Too many files/sims explanation for dummies needed

[veilchen]

Alright, let me try this again. I know there are answers all over the place for this, but I don't seem to be able to sort them right.

1. Sim neighborhoods can accumulate too many files because nothing ever gets subtracted, only added. That is, dead sims still retain their files, newborns get added to it.

2. It's the actual character files that cause 'burnination' or 'implosion' of a neighborhood, not the actual number of visible/playable/NPC pixel people.

3. As soon as a neighborhood file hits critical mass, its doomed, with no way to fix it, even if you never, ever, lot-binned, deleted binned sims that have been played, or imported occupied houses.

4. What IS the critical mass? Some say 300+ some say 500+, some (like me) say ??

5. One of the signs that your neighborhood is sliding into irreparable screwiness due to too many files is the disappearance of CAS sims and newborns after saving and quitting, true or false?

6. A neighborhood and its attached University count as one neighborhood, so all the NPC's (including the stupid secret society NPC's) get added to the neighborhood file. Thank goodness for the no respawn townies/dormies/secsoc hack.

7. Unless you are very SimPe literal and can delete memories/characters/etc. manually, you might as well put the flag on half-mast, play the funeral march and bid your neighborhood goodbye.

8. JM's and TJ's critical fixes stave this off for a time, but it is inevitable, since, as mentioned before, there is no subtraction, only addition.

9. Deleting tombstones/urns only affects the size of the file, the file itself stays. The size of the file is of little matter, since it is the actual number of files that will cause 'burnination'.

10. EA/Maxis has a limit of sims in a neighborhood induced into the game-files; once reached, the neighborhood is doomed, true or false?

I know these are a lot of questions. I try to read everything here and everywhere else I can, but instead of clearing things up they further confuse the issue for me. I also know that for some people these questions are extremely silly, but they are not for me. I see little point in playing a game that is doomed from the outset. A lot of time gets invested into those neighborhoods, at least by me, and I am an opponent of wasted time. I already use the deleteAll cheat, the noregen mods, the critical fixes, etc. I try to limit the number of NPC's I use, I haven't used any kind of Maid/Gardener/Nanny lately. I don't use dorms, just so I don't have those idiotic cooks come around, because more than once two came, one did the appointed tasks, the other one just hung around, showered, slept, played, and never showed any inclination to leave.

So bear with me even if those question sound silly to you, they don't to me. I don't, as a rule, ask many questions, but on these I could not find any clear, decisive answers.
Thanks for your time,

Gabriele

[ZephyrZodiac]

I also feel, like you, angry with Maxis for making this limit!  But I feel angry with Maxis for a lot of the stupid errors they made as well! 

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!

[J. M. Pescado]

1. Sim neighborhoods can accumulate too many files because nothing ever gets subtracted, only added. That is, dead sims still retain their files, newborns get added to it.

Right. Dead sims must retain their files, since they're still referred to in memory and ancestry....usually. It's possible for a dead sim to become completely "disconnected", but the game doesn't detect this case, and so you never lose files: If a sim were to be dead and deleted (no tombstone), everyone who knew him were to also be dead and deleted, and everyone who had ever HEARD of him was dead and deleted, this would mean that sim was completely orphaned and could be cleaned. But the game doesn't scan for this case, and it's somewhat gruelling to do so manually, especially since the dead can be talked about for generations to come.

2. It's the actual character files that cause 'burnination' or 'implosion' of a neighborhood, not the actual number of visible/playable/NPC pixel people.

Right.

3. As soon as a neighborhood file hits critical mass, its doomed, with no way to fix it, even if you never, ever, lot-binned, deleted binned sims that have been played, or imported occupied houses.

Not entirely true. The Critical Fixes existing can keep a neighborhood chugging for quite a good while longer, but obviously, this doesn't account for any undiscovered bugs, or any new bugs of this nature (too many iterations is generally most visible sign) introduced in future expansions. If Maxis never wises up, this is going to require future critical fixes.

4. What IS the critical mass? Some say 300+ some say 500+, some (like me) say ??

Early errors begin to set in around 800-ish. All known problems of this nature are resolved by Critical Fixes. Advanced errors can set in around 1000+. These are also resolved by Critical Fix hacks. Obviously, once you have to resort to hacks just to keep going, you've crossed the Rubicon already. How long you can keep going after that depends on how long it takes you to be assassinated. This point is unknown.

