dragged over.

Now, just to clarify: do these dummy sims end up as character files themselves?  Or are they just components of your original sims character file?

Thanks! :)

I had a similar problem with a fairly new neighbourhood where some of my sims got a jump bug which I just couldn't sort out.  What I did in the end was create a new neighbourhood and clone the families I wanted, copy all the data from their family ties, character, interests etc., and then basically start them all again with a clean slate.  It seems to be working, and interestingly, if a couple only had one lightning bolt for each other before, they still have only the one!  Took me ages, which is why I've been offline for a while, but it seems to be worth it. 

As I understand it they end up as unlinked character files which is why the hood increases massively in size..

Just cos you and I agree on how we think it works, doesn't mean we are right....
No one contradicted me which is a good sign.

Could the info from this thread go into the war room? - it's a keeper....

Basically, if you move an occupied house to the bin, all the sims known to that family turn into unlinked clones which you can find in SimPE (so although the family lose the memory of these relationships, the sims themselves are duplicated!)  therefore, if you try moving a sim from one neighbourhood to another, the same thing will happen.  You can get rid of all the unwanted files with simPE, make a list of all the filenumbers and then delete them from the Characters Folder, but it's risky!  Cloning is safer, but takes longer, and is more work.

Okay...all of that makes sense and is quite informative.

Now, I see here in this thread that errors are likely to set in at around 800 sims in a hood, +/- a few.  My experience with the hood that started getting glitchy bears that out.  Actually, that hood started getting glitchy at about 500 sims (including townies and UNI-generated sims).  I started having nannies who would never leave, a billion handymen or gardeners showing up on the lot all at once, social workers who would never show up with adopted-over-the-phone children, portal problems (I installed crammyboy's hack and almost half my lots had portal problems show up), house slowdowns to the point I had to move the families in and out of houses, occasional crashes, and game freezes.  In short, it wasn't pretty.

It was a hood I had worked very hard on (a Bottom-up hood), and so on this install, I am trying very hard to avoid losing a hood that way.

I have all the critical fixes installed, but I still want to be really careful.  So if the 800 mark is kind of a benchmark for the beginning of overcrowding, how many sims can I myself add to a hood (whether new sims or sims born in this hood), assuming they are all 'clean' (ie, free of memories of sims from other hoods, etc)? If I create a hood from scratch and attach a university and a downtown area, how many game-generated sims does that give me, before I even add my first playable sim?

Thanks!

And thanks everyone for this thread.  It is one of the more informative ones I've read in the last year.
 

I've done the same,  but this time I've packaged all my families after creating them.  I've done it right away before they started interacting with anyone outside the family, so I won't get any dummy files.  I checked the packages with clean installer, and there was nothing there that didn't belong, so I am pretty confident there will be no explosion visible from space or anywhere else.

Recently I had a fresh neighbourhood, with all the townies deleted, but with all the university and downtown characters included. I remember seeing around 350 files in my folder, including the 20 odd ones I created.

Remember that at any point before actually creating your families you can do the deleteallcharacters to wipe out ALL the sims in the game.  This will force you to create your own townies and dormies, but I consider that a plus.

^  Wow!  So if you don't delete the townies, you probably end up with about 400 game-generated sims before you even start?

So that gives you about 400 +/- sims to play with, including dead sims, etc.

Further, if you kill off some townies/dormies in-game (rather than deleting them before you start), they auto regenerate unless you have the hack to not regenerate them, right?  And these auto-regenerated townies/dormies do not replace the killed off townies/dormies files - they create *new* character files which count toward the total of about 800.

Correct?

Maxis CLAIMS that with the patch for Uni/Nightlife that they have upped the limit of sims for neighborhoods to remain stable.  I do not know if it is true...and what the new limit is suppose to be now.  According to MaxisHunter they are now unable to recreate the Final Exam bug...and the Dead/Elder bug...since the patch.  Again I do not know how true this is.  Does anyone know?

