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Field Researcher
#26 Old 13th Mar 2010 at 10:13 AM
Quote: Originally posted by ginrouken
scarletwings: to stop the bin families from generating in every hood, get the clean templates for the stealth hoods that come with expansion packs (look for them at MATY, the site is down right now so I can't find you the link). It should Pets, Bon Voyage, Open for Business and Free Time that come with the pesky stealth bin families, IINM.

GenOps: if you've just created the hood and never played it at all, the bin families' memories shouldn't have time to replicate through townies before you delete them. But don't quote me on this, it's just a random guess. It's still safer to use clean templates so they're not generated at all.


Thanks for the tip, ginrouken. Hopefully, my 'hood will be safe as I'd never played the neighbourhood before deletion, either - the first thing I do when I open a new neighbourhood is delete all the EAxis families in there. You're probably quite right that I should restart with the clean templates to be entirely safe, though... Thanks again!
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Lab Assistant
#27 Old 14th Mar 2010 at 1:31 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Sims2Nut
Same here. Hey, is there a way to "finally" delete the characters after deleting them in-game? Or no way? If so, that sucks. Because I used to delete characters if I put them in a neighborhood and they were made in the wrong one.

If you already deleted them from the Bin, you may as well trash the hood. If they still exist you might try using Deleted 2. Remember to destroy any family ties the sim might have with others before doing this though.
Instructor
#28 Old 14th Mar 2010 at 7:34 PM
Kind of angers me that the game was designed with such flaws that you really had to do thorough online research to learn how to not screw up all your hard work.
#29 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 5:23 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Clashfan
[....]One of the other things I found is that you should never save the game when a Sim is using the phone. This includes having a different Sim leave the lot, which of course saves the game, while someone else is on the phone. Mostly this occurred for me in University when playing a dorm with many Sims.

Wish I could list the technical reasons for this but that is not my forte. I will tell you that it lead to Sims being unable to use the phone at all. Sims "popping" out of actions when someone would walk by and then they would become frozen until you sent them to an action, after completing the action they would once again become frozen.[....]
Does anyone [else ] know why this is a VBI? I`ve been saving with people on the telephone and haven`t had issues yet, that I know of, anyway....

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Scholar
#30 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 9:34 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Sacred Nym
If you already deleted them from the Bin, you may as well trash the hood. If they still exist you might try using Deleted 2. Remember to destroy any family ties the sim might have with others before doing this though.

... Crap. Just, crap.

One quick question... how will the hood be unplayable? Will it be like, not being able to load any lots, or will the sims just glitch up when you try to make them do something?

Quote: Originally posted by jooxis
Kind of angers me that the game was designed with such flaws that you really had to do thorough online research to learn how to not screw up all your hard work.


This makes me really mad too. I started my neighborhood as the first one I've ever played and I can't believe that without going online and reading about how to not mess up your game, you will eventually mess up your game. Also downloading hacks to be able to fix stuff. I mean, WTH? You would think Eaxis would at least play their game and find out stuff like you can't get date gifts in apartments, or at least that CELL PHONES WERE GETTING EATEN when you merely answered them.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
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Lab Assistant
#31 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 9:44 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Sims2Nut
One quick question... how will the hood be unplayable? Will it be like, not being able to load any lots, or will the sims just glitch up when you try to make them do something?


How far did you make with those sims you deleted? Did you just make them and deleted from the bin, or did you make them, place them in neighborhood and then deleted; or made them, played other houses in the neighborhood letting them sit in the bin for a while and only then delete? If you just made them and promptly deleted them from the bin without playing the neighborhood before, there's a chance that memories about them have not spread (a small chance, that gets even smaller the more times you've done this, and said you did this a lot, right?).

If you put them in the hood, or let them sit in the bin while you played another house before deleting them, someone in the hood definitely got memories about them, which are now corrupt. The glitches that would come from this really depend, they can vary from small things like sims jumping back from objects or being unable to interact with them, to more serious ones like lots/neighborhoods eventually not loading anymore.

How much you wanna panic about this is your choice. You can cut your losses if you think your hood is doomed and start a new one, or you can keep playing the hood even if you know it's corrupt until you start seeing the glitches happen if you don't wanna let go now (but the problem there is you'd have grown even more attached to the hood at that point, so losing it would hurt more).
Scholar
#32 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 9:54 PM
Quote: Originally posted by ginrouken
How far did you make with those sims you deleted? Did you just make them and deleted from the bin, or did you make them, place them in neighborhood and then deleted; or made them, played other houses in the neighborhood letting them sit in the bin for a while and only then delete? If you just made them and promptly deleted them from the bin without playing the neighborhood before, there's a chance that memories about them have not spread (a small chance, that gets even smaller the more times you've done this, and said you did this a lot, right?).

