More Awesome Than You!

My Pleasantview has 380 charecters, I know there are a few extra baristas in there before I removed all coffee bars from community lots. Other than that, it's just the premade sims, and their children. My custom neighborhood (currently empty, where I build lots) has 197, I see some Uni snapshots there so maybe I did give the 'hood a school... Man, I might have more baristas than I thought, I only have a few kids born since I don't have a lot of time to play the game and I had a reformat a couple of months ago.
Anyway, what's the critical point where I should be seeing if my preventive hacks are working?

Trouble reportedly sets in sometime past the 800 mark. I'm currently running at somewhere under 500 in my neighborhood.

DUMB QUESTION ALERT

How exactly does one see how many sims they have in a neighbourhood?

Go into your neighborhoods directory and count the character files. Windoze will give a count of how many files you have in that directory. That's how many characters you have.

Does this number include dead sims? And if so, could the problem be avoided by deleting sim-centuries old character files?

Yes, and no, you should not go deleting files like that.

If you sell the gravestone, does the dead sim disappear from the list?

Does them character directory for each individual nieghborhood include the University sims too, I am presuming so only becuase i cant find any other directory related.

and also the initial poster makes out that bar staff and other comunity lot staff are stored here is that true or are they just ramdomly created each time.

Only realy want to know to figure out if this 550+ number i have is either just my sims or just sims and townies or all caracters including all the npc's.

All characters, including townies, NPCs, and everything else, are included in this count. 550 is starting to get kind of large, but not unhealthy. Yet.

So hwne you say 550+ is gettin abit big is that for what a decent PC would be,
what i mean is If i have a high end PC it will be able to handle more
Or is it a game thing and doesnt matter how good a PC i had.

and what bad things could i expect happening.

O yeh, would getting rid off the tills and cofee bar things in my community lots automatically delete the caracters associated with them. I tend to have quite a few tills and stuff to make them look more realsitic.

My favorite custom hood has 887 character files. I know that's a lot. What can I do to cut down? It there anything I can do?

I currently have around 450 in Pleasantview and this is only with 2 expansions and also with not playing it for a while (because it's so full).  Bearing in mind all the extra characters each expansion is going to create, surely the game will allow for that?  If not, Maxis can't have intended anyone to use the same neighbourhood for the entire duration of the expansions because it sounds as if it just won't be possible.  I assumed that if I reduced the size of the character files by deleting some tombstones, this would help, but presumably it won't, as it appears it's the number of files, not the size.

I have started a new Pleasantview ready for the expansion, but am very reluctant to give the old one up as I'm approaching 4th generation on the original families now.  For a while I've been trying to reduce the size by only allowing one child per family, but obviously that doesn't alter the number of files, only the number of playable Sims, so maybe it's a pointless exercise.

For an example on the other end of the spectrum, I've got a neighborhood with 55 character files.  22 of those were created by me (10 in CAS and 12 in-game kids so far), while the others are NPCs (maids, gardeners, etc.).  I haven't yet sent anyone to university, but I expect the number to jump again when I do.  I deleted all the Maxis-generated townies and dormies before creating any of my own sims and I've got the no-townies and no-dormies hacks.  Aside from the occaisional slow-down when the game had to generate an NPC on the fly, it has worked out quite well.

^ Yeah I did the same thing.  I have about 318 characters.  I was wondering if selling the tombstone does any damage.  I killed a hideous lunch lady and I really don't want her ghost around the dorm.  I already have a dead sim for that job anyway :)

Selling tombstones is harmless, if irreversible, as selling the tombstone destroys the sim's character data and makes him irreversibly gone forever, visible only as a fambly tree entry or memory.

So does that mean his character file disappears from the list and leaves a gap?  I mean, I killed off Sophie  in one of my neighbourhoods, but she just regenerated as a professor in the Academie!

No, the character file is still there, albeit in a reduced format. As for "Sophie", that's mostly just due to name repetition. Often the same name will repeat itself multiple times in your neighborhood. I have 5 or 6 Marylena Hamiltons. I'm going to have to start feeding them to the cow plant.

Yes, they still count. Unfortunately, moving things to the bin and deleting them has zero useful effect. It is purposeless to delete sims, since they will simply be hidden from view, not actually truly wiped. And if your Pleasantview had *1400* sims, you are well into the danger zone and probably have irreparable damage to your neighborhood files.

I had been in a panic about my character file count nearing 500. I guess I'm doing all right, then. Is there a safe way to remove extra files? I hardly play the University part of the game and I don't need all those professors. My sims have never had contact with most of them, so memories wouldn't be an issue. I don't think. Hell, that's it. I don't think. . Could someone please think for me and point me in the right direction with this? Or just take my lips, JM. Take 'em.

I have manually removed a few characters.  After making sure they are not mentioned in any memories, remove their sim descriptions (Sim Description under Filetypes in SimPE) and the corresponding character file from the \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N00X\Characters folder.  Note X is the number of the neighbourhood  ;)

However, that method (with a huge neighborhood) takes a long time. You have to manually go through everyone's memories to make sure they have none for the to-be-deleted characters. I attempted it once, but then I decided my neighborhood is in no real danger right now with slightly over 300 characters. However, I would love some sort of program that deletes these empty character files and any memories pertaining to them.

Wouldn't we all!  It's just a pity you can't delete stuff in SimPE and have to close the programme down before you can go into Windows to do it.  (Plus you have to make copious notes of all the numbers you need to delete!)  And a word of warning, you need to have a hack installed that will prevent any respawning, or the game will just simply refill all the vacancies!


I know, I've got loads of them too, but in this game where I made all the Townies in Pleasantvies babies it hasn't happened - they're still there, of course, but if you bring all their interests, personality points etc. down to zero I think it reduces the size of the file, and when you are changing something in any of your families you can just make them disappear from their list of friends and acquaintances.  The only sim townie I've had in this neighbourhood who's reappeared is Chloe Gonzaga, and I think that's because I made her into a toddler, not a baby, and she's reappeared as a replacement nanny - and it's the same Chloe, you can tell by her face!

I'm up to 693 character files now, so I guess this game won't last much longer before I have to abandon it and either start a new one or move in an old one and carry on with it!

The reason they have the same face is because townies are generated from the "Archetype" faces you see in CAS. This means that if a townie rolls the same face, the same hair color, the same skin tone, and the same name, it'll look like the same person.

I understand that, but she had the same personality as well - I know because in another game I had Chloe move into a house with a family and grow up and go to University!  So maybe the old Chloe is just a clone of the original, but it's still pretty wierd!

I just wish when they'd created the original faces they hadn't included quite so many really ugly ones! 

Same personality is very common, due to the fact that the game can only generate 12 different personalities (all townies have archetype personalities for their sign), and the often-mentioned "Firstborn" effect which makes sim personalities nonrandom.

I guess you're right again!  But how come in that case the alien babies always seem to have really wierd distributions of personality points?  And if I try to create a Virgo sim with as low a level of neatness points as Dirk Dreamer, they turn into some other sign!  I think it's one rule for the Maxis creators and Maxis generated points, and another for us mere simmers!

Because babies do not obey the same limitations as created sims spawned normally. Alien babies don't actually have "really weird" distributions of personality points at all, in truth. Pascal's two aliens clearly resemble Pascal, while Vidcund's alien clearly is Vidcundish.

That's because the Maxian premades have personality traits that are uncorrelated with their astrological sign, whereas if you create it in CAS, personality determines sign, and dragging the personality bars in debug mode changes the sign as well.

I said it was one rule fo the guys at Maxis and another for the rest of us!  Oh well, if I want a Virgo who isn't forever cleaning up and taking showers I'll have to change them in SimPE!

I've just noticed this thread here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=77155) if you are interested.  It mentions something about CHARrED - DatGen's Advanced Character Editor.  I don't know if this will clean up files with no character data.  Has anybody here had any experience with this programme?

There's varying levels of character files with no data. "Orphaned" files that are referred to by no actual memory or ancestry of any intact sim can be wiped through the laborious process of erasing all "invisible memory tokens" and then erased entirely from the game cleanly. Ancestral files, even if their actual character resources are stripped, should be kept in the game for historical value.

Thanks for the link Posie!

What are the chances of the bugs associated with overpopulation being fixed? I think JMPescado has some hacks that fix various aspects of it, but I don't know how deep the problems are. Are we basically dependent on Maxis for this one? Or is the cause something fixable by outside hackers?

*was also wondering Oddysey's question*

Is it mainly related to Memory and therefore fixable by adding RAM? 

I think I'd better change neighborhoods fairly soon, as I'm nearing 700 in the present Pleasantview!  Don't want it to be damaged before someone sorts out the way to fix it!

