More Awesome Than You!

I was checking my character folders just to see how many I had when I noticed by chance that there's one character in particular which takes up close to 5 MB.  The lot that they're on loads up just fine, but when I save and exit the game, the file size for that character doesn't shrink down to any sort of normal size.  It doesn't get a whole lot bigger either but I didn't play for more than a few minutes.

For comparison, most of my characters are close to 0.75 MB in size.

I can accept that character files will inevitably get larger because they record more data, but this seems a little out of the ordinary.  What might explain it?

Some of my character files have more than 10Mb in size.

That extra bloat is probably caused by photobooth pictures being stored in the character. If you open the character file with SimPe, you can see the resources of type 0xAF74F8E0 taking much of the space. Although that resource type is unknown, you can change it to 'Texture Image' (0x1C4A276C) to see what the images look like.

I figured it out when I looked in the ol' inventory and saw a whole pile of painted pictures.  Oopsie.

Aha! So that explains why lots with custom sim-paintings crash the game when trying to use them without the sim that made the paintings. If sim-created paintings are tied to the sims' character files, then that very much makes sense. Well, you learn something new every day.

I have a community lot with a bunch of custom paintings on it, the sim that made them is not even in the current hood this lot is in now. It has never crashed on me. It also hasn't crashed in a friends hood.

The lot was bought, paintings were placed, lot was sold back to community.

Paintings on a lot are not stored in character data.  In Marvin's situation, the paintings were in the sim's inventory.

I once had a Beau Broke who had a character file twice the normal size, and he had memories of meeting himself, and wants to be friends with himself, and eventually the memory of being best friends with himself (the good old handheld........) and although I had problems getting him back from uni, he was fine afterwards, although maybe just a little schizoid!

As to inventory items, sometimes if your sim owns a business, you will have him, his wife and his teenage kids make stuff at home, then go to his business with an enormous amount of stuff in his inventory, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.