If you put them in the hood, or let them sit in the bin while you played another house before deleting them, someone in the hood definitely got memories about them, which are now corrupt. The glitches that would come from this really depend, they can vary from small things like sims jumping back from objects or being unable to interact with them, to more serious ones like lots/neighborhoods eventually not loading anymore.

How much you wanna panic about this is your choice. You can cut your losses if you think your hood is doomed and start a new one, or you can keep playing the hood even if you know it's corrupt until you start seeing the glitches happen if you don't wanna let go now (but the problem there is you'd have grown even more attached to the hood at that point, so losing it would hurt more).


I put them in the hood, but never played them, while playing other families. Then I noticed them and went "WTH?" and deleted them, thinking that they really shouldn't be there. I have a feeling that the hood is doomed. It's too bad, because I was planning to have all the supernaturals take over the neighborhood and kill off everyone else.

What about moving Sims from neighborhood to neighborhood? Is that as bad? I had this one sim living in Belladonna Cove (I had no better place for him) he adopted a baby, she grew to a toddler, and then they both moved in an empty, fresh, lot. He was living in apartments, and occasionally he went to the hot tub and chatted, but only with the few sims that lived there, and he didn't make very much contact.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
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Instructor
#33 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 10:43 PM
Does anyone know by the way: what about when you go into Create a Family, you create a few sims but then Cancel the family - is it just as bad as deleting sims from the bin?
Lab Assistant
#34 Old 15th Mar 2010 at 11:23 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Sims2Nut
What about moving Sims from neighborhood to neighborhood?


....yeah, your hood is pretty doomed. Moving sims across hoods is the worst thing you could do. It corrupts not only the hood you took them from (leaving blank stubs where your sims used to be), but also the new hood you took them to (making false duplicate copies of sims they knew or had memories/gossip of in the previous hood). Don't do this, ever. Either clone the sims in SimPE or remake them from scratch on CAS in the new hood, and make believe they're the same ones.

Quote: Originally posted by jooxis
Does anyone know by the way: what about when you go into Create a Family, you create a few sims but then Cancel the family - is it just as bad as deleting sims from the bin?


No. If you don't save the family, those sims were never created (the game doesn't write new character files, which is the root of all problems).
Test Subject
#35 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 1:18 AM
Quote: Originally posted by ginrouken
How far did you make with those sims you deleted? Did you just make them and deleted from the bin, or did you make them, place them in neighborhood and then deleted; or made them, played other houses in the neighborhood letting them sit in the bin for a while and only then delete? If you just made them and promptly deleted them from the bin without playing the neighborhood before, there's a chance that memories about them have not spread (a small chance, that gets even smaller the more times you've done this, and said you did this a lot, right?).

If you put them in the hood, or let them sit in the bin while you played another house before deleting them, someone in the hood definitely got memories about them, which are now corrupt. The glitches that would come from this really depend, they can vary from small things like sims jumping back from objects or being unable to interact with them, to more serious ones like lots/neighborhoods eventually not loading anymore.

How much you wanna panic about this is your choice. You can cut your losses if you think your hood is doomed and start a new one, or you can keep playing the hood even if you know it's corrupt until you start seeing the glitches happen if you don't wanna let go now (but the problem there is you'd have grown even more attached to the hood at that point, so losing it would hurt more).



I really wish I would of known this sooner. I've always deleted families that I've played with for awhile then got tired in the sim bin. Agggh, it looks like I have to delete those hoods.
Scholar
#36 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 2:06 AM
Quote: Originally posted by GeneralOperationsDirector
Does anyone [else ] know why this is a VBI? I`ve been saving with people on the telephone and haven`t had issues yet, that I know of, anyway....


Generally, there are no major problems with saving while a sim is on the phone in regular gameplay. However, it can become a problem if the hood experiences a reset. A reset happens when you put in some hacks (creators generally put this information in the download thread; eg. I have seen this information included in the descriptions of a couple of hacks by Two Jeffs) or when you install a new EP or SP. A " hood reset" is when all the sims get sent home, from school or work, and everyone is standing around with all their needs bars back to how they are when you first create a household (ie. most of them full with hunger down a little bit). If you run a bakery business and installed a new EP you might notice that all the cakes in the displays have mysteriously gone off.

When a sim is on the phone, the game actually treats the sim they are talking to as being on the lot, but they are invisible. So when you have a reset, the sim on the other end of the line ends up remaining on the lot - invisible. And I'm pretty sure that this has the additional effect of marking the phone as "In Use" so nobody else can use it. You can nuke off-world loiterers using the Lot Debugger aka Bat Box and this might fix it. And you could try forcing an error on the phone afterwards so it gets reset out of it's In Use state. It's nothing to really panic about. If your sims don't tend to generate a lot of errors and reset themselves or you haven't installed any new EPs lately causing a hood reset then you probably haven't seen this and it isn't likely to happen unless something like that happens.

