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Help please from anyone who knows how to use SimPE
Sapientsimsolid
Posts: 3,169 Member
in The Sims 2
Hi recently developed a problem in Sims 2, and it involves use of SimPE.
Need help if anyone out there knows how to use it & doesn't mind helping.
Here is the situation:
Brandi Broke, she had 2 boys when I started playing her, (she was pregnant, but didn't know it)
She now has 4 kids, 3 boys & 1 girl and a husband.
I tried to send one of her boys to college & it wasn't happening in the town they were living in, so I moved them
to Desiderata Valley.
If IRC she was living there when I started playing her, then I moved her to Pleasantville.
Anyway, her eldest son aged up and went to college already, he is now living with his gf.
But he is not showing in the family tree as her son, trying to fix this.
When I moved Brandi to Desiderata Valley so her youngest could go to college, because for some strange reason I still don't know,
he couldn't go from Pleasantville like his older brother did.
So am trying to fix their family tree using SimPE, but noticed they (Brandi and family) are not listed in the town (Desiderata Valley) in the family ties section. So I can't reconnect them to their families like this tutorial says to do.
http://hullabaloo.sunsims.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7085
Does anyone know how to make SimPE update the town so all the townies there are listed (even if just moved there)
Or should I use another tool like bat box or ffs debugger ?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me figure out how to reset or restore or update Desiderata Valley, using SimPE to its current
population.
Need help if anyone out there knows how to use it & doesn't mind helping.
Here is the situation:
Brandi Broke, she had 2 boys when I started playing her, (she was pregnant, but didn't know it)
She now has 4 kids, 3 boys & 1 girl and a husband.
I tried to send one of her boys to college & it wasn't happening in the town they were living in, so I moved them
to Desiderata Valley.
If IRC she was living there when I started playing her, then I moved her to Pleasantville.
Anyway, her eldest son aged up and went to college already, he is now living with his gf.
But he is not showing in the family tree as her son, trying to fix this.
When I moved Brandi to Desiderata Valley so her youngest could go to college, because for some strange reason I still don't know,
he couldn't go from Pleasantville like his older brother did.
So am trying to fix their family tree using SimPE, but noticed they (Brandi and family) are not listed in the town (Desiderata Valley) in the family ties section. So I can't reconnect them to their families like this tutorial says to do.
http://hullabaloo.sunsims.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7085
Does anyone know how to make SimPE update the town so all the townies there are listed (even if just moved there)
Or should I use another tool like bat box or ffs debugger ?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me figure out how to reset or restore or update Desiderata Valley, using SimPE to its current
population.
0
Comments
The Brokes start off in Pleasantview.
You can not move Sims between neighborhoods in Sims 2 without corruption happening. I do not know enough about SimPE or what causes corruption to spread to even begin to fix it.
The only way to fix it is to reset both Pleasantview and Desiderata Valley. Which would undo all progress made in both neighborhoods
Do you have the Ultimate Collection or do you own the disc version?
Edit to add: You can still continue to play both neighborhoods, but at some point you will be unable to play in that neighborhood or even load it. And SimPE won't even recognize it. This could take 2 weeks. It could take 20 years. You'll know when it's starting to get bad.
I have both editions, discs and Ultimate Collection
How do you reset the towns, that's what I've been trying to do with Desiderata Valley.
Before it gets too far in the corruption phase; I have the families saved, been saving as I go, can let the game regenerate new neighborhoods
and then place them again ?
Are you playing from the Ultimate Collection or from the discs? If you're playing from the discs, did you install from compilation packs (Fun With Pets, Double Deluxe, etc)?
Edit: Are you trying to get the Broke Family tree to be correct? If so, resetting Desiderata will not fix it. You'll need to reset Pleasantview.
I moved her and her adult son to Desiderata from Pleasantview. (2 younger boys still with her)
The older boy Dustin went to college from Pleasantview, but when I tried to send the middle son the game wouldn't let me, so
I moved them (back to) Desiderata Valley.
That said, not sure why resetting Pleasantview is the way to go because I moved them both & the family broke then.
Yes I want them to be family again. (Broke family)
Both households are in Desiderata Valley, but she only acknowledges her younger 2 sons & not her eldest.
Playing from Ultimate collection but not through Origin.
The way I saved my families, I packaged them to file, and put them in a folder on my desktop.
Can I use them ?
Unless you used SimPE and those families are saved as individual Sims, then not unless you want to corrupt the new neighborhood. And like I said previously, it could be 2 weeks or 20 years before you aren't able to play the neighborhood, but I just feel that you should know when you do something that is known to corrupt the game. It's easier to take it when you know one day it's going to be unplayable, than to be one day surprised when you can't play it.
This game is not like Sims 3. You can't move Sims from one "world" to another "world" without the use of third party programs unless you want to corrupt both the original and new neighborhood.