The problems with overpopulation can be staved off to a much more indefinite period using the "Critical Fixes" available from FFS and Twojeffs. Although having recently been banned from rentech.com, it's now much more difficult to keep up with his work. We've been able to stabilize neighborhoods of over 2000 (garbage) sims. Although if you have THAT many, it points at a deeper root to your trouble.

However, Maxis is slow to learn from its mistakes, and there could be literally tons of lurking 0x85 time bombs in every expansion pack, which won't be clearly known until somebody actually runs into them with a huge bloated neighborhood.

I suppose if they got inundated with millions of emails from simmers all saying they wouldn't be buying the next EP unless some of the existing problems, such as this one, were fixed first, they just MIGHT be induced to "learn from their mistakes"!

Oh I see. You are an optimist after all ;)

G.

That's actually good news. If the problem is known, and apparently fixable, then that is a good thing. Even if Maxis does keep throwing new crap at us.

What is an 0x85 error? How does one recognize it in-game? Just so I can keep an eye out for problems, and help with the bug hunting in future EPs.

I thought I was being ironical, but maybe it was just sarcasm after all - and I remember being told at school (many years ago) that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, so I really should try to avoid it!

Well, teachers are not always right, as a matter of fact, they are often wrong. I remember when my best friend was told that being a left-hander was a bad, evil thing and was forced to use her right hand (also many years ago). Sarcasm, when done right, is a fine art. It does however, require for the audience to think and follow along. Maybe that teacher was a little wanting in the humor department.

G.

I think she was, a bit!  Mainly she was stupid, because she failed to add the rest of the quote - "and also the highest form of intelligence"!  (I think she thought I wouldn't know the quote, but I did, just don't remember where I read it!)

Ah, the politicians favorite ploy. Take things out of context, use the part of the quotation that suits you best, or cut and splice information until it suits your purpose are all strategies used by those who aim to deceive.

You just keep on using your humor, I like it; and since I know that I'm neither stupid nor witless, that alone blows the teacher's opinion to high heaven (or, to use JM's favorite: burninates it ;) )

G.

So as your neighborhoods keep growing, does the # of sims increase or do some of them go away, basically, is it inevitible to ahve a million sim files and be overpopultaed, the more you play the game, or does it slowly fix itself?

The problem is caused by the fact that the game never deletes character files by itself. Every sim that has ever been in the neighborhood will continue to be in the character files until you delete them.

However, natural "sane" growth is generally not the problem. Real problems only occur when you balloon the neighborhood population unnaturally, with tons of junk entries, or an endlessly respawning horde of townies because you mass-murder them for entertainment.

Somewhat related question, guess I'll put it here rather than a new thread.
I've been wondering why I had so many characters really. I don't actually play that much, and reinstalled a few months ago when I reformatted. So, I figured out why I have so many sims to begin with. My lovely toddler (nearing three) now knows how to click icons with the mouse. He made a new University town in Pleasantview, and since I only wanted one, I deleted it. All of the sims that came in that sim bin are now in the Sim State sim bin. All the dessert Uni town ones that is. So apparently the game makes it so that rather than behaving like a deleted neighborhood, any sims in your bin will be transferred to the existing neighborhood bin. Or something like that, maybe they were in the bin before the Uni town was deleted, I didn't check.
Anyway, were all the created dormies and students also transferred? I don't mind the new sim students, more genetics and whatnot, but the thought of extra professors cluttering up stuff and never being used gives me chills. My house is a mess, but I keep my computer clean. How do I check? I'm an idiot with SimPe, and never even figured out how to find un met baristas to delete.

Don't I wish there was a way to clean-start a Uni after the town/village has been made. I have made a beautiful village with the deleteAllCharacters, but I somehow neglected to attach an University and do the same there. So now my village will most likely never have a University attached because I can't use the deleteAll maxis cheat without wiping out my village as well.

Sometimes, when I'm not at work or studying, my brain clicks itself off every once in a while, self-preservation I guess :D

On the upside, my village teens and their relations have no uni-wants whatsoever. I don't really play the university all that much anyway, and when I do, I rush mine through with mods. University bores me to tears.

G.

Uni Sims are simply added to your normal neighbourhood characters (there is just one 'hood as far as the game is concerned), so you now have a few dozen unnecessary Sims in there.
I don't think anyone has found a quick and painless way to delete unnecessary Sims yet.

Okay, so I am still confused.  Please feel free to point and laugh at me.

For example:  I have 498 sims in my little neighborhood of Simsville.  78 of these are my currently active, Body-shop or born in game, sims.  The rest are all townies???  I have the "No townie" and "No Dormie" regnen. hacks.  So, it will still do me no good to feed them all to the cowplant?  Or, what about packaging and moving ALL my sims, creating a new neighborhood, using the "delete all charectors" before I move in my sims?  Then, will I just have my 78?  Or will I just have a FUBAR game? 

I thought the object of this game was to create family trees and allow your sims to "be fruitful and multiply".   >:(  Now you're telling me that if I do that, then I will screw up my game?  This sucks!!   :(

How old of a neighborhood are we talking about? Can you actually account for 478 sims, including about 50 dormies for a starting university, and about 100 assorted NPCs? 150 is a baseline figure for a population of an empty neighborhood. This is the population you basically are stuck with. Then you have maybe 30 townies, unless you nuked your neighborhood at start, and your 80 sims. This totals out to about 250 sims. Can you account for the remaining 200-odd as ancestors? If this estimate isn't off off by more than about 50 sims or so, then you're fine. If these figures are completely out of line, you may have some oddities in your neighborhood, and may want to check the Sim Browser in SimPE to see if you've got duplicate entries. You HAVE avoided all known problem behaviors, like downloading inhabited lots or lotbinning anything, right?

Family trees, yes. Be fruitful....I'd avoid that. Although the damage to your sanity will probably set in long before the damage to your neighborhood will. I'll run the math for you the fast way: Let's say you actually *DO* let your sims have their 10 children. In 3 generations, you'll have a population of over 1000 sims. This is clearly madness, which is why you need a sustainable growth policy.

If these figures are completely out of line, you may have some oddities in your neighborhood, and may want to check the Sim Browser in SimPE to see if you've got duplicate entries. You HAVE avoided all known problem behaviors, like downloading inhabited lots or lotbinning anything, right?

Righ.  I have not done any of that, because you told me it was bad.   ::)
Some of my Sims do not even show in in SimsPE.  I can't find them in the browser, and when I look into a related sims's relationships, it just says, "Unknown Sim."  I do have many sims that are repeated.  Just how many social bunnies do we need?

Family trees, yes. Be fruitful....I'd avoid that. Although the damage to your sanity will probably set in long before the damage to your neighborhood will. I'll run the math for you the fast way: Let's say you actually *DO* let your sims have their 10 children. In 3 generations, you'll have a population of over 1000 sims. This is clearly madness, which is why you need a sustainable growth policy.


Exactly, just like you were telling me over at WorldSims.  I have never done the ten-children aspiration, though I have let a few parents have five or more.  But all these children are counted in the nearly-80 number.  And the neighborhood was created when Uni came out back in March, so it's 4 months old.

That would be bad. There are a few "Unknown Sims" in your neighborhood files that are normal, namely, Grim Reaper, Therapist, the Hula Dancer, and the Pollination Technician, but you should certainly not have relationships with any of them!

3, usually, The game insists on a minimum of 3 of any type of NPC, including, of course, ones like the Social Worker, Repo Man, and Social Bunny. Even though these really aren't considered sociable and there's absolutely no reason why we need variety here....

Why, how many do you have?

Hang on a tick. The problem (or a problem) is that when a neighborhood gets enough character files in it, it starts making useless, weird character files? Which would cause there to be more sims in the neighborhood than there are any actual records of?

No, the problem is that bloated neighborhoods are often caused by useless, weird character files. Bloated neighborhoods also are at high risk for experiencing strange errors, many of which are fixed by Critical fixes, but more problems of this nature will surely occur in NL. Thus, pure size is not incurable, but if your neighborhood is bloated not because of age and heavy play alone, but because it is filled with GARBAGE, this is a serious problem, as garbage files can cause other, not-so-resolveable, errors.

Nope, these that I'm referring to are sims that I created with Body Shop.  :(

3, usually, The game insists on a minimum of 3 of any type of NPC, including, of course, ones like the Social Worker, Repo Man, and Social Bunny. Even though these really aren't considered sociable and there's absolutely no reason why we need variety here....

Why, how many do you have?

Oh, about 6.  And 4 repo men.  And 5 social workers. . .

Okay, so my game is FUBAR'ed?   :'(  Why am I not surprised. 

Ah. That makes significantly more sense.

The social bunny I can sort of see needing multiples of, up to a maximum of eight. But Social worker? You can't even interact with her, and they all look basically identical anyway! Variety is good, but only if it's not pointless.

