Keeping A Custom 'Hood Alive

[Sparks]

Is there any way to do regular maintenance to a custom hood to keep it going?
I haven't seen any problems that removing hacks didn't fix, but after reading some things
around here, I wanna make sure I can prevent problems in the future.

All SP's and EP's installed. The hood in question has at least 1 sub-hood of each type,
EXCEPT no vacation hood. When it was created I knew nothing of clean templates. I've used
Deleted 2/Theo's Sim Deleter Tool to do some basic clean up of the pre-made Sim Bin families
that never saw the light of day. Never moved any occupied houses or Sims to the Sim Bin.

That didn't really remove much.

I guess the real question is, is it inevitable that any hood would stop working? Become FUBAR'd?
Too many characters? Right now I'm at 800+. I also have HP's Uber Mega Hood that came with 1,000+
characters so, I'm not too worried about the amount...or should I be?

I'm an anal retentive n00b and wanna do all I can to help myself out before bugging people with actual problems.

[jolrei]

With awesomeware critical fixes installed from the Director's Cut, there is no particular reason to believe that your hood should be doomed unless you do something to doom it.  Don't move occupied lots to or from the lot bin.  It is not "inevitable" that your hood should stop working just by itself.  800 characters is not critical.

[Zazazu]

If you want to be anal, or are noticing some slowdown, a good habit is to use the lotdebugger to clear gossip periodically. At the least, clear it from the dead. I clear about every generation.

[J. M. Pescado]

800+ characters with full expansions is considered to be within normal parameters. There is nothing to worry about.

[kazebird]

Also, while moving occupied houses in the lot bin is dangerous, it is in no way dangerous to move sims in the sim bin. As long as you don't delete them of course. They end up just being townies until you move them in somewhere.

[cascaneda]

If you want to be anal, or are noticing some slowdown, a good habit is to use the lotdebugger to clear gossip periodically. At the least, clear it from the dead. I clear about every generation.

I learnt something useful today, thanks. I delete the sims manually, and so the gossips and all the memories go with them, but it seems much easier and faster with the lot debugger, I did not know about this feature. There is no more need to remove the whole sim if I understand. The relations and memories are automatically nuked for the dead ones, right ?
 
I don't use the clean templates.Like you (dirtandpretty ) I created my own custom hoods pre-populated with my own custom NPCs and made a backup of it for all my new hood needs.
With all subhood including university the total is 653 characters at the start. With the fixes available on this site the increase is under control and I don't encounter any problem with neighborhoods of more than 1200, it covers about 5-6 generations of playables with about 30 families. After that you could always delete the deads after 2 generations, but I don't do it myself because generally the hard drive or the computer crashes before I have to do (never understood how some people can keep their PC alive for more than 2 years, not speaking of hard disks but this is another story).
So you don't need to worry

[J. M. Pescado]

I learnt something useful today, thanks. I delete the sims manually, and so the gossips and all the memories go with them, but it seems much easier and faster with the lot debugger, I did not know about this feature. There is no more need to remove the whole sim if I understand. The relations and memories are automatically nuked for the dead ones, right ?

No, all sims, dead or alive, retain full data unless you purge them using the Lot Debugger. They are then reduced to minimalist stubs, which you can cleanup in SimPE to utterly eradicate them following Deleted 2, using either the manual process documented, or the TheoTool.

[professorbutters]

My Pleasantview was heavily played and fully operational for over two years.  I think most people would find that sufficient for their purposes.

PB

[Sparks]

I was never asking about deleting dead sims. Sims are okay dead. It's deleting played sims from the sim bin that's no good. And the un-seen web of CRAP that is connected to each sim.

And no, I did not have clean templates in when I originally created the hood...which is why I got Maxis sims in my sim bin in the first place. Those sims have been completely eradicated.

At this point, I have experienced no problems. Except one...my teen outcast V pops errors (in debug) every time she hops herself off the bus and reaches around her back to leave her homework somewhere on the lot. All the rest of the kids in the hood are fine. It's only her. Her grades still go up so I'm not too terribly concerned. I doubt it has to do with whether the entire hood is borked. More just her hitting so hard on the Headmaster...a perk?

[Emma]

At this point, I have experienced no problems. Except one...my teen outcast V pops errors (in debug) every time she hops herself off the bus and reaches around her back to leave her homework somewhere on the lot. All the rest of the kids in the hood are fine. It's only her. Her grades still go up so I'm not too terribly concerned. I doubt it has to do with whether the entire hood is borked. More just her hitting so hard on the Headmaster...a perk?

I don't know whether this thread might be able to help you with that.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,14666.0.html