5. One of the signs that your neighborhood is sliding into irreparable screwiness due to too many files is the disappearance of CAS sims and newborns after saving and quitting, true or false?

Unknown. This should not be occurring under any normal or abnormal in-game condition. This sounds more like failure to commit file changes to disk, which is a more serious problem. Causes include "locked files" due to being open in SimPE or "dead" instances of TS2 (even if they appears closed, they may not have terminated cleanly: Check your ALT-CRTL-DEL).

6. A neighborhood and its attached University count as one neighborhood, so all the NPC's (including the stupid secret society NPC's) get added to the neighborhood file. Thank goodness for the no respawn townies/dormies/secsoc hack.

Correct. Attached subneighborhoods share their populations with "main" neighborhoods, but not lots. No doubt Maxis will love to flood your neighborhood with yet more garbage sims, as well as new NPCs.

7. Unless you are very SimPe literal and can delete memories/characters/etc. manually, you might as well put the flag on half-mast, play the funeral march and bid your neighborhood goodbye.

Pretty much. Once you've passed the Critical Fix point, you're doomed. However, this point is very far away, as Critical Fixes have been able to repair neighborhoods in the 2000s. This is all assuming you're salvaging NATURAL populations, and not garbage bloat. Let us figure, as a reasonable number, you have approximately 40 families. That's about how many are in my neighborhood right now, although some are "crunchy" and will eventually be compacted together (college students, soon-to-die relatives living in small houses with no burial grounds, immortals, etc.). If your neighborhood is bloated because of *GARBAGE*, you're best off starting over.

8. JM's and TJ's critical fixes stave this off for a time, but it is inevitable, since, as mentioned before, there is no subtraction, only addition.

In theory, a meticulously maintained neighborhood can avoid a potential explosion on these grounds for the duration of TS2, assuming critical fixes are made for any such problem.

9. Deleting tombstones/urns only affects the size of the file, the file itself stays. The size of the file is of little matter, since it is the actual number of files that will cause 'burnination'.

Correct. However, the actual number of files needed to bring about irrevocable collapse is unknown. Unfortunately, each new expansion pack brings about more potential sources of error. As the hackers familiar with this particular class of problem tend to keep meticulously clean neighborhoods as a result, these errors will be slow to be identified.

10. EA/Maxis has a limit of sims in a neighborhood induced into the game-files; once reached, the neighborhood is doomed, true or false?

If you consider "32767" or "65535" as a limit, yes. Instance numbers are 16-bit variables. It is unknown whether they are signed or not, but both of these numbers are fairly large. My neighborhood has been played now for what will soon be a year, and I'm around the 500 mark. Calculating that maybe 300-450 of these files are NPCs, built-in ancestors, and other such, and it has taken this long to generate 50-200 sims naturally, (if not less - I know everyone in my neighborhood by name, an impressive feat for a man my age, and I'm pretty sure there ain't that many!), you can see that it would take years and years and years to hit the hard-mathematical limit. As to what point the game will be rendered unplayable and beyond recovery of any mortal agency? Beats me. I do know that it's theoretically possible to trim a LOT of debris if the right primitives were added (NID iteration by family!). If they were to, say, create a primitive iterating first through families, then through NIDs in families, you'd have a much lower instruction count bounded not by "number of sims living and dead", but only by "number of sims living", a far smaller number bounded by the user's patience, which is typically quite small.

[veilchen]

Thank you JM, that clears up a lot of things. I've been playing for a long time too, but not being a modder, I've lost plenty of neighborhoods due to Maxis' incompetence starting with the jump-bug way back when. I want to eliminate chances of losing another neighborhood; I wish I had the knowledge to keep a neighborhood immaculate, but since that is not feasable, at least I can collect enough information to ward off the evil maxis bugs as long as possible. That's one of the main reasons I've been following you around like a faithful old dog

My complete loss of faith in maxis' programming abilities is responsible for my paranoia that arises whenever I encounter game-silliness. I've seen small little bugs grow into neighborhood devouring monsters, I've even had one neighborhood completely disappear without a trace.