One time I happened to be playing a lot where there were two social bunnies (different colors) active at the same time.  Their respective Sims had been quiet for a while (asleep, probably) and the two bunnies suddenly started interacting with each other.  They progressed all the way to kissing and making out before I got tired of watching and interrupted them.  Social bunnies in love??  Weird, huh?

Karen

Yup, that's supposed to happen. And bunnies of the same color will fight. Actually rather funny to watch.

I posted a picture of the social-bunny makeout session waaaaaaaaaaaay back on MTS2 on the "weird pics" thread. I also had a sim complaining that he couldn't get into his bed. I couldn't figure out why for the life of me. When I switched to a different character, I found out her social bunny was relaxing and daydreaming on the first sim's bed! 

I did a check yesterday and found that well over a hundred files in my game were extra repair persons!  Took me hours with SimPE but I managed to delete every single one of them, did a quick reinstall of Uni, put the No Townie regeneration patch in as I think these were actually Townies as they were all supposedly unemployed, and for some reason the game just put them in Repair Persons clothes, and after moving the cleaned out folder back, tried my game again and it's working much much better!

The NPC's, for some reason, are "unemployed". If you check out Kaylynn the maid in SimPe, she is listed as "unemployed".

I suppose that's because those jobs aren't in the careers lists!  I'd probably noticed it before, but forgotten - but anyway, my sims mostly do their own repairs, so they didn't need over 100 repairpersons begging for work!  Anyway, by removing them I saved over 30 MB!

I did notice as well that I had two ghosts of Darren Dreamer's late wife and two of Michael Bachelor, which may explain why they show up at the Goth house as well as their home lot!  Didn't delete them but seems like two different Maxis programmers duplicated each other's work.

I did notice as well that I had two ghosts of Darren Dreamer's late wife and two of Michael Bachelor, which may explain why they show up at the Goth house as well as their home lot!  Didn't delete them but seems like two different Maxis programmers duplicated each other's work.


I didnt know that Micheal and Darleen showed up at the goth house (I resurrected both)...there is also 2 Skip's though


edit:  I resurrected darleen with the resurrect-i-nomitron, micheal with simpe and teleporter

Why do you revive Darleen Dreamer (Darren's wife) with the SimPe?

She can be resurrected with the O-Nomitron (you have to use motherlode for that), and you can have the O-Nomitron downloading Two-Jeff's reward collections, which you have to put in your Collections folder.

I did it month ago.

Yes, and if you have a University linked to your Neighborhood, this adds around 200 so more characters.  There seem to be a lot of Professors, more than necessary.  I guess they assume some will be lost in the campus riots.


JM,

If you have more than just 'the one', necessary University, do the numbers of college specific Dormies/Profs/Cows increase at all?  I am thinking that you get them in one lump with the first campus you choose.   

Add another campus, add another set of NPCs.  Been there, got the t-shirt.

Good Lord. Looks like Sim State is the only option for my sims...

Well, if you've got it, yes!  But you can have a different one in a different neighbourhood. 

My Pleasantview has a count right now of 641 character files.  and from what I have assumed from the messages , that even if i was to not have anymore kids for my sims, and let the neighborhood come down in size by killing off some of my sims, then that wont help, cause thier folder would still be there. 
So how can we bring down the folder size?   I just started this neighborhood again and Im finally at a point of getting past all the people that started the neighborhood.  the only ones still young are don, nina and dina, only cause I hate working them.
My families have grown though, isnt  this what the game was suppose to do is generation after generations...So people with families past the tenth generation, is that the only family that lives in that town? 
There has to be a way of when a sim dies that the folder gets taken out.  Is there a way?  if not then I might as well not play anymore cause my neighborhoods are going to grow no matter what I do to it. 

Just curious as to how far we can take a neighborhood.

take care,
Brenda

I might be incorrect (happens frequently  ;) ) but I thought these responses from JMP in Veilchens "Too many files/Sims explanation for Dummies" post answered our questions about "critical mass" in neighborhoods-

Quote
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.
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.


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

And-

Quote
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.
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.


Quote
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.
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.

The way I understand this is that if we've installed all the Critical Fixes we're good to go for some time (like up to 2000 sims per neighborhood). Am I way off base?

You would think, even with Maxiod Logic, that if characters can appear in two places simultaneously, ie the Student bin and the home neighborhood, they could rotate the campus crew especially within the same neighborhood.  There are already enough Professors to survive the next ELL and the NPC dormies are only off-stage for a costume change.  They are all part-timers at that.  I can accept needing a few extra of the showcased Students, but not an entire set of NPCs - that's 600-700 characters right there.

What Maxis does to us is just sooo wrong on so many levels. 

BTW - You did check to make sure that your Tee was a genuine Body Shop creation, didn't you?  We can't allow knock-offs of The House of Maxis label or these would be Mods and Hacks. No!...Bad hacks!...Bad!

Brenda, if you are playing with UniEP, I would choose just one campus and just one neighborhood for that campus - Period.  I liken this to 'the one' phenomenon that JM has often described.  No other neighborhoods with campuses, no more than 'the one' campus in the whole game.  Decide which neighborhood you want your campus in and resign yourself to only playing Uni in 'the one'.

You may want to consider placing your campus in a custom neighborhood.  As the students graduate they would become the seeds to populate the new neighborhood - the Pollination techs so to speak.  This would keep your favorite neighboorhood going a little longer, without the added burden of the Uni characters.

Did you install the Daily Gardener hack?  That has caused people to have this problem with gardeners, if they ordered the daily one without first sacking the normal one.  I think you can probably delete them, just make sure you keep the original ones.

I'm currently playing Pleasantview and I have only one college for that town,  however my daughter plays Vernonville and she also only has one college for her town.  I dont think it matters how many you start up as I believe each area has its own count as to how many files is in that area.  I hope that sounded right ,, lololol....
I wasnt aware that your students after college could be sent to another neighborhood . I only thought they are sent back to the neighborhood they came from.   I have never been given a choice on which one they would go to from school or I would surely send some of mine to a new town.  it would be awesome to have another town with some of my people .  So if there is a way to do this please teach me ....

You all take care okay and have fun playing your sims.

Brenda

No, I'm pretty sure when YA's graduate they can only go back to the neighbourhood they came from - the only way to move them into another 'hood would be to put them in the lot bin and manually move them over, which is A Very Bad Thing and will cause untold amounts of heartache and game wobbles, according to He Who Is More Awesome.

Not what I meant, I am sorry I did not explain it well enough to you.  A neighborhood to which a campus is assigned, becomes the home neighborhood.  Until a campus is linked to a neighborhood, the students don't belong anywhere - don't have a home anywhere, in other words, unattached.  What I was suggesting is that if you could assign one campus, either a Maxis or a custom made campus to a new, never before played neighborhood and be content to only play the University part of the game in that neighborhood, leaving your others alone.  The custom neighborhood would then become the students' home neighborhood once you assigned a campus and it is loaded into the game.  My reasoning is that instead of adding the 200+ more characters that the University adds to your existing population, they would be added instead to your new neighborhood and when they graduated they would return here and start populating. 

I did not mean that you should move the campus you are currently playing in to a new neighborhood, that just isn't done.  Yes, the students are directed by the games programming code to return to the neighborhood to which the campus (sub-neighborhood) belongs.

Apart from Brenda's needs at the moment - Does this clarify things for everyone else?  Besides, you guys already know all this.

OK - back to you Brenda - Since you and your daughter each are already playing a different neighborhood and campus, the extra Sim characters created for the college have already been populated into each of your neighborhood's game file, so this can't be changed now and you will have to put up with the possibility of crowding your neighborhood.  But, in the event that you have to start over with a new game, you may want to consider my suggestion.  You can both play the same campus and even the same characters if you want, it's entirely up to you.  Does this explanation make it more clear to you about what I was suggesting? 

I can't quite see how you can play a campus BEFORE you have assigned a neighbourhood!

Good luck!

There's alot of information on this thread that's helpful as I've been trying to read up on all threads associated with this problem(neighboorhood overpopulation and safe character deletion), however I have one question that i have'nt seen anyone bring up. I have a neighborhood with 515 character files. As I was looking through the character folder I saw that some of my character files had .bak  :-\  Why are there .baks in my character folder and is it safe to delete them?  (Okay that was 2 questions)

If anyone can answer this thank you in advance. ;D

A .bak file is made automatically by SimPE when you edit a file--If you have edited your hood file you'll see a .bak there too.

Yes, safe to delete, in fact better to delete them--unless you want to save them for some reaason, if so move them out of the game folder.

Mutant Bunny is correct and in addition, this is a default setting in SimPe.  There is a place in your preferences where you can deselect this so no .bak files are generated.

