My game was going really well until I downloaded some houses, and now it is so slow I can't even play properly. The game doesn't crash and I can play if I'm pacient, but this is annoying and shouldn't even been happening!! Can someone help me??

How big is your downloads folder?

How large are the houses and what kind of computer are you playing on? Sims 2 while an old game its still pretty demanding.

Delete any rubbish Maxis style houses and any non-major families or sims you don't need, from the game and from the bin, i mean honestly a lot of the houses that came with the game are ugy lol and some families like the girl who likes Grilled cheese are pointless, try not to download too much custom content ether, try to re-use the objects already in the game so i would delete some, i would build your own houses too instead of downloading them because many people never compress their houses or custom content and it ends up as a heavy load on the game.

I would have to disgree with the advice above. Deleting the Maxis houses would have a negligible effect on the game performance. And deleting families will break your neighborhood permanently.

A guess: Some hack or another sneaked in with your downloaded houses. Did you use Clean Installer?

@Pygsmyemm deleting families from the bin causes corruption for the hood they are in.

I for one like most of the Maxis houses and use them in every hood.

I've seen corrupted neighborhoods. Sims go missing. Entire families are swallowed up by the void. Memories and family trees are tangled.

Maxis never programmed the delete button properly. And they never removed it. It was irresponsible of them. And it's even more irresponsible of you to give this terrible, terrible advice that can break other people's neighborhoods and give advice on things you know nothing about.

Never ever delete sims. As soon as you do your hood is corrupted through broken data.

Did you delete your groups.cache file in your Sims 2 folder? That usually helps when the game starts to become unreasonable.

In Maxis's defense, all of the corruption stuff was figured out by players and only after the game was already out of production. Maxis had no chance to fix or remove anything because the game was a done deal by the time it was figured out. You might argue that they could have fixed it for the UC, but there's not really any profit in fixing something that they're just going to hand out for free and, besides, a lot of the fixing that would need to be done regarding corruption would probably mean recoding some fundamental stuff, something that would never be done on an out-of-production game especially not for a version of it that would be handed out for free.

So, the best we can do is let other people know how to avoid it but, even so, there are probably lots of players who never get fannish enough to venture into online forums about an old, out-of-production game. That said, I DO think people get too freaky about corruption but, yes, people ought to be corrected (nicely) when they advise someone else to do the inadvisable.

If your game slows down, do not use big lots, 3x3 is highest what works correctly. Also take a look at your downloads folder. Use Clean Installer to find double files. If you downloaded an incorrectly packed house you can get along with it huge amount of CC (like all configurations and colors of buyable mailbox) what you really don't need.

Yeah, gotta agree that larger lots that are heavily furnished can really lag a computer. I made the mistake of thinking, since Sims 2 was an older game, that my computer could handle such lots. Cue lots of lagging and crashing, to the point I had to abandon that hood and start over. Now I stick to smaller and less heavily decorated ones. Unless you're really stuck on wanting mansions, you can build some very nice houses (or download them) in smaller sizes.

Seriously? deleting families with no relationship with any of the other sims is dangerous?
Why?
Also the maxis homes are fugly, why does deleting them cause problems?

Even if they have no relation to other Sims, the game doesn't clean up the references properly, and there's a good chance they'll surface in the future. It's kind of like tearing out the toilet rather than unclogging it properly. You end up with shit all over you.

....Maybe that's not the best metaphor...

Deleting the Maxis lots doesn't cause any problems, but it probably won't help either.

We say this over and over again on here.

Deleting hosues causes no problems unless there are graves on the lot. Graves = sims.

I'll try to explain, using my now-deceased hood.

I used to delete Sims from the Sim Bin without a single thought. Back then, I was so green that if I didn't like a skintone on a Sim, of course I could just delete the Sim! Maxis let me do it!

Bad move. But to be honest, at the time (2006 - 2007), corruption wasn't as well-known. Some people knew about it, of course. But I've been a member of this forum since 2006, and never saw as much about corruption and VBTs here as you see now. (Then again, I might have just not read those threads. ) I didn't know about Sim PE. There were lots of things I didn't know then.

Around 2009/2010, I looked in my memory panels for that hood and saw "Met $Subject" memories. At first, I didn't pay it much mind. I wasn't one of those who paid much attention to memory panels. Those nonsense memories of "Met ______" didn't bother me then. I figured it was just a harmless game glitch. I got rid of them via the Batbox. There. Fixed.

Oh, boy.

I didn't know that $Subject memories were those of Sims that disappeared. Some were those I deleted. Others were those the game started deleting. It started randomly deleting Sims and as I created others, assigning the ID number of the now-gone Sims to the new ones. It was weird and unsettling to visit a Sims house that would crash because the Sims were no longer there and the game was really confused. Or visit a house, see empty beds, and never see the Sims in that house again.

In short, my hood was a big fiery ball visible from space. (BFBVFS) Corrupted as anything. At first, when someone told me that, I reacted as some still do here .. with disbelief and denial. But yup. My hood was toast.

