More Awesome Than You!

Finally made the decision last night to restart Pleasantview over - this time with much more population control!  1-2 kids max!  I'm debating what to do with Brandi Broke, though.  (I've left the old saved games on my desktop - I may move them into another account)

Don left Cassandra at the altar - for once.  As she's having her nervous breakdown, Don did the 'bleeecchh' Anti-Chemistry move on her and left the lot.  Glad I didn't marry them together this time.  Cass is furious with Don, and instantly wanted to talk to Darren and Mary-Sue (a couple long phone calls later, she crawled into bed).  The next day, I had her call Darren over (called in sick at work - "sorry, had a breakdown, I won't be in today"), and when she greeted him - BAM, wasn't just a hug, it was a full on smooch (interesting that the type of greeting doesn't change relationship status - she was still only best friends with him).  It's a sign.  So she kissed him and fell in love, got engaged, got married - all at the front door!  Even Dirk moved in, which I ummed and ahhed a bit about.

Swapped to the Pleasants.  Daniel and Mary-Sue were actually getting on rather well when she left for work, and the girls were apologising back and forth until the moment they had to go to school - they're well on their way to recovering their relationship.  Of course, Daniel HAD to woo-hoo with Kaylynn, but they were done before Mary-Sue got home (chance card was a bit late).  They were wandering around in their underwear and making out when MS finally got home and I had to SEND her into the lounge to catch them.  Furiousness!  With both of them!  Tells Kaylynn to leave then argues like there's no tomorrow with Daniel.  But this time, I didn't have them break up.  Angela and Lilith are just oblivious to it all.  Angela got her first kiss with Dustin, and Lilith made a new friend with a downtownie teen called Brady.  I think.  Daniel went to bed and now Mary-Sue refuses to sleep there, all the while thinking of Daniel and Kaylynn with the little furious flames.  She may not have seen it, but she KNOWS what happened in that bed!  Went into neighbourhood view and looked at the Pleasant family portrait.  Daniel and Mary-Sue are now back to back and scowling, Lilith still looks pissed off at the universe, and Angela is shrugging as if to say 'what could I possibly do?'

Swapped to the Lothario house.  Don gets his wish to woo-hoo with Nina and Dina (which gives him his 3 woohoo wish after having woohooed with Kaylynn previously.  While Kaylynn's there cleaning in between Nina and Dina, he woohoos with her as well.  Why not.  Now after woohooing with Dina, he of course gets the want to woohoo with 5 sims.  The next day he invites Kaylynn over, not knowing that I have plans for him.  Before he knows what's happening, he's engaged, married and trying for a baby with Kaylynn.  Interestingly, the Woo-hoo with 5 sims want was met!  I don't know why this is, except that I guess every time Don woo-hooed with Kaylynn she picked up a woo-hoo doodad  above her head.  Remember, he never woohooed or married Cass in this incarnation.  He has no idea whats coming.  Kaylynn's pregnant.  Cass is constantly kicking over the rubbish and stealing the newspaper, but she had no carefactor about Kaylynn until she saw her outside gardening.  Now Cass has flames around any thoughts of Kaylynn!  She obviously knows that Kaylynn has succeeded where she failed!

The Burb family moved in Downtown, and as a sop to John, I let him and Jennifer get pregnant.  They have this huge 2 story house (familyfunds cheat) and hardly any room for Lucy (I still had to do some serious remodelling of the place just for a bedroom for her), and it will get worse with the arrival of Baby Burb (I'm hoping for a boy).

And this is without playing the Calientes, Brokes or Oldies!

I did the exact same thing right after I install Nightlife but since I install it I did not play those neighborhood yet since I was waiting for the patch to be out.  Now that it is out, for sure I will have fun again with all the pre-made Maxis families in Pleasantview.

My 1st move will be to make Cassendra a Vampire, it fits her  :P  And of course she won't marry Don.

Right now I am creating a custom neighborhood that I will play too, I will alternate between those 2 and might also take a peek at Strangetown, no interest in Veronaville since with the new furious state that neighborhood will probably be a complete mess with fights every minute lol.  I guess you will have fun with the Pleasant teens...

Good idea espacially if you like those pre-made neighborhood, it is fun to make them have completely new adventure.

I have been cosnidering restarting Pleasantview. I was kind of incompteent when I played it before lol.

How do you restart an individual neighbourhood? It's probably bovious and I;m probably and idiot and deserve to have my lips ripped off.