You would need to reset Pleasantview in order to get a non-corrupted Broke family with the family connections set correctly if you don't want to use SimPE. You would only lose the 4th child unless the 4th was a twin birth with the 3rd. Brandi's baby from the pregnancy that she has when you first load her house is always a male clone of her.
I can walk you through safely moving the Brokes from Pleasantview to Desiderata (you would need to play long enough for any pregnancies to be over and all infants to be aged to toddler if you wanted to keep the unborn 3rd child without having to cheat it back. It is possible to cheat this one back. If you wanted, I could tell you have to safely save the husband (assuming not made in body shop) and the 4th child if it wasn't a twin of the third baby.
I appreciate your willingness to help me & talk me through things.
There is a problem with Pleasantville then if I can't use the families I've saved in my folder on desktop. I didn't individually save them.
There are eleven families, Sims I've created.
Then I resurrected the elder Goths.
What is the 3rd party program used to move families ?
Because I'm not losing all my families if I can avoid it.
And the broke family (Brandi) I've played her from when her eldest & middle child was in school.
Before she got married.
Not sure I'm willing to start over with her.
The third party program is SimPE. It will be tedious to move them especially if there are more than 8 Sims in the families, the families have progressed past 3 generations or there are multiple generations of the same age (like Dustin and Brandi Broke both being adults). Basically if you can't set the family ties in CAS it will be tedious. Or if you care about skills, personality points matching for the born in game Sims, exact career levels, etc. If you don't care if say Dustin and Beau Broke were both adults and had the same number of days left that would also reduce the tediousness of moving them.
Since you've got the UC, you've got Origin, it would make helping you a lot easier if we did this via Origin chat since that will notify the other immediately if there is a response. Especially for the parts using SimPE. My Origin ID is the same as my username here.
My best days are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Afternoon/evening EST for all as I'm not a morning person.
I can help save:
Of the list above, the relationship one is the most tedious and the step with the most risk of causing corruption.
I'm going to have to think on what I want to do with Brandi & her gang.
It was difficult in the beginning, then learning she had another on the way & they all were in school !
Not sure if I want to go through that again.
I don't like playing families with more than 2 children in school.
Things can get kind of hairy to me.
I don't like feeling as though I always have to "catch up"
Only one family I have has 3 sims and 2 dogs. That's the largest.
The couple just had a child.
Just to get an idea, what if I just want to recover or reset or obtain Pleasantville without the corruption,
is there a way I can do that ?
I also have one Sim in Riverblossom Hill I created the day before yesterday.
He's supposed to be for one of the female Sims in Pleasantville. If I can somehow save her, and I don't know move her in
with him in Riverblossom Hill, would she have the corruption attached to her ?
I really don't know what I'm doing here, just winging it because I know nothing about how to handle corruption in Sims 2
Trying to see if I can salvage anything or do I have to start completely over.
Or remove the entire EA game folder if you want to start over in all hoods etc.
If you want to try to salvage this but I highly advise let it go and start over in fresh EA game folder/with fresh regenerated hoods.
Here are the beginner instructions to SimPe. There are more complicated instructions as you learn to use SimPE but these are the basics.
https://simpeforum.ambertation.de/viewtopic.php?t=30
Basics of TS2: The hoods included in the game are Main Hoods, never move Sims in and out of these main hoods to other hoods. The only hoods your Sims can move to are subhoods attached to your main hood. And never delete subhoods if your Sims met and know any subhood Maxis Sims who live in those subhoods.
Am thinking about doing exactly this, starting over with new towns completely, but I am extremely interested in salvaging my Sims.
I have used SimPE before for other things, I don't know how to do a lot with it, but I self taught myself & am fairly comfortable with
it.
Given that, this is what I'd like to know if you know the answer given your expertise.
If I removed everything from the Sims homes, put it in their inventories, packaged their homes to file,
and put the Sims in the Sim bin, would I be able to place them in a newly generated town, or are they corrupt ?
Here is what I am looking at:
10 Sims I want to save from Pleasantville (already did some work in trying to salvage them, doing what I asked about above, but I'm not sure
it was the right thing to do & before I move on to the other towns, I want to see what you have to say.)
2 /3 I want to save from Belladonna Cove
1 Sim I want to save from Riverblossoms Hills
And 2 Sims I want to save from a custom town I made named Bilnee Shores.
This is leading me down the rabbit hole of corruption, and I've learned there are 2 types.
One is the game corruption.
And the other is the town corruption.
Of course I still have a lot to learn.
I didn't expect to be catapulted down this rabbit hole obviously, or I would never have moved that family
so I'd appreciate it if people didn't try to make me feel worse than I do.
I will take peoples word the towns are corrupted due to me moving family from one town to another, although my game
is not showing signs yet of corruption.
That said, I'm attempting now to take steps, to save my sims.
