More Awesome Than You!

I'm absolutely clueless when it comes to SimPE, so I was wondering- is there a tutorial anywhere that shows exactly how to delete those so-called "dangling SWAFs"? I know that they're left behind when you use DAC, and I wanted to make a custom neighborhood with me-made townies, so I'd like to know how to fix the mess DAC leaves behind.

Thanks in advance.

If you've just done a DAC, it's very simple.

Open up your neighborhood in SimPE. Select the "SDSC" or "Sim Description" file type. Delete them all.
Now do the same thing for SWAFs, or "Sim Wants and Fears". Wipe them out. All of them.

Save. Exit. Mission complete.

I made a using a custom hood. I DAC'd and then deleted all SDSC (Sim Description). There were Five NPCs and two unknowns. These are safe to delete?

Also, I read to delete all SDNA (Sim DNA) and Sim Relations, is this true?

Lastly, in my custom hood, there was no section for SWAFs. Is this normal?

Thanks in advance.

That was your plan, right? Kill 'em all. And their character files, too.

Deleting all SDNAs is fine. It will corrupt the ones that remain, but there shouldn't be any that remain anyway. Kill them all!

If there aren't any, they're all dead. If there are, kill them all.

Great. One last question. Killed all the SDSC, opened the hood, closed it, went back to SimPe. They were back. Five NPCs and two unkowns. So seems no point in deleting them, n'cest pas? (Or however you spell that danged french.)

Those would probably grow back, yes, but the first time you purge, you may as well kill everything just to kill all the dangling entries. The important ones, like those, grow back.

If you are not deleting all the sims, you don't delete all the SWAFs.  You find the ones that match by checking incidence numbers between the SWAF and SDSC screens.  You can delete them all and they will regenerate, but you'll lose all the wants and fears history that makes a Sim want to paint  a 10th masterpieces, earn an 9th logic point or flirt with his/her partner rather than any sim in view.

Your game will need a grim reaper and the unknowns.  If you delete them it will make new ones.  If you are deleting everything - nuke them too otherwise don't bother.  And don't touch the DNA files!  This is the thread where I kept asking questions about cleaning hoods until I got answers that made sense to me -- maybe it will help you.   it gets to the unknowns at the end -there are 3 with OFB - the first is the remote control car and the OFB one is a robot base. There are others around if you search on SWAF.  It's not a tutorial, but some of it is quite detailed.  You can always write one and ask for feedback!
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4580.0.html

Oh and don't touch the DNA files :-[

Cwykes, that is a very long thread, a lot of it pertaining to hoods that have been played. So are you telling me that it is NOT safe to delete DNA, despite what Pes said, on a new, totally unplayed, just DAC'd hood?

If so, why? What Bad Thing would happen?

ETA: I am being so precise about this because I *AM* writing a tutorial on creating a custom hood.

Deleting the SimDNA will garble the data on any SDNAs that remain. If you delete ALL of them, there won't be any left to take damage. If you don't delete them, this is harmless also, they'll get overwritten when the slots are reclaimed. Ultimately it doesn't matter what you do if you intend to nuke your neighborhood anyway.

Excellent.  hope something in my long thread was useful, if only info on the "unknowns".  Don't listen to me when Pescado is talking!  I spend a lot of time quoting him. 

More people I try and help need to clean up played hoods - on those "don't touch DNA" is now the mantra - I didn't know that so I've messed with mine.  Don't think many of my sims had recessive genes thank goodness and I think that's what gets hit. I've not made it into generation 3 with any of my sims yet! I think we need a tutorial on cleaning up existing hoods.

If you've damaged an existing hood AND you have a recent backup from BEFORE you borked it by deleting an SDNA, it's possible to laboriously restore things. First, you need to compile a "clean" DNA extract by extracting all the old SDNAs from the "undamaged" backup, then adding any new or changed SDNAs to the pot.

Then you get to play with the Lot Debugger "Instantiation Slideshow" button, hiting "pause" after every hiccup and typing "simdna <name>" for the sim that appears frozen. After every single one of your neighborhood sims has been "slideshowed", you then once again delete all the SDNAs and reload the batch of "good" SDNA. Fun process. Not easy at all. Very strange system.

Alright, new problem. Deleted everything. Made one sim, slapped sim onto blank lot. Spawned Townie Creator Tree, started creating townies. Got this error. Tried this several times, even made ANOTHER new hood, DAC'd, SimPe'd, CAS'd a sim, slapped on lot, got same error.

It was a community lot populator error. Also, this is in a clean game, no DLs.

Attached is a log.

