Empty and Cleaned-up Templates. [UPDATED]

[Miss-BD]

I followed these directions. Checked thrice for good measure, and I'm still getting the two dumb pets families: Kitty condo and forgotTheName. What have I forgotten, overlooked and/or missed.

EMPTY PETS TEMPLATE

Pets gives you several occupied houses. To get rid of them, delete the files in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Pets\TSData\Res\UserData\LotCatalog

The rest of the Pets sims come with the neighborhood.

Download: http://www.box.net/public/0g2fvth4pb

    * Open C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Pets\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\
    * Make a backup of the P001 folder
    * Open the P001 folder. Delete everything inside the Characters folder and delete the file P001_Neighborhood.package
    * Unzip the downloaded file, which is P001_Neighborhood.package. Place this into the P001 folder.

You need to delete the contents of the lot catalog in P001 to get rid of them.

Just curious but is this supposed to include the Kim family in the "Nuclear Nest" house (which is flagged as Pets)? Because I have cleared out the C:\...\Pets\...\LotCatalog folder but this household still appears in the occupied houses bins.
It's entirely possible I've missed something, but I just thought I'd ask about it first.

[cocomo]

This is the problem that I'm having.  Used clean belladona templates (E001 & E002), but still spawning 65 character files after creating a new hood.  I've been using clean templates for the longest time (so I know what I'm doing and I can follow directions), but this is really stumping me.  After spawning the 65 character files can I just delete them before creating my sims?

[Jelenedra]

Do you have antiredundancy installed? It's supposed to prevent the game from spawning the social group townies.

[cocomo]

Do you have antiredundancy installed? It's supposed to prevent the game from spawning the social group townies.

I do.  I'm going to dl it again and see what happens.

Edit:  D/L it and I still have 65 freaking files.  This is driving me nuts! 

[Jelenedra]

Can you open the files in SimPE and see what they're supposed to be?

[cocomo]

I opened it twice before and I had a few npcs, but I had alot of potato heads.

EDIT:  I think I figured it out.  I opened simpe and went through the list again and saw that they were bv npcs and townies.  I never used a clean template for bv and I'm about to do that right now.  I think that's my problem.

[cocomo]

Jelenedra, thanks so much!  The problem was that I didn't use a clean bv template.  Completely forgot.   

[Jelenedra]

Glad I could be of service.

[sloppyhousewife]

Do you have antiredundancy installed? It's supposed to prevent the game from spawning the social group townies.

Jelenedra,

My download folder has all of the hacks for blocking excess NPCs, townies, and dormies.  All work as expected through the FreeTime EP.

As with being able to keep unwanted dormies out, I had hoped I could keep by unused apartments vacant.  With the Apartment Life EP, however, these hacks DID NOT prevent the spawning of social group townies.  When I rented an apartment, 3 townies from one social group were generated to fill the building.  Additionally, when I went to look for a roommate, 8 townies from a second social group were generated.

I suspect this occurred because base game townies which are blocked are listed in one family (XXXXFFE in SimPE) and the social groups are listed in 5 other families.

So a new hack will probably have to be developed to keep social townies from being generated.  This is probably also the case for the spawning of vacation townies and locals; although, I have never played with an empty neighborhood to see if this is true.

The game will spawn townies when necessary, despite the hacks. Obviously, it needs social townies for the unoccupied apartments, and also for roomies. If you have no apartments, you won't get social townies.

[Roux]

Do you have antiredundancy installed? It's supposed to prevent the game from spawning the social group townies.

Jelenedra,

My download folder has all of the hacks for blocking excess NPCs, townies, and dormies.  All work as expected through the FreeTime EP.

As with being able to keep unwanted dormies out, I had hoped I could keep by unused apartments vacant.  With the Apartment Life EP, however, these hacks DID NOT prevent the spawning of social group townies.  When I rented an apartment, 3 townies from one social group were generated to fill the building.  Additionally, when I went to look for a roommate, 8 townies from a second social group were generated.

I suspect this occurred because base game townies which are blocked are listed in one family (XXXXFFE in SimPE) and the social groups are listed in 5 other families.

So a new hack will probably have to be developed to keep social townies from being generated.  This is probably also the case for the spawning of vacation townies and locals; although, I have never played with an empty neighborhood to see if this is true.

The game will spawn townies when necessary, despite the hacks. Obviously, it needs social townies for the unoccupied apartments, and also for roomies. If you have no apartments, you won't get social townies.

It also bears mentioning that you can reassign your existing townies to social groups using Inge's teleporter cat (AL version, of course). It's working like a charm for me so far: the townies I reassigned have been moving into unoccupied apartments without any apparent ill effects. I have 20 total, 4 in each group.

You could also make your own social group townies in CAS and then assign them to social groups using the teleporter.

[BirmanKat]

Ok...   I grabbed the two empty hoods from giggy, and have a question about them.

Are these hoods cleaned, and empty?  Or are there sims in them?  I need to know this before I add them to the collection I am hosting on K and B Designs.  (BTW  the name and URL will be changing soon.  Preview of name:  The Kats Meow.  Have to change the name, because some meatheads keep emailing me asking where the kitchen and bath stuff is.  D**b you EAxis for using that name.)

