More Awesome Than You!

Was playing the Burb family in Pleasantview when I came across this bizarre problem. The husband, John Burb, kept rolling romantic wants for Brandi Broke, who he has never even met. He wants to do nothing but flirt, kiss, hug and backrub her, just as if she was his wife. His own wife, Jennifer, doesn't exist as far as wants and fears are concerned. Brandi also started rolling fears about John dying and being rejected for woohoo by John, despite the fact that she has never met him either. Is this a case of predestinated love? Are the two of them telepathic? Is John Burb actually the reincarnation of Skip Broke, or does all this merely signal an impending BFBVFS for Pleasantview? Most importantly, is there a solution to the problem other than 'nuke everything and start again'?

Sounds like SWAF corruption of some kind. That, or the two are somehow preprogrammed to be together: All the Maxian premades have unique want trees.

Is SWAF corruption fixable? If it will help, I never played the Burbs before this incident, nor did I alter anything in SimPE. I use virtually all the awesome mods plus one or two unawesome ones, the Insimenator mainly, and never experienced any problems until now.

The whole "Wants" system is deeply corrupted with bugs as is, and is totally unfixable (even for Maxis).

I would've thought that if Maxis was trying to "fix Brandi up" with someone it'd be that Dreamer dude. (I never play Maxis households)

I think that they're specifically trying to get you to fix up the Dreamer guy with Cassandra.

Yea, and John and Brandi have 3 bolts (if you have NL or later) when they finally meet, so they're kinda destined for each other, too.  They pretty much always end up together whenever I restart a Pleasantview on my laptop -- in my main game, they had 3 kids together (he's now dead, and she has maybe 1 day left).

Oh yeah. *Boinks forehead* I forgotted. All those not so subtle hints in the neighborhood photo album.

I've never seen John having the hots or any wants for Brandi or vice versa at all. *shrugs* Then again I always hook up Brandi with Gordon King. I forget how many bolts they have, since I don't really pay much attention to those, but its at least a couple I believe. Gordon is a knowledge sim which is Maxis-compatible with family sims. I always figured that's who she was supposed to end up with since they went to the trouble of having Dustin know the guy and all.

I think Gordon King is Pleasantview's resident burglar. Poor Brandi always seems to pick the wrong guy then. The President suggested that it might be SWAF corruption, so I deleted their SWAFs in SimPE and let the game regenerate them. This seems to have fixed the problem. John is now properly interested in his wife, Brandi in her children. Thanks all the help and suggestions.

In my Plaesantview Brandi always ends up with the resurrected Skip.

In my first Pleasantview she ended-up with the headmaster, Vince Walter, but that was before lightning bolts.  She was never interested in anyone else, all she wanted to do was veg-out and watch TV.  In my second, she married Hegelian, although she did have 3 bolts for John Burb and also for Darren Dreamer, as I recall.  I did very briefly play Pleasantview with all the pre-mades as teens and brought Skip back, but he and Brandi had no bolts at all, although they were platonic best friends.  She was more interested in Don Lothario than she was in Skip.

In my current incarnation of Pleasantview Brandi recently married former repairman Waylon Fairchild. They just had twin daughters who are very pretty.

And with the SWAF problem I've noticed that Pleasantview seems to have the problem with hanging SWAF's even in an untouched version. So whenever I rest Pleasantview now one of the first things I do is to go in with SimPE and delete all the SWAF's with no sim associated to them. Seems to help the problem.

How do you see them/know they are dangling?

In my experience Waylon Fairchild always makes adorable kids - assuming that the mother isn't hideous, of course.

I tried to keep my Pleasantview as 'clean' as possible as the stereotypical Sims town. I never deleted a Sim or made any major edits. Yet when I opened it up in SimPE to fix the John Burb problem, I found about 150 'blank' or 'hanging' SWAF entries with no owner. There were two 'Unknowns' but they are most likely the remote control car. I removed them all. It also seemed as if double the number of townies had been created. Great, another 30-40 lowlife genetic freaks for the game to harass my Sims with. What a mess.

Have you installed Nightlife? That adds another 30 or so 'downtownies' to the mix. And they're actually much better looking than the original townies. :)

(Oh, and Uni adds at least 49 more too.)

Yes, even accounting for all the downtownies and dormies I have about 40 additional townies.

Downtownies are only ‘better looking’ because they're based on predefined templates complete with makeup, rather than being randomly generated like townies.
If for whatever reason the game generates downtownies more than once you end up with near-duplicates.

