Neighborhood corruption

[Ellatrue]

Okay, I accidentally removed an inhabited lot from my neighborhood, and it was moved to the lot bin. Can I safely place it back in the neighborhood without corrupting everything? The reason that I ask is that once when I installed an inhabited home from another computer, the files seemed to contain character data on every single person the family had ever met (on the other computer, I mean). Now my strangetown neighborhood is messed up, and when I go into SimPE I see that there often seem to be two of every character...

I am afraid that this could somehow happen in this situation as well. I realize that they have lost all their relationships and family ties, but I could restore those with certain unmentionable hacks and I want to return them to the neighborhood (or move them to a new one). And would it corrupt everything if I just dropped the lot in another neighborhood and pretended that they left town?

Also, how do I configure trillian to use the chat?

[J. M. Pescado]

No. Never install an inhabited, played lot. If your sims have met anyone or have any family, do not attempt to put them back. It is possible to recover the lost sims from their character stubs with some file manipulation if you had a neighborhood backup, but otherwise, you're hosed. Better just flag them as "Dead" in SimPE for completion, and figure the family was killed in a helicopter crash.

[cheriem]

I still want to know how you configure trillian to use chat.

[nectere]

JMP if she did some clean up couldnt she drop them in a clean custom hood? (without any characters there?) It seems to me she could create a new hood, delete all characters, add notownieregen and then place the family. Go to simpe and do the neccessary cleanup work and tie up all the loose ends as well as restore all the proper relationships?

No?

Ellatrue - look here

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1670.0

scroll down to reply #29 for trillian set up

[Katze]

I still want to know how you configure trillian to use chat.

Go to this threat that should help you.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1670.msg56080#msg56080

[cheriem]

Read, followed instructions, now how do I see who is chatting and how do I enter the conversation.

[Ellatrue]

weep weep weep

what sort of file manipulation?

[syberspunk]

No. Never install an inhabited, played lot. If your sims have met anyone or have any family, do not attempt to put them back. It is possible to recover the lost sims from their character stubs with some file manipulation if you had a neighborhood backup, but otherwise, you're hosed. Better just flag them as "Dead" in SimPE for completion, and figure the family was killed in a helicopter crash.

ROFLMAO! Poor family. Storywise, just think of it as an earthquake that swallowed their house whole. As for the file manipulation... it probably requires a lot of tedious, time-consuming and frustrating work.

Alternatively... you could Clone the family, using SimPE. Open Sims Surgery and extract all the sims in that family, and save them in your SavedSims directory. Then... go into CAS and rebuild the family. Move them into a NEW house (DO NOT put back the old house containing the old family into your game!!!). Then you could say that your family was like reborn and have entered the witness protecction program with new identities, or came from an alternate dimension, or perhaps the whole family was disposed of by a family of evil twins or spies who have undergone facial reconstructive surgery and assumed the identity of your family that has mysterioiusly vanished. At least in this way, you sort of "save" your family, but you'd have to rebuild any relationships that previously existing, starting from scratch. Unless you want to painstaikingly go through SimPE and add back all the memories and what not manually.

Read, followed instructions, now how do I see who is chatting and how do I enter the conversation.

This is so off topic, lol. But right click on your IRC connection, and there should be an option for "join channel"
Type grah in the dialog box, hit enter, and voila, you should be in chat!

With trillian, it should open up like a chat room window, with the user list on the right, the main chat window on the left, and place for you to enter text at the bottom. 

Ste

[ZephyrZodiac]

I had to clone a whole neighbourhood, and it's a lot of hard work!  But I just started every family from scratch, although I did copy over all the correct interests and personality.  Only relationship editing I did was for Dustin Broke and Dirk Dreamer, since I cloned them from YAs and they didn't know they had family!

[J. M. Pescado]

weep weep weep

what sort of file manipulation?

Do you have a backup? If so, it's possible to resurrect their character data by splicing the "large" versions from the old neighborhood into your new one, overwriting the "small" gutted versions in the Characters directory for your neighborhood.

That resurrects your sims as live sims instead of broken sims. You can then move them back onto lots using the Ingelogical shrub, and see if their memories are intact. If they are, then you need to reinitialize all their relationships, either manually, or simply in-game, correcting all the fiddlybits if the game does not properly reinstate family flags and whatnot in SimPE. If your sims' memories have been shredded, you'll have to manually reconstruct them by copying each entry by hand from the old neighborhood backup, then reconstructing from memory any memories that were added between the time you backed it up, and the time you fatfingered it.

[Ellatrue]

I think I have a backup of them as teens and kids, before they got married and started their family. How can I remove the characters from that file while still leaving the rest of the neighborhood unchanged? I am not very adept at SimPE, I can only do simsurgery and use the wizard. The last time I tried extracting a sim it got weird... Is there any way I can avoid CAS? For some other, unknown reason, whenever I try to choose a pre-existing male sim, it crashes the game... or, is there any way to fix this?

[angelyne]

What I would do in your case is use SimsPE to export the appearance of your sims, using sim surgery in order to recreate your family.  That does involve CAS, which is a problem for you. It sounds to me like you might have a corrupted file that is causing your game to crash when you try to use a pre-existing male sim.  To test this theory, move your download folder to your desktop and try loading up CAS again and see if it crashes. ( DON'T load any lot without your download folder though).  If it's fine you'll have to identify the file that is the problem.  Load up clean installer and take a peek at your files.  Character files are usually one of those long file names, and don't have a category in Clean Installer..  Hopefully you wont have a gazillion of those, because the only way to be sure that they are indeed character files, is to open them one by one with SimsPE.

