More Awesome Than You!

So, in my half-assed quest to find (mainly by reading this forum) safe ways to transplant lots and families to other neighborhoods without using SimPE, I have come up with two questions:

(1) Is this an acceptable method of moving an occupied lot (in which you don't want to disturb original family, but don't need them to be copied to the destination hood):  Use the "package lot to file" button when selecting the lot in the hood screen (not using the bin), then placing the occupied lot in a test hood that you don't care if it gets screwed up, killing or otherwise removing the sims from the lot, binning the empty lot, and placing it into the destination hood?

Starting hood: Package lot and family without disturbing it
Disposable hood: place occupied lot, burninate occupants (eliminate graves if necessary), bin empty lot
Destination hood: Place empty lot.

Will this be a VBT for either the start or destination neighborhood?

(2) One of my sims has a lot of original paintings and photographs, and I would like to move her to a more cosmically stable hood by using Simsurgery and recreating her with CAS in the new hood. How can I safely move all her artwork to the new (clean) hood? Is this possible?

I'm not sure but...

Use the very same procedure you describe in (1) to get an empty lot with all her pictures.
Put this empty lot into your new neighbourhood, recreate your sim, move her into the empty lot, put all the paintings in her inventory and move her out again (if you don't want to keep the lot). Done.

I recently tried packaging an occupied lot, installing in a test account's 'hood with the clean installer and only selecting to install the lot segment and the needed custom content. The lot crashed on load, over and over.

Oh, and the lot packager is again packaging every single recolor you have of a used item. The bloat is unbelievable.

Unless its a maxis recolor you want packaged. Then it doesn't package it at all.

Keep in mind that no matter what you try, all those custom paintings might randomly turn into sunsets because the game just does that sometimes.

I moved a family into a new house, all the paintings survived the move and all decided to disappear on a later lot load.  I recreated some with the "custom painting" option, but I wouldn't get too attached to paintings, honestly.

Every time I've tried to package and/or move a lot with sim-created paintings in it, the game crashes when I attempt to load the lot ('attempt' being the operative word in this sentence).

Were you putting it in a different 'hood? Hmm. This makes me wonder...the lot I was trying to move had paintings (non-custom) and two or three photos. The photos may have been what borked it.

The way I saw Pescado recommend once and that I used to share lots sans families with custom paintings, photographs, and photobooth pictures is this:

1) Back up the neighborhood's Lot folder.
2) Move out family.
3) Enter lot and save. Then quit.
4) Replace Lot folder in Neighborhood folder with back up.
5) Have empty fully furnished house safe to be packaged and/or moved as the family is in the bin.

The problem I had during Seasons (post patch3, I can't speak for unpatched) was that as soon as I moved out the family, all furnishings disappeared. Anything from buy mode went poof. I was trying to package the lot because it was pretty and someone wanted to touch the pretty, but I wasn't about to move the family out, refurnish the damn thing, package it, move the family back in, then reorder all the snapshots. There is, of course, the chance that the bug is gone, but I haven't had the chance to test and I wasn't going to on a fully prettified lot.

I thought this was standard behavior, and the only way to avoid it was to place an Ingeological 'Stay things' shrub (http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_MovingHouse.htm) on the lot, prior to the move-out.

But some comments here leave the impression that there's a way to make it so sans-hacks, is that true?

I think it's only if people move out to move in with other people or if they die that the lot stays how it was. Then again, I've not done that probably since Nightlife.

But, I don't know if sims dying on the lot would cause any problems with moving it afterwards, so maybe that's not the solution.

Right, I forgot you can propose the last sim in a lot to move into another :D

But anyway, does it make a difference if that lot has pending actions (like a maid cleaning stuff, carpools, etc...), or will all that be cleared when moving in the next family?

Pending actions are cleared when a new family moves in.

That is standard behavior, but if you have a backup of the lot file from when it was furnished, and you enter and save the lot after the family has moved out and quit, then you can replace the lot file and it will be a fully furnished empty house. Pescado posted about this elsewhere because he said Ingeological's shrub left junk data, particularly on the refrigerator and such, and that this was a better way. I've done it in a fully patched all EPs and SPs through Seasons game and it works I swear it.

The Ingelogical Stay-Things will corrupt the value of the lot. This approach is not recommended, especially not for lots you intend to package and share.

Yes, you can simply back up the lot file, evict the target family, revisit and save the lotfile, and then quit game + restore backup at some later date. Note that you must revisit and save the lot again after the game removes all the furniture, or else whatever causes the furniture to be removed will still be in place, as the game does not actually remove furniture until you revisit the lot.

How do you know which lotfile it is?

CPI should work, as should only modifying that lot in a given play session and sorting by date modified.

I do the later. Back up the Lot folder. Go in and move out the family, enter and save, quit, then replace the Lot folder with my back-up and let it overwrite everything.

Then it looks like evicting a family involves little more than setting the Lot Instance field in the FAMI resource to zero.

Of course it's necessary to re-enter the lot and save it again, in order to 'clean up' the lot; I wonder though, if these two steps can be reproduced in simantics, making it possible to create an awesome lot eviction tool ;)

As J.M.Pescado said to use the Neighborhood lotcatalog backup, isn't it just simply a matter of finding out the lotfilenumber in the neighborhood lotcatalog- copy that to the Sims2/Lotcatalog and rename it to cx_00000001 or whatever the next number in the catalog is?
Wouldn't that give you a clean fully furnished lot without the families in the lot bin, or will that leave any junk data?

Nope, same hood, but the sim who painted them needed a bigger house, yet I liked the small house and wanted to preserve it as-is, so I packaged the lot, sim and all, but then used Clean Installer to install only the lot file (the paintings didn't show up in Clean Installer, and I already have the CC in Downloads, so it would show up anyway, because the 'footprint' is still there even when deleted from Clean Installer). I specifically wanted to keep the paintings, because they were still-life paintings of the house and some views of the surrounding neighbourhood that would be less meaningful in a different house.

To recreate custom paintings on a new lot (or in a new 'hood, for that matter), I follow the instructions in this tutorial (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=183108), with a few modifications:

• Eliminate Step 1.  You don't need to download anything.
• Eliminate Steps 6-13, since you're not actually using the easel canvas template.
• Save copies of the PNG files in C:\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Paintings.  (I think you have to have the Pets EP in order for this folder to exist.  Pets really simplified the whole custom painting process, so there are probably some extra steps required here if you don't have this EP.)
• Next time you have a sim at an easel, choose "Paint... Custom Painting" and your exported PNG files should now be available!

I thought of that too, I tried it and it didn't work for some reason. I'm vaguely remembering being able to track down the proper lot, copying and renaming the file and putting it in the proper place and then having it not show up. This was nearly a year ago now though, something else may have gone wrong instead, but I think the problem was it just didn't show up for me.

I moved an entire hood, lots and sims, to a new terrain using packaged lots and clean installer and SimPE. With CI I installed only the lot and the sims living there, no need to install any items/recolrs as all of that is in the DLs folder anyway. I next placed all lots without opening any of them. Next I went thru ewith SimPE and edited as needed. Then I started entering lots.

I found that some lots had stuck sims and some did not. I went back to SimPE and found the only difference to be those with stuck sims--the sim's memories did not have the sim Initalized and the Sim loaded markers. I put those in and everything was ok...so far.....we'll see :P

Of course the other option -- NOT moving them -- was to start a new hood and I would rather take the chance of a flaming ball then go thru starting a new hood. Maybe next time I'll choose making a new hood from scratch.