Dormies (students) are all townies.

And installing the default Bluewater (OFB) adds another group of townies.

I see in the townie section (downtownies separate) about 169 entries. Assuming 40 basic townies, 49 dormies and 40 bluewater townies I get 40 extra... Nobody has died in this version of Pleasantview (yet).

You most likely have more than 49 dormies: each dorm is filled with dormies, and they are not freed if your playables leave the dorm. The next time you enter another dorm, new dormies will be generated for it.
Additionally, unless you had Pescado's SS hack in place before first playing uni, there will be over 20 SS members generated as well.

The visitor controller may have also ran into a bug, and began creating another set of townies (I've had this happen before). It will sometimes do a full run of 30~40 townies before stopping.

A new neighbourhood with Uni, Downtown, and Bluewater added easily leads to over 160 characters: 30~40 townies (predefined from N001), 30~40 dormies (predefined), 30~40 downtownies (predefined based on templates, including the Tricou dead), 30~40 townies from Bluewater (predefined templates with skill badges), two male grand vampires, two female grand vampires, two slobs (male+female), Mr. Big, the Diva, and three of every service NPC (including the useless ones such as the social worker and repoman which can never appear more than once).

Gvamps normally append themselves into the NPC pool, which is where mine landed, although they respawn themselves into the downtownie pool. Big/Diva spawn in the downtownie pool. Normally you get about 30 townies, 30 downtownies, and 50 dormies, so you've got an additional 50-60 extra. Not sure what the "townie" section is supposed to mean, though. Are you counting the number of members of the townie family?

Yeah the second half of the post is more a total account, not just townies.

I spawned a summoner from Insim and counted the entries in the "townie" family manually. 15 clock faces of 11 names each (12 minus the "more" option) plus one face of four names. 169 names total. The "downtownies" are a separate family composed of around 6 clock faces of 11 plus one of four. 70 names total. In SimPE the data is 470 Sim description files, 590 SWAFs, 592 DNA files. I read somewhere that around 4 teens and 2 children townies are spawned per neighborhood. I have 16 teens and 8 children in mine.

I guess it's time to use "notownieregen" and break out the cow plant.

You shouldn't need notownieregen, you're way over the limit.

Sorry for not getting back to this earlier Blue, I got a little sidetracked with a sick daughter yesterday. The way I understood it is when you look at all the SWAF's the ones that are dangling do not have a sim associated with them. So I methodically looked at every SWAF using SimPE and if it didn't have a sim I deleted it. It's monotonous to look through all those SWAF files but it only took me about 10-15 minutes and once done it should keep my Pleasantview in better shape (knock on wood). There's a post about deleting the SWAF's here a while back. I go see if I can find it. Here it is- http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4580.0.html

Over the limit? What's the normal number of Sim description files for a neighborhood like Pleasantview with all expacks installed?

A little aside here:

When I first got The Sims 2 I thought that the townies were a great idea because I wouldn't have to create families just to populate the neighborhood. This feeling lasted approximately 5 Sim days. The third time my married Sim brought home horsefaced homewrecker Goopy Gilscarbo and rolled nothing but "Flirt with Goopy" wants I declared war on all townies. Good feature but poor implementation. Not only are the townies buggy, ugly, and shallow compared to Sims you have created yourself, they also tend to be romance aspiration types, so poor friend/spouse material. But it's the way the game keeps forcing them on you that is really irritating. They harass your Sim at community lots, after work and even when delivering groceries. And once they appear on your Sim's relationship panel he develops townie fixation regardless of his aspiration: for the rest of the week all he wants to do is "Play with townie", "Talk with townie" and "Flirt with townie". I've had a knowledge Sim lose the coveted "Max all Skills" want (8000) to a miserable "Tickle Marylena Hamilton" (250) when he invited her home after work. I want my Sims to be friends with other playables in the neighborhood. Instead I keep getting that retard Goopy Gilscarbo after work.

Ha. Tosha Go is the most annoying townie ever. She's everywhere. I was tempted to muck up all her DNA, SWAF and set her aspiration in red just to see what would happen but then decided to marry her into the Lothario family so she can have Kaylynn, Cassandra, Dina and Nina knocking over her trash can and stealing her newspapers until she dies her own miserable death alone :D :D :D

SimulatedDork, why do you put so much energy in sims you don't like? Tosha is a teen - send her to college, and keep her in the student bin; end of Tosha, no more annoy.

You don't like any adult? Pull him to the family bin (find own place), and keep him there forever.