So no, you don't delete Sims! Not game Sims, not your Sims. Unless it's one of those Sims you aren't supposed to touch, such as Mrs. C and the Charlatan (the wiki has a complete list), there are plenty of neat ways to kill 'em off if that's your thing. Build a pretty cemetery or columbarium, stick those tombstones or urns in there. and forget about the lot. No more Sims you don't want!

And also learn from me , please. Use Clean Installer to examine everything in a downloaded lot before putting it in your hood. I still have a ghost stub file from someone's lot. I've asked about it here, even uploaded it for others to examine, and the good news is that it's not the type of file that will corrupt my hoods. (And this came from More Knowledgeable Ones. ) I was lucky ... at least this time. I was advised to just leave the stub in my Downloads folder, and it's still in there.

I downloaded a lot a couple of years ago that had a ghost on it. It proceeded to corrupt a couple of people's hoods. Fortunately, I was more careful. I didn't even put the lot in my game (though apparently, I found out after deleting the lot that I could have cleaned those references using Sim PE). The CI generally will highlight files that may need your attention, but for some reason, did not highlight my stub file. So don't entirely rely on those red markings, either. Look at every item and see just what you're downloading with the lot. Do not download anything you're not sure about. Leave the boxes unchecked. Ask about those unchecked boxes here or at a forum with more-experienced Simmers, if you really aren't sure about a file

One of the reasons why it may have taken a long time for corruption to become more known, and why you hear so much more about it now than you did in the past, may be that some players have been playing certain hoods ever since the game first came out. Those hoods got bigger and bigger over 12 years, and collected more and more stuff that at long last gets in the way of fluent play.

There have been known instances of pet pregnancy controllers running amok, and slowing hoods down. What I mean is this: some pet is - or has been - pregnant, and upon loading the lot where that pet lives, the game accidentally duplicates the controller and/or token associated with that pregnancy,. So in stead of one of each, there are now two. You won't notice much from this yet. Then you save the lot, and later reload it. And the already double controllers or tokens are doubled once again. Still no problem... But if you do this a couple of times, in a few days there may be thousands of copies of either the controller, or the token. And by that time, they are going to slow the game down considerably.

I've once had a hood where a single house contained over 50,000 pregnancy controllers. This was shortly before TwoJeffs of Simbology made a fix for it: Pet Pregnancy fix prevents this bug from rearing its ugly head. There is also a debug option on SimBlender, to get rid of these controllers on a lot where they already pose a problem. These fixes are good!

There is a person here on MTS whose name I do not wish to type, who also appears to have a fix for it. I can not attest to this mod's quality, for I have never needed to try it.

And then there is my No Sim Loaded, which - among a lot of other stuff - also destroys all unneeded controllers and lots of other crud that may or may not cause corruption in the long run.

But then, the current problem may not have anything to do with pet pregnancies. The most important thing to keep your game safe is to use Clean Installer to check every download before you install it, and to never ever delete sims, families or *occupied* lots from the bin.

http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Game_gui...ding_corruption

This reminds me of my good old days when I just deleted willy nilly and like added the Grim Reaper to my family and cheated with Mrs. Crumplebottom and stuff. Good times...good times...

Yeah, no not really. So basically Maxis forces us to KILL Sims we don't want rather than just delete them. This means unless you want duplicates (IE: Bluewater Village attached as the shopping district to all your 'hoods) then you have to MURDER them. And the Sim Bin families too. So recently I have gotten used to having duplicate Sims in different 'hoods. Kinda funny actually.

And hard to keep track of -_-

Well - along comes the broken record - if you have deleted Sims and you like your hood - by all means, keep on playing. It will blow up eventually, but it may take years before it gets to that point. No reason for not enjoying it until then. At least you have been warned and will not frantically search your pc or looking for a culprit who (must have deleted my hood although I was completely alone in the house then) - like I did. My hood lasted four and a half years. And, despite it probably being as corrupted as could be, it played well until the day it just was gone, gone, gone.

Add the mods to keep the hood safe in the meantime.

Yeah, this question reminded me of a sim whose picture I stumbled upon while poking my neighbourhood in SimPE, it was one I had created, moved in with someone and moved out and bin-deleted right after, I think I just wanted to try a hair or an outfit on him, or take some pictures, or doesn't matter.
And loooooong after that to randomly find his smiling portrait! The bin definitely doesn't delete much more than the character file and leaves a bunch of orphan files and infos.

More options: http://leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=7127

I was an idiot. Some would say I still am. But at least I'm a better-informed idiot!

Soooo, one day the 'hood just won't be there at all? In the opening screen?

It might or might not be. The hood might be there but won't open. The hood might open but characters will be missing. Characters might be there but have messed-up memories or missing aspirations. So forth.

After the Great Crash (which happened when I tried to save with not enough disk space), I could only get Springwater to open once, but it crashed when I entered a household. It was going through SimPE that I realized the extent of the damage.