More Awesome Than You!

without bringing any unwanted/duplicated files? and vice versa, i.e. moving home town sims/families/occupated lots to downtown?

And a related question, do downtownies wander around in the home town as passers-by or in community lots? Do home town townies wander around in downtown community lots? I'm trying to decide whether to put all the families from home town and downtown in one place. My MATYville (the painful version) hood loading time and navigation lag is just too much.

I think you're safe as long as they remain within the same neighbourhood - you'd only have a problem if you moved someone from, say, Pleasantview to Strangetown, not from Pleasantview to Pleasantview Downtown.

You mean move the family or (move the family AND the lot) ?

You can move the family out of their existing home so the family is in the sim bin and then move them into any lot in the home / downtown neighborhood. Do NOT put the family into the LOT bin.

Downtownies not wander around the base hood. To help with lag, start by deleting neighborhood decorations - especially ones with animation like the waterfall, flying birds, helicopters - and vacant lots that you don't want (or lot bin the vacant lots if you think you might want to use them later). Is there a big lag when you enter then lots (after the first visit to each lot) or is the lag mostly when moving around in neighborhood view?  I can't think of why you would have any problems moving the sims to either the downtown lots or the mainhood lots if you wanted to stay in one hood.

Thank you for the warning, simmiecal, I meant to keep their abodes because I want to keep the place you put them in as much as possible. But since now you warned me, I think I can move them out (with Inge's stay things shrub's help), and move the family and the lot separately and then put them back in the lot after moved. Thanks a lot.

Oh, just to let you know, I did a lot of trimming in the neighborhood, got rid of all the trees and most hood decorations except for the castle you made, deleted all the empty houses, merged a few households, set free some townies. Now it is much easier to navigate in the hood. But the hood loading time doesn't seem to be any shorter.  :-\ Today I first went to downtown to have a look. It is very very nice but just too lagging. I gave up the idea of trimming it down, so I will just move the families to the home town so that I can play them. Do you have "free" downtownies there?

Hometownies dont wander downtown either...

There are townies in the base neighborhood - but honestly, there are plenty of sims in the hood - you'll never have a shortage of walkbys or people on community lots.  In the downtown area - there are a couple of buildings in the middle of Simhatton - the really tall ones. If you haven't gotten rid of those, give that a shot to see if it improves things.

I remembered that Inge was passing by the house that I was playing. And today I found she lives in downtown.  ;D Oh, you mean strictly downtownies, not downtown residents. OK, I will keep in mind.

Mostly lagging in the hood view. Not much lag when actully in the lot, except for large lots and/or a lot of sims (like the dock house, huge trailor lots, and the mountain top lots), whether it is the first time entering the lot doesn't seem to matter to me.  The most problem I have is the hood and lot loading time, even a single sim house (the back to basic houses), or a house with no or very little CC (Like the Jenkins or Database house) loads a long period of time.

But how about the downtown? If I move all the residents to the base hood, will I meet people when I go to downtown community lots?

Yes. Think about when you first installed Nightlife. When you went to a downtown lot and didn't have any playable sims living downtown, the community lots had the new "downtownies" but you'd also run into other sims from your main hood.

Edit to add:

In the Willow walk section there are a lot of trees in the hood and on the lots. I've recently learned that trees seem to add to lot lag so you might want to ditch a few and see if that helps.

I heard moving them from the neighbourhood to downtown was as bad as moving them to a different neighbourhood so i'm not about to attempt it.  Maybe someone can give a definite answer though.

ok, now I'm confused.

That is true if you move them ON THEIR LOT - meaning you move them into the LOT bin. But there shouldn't be a problem if the family moves out of the lot - and to the SIM bin - and then move into a new lot.

Oh okay so if you move ONLY the family and not the house you shouldn't get dupes?

There have also been some issues, namely the "lottery bug" where if you ask someone from an attached hood (downtown -> main hood) to MOVE IN with your sim, the game will calculate some odd HUGE amount for the funds the sim brings when they move in. Unless you can be a little more specific as to what the problems are...I've also heard that boolprop is the work of the devil and can ruin your game.  ;D  ::)

It's funny i've never once had the lottery bug.  I can't remember where i heard that but maybe it was as you said moving the house with the sims instead of just the sims.

I've moved several families from the main neighbourhood to the downtown one and not had any problems at all, although I wish there was a way to do it without having to move them out of their houses.  Inge's shrub doesn't work in my game, so I have to go through complicated replacement procedures to keep the house intact.  I've stopped using downtown for residents now though, since the introduction of the time syncher thingy, because it doesn't track both of them together.

As for walkbys, in the normal neighbourhood you only get residents of that neighbourhood (your Sims or townies), but downtown you will get all of them (residents of both neighbourhoods, townies & downtownies).

I've gotten the lottery bug twice now - once when a downtown Sim invited someone from the main hood to live with him, and she brought about 5 million. I left it since he was a vampire, so I figured, hey, rich goes along with it. The other was more recently, when a main hood Sim invited a downtown Sim to move in, and she brought about two million. I used the money order to have them send most of it to the vampire house, hah, since it didn't fit with that family. Neither were 'townies', but were in houses.

It's the crossing of neighborhood boundaries using the "move-in" feature that triggers the lottery - doesn't matter if they are townies or playable characters. Certain NPCs - like the vampires, MrBig, etc - are associated with downtown so if they move into the main hood, they can trigger the lottery event but it has nothing to do with them being NPCs.

I have never had it happen to me-and I only ever marry the (down)townies or uni students. I almost wish it would, cos I like my sims to have tons of money, but I don't like to cheat! :D