From the top navi bar: Extra->Preferences->SimPE Settings(icon with wrench & screwdriver)
It's the first box under Language Preference at top.

Thank you MutantBunny and Bane~Child for the info. Now it's clean up time. ;D

Every time the slowdown bug occurs it generates multiples of whatever NPC triggered the slowdown.  And they will keep multiplying until the vehicle is gotten rid of.   Any other NPC vehicle that later attempts to enter the lot will trigger it again.   I  have gotten hundreds of extra character files that way  before I figured out what was happening and stopped it.  But I went into the character folder and deleted them all.  Have had no problems that I know of since as a result of it.   Have done this in several neighborhoods.  No one had ever interacted with these characters so there were no memories involved.   

But what happens if you delete a character that people do have memories of?  I have  done that.  I tried out some of the hooker npcs  available at MTS2 and later removed them from downloads.  The sims who had interacted with them later had memories of  "did woohoo with $subject$.  But they were downloads rather than real npcs so effect might be different.

I've done it before. The memories just lack a subject. I can't see how it's harmful. And they can easily be deleted /reassigned to another sim :)

One thing about this I'm hazy about.  If you delete the relation between a sim and an NPC, does the memory still remain, or does SimPE automatically delete it too?  And if the memory remains, how exactly do you delete it?

Memories are separate.  I know because I modified a CAS family so I could have two siblings - one teen, one adult - instead of a mom and daughter.  The memories of 'Had X!' were still there.

Edit: Actually maybe that's not the most helpful example ever :P

I thought they were separate, but how on earth do you get rid of "Met X" , "Made friends with X"?

Go into the "Neighbourhood Memory" section in SimPE and delete them from there.  I spend hours in there myself, changing this and that.  Doesn't always work completely, though.  Some memories (maybe all, not sure) are stored somewhere else (I think the neighbourhood.package file), which explains why you can delete the memory of a death and they still remember it.  For the main part, deleting memories suffices, though. 

Thanks, I shall give it a go, starting with all memories of Komei, I think!

Well, I've found out how to open the neighborhood memory section, and I find a lot of Met Unknown memories.  Are these the ones that can be deleted?

Some of those refer to the Mystery Sim, usually the first few memories in a CAS created sim.  I might delete them if I come across them, but I don't obsess over it.

If they have several different reference numbers, would I be right in assuming they are not the mystery sim, but just any old sim?  And if it's a CAS sim who was created as half a couple, or a child, they wouldn't have met the mystery sim anyway, would they?

I wouldn't think so, but I would check their memories in-game, to see how they are identified.  Once you identify the Mystery Sim, it wouldn't hurt to write down his/her number for future reference.  If I remember correctly, couples created in CAS have instead the memories of meeting each other, first kiss, woohoo, etc., with their spouse.

Yes, they do, so any unknown sims in their memory files would presumably not be the mystery sim?  but possibly a townie that I've deleted from their relations?

Probably.  I don't think it would hurt to delete most memories, but it's easier to delete them before you delete the sim they refer to, because then it will still have the name of the sim.  But always back up your neighborhoods just in case.

Well, I do back up fairly frequently.    I know which sims I've removed, and their all actually sitting in a file on the desktop, so I can quite easily get the file number, but not the ref that appears in memories.  Trouble with simPE is you can direct it to scan any folder anywhere on your pc for objects, but not sims!  I suppose I could swop them in and move other stuff out, but I think I'll just work on one sim for now and see what happens! 

If you can delete most memories, does that mean you can delete all those family reunion spams?

Thanks for all this helpful advice, by the way, I do appreciate it!

Yeah, I don't even get them any more after installing JMs fix for that.  You can delete all that A+ memory spam.  Not only does your sim teen get the memory, but his parents get memories and then visitors get memories of them getting memories.  Other siblings get memories of your sim getting a memory.  :o  Some memories will be recreated if they don't exist the next time an event occurs, such as first kiss, first woohoo, met so-and-so.

A word of caution:  Be careful about repetitive stress syndrome!  All that clicking and clicking and clicking.  I was trying to clean out some of my sims' memories, but it was monotonous and tedious, I was going cross-eyed, and my wrist and mouse finger were getting sore, even with my gel wrist rest mouse pad.  :P  I wish we could send EA/Maxis our medical bills when we get carpal tunnel syndrome from fixing our games!

You're welcome, I don't mind helping if I can. :)

Well, if I get tired of clicking I can always switch to the other PC and do something else, but apart from typing, it's all clicking, whatever you do!  What I can't understand is why, when Maxis made the jump bug fix, so sims with a lot of memories were no longer unplayable, why the heck they didn't fix this memory spam so only important family reunions like wedding, funeral and birthday or graduation parties are remembered!  I mean, do you or I remember every time we get a visit from a family member?  And why on earth they made these "someone else had" memories?  I certainly wouldn't remember that someone's cousin's grandmother's best friend burnt the dinner!

Thanks again for the help!

I guess it's so sims can have something to gossip about.  I sure don't remember every A+ I got or my whole family got.  And my memories of family reunions are of one event, not one for every family member I talked to!  Maxis advertised the gossiping like with big stuff, like cheating and getting caught, but most sims seem more interested in talking about burning stuff.  When I have sims meet for the first time and I go back and look at their memories later, the other sim will have invisible memories that she received from the other sim about meeting so-and-so, getting potty trained by X, doing woohoo with Y, etc.  Then the next time this sim talks to someone else, they can randomly pass these memories.  That's why it's so hard to clean your neighborhood of unknown sim memories because you never know who they may have passed these memories too.  It's like a virus that spreads.  When I was deleting corrupted death memories, I found them in other sims that didn't even know the dead sims.  They got them from talking to the sims who had the original memory. 

It would be so much easier to delete memories if we could select several at once and hit delete, like Windows lets you do, but it doesn't work that way.  So we are stuck with click one, click delete, scroll, click the next, click delete, etc, ad nauseam.

YES   then put in the no family reunion spam hack if you haven't already.    I sometimes leave ONE of those memories when I come across them but no need for all of them. 

Thanks.  I'll make sure I do that.

Yes! I have a callous on my index finger from all that clicking.

I just became aware of how much nicer hacks can make your game run, so I haven't been following forums here, or other hack places before just a few weeks ago.

I understand from first hand knowledge why not to download houses with people in them. I uploaded a house of my own once, then downloaded it again after I had to reinstall, and when I went to install it with Clean Installer, I saw what must have been every Townie in the neighborhood trying to hitch a ride. Not sure what's up with that.

But what is lot binning and why is it dangerous? Is it just when you move a populated house to the lot bin? Or any house? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

Populated houses cause problems because your sims can go to work or school, and what you get are a lot of clones causing extra files in the game.  It's then dodgy to delete them because other sims have memories of the clone, not the original sim.

Thanks for answering :). I'm wondering at this point with none of my families very far along since my new harddrive (and new install), if I should just start fresh, with the knowledge I have now from this place.

Well, my current version of Pleasantview which I've been playing a while has a lot of my mistakes in it, but so far it hasn't disintegrated, so I'll carry on until it does!  (And keep backups, of course!)

OK, so since i've read up to post 56 and then i read some others like the post 70, the 91, etc.. so i guess i'm cathing up.

Now, since there is this problem and it is eventually inevitable, what can we do to prevent or fix it?

What about packaging our lots, deleting all character files and installing those packages again? will this work? is this a good solution?

Have you seen what happens when you try to reinstall a package file with sims living in it?

Double trouble, sometimes triple and quadruple.  NOT good.

Unfortunately, ain't that the truth!

I started afresh after reading all the guff here. In fact I started afresh twice, the first time I embarked on a campaign of mass slaughter of townies, then discovered I could 'delete AllCharacters'. Starting again worked out well for me, all my own characters, JM's critical fixes in place, haven't had any bad bugs so far, touch wood.

No i don't know!! i hate having to fix files that the game designers should have fixed.

What happens when you install a package of a house with sims living in it? what what

My experience of installing packaged sims in a house is that it will fubar your game with all the additional memories and artefacts that are part of the package. If you've ever opened a house package file containing sims in the Clean Pack Installer, you will see it includes every sim they have ever met or been related to. If some of those packaged sims are townies, then the sims meet the same townies in the new n'hood, then a mess results. If you untick all the extras in the package file in clean pack installer, the lot is most likely to become unstable and uninstallable.

When my original n'hood first started to become unstable, I packaged every family I wanted to keep and carefully installed them all to a new n'hood. What a mess. Completely unstable from the start, that's when I started really seeking information from sites like this.

eew... god no! we don't want that, do we?

so basicaly everyone that is in their family tree and on their memories and on their relationship pannel will be packed as well?

