I have made the tentative step of emerging from safe, cosy lurkdom to pick some awesome brains about the issue of packaging occupied lots.
I have read around & have seen lots about deleting SWAFs after performing DAC but couldn't seem to find a definitive and appropriately reassuring answer to my specific question - please feel free to P&L if I have missed a glaringly obvious topic on this before!
I have been playing the same neighbourhood (a made-over Veronaville) for, oooh, years and in my pre-lurking days committed a number of VBTs, largely in the form of mass fuggo-cide and sim-bin delete-athons. Luckily I have no signs of borkedness yet, but as I need to migrate my game to another hard disk before finally installing AL and M&G, I feel a fresh start with empty templates is the way forward.
However, I am awfully attached to a fair few simmies and I was planning on packaging my beloved legacy families along with their lovingly renovated lots, rather than cloning them as I've done with all the individual 'keepers'.
I have followed the instructions to nuke all memories of, gossip about, & relations to anyone not to be packaged in the lot. I have double, triple & quadruple-checked these changes in SimPE (which seemed to adopt a somewhat lackadaisical approach to actually COMMITTING the 8,000,000 deleted sim relations the first few times, gaaaaaah!) and also in Clean Installer. All looks well. Then just as I thought I was good to go I stumbled across the topic of SWAFs - specifically SWAF History containing yet more inconvenient 'dangling' detritus.
So I am hoping that those more awesome will be able to advise on the following:
1- Will packaged Sims' SWAFs introduce 'ghost' character info into my new neighbourhood?
2 -Will deleting the SWAFs for my legacy families & repackaging them for export minimise potential borkination in the new neighbourhood or is still a major no-no?
And
3 - If it is ok - is it as simple as highlighting all the SWAF files in SimPE, right-clicking and selecting delete? (and of course the inevitable cycle of commit-save-close-reopen-*bangheadondesk*-startagain)