Removing sims without removing links to them.
Mootilda:
I just found a group of people who recommend using the Clean Installer to remove some of the sims packaged with a lot, without removing the memories, relationships, and family ties which link to those sims. One person who is making this suggestion has explained that this will remove the possibility of corrupting your neighborhood, since you will no longer be installing the sim stubs which are inevitably packaged along with a family which has not been properly cleaned.
On the face of things, this seems absurd. I cannot help believing that the game deals with stub sims much better than it deals with memories, relationships and family ties with non-existent sims.
Can anyone confirm this? I'd appreciate hearing from someone who had actually done research in how the game deals with stub sims, vs how it deals with non-existent sims. Obviously, the best alternative is to properly clean up both the unwanted sims and the links to those sims, but does anyone know whether it is better to have stub sims or links to non-existent sims?
rufio:
Well, I was under the impression that all of "stub sim" problems actually arise as a result of deleting sims without deleting memories and links to them, a subset of which problem is moving sims who already have memories to a new hood where the sims referenced by those memories do not actually exist. Deleting sims from within the game without deleting the memories that link to them certainly does cause corruption, and I can't imagine that this would somehow be different just because you just deleted them from from a house using the clean installer instead.
Mootilda:
I believe that there are two major problems with "stub sims", separate from the issue with links to non-existent sims:
1) Since each family which is packaged has its own version of the stub sims, you can end up with a large number of identical Goopys (or other sims) in your neighborhood. As if one wasn't enough.
2) Since each family drags along a number of stub sims, you will reach the "sim limit" of the neighborhood much faster than if there were no stub sims.
That said, I have always assumed that stub sims were EA's "fix" for broken connections. Obviously, not everyone believes that. Now that I'm doing the development on the Clean Installer, it's clear that the Clean Installer doesn't actually clean up the broken connections when you remove one of the stub sims.
rufio:
Quote from: Mootilda on 2011 February 09, 01:43:54
That said, I have always assumed that stub sims were EA's "fix" for broken connections. Obviously, not everyone believes that. Now that I'm doing the development on the Clean Installer, it's clear that the Clean Installer doesn't actually clean up the broken connections when you remove one of the stub sims.
This was what I thought too, based on reading Pescado's posts here - that when you package sims or put them in the lot bin, the game figures out, oh we are moving neighborhoods now, all these pointers will become broken, and creates partial character files for them to point to and stuffs them in the lot, too, and then problems arise because they are not "real" sims and lack a lot of data that the game will inevitably try to access anyway. If that's the case, the "stub sims" are just a deferred dangling pointer issue, rather than something that will immediately cause crashing and corruption, but are still the same basic problem.
Could Clean Installer actually be modified to clean up stubs and broken memory references, though, maybe even to the point where you could move occupied lots into the bin and export them, purify them with CI, and safely install them in a new hood? I understand the old hood would probably still be hosed, but if you are evacuating sims from it you might not care about that.
Mootilda:
Yes, I've been wondering whether the correct solution would be to have the Clean Installer remove all of the broken connections whenever the user deselects a sim. I'm pretty sure that it's safe to just remove the broken family ties and relationships, but I have heard that it can be bad to remove some kinds of memories. If this is true, then it might make sense to change (some of) the broken memories to point to the "mystery sim" instead. If I had a list of memories which could be safely deleted and those which cannot, then it should be a fairly simple matter to delete the ones that can be deleted and change the rest.
I've also been working on a neighborhood corruption detector which may eventually have a "fix all issues found" button, which would do the same thing but on a larger scale.
I wasn't aware that the game might attempt to access invalid portions of the stub sim's data. That may explain why these people believed that removing the stub sims was the safest option. Can I assume that the game is smart enough to avoid accessing invalid portions of the mystery sim's data?
Can anyone confirm that there are only three things that I need to worry about: memories, family ties, and relationships?
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