I agree with that - I put the no townie regen hack in as soon as I found it.  Another reason not to get Uni and NL for me.  There is an NPC and townie creator on MTS2 that lets you generate NPCs to suit your taste - all young men - all elderly black ladies an or whatever and turn your own sims into townies.  It recommends starting with an empty hood, so I haven't done much with it

^  Yeah...although I have UNI and NL, I have the 'no townie regeneration' hack in my game, and I believe I have one for dormies too, unless that was one of the ones that conflicted with NL (can't remember and I'm not at home).  I thought I had one related to the secret society members too, so that they wouldn't regenerate - can't remember.

What I'm *really* glad I never did was attach two universities to the same 'hood.  That would in all probability be a disaster waiting to happen.

The main problem with two universities is the resident students, whether waiting in the bin or living in a dorm, house or Greek House, will wander between the two universities and interact with the sims there, which makes it difficult if you decide you don't want that uni any more.  I think it's safe enough if you create the unis and then deleteallcharacters, then the sims wandering between lots will be mostly your own sims who may well already know each other anyway, but obviously you can only do this before you start creating any sims at all.  If you want, you can use SimPE to delete any characters you don't want, again best done before you start to play so you don't have to search out all the memories of other sims having met them.

That is exactly as I understand it. No Sim is deleted by the game. Ever. Their character files stay and count towards the total. Nuking any and all characters before any Sim has any memories of them seems like a great idea. I know this may seem kind of stupid, but I have to ask: If I delete all characters where will my service NPC's come from? I.E Maids, nannies, ect. Will delete all characters delete NPC like Grimmy.

Couldn't I just put in the no regen hack and manualy delete all townies, downtownies, and dormies? Who needs them? I'm talking about a spanking new never played 'hood with only NPCs in it.

The game does regenerate Service NPCs as needed, you can feel the pause sometimes when it does it - it's only the townies that don't regenerate with the hack. 

I did get rid of all my townies by moving them in and playing them. There's a thread here somewhere about" how many townies do you have".  I think my 1 was an all time low!  I intended to kill them off for ghosts and couldn't do it. They were actually quite fun as their personalities were different from the sims I make.  Most of them were Butt ugly of course, but new clothes and hair did wonders for most.  But I only have the base game, no Uni or downtown. 

You need to be aware that everytime a new NPC is generated, the game will lag as though there's something wrong with it, and you just have to wait until the new character has been generated.  However, you may get some unacceptable NPCs (in my present hood I've one maid who keeps walking onto lots where she works at midnight and kicking over the trashcan!  And when I check in SimPE, she's not furious with anyone on that lot!  wierd!

I double-checked my numbers now that I am home.  The original game generates around 127 characters for Pleasantville.  I did a deleteallcharacters and then added uni and downtown.  I ended up with 245 characters.  So 127 + 245 - some duplications with NPC's and - my own characters you have roughly 400 pre-generated characters... and you haven't even started playing the game yet!

Conclusion : Deleteallcharacters is your friend :)


damn, i just noticed I'm no longer tasty :(

Well, we were all Asinine at one point!  It can only get worse!!!!!! :'(

I'm seriously considering making clones of any characters that I may want (I already have most of the playables) then reinstalling and deleting all characters after loading a College and Downtown just so at least most of the characters will eventually be MINE!  (After all, it's MY GAME once it's on my pc,and if I don't want Goopy and Co, that's my choice.  Maxis should just have made it easier!  I'd actually like it if they made it just delete: then give a list of townies etc to choose form.)

I just went throe sim enhancer and got rid of  a bunch of ugly townies that I never play keeping only essential characters and ghost files .I also kept NPC's and Uni personnel

Well, NPCs and Profs only get replaced, and what you get next time might be worse!  Just wish they'd found a way of having an Education career track and using the sims who are actually in that career to be the profs  - I mean, how hard could it be?  (Go on tell me, too hard!)

I kept all NPC's and Professors,service personnel like store clerks,Uni Mascots,Cafeteria workers as I didnt want the game to regenerate anyone.I only got rid of  townies and I also Kept the frat house kids at SSU and the Sorority house YA's  I also kept the Bright house intact  and the students that Maxis Puts in the Uni Bin. they might have a purpose at some point in my hood so I kept them. Heather Huffington I plan on using a swingin single in my Neighborhood  so I kept her.her aspiration is Romance.