Ok now if your CAS does STILL crash with the download folder temporarily absent, you can also move the content of the savedsims folder somewhere else on your computer.  That contains the sims you have created with BodyShop.  That's a simpler problem, because there is nothing of real importance in that folder, except your custom template sims.

Anyway, this is getting long-winded.  The idea is that you need to load up CAS in order to recreate your family. If for some reason you simply can't use your existing game  to do so, you can always try it with a fresh copy of the Sims (by loading the Sims under a new user in XP for example) and using the exported file from Sim Surgery, recreate the family.  In SimsPE you can adjust the attributes to match the ones of your previous sims.  Then you can package your family for export into your game.

[Ellatrue]

(mourns) my poor simmies!

now I am having more issues with CAS that need to be solved... what have I done?
I tried deleting a number of the saved sims with bodyshop (all the funky ones with no hair) and disabling all the files in my savedsims folder, but when I went in to select a pre-existing sim, the game still crashed... it seems that these files exist somewhere outside of the savedsims folder, because there were only ten files in there and I have at least 50 downloaded sims... and the second time I went to load bodyshop, it crashed as well when I tried to create a new sim...

[ZephyrZodiac]

If you install them with the Sims2Pack Installer, they end up in downloads as files with great long file names.  You can use SimPE to find out which they are.  Ones you made yourself in simSurgery come as a normal .package file, and you probably put those into Saved Sims yourself.

I don't know about the Bodyshop issue, I never use it because I never found it worked properly.

[Ellatrue]

When you open them in SimPE, how do you know it is a character file? I assume you can tell because it will contain something about "age data," but I'm not sure.

[ZephyrZodiac]

You shouldn't need to open the individual files, just open the downloads folder and when it loads, you will have a list of files.  Some of those files may have  "Person" in the description.  what they won't have is "Clothing", "Object" etc.  You can also use the Clean Installer to check the downloads folder but it won't give you the file names.  You need to note down which of the files are character files, then when you have closed SimPE you can remove them from the Downloads folder. 

There may also be an enormous amount of hair, clothing, make-up etc., that came with the downloaded sims.  If you normally keep these in a separate folder, then it's not going to be easy to find that you have duplicates.  However, if you have files with long file-names followed by .001, .002 etc., these are frequently duplicated files.  Unless there's anything you particularly want to keep, I'd be inclined to ditch the lot.

[Renatus]

You can also use the Clean Installer to check the downloads folder but it won't give you the file names.  You need to note down which of the files are character files, then when you have closed SimPE you can remove them from the Downloads folder. 

Actually, it will, but not directly -  hover your mouse pointer over a name and a little thing pops up with the file name.

[ZephyrZodiac]

You learn something every day!  I'd really never noticed that!

[Ellatrue]

so, is there any way to clean up the extra character files in a neighborhood that has already been corrupted? I realize I have probably messed up two previous neighborhoods in this way

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, firstly, any files you find with Clean Installer in Downloads (which have long file names) can be deleted.  Any sims who have anything like custom hair which belonged to those files will just either go bald or get Maxis hair.  If they go bald, just replace the hair in the mirror.

Here comes the hard part.  You need to open SimPE (I find the Classic version better for this) and open your Neighborhood Folder, then if you feel it's worth it with an already corrupt hood, back up the one you want to work with.  Open that hood, then open SimBrowser.  Once the character files have all loaded, scroll down slowly, looking for two or more files of the same sim.  (Ignore ghosts.) 

When you find duplicates, they will have either a red or blue dot on the photo.  Open these files and you will see that they have nothing in the Relations file.  Go to the Extended page, and check the box called Miscellaneous.  You will see a box marked Unlinked, which for a normal sim would have the number 0x0000 beside it.  If it has anything else, then this is definitely only a clone of your sim.  Look at the right hand top corner of the editor and you will see the package file number for that character. Write it down.

If you found anything in the Relations page at all, then you will need to firstly edit the memories of any sim this clone has met while wandering around your hood.  To do this, first you need to note down the Sim GUID for that character, then Click on Neighborhood/Memory under Filetypes and again in the top main panel.  This will open the Neighbourhood Memory Files, and you will need to scroll down until you find each sim that this clone has met.  Look through the memories until you find "Met John Doe + the SimGUID you noted down" and click on it and click delete.  When you have done this, press Commit and edit any others in the same way, commit each time, then return to Sim Browser, and find those files and open the Relations page for each.  You will either find Met John Doh etc or more likely Met Unknown. You need to delete these relations too, and again, commit everything you have done.

When you have done the first, you need to do the same for each unlinked sim you find.  When you have finished (or maybe just done one family to start with) close SimPE and make sure you tell it to save the changes.  Then open MyDocuments/EAGames/theSims/Neighborhoods/N00X/Characters.  Scroll down until you find the first package file number you noted down, and delete it.  It should be much smaller than the original.  Most of these files will probably be near the end of the list and easy to find.

Once you have edited one family, you could try loading your game and going into that lot to see if the family is playing correctly - but don't save anything that you do while there in case any more clones appear on the lot.

It's a long, slow process to be sure you haven't made things worse, and I wish you luck - I know from experience how long it takes!