Want to move the ENTIRE family to a new 'hood--will this plan work?

[Regina]

As my sim self has just turned into an elder and is just a tad bit older than I am in RL, I found myself pondering about the ugly, horribly Strangetown in which she lives which so much resembles my RL surroundings.  I decided even though I may be stuck in my own Strangetown for the rest of my life there's no way I'm going to allow my Sim-self that same fate.

So, thanks to that new memory nuker which I've been using extensively to see if would mess up a test neighborhood and so far hasn't, I hatched a plan and want to know if anyone else thinks this will work.  (Keep in mind I don't have OFB yet and would like to do this BEFORE I get it.)

First off, the family is just a bit extended, with 4 children not living at home, one in Uni who'd have to be advanced through before the move.  The three oldest children are on their own, some married, etc., etc.

First off, I would get the one in Uni graduated and moved back to the main neighborhood.  Then, using that no-family size limit mod, invite all of the children, their spouses and children (there are only a couple) to move back in with the parents.

Once they were all in the same house I'd close down the game and with the upgraded memory manager in SimPE, go through and delete all of the memories of all the OTHER sims in the neighborhood, which has the extremely awesome ability of taking away all memories of any sim that had anything at all to do with them, even if it's hearing through six other sims about that sim's first kiss with Mystery Sim!

Once that was done I'd delete all of the other sims character files, and once that was accomplished, start up the game, pick up the whole entire houseful of that one family of sims and their little branches, put them in the family bin then move them to a BEAUTIFUL, lush new neighborhood.

So, does anyone think this should work?  I'm really getting pretty desperate to get them into someplace that looks less like Perfection, Nevada and possibly more like Roseburg, Oregon!  (Owyhee County, Idaho desert rat, myself, who would LOVE to move to Roseburg if the climate wouldn't kill me!)

[gali]

You make your life complicated....

As long as all the family is in one house, exit to the hood, and move the house to the house bin. Then pass to the hood you want, and plant the house there.

All the members will lose their relationships with Strangetown residents, and I think they will not have memories about them (because they won't appear in the relationship panel). So don't delete any memories with the SimPe - it's redundant.

I moved the Grunt family to a new hood (custom), and they lost the memories they had about their friends and enemies - and I didn't have the SimPe then.

Just be sure that ALL family members are in the same house; I moved Ripp's house once to the house bin, and he lost the relationships with the family.

[Sleepycat]

Regina,

1, get everyone on 1 Lot + make a list of who is on the Lot
2, package it to a file
3, exit game
4, using clean installer, install Lot - removing all sims that are Not on the Lot (note -sometimes clean installer has trouble installing occupied Lots)
5, enter game/new hood and place Lot
6, exit game
7, run the simpe- memory plugin an "fix memories"

thats it, all nicely moved, no extra tag-a-long character files (like you would get doing it the way gali does)

edit to mention - according to JM, putting occupied Lots in the Bin is very BAD!! Don't Do It!!

[Regina]

You make your life complicated....

As long as all the family is in one house, exit to the hood, and move the house to the house bin. Then pass to the hood you want, and plant the house there.

All the members will lose their relationships with Strangetown residents, and I think they will not have memories about them (because they won't appear in the relationship panel). So don't delete any memories with the SimPe - it's redundant.

I moved the Grunt family to a new hood (custom), and they lost the memories they had about their friends and enemies - and I didn't have the SimPe then.

Just be sure that ALL family members are in the same house; I moved Ripp's house once to the house bin, and he lost the relationships with the family.

Way early on, before I knew any better, I moved a sim family that had been in one neighborhood to another.  Their memories weren't erased.  Although their family ties were cut, with them came the baggage of over 200 sims they were either related to or had met in some capacity.  Each one of those sims were created in new character files.

Another time before I knew better, I picked up a sim in her house and put her in the lot bin.  When I replaced her in the neighborhood there were double character files of everyone in that neighborhood she had met.

These two cases fubared a couple of good neighborhoods and I really don't want to do that again.

