Rufio, I was under the impression that your program displayed data from the game.
To follow up directly after Inge's post and not say anything about the issue appears 'dishonest'.


Life stage and days left are the key values.  If you store nothing else for age, you store these.
Otherwise you end up with bugs like...
(emphasis mine)

Doing it properly will also handle the different pets properly using the same code.
You could then also include the days until death for elders.


Your way is akin to training a guarddog and then barking yourself.
Of the people that I've spoken to about SimSheet, their interest is fueled by that fact that they can import the data via SimPE.
I don't know anyone that wants to play the SimSheet game.


No it isn't.  It's your interpretation of Days old.  Will your code spot buggy elders that say they are 5 days old?  No.
How can you say this as fact, when you state above that noone has clarified this for you?
Here's the clarification you need.  It's PrevAgeDays + AgeDuration - AgeDaysLeft

There are also some bugs in your attempted CSV handling code.  That was expected though.  We all knew it was a hard thing to get right.
There are enough links in this thread already pointing the way to clean and tested code in that area.

While you are rewriting the savefile version, have you considered that you already have it in the form of the SimPE output?

Doesn't SimPE export the numbers required for this to happen automagically?

Thanks for the post

Pes needs to move all the posts there, so give him a poke.
Or ask the nominated Pes poker to poke him.
Or sacrifice a goat.
Or ask rohina, she'll know.
 

There's a list of 'special' family ID's in the Trogdor forum.

Inge's cat uses those labels I think.
SimSheet does.  Marhis posted a better list in that thread in the peasantry.
In SimPE you would have to look them up yourself.

Not sure what you mean by 'SimBrowser'?

I believe that's one of the changes she's doing now
I've lost the post now but it's the one in this threadexplaining where she's going to be saving more fields, and therefore changing the savefile version.
V0.5 only has one field for age, which worked fine for the original manual entry and default age lengths.

Worth putting that data in the War Room?

Or use SimSheet. (See peasantry)

Import your hood into SimSheet before starting the game. and then save it in SimSheet format.
It's lighter to run than SimPE, and you can also run it at the same time as running the game without the file-locking troubles.

Not exactly dumb code, as it's not used.
Although why it has not been removed since the basegame I'm not sure.

7f647BAD 1002 CT - Change School
The programmer had one hell of a headache trying to write this.
51 nodes, of which 14 of them are breakpoints.
Wonder if the 'Manage Inventory' tutorial at MTS2 would have helped if it had been around.

Any others that beat 27% breakpoints?

Loads OK again

Full hood.  All sims were loaded, as their names appeared in the right 'Households'.

Problems
1/ Quiet a big bug with the 'List of Sims'.
I found a workaround to stop it crashing.  Hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

At first, only playables were listed in the 'List of Sims' window.
Had to toggle the townies off&on to get them to display.

Opening from a savefile, then trying to sort on any field causes simsheet to just disappear.
 - think this is related to townies not showing.  It sorts OK after toggling the townies off&on in the filter.

No 'Adoptables' showing until you toggle the Filter off&on.
I think there are more like this not showing until you toggle the filter off&on.
The list of names starting with A was 1 page to begin with, and grew up to 5 pages after I'd cycled through all the family-filter options.

Not sure if you've implemented these 2 yet...
2/ Pressing 'Add Notes' causes a crash (with MS send report dialog).
3/ Cancelling the 'Add Image' causes a crash (with MS send report dialog).

Suggestions
1/ 'At Large' is confusing, can this be 'Townies/Dormies'?
2/ Some way to filter/sort on family?
  We can easily filter most of the special families through the Filter checkboxes.
  Maybe add a dropdown to filter a specific playable household.
  Maybe add a surname or household column to the list for sorting on.

Thanks for the update

Yeah, my fault you didn't read the last email that contained the attachement

BTW, this tool helped me find out why one of my sims was broken, and highlighted another broken EA-made sim

Chastity Gere looked like she was stuck in permiplat, and she should not have been as I'd not played her that much.
Her 'real mood' was hidden, she was actually heading for aspiration failure.  I put the thinking cap on her and she lost skill points and had her energy drain to zero.
Sorting my playables in SimSheet showed her aspiration was set to 'Nothing', although in game all indications said she was a romance sim.
There was another child set to Knowledge instead of grow-up.

