Too many files/sims explanation for dummies needed

[bluecatvon]

oh thank you thank you! you and the creators are like my gods!! kiss your sweet feet!

[dizzy]

It seems as though the behaviors permit far too many disorganized searches into the neighbor list. What they should have done from the start of this project is designed some objects that are used for searching, and that only permit family-oriented neighbor tree-style searching.

Plus, they need to toss out the whole design for "townies," "NPCs", adoptees, etc. This flat-list-biased way of thinking has got to go.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Have you tried telling them that?  I and a lot of others would agree with you, but I don't somehow think the people at EA/Maxis are listening!  And I think they enjoy creating ugly and often nasty townies just to annoy us!

[dizzy]

I doubt this is news to them. In fact, I'll bet they have fixes that are ready to go but just have not been debugged.

As a coder, I can tell you from experience that you spend 1% of your time designing, coding, and revising. The other 99% of the time is debugging.

[CynicalChick]

One thing you can do though is to use SimPE to delete every townie with no relationships.  Then you can renumber the files at the end so they fill in the gaps.  That way, if the game does decide to respawn anything, they'll be at the end, and therefore easy to find!

Do not do this! Renumbering the files can severely bugger your game as the instance numbers are also used for NIDs, and changing these in mid-game will confuse the game.

I second this completely. As an experiement, I removed all of those disconnected townies and other characters. The result was that anytime an NPC came on the lot, it crashed or froze for a long time.

[Oddysey]

It seems as though the behaviors permit far too many disorganized searches into the neighbor list. What they should have done from the start of this project is designed some objects that are used for searching, and that only permit family-oriented neighbor tree-style searching.

Plus, they need to toss out the whole design for "townies," "NPCs", adoptees, etc. This flat-list-biased way of thinking has got to go.

So it is a searching thing . . . JMPescado's comments have pointed in that direction, but I'm not entirely sure what the exact mechanism of the error is . . .

Fundamentally, anything in this game that wasn't in the original is going to be deeply screwy. The mood system works, the socials work, most objects work. The memory system is screwy (death memory! argh!), mobile objects are screwy, parties and age transitions can be screwy. Most of the "new" stuff is rather tacked on and hasn't had the kinks totally worked out. Also, the mood system is a combination of extreme object oriented code. (the objects themselves) and algorithms. (Mood adjustments and decay.) This is what the system can handle. The new bits really should have been designed with this in mind, but this wasn't done very well.

Having multiple different varieties of sims (NPCs, Townies, etc.) was probably a bad idea, as dizzy-two pointed out. The more exceptions, ie, forced modifications to the way the game handles stuff for specific things, the more problems you're going to have and the less flexible the game is.

[syberspunk]

I don't recall specifically what has been said, so I guess I'll ask this, although I'm sure it's already been brought up previously:

Is it a bad idea to have more than one Uni attached to your neighborhood? I thought it's a neat idea because it would give the illusion that there is more than one choice for university and that my sims wouldn't all necessarily go to the same "community" college. Is there anything especially dangerous about having more than one Uni, or is it just the fact that it adds to same issue of the ever-building, ever-increasing size of neighborhoods and number of files leading to your game blowing up in a big fiery ball visible from outerspace problem?

I've started to take measures as far as exporting my CAS made sims and documenting their zodiac signs/personality point distribution so, if need be, I can recreate them should my game blow up and I have to start from scratch. :p But for now, I'm willing to take my chances, especially since I have all the critical fixes so far. I don't want to start from scratch now as it is, since I've put in so much play time. I don't know what's worse, just playing now as is until it 'splodes or having to start over fresh now. I guess I'm just in denial and trying to avoid the inevitible, but I really don't want to start over now if I don't really have to. :p

I wonder, did the first Sims have any of these sort of problems? I've practically new to the whole Sims modding community since I never used any hacks for the first Sims. Heck, I wasn't even aware that there were such things. I pretty much stuck to only using "official" new objects from the EA/Maxis official Sims site. And I didn't really care that much to go searching for new objects or even new skins really for the first Sims.

Oh well. I guess I'll just trudge along desperately hoping to avoid the fateful fiery ball for now. I just don't have the heart or energy to give up on my sims as they currently exist. :p

Ste

[ZephyrZodiac]

Have you made back-ups?  If you have, at leasdt if your neighbourhood does explode into a bfbvfos, you can have a try at fixing it, then play it again.

[syberspunk]

Oh. I constantly do backups. Usually after a major update of some major hacks, just in case something unexpected happens. :p So yeah, I usually backup the entire The Sims 2 folder, if not just the Downloads, Neighborhoods, and SavedSims folders. But my neighborhood is actually buggered as it is, because I made the terrible mistake of importing two lotbinned families. This was done before it was none that doing so buggers your game. :p

I attempted to look through my neighborhood and see if I could clean things up and delete files and what not, but there were just far too many clones and junk that I didn't want to deal with it. It is probably more trouble that it's worth and I'm afraid I would either delete the wrong files or that it would still get even more buggered than it was in the first place.  Just thinking about it all gave me a headache, so I've decided to opt for living in denial and turning a blind eye or whatever. I'll just play this game until it bursts into a bfbvfos and I'll have to start over. Pretty much the way that I'll have to drive my car into the ground before I even think about getting a new one. :p

Ste

[nikita]

Isn't the Shakespeare crowd the entire point of Veronaville? If you wanted the neighborhood with nobody in it, wouldn't you have been better off just using the terrain in a custom neighborhood?

