Deleted Characters

[moniquinin]

Ok so I did something monumentally stupid (before I found this site) and I'm not sure what to do.  I guess I'm not too attached to my game since I haven't really been playing for more than a couple sim days.  I'm playing up to OFB on a mac, in case this makes a difference, don't do windoze so can't use simpe.

I have 18 CAS sims and havent played university yet.  I'm not sure what the difference between townies and NPCs are, don't know how many characters are in my neighborhood, but I guess i could count the number of files in the folder.  I am playing pleasantview, bluewater and downtown. 

Right, so the stupid thing I did was I created a "family" of three sims who were all just roomies, moved them in, spent a day with them (the welcome wagon came to meet them, etc.) then decided I didn't like the assholes so moved them out and deleted them from within the game.  I then created three more using CAS, same names, tweaked their personalities a bit, moved them into the same house, and they received the same welcome wagon, etc.  How badly did I bugger things up?  Should I just blast the whole neighborhood and start again?  If so, how do I do this safely? 

[tabbs]

townies are sims maxis created to pester and annoy your sims - they basically just wonder around causing trouble - or they are there for your sims to make friends with for job promotions I suppose.

NPC's are sims who work for you or have a function.

The game will generate the same sims default for each new neighborhood.
I'm not sure why your game gave you two sets of the same ones after you deletedallcharacters is beyond me.

[miros]

I'd say the game is not buggered too badly, since the welcome wagon came again.  Just don't give the next set the same names!

If you really want to start over,
1) go to Bluewater Village and pack up the owned lots (J'Adore, Club Dante, Ramirez Fine Furniture, Electronics Supercenter)
2) add a University or two
3) use the "deleteallchars" function
4) bulldoze the owned lots
5) quit the game
6) install the owned lots
7) start the game
place new copies.

[J. M. Pescado]

Right, so the stupid thing I did was I created a "family" of three sims who were all just roomies, moved them in, spent a day with them (the welcome wagon came to meet them, etc.) then decided I didn't like the assholes so moved them out and deleted them from within the game.

Never delete from the sim-bin. This can be salvaged, if you follow the "DELETED 2: Electric Boogaloo" tutorial, and your sims appear under the "unlinked" category. At this stage, I'd just nuke and restart, though.

I then created three more using CAS, same names, tweaked their personalities a bit, moved them into the same house, and they received the same welcome wagon, etc.  How badly did I bugger things up?  Should I just blast the whole neighborhood and start again?  If so, how do I do this safely? 

I would recommend simply restarting, yes. Delete all characters, wipe all SDSC/SWAFs, then follow the Deleted 2 tutorial for resetting the sim creation index.

[Merope]

Wait, is it cool if you deleted the Oldies and the Burbs when you started?  Or did I unwittingly set myself up for a BFBVFS two years ago when I first started playing? 

[Marhis]

Welcome on board, mac sister  I'm a mac user too, although I use SimPE (with some difficulties) in a virtual environment.
From what I can understand, doesn't seems to me that you have buggered too much your neighborhood, only a few files/sims "in excess" compared to default, you have just started, I would not be too worried so far.

Anyway, if you want to get rid all this and restart everything, you can save the sims you want and then reinstall Pleasantview:

To save your sims: if they are yet in the sim bin (i.e. you don't played them yet), move them in an empty lot (one sim per lot, or more, as you wish), as soon as the lot loads, save and exit to neighborhood view. Now, click on the lot, then on the info icon and in the info screen choose "package lot to a file".
If you want to save yet played sims safely, you may clone them with Christianlov's cloner http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=178826, have the clone "find own place" with newspaper or computer, and move out. Once all the clones are in sim bin, package them as explained before. This way, your sims shouldn't have too cluttering memories and such.

- Delete the N001 folder in "Macintosh HD/Users/<your name>/Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighborhoods/"
- Copy the N001 folder from "Macintosh HD/Users/<your name>/The Sims 2/TSData/Res/UserData/Neighborhoods/"  in "Macintosh HD/Users/<your name>/Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighborhoods/"

Now you have to choose if you want to get rid of the whole Pleasantview population (playables, townies and npc) or not; if you can't use SimPE maybe it may works this way:
- Delete every sim with lot debugger (here, in Pescado's hacks), one by one.
- Do a deleteallcharacter in the cheat window (hopefully it could delete sim's description resources - I hope, but I have no idea if it works)
- Delete all the files you find in /N001/Characters/ folder

Then, install the sims you saved; you will find them all in PackagedLots folder. For the character deletion, however, I will make a test and then check it with SimPE, I think it's better.