I think theres a quick way to erase all that, if you are interested. i think i found it out once when i was messing with testingcheatsenabled. theres an option there (i don't know if it is in the tombstone or somewhere else) that will reset the lot, and it will erase everything, memories, relationships, family trees...

 I think there's a quick way to solve it too. Apparently society frowns on my idea of eliminating everyone.

That's my understanding so far. Just all the memories and data though, not all the actual sims that are being remembered.

I've not seen that, sounds interesting but mostly I want to keep memories & relationships. :)

I actually thought that the idea of packaging, like moving an occupied house to the lot bin, was that all memories apart from those of the other sims in the house would be erased.  It seems that like so much other stuff, the idea is better than the execution!

I  have had one instance of an actual character, not just a memory being carried along with a house. 

I had a legacy household in Strangetown which included an elder female who was having an affair with Joel Jeffress.  I wanted to move the household to a fresh neighborhood.  After I had done so I discovered that Joel was also in the new neighborhood along with the Pleasantview townies.   

The family had no memories of any of the other people they had known in Strangetown but character files for those people were transferred also.  I just went into the character folder and deleted them all.   There have been no bad side effects of the deletion that I have noticed.  It's easy to identify the files to delete as they are much smaller. 

Well, I've deleted loads of files, especially those with the red or blue blobs in the pic (but not ghosts!) and had no serious problems.  I can only think that the file you got carried over with the house was because that sim was either just about to enter the lot, and thus was in a portal, or just leaving, and also in a portal.

I've also done what JM said would finish my game off, and where I've deleted files, I've renumbered new CAS sims to fill those spaces, so any townie spam goes at the end, and again so far it's not caused any problem, and weeks later I'm still playing the same neighbourhood!  No bfbvfos yet anyway!

mmm. i just deleted 300 character files worth of social workers and repo men from strangetown today.

they happened from a lot that had a missing service npc car portal. i'm guessing because the repo men and social workers are of the stubborn, persistent persuasion is the reason they were the only npc types to try to multiply into the zillions when their vehicle couldn't arrive. the maids and gardeners and such didn't do that.

glad i finally got around to cleaning that up. i was pretty baffled at first as to how i had already gotten strangetown up to over 650 characters.

I got Crammyboy's portal fix, and just today I went into a lot, and got a notice saying that car portals had been deleted and to exit without saving.   I entered again, got the same message, so I exited, moved the family out, bulldozed the house and then built them a new one.  So far no problems.  Seems like the portal fix is worth putting into your game.

oh yeah, i got that shortly after the incident.

VERY useful item that.

now one of my lots has a missing trash can. um, dunno how that one disappeared. i'm gonna try replacing it with the one in carrigon's weird buyable objects collection. not having a trash can hasn't proven a big deal so far except that whenever a sim tries to empty the garbage, they just put it on the floor, and sometimes i don't notice it for awhile, and then here comes the plague.

You don't have to evict and bulldoze your lot if you follow the link in Crammyboy's post to another post by Erzengel that has portals to replace missing ones.  It tells you exactly how to do it and everything. 

oh yeah that's the one i have actually. good stuff.

I did look at it, but it seemed too complicated for my poor little brain!  I will try it if it should happen again, though.

SimaLittleDreamaLot also has trash can/mail box replacements, which come with a free pizza!  Useful for poor uni students!

HO WO!!  Is this a fix for the slowdown bug?    Where is it located?  MTS2?

Yes, it's at MTS2.  I don't have the link handy, but if you search for Crammyboy you should find it, or scroll through the hack downloads.

I don't know about the slowdown bug.  It just said portals had been deleted, although the last ime I'd played the house before that I didn't have any problems.

Found  it!  And it does fix the slowdown bug.  Apparently the npc vehicle gets stuck because the portal disappears.  Or perhaps the stuck vehicle causes the portal to disappear.  Anyway, crammyboy's fix prevents it and erzengal's fix will replace the portal.   MY GOSH!  NO  MORE  SLOWDOWN  BUG. 

This has been the worst problem I have had with my game and now it is no more.  Wooo   hoooo.

Great!  I think you'll probably find it was a darn nannymobile that got stuck!  The lot it happened on in my game had no nanny spam problems, because my sim fired the nanny when she waterbombed her as soon as she got home from work, and then took the next few days off with no pay in order to be there at 3.0.pm! But the nannymobile could still have got stuck, I guess.

Carrigon has this also.  It may be the same one.  I think she says her friend made it.

It could have been the nanny in a couple of my houses but not all.  I have been having the problem since last september in various lots in different neighborhoods.   Quite often it seemed to be the grocery van that got stuck first.  Several times it was the firetruck.  And the repairmen.  I don't remember it ever starting with the maid but once it started maids quit coming. Also gardeners, exterminators and repo men.  I've had them all by the dozens.  I had totally quit using any service people in order to avoid it.

I do remember when it was early days with Sims1 before the patch, that grocery vans were forever getting stuck, but usually if you saved and quit they would be gone next time you loaded the lot.  I've never had the problem with other vehicles getting stuck, but I have experienced Nanny Spam!  Ugh!!!!

Ok, so no packing the house with sims living in it...

What about this: you evict a family so they will be in the family bin, but not packed, so there are no other sim-files packed along. then you go to the game's folder and copy the file of the family in the family bin into the new neighborhood.
I suppose this way it will not take with it those dreafull clogging files, right?

Probably not good. If you want to re-create a family in another neighborhood you're much better off extracting each member with SimPE so that they'll be in the sim bin, making each sim in CAS in the new neighborhood, pulling them from the sim bin, and then recreating necessary ties and memories with SimPE. Pain in the ass, but it's a clean way to do it.

Renatus, how exactly do you do that?  I have problems with SimPE over and above the basics, and I still use version 0.36.  Can you do it with that, or do I need to get the new update?

I don't think this would work because the game would not have a way of recognizing those sims files.  When you open up a neighborhood file in SimPE, all the sims are listed even if they aren't in a house.  I'm not sure how they are categorized, but they are flagged somehow so the game knows they are in the bin, just as it does with sim babies and kids who have been taken from their parents and are in the adoption pool as well as dead sims and townies.  Besides, you'd still be stuck with all the sims' descriptions, family entries, memories, etc. in the original neighborhood.  You are better off recreating your sims like Renatus described. 

I have never tried moving a family that way. I have never seen a family file anywhre in the neighborhood folders.    But I have tried moving a single sim that way.  Well, it worked,  Sort of.  I copied the individual character file into the new neighborhood, making sure it had a different number.  Then I went into the game to the family lot where I wanted her to be.  I used a teleport object to get her onto the lot.  Everything was fine up to that point. But she was unplayable.  She appeared in the same manner that any teleported sim does, but then she collapsed on the ground and just kind of moved around like a baby.  No responses to any stimuli.  Used InSimenator to make her selectable.  She had no wants or fears, no memories, no relatives.  Don't remember what her needs were like,but thinking they were pretty red.   but couldn't get her to do anything.  Like a person who has had a stroke.  Or a newborn.  It only now occurred to me that perhaps the game regarded her as a newborn. I didn't keep her around long enough to see how long she continued like that. 

ON the other hand,  I have transferred at least one townie by just moving his character file with no problems at all.   

But definitely in future if I want any sims in a different neighborhood,  I will be cloning them with sim surgery,  then recreating them in CAS. 

Here is what the sim I tried to move looked like after the move.



[attachment deleted by admin]

Eww...that is creepy.  You're right, the game probably didn't know what to do with her and regarded her as an infant.  She is moving her hands and legs just like one.

If you change them to babies in sim PE it's exactly like that!  I did it to Angela Pleasant once, just for the fun of it, but eventually changed her back and gave her a mohican haircut!

Townies' memories are possibly part of the original file, since any neighbourhood you create they will be generated in it, so it's maybe because of that the memories move with them.  Also, it might be that the townies you move only retain the original memories etc., not any they have added since you started to play their neighbourhood.

So, if you move the file across, then open SimPEm would you be able (a) to allocate them to a family without any teleporters?  and(b) change them from babies to adults and would they then be ok?

It was way back in December that I moved the townie so don't remember anymore exactly how I did it.  But it was Jonathan Ternynck from Strangetown so he is never put in a new hood by the game. It was a really strange situation.   I had been playing only Pleasantview and had moved many of the townies into families.   Then I created a new hood for a legacy challenge.   But the new hood had only those original Pleasantview townies and NPCs that I had NOT moved into families in Pleasantview.  And it had none of the NEW townies that had been generated in Pleasantview.   I have created several other hoods since and this has never happened again.   Anyway, the game did not seem to be regenerating new townies and npcs in the new hood so I thought I would try moving unused ones from Strangetown. I had never played that hood so they had no memories other than what Maxis had given him.  The first attempt was successful but I didn't do any more because by then I saw that new ones were then being generated in the legacy hood. 