These are Sims I've created and I enjoy playing them & watching their lives progress.
Thank you for your help
edit: what's interesting is I just created custom town not too long ago.
I just created it, moved a few sims from the Sim bin into it so it won't appear abandoned
and moved one of the Sims I had created to go to Uni to it after she graduated.
Only Sims I've played in this town are her & her room mate.
And the only other Sims in this town is a couple or two moved into it from the Sim bin.
She just got married, but that's beside the point.
What I'm trying to say is, the town was just created, but its corrupted already ?
I ran Hood checker on it and its showing corruption.
Then, I found this interesting discussion. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/ts2/what-exactly-causes-game-corruption-t1027.html
I am learning as I go, and I may not have to, but I am leaning toward newly recreated towns, but finding
some things very interesting.
Thank you Cinebar, for offering up the SimPE instructions on the basics.
I will read in my leisure, but I've worked with it before & am fairly comfortable with it.
I just don't know how to do a lot with it, or its full potential yet.
Re: the bolded part of your message, sorry that's lost on me, because I didn't participate in the forums
then for Sims 2, so I couldn't possibly have known what they said not to do.
I will also say neither the game (Sims) or town is showing signs of corruption. That could change.
But what led me down this path is trying to restore Brandi Broke relationship with her son
after moving her & her son back to Desiderata Valley so one of her sons could go to College.
They are showing up in SimPE in other areas for Desiderata Valley, but trying to follow that tutorial posted above is not
helping because they are not showing up in family ties.
I realized the town population is not being updated in real time, and wondered if that could be done & how, using SimPE.
That's why I made this thread.
When you package a lot with Sims to the bin it cuts the connections between the Sims in the neighborhood and the Sims in the binned house. Hence why Dustin no longer knew Brandi after he came back from going to Pleasantview first to go to University. However, EA didn't set up the code that cuts the connections the best. It leaves traces in the forms of memories. Like Dustin's memory of kissing Angela. When you moved Dustin to Desiderata, he know longer knew Angela, but his memory of kissing her still referenced "her".
Each Sim is stored in the game by a unique ID #. Angela may be #30. Dustin may be #24. Memories of things happening to Sims that involve other Sims reference the Sim by their unique ID #. However, that number doesn't note what neighborhood they are from. So there's a Sim #30 in Desiderata Valley and a Sim #30 in Pleasantview. When you packaged the the lot, the reference to Angela was not fully removed from Dustin.
This not fully removed reference is what causes 99% of preventable corruption to spread. Dustin starts telling the world about his kiss to "Sim #30". Which spreads that not fully removed reference around in gossip memories. Which is why some people can go 2 weeks and others can go 10+ years. Just the luck of the draw in what memories were talked about in discussions and how often Sims interact with each other.
So you can't package the Sims you want to save into lots and use that.
It is a doozy to get thrown into researching the options when you realize you've corrupted your neighborhood. At least you caught it before you were unable to load the neighborhood (which may not have happened before you were bored with the neighborhood and wanted to rest it or move on). Keep in mind an option is to fix the family tree now and play the neighborhood until it decides to blow up or until it starts showing signs of corruption. I myself was once in your shoes, but with a family that had been going for 10 generations when I learned what you're learning now.
I'll link a good tutorial for the process of saving the Sims. You can stop after you've cloned the Sims you want in Body Shop. The tutorial is for packaging born in game or made in game Sims in order to share them with other people in a way that removes anything that could cause corruption, so they went a step further and packaged the Sims. Here is the tutorial: https://pixel-trade.livejournal.com/16091.html
I still use this feature today. I like to cheat and see what kids will look like when they grow up without waiting for them to do so. I like to use my born in game Sims as bases for new Sims. The above tutorial is the only safe way to save a Sim to the "Sim bin" like you would in Sims 3 when you went to change their appearance.
The tutorial that Cinebar linked to is an outdated SimPE version and the UI and where things are have changed. But the gist of what you can do in SimPE is there.
I just want to say I'm not sure you understand what I did so I'll explain it again.
Last night I put all their furniture & household things in their inventory, then moved them out of their homes by
using the move family tool.
They went to the in game saved families bin.
Then I packaged the empty home they were in to packaged lots.
In the past I had packaged their lots, with them in it and saved them in a folder on my desktop.
But you've made it clear to me I can't use them.
So I tried another method.
But have I lost these Sims for good by doing it this different way ?
If you ever want to keep the Sim (because of how they look and the personality you gave them) you can extract them with SimPE and start them as a fresh Sim in a fresh hood. (If you never built them in Bodyshop).
I gave you the basic instructions to SimPE because it tells you how to fix a relationship that is broken, such as in your game, if you read it.
Hope you get this worked out. And I'm not talking about back in the day, I mentioned the things never to do that have been posted here in the last six months on this site. Don't mean to make anyone feel bad.