[miros]

If you just want to recreate Pleasantview, you can just delete the old hood and it will be recreated as virgin when you run the game again.

[seelindarun]

Right, so the stupid thing I did was I created a "family" of three sims who were all just roomies, moved them in, spent a day with them (the welcome wagon came to meet them, etc.) then decided I didn't like the assholes so moved them out and deleted them from within the game.

Never delete from the sim-bin. This can be salvaged, if you follow the "DELETED 2: Electric Boogaloo" tutorial, and your sims appear under the "unlinked" category. At this stage, I'd just nuke and restart, though.

Doesn't the tutorial require SimPE to clean up after the lot debugger?  I haven't read all the posts below the tutorial, but moniquinin states she's playing on a mac, without SimPE.

If there is a way to clean up without SimPE could you please toss me a link?  I have a couple of rather critical sims (interlinked relatives) I naively deleted a several generations ago...

[moniquinin]

Marhis, does it make a difference whether I created my sims using bodyshop and then CAS to give them their names, aspirations, etc?  What I mean is, I don't care to lose all that - I only have the 18 and what took me the longest in creating them was what I did in bodyshop.  I guess my question is, are the created sims in bodyshop saved in a different place so if I restart a neigborhood and delete all sims, would the sims I created in bodyshop still be there all ready to be brough in again?

[J. M. Pescado]

Marhis, does it make a difference whether I created my sims using bodyshop and then CAS to give them their names, aspirations, etc?  What I mean is, I don't care to lose all that - I only have the 18 and what took me the longest in creating them was what I did in bodyshop.  I guess my question is, are the created sims in bodyshop saved in a different place so if I restart a neigborhood and delete all sims, would the sims I created in bodyshop still be there all ready to be brough in again?

Yes. Bodyshop template sims are not consumed by creating them in CAS. They will remain in the CAS sim bin.

[Marhis]

Yes, as Pescado said; I assumed you create them in CAS, not BodyShop, my fault.

Anyway I am testing right now total nuke of neighboroods' people, which is somehow relaxing *evil grin*. So far, I deleted all the population of a fresh Pleasantview, but the result is not very good. Plus, deleting dead Goths and expecially Bella was a pain.

I did it this way, if someone is interested:

1 - Delete tombstones/urns in lots (Michael Bachelor in Caliente lot, dead Goths in - guess what? - Goth, Darleen Dreamer in Dreamer's).
2 - Enter a lot (I choose Don Lothario).
3 - Buy the lot debugger and delete all the sims. For some reason, I had to do it twice, because the first "delete" resulted in deleted sim showing in "unlinked" menu.
Those damned dead Goths, Michael Bachelor, Skip Broke and Bella were a pain: I kept deleting them (from Default household) but they didn't. In the end I had to resurrect them one by one, remove them from Lothario household as townies, and THEN delete them. I'm almost sure that it is somewhat related to the fact that most of them are doubled characters.
Anyway, Bella was really nasty to get rid of; the only way I found out was resurrecting her, then "find her own place", so she was put in sim bin. Only this method worked, otherwise she seems deleted but returned in Default household menu.
4- Wipe out all memories, attraction marker, etc. from Don.
5 - Save and exit to neighborhood
6 - Deleteallcharacters

This is the result in SimPE:
- Sim Descriptions (SDSC): 6 (Shrink, Grim, Hula, PT and 2 Unknown), and this should be quite ok.
- Sim DNAs (SDNA): 272 (correct, they were not deleted)
- Sim Relationships (SREL): 2128. Definitely NOT correct. There were 11 Grim/Unknown, 11 Hula/Unknown, 11 Therapist/Unknown, 33 were these 3 reversed, and the rest was Unknown/Unknown.
- SWAFs: 172. Not correct too.

I could bet that this mess is due to the shipped sims in Pleasantview.

[moniquinin]

Ok, this is all very confusing.  Read the tutorial as per Pescado's orders, but like someone already said, I need to use simpe, which I can't.  I don't want to encounter any weirdness in the future since I know I could really get into my game and since I really haven't played many sim hours, the best thing is to restart the neighborhood or delete all characters and start again.

I created my sims with bodyshop so that's cool, but all my lots in pleasantview are custom (except for the ones already lived in by the townies)  These all have been dled from MTS2 or built by me and I REALLY do not want to do that again -- took me about three weeks to build, decorate, furnish, etc. these homes.