I never played with the Oldies and the Burbs, since TS2 was issued, nor with the 4 girls in Strange town, although the simulator sent once one of Polination daughters as a guest to my lot.

I'm probably just weird, but if I really don't like a non-playable I incorporate them into one of my Sim's families and they eventually die of old age after a long, happy life.  The ones I like end up being townies forever.

The thing that is the most irritating is the genetics of the townies.  All sloppy, lazy, playful - even the knowledge sims (which I prefer as serious as possible).  To top it off the townies that are supposed to be serious have been altered to be more slovenly and playful than they genetically are.

It got to the point that I only create CAS Scorpios in my legacy house hoods - 10 neat, 10 active, 5 nice in an attempt to breed out the useless kids I kept having.  You know the ones - they fall over from exhaustion after getting off the school bus, require a few rousing games of red hands just to get through their homework, take a shower so they can splash in their puddles and then bounce on the bed until complete energy depletion?  Then they leave their bed that they were bouncing on to go sleep in their parents bed. 

Spawn of the townies = bad news.

That is not actually a fault of townies specifically, but of the horrible way want trees are miscalibrated. Basically, once your sim has an orientation, ANYONE of appropriate gender he satisfies a "Talk to" want will immediately spawn a "Flirt with" want. It's quite the nuisance and received the axe in the "norandomflirtwants" hack.

They're approximately evenly distributed, but romance sims exhibit visible radiative markers, so they're easy to spot.

There's 90 of them and however-many playables. Odds are somewhat against you by pure random chance, even before the "dining with scum" code that INTENTIONALLY foists townies upon you.

btw.. is it safe to kill all townies off and play without them (notownieregen) ?

Yea, as far as I know, though you'll still get the special NPCs (i.e., mailman, paperboy, grocery delivery, etc.). But your businesses and community lots will be pretty empty. :) What most folks do is kill off the maxis townies (usually via 'delete all characters'), and then make their own CAS townies and use the testing cheats or something like Inge's transporter bush to turn them into actual townies.

"two slobs Mr.Big and the diva"
 
             i've never met or seen Mr.Big or the Diva. Where can i find them or is there a way i can get them to show up?
                 

You'll only find them on downtown community lots (as well as the slob, the vampires, and Mrs. Crumplebottom). If you hang around a downtown community lot long enough, one of them will wander by, and it'll be real obvious that it's Mr. Big or the Diva.  Distinctive clothing, and they're always primping or admiring themselves in the mirror they carry.

oh ok thanks i've seen Mrs.Crumplebottom. she hits people with her ppurse for no reason :D i think it's kind of funny

Actually, she usually hits people for PDAs (public displays of affection).  You want to really get her wound up, wait until she's on the lot and the go woohoo in a photo booth or hot tub. :)

OTOH, she's a wicked poker player, so putting a poker table on the lot keeps her busy so she won't bother your sims on a date.  She's also a bit of a lush, and a bar on the lot will keep her occupied, too. :)

Don't forget she's a great bowler as well.

You know, in the year I've had NL I've actually never had sims go to the bowling alley.  I'll have to do that one of these days.

Its pretty pointless, i cant even get a group to play because one walks out as soon as they are finished.

Perhaps Crammyboy's 'Better Bowling' mod would help that? http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4644.0

Mmm...i thought i had that one, i guess not. Thanks  :)

Does this "dining with scum" code force your sims to constantly bring home townies instead of other playables? I like to choose the friendships my sims make and I mainly want the playables in a neighborhood to mingle with each other. I consider townies (and NPCs) random riffraff to keep away from the playables at all costs, and thus I hate how you always bump into them.

Dining with scum controls restaurants, not carpool buddies.

Twojeffs has mods to control the latter.

Dining with scum has nothing to do with the carpool. If you want to control carpool dragging a bit, try "no fraternization" in the Director's Cut. It will prevent the dragging of riffraff of any kind home if you already have queued plans for your sims, thus preventing you from ending up with some annoying tail that decides to arbitrarily tag along without even bothering to see if you were busy first.

She also hits people for inappropriate nudity - changing into a bathing suit to get into the hot tub, taking a shower in a gender-specific bathroom after working out (which I find particularly annoying). I don't mind so bad that she messes with dates, it's kinda funny, but geez she can yell at a guy, interrupting his shower, in a male-only restroom from 3 rooms away. STFUB :p

There's a mod somewhere that nukes her powers of omniscience and telepathy.

The crumplefix (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/crumplefix.zip)?