No Stray Respawns

[J. M. Pescado]

Prevents strays from respawning. Stray animal population will only grow or shrink as a result of your actions. Save the kittens and puppies!


nostrayrespawn.zip

No Stray Respawn for TS2PETS
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado)

Special Thanks To:
Hobbsee the Scrawny Pencil Neck
Fat, Hairy-Bellied Ness

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

INSTRUCTIONS:
Place in your MYDOCU~1\EAGAME~1\THESIM~1\DOWNLO~1 directory.

FEATURES:
Stray animals no longer respawn. Existing animals unaffected. Animals that
exist in play may become strays, but no new random ones will generate. Please
don't kill the animals. Now includes anti-respawning in the adoption pool as
well, reducing minimum pool size requirements, and first dragooning stray
animals before creating any new ones as a last resort.

COMPATIBILITY:
Compatible with all FFS hacks. For TS2PETS.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

[Motoki]

Does this effect wolves or just cats and dogs?

[twojeffs]

Wolves and skunks are NPCs, not strays so I would assume those are covered (or will be) by antiredundancy and this only affects the stray cat & dog populations. But I haven't peeked into the code in the hack, so I could be talking out of my ass here too.

[SimMoon]

The wolves had two pups in the pack that my sim is running with. ::rolls eyes:: He wants bit so he can become a werewolf and I only see him out when I'm on another lot during the night. Such a sad commentary on our Sims. LMAO!!! I don't want KILLER spawning though, so I downloaded this. (That dog gives me the creeps)

[J. M. Pescado]

Wolves and skunks are NPCs, not strays so I would assume those are covered (or will be) by antiredundancy and this only affects the stray cat & dog populations. But I haven't peeked into the code in the hack, so I could be talking out of my ass here too.

Wolves and skunks are indeed NPCs, and are affected by antiredundancy: You will get one wolf, unless the game has need of a second simultaneous wolf.

[Madame Mim]

The strays were really annoying me. In one neighbourhood I noted how high my character numbers went up (it was a backed up neighbourhood) then loaded it, let pets spawn, exited out of the game and deleted every new character. Now when I play the game I get the attached error. It's either me fubaring the game or your mod code not being able to cope with their being no strays at all. So I thought I'd post it here and let you decide if it was relevant or not.

[J. M. Pescado]

An update to fix that case has already been made. Is that still happening?

[Madame Mim]

Well, I was pretty sure that I had the latest one, but file sizes say that I don't. So I will try the updated version and get back to you.

Update: installing the latest version has fixed the problem, sorry for bothering you.

[twink]

After playing and adopting a wolf I decided to take it out...my neighborhood reset. So, put it back in and all is well.

Twink

[J. M. Pescado]

I do not understand what you are trying to say.

[twink]

You know when you install an expansion pack all your lots reset....low hunger, bladder, people all at home, etc., well taking out the no stray hack resulted in all my neighborhood resetting. After thinking this over maybe it is because strays are secretly updating their numbers which reset the lots.

Twink

[shiniki]

If you use this hack and use DAC to clear your neighborhood of useless gutter trash, then use the Pet Adoption Service option on the telephone, will the game not generate any pets to be adopted? Or will it create an entire new pool?  I tried doing this on a test neighborhood, wondering if it would regenerate a new pool of adoptees, but the game seemed to have frozen. Not completely, but a good amount of time passed and nothing was happening, and I was still able to alt-tab out to attend to other tasks. I wonder if this situation has ever happened to anyone else or is expected as a result of the combination of nostrayrespawns and DAC. No error message popped up so I'm unsure if anything was recorded by the game, or if the game was just confused by the sequence of events. In any case it's not a big deal but I am curious if it just takes a ridiculously long amount of time to regenerate an entire new pool or if indeed the game encountered some kind of problem and got itself stuck.

[Eleonora]

I've had this problem aswell. I played a pre-pets hood with the correct N00x_suburbx file added, so that it had no strays in it. But calling the adoption agent made my game freeze indefinitly and I had to exit with CtrlAltDelete. I haven't tried taking out nostrayrespawn, because Im worried that my game might generate those 50+ standard strays.

[miros]

I would assume (but you know what that does) that the no-stray-respawn hack would realize that "at least one adoptee" is necessary and spawn it.  Did you let the stupid dialog sit on the screen for a while (2-5 min) or kill it almost immediately?  Since all the new stuff in Pets seems to take a dog's age, I'd expect it to take well over a minute to decide what to do.