So, my question is, if i do the delete all characters cheat someone mentioned (and I'm not sure how, I need to search and read about it) would this be as if starting from scratch with the neighborhood physically intact and all the townies would be automatically respawned once I begin playing again and moving in my sims?  Or, will I have to package my lots and reinstall them etc.  Also, I'm not sure how this would affect my Downtown and Bluewater village if at all because I don't know how the whole thing works.  I haven't customized anything there (don't own a business or anything), haven't even visited all the lots, but I guess my sims have met people there so they're in their memories.


Also, I didn't mention this before because I completely forgot about it, but while I was setting up the neighborhood I deleted the premade families from CAS (you know, the two old farts, thos twins and the family) from within the game because I'm just not interested in them.  Never moved them in though.  Is this a no no?

help, anyone??



I'm still very confused

[miros]

I posted above what to do about Bluewater Village.  You do have to do step1 on any owned business lots anywhere (main hood, village or downtown), or when your Sim tries to go there, they'll be stuck in Build mode.  This is not good.

If you really want to start over,
1) go to Bluewater Village and pack up the owned lots (J'Adore, Club Dante, Ramirez Fine Furniture, Electronics Supercenter)
2) add a University or two and Downtown (don't think there are any owned lots in the standard Downtown)
3) at the neighborhood screen, use the "deleteallchars" function (control-shift-C and type the cheat)
4) bulldoze the owned lots
5) quit the game
6) install the owned lots that you packed in step 1
7) start the game
8) place new copies.

Your lots and all the Maxis lots will be there waiting for new inhabitants.  Your BodyShop Sims will also be happy and safe in their bin waiting for you.

[moniquinin]

Miros -- thanks again for your help.  Now, I'm not trying to be especially dense here, I just want to understand how this works and why we should do things one way and not the other.  So the way you described...it's better to do it this way than if I were to package my residential lots (in Pleasantview) and just replace my N001 folder? 

[Marhis]

The main problem is that when you delete all characters in a played neighborhood, there are always some "relicts" hidden in neighborhood file (sims' wants&fears, relationships, etc.), deletable only via SimPE, and these relicts are the main culprits for neighborhood damages.
A full deletion of character is possible - following Pescado's tutorial in non-SimPE parts, and then performing a deleteallcharacters - but it works only in new neighborhoods, not Pleasantview (and I suspect the same for Veronaville and Strangetown too).

So, the best way I think is restarting from scratch, with a new neighborhood. If you will use copies of the sims you have yet played, you don't have to worry at all about their memories and such. Every neighborhood is indipendent, and every sub-neighborhood (downtowns, bluewater, universities) is linked to its main neighborhood, and all its characters are part of that neighborhood, even if they are identical to those of other neighborhoods.
The game has its own pre-made set of townies (non playable sims) and automatically installs them in every new neighborhood. So, for example, if you have met Komei Tellerman in Pleasantview, in your new neighborhood you will meet Komei Tellerman again, but he will NOT be the same Komei, but only a copy. Same thing for pre-made downtown and universities, so don't worry for this.

For your lots, evict families, or delete characters and then package them: in neighborhood view, click on a lot, click on the info icon (that with the "i") and then on the asterisk+arrow: you will see a window asking you if you want to package lot in a file or on Sims2.com. Choose "file" and click ok. Your lot will be packaged in /Documents/EA GAMES/The Sims2/PackagedLots.
Do this for every lot you want to save.

Quit the game, go to PackageLots folder and open these files with double-click (they have .Sims2Pack extension), choose install. When you open the game again, you will find those lots in the lot bin, whatever neighborhood you are playing: this way, you can put them again in your new neighborhood. Plus, you'll retain forever a copy of them in the lot bin, unless you delete them of course, and this may come in handy if you want to have multiple houses looking the same.

ETA: I forgot, if you evict a family from a lot, or made a deleteallcharacters, you will lose all the furniture in inhabited lots. To avoid this, put in every lot you care Inge's shrub. The description is here: http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2MiscHacks.htm (StayThings Shrub)

[moniquinin]

Thanks!  I was about to post the question about losing the furnishings upon eviction and whether doing the DAC was a runaround for that.  Thanks again.  So after i package the lots I want to save (not bothering with the townies because they will regenerate, right?) all I need to do then is replace my pleasantview folder, right?

[Marhis]

Yes You will have a restarting Pleasantview, with all the residents and the townies hanging around. The only thing you might notice is that in recreated Downtown all the townies are identical, but their names are different. Don't know how it works in Bluewater, though, but anyway is not a major problem, I guess.