Thinking of Starting Over (what I'd like to know)

[Kala]

I'm thinking about reinstalling my sims game and thier are a couple of things I'd like to know before I try.

How can you move people out of thier homes useing SimPE?  I've lots of time fixing up homes and I'd like to use them if I reinstall my game.

Is there a NL version of the no Townies hack? 

Can I get some link to good SimPE tutorials? 

[Andygal]

I don't know if the no towniie respawn hack has been specifically updated but I do believe that it works with NL and even stops downtownies from spawning.

I have an *idea* of how to move sims in or out of houses in SimPE but I don't want to give it to you because I haven
t actually done it and it might cause your game to explode in a big firey ball visible from space and I don't want to be responisble for that.

[nectere]

You can easily move sims out of a house in simpe, if the point is simply so you can package your houses that you built and save them for future use. Its an involved process and its how I get dead characters back in game and living at the right house without doing anything else ingame such as resurrecting etc. (Bella comes to mind) It involves removing them from the lot in simpe and putting them in a townie family, with the proper lotid and family instance. I wont get into it because I am sure someone far more concise can explain it better. Although its quite easy once you have done it a couple of times.

It might be easier however to kill off the sims in game, delete the gravestones and then package the house. Or use the teleport shrub By Inge and make them all townies and then clear off the lot. Assuming that once you package the houses and set them aside for safekeeping, you will be completely reinstalling the game and characters.

[BlueSoup]

For the first question, couldn't you package the lot(s) to file, and then save them to your computer elsewhere (other than Packaged lots) so they didn't get deleted?

After you reinstall the game, you could use the Clean Installer to install the lots and just deselect everything you didn't want to reinstall (like the families).  I just did this for a lot that I created for a family, and I wanted to package the lot to the exchange, but with no CC or family contained.  So, I packaged the lot to file, removed the Downloads folder, and installed the lot to the game, selecting only the lot file.  When I was in the lot back in the game, no one was on the lot and I still had all of the furnishings (Maxis default) which I just deleted to empty out the lot.

I am a bit of a techno-retard, but I think this would work for your purposes, right?

[witch]

I find the simplest way, without any messing about in simpe, is to uses Inge's 'staybehindbush'. Get the house the way you want it, set bush to make things stay, move out family. Package lot. Voila!

Initially you had to delete the fridge 'cos it went funny if it stayed, but I believe Inge has sorted this now.www.simlogical.com -go to downloads and then sim2 downloads.

[Kala]

I should have left things alone.  I decided not to package any homes because the two or three times I tried to do it, my game crashed.

I reinstalled the game.  I moved my favorite maxis families in to the house bin, made a simpe neighborhood, and places the homes in it.  I played Nina and Dina for a little while and then I pot my downloads in the game.  I started the game agian and I went back to Dina's house and I was able to change her hair and make up. However, I didn't see custome odjects in buy mode.  After I exited the house, I went to options to enable custome content.  After restart number three, Dina's house loaded for five munites and then crashed.  I opened up Clean install and deleated all the files in pimk.(duplicates and empty packages)  After restart four my game froze when I clicked on a house.  The family preview window doesn't even pop up. I tried to use my windows button to get out of the game, but that didn't work.  I had to press the power button on my computer to turn off the game.  Restart number five went the same way restart four did.

[witch]

Do you have a backup of the hood you started with? Before or near when you first started having issues? It lives here:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N00#
You'd have your hood number instead of the hash chatacter.

If you have that and a backup of your downloads, it would probably be easiest to re-install and put your hood in place of the new one.

There's weird stuff that can happen with objects.package and groups.cache and probably other files too, but if you've just re-installed it's not likely to be those.

To me as a builder, I've had terrible crashes like you describe when I've deleted custom ground terrains. These are hugely buggy and basically shouldnot be used at all IMHO!

[Kala]

At first I thought the crashes had to do with the no townies hack, but taking it out of downloads didn't help.  I deleted most of my custome terians because I don't like them, so I hope that works.  I din't get to do much in my custome hood before things got freaky.

[Regina]

Your problem may've come from breaking cardinal rule #1:  you moved existing families to the housing bin, then put them back into a neighborhood.  This can create absolutely HUGE problems with your neighborhoods in that all their memories have to go back into the game and creates literally hundreds of character files in your neighborhood for one sim alone.

