A question about moving sims, deleting all characters, and other weirdness

[uaintjak]

So, I'm getting set up to play my ultimate neighborhood, which will consist of all the sims from Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville (not including the townies).  It will have a college campus consisting of all the playable sims from La Fiesta Tech, Sim State University, and Academie Le Toure.  It will also have a downtown (the default downtown lot).

Things I do NOT want: Townies, Downtownies, and Dormies.

My plan is to combine all the sims of Pleasantview onto one lot (ditto with Strangetown and Veronaville), and move them into the lot bin.  Yes, I know this would normally be A Bad Thing, but having all the known sims together apparently circumnavigates the problems, yes?  I plan on doing the same with the three colleges - combining all the YA sims together into one house, then moving that house and sims into the lot bin.

I'll then create a new neighborhood, deleteallcharacters (and I'll have the no new townies and no new dormies hacks) and move my super-huge households into the neighborhood, before dividing up the households properly.

Does this sound like this will work?  I'm hoping that certain important sims, like Mr Big, Ms Diva, the Grand Vampires, etc, will automatically be generated.  Anyone know if they will?  I know the service NPCs are automatically generated, I'm just curious about the others.

[ElfPuddle]

As has been posted elsewhere.....
character-wise, your best bet is to put EVERY SINGLE SIM (including Townies) into the lot with the characters you want before moving them. Feel free to "dispose" of them afterwards, but you need to bring them with or you'll end up with duplicate files ...

[uaintjak]

I don't think it's necessary to include the townies unless they have a relationship with someone already, correct? (I'm thinking of Kaylynn the maid from Pleasantview and Crystal Vu from Strangetown, maybe some others).

[BlueSoup]

For Strangetown, you need Crystal Vu, Meredith Lillard (an NPC) and Abhijeet Cho. 

For Pleasantview, you need Kaylynn Langerak and Gordon King (or Russ Bear - check Dustin Broke's relationships to see what he's named in your game since apparently it's different).

I don't know about Veronaville.

[SaraMK]

I'm only going to comment on moving Uni and Downtown sims.

I plan on doing the same with the three colleges - combining all the YA sims together into one house, then moving that house and sims into the lot bin.

A better way would be to cleanse your templates. Then you will have no need of moving the Uni sims or Downtown sims. You'll just add the Uni and Downtown neighborhoods to your big one, and only the sims you wanted will get moved with them. Take a look at my tutorial at http://www.geocities.com/saramkirk/nhoods/nhoods.html and see if it makes any sense to you. If you want already-cleaned templates that you can just dump into your directory, I can give them to you (what EPs you have is completely irrelevant in this case).

Doing it this way means you don't have to sort sims back into the right houses of any of that stuff, and nothing about them (relationships, etc.) will change from the default.

I'm hoping that certain important sims, like Mr Big, Ms Diva, the Grand Vampires, etc, will automatically be generated.  Anyone know if they will?  I know the service NPCs are automatically generated, I'm just curious about the others.

Yes, they will. It may take a while, and you will have to patrol the downtown lots for quite some time, but sooner or later you'll get 4 Grand Vamps and however many Slobs and Divas and Bigs that you are alotted.

[uaintjak]

Wow Sara, I love you.

If I'm understanding this correctly, I'll be saving the sims from all 3 universities, but I'll have to add all 3 universities to one neighborhood, correct?

I'd LOVE it if you could give me the templates with the playable sims for the Universities and Downtown.  That would save me a ton of work.

[SaraMK]

Wow Sara, I love you.

If I'm understanding this correctly, I'll be saving the sims from all 3 universities, but I'll have to add all 3 universities to one neighborhood, correct?

I'd LOVE it if you could give me the templates with the playable sims for the Universities and Downtown.  That would save me a ton of work.

Yup, you'd have to add all 3 Unis to get all the playable sims this way. If you use J.M.'s noregen hacks, you won't get too many excess NPCs because of this. I routinely attach all 3 Unis to my neighborhoods.

I'll package up the templates for you. I'm not sure how big they are, but I don't think they're too horrible.

[uaintjak]

THAT...would be super groovy.

Let me know if you need an email address or sumpin.

Also, I hate to be a boor, but if you could give me a step-by-step of just exactly what I'll need to do in order to keep my NPC count to a minimum, I'd be very grateful.

[SaraMK]

Since you don't have OFB, the hacks you need from J.M. are in the NL Directory: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/nl/hacks/

nodormiespawns.zip
nossrespawn.zip
notownieregen.zip

and TwoJeffs' hacks:

no meeting professors at http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1507.0
visitor controller http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2271.0

TwoJeffs' hacks aren't necessary, they're just nice to have so you can prevent annoyances.

I'm not at home right now, so I'll figure out how to get the templates to you later tonight. Now that I have thought about it some more, I realize that the files will be very small. All you need is the neighborhood file and the character folder. I'll bet they're less than 2MB each or something like that.

[J. M. Pescado]

I don't remember those needing OFB updates, so the ones in the NL directory are probably just symlinks of the old ones.

[uaintjak]

Thanks Sara.  I'm hacked already - I have nearly everything by JM and TJ anyway, including the ones you mentioned (but thank you for mentioning them).

You even gave a link.  You're like, in the qualifying round for most helpful person evah.  Benes!!!!!!!!!!1111

[shanpooter]

I would also love to have these templates, if it's not to much trouble.  I want to get ALL maxis-made characters into one neighborhood.  That means everyone from Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville, the playable characters from all of the Uni's as well as the playable characters from downtown and bluewater village.  If I had to add all of the sub 'hoods the regular way, I would have, like 10 million characters files.