I'm using the Seasons DC, haven't grabbed BV yet.

For the game to generate new hoods you've gotta thwack or rename (in fact rename and then delete when everything is looking good is prolly best) the entire neighborhoods folder, not just N002. If you delete just one Maxis neighborhood, or have any neighborhoods that exist at all, none of the old hoods get deleted recreated.


Not necessary, cuz you thwacked the whole neighborhoods folder, so the game doesn't know they exist anymore.

Well, if you are going to delete all the hoods anyways, you can have the game just recreate Strangetown. After you've done everything you need to do (backups and saving stuff) if you delete the entire neighborhoods folder (the one in My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2) the game should just up and recreate it. This'll make all the EA Hoods again, and bume, original Strangetown. You may want to check SaraMK's clean and empty hoods thread over in Peasantry before you do this, as it has all the DNA fixes for the Strangetown crew but also gets rid of some townies and such, but those are pretty easy to generate.

Can't really help with the rest, I've never played with SimPE and I haven't ever wanted to export a sim yet, but I have deleted a lot of stuff. So here's one more reminder to back up every single thing you hit the delete key. Mostly in case of screw ups, but you never know when you might want a neighborhood back.

Did the game used to run ok? If so, when did it start acting up?
Any significant changes (or any you remember at all) that were around the time things started getting weird?

I think you should nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Also, if you're thinking of a name tweak, might I suggest you prepare to get your nuts smashed, by Awesometown!

http://www.thelonelyisland.com/awesometown/

Don't the EPs check to patch the base game upon install?

Hey JennyJenny, did you mean this one in Peasentry?

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5861.0.html

There's no pictures but it's pretty comprehensive.

I think for when I'm finally ready for my own custom hood I'll make my own townies and play around with SimPE. While I dink around in Pleasentview I'll either toss out some of the noregen hacks for a while or mess around with boolprob and use the generator there, now that I've got some nice faces.

And speaking of hacks since I've taken a whole "ask questions first and shoot later" approach to this (I dunno what's gotten into me), I've decided to refresh my memory on all the director's cuts hacks before I just toss them in. So I'll be rtfm'ing...anticking...antiquing...whatever...for a while. From what I've found so far though most of these are gonna have to happen.

Awww, no more female caveman exterminator? Seriously tho these templates are awesome, thanks Amber.

Organize hacks, mods and other crap...check.

Generate dormies...check.

Thanks for the additional tips guys.

Yeah I used the whole thing back when I was first playing and enjoyed it, so I figured I'd give all the new stuff a go. I can always turn off anything I don't like but haven't been disappointed before. I noticed the super neighborhood and may have to try that out soon.

**edit: Of course I may need to rethink this, as living in the dorms all by yourself is purty lonesome**

Hey all. So my old computer didn't run the sims 2 very well and so my copies of it, Uni, and NL sat in a drawer gathering dust. Recently built a new machine and decided to pick it up again. Ran out to Gamestop today since I had a bunch of trade in credit there and picked up OFB, OMFGPETS!!11! and Seasons. I had installed what I already owned first and dinked around for a bit but decided to hose everything out and reinstall fresh with all the new expansions. Just wanted to check in and made sure I am doing everything to avoid future headaches and explosions. For now I'm going to tool around with the premade stuff and worry about a custom town later, but I read up as much as I could here, and wanted to check in and made sure I'm doing everything I should be. Here's what I did.

1) Installed and patched everything in order (installed ts2, patched, installed uni, patched, etc.)
2) Copied the Neighborhoods and LotCatalogs folders out of mydocs in case I ever needed to go back to maxis fugliness
3) Read up SaraMK's cleaned templates FAQ, backed up everything required and downloaded and copied over the new stuff (minus the rar'd townies)
4) Deleted the mydocs Neighborhoods and LotCatalogs folders
5) Created a Downloads folder, grabbed the latest director's cut and threw everything in said Downloads folder
6) Started up The Sims 2, which took a while as it freaked out and then recreated all the neighborhoods from the new templates
7) Quit out and checked on the neighborhoods, found G001 and got confused
**edit: (eek smiley, this is step 8, though you hopefully figured that out)** Realized G001 was Riverblossom Hills, couldn't find a clean template for it, so I just hosed it out of mydocs and left the one in program files etc alone
9) Looked up all the objects.package files I could find (15 of 'em) and made them read only
10) Backed up the Neighborhoods and LotCatalogs folder again so if I do something I don't like I can get back to this point with minimal effort

That's about it. I'll prolly pickup a few of the awesome objects eventually. Is there anything I'm forgetting? Thanks!

Some other non-crash related wonkiness going on once I removed that hack. It appears that my sims can't skill up anything. The little meter just gets stuck at the bottom and a skill never goes up. I've tried cooking and chess so far. In fact the skill meter stays there even when I stop trying to increase a skill. I removed the hacks I thought might be causing this (skillinator, macrotastics) but it still doesn't work. If I remove all the hacks it works fine. Not sure if I want to further troubleshoot this or just catch up on the expansions that I'm missing, since I'm interested enough in the game now that I have a nice computer that I think I can justify buying the 3 expansions I am missing. But just a heads up.

It looks like the culprit is nopedostalkers. This occurs whether it is installed with all the other hacks or all by itself. I tried looking for an rtfm for this but couldn't find one, so I dunno what it even does, something about stalking kids or pedestrians? **edit: user error with search, I was only searching in this forum, seems to eliminate creepy behavior** But that's the one causing the error. Looks like everything else is running super awesome.

The issue has been somewhat localized but I'm not done testing yet. I grabbed the newest zip this morning and have been installing them a bunch at a time mostly by letter, around 20-40 at a time. I got all the way to the n's and had my fingers crossed as they are both awesome and huge, and awesomely huge as well (there's like 40 of them). Sure enough in the n's I got the crash. I loaded everything but the n's and experienced no issue. So I need to remove everything and just add the n's and then figure out which one is making this happen.

As to when this happens, it's between 1-30 seconds of entering a lot, everything runs flawlessly before that. Sometimes it'll be as soon as I enter the first command, sometimes I'll get to do a couple commands before it happens. Anyways I'll start playing around with the n's and get back with some more information. Thanks for the super quick replies.

Hey guys. Got a new machine so I figured I'd install the sims 2 again and see how it ran. The only expansions I own are Uni and NL (everything is patched as well). Installed everything and patched and things were fine. Found the Director's Cut for NL here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/nl/

I used moreawesomethanyou-nl.zip. Created a downloads folder and extracted everything to it. Enabled custom content and when I try to play I get the application crashed and has gotta quit error. From reading the boards I thought this might be a driver issue (nvidia 7600 GT) but when I tried to roll back to 77.77 I get told that it's not the right driver for my hardware, so I went back to the latest one. After uninstalling and reinstalling everything and testing a bit at a time I started to suspect the hacks. Sure enough, as soon as I delete the downloads folder everything is running fine again. Just wondering if anyone has run into this issue and knows which file might be causing this to happen. I'll likely start putting things in one at a time tomorrow to see if I can find which one is the culprit. Either that or it's entirely possible I'm doing something wrong with the extraction (just tossing everything into the downloads folder).

Oh yeah for test purposes I was using Pleasentville, with the standard Downtown and Sim State Uni attached to it. I was using a create a sim at Sim State when the issues started popping up. When I uninstalled and reinstalled and tested things one at a time I was just using Don Lothario. I'd just play for a few minutes and made sure he could safely nail one of his ladies and then would move on to the next install. If there's any other information I can provide please let me know. It's 1:40 AM so I apologize for how disorganized this post might be.