Posted by: ZephyrZodiac
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!

Thanks ZZ, I'll keep that in mind. I have not played any of my other neighborhoods, and I'm considering just exporting the sims in those neighborhoods with SimPe and then just make use of the trashcan. With all the noregeneration fixes in place, I'll just start out with a completely clean neighborhood and go from there. If I had another computer at my disposal, I would love to install TS2 and SimPe and experiment to my hearts content, but I only have this one and I can't clutter it up with too much stuff. I need it for work and study. It's coughing and wheezing as it is.

Besides, can you really see me re-numbering/re-doing/manipulating files in SimPe without either extremely comical or disasterous results; even though you have been very kind and I'm much more comfortable with the older version of SimPe for now

G.

[draranha]

I have a neighborhood with 952 characters (alive, deads, deleted, townies and NPCs). Surely I use all Pescado's critical fixes and I'm able to play quite peacefully. But now I'm beginning to feel a little worried about these crowded village of mine... Gess I'll not be able to go on with this for too long

[ZephyrZodiac]

Besides, can you really see me re-numbering/re-doing/manipulating files in SimPe without either extremely comical or disasterous results; even though you have been very kind and I'm much more comfortable with the older version of SimPe for now

Try it this way:   1. copy your character folder to the desktop.
                        2. open SimPE.   
                        3. make a simPE backup, then open SimBrowser.
                        4. start going through till you find a sim townie you don't want.
                        5. open the duplicate file on your desktop, find that file and 
                             move it to a deleted sims folder on your desktop. 
                        6. when you have deleted a fair number of files, start renumbering
                            the ones at the end to fill in gaps in the numbers at the beginning.

                         7. close SimPE, remove the existing character folder and replace with
                             the one on your desktop.  (Don't get rid of the old one, just put
                             it somewhere safe.)

                         8. try your game again.  If it works fine, throw away the deleted
                             sims folder after exclaiming "Oh my, what a lot of useless sims!" 

                         9. any problems, just replace the original folder.  If you've gone and
                             lost it, never mind, you still have the SimPE Backup!

[J. M. Pescado]

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.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Mine's working fine!

[themaltesebippy]

Hey I just wanna say, we should be knowledgeable about what can hose up our games but why do we play?  We play for fun.  If you want to do the have 10 children want, do it!  Play the way that makes you happy, extract your fave sims with SimPE and try not to stress too much over it.  Make backups daily just in case but don't let all of these errors keep you from playing as you want (unless you do something very stupid).  This is your free time for enjoyment when you play, not tedious task.

[veilchen]

Hey I just wanna say, we should be knowledgeable about what can hose up our games but why do we play?  We play for fun.  If you want to do the have 10 children want, do it!  Play the way that makes you happy, extract your fave sims with SimPE and try not to stress too much over it.  Make backups daily just in case but don't let all of these errors keep you from playing as you want (unless you do something very stupid).  This is your free time for enjoyment when you play, not tedious task.

All true, but if you've played for a while and suddenly everything starts going bonkers it makes me angry. I feel like I've wasted precious time and I don't have too much free time. Plus, there is one neighborhood specifically that is near and dear to my heart and not just for relaxation purposes. It's a replica of my home, and helps me over the homesickness spells :D

I do make back-ups, I even make back-ups of back-ups, but I want a game that lets me enjoy playing without bugs continuously crawling out of the woodwork so to speak.

What do you mean "unless I do something stupid". Have we met? You seem to know me. :D

G.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, just remember: Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Stick with this rule, and you'll be fine. Ignore it, and you're going to bugger your files.

[themaltesebippy]

Yeah I wasn't pointing finger at you, this is for all of us.  We get attached to our characters and yeah who wants to waste time putting into a project we love only to find someone else's incompetence has ruined our work and wasted our time.

Other thing, anyone else annoyed that in SimPE, the # of files no longer is displayed under Sim Description.  Counting files in characters folder is not accurate as it doesn't include NPC's and others.

[Ancient Sim]

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.

Oopsi-diddly  ...