Birman Kat

[EsotericPolarBear]

At the risk of invoking the ire of the informed, what is the purpose of a cleaned template hood?

Do "clean" hoods still spawn all the necessary townies/roomies/dormies/etc for gameplay purposes?

i.e. If I don't plan on custom creating every house and every sub-hood and just want to play normally, what would be the difference in going through the trouble of getting all the cleaned templates or simply moving out the EAxis families I don't want?

[edalbformat]

I have no patience to read all about, but from experience I know that you cannot reuse a lot house where you deleted the characters by cleaning up the hood. A house keeps a lot of information such as relationships and even job info and other details that is specially related to a resident Sim. If you enter a house emptied in the root, the game crash to the desktop (in worst it freezes and you have to hard shut down the computer).
If you are intending to reuse the original game houses, try a clean-up version where the supplied playable Sims are kept. I have a personal version for this and had no problems at all. Both FreeTime and Appartments have something good in it - all the townies/NPCs are the last character numbers (about 70 of each - aarrgh!) and are very easy to delete.
Procedure:

Open the hood that is located in UserData not the template;
This hood is played only to the point that NPCs and Townies are included, so they are the last characters or are in the exactly place where they should be;

Open Simbrowser and cross only NPC and Townies and uncross the others.
Take note of all the character numbers, they should be just a long sequence.

Open Memory and check if Sims have any memory of a townie or NPC and delete it. So far I know that only Daniel Pleasant and Don Lothario contacted Kaylynn Lange whatever. In Appartment, the sisters Cordial contacted some witches. Delete them too, it is very difficult to select only one Sim. Normally you end up by messing up and getting an unknown char.

Close SimPe and delete all the character numbers you took note.

Open SimPe and in Sims description you will have a lot of unknown. There are only 5 Unknown that you have to keep and it is easy to identify them. They are in the lot 0000 (default). All the others are in the lots FFFF and FFFE. Delete all of them, they are only townies and npcs.

Open Simbrowser again and cross all the alternatives. You should see only playable and dead sims, and of course, the game objects (hulas, hummers, bigfoot, etc).

That is it!

By deleting all npcs and townies, you also delete roommates (unless you chose the hard way and keep some that are in the special families - very difficult in my opinion). They will be recreated. If you don't want Maxis roommates or don't have a proper CASFace replacement, create a couple of Sim families, move them to an empty lot and make them all to townies. Inge Jones has a teleporter for appartment that works feilfree.
Those user-made townies will be chosen as alternative for roommates (still didn't test) as logic supposition.

In the case of someone that had a problem with clean templates - probably you deleted the main residents of an appartment and didn't properly deleted the fictitious resident of the other appartments. They are just visitors, with a new classification - roommates. Never try to select them when playing, they get back the status of visitors and you start to get messages that it is too late and they have to leave. So they freeze. They are really Non-playable.
 

[seelindarun]

i.e. If I don't plan on custom creating every house and every sub-hood and just want to play normally, what would be the difference in going through the trouble of getting all the cleaned templates or simply moving out the EAxis families I don't want?

It's really quite impossible to tell what you mean by 'normal' gameplay.  As far as I'm concerned, my way is normal and all others are freaky.
The purpose of empty and cleaned templates is mostly all about the townies.  If you like the townies that EA ships then you don't need clean or empty templates.

If you're mostly concerned with cleansing yourself of the playables then you can obliterate them as per the Boogaloo thread, or you can just make them into townies.  Just don't EVER delete them from the sim bin.  I would not recommend taking the advice of people who have no patience to read.

For the purposes of gameplay, in a completely empty 'hood townies and NPCs are generated as needed.  If you install noregen hacks, that usually means a minimum, as in one.

[EsotericPolarBear]

It's really quite impossible to tell what you mean by 'normal' gameplay.  As far as I'm concerned, my way is normal and all others are freaky.

haha, for the purposes of my question, let's define "normal" as "un-tampered-with".

The purpose of empty and cleaned templates is mostly all about the townies.  If you like the townies that EA ships then you don't need clean or empty templates.

If you're mostly concerned with cleansing yourself of the playables then you can obliterate them as per the Boogaloo thread, or you can just make them into townies.  Just don't EVER delete them from the sim bin.  I would not recommend taking the advice of people who have no patience to read.

For the purposes of gameplay, in a completely empty 'hood townies and NPCs are generated as needed.  If you install noregen hacks, that usually means a minimum, as in one.

Ahh, I see.  I typically need townies, otherwise such wants as "have 20 simultaneous lovers" would go unfulfilled since I only make one or two families.

However, I went ahead and installed all the clean templates, just to see what would happen (I'm impatient) and then used the mailbox to batch create townies and downtownies to populate my hood.

I now have a new question...although I think it may actually belong in another thread at this point, but it's almost related:

How will an empty hood handle social groups and what the heck are social groups anyway?

[seelindarun]

Well, wiping out several hundred townies and NPCs would qualify as some serious tampering, so it would seem this is pretty far from your normal style of play.

