So what is an overpopulated neighborhood anyway?

[Bane~Child]

I wasnt aware that your students after college could be sent to another neighborhood

Not what I meant, I am sorry I did not explain it well enough to you.  A neighborhood to which a campus is assigned, becomes the home neighborhood.  Until a campus is linked to a neighborhood, the students don't belong anywhere - don't have a home anywhere, in other words, unattached.  What I was suggesting is that if you could assign one campus, either a Maxis or a custom made campus to a new, never before played neighborhood and be content to only play the University part of the game in that neighborhood, leaving your others alone.  The custom neighborhood would then become the students' home neighborhood once you assigned a campus and it is loaded into the game.  My reasoning is that instead of adding the 200+ more characters that the University adds to your existing population, they would be added instead to your new neighborhood and when they graduated they would return here and start populating. 

I did not mean that you should move the campus you are currently playing in to a new neighborhood, that just isn't done.  Yes, the students are directed by the games programming code to return to the neighborhood to which the campus (sub-neighborhood) belongs.

Apart from Brenda's needs at the moment - Does this clarify things for everyone else?  Besides, you guys already know all this.

OK - back to you Brenda - Since you and your daughter each are already playing a different neighborhood and campus, the extra Sim characters created for the college have already been populated into each of your neighborhood's game file, so this can't be changed now and you will have to put up with the possibility of crowding your neighborhood.  But, in the event that you have to start over with a new game, you may want to consider my suggestion.  You can both play the same campus and even the same characters if you want, it's entirely up to you.  Does this explanation make it more clear to you about what I was suggesting? 

[ZephyrZodiac]

I can't quite see how you can play a campus BEFORE you have assigned a neighbourhood!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Good luck!

[kryptmoon]

There's alot of information on this thread that's helpful as I've been trying to read up on all threads associated with this problem(neighboorhood overpopulation and safe character deletion), however I have one question that i have'nt seen anyone bring up. I have a neighborhood with 515 character files. As I was looking through the character folder I saw that some of my character files had .bak    Why are there .baks in my character folder and is it safe to delete them?  (Okay that was 2 questions)

If anyone can answer this thank you in advance.

[MutantBunny]

A .bak file is made automatically by SimPE when you edit a file--If you have edited your hood file you'll see a .bak there too.

Yes, safe to delete, in fact better to delete them--unless you want to save them for some reaason, if so move them out of the game folder.

[Bane~Child]

Why are there .baks in my character folder and is it safe to delete them?

Mutant Bunny is correct and in addition, this is a default setting in SimPe.  There is a place in your preferences where you can deselect this so no .bak files are generated.

From the top navi bar: Extra->Preferences->SimPE Settings(icon with wrench & screwdriver)
It's the first box under Language Preference at top.

[kryptmoon]

Thank you MutantBunny and Bane~Child for the info. Now it's clean up time.

[hedgekat]

Every time the slowdown bug occurs it generates multiples of whatever NPC triggered the slowdown.  And they will keep multiplying until the vehicle is gotten rid of.   Any other NPC vehicle that later attempts to enter the lot will trigger it again.   I  have gotten hundreds of extra character files that way  before I figured out what was happening and stopped it.  But I went into the character folder and deleted them all.  Have had no problems that I know of since as a result of it.   Have done this in several neighborhoods.  No one had ever interacted with these characters so there were no memories involved.   

But what happens if you delete a character that people do have memories of?  I have  done that.  I tried out some of the hooker npcs  available at MTS2 and later removed them from downloads.  The sims who had interacted with them later had memories of  "did woohoo with $subject$.  But they were downloads rather than real npcs so effect might be different.

[Zythe]

I've done it before. The memories just lack a subject. I can't see how it's harmful. And they can easily be deleted /reassigned to another sim

[ZephyrZodiac]

One thing about this I'm hazy about.  If you delete the relation between a sim and an NPC, does the memory still remain, or does SimPE automatically delete it too?  And if the memory remains, how exactly do you delete it?

[Marvin Kosh]

Memories are separate.  I know because I modified a CAS family so I could have two siblings - one teen, one adult - instead of a mom and daughter.  The memories of 'Had X!' were still there.

Edit: Actually maybe that's not the most helpful example ever

[ZephyrZodiac]

I thought they were separate, but how on earth do you get rid of "Met X" , "Made friends with X"?

[Ancient Sim]

I thought they were separate, but how on earth do you get rid of "Met X" , "Made friends with X"?

