Anti-Redundancy *CRITICAL FOR BVp0*

[J. M. Pescado]

Includes fix for Endless Tour Guide Spam in BV.

BV: Seasons-:
antiredundancy.zip

Anti-Redundancy for TS2NL - TS2BV
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado & Doctor Boris)

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

FEATURES:
Eliminates spawning of unnecessary redundant NPCs. Should only spawn one per
type, more only if needed because the first is unavailable. All spawned NPCs
should be equally accessible instead of just the first 3.

BUGS FIXED:
Shady Charlatan and Tour Guides should no longer spawn apparently without end.

COMPATIBILITY:
Compatible with all FFS hacks. Tested for TS2OFB - TS2BV.
Possibly working for all versions.

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.

[cwieberdink]

And there was much rejoicing.


Yay.

[Celestra]

Thanks will this remove the 40 tour guides i already have as well  or can i just delete them from my characters folder plz

[jsalemi]

It won't remove existing ones, but it will prevent the game from creating new ones.  As for 'just deleting them', I don't think that's safe -- follow the 'Deleted 2' instructions you'll find elsewhere on this lot.

(Unless, of course, it's a test hood and you don't care if it eventually goes up in a BFBVFS... )

[aussieone]

Just a question because someone else mentioned it.

Seeing as you can't interact socially with the Tour guides, if you nuked all gossip memories using the debugger and deleted the character files of the unecessary tour guides, , would that be a safe option or not?

ETA: NM, testing results in BFBVFS apparently.

[J. M. Pescado]

Follow the "Deleted 2" procedure. It is, in fact, pretty quick and easy to do, and you can mass-delete them by the dozens in a fairly short period of time: Because you probably haven't generated many sims, all the tour guides will be a single contiguous block or two of character files. You will know that they are the tour guides because they're the ones which are now suddenly < 30k in size. So nuke all their SDSCs, then mass-delete all their character files. Just look for the huge chunk of files which are suddenly gonna get small when you Prep For Delete on them. There may also be a Theoplugin which can complement Deleted 2 that will automatically remove the offending character file for you, without you having to manually identify it. Is Theo still alive?

[simkat]

First time poster but long time lurker.Thank the lord there is a god and it's name is J.M. I love your work and I have been waiting for this so I can reinstal BV.Will this take affect amedietly or will I have too do the Delete 2 thingy?I'm going too reinstall BV with a custom hood I don't care about EA townies I just don't want random Tourguides and Pickpockets.
Thanks again so much for this.

[aussieone]

I took a look at Deleted 2.

A) I am severely simpe challenged, so it all looks like gobbledygook to me.

B) If I do decide to have a go at this, I presume I can use the seasons version of simpe, seeing as the BV version is as yet unreleased.

C) I may well be SOL in all instances. I can live with it, 'tis only a game after all.

[Sarimar]

I bow at your feet, oh mighty Pescado! I was ready to throw BV into the garbage bin but now I can actually play it. Thank you 

[miramis]

The version linked to from here seems to be a year older than the one I downloaded from the test area last night.  I'm guessing this version isn't updated for the Bon Voyage issue yet?

[maxon]

I took a look at Deleted 2.

B) If I do decide to have a go at this, I presume I can use the seasons version of simpe, seeing as the BV version is as yet unreleased.

I believe there is a QA version of SimPE available for BV.  

I know Pescado was asking for testers - I'm guessing it's been tested already and I'm late to the party again but I'll try this out tonight.  Miraculously, BV is working fine in my game.  Who'd a thunk?

[J. M. Pescado]

The version linked to from here seems to be a year older than the one I downloaded from the test area last night.  I'm guessing this version isn't updated for the Bon Voyage issue yet?

Flush browser cache, or make sure you're not looking at the RTFM timestamp?

[SimFeliz]

Is it safe to follow this method http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.200 posted by Invisigoth? I only do the first part, as I will just do a little surgery on the locals as there arn't many. It did work for me, but i don't know enough to know it it's really ok to do.

[miramis]

The version linked to from here seems to be a year older than the one I downloaded from the test area last night.  I'm guessing this version isn't updated for the Bon Voyage issue yet?

Flush browser cache, or make sure you're not looking at the RTFM timestamp?

It was browser cache, thanks!

[tngrspacecadet]

Yay!

Is that guy who blathers on about the weather a tour guide? I so wished I had the option to SMITE.

[minicarrie]

Thanks so much for this!

Did you set it to fix the spawning of Unsavory Charlatans as well? I had 7 tour guides and 5 Unsavory Charlatans before installing the hack and trying another vacation. Spawned no more tour guides (yay!) but spawned two more Unsavory Charlatans.

[J. M. Pescado]

Added additional fix to kill the Charlatan spawning. Honestly, I have no idea why EAxis wrote the code in the utterly bugfuck baffling way they did, which was both unnecessarily bloated and convoluted, not to mention broken.

[Celestra]

Thankyou Jm installed and tried this , lot hopping round the beach vacation lots and checked after

Still only the 40 tour guides i had before i installed so its stopped them spawning thank goodness

[Havelock]

Not sure if its related got an error. Log attached.

[dorquemada]

Does this ban Uni profs as well? 'cause 'No meeting those buggers' hack doesn't prevent the game from generating another truckload of them whenever new add-on is installed or after deletion spree.

[J. M. Pescado]

Not sure if its related got an error. Log attached.

Fixed.

Does this ban Uni profs as well? 'cause 'No meeting those buggers' hack doesn't prevent the game from generating another truckload of them whenever new add-on is installed or after deletion spree.

The game demands a minimum count of apparently 2 professors per major, so if you delete them, they regenerate up to this number, but no more.

[adammc]

If I delete every single one of them, will the game regenerate the three that I need? Or should I delete all but the three?

[adammc]

Ok, this is the error message I get when I try to open SimPe. Is it because I don't have the updated one, or is it telling me that I have duplicate sim files?


Message:
Error while trying to open

Package: C:\Documents and Settings\Games\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001\N001_Neighborhood.package
File: Sim Description (AACE2EFB) - 00000000 - FFFFFFFF - 00000024

SimPE Version:
Default (0.62.1.100).

Exception Stack:
System.OverflowException: Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow.
  at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.SDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.ExtSDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.LinkedSDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.Interfaces.Plugin.AbstractWrapper.ProcessData(IPackedFileDescriptor pfd, IPackageFile package, Boolean catchex)

Source:
simpe.filehandler

Execution Stack:
at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.SDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.ExtSDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.PackedFiles.Wrapper.LinkedSDesc.Unserialize(BinaryReader reader)
  at SimPe.Interfaces.Plugin.AbstractWrapper.ProcessData(IPackedFileDescriptor pfd, IPackageFile package, Boolean catchex)

Windows Version:
WindowsXP

.NET Version:
2.0.50727.832

[selzi]

@adammc: That error message has nothing to do with your tour guides - it is caused by the new expansion pack you installed. SimPE can't handle it, so it will throw some weird exceptions. Quaxi and his team are already working on the new version, so better don't touch your neighborhoods with the outdated SimPE until the new one is released!

[EWallace]

Thankyouthankyouthankyou!  I've put off playing BV after the first few days when I realized the tour guides were screwing up the entire game.  Doesn anyone know if this affects the ninjas, too?  I know I have at least 2 ninjas...