[Darkstormyeve]

Besides, can you really see me re-numbering/re-doing/manipulating files in SimPe without either extremely comical or disasterous results; even though you have been very kind and I'm much more comfortable with the older version of SimPe for now

Try it this way:   1. copy your character folder to the desktop.
                        2. open SimPE.   
                        3. make a simPE backup, then open SimBrowser.
                        4. start going through till you find a sim townie you don't want.
                        5. open the duplicate file on your desktop, find that file and 
                             move it to a deleted sims folder on your desktop. 
                        6. when you have deleted a fair number of files, start renumbering
                            the ones at the end to fill in gaps in the numbers at the beginning.

                         7. close SimPE, remove the existing character folder and replace with
                             the one on your desktop.  (Don't get rid of the old one, just put
                             it somewhere safe.)

                         8. try your game again.  If it works fine, throw away the deleted
                             sims folder after exclaiming "Oh my, what a lot of useless sims!" 

                         9. any problems, just replace the original folder.  If you've gone and
                             lost it, never mind, you still have the SimPE Backup!

It all seems very confusing. Since re-installing my game last month, I am very aware of not having my sims meet any townies. I also have JMP's No Regen mod. I write down the names of those who get brought over after school and work. I had thought that I could just delete the character file in my Maxis Character File folder and leave it at that. Yes, identify them through SimPE but basically thats the only role SimPE would play.

[nocomment]

This is a very useful thread.  I wonder if I could ask a more specific question?

I stupidly added a second university to my Pleasantville.  I haven't visited this new university yet.  Has it generated Townies?

If it has, can they safely be deleted?  I've heard Townies visit from one university to another.  In this case, Townies from the new university may have interacted with my sims.

[J. M. Pescado]

I stupidly added a second university to my Pleasantville.  I haven't visited this new university yet.  Has it generated Townies?

Yup.

If it has, can they safely be deleted?  I've heard Townies visit from one university to another.  In this case, Townies from the new university may have interacted with my sims.

Townies are not specific to any university. So if you've been playing, they're likely to have possibly visited, in which case you are buggered.

[nocomment]

Thanks for the fast reply.  Even with the second university, I have less than 500 files, so I'm ok for now.

I think when the new EP comes out, I may play a new neighborhood for a while.  I'll wait to play my main neighborhood when the dozens of critical fixes have been made.

[Brynne]

Veilchen, thanks for putting all these questions together for us! I'm glad I'm not the only one confused. As I mentioned in another thread, I am in the process of cloning and reproducing all characters. I have the physical characters in the game and have been working for hours creating family ties in my main family alone. And since my family has offspring related to the Goths and Brokes, I had to clone those characters and recreated them in the game, as well. Which led me to the realization that I would pretty much ave to recreate all the original Pleasantville families because of their ties with each other (Cassandra and Don Lothario, Dina and Mortimer, etc.). I'm trying to be as faithful to the original story lines as I can. Maybe it's my perfectionism that's forcing me to do it, but I feel I must recreate every ancestor to these families, for their historical value. I am seeing now that the neighborhood will not be usable for quite some time, because, well, talk about tedious!

My point is, I am doing all this because I have only played Pleasantville, and I've been playing it since I got the game which would be since not long after the game came out.
I had pared my neighborhood down from close to 500 character files down to about 350. Then I removed a few cellphone tokens, found out that was the wrong thing to do, went out and got some Rogaine for my game-induced hair loss, and decided that, instead of reverting to my backup I would start clean. Which would probably still be the safest solution. But since I now have a better understanding about the "critical mass" problem, thanks to everyone here, and actually want to play this game, I may go back to my backup and remove the extra files again (and leave all cellphone tokens!) and play the game.

Here's a hypothetical question for you, J.M. What exactly does happen if a character is deleted, and one or two memories are inadvertently left in the game (say they were missed during the memory-wipe comb-through). Obviously whatever sim carried that memory will have "subject" in place of the deleted sim's name, but how does this impact the health of the game. If I play the game, notice that a sim does have "subject" memories, will all be "okay" if I just go back through and delete the passed-over memories in Simpe? Or does it cause problems much deeper than that? I'm still a little confused about the deleting of character files. I know my way around simpe at a beginner/low-intermediate level, but am not a modder or a simpe expert by any means. I can follow directions, though, if someone would be able to explain what needs to be done to fix it. I'm asking because I have had a few townies that have appeared on my lots, and I killed them. I deleted all the memories of any sim that had contact with him, but I missed one or two. I then deleted those memories in simpe. I'm not talking about main characters or townies that had relationships with any of my sims; the memories I missed were from sims that were present on the lot when the deaths occured, and their only memory of the deceased sim is that he "died".