I tend to save at 6am sim time so that everyone is home and ready to get up for the day but they are not doing anything other than sleeping. That way if I experience a hood reset, no harm done as this does not seem to affect beds. And if it does, I just force errors or replace the bed.

Another non-intuitive thing not to do is to move sims between houses with beds in their inventories. One of the EPs, I think BV, gave sims "bed ownership", where they will tend to go to the bed to which the player sends them the most. Moving sims with beds in their inventories does something to this bed ownership and I have a vague recollection of the beds becoming unusable so players had to re-buy them anyway.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#37 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:10 AM
There was also, if I recall, a problem if you saved while anyone was using a remote control car and experienced a lot reset, something similar to the phone problem, but potentially, worse. Because I'm pretty sure the remote control car controller is treated as an NPC.

Sorry to hear about all the ruined hoods. I've been following all of the rules stated so far since I started playing, but I'm still sure there's something I've missed that will eventually cause my game to explode.

Does anyone know if removing custom foods after they have been used is a problem? I know that Sims get invisible marker memories that mark their favourite foods and often want to learn to make custom foods and gain that memory as well. I have done this in the past and can't help but wonder what this has done to my hood.

Necromancy is Good
Lab Assistant
#38 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:32 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Kazzandra
There was also, if I recall, a problem if you saved while anyone was using a remote control car and experienced a lot reset, something similar to the phone problem, but potentially, worse. Because I'm pretty sure the remote control car controller is treated as an NPC.

I'm 99% sure this was fixed with a patch. But if not, then I would gather the problem also appears on the non-toy non-Servo craftable robots, since I'm pretty sure they work the same way.
Quote: Originally posted by Kazzandra
Sorry to hear about all the ruined hoods. I've been following all of the rules stated so far since I started playing, but I'm still sure there's something I've missed that will eventually cause my game to explode.

If nothing else, overpopulation will probably hit you. As an observation, I think the overpopulation issue has less to do with the number of character files and more to do with the collective size. I've noticed in my readings of MATY threads that character file "bloating" is seen as an issue.
Quote: Originally posted by Kazzandra
Does anyone know if removing custom foods after they have been used is a problem? I know that Sims get invisible marker memories that mark their favourite foods and often want to learn to make custom foods and gain that memory as well. I have done this in the past and can't help but wonder what this has done to my hood.

That's a good question. One I'm kind of curious of myself. It seems like it could go either way depending on how the memory data is handled, particularly when calling the name of the food. My first guess would be that it's harmless, but don't hold me to it.
Instructor
#39 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 10:16 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Sims2Nut
... You would think Eaxis would at least play their game and find out stuff like you can't get date gifts in apartments, or at least that CELL PHONES WERE GETTING EATEN when you merely answered them.


They don't even know how to fix their own stuff. When I had a problem (after waiting half an hour for a live-chat rep) he sent me to this forum. Which, if I understand it correctly, is not even run by EA, but just fans of the game? Pretty sad.

But it led me here, so that's good.
Instructor
#40 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 10:57 AM
ginrouken, whew, that's good then.

Also, the whole gossip thing in the game - is it safe to do? I've heard of files becoming corrupt and things getting screwed up related to the gossip action. Is it safe to use? I'm pretty tired of starting new hoods.
Lab Assistant
#41 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 2:15 PM
Quote: Originally posted by jooxis
Also, the whole gossip thing in the game - is it safe to do? I've heard of files becoming corrupt and things getting screwed up related to the gossip action. Is it safe to use? I'm pretty tired of starting new hoods.


Gossip is not player-controllable, you can't stop it. Townies and NPCs will gossip, and even if you never direct your sim to gossip, or cancel all gossip interactions started by other sims, you sim will still magically receive gossip tokens. You'll get at least one random one when they're initialized (try this is if you have SimPE: put a new sim in the hood, fresh out of CAS, quit the game, then check his memories on SimPE; you'll find at least one gossip token about some random sim or stray already), and you'll keep getting tokens for everything your sim witnesses in daily life, plus some completely unrelated incidents in the neighborhood (Johnny got an A+, Mary ate cheesecake, Abhijeet lost fight with Unsavory Charlatan, etc).

So gossip away. It builds relationship faster than chatting, and it's not like you can keep it from happening anyway.
Scholar
#42 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 2:47 PM
Quote: Originally posted by grumpy_otter
They don't even know how to fix their own stuff. When I had a problem (after waiting half an hour for a live-chat rep) he sent me to this forum. Which, if I understand it correctly, is not even run by EA, but just fans of the game? Pretty sad.