[Regina]

Regina,

1, get everyone on 1 Lot + make a list of who is on the Lot
2, package it to a file
3, exit game
4, using clean installer, install Lot - removing all sims that are Not on the Lot (note -sometimes clean installer has trouble installing occupied Lots)
5, enter game/new hood and place Lot
6, exit game
7, run the simpe- memory plugin an "fix memories"

thats it, all nicely moved, no extra tag-a-long character files (like you would get doing it the way gali does)

edit to mention - according to JM, putting occupied Lots in the Bin is very BAD!! Don't Do It!!

Thank you, Sleepycat!  Everything's all backed up, just in case.  I'll take notes here so I can do it right--and let my niece get online for her geography assignment!

Edited to add:  I know it's a very, very bad idea!  That's why I was trying to figure out a way to do it as safely as possible.  I don't want to lose the family ties, thus deciding to put them all on one lot for the move.  However, I do need for them to suffer a sudden bump to the head and have almost total amnesia! LOL

[Sleepycat]

your welcome 


If clean installer does screw up installing the Lot then just delete the messed up Lot and try again. 

[Regina]

Good idea!  I'll try it in a test neighborhood just to make sure it's going to work.  I can always 'deleteallcharacters' in the test hood if things go awry.

[RainbowTigress]

My experience with moving the Goth house to Strangetown (when I believed those fables at the BBS that something special would happen when they met Bella) was the same as yours Regina.  Every sim they had ever come in contact with came over in the form of unlinked character files.  Then I compounded the problem by bringing the Goth house back to Pleasantview, so both neighborhoods were messed up.  I think I have them straightened out fairly well, but Mortimer's dead ancestors still insist on being duplicated.  I never could understand why the extra files kept coming back.  And the memories of meeting and interacting with those other sims do not get erased.  This is why JM says it's a bad thing.  These loose ends can lead to errors down the road when the game tries to reference one of these invalid references, and all the extra characters add to the deadweight of the neighborhood, pushing you that much farther toward the BFBVFS.  The only way around it is if you manually erase all these references, which isn't as hard when the sims are new and there aren't as many to deal with.  But it's very hard to get rid of all those loose ends, so unless you're willing to go through all that, the standard advice is not to do it.

I had downloaded some houses from Sims Estates that had the original Newbies and Goths and some of the other original families from Sims 1 recreated for Sims 2.  I could not install the occupied houses with clean installer, and this is what the site owner told me to do.  Instead of double clicking on the package as usual, shift+right-click on it, and choose Open With.  Choose The Sims 2 Body Shop Package Installer.  That will launch the original TS2 installer, and you shouldn't have any problems with it then.  Of course, this is a file you created, so you would know what was in the file.  If it's a file you got from somewhere else, I would recommend opening it in clean installer first to see what's in it.  You may be able to modify the file by deleting stuff you don't want and then re-saving it, but do this at your own risk because I haven't tried it myself.

[angelyne]

how about this for thinking out of the box.

If the only think you don't like is the look of the neighbourhood, why not just perform a little "surgery" http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=151.0

[RainbowTigress]

I dunno, those are some pretty bad side effects! 

[Regina]

Yeah--I think the side effects could be worse than what I'm thinking of attempting! 

Actually, I had thought about doing that but then got to thinking about my custom terrains I've made that I would also really like to use, so was thinking in the long run it might be worth going the long route.

Rainbow have you tried the new memory editing plug-in for SimPE?  It's found here in Peasantry and let me tell you, it's a marvel!  You can delete memories cascade-style.  Say for example you wanted to delete Mortimer from your neighborhood but of course 99 other sims have memories associated with him.  You load up the memory plug-in, find Mortimer in the character list, then click 'nuke all', then the commit button and of course save the hood.  You'll get a little pop-up saying how many memories were deleted from the entire neighborhood, which in this case would be a lot of memories.  This is why I thought of deleting all the memories from all the other sims in that neighborhood because by doing so I would also be deleting all the memories those family members have associated to all the other sims without harming their memories, and without going through one-by-one and deleting.  Once the memories are nuked, it's then safe to delete the character file.  I've been playing exclusively in one neighborhood the past few days, nuking memories and sims right and left, and so far haven't run into any problems.