I apologize if that was confusing.

[J. M. Pescado]

I had pared my neighborhood down from close to 500 character files down to about 350. Then I removed a few cellphone tokens, found out that was the wrong thing to do, went out and got some Rogaine for my game-induced hair loss, and decided that, instead of reverting to my backup I would start clean. Which would probably still be the safest solution. But since I now have a better understanding about the "critical mass" problem, thanks to everyone here, and actually want to play this game, I may go back to my backup and remove the extra files again (and leave all cellphone tokens!) and play the game.

Is this with or without Sim State? Pleasantview ships with 170 files. I know at least one of them is redundant (clone of Skip Broke, referenced in a few Broke family memories). And did you make sure not to MISS anyone?

Here's a hypothetical question for you, J.M. What exactly does happen if a character is deleted, and one or two memories are inadvertently left in the game (say they were missed during the memory-wipe comb-through). Obviously whatever sim carried that memory will have "subject" in place of the deleted sim's name, but how does this impact the health of the game. If I play the game, notice that a sim does have "subject" memories, will all be "okay" if I just go back through and delete the passed-over memories in Simpe?

If caught quickly, it shouldn't be a problem. If counting-codes start scanning those tokens and trying to actually validate the NID referenced, well, you're going to start seeing godknowswhat errors. So try to nuke them quickly, preferrably along with all "invisible" memories. If you're trying to "clean" your neighborhood, you're best off destroying all "invisible" memories (NOT unknowns or tokens!). That cleans up a lot of debris right there. Full destruction of any invisible "gossip" memories will make it much less likely you missed anything. Your sims will briefly have less to gossip about, but that'll quickly rectify itself.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Several of the ghosts are duplicated.  Darleen Dreamer and Michael, I think, as well as Skip, as you said.

[Brynne]

It's with Sim State. I deleted a "few" NPC's and professors, but in my backup those files are still intact. I didn't realize when I deleted those files that there were supposed to be three of every npc. I deleted professors that my sims had not met. However, if I go back to my backup (my alternative is to keep working on the brand new hood, not to continue playing with the hood that I screwed to hell), I won't touch the npcs or professors, which will obviously make my character file count higher. I can live with that, though, because I still have plenty of useless townies to get rid of, again.

Thanks for the quick reply!

[nikita]

I will have to bookmark this page, it's full of lots of useful info.

I only pretty much play Veronaville and gutted the entire cast of shameless Shakespeare rip-offs, deleting them and their character files.  I did so out of my own laziness of not wanting to scroll through a bunch of useless dead and unwanted icons when loading Sim Brower or Sim Surgery rather than a fear of my game "exploding into a fiery ball".  I actually just recently created a second college town in Veronaville (a less prestigious institution than Academie le Tour, I felt was necessary for my more mundane looking Sim kids) and I believe I have the no townie regen mod and most of the new dormies that moved in are actually just the dormies from AlT so I'm not too worried about Sim overload as I'm only on my 3rd generation anyway.  After spending a good half hour in Sim Pe last night, changing the names of all the duplicate townies, I saw that I had a lot of Sims, wasting my precious scrolling time, who have no character data because they are Sim Surgery archetypes that I make in CAS, use to replace ugly townies/dormies and then delete.  As they never see their way out of the Family/Student Bin, I'm assuming its safe to delete their character files.  Right? 

[J. M. Pescado]

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?

[bluecatvon]

this has scared me so much...i don't want to play and worry about crashing the whole neighbourhood that i've played for eons at the same time...where can i find TJ and JM's critical fixes in case the worst really does happen?

[nocomment]

The critical fixes are here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=10.0

http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=806

You might want to go ahead and install them now, to avoid problems later.