But it led me here, so that's good.


Seriously? That's a whole new level of corporate laziness.
#43 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:12 PM
Thank you, Engram. I already have all expansions and all Stuff packs [except for Happy Holliday Stuff and Store Edition] --and have them installed-- so I`m not likely to have many more neighborhood resets. I have ffsdebugger.package, and use it occasionally, but never new what Nuke Off World Loiterers was *for* [although I had a pretty good idea what it *did*, just from the name ]. The option for deleting trash from the memory tends to delete stuff I don`t *want* deleted, so I`ve stopped using that feature. D`you happen to know how the BatBox decides what memories are trash?

Kazzandra, you`re right: the RC cars and helicopters are NPCs, as are a few other items [including, as mentioned above, the autonomous craftable robots].

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Lab Assistant
#44 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:27 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GeneralOperationsDirector
how the BatBox decides what memories are trash?


- met someone
- moved in/out
- any memories with Mystery Sim
- corrupt memories

I kinda like the Moved In/Out ones because they help me trace back when a family moved to a new house, and wiping the Mystery Sim ones on CAS sims was giving me a lot of virgin/never-been-kissed adults, so I stopped using that option on the batbox too. I'd rather fix the ones and remove the zillions of "Met ___" on SimPE.
#45 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:37 PM
Thank you, ginrouken. I`ve noticed that pre-Uni Sims who have NOT had their memories detrashed have a memory of having attended University, while pre-Uni Sims who *have* been detrashified don`t. Is this correct, or am I imagining it?

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Lab Assistant
#46 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 6:37 PM
That could only happen if you used the batbox to Upgrade -> Pre-uni a sim. Otherwise even new CAS sims don't come with a Went to College memory.

edit: actually, nevermind that, I'll have to owe you on this one. I just remembered I have a mod that kills all "Was Uneducated" memories and prevents teen who grow to adult without going to college from getting one, so I'm not sure if the false "Went to College" memories you're talking about aren't being zapped in my sims too. I wouldn't have seen the case you mention.
Lab Assistant
#47 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 10:04 PM
I bin delete all the time - is it really that bad?

Call me Isobel

*hates recorders, no-touch-the-baby mommies, and lost dice"
Mad Poster
#48 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 10:30 PM
Quote: Originally posted by shadowfan360
I really wish I would of known this sooner. I've always deleted families that I've played with for awhile then got tired in the sim bin. Agggh, it looks like I have to delete those hoods.


I think perhaps I sounded too alarmist.

I deleted Sims in the Sim Bin back in 2006 - 2007. I didn't have problems until 2009. These problems were probably due MAINLY to overpopulation.

Perhaps, it's much like trying to mate your Sim and The Grim Reaper ... it's a crap shoot. Either things will be OK, or they will go terribly wrong. I didn't reset the neighborhood after finding out that deleting Sims from the Sim Bin = Bad. Personally, if, in a haze I started doing this again, I would sin no more and just keep a watchful eye for anything wonky.

Thanks to ALL free-site creators, admins and mods.

RIP Sunni ... truly a ray of light.
Lab Assistant
#49 Old 16th Mar 2010 at 11:21 PM
Quote: Originally posted by gazania
These problems were probably due MAINLY to overpopulation.


Unless you were playing only base game until your hood died, I'm willing to bet it was the bin deletion that caused your problems. They fixed the overpopulation problems the base game had back in the first EPs.

Quote: Originally posted by gazania
Perhaps, it's much like trying to mate your Sim and The Grim Reaper ... it's a crap shoot.


It's not really the same thing. Deleting sims from the bin does corrupt character files, it's not a possibility that it may or may not happen if you're lucky. The damage that this corruption will cause to your hood is what varies - it may break your hood in a week, it may take years to cause only minor problems. But the file corruption is there, whether you see it or not. Nah, it's not the case to cause rushes of panic, but let's also not understimate the problem that it causes. I lost two hoods to this before, so I wouldn't play with chances again.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#50 Old 17th Mar 2010 at 6:03 AM
Alright, add as a minor DO NOT DO--
deleting established custom foods.

It breaks your want trees when you encounter a sim who had it as a favourite food. I thought it might be unrelated but then I saw the tell-tell Eat $Object want and some Sims would reroll using the lot debugger and others wouldn't (the ones having problems were heavily eating the ousted content), I knew that that was the only change I had made that could affect the game.

I think I should be able to fix it my going into SimPE and deleting any memories of foods that are $Objects. I would just reinstall the food, but I had two food packages conflicting. ARGH.

Necromancy is Good
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