As for the attempted moving of the born in game sim in my pic,  I think I did use simpe to allocate her to the townie group.  Didn't try aging her up to adult again as I just thought of the baby possibility yesterday.  ZephyrZodiac, would you like to try experimenting with it?

ZZ, I think you can do it with 0.36, I remember extracting sims with a version around that number... I think. If you open up sim surgery (under plugins, after you open up a neighborhood) and choose a patient sim, you should have an option to extract the sim, it's a little text link above the portrait of the sim you choose as 'patient'. It extracts the sim and all of their currently set clothing. When I want to recreate a sim exactly I also go in and write down all of their personal data like personality and interests, and I write down important memories if I want to re-create families and such.

When I extract them, I make sure to re-name the file to their original name so I know exactly which one it is, and I usually save it to a different folder than the default of SavedSims. When I want to recreate them I move them temporarily to my downloads folder, then back out to my backup folder when I am done.

Sounds complicated, but I'll try it when I go into simPE again.  Thanks for the explanation, I've saved it in a notepad doc in my docs folder so I'll have it handy!

Hedgekat, I think growing them up again is fairly simple, at least it was for Angela, I just changed her back to a teen again and it worked with no problems.  Since I deleted all her interests, skills (apart from cooking and cleaning), relationships and changed her from Aquarius to Capricorn she's had to start again from scratch, and Lilith actually likes her!  I wouldn't want to try the experiment again, though, although I've got a lot of townies and NPCs who I've changed to babies.  I never get burglars as they're all of them babies and the game doesn't seem to generate new ones, at least not very often.(Unlike nannies!  But I've stopped using them, so maybe now they'll stay in their cots and won't call out their friends!)  I did find, though, when I tried this in Uni, that they were lying around community lots and the SS house, so I don't think it's such a good idea with Uni NPCs.  Dunno why!

Or everytime a sibling or relative got an A+ (before JM's fix)

Want to see something really fun? Next time you're in the memory section of PE, check out a Bus Driver. They remember every A+, every promotion, every Sim meeting, every kid who was potty trained while they were outside....

It's so tedious to delete memories (what I wouldn't give for Ctrl click to select multiples or even sort by type in PE) I usually pick one family at a time and delete everything I don't see as significant. Everything invisible, and anything not directly related to them.

To check NPC relationships before deleting, I usually leave the 'relations' tab open as I scroll through Sim Descriptions and only delete them empty ones. (though it's easy enough to delete the relationship, but I'd rather keep it simple)

If you run Clean Installer on your character folder while PE is open at that neighbourhood, it will give you names (first only) though you will have to close PE before you delete them...

How do you safely get rid of bus driver spawn?  (Are they the ones in the brown shirts?)

I delete all their memories - one at a time if you're excessively bored, or teleport them to a lot and use Carrigon's bottle (voodoo bottle I think) to make them 'forget' everything they know. They're just bus drivers and character spam as far as I'm concerned. 
Don't usually pay attention to it, but the last lot I played had the same 'driver' for every carpool including the helicopter, she also drove the taxi and bus. I give her amnesia every couple weeks but I've also deleted the drivers with no memories when I felt so inclined with no apparent effects.

Interesting thread. I can't say that I've had any of the problems collected here and my neighborhood has hit 1,030 packages (more dead than alive). I can only assume that Pescado's fixes are just that: fixes.  :)

I get rid of them by deleting their character files.  Check with sim browser to see which numbers are the extra ones.  Then exit simpe and just delete the files.  I do the same thing with all the excess nannies, grocerymen, exterminatiors, whatever got generated by the slowdown bug.  No one ever meets those npcs so don't have to worry about memories.  And now thanks to crammyboy and erzengel  I will never have to do that again.

Just wondering if this problem is a symptom of an overpopulated neighborhood.  My copy of Veronaville has 742 character files.

I was playing a graduation party at a Greek House (and I had the amnesia fixes in place until I installed Nightlife a couple days ago, I don't believe that I've added any sims since then and even if I had, the sim affected was not the one added since then), which involved inviting a woman who was the graduate's mother, but also the grandmother of two other sims on the lot.  One of her grandchildren, who had had a friendship with her, seems to have lost that relationship, and has even had his family ties to her severed.  To him, his grandmother is now just like any other nonfamily sim, and he can flirt with her and kiss her romantically and so on.

I can restore the relationship with SimPE, but I'm wondering if this is one of the problems that an overpopulated neighborhood causes, and if it is, what critical fix fixes this issue?

I guess if you don't let your sims gossip you don't spread burnt dinner memories around the 'hood.  I used to use gossip a lot in making friends, but have quit - back to chess.

I have under 500 characters, but I've been playing most of them for a very long time.  Are there memory problems associated with a smaller number of very long lived sims?  Different dimension to bloated 'hood. EDIT looks like the answer to this is "No" from other threads.

PS-Thanks for explaining what those .bak files were in character files. found them when I counted characters!

There is a hack which stops the generating of numerous bus drivers and baristas etc., it's JM's Nonpcspam which you can get from the Armory.  I've explained in the other thread on this issue how you can safely delete duplicate unlinked sims, which are caused by doing something which JM does NOT recommend, which is moving occupied houses into the houses bin.  Unfortunately this is something that Maxis does not appear to have fixed yet!  (Despite knowing about it since before Uni!)

Your sims can still pass memories to each other even when just chatting.

In case anyone is still watching this topic,  boy you folks really kicked this one around.    I noticed in my Sim Enhancer there is an option to kill off specific SIMS and that includes NPC's .... I haven't had to do it, my neighborhoods are pretty barren.   I develop a few Sims at a time and then move on to another neighborhood.   Just to let you know that there is a tool to use.
K

I haven't really used Sim Enhancer, but I am not going to pay for a program especially when there are free programs available.  I know SimPE is a little technical for some, but that doesn't bother me.  I actually prefer it.  I don't have a lot of money to spend on stuff like this, and I spent enough for the Sims and expansion packs.  I would rather invest my money in a better graphics card or more RAM for my PC so the game will run better rather than spending it on pay sites for sims and pay programs.  There is still a lot out there that is still free.

The trouble with pay programs like simEnhancer is that every time there is a new EP and the program is upgraded, you have problems which don't apply with something like SimPE.  I did buy the original SimEnhancer as the sims1 stuff was so useful, but when I went back to try and upgrade what is now an unusable piece of software, thre was no option to upgrade, only to purchase!  And any time you replace your hard disk, you have to mess about emailing for a new ID code, or you can't use the program again.

And SimPE covers both objects and sims, SimEnhancer so far only deals with sims and Rick has yet to write a program to use for objects.

You can get a trial verson of SimEnhancer.  I was recommended to it for deleting duplicate sims easily, so I got the trial version and did the job last night.  It's very easy to use, but don't think I'm going to buy it.  If I had to do that job again, I might, but I don't need it for everyday.  I can usually cope with SimPE.  What would convince me to buy it would be functionality that doesn't exist in SimPE.  Like a cleanup tool for duplicate sims..   or fix duff DNA  or find duplicate object GUIDs......  SimPE gives us a tool to do everything.  A task focussed tool rather than a sim focussed tool would appeal to me.

I have read this thread twice and I am totally confused.   I have 827 character files in strangetown.  I have deleted  a bunch with simenhancer because I had almost 1000.   I deleted all the ones that did not have any relation with anybody.

 I also had the slow down bug the other day on one lot, so I had to move the family out and then move them back in and it fixed it.

so do I need the JM critical fix and the TJ critcal fix and the Crammyboy portal fix all in my game at the same time??    Do I need to get the voodoo bottle to delete the npc memories also and do I need to put in JM's nospc file too?   ??? ??? ???

I don't want any nannies or gardeners because my christianlove npc does all that stuff.

  Something else that I hate about the sims,  why is it that you can call a maid or a gardener and hire them but you can't call them up and fire them.   You have to run them all over the lot and fire them before they say " I am done for the day" to fire them.   Once they say that, the fire them option is gone.   Just another of maxis dumb  mistakes.    I can never catch the gardener, he says "your yard is in great condition and you don't need any help from me" and he jumps in the truck and leaves.   >:(

Well, I think the answer with the gardener is you have to put so many hedges round your lot that he/she can't possibly finish it all in a day - then catch him/her before they say "It's a bit late, I have to leave now!"

As to SimEnhancer, yes, you can download a trial version, but you can only do that once!  After that, you can't get it again without buying it.

How is this done; step-by-step, please.