I never understood why anyone would want Don and Cassandra to get married.  I just couldn't do that to the poor girl.  Besides, what would you do with Darren then?  Let him pine away untill he dies old and lonely?

Besides, Don and Nina need to pass down those Romance genes to the second generation.  Pleasentview is sorley lacking in Romancer teens.

Go into your SIms 2 folder (in MyDocuments\EaGames)...........If you want to regenerate all the default neighbourhoods, just remove (delete - or - move elsewhere, outside of the SIms 2 folder if you want to save your original files).  If you just want to recreate the default neighborhood 1......then go into the neighbourhood folder and delete N001. 

Next time you launch the game, it will regenerate the default hood(s).  Have fun!

Not quite true... I tried that once and I never got a new Pleasantview that way.

I had to copy the Neighbourhood folder from Program Files.

Same here vecaroonie, if I delete the N001 folder my game restarts sans a Pleastantview until I copy the folder over from the Program Files.

I use the Enhanser to restore neighbourhoods. It backups the default hood at first. I play it as long as I want, make other backups, and when I am tired of it - I just restore the default hood. Works all the time.

For those of you that hangs on the "official" bbs, you probably saw me post this a million times, but just this once I will make an exception and post how to reset either all or only 1 of your neighborhood, here it goes:

For all of them, simply delete the Sims 2 folder located in C:/mydocuments/eagames (you will loose all your families in all neighborhoods and your custom stuff though this way, just make sure to do a copy of your downloads folder if you have custom stuff and you want to keep them).  when you will restart the game, it will recreate all the 3 Maxis neighborhoods.

If you want to reset only 1 neighborhood than follow these instructions (all the families your created in that neighborhood will be deleted):

Make sure your game is not running when you do that.

Go in C:/mydocuments/eagames/thesims2/neighbrohoods folder

In that folder, there are 3 subfolders (or more if you have custom neighborhoods) containing the orignals neighborhoods of the game.

Here is what each folder correspond too:
N001 is Pleasantview
N002 is Strangetown
N003 is Veronaville
if you have more like N004 or N005 they are custom neighborhoods you added, those cannot be reset.

In the c:/mydocuments/eagames/thesims2/neighbrohoods delete the neighborhood folder that you wish to reset. Now, go to the driver in which you install the Sims 2 game, there are backups of each of the 3 default neighborhood in there. If you used the default installation path this will be in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods

You will notice the 3 folders mentionned above in that neighborhoods folder. That is N001, N002, N003

Do a copy (do not cut or move any) of the folder you wish to reset and copy it back in c:/mydocuments/eagames/thesims2/neighborhoods

That should get you reset without losing any of your downloads or having to reinstall the whole game.

Don't forget to delete the folder in your recycle bin before restarting your game.

One little thing you should know too, do a copy of the storytelling folder related to the neighborhood (which should be in c:/mydocuments/eagames/thesims2/neighborhoods/N001 folder for Pleasantview) before you reset it otherwise when you will start to play that neighborhood you won't see a story at all, after you reset it, quit the game and just place it back where it belongs.

You do know there are no benes here, don't you?  :P

Lol, yes I do, I always put more than the customer ask for.. sorry  :P

My bad.  You're right vecaroonie, it can't be just the individual neighbourhood's folder; the neighbourhood manager file has gotta go too, so it's the whole neighbourhoods folder that's be removed.

I've manged to pull this off several times; whenver I'm testing new mods, I generate a fresh game, and so far I've not had to remove the whole Sims2 folder, just the neighborhoods one.

This is something I've been umming & arring about for a while now.  I did in fact start a new Pleasantview a couple of months back, intending to use it when NL came out - I altered all the DNA for the preset characters (which is hopelessly wrong), resurrected Bella, Michael Bachelor, Skip Broke & Darleen (via SimPE) - I even made Skip the brother of Dustin & Beau so the third child would be his first with Brandi ... then when NL came and I started playing all my favourite characters I thought "No, I can't abandon them" and deleted the new one.  Now I think maybe I shouldn't have!

I found that when I was playing the new version it was actually rather boring, especially when I had to play characters I couldn't stand (such as the Oldies, who I moved in with the Pleasants so I could basically leave them to their own devices and not have to bother with them).  I honestly don't know if I could go through it all again from scratch, there are too many of my current characters I would miss and it would be a nightmare if I had to clone them all and remake them. 

