More Awesome Than You!

I'm playing a legacy, and have noticed that the last couple of children who grew into teens got LTWs that didn't match their aspirations. Example: "Become Hall of Famer" for a Knowledge sim, and "Become Business Tycoon" for a Romance sim. I don't have any LTW variety mods installed, and I have very few global hacks enabled (Phone mod, coffee cup, no pillow fight, nobuskers, and a few fixes; that's about it right now). The only thing I can think is that I used the Lot debugger to randomize the Sim generation to prevent first-born clone effect. The other thing I've noted is that the teens have their LTWs right away, instead of it generating when their first want is fulfilled.

Any ideas?

It sounds like you've done something to corrupt the underlying data of your neighborhood and turn it into a BFBVFS. Pretty soon toddlers and children will start getting them. You can ask Fat Head about that one.

Do you know what could have caused this impending ball of fire? I created this as a new neighborhood several months ago; deleted all characters, and generated new townies - all pre-OFB. I only started playing it post-OFB, however, when I attached a Uni and a Downtown. Other than that I haven't touched any character files in SimPE, or done any other tweaking.

Any possible fixes, or is this a doomed BFBVFS ?

No idea. Fat Head might know more about it, she had this problem once.

Pegasys did you do a "delete all characters" in that hood?  If so, I notice a long time ago and posted about this that some sims ended up with mismatch aspiration/LTW.

I think it was about 4 or 5 months ago I posted about this, people did add some theory on this but I cannot remember them all except for the delete all character one.

You could do a search and try to found out.

It could be a dangling SWAF issue. After doing a DAC, perhaps you want to open up the neighborhood file and see if there are left over SWAF files, and burninate them all.

JMP,

I think you're on to something (of course!)  I had no idea what you meant by SWAFs, but as soon as I opened up SimPE it became readily apparent (Sim Wants and Fears). Then I looked at the Sim Descriptions vs. the SWAFs and noticed a discrepancy in the number - 277 Sim Description vs. 304 SWAFs. I noticed a string of SWAFS where it says "Sim Wants and Fears for " and the rest is blank; there is no name. I assume these are the dangling SWAFs and they are safe to delete?

I have noticed this problem too, but only in 'hoods that have had a D-A-C performed on them.

I think they're all dangling, or at best incorrect, and that your neighborhood might be buggered. You might want to start over, this time nuking all SWAFs immediately following DAC.

I've come up with some wierd things after a DAC too, but at least now I know what to look for!  (If I ever play those hoods again...)  However, i would have thought that just changing the LTW with the debugger would solve the problem, if the sim has merely taken over the LTW of the original occupant of the File space.

And it doesn't explain why Alexander Goth has an Aspiration in his Neighbourhood Memory, likewise Beau Broke, whereas quite often CAS adults don't get the marker for their aspiration at all.  Nor does it explain, for me, why Keanu Broke spins the Get Abducted want as soon as he rolls his wants after aging to teen - as a Romance sim!)

I have a lot of Sims roll the abduction scholarship want straight after ageing to teen.  Had one yesterday and he was Popularity (one of Brandi's oddly enough, this time to Hegelian).  It does seem odd that they want this, bearing in mind the fact that if they are abducted they're not going to be too happy about it.  Maybe it's their way of telling us they'd like to be Knowledge Sims.

I think teen Sims might just check if there's an expensive telescope on the lot, and if there is, they roll up the abduction scholarship want. That want always goes away for me after they fulfill another one.

Well, the Brokes didn't even have a cheap telescope.  I've previously had Dustin and Dirk get the want, presumable because it's the best scholarship value, but the youngest Broke (Keanu in my game) really surprised me, especially since this one is far less aggressive than he usually is!

The only reasoning I can think of is that they want to meet people, but with a Romance aspiration I can't see why they would want to meet aliens!

It's the probing.

Ouch!

Returning to SWAFs, I removed some townies (the Pleasantview townie kids) at the beginning of this new install, by removing their character files myself.  All the other townies and dormies still exist.    Would there be any left over SWAFs from Marsha and co with this method?

I think the best way to find out is to load the neighborhood in SimPE and compare number of Sims to number of SWAFs. If it's a match, you're ok. If not...  :-\

Well, it's bad if there are more SWAFs than sims, but some "sims" do not have SWAFs, because they are weirdo sims like Grimmy.

I seem to have 530 SWAFs shown in the Resource Tree, I have only 413 character files, I only deleted the Pleasantview townie kids (6? 7? something like that) and I have two strange-looking default characters that look like they're in a cartoon (I did have one munchiebot that got destroyed, and one of these things has memories, the other has none.

But I do seem to have an awful lot of SWAFs with no info at all (and no SWAFs depicted, just a placeholder for them.

The only thing that springs to my mind is I installed OFB to my complete game, then played the new Pleasantview as I didn't want to fubar my existing hoods, but so far I haven't created a Downtown, so therefore I have no downtownies and no Downtown NPCs.

Yup, that's usually a sign of neighborhood corruption, "dangling SWAFs". If you have a SWAF that does not correspond to an NID, and a sim spawns into that NID, he will inherit the corrupted SWAF.

Sorry, I just added to my post above as you were posting, JM.  I think it may be the Downtown files that haven't been used yet.  There are far too many to be 6 townie kids!

A lot seem to have absolutely no information at all as to who they are, but some are "Unknown" and have the GUID number, so I think if the number of these that corresponds to the number of kids I removed, these are the dangling swafs, but the rest I can only think that SimPE expected to find those Downtown NPCs etc. and didn't.

I think that's what it is - I've checked, and even the latest baby in my hood has a space for an LTW  (Wants, Fears, History, LTWs), but all these blank ones seem to just have three (no LTW) so I rather think they haven't actually been generated yet.  I suppose there's one way to find out!  And I had hoped to avoid adding a Downtown!

At least I now know that DAC is a dangerous process ... I always assumed it was because it was a Maxis operation and surely nothing that (apparently) useful could possibly be awesome as well ::)

Well, according to Maxis, it's safe to move inhabited houses into the bin!  Ho! Ho! Ho!

I have been playing my neighborhood for 3 generations before I knew anything at all about dangling SWAFs. I did a search but can't find the answer I need. How do I clean it up now without screwing up my sims? Some are already screwy as they have wants that sims of a different age group should have. I just want to clean stuff up so I can keep using this neighborhood.

Deleting the SWAFs of the sims that exhibit the weirdest corruption tends to fix it by forcing the game to rebuild a clean one.

So I can just go through and start deleleting SWAFs? I'm sorry if I'm so dense. I looked into SimPe and actually found SWAFs. It looks like there is one for each sim although I really don't know how to find what is "dangling" or if there are leftovers or what. And I guess it would be nice to find a way to sort the list in SimPe so that all the SWAFs are next to each other.

How about a short "HOW TO" thread for dealing with these SWAF problems JMP? Or do you mean we can just go deleting them all willy nilly and the game will fix it for us?

I wouldn't delete them willy-nilly, but if a sim is obviously exhibiting a corrupted SWAF, you can try deleting the one corresponding to that sim. Similarly, all SWAFs that DON'T correspond to a valid sim should be incinerated preemptively.

I have deleted SWAFS that have no reference to any Sim without problem. It fixed the problem of the mismatched LTWs and my children don't have LTWs anymore.