In SimPE it's a fairly slow process, so it's probably best if you take it a family at a time and check them all.  You need to go into Neighbourhood Memory and open the file for each member of that family to see if they have any memory of meeting the sim you want to delete, or of any unknown sims apart from the one that single sims meet and have their first kiss with if they're created in CAS.  (The Unknown Sim always has the same ID number, and will be at the beginning of their memory store.)  If you find any of these memories, click on them, then click delete and commit.  Check also for any memories that have been passed to them by the sim in question and are invisible memories owned by that sim.  for example, had very first woohoo with etc. (owned by XXXX)

This awesome plugin enhancement for the memory editor in SimPE helps with this process quite a bit:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2590.0

Be sure to read all the directions.  But once you use it, you'll wonder how you ever did without it!

There's a great hack at VariousSimmers in the Contributor forum that greatly expands the available name database for when sims are generated.  It's also based on the common names found in US according to census data or something like that.  At any rate, I highly recommend it.  I've used it for a long time now, the names are realistic, and I've never had a single "dup" occur.

http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=1593

When I have a themed hood, I like to give some of my most used NPCs names that fit with the theme.  Same applies to any townies and dormies that don't get deleted.  And please don't take this the wrong way, but there are already too many US type names in the game for me, so I'd personally prefer a hack based on popular names in the UK.

But what I'd really like is a hack that completely banned the anme Goopy!  Does ANYONE know a Goopy?  (Or was the name invented by a 5-year-old who couldn't spell Goofy?)

Goopy is a guy who works at Maxis (see the credits section, he's the animation director). I guess after he reads posts like this, he sits in his cubicle and cries his eyes out for hours.


:D

Yeah, a lot of the townies are named after Maxis developers, such as the ones with the last name LeTourneau.  I read a chat transcript once where everyone was bashing Goopy and wanting to feed him to the cowplant, and they said something like it really hurts the real Goopy's feelings and he cries when he reads stuff like that.  I wonder if the real Goopy looks and dresses anything like the one in the game though???

Hey thanks for the praise.

Well, shows it just doesn't pay to advertise yourseves like this!  I always suspected a lot of the names were either their own or those of their friends, as some of the names are just too outlandish and wierd for anyone to have thought up otherwise!  Vu and Ng are just not names that would occur to the average person, unless you actually knew someone with one of them.

But don't tell me that the real Goopy was given that name by his parents!

One never knows, God save us all.

I too don't know how I did without the memory editor plug-in mentioned by Rainbow.  I was moving along pretty well with the manual process, but there were many memories I didn't delete because I wasn't sure.  The new plug-in found over 2600 invalid memories and removed them.

I'm going to try it as soon as I close my game!

There is also a Dr. Vu who was in the chat, who I assume the cosmetic surgery table is named after.  That sounds more like a nickname to me.

Goopy isn't a nickname?  Oh, dear, I hope it isn't his given name, poor guy!

I believe Vu and Ng may be Vietnamese names, or from that area of Asia, anyway.

"Goopy" sounds like a shortening of some longer name.  No idea what it would be, but I used to think it was made-up as well until I found out different!  I'd hate to grow up with a name like that!

Dr. Vu is also in Sim City 4, one of his jobs is to drive his mother to the airport so she can get her evil french manicure in Hawaii. :P

Ng is definitely Vietnamese.

And why no Irish names?  There's not a single Murphy, Flanagan or O'Rourke amongst them!

Because this is a video game company with a limited size crew, and as such, ethnicities with higher dork ratios are more likely to be overrepresented. Also, Maxis is based in California and pale-skinned people, like the Irish, tend to combust and burn to death when exposed to the sun.

There's a lot of Spanish blood in some Irish families, you know! Besides, if the Scots can tolerate Silicon Valley, I'll bet the Irish can as well! They survived the Australian outback, and the majority of Australians can trace Irish blood somewhere in their family tree!

Pfft.  I exposed my English/Irish skin to it and the Californian sun is pissweak.  Not only do they have a protective smog layer, they still have an ozone layer!  I sat out there for an hour and still couldn't feel that mutagenic radiation scorching through my skin, in an Australian summer I can get burned taking out the garbage.

California's got nothing.

Nothing but never ending traffic and Macdonalds!

Well, since I have only been able to create two families... I didn't think I could have much population, but what I have read here scares me! I am just about to reinstall everything from scratch! My granddaughter thought it would be wise to have a University with each neighborhood, so she did. There are only 5 neighborhoods and we only played three so far, but that sounds like it could be an issue which I don't need on top of the other ones I have. I had been wondering how many families I could put into a neighborhood. The way things were going, it seemed like two was my tops... LOL... Obviously I have some other things happening..... *sigh*

I'm not as awesome as some of the others on this thread, but I believe -and someone please correct me if I'm wrong - that for the most part, each neighborhood stands alone. Meaning, if you have an overpopulated Pleasantville and it goes *splat* that won't effect your Veronaville. Even if you have La Fiesta Tech as the college for Pleasantville and Veronaville - in reality - they are two different universities and not connected to each other. The sims may have the same names because the game generates the same names over and over, but the Max Flexor that your sim meets in Pleasantville will not be the same Max Flexor that your sim in Veronaville has met. So, I don't think it's a problem to have a university for each neighborhood - in fact, each neighborhood has to have its own university as the universities are not shared across neighborhoods.  Having said that, I don't think you want to add more than one university to each neighborhood as all the extra NPCs generated for the second university will add to your population bloat.

As far as I can tell, Simmiecal, you're completely correct.

You are absolutely correct, simmiecal.  Each neighborhood is self-contained.  Each neighborhood has its own folder with its own Neighborhood file and character files.  They also have their own storytelling folder as of Uni, I think it was.  Like simmiecal says, it is not a good idea to have more than one Uni or Downtown per neighborhood.  Anything you can do to minimize the number of characters in your neighborhood helps, especially unplayable characters.  There really isn't any benefit to having more than one per neighborhood.  I even wish we could use the same Uni and Downtown for all our neighborhoods instead of having to set new ones up every time.  It would save hard drive space, but I guess it's not feasible.

Your sims would all meet up with sims from other hoods, though, which would, I think be a bit problematical!

Well, that's one reason I was thinking it wouldn't be feasible.

Maybe when they get up to sims3 Holographic?  and then, how long before sims are sentient?

I added all three universities to Pleasantview before I heard about 'population bloat' (before I found this site, actually :)). So, the question is, does deleting the extra universities also delete the new dormies and npcs added by that university, or are they part of the neighborhood for good?

I did the same thing way back in the early days of Uni, before I knew of overpopulation or even hacks.  I had all three premade unis attached to Pleasantview.  And it wasn't long before I started getting the bad omens. 

One of my Uni graduates lost all of the extra want slots she got from graduating.  And when I added them back with TJ's hacked money tree they were blank.  And the ones that weren't blank wouldn't spin.  That was followed by a corrupted death for Dina Caliente.  I think she managed to give out an inherantence, but her picture never went away from the family portrait.  The Dina's daughter got the message "Its high time you went back to the real world" and got ejected from uni while she was still a freshman.  And finally I started getting those "too many interations" errors.

And I barely made it past the second generation too...

Live and learn so they say.  But that was my favorite version of Pleasantview ever.  I still have the pictures I saved from the storytelling folder.

It's a lot of hard work in SimPE, but you can clean up the extra files - just takes time, patience and a lot of care to make sure you get rid of all the memories!  Some sims will be duplicated or triplicated, for example the ones actually living in houses, but the extra files are (or they were when I tried this out) unlinked, and should be safe to delete, though again you need to check all memories of them having been interracted with as they wandered around the other campuses.

Thanks, I was afraid it was going to be a bit more complicated than I hoped. :)  At least I have the enhanced memory manager for SimPE from here, so that should make cleaning up the memories easier, in any case.

Well, it's not so much complicated (if I can do it, it's not complicated!) as a long and boring chore!  Remember, though, once you've deleted all the memories, etc., you need to remove the files from your characters folder, in my experience it's the only way to be sure they're gone!  I just write down all the file numbers as I go, then after I've closed SimPE I get rid of them.

And then, get all the anti-spam mods that you need!

Ok, here's an interesting situation -- I fired up the game, and got rid of one of the three universities (La Fiesta Tech -- I still have students in the other two, and like them both so I may keep both).  I then quit, and went into SimPE, and the only unlinked and 'no character data/unlinked' sims I could find were dead folks, like Skip Broke, Bella Goth, etc. All told, there's maybe 30 of them or so.  A fix memory run didn't find any bad memories (it found a bit over 400 on the first run a couple of days ago), so I guess it's ok to get rid of these unlinked/ncd dead folks to clean things up a bit.

Or should I leave well enough alone?

Be very careful with dead sims!

So I guess I'll leave well enough alone, since all the unlinked characters are dead ancestors.  None of the townies/dormies/npcs got unlinked when I deleted the university from Pleasantview.  But I've only got around 400 characters total right now, so I'm still in the safe zone.