[Eleonora]

Did you let the stupid dialog sit on the screen for a while (2-5 min) or kill it almost immediately?  Since all the new stuff in Pets seems to take a dog's age, I'd expect it to take well over a minute to decide what to do.

  Well I went to do the dishes, and when I returned it was still frozen. Restarted my computer, tried agian, same outcome. I've just given up on adopting and only but pets from community lots.

[miros]

Yes, I had this happen to me too.

Change request: If you call the adoption service and there are no strays... create one and only one.  Or add "spawn one stray" to the Lot Debugger?

[J. M. Pescado]

I believe this is already checked for in the current version: the adoption pool will always be populated with a minimum of one animal. However, generation of that animal can be a slow process resulting in a system hangup.

[notveryawesome]

Adopting pets seems to cause problems anyway, so I personally would not advise it (not that I'm in any way awesome, mind you). I did 'successfully' adopt a pet, but once my sim picked up the newly adopted kitten, the damn thing became stuck to her, she couldn't put it down, and it nearly starved to death. I had to use testing cheats to reset both the sim and the kitten. Argh! Pet adoption is more trouble than it's worth, IMO.

[vilia]

Should the adoption pool for each type of animal always have a minimum of one animal e.g. 1 x small dog, 1 x large dog & 1 x cat? I have run out of small dogs for adoption and am curious if a new dog should be taken from the stray pool.

[J. M. Pescado]

Should the adoption pool for each type of animal always have a minimum of one animal e.g. 1 x small dog, 1 x large dog & 1 x cat? I have run out of small dogs for adoption and am curious if a new dog should be taken from the stray pool.

I think "dogs" is considered a single type of animal independently of size, so that there will be a minimum of one dog, one cat, but size is undetermined.

...and near as I can tell, all dogs large and small are actually the same functional size in-game, only their sprite differs.

[jsalemi]

Does that mean there may not be puppies or kittens in the adoption pool with this?  Only adults?

Adopting pets seems to cause problems anyway, so I personally would not advise it (not that I'm in any way awesome, mind you)......Argh! Pet adoption is more trouble than it's worth, IMO.

I've adopted at least 2 kittens, a cat or two, and a couple of dogs, and never had a problem.  The 'stuck baby' thing has been around for quite some time, and now it's happening to pets too.  The only instance I had of it happening was with a cat that was bought at a pet shop getting stuck and ending up going to work with the owner when the owner was hugging it when the carpool arrived.

[miros]

Well, I got tired of my game hanging up, so I did this:

1) Checked the maximum file # in the Character folder.
2) Removed the nostrayrespawn hack.
3) Ran the game. 
3a) Loaded one house. 
3b) Adopted a puppy. 
3c) Saved and quit.
4) Replaced the nostrayrespawn hack.
5) Checked the maximum file # in the Character folder. (Over 20 new files, gah!)
6) Ran SimPE.
6a) Opened Neighborhood Browser and chose my 'hood.
6b) Looked at the screen shots for all the new characters (one of them was the pet police).
6c) Sorted by Instance #.
6d) Chose 5 pets to keep. Wrote down the names and instance numbers for all the unwanted pets.
6e) Removed SimDNA, SCOR, and SDSC for each unwanted pet (18 of 'em, gah!).
6f) Saved.
6g) Checked the string data for each of the new Character files and deleted the unwanted ones.

BTW, even with nostrayrespawn out, I had some sort of stray generation error -- I had no kittens and one large breed puppy named "Male Puppy" or some equally brilliant thing.  Fortunately, you can change the names in the Adoption Screen!

[J. M. Pescado]

6e) Removed SimDNA, SCOR, and SDSC for each unwanted pet (18 of 'em, gah!).

Deleting SDNAs corrupts the entire DNA record for your neighborhood. You should probably restore from backup now. Otherwise all recessive traits of all sims will be lost and elders will all have severely corrupt DNA.

BTW, even with nostrayrespawn out, I had some sort of stray generation error -- I had no kittens and one large breed puppy named "Male Puppy" or some equally brilliant thing.  Fortunately, you can change the names in the Adoption Screen!

The names of animals in the adopt screen are unimportant since you can rename them anytime you wish. Posting the error would be more useful than saying "some sort of error".

[miros]

Gah, should have known Maxis would make it impossible to delete just the unwanted SDNA without screwing up the others.  Can I just export the SDNA from my backup, or do I really have to lose my cute children (one of whom is the toddler in the picture, mauling the grown up puppy)? 

I looked for an error log -- none found.  "Some sort of error" is the best I can do. 

[J. M. Pescado]

It is not necessary to delete SDNAs. SDNAs are automatically overwritten when the NID is reused.