I wanted to keep the houses, just not the people. 

I've never had any problems when deleting the files of unlinked Sims with no character data but aside from the entire Vernonaville cast and CAS sims that never see their way out of the Family/Student bin, I've never deleted any Sims' character file so that's probably why. I'm skittish about continuing to do so now however.  If only there was a way to do Sim Sugery without having to make an archetype first.

[Judecat]

Ok,  I have the ultimate stupid question -- or rather 2, or 3 or even 4. 

Please don't rip off my lips,  I need them to suck on my cigarettes.

1 -- what is SimPE
2--where are the character files
3--how do I get all those stupid dormies out of my sims memories.
4--is there a way to lobotomize Mortimer Goth.  I changed his name and turned him into a teenager,  also did some plastic surgery on him. (don't ask me why -- I was playing). 

[Sandilou]

On a separate note, I noticed yesterday that my level 6 greek house has room for 32,000 pledges.  Does that mean what I think it means?  Can TS2 really handle that many sims?

[jrd]

No, but 32k is a nice integer.

[J. M. Pescado]

32000 is basically the approximation of 32767, the largest signed 16-bit integer. In programmer-speak, using values like that tends to mean "infinitely large for all practical and functional purposes", since these are not values that should occur naturally. In this case, NIDs are signed 16-bit integers, so if every single possible sim the game could tolerate sitting down was in the game, all but the last 767 could join your Greek house.

Of course, your game would also overrun your hard drive and explode in a big fiery ball that is visible from space well before THAT ever happened. So basically, that's a programmerese way of saying "infinite for all practical purposes". Non-programmers obviously would not understand the relevance of 32767 or 32000. They're not trying to say that your game can actually have that many sims, they're trying to say there's no way in hell your game can have that many sims, and so the value is infinite for all practical purposes.

In practice, the level of Greek house is pretty much irrelevant since all levels will permit the maximum-allowed value of 8 sims, and graduated sims do not count against this value.

[jrd]

If they'd been allowed to spend a little more time coding Uni, they probably would've replaced it with ∞. At least that's what I'd have done.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, after the delays with Sims 2, that wasn't on the cards, unfortunately!

[Oddysey]

I think the main advantage to having a level 6 is that you can have a never ending stream of pledges. Theoretically, anyway, if influence weren't ridiculously easy to come by.

[MutantBunny]

So, after reading this thread I guess it would be ok to just go delete those annoying Maxis families Livingston and Baena? IS that the right spelling? I never play them, talk to them, look at them. I hate them. The families are extremely large and useless.

So is it safe to delete them, JM?

[J. M. Pescado]

I think the main advantage to having a level 6 is that you can have a never ending stream of pledges. Theoretically, anyway, if influence weren't ridiculously easy to come by.

You mean if influence wasn't both ridiculously easy to come by and nearly entirely useless?

[J. M. Pescado]

So, after reading this thread I guess it would be ok to just go delete those annoying Maxis families Livingston and Baena? IS that the right spelling? I never play them, talk to them, look at them. I hate them. The families are extremely large and useless.

So is it safe to delete them, JM?

I'm not sure what the Livingston and Baena families are, but if their families IDs begin with 0x7FFF, do not delete them, they're the "townie" and "NPC" families, and deleting them can cause your game to behave strangely.

[veilchen]

As far as influence is concerned, right on both accounts JM. I don't think I've ever used it. Maybe, if I get a brain spasm, I will decide to play Uni through in the regular way and use it there, meanwhile, I am perfectly happy with the noinfluenceobsession.

Livingston and Baena sound like the names of the families that are indeed either townies or dormies, I forget which, since I always deleteAllCharacters on both, the neighborhood and the sub-neighborhood before I play. I use my own townies/dormies.

[Brynne]

In Pleasantville, the Livingstons are the townies (Goopy, Komei, etc ) and the Thomasons are the NPCs (Kaylynn, Remington...) if you have Uni. Or vice versa. I guess Baena is the equivalent from one of the other neighborhoods, perhaps?

[ZephyrZodiac]

In my Pleasantview they're Gilscarbo!  I wonder if they're named after the first Townie to make an appearance in the game?  In another version of Pleasantview, they were named Livingston, so there does appear to be some flexibility.

[MutantBunny]

Baena is 7FFF, damn it, but Livingston is 7FFE--can I dump them?

[J. M. Pescado]

No, you cannot dump them. One is the NPC family, the other is the townie family. A third family can also appear, the orphan family. Don't bother destroying these, they're required for the game.