Go into the "Neighbourhood Memory" section in SimPE and delete them from there.  I spend hours in there myself, changing this and that.  Doesn't always work completely, though.  Some memories (maybe all, not sure) are stored somewhere else (I think the neighbourhood.package file), which explains why you can delete the memory of a death and they still remember it.  For the main part, deleting memories suffices, though. 

[ZephyrZodiac]

Thanks, I shall give it a go, starting with all memories of Komei, I think!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I've found out how to open the neighborhood memory section, and I find a lot of Met Unknown memories.  Are these the ones that can be deleted?

[RainbowTigress]

Some of those refer to the Mystery Sim, usually the first few memories in a CAS created sim.  I might delete them if I come across them, but I don't obsess over it.

[ZephyrZodiac]

If they have several different reference numbers, would I be right in assuming they are not the mystery sim, but just any old sim?  And if it's a CAS sim who was created as half a couple, or a child, they wouldn't have met the mystery sim anyway, would they?

[RainbowTigress]

I wouldn't think so, but I would check their memories in-game, to see how they are identified.  Once you identify the Mystery Sim, it wouldn't hurt to write down his/her number for future reference.  If I remember correctly, couples created in CAS have instead the memories of meeting each other, first kiss, woohoo, etc., with their spouse.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Yes, they do, so any unknown sims in their memory files would presumably not be the mystery sim?  but possibly a townie that I've deleted from their relations?

[RainbowTigress]

Probably.  I don't think it would hurt to delete most memories, but it's easier to delete them before you delete the sim they refer to, because then it will still have the name of the sim.  But always back up your neighborhoods just in case.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I do back up fairly frequently.    I know which sims I've removed, and their all actually sitting in a file on the desktop, so I can quite easily get the file number, but not the ref that appears in memories.  Trouble with simPE is you can direct it to scan any folder anywhere on your pc for objects, but not sims!  I suppose I could swop them in and move other stuff out, but I think I'll just work on one sim for now and see what happens! 

If you can delete most memories, does that mean you can delete all those family reunion spams?

Thanks for all this helpful advice, by the way, I do appreciate it!

[RainbowTigress]

Yeah, I don't even get them any more after installing JMs fix for that.  You can delete all that A+ memory spam.  Not only does your sim teen get the memory, but his parents get memories and then visitors get memories of them getting memories.  Other siblings get memories of your sim getting a memory.    Some memories will be recreated if they don't exist the next time an event occurs, such as first kiss, first woohoo, met so-and-so.

A word of caution:  Be careful about repetitive stress syndrome!  All that clicking and clicking and clicking.  I was trying to clean out some of my sims' memories, but it was monotonous and tedious, I was going cross-eyed, and my wrist and mouse finger were getting sore, even with my gel wrist rest mouse pad.    I wish we could send EA/Maxis our medical bills when we get carpal tunnel syndrome from fixing our games!

You're welcome, I don't mind helping if I can.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, if I get tired of clicking I can always switch to the other PC and do something else, but apart from typing, it's all clicking, whatever you do!  What I can't understand is why, when Maxis made the jump bug fix, so sims with a lot of memories were no longer unplayable, why the heck they didn't fix this memory spam so only important family reunions like wedding, funeral and birthday or graduation parties are remembered!  I mean, do you or I remember every time we get a visit from a family member?  And why on earth they made these "someone else had" memories?  I certainly wouldn't remember that someone's cousin's grandmother's best friend burnt the dinner!

Thanks again for the help!

[RainbowTigress]

I guess it's so sims can have something to gossip about.  I sure don't remember every A+ I got or my whole family got.  And my memories of family reunions are of one event, not one for every family member I talked to!  Maxis advertised the gossiping like with big stuff, like cheating and getting caught, but most sims seem more interested in talking about burning stuff.  When I have sims meet for the first time and I go back and look at their memories later, the other sim will have invisible memories that she received from the other sim about meeting so-and-so, getting potty trained by X, doing woohoo with Y, etc.  Then the next time this sim talks to someone else, they can randomly pass these memories.  That's why it's so hard to clean your neighborhood of unknown sim memories because you never know who they may have passed these memories too.  It's like a virus that spreads.  When I was deleting corrupted death memories, I found them in other sims that didn't even know the dead sims.  They got them from talking to the sims who had the original memory. 

It would be so much easier to delete memories if we could select several at once and hit delete, like Windows lets you do, but it doesn't work that way.  So we are stuck with click one, click delete, scroll, click the next, click delete, etc, ad nauseam.

[hedgekat]

If you can delete most memories, does that mean you can delete all those family reunion spams?

YES   then put in the no family reunion spam hack if you haven't already.    I sometimes leave ONE of those memories when I come across them but no need for all of them.