Worth checking, though, that you haven't got more than you need of each NPC.

If you don't see an NPC in the game, how can you tell in SimPE that a particular character is an NPC (besides the obvious ones, like the GR and social workers, of course)?  I know the nannies now, but I'm not sure I can tell who all the gardeners and repair folks are. 

They have different work clothes!  Aslo, the original ones are usually in close number order, so any extras would be generated and either fill gaps or be tagged on at the end.

Ah, so you gotta keep an eye on the work clothes.  Thanks -- now I know what I'm looking for next time I go poking  around in SimPE.

I added all 3 universities and then ransacked them to make a custom one (took out all housing and dorms and people and everything) thinking it wouldn't make a difference if there was no place for dormies to go and all (and I'm dumb and didn't know better) when I first got Uni, right after it came out. Then I never played it much. Recently when I attached a single uni just as I should have to a new neighborhood and looked for the first time at an uncorrupt campus directory - I've realized I must have had 4 times as many students in there as I should have. The campus directory was something like 6 pages long, with many similar ones or doubles. That's also probably why my students met way too many professors. Now it's just 1.5 or so... so the game must have generated all those files even tho it didn't have any place to put them. And linked them. Silly game, silly me. I'd check for doubles - doubles with different names but the same features or... well just how many dormies you have.

Yes, unfortunately the game doesn't see NPCs as having a job, so they all have the Unemployed box checked.  But the work clothes should help find any extras.

There should be 23 professors, if that's any help - one has the Secret society token.

I see no one's posted on this in a while... I was just wondering if there has been any progress in combatting this problem? I never even thought about it before, just stumbled upon this thread by accident. I have 550 characters in my Pleasantville folder, but there is no way I have that many Sims.  I'd say I probably have at most 50 active Sims that I play, and if you figure in ones that have died, that's probably another 15.  I haven't seen any problems yet, but I'd like to be able to stop any before they start. Any new methods or anything out there?

If you have a downtown, Uni, shopping district and then the regular townies and NPC's, you could very well have that many.  In my recent Strangetown/Pleasantview neighbourhood, I've only added one playable Sim on top of the Sims I already had (and only 5 townies/NPC's from the original neighbourhoods made it in before I did a DAC) and I have something like 500 files.  For those two towns alone there is 38 graves before any of my own Sims will die.

Yeah, I have all the EPs, so I guess that explains all the extra files. I just don't want my game to explode from having too many! :o

Nah.  The amount of files you can have has been raised with OFB so if you only have 500 you're good for a while.

If you wish added security, it probably wouldn't hurt to download Pescado's Director's Cut, which should include any Critical Fixes that the Great One currently deems necessary to prevent a BFBVFOS (although one should of course always RTFM, and avoid installing anything in there that has effects you consider undesirable.)

Edit:  Whoops!  I forgot, TwoJeffs also has some critical fixes in his section.

Ahem.

crammyboy does too.  ;)

Does he really?  *Toodles off to see*

Thanks so much! The documentation link at the director's cut doesn't seem to be working, though, so I searched through the rest of the site to find descriptions for each individual hack. I couldn't find them all, though, so I'm not sure what they all do.

Edit: Thank you, too, BlueSoup!

Read through the Directors Cut and hack directory threads in The Archives -- the vast majority of the 'undocumented' hacks in the director's cut are identified in there somewhere.  If not, just ask there and someone will give you a description.

Umm...  need a little help here please.  I've been playing Pleasantview since University and have only had 2 sims die.  After reading this thread, I checked my folder and I have 580 character files.  Yikes!  I need to change my playing style, and employ population control as JM states.  I'd like to restart the neighborhood without deleting all of my other hoods that are at 300 or so files.  How do I have the game regenerate Pleasantview?  Do I just delete the contents of the N001 folder?  Thanks...

Just copy the folder found at Program Files/EA GAMES/The Sims 2/TSData/Res/UserData/Neighborhoods and then N001 and paste it over the N001 folder in the My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighborhoods/N001 folder.

But at 580 you're not doing really that bad.  I wouldn't worry about it, and you probably have a lot invested into it.

I found this information a long time ago on the official BBS. *gasp!*  Yes, I found some useful information there, and I tried it myself.  It works very well.  I saved it in text file, which I pasted below:

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, BlueSoup.  I do have quite a bit invested but I think it would be good to start fresh.  In that 580, I must have at least 3 pregnant sims and several families I haven't played in months.

I found the folder you pointed me to with just 170 little character files.  Would it work for me to just replace the character folder and keep all of my houses?

Umm...I don't think so.  Not totally sure though.

If you want to save your lots, you can go into each lot and place a Stay things shrub (found at www.nectere.net/smf and in the Simlogical Sims 2 section), then do a DeleteAllCharacters.  Everything will stay (including furnishings) and you'll have the same neighbourhood with no Sims.

If you do want the Pleasantview original Sims, you can do the above, and instead package the lots for reinstallation after you reset the neighbourhood using the method listed above.

Be sure you do not have owned businesses before doing a DAC though…

Simply replacing the characters files wouldn't work and would probably fubar the neighborhood because all the character references are kept in the Neighborhood file.  This file is like a database with information about all the sims in the neighborhood, including family ties, DNA, wants and fears, and memories.  You would be better off starting fresh or using one of the methods described above by Blue or myself.

Sorry.  I realize that I wasn't clear.  In anticipation of loading OBF and FFS, we moved all of our sims out into the Sim Bin.  Reloaded all of the houses to be sure that they were empty.  Saved the empty homes.  And dumped lots of unnecessary downloads.  Now ALL of my current Sims (over 23 active families) are in the sim bin, unattached to houses.

I think I will need to replace the entire folder.  I will go into the game and move the houses I want into the house bin and replace the entire N001 folder.  Thanks for all of the help, BlueSoup.

And thanks rainbow.  I will replace the entire folder.

Lauraglenn

if you have families in the sim bin, make sure they don't have any memories of any other sims. Otherwise you can make your problem worse, because they bring along a copy of the sim they have a memory about (albeit a hidden sim).

No, the sim bin is fine. The lot bin is the one with the problems.

I guess it's going to become a cliché to say 'Why do it this way when they could have done it differently?' but why did Maxis even bother making occupied lots packagable if they knew that these sorts of problems would result?  Why not build in functionality to safely move Sims from one hood to another from the get-go?

I'm guessing that the answer starts with an E and ends with an A, which explains a lot.  Still, if the time and the money were available, what's the list of pitfalls in having neighbourhoods which are not effectively on different planets?

I'm guessing that it goes back to the fact that they didn't extensively play-test the game, so they didn't know these types of side-effects would occur or even cause problems.  They didn't know that players would have a problem with having too many memories when the "chat bug" was discovered.  They first blamed it on the player, saying it was caused by "extensive use of the aging-off cheat or elixir of life."  HELLO?  I thought those were put in the game to be used!  There was no limit to how many times you can use elixir or how long you can play with aging-off.  They didn't have a warning anywhere saying that using these too much could cause problems in your game!  Sure, aging off is a cheat, but Maxis encourages the use of cheats as "features."  Besides, the elixir of life is not a cheat, but it accomplishes the same result.  I think the chat-bug fix was the first one of JM's fixes I ever used.  And their "work around" solution to the problem?  To package your sims into the lot bin and move them to a new neighborhood, then move them back!  Can you say, "compounding the problem?" 

I started a neighborhood from scratch after having my two previous neighborhoods become BOFVFS.  I used the delete all characters cheat and installed all of JMP's no regen hacks.  At the time I only had UNI, this was before NL was released.  I created 30 sims in CAS and only 1/ of these became playable sims.  The rest became townies.  I followed a strict population growth limit.  When NL and later OFB were added, they became the only outsiders in my hood.  Some of them married my CAS sims and have produced some beautiful children, giving the gene pool a greater variety.

Fast forward to today.  It has been almost a year now.  I only have 341 files in this neighborhood.  I have recently celebrated the birth of my 4th generation.  In fact, to keep the population down, I pared it back by killing off many sims with disease.  Yes, my sims suffered the plague.  Most great civilizations do.   :P  I don't delete any of my playable sims's tombstones after they die, though I might start the practice as the neighborhood continues to age.

Anyway, I couldn't be happier with my neighborhood and it's population.  :)  Thanks JMP.

I get that it's memories that are the problem.  As far as I remember from discussion here, they're flat-filed which means when you want to go check if Sim X has memory Y, it's easy to clock up a lot of iterations doing so.  Or something like that.

Anyway if there was a means of moving a Sim from one neighbourhood to another without ill-effects, you and I could avoid the negative consequences of this shoebox filing system.  Or, EA could hire someone who actually has a clue how to code a database, rip out the existing system, and start over.

Either way you look at it, it's a feature I want to see more than pets :P