What I would really like to do is combine the best characters from all neighbourhoods.  I'd love to see General Grunt & Nervous in Pleasantview, for instance.  Seems the only way I could do that would be with cloning, though.  Then again, I did move Mortimer & Alexander to Strangetown and back to Pleasantview with Strangetown Bella in tow (who married Alexander), with no ill-effects that I can see, so maybe I might try it and risk my third set of lips ...

My daughter and I play the game together and she did some things without asking me if it was ok...like deleting the Oldies, Mortimer Goth and the Calientes (she's only 12, what can I say? :o) But she has created some characters that she's really attached to, so instead of resetting the neighborhood I decided last weekend to start a second account on my computer and play Pleasantview from scratch (and I got to add some "adult" content to it e.g. removed the censor patch, anatomical skins, etc.,).  I've resurrected Skip Broke, had him romance and remarry Brandi, then I motherloaded them and moved the whole family  into a nice townhouse....something interesting there, I found that when I moved them, Angela quit coming home with Dustin every damned day (pre NL patch). I am still looking for a nice girl for Dustin because for whatever irrational reason, I hate Angela, lol. I turned Mortimer Goth into an adult and had him marry Dina. I resurrected Michael Bachelor at the Caliente house and have plans for him and Nina. I did have Don and Cassandra get married, although I'm kind of regretting that now; I may have to remedy that situation. No plans for the Pleasants yet, I don't really like any of them but Lilith.
I'm like Ancient Sim though, what I would really like to do is just make up a neighborhood of my favorites like Nervous Subject, the Brokes and some CAS sims I have made in my custom neigborhood.

That's funny, KellyQ, that you posted about Angela coming home with Dustin every day. Before the patch, I didn't realize that was a glitch. There is so much illogical intentional programming in the game that I thought they meant to do it, because D & A were dating. I thought maybe all non-live-in relationships would turn out like that.

Angela always brought Dustin home in my game - she's dead now and I'm not sorry (I couldn't stand her either!).  Lilith always brought Dirk home too, although after a while she stopped and started bringing his best friend Orlando Centowski home instead, ending up with them falling for each other (with a little help from me).  She did marry Dirk in the end, though.  He walked by one day after she'd aged to adult and he was still a teen and flirted with her.  Lilith is the only one of the four left alive now.  They all shared a house towards the end and Lilith now has 2 or 3 days left.  She is such fun in the game now with all the new fight interactions (she automatically starts on people she fancies) that I don't want to lose her.  She fancies the Count like mad, but unfortunately made an enemy of him, so I may have to cheat to make her a vampire as I think she'd be perfect at it.

Yeah, I didn't think it was a glitch either, I thought it was designed that way. I thought it was odd how when I had the Brokes move, she quit coming home with him and he hasn't rolled any wants involving her either. Mind you, that was even before I installed the patch. Maybe when they moved they entered the Witness Protection Program to hide from her, lol. I haven't played the Pleasants house yet though, so I don't know if she will end up bringing him home when and if, I do. Or maybe they fixed that too. I hope so because you know that if she brings him home, when I get back to his lot, he'll start rolling up wants about her. Damn kids! ;)

Oh it was a bug alright, I reset that neighborhood a few times in the past year and I had to move the Pleasant and the Broke everytime.  The problem was that if you made Dustin go to college  or growup into an adult but not Angela, when Angela was coming back from school she kept bringing Dustin which was a YA and because of that neither Angela nor Lilith would bring back homework home.  I am glad this is fix though it was already in Nightlife.

I had never noticed Dustin bringing Angela home everyday.  I guess because I had made a new house and moved the Brokes in immediatly after starting the neighborhood anew.  That house they live in at the begining is barely suitable for one sim, let alone four...

I want to play around with Veronaville some, but there's that Capp family that has six members and only $20k.  Not sure how I'm gonna handle that without resorting to throwing five beds and a crib out on lawn.  I guess I'll see if JM's Moneyorder still works and get Consort to help them out, as that seems less like cheating than Motherload does.

Well now we have very small lot we can create which are cheaper so that could be a possibility or you could use 1 of the 4 new pre-made Nightlife ones which are not that expensive.  I must admit I did a few kaching for that family in the past but maybe with those small houses I would not need too.

You can move daughter Miranda out by sending her to college, one less family member to worry about. Just a warning though, she's pretty as a teen but as a Young Adult she has a bit of her mom's mouth. :-X I decided to reinstall a couple weeks back, once I get back to Veronaville (too busy with Pleasantview) Miranda's having a meeting with the plastic surgeon as soon as she moves into Academie LeTour! I'm also considering sending Tybalt, Juliette & Hermia to college too and have Gonereil and her family move in with dad Consort.

