Hello everybody,

I have a question regarding SimPE (I hope this is the right place to ask):

I always extract/clone my user-created sims, and sims created in Body Shop, CAF or even in-game usually will show up in SimPE's Sims Surgery editor.
However, almost all of the sims born in-game and a handful of sims I recently created in CAF suddenly aren't available for extraction/cloning any more. Sims Surgery just can't seem to find and display them.

I tried to find these sims using the Sim browser and got the information that these sims had "no character files".
I had a look at the files in the "Characters" folder and it seems that my sims' data gets split into two files: A normal "x00x_Userxxxx" one and one ending in "x00x_Userxxxx.1". The data appears to be (randomly) split between these two files, e.g. one sim's x00x_Userxxxx-file contains "Age Data" only and the x00x_Userxxxx.1-file the rest of the information, or one file contains "Age Data", "Edith Semantics Behaviour Labels" and "Directory Compressed Files" and the other file everything else.
The game accesses both files but doesn't always alter them at the same time.

All of the affected sims are fully playable and my Sims 2 game is working fine; no freezes or crashes, no odd behaviour. I just can't extract and clone these sims.

Has anyone got an idea as to why this happens? Could this problem be caused by the Ultimate Collection (I didn't have a similiar problem before installing UC), broken neighborhood files or something completely different?
Is there any safe method to fuse the split data files or any other way of extracting and cloning sims?

No, I'm not sure why this happens but it seems to be related to errors while you play. That is to say, I usually notice this has happened when I get an error showing in game (I play with Debug Mode on). I don't get many errors these days so I haven't seen it in a while. I think it's a sort of failsafe. I think what happens is the game throws an error and, in order to keep things on track, it immediately makes a copy of the character file and uses that as the current version thus avoiding any problems with corruption from the error. It effectively abandons the old version of the file. Basically, they are redundant. The version of the file you want is the one that has the large filesize. Usually the copy is a ripped version of the character file with only a few KB of data (or none). In the past, I have been known to delete these files (and rename the xxx.1 ones to the original name) though I would warn off that since I don't know if that causes problems. I've not seen corruption from it but then I might just have been lucky.

What you could do, if you're wanting to clone, is temporarily remove the abandoned files and rename any xxx.1 files and then run SimPE. Put it all back once you're done (or better, actually, do it with a copy of the folder and put the old one back once finished).

Hello maxon,

thanks for the advice and quick reply!

The files ending in .1 differ in size, some are smaller, and some are larger than the original 'abandoned' files and some are roughly the same size.

I renamed all files ending in .1 and moved the abandoned files to a different folder, then I tried to run the game to see whether they contain any information necessary to play the game:
Removing the 'abandoned' files (unfortunately) didn't change anything about the way my sims were displayed in the Sim browser or Sims Surgery; I still couldn't clone them. It didn't crash the game either but I couldn't control most of my sims anymore. They were invisible, missing wants, LTWs and other information and couldn't execute any actions assigned to them.
Putting all files back into the Characters folder restored everything back to normal.
So it seems the game does indeed need both files for the sims to show up properly in the game. Which is odd.

It is odd because I've never seen that and AFAIK the game only reads one file per character. One thing you could do is look in the character section and see which file is being used. Um - you go to the character in SimPE and it's under the last tab in plug in view.

Edit: added pic to try and make it clear what I mean:

The one ending in .1, but if I remove either of the two files my sims will become unplayable. I also checked whether they're unlinked but they aren't.

In another thread user J.D wrote (http://modthesims.info/t/510911, #2):

This could be true, but I've never seen this happen before no matter how long I played. There are four sims whose data files haven't been split into two, and their data files are definitely larger than some of the ones that got split.

Maybe that's what's happening with yours but I've never seen that. Having said that, and looking at the picture you posted, it would seem that the files you are looking at do contain character data - i.e. they're not really small files. What you could do - temporarily again on a COPY - is try merging the files with SimPE. Just use the Exprt/Import functions. This might give you the data needed to make the clone. It's the appearance and genetics data you need.

That sounds like an interesting suggestion and I'd like to try that, but I can't figure out how to merge files and where the export/import functions are in simpe.

Could you explain how exactly this is done, please?