too many character files

[LynnMar]

I just checked and I have 1296 character files in my strangtown neighborhood.   I was wondering if I could use sim enhacer to delete some of the extra townies and dead people or will it mess up my game?

I know that in another thread someone said that you have to use simpe and delete all memories of the character or something to that effect.

I don't know how to use simpe.   What if I just delete the characters I don't want and put in the no townie regenerate hack, will that work?     

help and thanks.     

[AllenABQ]

I just checked and I have 1296 character files in my strangtown neighborhood.   I was wondering if I could use sim enhacer to delete some of the extra townies and dead people or will it mess up my game?

I know that in another thread someone said that you have to use simpe and delete all memories of the character or something to that effect.

I don't know how to use simpe.   What if I just delete the characters I don't want and put in the no townie regenerate hack, will that work?     

help and thanks.     

As I understand it, it is bad to delete characters from the game.  But large numbers of excess characters are known to contribute to the game having problems.  JMP has several critical fix hacks that help stave off game melt-down, and you've got enough characters now where using them is certainly advisable.

Just be certain that if your game has been updated with the recent patch that you don't grab a critical fix for something that Maxis resolved.  I believe that the death fix was one of these, but do some checking on the other threads here on the forum.

It is hoped for that SimPe will eventually have a utility for deleting characters safely, but no promises have been made as yet.

The no townie regen hack is certainly a worthwhile investment for someone in your case.  As for getting rid of unwanted sims, my best advice (if they are townies) would be to use some kind of summoning hack to bring them to a lot and force them to join the family (Inge's updated teleporter painting lets you do this), then either kill them or -- if speed is a concern because you've summoned/joined a bunch of them -- save the lot, go back to neighborhood view, move them back into the Sim Bin, and delete them that way.

[Oddysey]

Are all of those files from actual sims? Because it's rather hard to get that many without using junk files, like from moving sims (or ghosts) from one neighborhood or another, or from downloading lots with sims from the exchange.

The trouble you're going to have, even if those characters are all actual sims, townies, and ghosts (or ghosts you've deleted their tombstones) is that when you delete them you also have to go through every not going to be deleted character file and nuke all reference to them. This can be tedious, especially when you've got that many character files.

Killing them won't get rid of their character file, which is what causes the problem. Neither will deleting them from the sim bin. It is not necessarily bad to delete them in SimPE, only to do it incompletely.

[LynnMar]

yes, they are all from actual sims,  stangetown is the only town I play.   I have had some of these characters since UNI. 
 No, I never move sims from one hood to another, learned my lesson the hard way on that one,  and I never download any houses,  I build my own, even though building is my least favorite thing to do. 

I suppose I could just start over with a fresh install but some of the sims I will miss, because I have had them from birth, through college and some are into elders now.   

[dusty]

Are you having problems with gameplay though?  Now that the patch has been released the number of character files might not be as big a problem.  It seems premature to ditch the neighbourhood because it has lots of character files if it's not being particularly glitchy or buggy.  Not that I'm remotely expert on this subject ... 

[Regina]

Just FYI because you don't like building houses:  it's perfectly fine to download empty houses from the Exchange or websites.  These don't bring character files with them.  Sometimes I'm just not in the mood to build a house so I download empties once in a while. 

[Oddysey]

yes, they are all from actual sims,  stangetown is the only town I play.   I have had some of these characters since UNI. 

Yeowch then. That's a lot of playing hours. What files do you want to get rid of, exactly? Townies, or playable sims? It's probably not a good idea to mess with files that are linked genetically to living sims, however distant, and your average neighborhood has "only" around 150 to 200 townies and NPCs. So unless for some reason you have massive numbers of NPCs, you don't have a lot of options unless you have a LOT of sims that you created but now never play. If they're all organically integrated into your neighborhood, you're better off doing frequent backups and keeping an eye out for problems.

Maximum stable population with all fixes, pre-NL, is around 1200 according to JMP and TJ. According to MaxoidTom, NL upped the number of sims/iterations that the system could handle, so you may very well be safe. But if there's any dead wood in the neighborhood, i.e., townies you don't want or need (and with that many sims, that's probably all of them) or sims unconnected relationship-wise to any sims you want to keep, it might be worth trimming it.

[sanmonroe]

If you are really set on saving your hood, here is a list of what you need to do for each char file you want to remove.

http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=1731

Or send quaxi a bribe and beg for a utility

[Motoki]

Just FYI because you don't like building houses:  it's perfectly fine to download empty houses from the Exchange or websites.  These don't bring character files with them.  Sometimes I'm just not in the mood to build a house so I download empties once in a while. 

Actually, if you use Sims2pack Clean installer you can even ditch all the character files and just get the house if you just check off the lot part and uncheck the rest.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I deleted loads of townies from Pleasantview, but what I've done is each time I close the game, I think, what family shall I play next, then use SimPE to delete all reference in their memories to any of the deleted sims.  Just in case there was a problem, I didn't actually delete the files, I moved them from the N0001 folder to a folder on the desktop, so I could restore a problem if necessary.  And the game still works ok (or did last time I played.)  I also at the same time got rid of a lot of spam memories that had occurred before I installed JMs fixes.

I turned the burglars into babies, and they don't seem to regenerate, and no burglaries!  (Not advisable with the nanny, though!)