Another thought is with that new "familyfunds" cheat, you can give that Capp family a smaller amount than motherlode or any amount you'd like even to help them out and consider it an inheritance from Consort's deceased wife (blanking on her name at the moment) or Gonereil's "trust fund" finally being available.

I was initially bummed out at reinstalling and starting everything over but it's becoming quite fun after all. Happily ever after and mass chaos and drama all rolled up in one big fun mess. ;D

I was also going to suggest the family funds cheat.  It's never seemed right to me that a family of 8 starts out with the same funds as a family of four so I've never been against using money cheats in situations like that.  You could put them on a smallish lot and just add enough money to their account to get them started with the necessities.  I wouldn't feel like that was cheating at all. :)

Download 4ESF's Bedroom 6, and every morning just sell the bed!  Or put loads of beds on the lawn, and sell them all in the morning!

I just find it unreasonable that every single family would move to a neighborhood with the same amount of money.  If I create a CAS family where the parents already have children who are child and teen stages, then I could just as easily assume that this family has already done quite well for itself in the past and moving to the neighborhood is just another life event, not a "just starting out" venture with only $20,000 in funds.  So I've never had a problem using the various money cheats to boost my sims' abilities to move into their first houses depending on the back story I've created for them.  Heck, I'll even use hacked objects to tailor some family's skills, jobs, etc., to be such that it looks like they've already been played for a bit of time and I'm really just picking up at a certain point.  After all, isn't that what the pre-made families really are?

My rule is: "as long as the family is interesting to play".

It has no bearing on whether they are financially challenged or not.  I enjoy playing my scraping by sims as much as my middle-class and rich sims.  Cheating is hardly what I would call it.

And since they never get those useful phonecalls to say "Hi you've won such and such a prize" like they had in sim 1, all you're really doing is making up for that lack!

Heck, I'll even use hacked objects to tailor some family's skills, jobs, etc., to be such that it looks like they've already been played for a bit of time and I'm really just picking up at a certain point.  After all, isn't that what the pre-made families really are?

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I do the same thing for some sims as far as skills go. For instance if I use CAS to make an elder, I think it's ridiculous that an older person wouldn't have at least one skill at cooking, cleaning, etc., By the time a person is older they surely would have accomplished some skills in life (at least I would hope so!), so I give them what I think is a reasonable amount of skills and then have them work on the rest.

I played that Capp family with the 4 kids, it was kinda rough. LOL Oh and be prepared to throw Hal in the plastic surgery machine when he grows up. He's a very cute kid and teen but suddenly morphs into being butt ugly when he grows up to be an adult.  :o

You actually can find some good starter houses for families. They're rare and you reall have to dig but there's a few out there. I was just browsing over MTS2 and found this one that looks like it would work out very well for that Capp family. All it needs is a crib for the toddler.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=68111

Another thing you can do is what I remember reading that Gali (I think it was) does.  She builds one house, then packages it, and then you can install it as often as you like.  A bit like RL, too, with a new housing estate of identical houses, but once people start living in them, they all add their own bits until eventually the houses are very different!

Yup.  Hard to imagine an elder with no skills, etc., and $20,000 in funds.  What did all such sim elder do with their lives?  Live off a trust fund?   :D

I'm getting ready to start over as well. I went from "no way I'm downloading anything" to "how many gigs is that download folder?".   :o ::)  There's a lot of amazing stuff out there, but I'm not going to be using as much as I thought I would.

This is what I was thinking of doing. Please let me know if you see a problem with this.

1. Build all my homes, furnish them and package them to a file (as if I was going to upload them). Packaging them will save any custom content that was used in their creation.  (Or will the system just replace items -like the Simlogical doors- with Maxis defaults if they are not in the download folder when the home is unpackaged?)

2.After I've created all the houses I will want to use and packaged them, delete custom content from the download folder (or just move it out of the download folder) and delete the Sims folder in my documents.

3. Start the game and have it regenerate the base neighborhoods.

4.Use Clean Installer to put my homes back into the game and at the same time, it would re-install the custom content that I am actually using (versus the endless junk I downloaded for whatever reason).

One thing you are overlooking.  When you package a lot, it doesn't just include the custom content you have in the house, it include every single recolor of an object you have in the house.  So while you may have that nice double bed with the custom bedding packaged with your lot, you're also going to get every single bedspread and frame color attached to it as well.

