Cleaning up Characters?
Kigan:
I've heard about a lot of problems being caused by having too many characters in the neighborhood. I've been playing with a carefully merged neighborhood that consists of Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville attached as Downtowns to a main Neighborhood. This was done by a friend who learned the way to do this without causing problems. He also did the same with the Seasons Neighborhood. I'm not as good at all that as he is.
I've spent a lot of time making up a neighborhood with plenty of people to interact with. Needless to say, I've spent a lot of time making up this neighborhood so that, with each family I play, it is a different experience. Plus the sims friends have made to add to it.
Now, I looked into my Characters folder to see what sort of numbers I'm at, and the number is well over 3000. From everything I've read, that is quite bad. So I went into SimPE, and see duplicates of some sims, some that have no connections to people (At least if the identification SimPE gave them is right). I'm afraid that something bad is going to happen to this neighborhood if I don't get it cleaned up, but I don't know how to go about that. I'm especially afraid of losing one family that I've worked a lot on. They currently have 4 grown kids, one being an alien (I couldn't believe it) and 3 graduated college. All married, with their own kids, careers, etc. If I could package them up safely for use later without losing memories, pictures (large photo album), etc. I wouldn't be so worried. But I know they'll lose their friendships, among other things. Which would in turn screw up their memories of those people and pets they have met. They are the one family I couldn't stand to lose all the work from. The others I'd do whatever it took to wipe out their memories as far as outside contact to safely move them, but this family is much more difficult to deal with should a problem arise because they have been the most active.
Getting to my point, what can I do to either clean up the character files or safely move the important families? At this rate, recreating using a safe process doesn't sound so bad, especially since I was late to finding out about the Tour Guide/Unsavory Charlatan thing. I just want to be able to keep going without worrying that the game might really screw up to the point of losing it all, and I have the time to use whatever process necessary to clean it up or recreate.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: Kigan on 2007 October 02, 04:58:11
I'm especially afraid of losing one family that I've worked a lot on. They currently have 4 grown kids, one being an alien (I couldn't believe it) and 3 graduated college. All married, with their own kids, careers, etc. If I could package them up safely for use later without losing memories, pictures (large photo album), etc. I wouldn't be so worried.
Impossible. A played family with outside contact cannot be packaged intact without transporting the carnage to a new neighborhood, and the process would still wreck their memories.
Quote from: Kigan on 2007 October 02, 04:58:11
But I know they'll lose their friendships, among other things. Which would in turn screw up their memories of those people and pets they have met. They are the one family I couldn't stand to lose all the work from. The others I'd do whatever it took to wipe out their memories as far as outside contact to safely move them, but this family is much more difficult to deal with should a problem arise because they have been the most active.
Getting to my point, what can I do to either clean up the character files or safely move the important families?
If you really feel it's worth the effort to save, you can start by carefully following the instructions in DELETED 2: Electric Boogaloo to carefully remove each and every last dud one by one, likely crosschecking in-game dozens of times to make sure you're killing the right one.
Kigan:
Hmm...I'll give that a try. I really feel that it is worth the effort to save because it would take just as much effort to start them over from scratch again. Getting all the default neighborhoods isn't that big of a problem, but remaking every family and putting this family back through life would probably take just as long.
I didn't think they could be safely moved as-is. At least I know how to put them back into CAS if things don't work out.
doren:
At the moment you haven't got any problems, you only fear that you will have problems in the future, is this right?
I would suggest regular backups. It is a very large number of character files, but I don't thinik that there is a limit where the game invariably blows up. Trying to solve problems before they come up does not sound like a good idea.
I think that it is a pity that it is not possible to move sims to another neighbourhood (maybe even the entire population) - I played with the same sims (and their offspring) for about two years now and also worry that the neighbourhood will become overcrowded eventually - but I decided for myself that I carry on playing and see what happens. I make backups. I am safe.
cwykes:
I have to say that I made a huge mess trying to clean up my favourite hood and managed to lose 6 months of play by corrupting the neighbourhoodmanager file. I'd have been better off not doing it at all. The problem was that I thought I knew what I was doing... I did my research and when I thought I understood it, I went ahead and cleaned up. Result - hood went back 6 months in time. So I learned some more and cleaned up that version, but I'd still been too impatient and deleted things I shouldn't have deleted (genetics files). This was in the days before Pes wrote Electric Boogaloo 2 and put deletion options on the lotdebugger. You'd be a lot safer using that than I was doing it the old fashioned way, but it's your choice. I'd say, think about it some more and play safely from now on. Never move occupied lots into the sim bin or delete sims in game and keep regular backups! I'd definitely suggest you practice cleaning up another hood first! Maybe someone will write an good cleanup plugin in SimPE so you don't have to load up the whole freaking game to clean up the files.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page