Too many files/sims explanation for dummies needed

[MutantBunny]

Well shucky darn. I would really like to get rid of them, they have about a hundred family members each, maybe more! They are the bulk of the files in my hood.

After reading this thread, I had the chance to ask a maxiod if Maxis had set upper limits on the number of sims one can have in a hood. He said nope, they set no such limit. That the game can have ...oh gosh I think he quoted 4ooo sims the game does start to act up a nd do weird things, but anything like a thousand sims should play just fine.

[veilchen]

Since this will be acute again with the coming of NL I will give it a nice friendly bump. I read somewhere here that ea/maxis has fixed the 'too many iterations'. I would really like to know some specifics, and also how many new NPC's the new ep will throw at the game itself. With its theme being a night out in the town, there must be plenty of new service NPC's. I wonder how they will behave; remember the endless spawning of baristas?

[dizzy]

Actually, Maxis should just toss the iteration tracker, and process objects preemptively. Then, if an object gets stuck active for too many slices, make note of it in a log file somewhere.  Problem solved.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I actually can't see why they ever needed to make more than one nanny, one repairperson, one burglar, one gardener per neighbourhood.  Maids, I can understand, I like having the male maids as well as the females - my present game has two male ones.  But if they'd stuck to one of each of the others, that would be 8 files saved for starters!  Then add the cook in the uni dorms, the various other uni NPCs and the savings really add up - and also, with only one of each, we ight actually want to play them instead of zapping them all!  And only one professor per major instead of two!  Obviously, you need several shop assistants, but that's really the only NPC which does need more than one!

[Hook]

And only one professor per major instead of two!

If your Sim declares Philosophy the first day, his first class he meets FOUR professors.  I assume this is two for undeclared and two for philosophy.

Having that many professors means you hardly ever need to attend class, as simply making friends with all four of them fills your grade meter quickly.

Making friends with drama professors doesn't give you a grade boost. I assume you have to flirt with these.  But they're a pain in the butt.

Hook

[ZephyrZodiac]

They're ALL a pain in the butt!  There's one female Prof in my current neighbourhood who keeps trying to call on my sims even though all professors are banned, she clearly hates her job as all her wants are to "get a job in such and such", can't remember what her LTW was, but it was ridiculous since she's about 104! 

I'm afraid I'm mean to my sims, I make them work for their degree - like they HAVE to write term papers and do assignments!  (I had to work for my degree, I don't see why they should get away with just socializing!)

[BeckerCheez]

Is a neighborhood safe at a character count of 600+ ?  I'm giving my Sims game a break at the moment, so I was wondering whether or not to keep playing or start from scratch and see if I can get a safe notownie hack (though I could put the notownieregen into my current neighborhood, is it compatible w/ NL yet?)

[dizzy]

The "Too Many Iterations" error has been bumped up to 100,000 in Nightlife, so you should be okay until you start hitting 5,000 to 10,000 sims in your neighborhood.

Expect serious lag on certain things (like the College Phone Directory) if you do have thousands of sims, though.

[AllenABQ]

Prior to discovering through this board that it was dangerous to delete sims from the characters folder, that's what I did to get rid of unwanted ones.  And I deleted a lot!  In Pleasantview I don't have a single remaining original character or their dead relatives with the exception of Daniel Pleasant and Nina Caliente. (Both are retained as ghosts.) I have also deleted tons of nannies, maids, repairmen, townies -- many of these having interacted with my playable sims and thus generating "met so and so" and "made friends with" memories for them.

But despite all this, my game has hummed along without a hitch.  The vast majority of this clean-up occurred in the early part of this year, and I've played all the residences in my neighborhood many many times since with no adverse effects.  My character folder currently lists 335 sim files.  I've easily nuked ~70-80 since I began playing.

I guess I've been lucky. 

I have stopped deleting them completely now and opted to just kill/delete in-game and retain the character files in order to prevent future problems.  One thing I will note is that I've never nuked a character file for any sim I've created and played in the game.  All those (dead included) have been kept.  So I'd say the majority of the nuked ones were largely townies and NPCs with no relationships.  When the game regenerated new ones, it used the old character numbering to fill in from the smallest unused number it could find.  However, SimPE sorts on instance number I think so they are organized in order of creation when I view them in the Sim Browser.

[ZephyrZodiac]

One thing you can do with any annoying townie with too many memories to delete is to turn them into babies.  Since they still exist, the game doesn't seem to replace them.  However, not recommended for nannies, although it works great for burglars!  Won't work for repomen, though, unfortunately!

[cwykes]

Here's another question everybody except me probably knows the answer to, cos I can't find the answer with search:
Why do you get 3 character files for the same sim?
Iis it a problem or a sign of a problem? - Other than the obvious bloating -
Can you combine them into one? - I know not to delete them!

I was thinking that if you knew when and why it happened, you could catch the duplicate early enough to fix it relatively easily in SimPE  - if you knew what you were doing.....!

[ZephyrZodiac]

You get them when you move an occupied house into the houses bin.  The sims lose their relationships with others sims outside the house, but somehow the game turns those relationships into unlinked sims.  If you look in simPE you'll find those sims have no relationships, and are only about 30 kb in size.  since they aren't the sim that is in your game, but a clone, you can safely delete them, just make a note of their file numbers (the user nos.) and delete them from the characters folder in Neighbourhoods.