Yes, that's what happens with 'delete all'. Whenever you need an NPC, like the paper-girl/boy, the mail delivery person, maid, nanny, etc. the game generates it. And as ZZ points out, the game may lag while doing so. But really, no worries, there will always be the postal worker, the delivery people or anything else that you need. Delete all characters in conjunction with 'noregeneration' will just prevent the spawing of towines, not the spawning of NPC's.

I ususally just use the 'noregeneration' because the townies bring in some variety. For the ugliest ones there is always the career reward surgery and/or SimSurgery in SimPe. Personally, I don't alter much, just über-long noses, fish mouths, and frog eyes :D. There is even a tutorial on how to make the surgically altered DNA permanent, it's a simple and easy proceedure. It's posted on MTS2 and the link to it is posted here as well.

if I alter DNA like eye color or skintone I use Sim Enhancer because it records the changes and makes them permanent in SimPE. other changes like Uber long noses  I have to use SimPE to make the change permanent

I just can't be bothered with all that!  Best thing is to partner the ones with original big noses etc. with aliens with original no noses etc., then maybe the kids will be somewhere in the middle!  But I wish, if you put a green skin and a blue skin together, you could have turquoise babies!

Would like confirmation of this also...

Well, I started getting corrupted character files at 365 characters in my last install of Pleasantview ( and I've played it before NL with double that number and no problems) so I'm sceptical about how well they've done the programming for that upped limit.  Or whether it's one of their own objects that caused the problems I've had (every sim with this problem has the restaurant podium token in their memories, so I wonder if that has issues, and if so, it would affect every darn sim who ever goes out for a meal, and every sim who appears on that lot!)

I have a couple of questions about this problem that I hope someone can answer...
1. A hypothetical question really; what if I exceeded the recommended number of character files so I had to do a clean install, but there were one or two families I really didn't want to lose. Could I just upload them to the sims exchange and download them after reinstalling and have no problems, or would they bring all their associated character files with them therefore reintroducing problems to the game?
2. Where would I get a hack that stops townies from regenerating (for TS2 and NL)? Are there any problems associated with them?
Thanks for any help,

As the Hind

No, this would simply re-import the BFBVFS back into your neighborhood.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/hacks/nl/

Thanks  :)

As the Hind

I can't get that link to work - it says URL not found?

As the Hind

Asthehind, you could try searching the board for 'notownieregen' ... or hope that someone with enough nice points comes along and gives the correct link. 

Bleah, I guess my 6 niceness means I'll tell you.  Try this http://moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/nl/hacks/ (http://moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/nl/hacks/) and then look down the list for notownieregen and if you have uni, you'll want the nodormie one as well.

If you want to, you can use SimPE to recreate your sims that you want to keep.  You need to clone each of them, and make notes of all the personality, voice, aspiration and interest data.  Then, you create a package file of each of the sims you clone, put it into Saved Sims or Downloads and then you will find the faces when you go into CAS and you can recreate your families.  You will need to edit their interests in SimPE afterwards if you are bothered about this.

However, before you give up on your neighbourhood, try checking for any extra copies of the sims you have in your game, if they have nor relationships and are unlinked, then you can safely remove tham from your Characters folder.  Similarly, any townies, dormies, SS or Downtownies with no relationships can be safely deleted. 

Check also for multiple baristas if you haven't been using the nonpcspam mod.  Any that have no relationships can be removed.  If you still have more than three baristas, you will need to get rid of the relationships and the memories of "Met so and so" for each sim they have met, after which they can be deleted too.

My current hood is an old one which I played without any of JM's mods and eventually became a BFBVFS, but luckily I had back-ups, still full of unwanted characters, most of which I deleted, and the game is now playing perfectly well.

Thanks for the advice, I must say that I am ridiculously sentimental about my sims, and the thought of them all dieing in an apocaliptic explosion scares the blank out of me!

As the Hind

I'm very fond of my sims too, they're rather like part of the family!  the thing that really scares me rigid is the thought "If I die, who will look after my cat ..... and MY SIMS!"

And I thought I was the only one! ::)

As the Hind

No, I think there are quite a few of us who'd like our sims to be buried with us ready to take that final journey to wherever!