What I would do, and have done for that matter is the following:

Use SimPE to make copies of the sims you want to save.  You do this by opening SimPE, going to Tools>Neighborhood Browser and choosing the neighborhood.  Once that loads scroll down in the list on the top left-hand side of the screen to SimDescription and click on that.  This will load (right of the screen) all the sims in that neighborhood.  You can see their names listed.  Next, click Tools>SimSurgery.  Now on the left side of your screen you'll see a panel that shows thumbnails of all the sims in that neighborhood.  On the right side you'll see the SimSurgery section.  Click on the sim you want to export (keep in mind, this only exports their genetics).  Now their face should show in the top section of the right side.  Click 'use' then 'export'.  This will give you the option of saving this sim, in this case in your SavedSims folder.  I just give them their sim name as their file names so in case I want to delete them later I can find them easily (you can't delete them from BodyShop).

In order to save their houses with the furnishings, use Inge's mod as recommended above, and move each and every family from the houses you're wishing to save into the family bin.  Now, move the houses themselves into the Lot Bin.

Before uninstalling your game for re-installation you'll want to make a lot of back-ups.  These are the folders you need and they're all found under MyDocuments>EAGames>TheSims2:  Downloads (if you have custom content installed), LotCatalog (this is where your houses in the House Bin are stored) and SavedSims (this is where any clothing you may've created and sims saved in SimPE are stored), Collections (if you've made custom collections the info is stored in this folder), Projects (if you make custom clothing, etc.).

If you want to create the sims exactly as they were you'll need to make note of their personality traits, turn-ons and turn-offs and skills.

Oh, I keep forgetting!  When you install your game and expansions, once your game starts you'll need to enable custom content, then re-start your game.

[Kala]

I've decided it would be best for me to just chuck old SimMathews.  I didn't know I broke cardinal rule #1  I've done it (two or three) before with little side effects. either way, I'm just going to play in Pleasentland and leave it at that.

[Kala]

What kind of trouble will I get in if I download maxis families from the exchange?  I know I can seach for the vanilla versions, but is there anything else I need to be warry of?

[BlueSoup]

Don't do it.  They often come with character files from friends they've gotten in the uploaders games, which can make your game explode into a big fiery ball visible from space.

[qvcatullus]

Would anyone care to speculate on why Maxis never bothered to anticipate problems like this? Or would that just be pointless/dangerous?

[angelyne]

Whatever you do, do not put families from the exchange into your game.  That's a sure way to mess things up big time.  If there is a family that you MUST have you can always recreate it if you have lots of patience.  You can always import the family into a temporary neighbourhood that must be totally separate from your "good" game.  Move the family to the family bin. Package the house. Then export the chars with SimsPE using the method described above and re-create the family in CAS.  This way you can recreate a squeaky clean version of a family from the exchange with none of the hazards associated with just tossing it in your game.

If that's something you want to do I can go into more detailed steps

[Kala]

I'm not going to try and remake the maxis families I lost.  I'm not even going to download the bin families from Sim Estates.

[cwykes]

I don't know why you re-installed, but for future reference...  If there is a game problem it is most likely to be something in your My Documents folder and probably something in either the downloads folder or one of your neighbourhood folders.  If you move everything out of your My documents\...sims2 folder onto the desktop or somewhere out of the way and start the game, you will get a whole new and clean game including the original neighbourhoods to play with.  If you had a problem before you did that and the game runs fine afterwards, I take that to mean the problem is in your game folders not the program files and re-installing is pointless.  You can put your own files and folders back over the top of the maxis ones in chunks.  When the problem comes back you know which set of folders it was in.

Experienced simmers will only offer sims created in CAS for download.  They have no memories of other sims.  It's downloading sims that have been played a lot that is the bad thing.  Sims that have been played very little are not so dangerous which certainly led me into a false sense of complacency.   Another dangerous thing is to move an occupied lot into the lots and houses bin.  That creates all the extra files it needs to be self-sufficient in case you decide to move it somewhere else.  I caused most of my problems doing that while I rearranged the map.  As an alternative to SimPE, Simenhancer is a nice easy way to clean up a neighbourhood - you get a free trial. 

The real moral is - get things from people you trust and don't trust blindly!  If you get cleaninstaller from Modthesims2 you will be able to see what you have downloaded before you put it in your game.  That works wonderfully well for me.