[J. M. Pescado]

3 files of the same sim is generally the impending sign of a Big Fiery Ball That Is Visible From Space.

[ZephyrZodiac]

It is also a problem that can be sorted - I've had it happen, done just what I said, and the game has played fine afterwards.  As you yourself have pointed out, JM, it's generally caused by moving occupied houses into the lots and houses bin.  What I have discovered is that they are, in actual fact, the "lost relationships" - somehow the game turns them from relationships into clones!  But since they too have no relationships, they can be deleted.

[Motoki]

It's still better to avoid all that mess in the first place and not move sims living in houses between neighborhoods. It's much cleaner to export that sim's template in sim surgery and recreate a new sim with their stats in the CAS.

I know you know all this ZZ, but just mentioning it again for those who might be thinking in the future of moving occupied houses between neighborhoods. DON'T DO IT!! 

[ZephyrZodiac]

It happens if you move them in the same neighbourhood too.  Just NOT A GOOD IDEA!  But, if someone has done it, it can be sorted before the BFBVFS occurs!

(Having said that, I just did it in a last ditch attempt to save Liz Young, and found that, even with NL, the same thing happens.  It also caused the game to hang when I tried to replace the house, because she knew almost every playable sim in the game, plus several NPCs!  And the game was obviously trying to move every single one of the clones with her!  You really would think that, since this problem has known about since before Uni, they would have got it sorted by now!)

Anyway, Liz has now gone for good (although I still have copies of her file for old time's sake! and her clone has just been updated with her memories, and her family now have memories of the clone instead.  Shame, but there you have it!

[Motoki]

It happens if you move them in the same neighbourhood too.

Yep. I accidentally clicked move house to bin on an occupied house once when I meant to do move family to bin and ended up with dupes. 

[ZephyrZodiac]

Easily sorted, though, it just takes ages finding all those file numbers so you can delete them.  (I found that, although SimPE apparently deletes files from the game, it doesn't seem to delete them from the Characters folder, so I would assume that, rather than deleting them it actually just disables them some how.)

But imagine having TWO Mortimer Goths!!!!  (Not to mention two Don Lotharios!)

[Motoki]

Yeah I've done it before when I had to, but it would be nice if the game put up a confirmation box or something. Heh, that Harrassment is bad Mmkay? pop up on the phone hack has saved my butt from having a relationship go down many time. Sometimes I am just ditzy and forget and do something I didn't meant to.

[Dark Trepie]

I'm one of the few that likes having more than one university attached to a neighborhood.  Back before NL came out I had all three attached to Pleasentview, and things started getting screwy around the mid 700 character files mark.  One of my uni graduates lost her extra wants slots, one of my uni students got the "its high time to move back to the real world" message when she was in her first semester, and when Dina Goth finally died her picture was still in the family picture thing when you clicked on the Goth lot just once.  And this was all before I discovered these critical fix hacks.

Now that NL has bumped the iterations up to 100,000 and I have those critical fixes, can I throw caution to the wind and reattach all three of the universities and Downtown to my new Pleasentview without it blowing up anytime soon?

[ZiggyDoodle]

Out of curiosity, has anyone actually experienced the dreaded Sims Apocalypse?

Or is this the early warning system?

[Nihale]

Out of curiosity, has anyone actually experienced the dreaded Sims Apocalypse?

I might have. It may have been the second or third run-through of Strangetown. First run-through was on 98, where the Reaper became completely invisible and her scythe clipped to the floor, third run-through was quite recent. (I just got bored of the place. Deleted!)

Yah, must've been 2nd time. I've learnt to never ever go on a mad CAS! rampage again.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I think it's happening to my game now, and I only have about 300 character files.  But something has definitely gone screwy, as I now have another sim with the jump bug!  and I can't move HIM out either!  And I just reinstalled NL, just in case that might put things right, only of course, if anything it's made them worse!  I'm going to try one last ditch attempt, reinstall the EP but NOT the patch and take out all my hacks, and see if that fixes it.

If not, I shall just give up playing the Sims at all I think, or go back to sims1!!!!

[cwykes]

3 files of the same sim is generally the impending sign of a Big Fiery Ball That Is Visible From Space.

Oh rats! and here I thought I understood something at last!  "Deleting sims is bad" was such a nice golden rule.  I found 3 of the same sim at least 6 months ago when I first got SimPE and could have tackled it then.    So instead of preventing the fiery ball, failing to delete them has hastened it's arrival!    I only ever downloaded 1 lot with a family (in month 1 of owning the game), never moved lots with sims between 'hoods, I've hardly let any sims move house and the only time I've moved Sims in houses to the lot bin was while I rearranged the 'hood to fit more into the space available and one or two might have gone into the bin temporarily....  wish I'd known

I've backed up and deleted  about 130 of 440 grey files with simenhancer - which DOES delete the character files.  Unfortunately dead sims are grey too, so it's easy to delete a dead sim by accident.  There are about 60 of them - mostly the maxis made ancestors. 

I thought sorting the character files by size would give me a good handle on the number dud files and their character numbers.  I have 130 character files under 30k, another 60 between 30k and 50k, 5 between 50 and 100k and 3 between 100 and 200.  The other 250 are all over 200k.  Anything under 200k seems to be a dead sim or junk

Thanks JM, ZZ and Motoki.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Be careful, some ghosts are very small in file size.  Best to put them in alphabetical and look for doubles. (or trebles).  Then check to make sure they don't have any relationships before you delete them.