More Awesome Than You!

I'm about to start bulldozing  :D the MATYhood - removing empty lots and custom content. If I delete a custom content file - do I have to worry about anything in the game that would cause instability? I realize that the item that the custom content was cloned on may look nothing like the custom content and that the original item will show on the lot. That would look ugly and I can check the lots for stuff that sticks out, but I am more concerned about doing something to fubbared the lot. Do I have to worry about that???  ???

Terrain paints will cause unstability, which I notice you have quite a few of.  Also, objects should not cause instabilty, they should just get replaced with Maxis defaults.

Going through your Downloads folder with the Clean Installer, I noticed quite a lot of empty packages and duplicate files.

My bad. I'm a little nervous about deleting duplicate files. I did that once and some meshes stopped working but I'm willing to chalk that up to being a noob and figure I must have done something wrong. I was going to leave the terrain paints as the file sizes are small. The only ones I knowingly imported were for the beach - I really wanted the sims to swim in the ocean. The other ones I must have missed when I was installing some lots.

I know what you mean...offering such a huge project for downloading has got to be nervewracking, and I definitely don't envy you the job. You did an amazing job.  :)

If you are using Clean Installer and are reading the pink files as duplicate files sometimes that is not always the case.  Two simple ways of checling to see if it is indeed a mesh or cc is to click the gray header bar titled "name" which will sort the files by their name and then you can easily see what is truly a duplicate and what is not.  Also when you click a fiel name usually a thumbnail will pop up.  Mesh files to my knowledge do not have thumbnails.  (I could be remembering that wrong, it's been a while since I've cleaned my folder)

I have found the most obvious and clear method of finding dups with clean installer is to sort by the MD5 column, this groups files together with the same MD5 and are in fact dups.

That's what I'm doing right now and Blue wasn't kidding - there are a lot of duplicates.  :-[  :-[ Well, at least the corrected download file I put up tonight will be smaller.

Thanks for the info on finding dupes--that should be helpful.  (I myself am a dupe, but we won't get into that now). :(