Installing the empty templates just gives you a blank slate for your neighbourhood.  How you choose to fill it is up to you.  Everyone needs townies, but there are nearly as many ways to make them as there are players.  For more opinions about different ways to populate your pristine new 'hood, you can search or start a thread.

I don't have enough experience with social groups to advise properly, but you can stimulate the game to make some if you play apartment lots and try to get roommates.  You may or may not like the townies the game makes for you, if you allow it to generate them.  Of note, there is currently a thread in Podium about the non-random generation of social group townies.

[Kitte]

I'm using the empty Belladonna Cove templates, but when I try to bulldoze a couple of the apartment buildings, the game tells me I have to move out the families.  It's weird, the building thinks there is a family in it, but there's no family to move out.  So, I can't move the family the building thinks is in there and I can't bulldoze the building.  What did I screw up?

I haven't seen an answer to this, but I have the same issue.  The Belladonna Cove apartment buildings that came with MAXIS Sims in them can't be modified, deleted, etc. even after using the clean, empty template.  It says there is a family there (no name) and gives the amount of family funds.  Is it okay to remove some of the Lots in addition to the Character files in the Userdata/Neighborhoods/E001 folder when creating a clean, empty E001 neighborhood?  I don't use SimPE much, but I assume there is a way to identify the Lots that were pre-made with playables? (Or maybe someone can tell me another way.)

EDIT: I was wrong - the lots can be modified.  Changelotzoning works.  Once the lot is changed to Residential, it can be bulldozed.

[Mootilda]

I'm using the empty Belladonna Cove templates, but when I try to bulldoze a couple of the apartment buildings, the game tells me I have to move out the families.  It's weird, the building thinks there is a family in it, but there's no family to move out.  So, I can't move the family the building thinks is in there and I can't bulldoze the building.  What did I screw up?

I haven't seen an answer to this, but I have the same issue.  The Belladonna Cove apartment buildings that came with MAXIS Sims in them can't be modified, deleted, etc. even after using the clean, empty template.  It says there is a family there (no name) and gives the amount of family funds.  Is it okay to remove some of the Lots in addition to the Character files in the Userdata/Neighborhoods/E001 folder when creating a clean, empty E001 neighborhood?  I don't use SimPE much, but I assume there is a way to identify the Lots that were pre-made with playables? (Or maybe someone can tell me another way.)

When a family moves into an apartment building, that lot is cloned.  The cloned (occupied) apartment sublot gets the same name as the (unoccupied) apartment base, followed by the family number.  So, you can easily find apartment sublots in SimPE by sorting the Lot Descriptions by name and scanning down for nearly-identical names.  Once you find one, the plugin view will tell you whether the lot is an apartment base, an apartment sublot, or some other type of lot.

However, I'm not sure that it's a good idea to just delete an apartment sublot, since the apartment base contains information about each of the (occupied) apartment sublots.  There's a possibility that EA's code isn't checking for non-existent sublots.  It's clear that they aren't checking for non-existent families in apartment sublots... this is why it shows a family with no name.

To fix this properly, you should delete the apartment sublots and also clear the array of sublots from the apartment base.  Anything else risks corruption.

The easiest way to clear and delete the apartment sublots might be to move the families out of the apartments in-game before starting the "clean and empty" process.

[Ruann]

Did you save and exit after creating townies?  Did you wait until the game said it was done making townies?  It takes a bit of time for them to all generate and the game will continue marching along in the meantime (this is why you use the Synch Timer to reset the lot time and prevent unwanted paperboy spam from happening)

[Jelenedra]

A few questions..

Number two. Lets say I use boolprop to make townies in a hood that already has townies. Would my game explode, or would it just replace the current townies?

You would just make new townies. The old ones would still be in the neighborhood. No getting rid of them unless you kill them.

[Ruann]

The paperboy doesn't mess things up, but there's no reason to let him spawn unless you really want a newspaper

[Gastfyr]

I made an empty template for AL if anyone's interested?

Back up E002
Put file in C:/Programs/EA Games/The Sims 2 Apartment Life/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplates/E002
Delete characters.

I have tested this and it seams to be working so far, since this is my first I wonder if I done it right?

Wow, had to find this on page 22 of a 26 page thread.  lol  Any chance of getting this linked in the first post?  Also...this is the template I need for AL, right?

[mitchellcjs]

That prevents AL from dumping unwanted sims in the simbin, and doesn't add precreated social townies.  Belladonna Cove is untouched.  If you want to prevent premade idiocy in your 'hood, then it will work.  If you want to use Belladonna Cove, emptied, then you need an E001 clean/fixed file.

[Gastfyr]

Ah, then, it's exactly what I need.     I'm making a new custom hood and I want to avoid all the stupid premade maddness.  I used to use deleteallcharacters, but I have since learned that it corrupts hoods.

[BastDawn]

Wow, had to find this on page 22 of a 26 page thread.  lol  Any chance of getting this linked in the first post?

Fixed!  It was on page 23, not 22.     Thanks for pointing out the need for an update.

EMMA!  Weren't you going to make a shiny new thread for this stuff?