Easily fixed in SimPE, but much easier to actually locate the problem aspirations using SimSheet

Does the output path have a trailing '/'?

Check your email to sort out the details

I could write a batch file that you could call with the 2 arguents if you like?
batch files are windows answer to shell scripts.
I could add some sanity checking that the directories and files exist etc,
and end with a pause so we can debug.

The only 2 args you'd need to supply would be the "SimPE.exe path" and the "output folder".

ETA, make that 3 args.  Forgot the hood.

The 'pause' command gives the 'press any key' prompt.
Just tried these below in a command prompt and they work just like they'd do in bash.

echo foo || pause
echo foo && pause

I'm getting the same as Coral
Any chance you can leave the cmd.exe box up after execution until we get it working on everybodies machines?
Either by a switch or a 'press any key to close' prompt.

Yes.  That's where your code fails. You backtrack -2 to test '!='.  So as -2 held a '\' too, you'd need an 'else if' to go back to -3... etc.
I was just trying to show you how escaping characters will add more complexities.
It's actually tricky to do properly without a backtracking regex engine.
So while you invent a new standard to fix a bug, you'll have all the bugs that come with reading this new standard too.

CSV has some flavours sure, but the libraries I've seen allow you to choose the ruleset.
That's why I suggested 'text/csv' and the link to the rfc

Any standard is good, CSV seems the logical choice here, with XML coming a distant second.
CSV will also cope with the non-ascii charsets.

Rufio, any field with a \ before the NL in the original data would break the code you suggested.

Orig field
"/\/\ () /\/\
\/\/ () \/\/"

SimPE output would then have to be...
"/\\/\\ () /\\/\\\
\\/\\/ () \//\//"

I don't see what benefit there is to invent a new data standard, especially if in the process you corrupt the data and make it less readable.

There's C++ and .NET support listed here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSV_application_support

Inge, Peter will still need to scan all characters to escape existing quotes with a quote.
The slowdown of testing every character shouldn't be noticeable.
Also Rufio fixed the problem with the long transfer time.  Now if you blink you almost miss it

Yep, DOS uses CR+LF where linux would just use the NL.
Excel *does* handle the embedded line breaks fine, both importing and exporting them.
*The* spec to look for CSV's is rfc4180.
You should be able to find a CSV library to do the parsing for you for most languages.
I know that Perl Text::CSV took care of all the parsing and escaping headaches for me

I agree that it should be SimPE's job to just make the data available unaltered.
Then if somebody needs access to the information not used by SimSheet, they can easily use Excel, Perl etc...

If SimPE is going to destroy data for the transfer, then that should be a '-simsheetformat' option IMO.
I don't know what the ultimate goal of SimSheet is.  The next version may use more fields that it is using now?

I'm going to lose power any minute now.  The power company are replacing some poles.
All the info is in that thread but I'll mail you a completed list later when the power comes back up.
Some of the special NPC's are in the downtownies group.  I don't have a list of all these, but they'll have the NPC flag set.
In fact your program will make finding info like this much easier

For aging, you could skip all the groups above 0x7f?? (will check later)

Now that we can import the 'live' data simply and quickly, is the aging option now redundent?
Using the live data also accounts for againg mods that the user may be using.


That would be brilliant
The output from SimPE lists these fields under 'FamilyInstance'.

The exe is there now

The At large family is now showing ~600 sims, so this appears fine now too.

I had noticed that in an older version you had split the townies & NPC's into the family names given by the SimPE output.
Could this be an option?
Reason:  I used SimPE to change the useless names for the all the special townie/downtownie/NPC's to their 'functional' names (see here.

In alfixes, that's the fix for pets coming home from their jobs and reseting (so no pay or promotion).
The bug that EA introduced in ALp2.  Probably while they were trying to fix...

"A friend that was brought home from work after certain hobby chance cards will only be brought home once instead of every day."

Ste's mod will be useless without this BHAV, so I'd say use both and load his last.
Ste's mod might not have the chance card bug in it anyway.

Wow, just a slight increase in speed there
Hardly had time to look at the progress bar at all, great work.

Yes - install the no-cd for your latest ep
No - the old pets .exe file does not need replacing back to the original.

I don't know if this is related...
http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php/topic,2017.msg40725.html#msg40725

Basically, there's a file in the Thumbnails that was stopping the catalog from being reordered.
Could try backing those up, then deleting them to force the game to recreate the files.