Apparently the townie tree is broken, dont use it.

Yes, from what I understand, the Townie Creator tree is borked. I guess the "good" way to remake townies is to make them in CAS, move them onto an empty lot, and use the shrub to "set as townie" or "set as downtownie".

Does anyone know if NPCs can be created using the townie tree, or do we have to wait for the game to load them as needed each time?

Creating Townies one at a time with the tree works fine. What gave you the error was when you tried to "Create All Townies" (which is broken).

Multi-reply!

-Sims after DAC:
All 'hoods have the default NPCs plus one or two (OFB and up) Unknowns. These are regenerated on 'hood load. The two unknowns are the RC car and the OFB robots.

-Further DAC cleanup:
Delete ALL remaning Sim descriptions (including the above default NPCs), ALL SimDNA strings, and ALL Sim Relationships. Best to do this from the neighbourhood "root" to avoid some SimPE bugs (ie do not click any item in the left).
DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE. Deleting memories, family relationships, or family unknown will prevent the 'hood from loading. These are cleaned by the game automatically so leave them alone.

-Townie/NPC spawning:
The townie BATCH generator is broken. You can still use the tree to generate one townie at a time (and with this use your desired settings for gender, age, and skintone).
You can also generate one TS2 or Uni NPC at a time, again allowing for gender, age, and skintone (for NPCs I recommend using ‘smart age’).

Downtownies and SP2 NPCs can be created with the tree after switching it to create downtownies, again allowing for gender, age, and skintone settings. Use the tree also to spawn the Special Townies Slob, Diva, Grand Vampire, as these are often not autogenerated.

Caveat: unless you like near-twins, do not create downtownies using the tree. Instead, turn some playables or townies into downtownies using my version of the Ingelogical shrub. Reason is that all downtownies come from a template set with VERY limited options.

Caveat2: if you are not anal about controlling gender, skintone, and age for your NPCs just let the game generate them as needed. NPC spawning on demand works just fine.

Caveat3: the tree will allow you to set invalid settings for NPCs, such as male teen nannies. If you are stupid enough to do this, all settings will be ignored (including skintone which otherwise is valid). For NPCs I highly recommend using 'smart age', and keep the gender in mind.

Must be female NPCs:
-nanny
-social worker

Must be male NPCs:
-repo man
-headmaster

All the rest can be either.
In the case of "Mascot good" a female results in a cheerleader, a male in a llama.
In the case of Mr. Big a female becomes the Diva, a male Mr Big.

This makes me ask.  Is it then possible to create a new neighborhood, with an attached Downtown, without having any Vampires?  'Cause for me that would be a good thing.

Probably not -- as soon as you designate a sub-hood a downtown, it generates the downtown NPCs when you first go to a lot there (if not sooner). Only way I can think to avoid that is to not add a downtown, but instead add what you want as your downtown as a shopping district (if you have OFB). You won't get any of the downtown NPCs that way, and your sims could still visit clubs, restaurants and the like.

Ah well.  I expected it was too much to hope for.  What I actually do is just ignore the Grand Vampires, so vampirism never spreads in my neighborhoods. 

So, what is the best way to delete all character? In a tutorial somewhere else on this site, you are told just to delete through select all from the game folders.

Then someone else mentioned deleting through SimPe...

What is there to delete in SimPe if you deleted all the character files through the game folders?

Conflicting advice. Which one is true? Help?

I have never seen Grand Vampire in my downtown, so this is not hard to do. What I would do is if one ever showed up, just delete him from the lot, with insem, or inge's bush...or perhaps TJs visitor controller?

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2271.0.html

Vampirism never spreads if you never let your simmies become friends with the Grand Vamp (or boolprop them).

The Pesc. I don't know what I was thinking off. Consider it a typo =p

Wants/fears can be deleted if you're deleting Sims anyway. (I should know, do so frequently.)

I could have sworn I had a female headmaster once.  If I did, it was a long time ago, either pre-Uni or just after, and I don't have that neihborhood anymore to check.

I think it's possible if they don't regenerate. But I have no idea if they do.

This morning I added a downtown to Strangetown finally. I immediately quit the game and went into SimPe and deleted all the downtownies and thier SWAFs.

I saw that 4 Grand Vamps, Mr. Big, The Diva, The Slobs, and some restaurant personnel had all already been generated. I just left them there, but it'd be interesting to know for future reference if they regenerate or not.

Untrue. Vampires can and will potentially bite anyone, although their target selection is restricted a bit with vampirefixes. They probably shouldn't respawn if you purge them and have antiredundancy in place, though. Let me know how that goes.