The trouble with that is, instead of a useful file name like XSimsdiningTable3.xxxxyy3.package, you'll get all the long file names!  why not sort your downloads into Modern, Victorian, etc., then use one set for each neighbourhood?  You still keep your downloads folder fairly small, but you keep the variety. (Oh, and large sets you can put into a collections folder when in game, so it's easy to find the whole set!)

And you can save problems with the extraneous recolours, etc. if you keep nothing in your downloads folder that isn't in a file, all your skins can go into Savedsims.  the only file I have that isn't in a folder is the CEP file.  Then after installing any house, I can go into downloads and get rid of all those extra long filename files which I used to spend hours hunting down!  Also, I tend to use Maxis originals for housebuilding for that reason.  Once you put the house into your game, it's easy to replace everything.

 :-[ Putting dunce hat on.  :-[
I have a bunch of files with those ugly long names already. How do I find out what each file is? I am just learning SimPE, so that's all new to me. Is this something I can do in SimPE - look at what each package is? I can't get the preview to work on most of the files when using the Clean Installer - it might show me the texture or color of what's in the package, but I have no idea if it's clothes, a wall or a floor.

When I put something in a collection, is that just another way to sort the items or will that item only be found in with the collections?

Thanks.

The short answer is, you don't. :p Welcome to file management for The Sims 2.   :o

Some of them if the creator named them something useful and you didn't install them with the default Maxis installer (which scrambles up all the names into hex code) you might be able to figure out what they are, but for others that are all seemingly jibberish pretty much the only way to open the package and look at the texture or the geometric data container if it's a mesh and try to figure it out.  :-\

Having subfolders to narrow your stuff down into categories and subcategories helps, but still there's going to be some files where you look at the name and are like "What the hell is this?"

&$#%*& !!!
Should have asked sooner.
I had everything in nice folders with the site name where I downloaded the files from. I noticed that some of the packages weren't showing up in the game, so I used the installer on all of them and they got that new ugly file name. In the middle of this, I got the brillant idea that I would organize the folders by function rather than where I got the file from.  Basically, my download folders are a mess (when it comes to objects - my hacks are all VERY carefully labeled and sorted). I'm thinking I should just kill this folder as well and start over.

So, what is the best way to organize the folders: by the site where the file comes from, by function, by style/theme, by ???
Thanks.

Never, EVER use the Maxis installer. Not only does it scramble up the filenames but it has a nasty tendency to sneak in lots of extra files you don't want, particularly with houses.

How you organize it is up to you and how anal you want to get with it. ;) I find in general I like to keep any new meshes together in a folder with their recolors because if you ever decide you want to get rid of them it is a royal pain in the ass to hunt down the meshes that went with those textures you deleted in buy mode or in the body shop or CAS.

My folders are really super categorized. I even have my hacks folder with subfolders for J.M. Pescado, TwoJeffs, Inge Jones etc lol.

I just sort objects by site but walls and floors I have much more organised - it helps a bit so they stay roughly together most of the time (though not always) and every time I get a new bunch of wall, everything goes walkabout again!  I do need to get my objects better organised, though.

If a package doesn't show up in your game, it may be that it's a recolour for which you don't have the mesh.  (I'm assuming you have CEP installed.)

Sometimes SimPE will give you a description of the object, but more often than not, you just get something like Quaint endtable which tells you nothing!  And the thumbnails are totally useless as a means of identifying everything!  If you kept your original zips, then maybe it would be best to just discard the downloads folder, make a new one and start installing all those files again.

I don't know if this is any help, but I noticed today that, if I have the Mind Control Mirror in a lot (for example, the Gym, but a community lot should work too) then you can select and NPC, say, the Barista, and get them to serve food, and select the dorm cook and get them to work as barista.  All the money they earn goes into your family funds!  Mean or what?

It may be mean, but it's downright necessary in some cases. For example, I have a bad bug in my game where vampires can't bite autonomously. Now, given my already poor choice of a sim to vamp (http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b354/Venusy/I_am_going_to_get_banned_for_this.jpg), I would have normally left it well alone. Something aroused my interest of why the Contessa Sophia Conley couldn't bite. My soloution was to make her temporarily selectable, then Bite Neck.

If anyone wants a look at the error log, you can't, as the game saved over it. But I do have an error log of Contessa Sophia's failed attempts to bite a different sim... Also, this has only slight relevance on the post quoted.

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I rather like the idea of a vampire that can't bite!  I imagine her motives fell very low!  ;D