[RainbowTigress]

Yes, I've tried that plugin, Regina, and I agree, it's wonderful.  I did use it on my old Pleasantview, which is why I've got it somewhat in good shape now.  I still don't know what's going on with Mortimer's ancestors.  I did delete his one aunt, but I had a problem with her coming back every time I ran the game, even though I deleted her character file.  I wondered if she had another file somewhere.  I didn't mess with the others, but every time I click on Gunther Goth in the Family Ties editor, I get an error message.  I always choose to continue because the other choice is to quit SimPE.  I'm not sure what that's about.  I got the same error when trying to edit Pascal and Vidcund Curious' alien sons' family ties.  I think theirs has something to do with the change they made in NL with the Pollination Tech and family ties.  I didn't know what else to do, and it doesn't seem to be affecting the game right now, so I left it alone.

[Regina]

Rainbow, I was going to say this earlier and then I forgot!  I had the same problem, with character files regenerating in Strangetown.  I had used the Deleteallcharacters code before moving anyone into it.  When I ran SimPE for the first time (I had made one family, a few townies, generated my Downtown) there were a bunch of the original characters' files that shouldn't have been there.  No doubt it's something haywire in the programming.  My guess is Maxis figured either people would play in-game hoods or start on fresh ones.  I was wishing I had started fresh! LOL

I've had the error message in SimPE also, and usually choose to continue.  I've noticed it happening on other occasions after using the program for a long period of time and thought perhaps it had something to do with a memory leak, but I have no idea if the program really has a memory leak or not, just my supposing.

[cwykes]

When you start playing the lot, check to see if all the sims are aging OK.  I moved a family recently and had problems with sims not aging (endless baby and toddler hood!!!).  I think it was to do with using the tombstone of L&D to move the sims in.  Better to use "move in" if you can, but when you are over 8 on a lot that doesnt' work. 

I knew I was going to move them and didn't let them meet anyone, but cleaning out the memories of the ones they met accidentally was still a pain.  I think MAXIS need to do a new version of lotpackager that lobotomises the sims rather than taking relationships and memories with them - like a townie move in. Cleaning up the mess afterwards is a stupid way of doing things.  I did a post with an attempt at a spec for a new lotpackger in the hope someone could get Maxis to listen.
 http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2566.0

Aren't there problems with DNA and wants and fears when you delete sims?  Inge's mentioned both these here
http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=1731
I don't know about DNA, but I know the sims I've copied to another hood have zilch in their wants and fears history and aren't throwing the wants they used to throw.  My master painter fortune sim didn't act like she had maxed creativity and isn't throwing wants to paint masterpieces any more... 

[Ancient Sim]

Although the new memory plug-in does delete all the memories, it doesn't delete the relationships and all Sims who knew the removed Sims have a relationship with "Unknown" left behind, so you have to delete those manually.  If you're going to move the entire family en masse, the best way would be to put them all into one house and put it into the Lots & Houses Bin, as someone else mentioned.  You can then package it, remove all the excess rubbish with Clean Installer, place it in the neighbourhood, then come straight out (without playing the lot) and remove all the memories and "Unknown" relationships.  That's how I've been doing it with families I've transferred from neighbourhoods I no longer wanted to play and I've had absolutely no problems with them whatsoever.  The Beakers are now happily annoying the hell out of everyone in Pleasantview, to name just one, and I even transferred over a family containing a woman pregnant with twins and nothing untoward happened with them, either (well, she did have a miscarriage, but that was the Kitten Killer, not the transferring).

[angelyne]

I dunno, those are some pretty bad side effects! 

What side effects?  I was toying with the idea of doing it, so inquiring minds want to know

[RainbowTigress]

I dunno, those are some pretty bad side effects! 

What side effects?  I was toying with the idea of doing it, so inquiring minds want to know

WARNING:
Side effects include dry mouth, nausea, vomiting, water retention, painful rectal itch, hallucinations, dementia, psychosis, coma, death, and halitosis. Terrain replacement is not for everyone. Consult your doctor before use.

Funny how death comes before halitosis.