I thought the antiredunancy just keep the game from respawing multiples of a particular class of NPC, not completely prevent any of the class from being spawned.

Also, anti-redundancy is still in testing, at last look. Is it going to be moved from there any time soon? I have it in my game, and about to try it out when making a new hood.

It prevents the spawning of all but necessary NPCs. However, I don't think the Grand Vampires qualify as "necessary" NPCs, meaning if you remove them for whatever reason, either because you're on a vampire-slaying campaign, or because you've taken control of vampire society yourself, they will not respawn in an endless train.

Those aren't generated per sé, they come from the D001 template, just like the dead Tricous and a full assortment of downtownies.
Some of the DT lots actually have a cook standing in them if you edit them.

I recall they happen even if you generate the neighborhood without using the D001, though.

Yes, they do -- I built a custom hood with a custom downtown (no maxis templates used at all), and the downtown NPCs all generated themselves just fine.  The vamps are stalking, Crumplebottom is whacking, and the rich folks are preening. :)

Hmm. Maybe I should stop DACcing, or start doing a DAC before adding the subhoods.

Aren't you supposed to DAC each time you load up a subhood? I know you're supposed to do the main hood THEN the college subhood....

I usually create the main 'hood, add all subhoods, and then DAC.
Then I clean in SimPE, and start playing. I have some CAS templates I now use for townies, and I let the game generate NPCs on demand. I do create the special townies manually (1 of each gender).

Hmm, see this is why we need a new tutorial. Because the one here in the site says to make the neighborhood, DAC then add one subhood at a time and delete the character files.

Which reminds me, no one answered my question earlier. Do you HAVE to use SimPe to clean up character files if you cleaned out the character files via the EA Games Folder like the tutorial tells you to?

As long as they're all gone anyway? Nope. But since you're going to remove all SDNA anyway, might as well delete the default NPCs' SDSCs to be sure no problems can arise.

Is there a fast way in SimPe to nuke everything? Or do you have to go sim by sim?

You /don't/ go Sim by Sim.

You do the DAC in the hood, save and quit TS2, and then in SimPE you select and delete ALL the SWAFs, the remaining SDCSs, SDNA, and relationships.
Save and quit SimPE, and you're done with cleaning.

*obviously hasn't done it before*

Do you go through the neighborhood browser and pull up the neighborhood and is it all... just there to delete?

OK...

Open the 'hood file in SimPE. Do not select anything on the left (keep it on All Resources).
In the right pane, sort by type (click on the type header), it should look like this:

(http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/simpe.jpg)

Select all the Sim DNA, Sim description, sim relationships. Delete them.

Ah. Easy Peasy then.

Jordi, I have the very latest version of SimPe. Why don't you select anything in the left pane?

Because a bug in SimPE prevents you from deleting all items of a kind. If you pick 'Sims DNA' in the left, you can't select and delete all SDNA entries. (It may look like you can, but in fact you'll delete nothing).

Plus it's faster to work from the top level, since you can delete all unwanted entries in one go instead of one type at a time (if the bug wasn't there).

Thank you Jordi this is what a ding bat like me needed to understand how to do this properly. Hits the thanks button many times in your honor ;D Also hits it many times for Jelenedra for asking the right questions to get the right answers ;D

Hah, thanks. Whoo for being a SimPe idiot!

Jordi, thanks for that answer. Another one:

Until you enlightened me, I was deleting SWAFs etc the wrong way. But I never noticed they were not gone. I would open the hood file again to make sure everything took and nothing. They were gone. I am using the latest simpe.

So perhaps this bug was fixed? How do I know they are NOT really gone if they look deleted?

It may be a bug in the development release (0.59), I don't use 0.58 myself.
In .59 at least they will re-appear on opening the file again after closing, proving they were not actually deleted.

I'm using .58, and while simply trying to delete all the entries post-DAC alone doesn't properly remove them, I find that if I delete and then save before closing, the files are gone.

Yes, that is what I do as well, delete then save, delete the next group then save.

Perhaps you were not saving Jordi?

Or perhaps it really is a bug and I don't know what the F I am talking about? Perhaps? *grin*

Thanks for the help.

A wild theory suggests you might want to SAVE the changes BEFORE you reopen it.

Of course I save before closing.

Fact remains that the last few times I selected a category on the left, selected all items in that category, deleted (AND SAVED) all entries would still be there after closing and reopening the 'hood file. Deleting from 'All Resources' tree DOES work.

I'll try it again later, maybe it's changed in the current development release. I'm one version behind.