EDIT: I forgot to mention I have all the mods - notownieregen, antiredundancy, etc. I even have the mod that limits the NPCs to one each but for some reason I have 3 break dancers. I haven't checked the rest though.

Hello! I stopped playing TS2 for 2 months to concentrate on my studies. Now that I can play again, I decided to start over since the characters folder of my previous neighborhood got too bloated (1052 character files). So I redownloaded the main belladonna hood here: http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/63030.html
got rid of my old neighborhood and put the redownloaded hood in my neighborhoods folder. I didn't redownload the subhoods.

After creating the new hood, there were about 360 character files which I thought was unavoidable (I thought perhaps they were the pre-made maxis sims, the vacation sims, etc), so I went ahead and made custom sims, about 63 new sims. After making them into townies/downtownies, I decided to check the characters folder for a headcount and was surprised to find out that there are already 1108 character files!

And the ones that I'm assuming were the custom ones I made, have locks on their icons, something I've never seen before:


Does anyone know how this happened? Did I do something wrong? I am playing Sims 2 UC btw. Many thanks for reading!

It sounds like the windows 8 bug/feature that comes with windows 8 where it will not you replace any files in the programs folders. (Make sure to restart your computer after this.)

To get around this you need to turn off User Account Control and restart your computer, now you need to set both the programs folder and My Doc folders for Sims 2 to read and write and restart your computer. (Make sure to restart your computer after this.)

Now you will need to get all of these for your game, these are by far the best clean and empty templates we have now: http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=544800
(You dont need the ones for LS, PS and CS for they are for the Stories Game.)

I'm actually using Windows 7, but I'll give these a shot. Thank you for showing me the templates, Marka!

Btw, can I use these templates to make an uberhood?

For an uberhood, I believe you still want these: http://meetme2theriver.livejournal....0neighbourhoods

You need to be an administrator-type user, turn off UAC and set your Documents/EA Games subfolders to not be read only. (I am on Windows 7 x64.) Sometimes it takes several tries to talk 7 into letting you do what you want.

If you have three break dancers, it sounds like you created the neighbourhood without empty templates and/or the mods you have are not working for some reason (did you activate CC before you created the hood?).

FYI a completely new custom hood (i.e. not a pre-made) will generate about 360 files (362 actually) before you play one second of game time which is what makes me think the above. However a bloat like that to over 1000 files is something else.

Sunbee- I managed to turn off UAC but how do I set my folders to read only?

Maxon - all I did was take out my older neighborhood, redownloaded the same neighborhood from meetme2theriver's LJ (the belladonna mainhood) and cut-pasted it into my neighborhoods folder. Started the game and after creating a new hood, I alt-tabbed to check the characters folder. I saw about 360 files. I closed the game, did other stuff and started playing again a few hours later to make the first 4 batches of my custom townies. Unfortunately I wasn't able to check how many character files I had at that point, but CC was definitely working as ACR gave me a pop up message to inform me it was installed successfully. I also used the sim blender/insim.

Next day I made more of my custom townies and that was when I realized I had 1108 files. Considering the first townie I made had a character file name that was in the thousands, I'm guessing I already had about a 1000 character files before I started making custom townies.

I should also note that I did rename my N001 folder in the install location (under double deluxe for UC) to N001-bak, following the tutorial from MATY (?) but I'm not sure if I should've done that considering the N001 I'm using is also a template from meetme2theriver. That was all I did though.

More to consider: I have custom vacation hoods as well (added but not visited yet, for I haven't started playing with a family yet, not counting the custom townie families). One with a custom family, and the other one (sunsphere islands iirc) produces new npcs so I guess I can attribute the extra npcs to that, but I still don't get how I can have more character files than before. I also had those vacation hoods in my previous game.

Right click on the EA folder for Sims 2 and select properties and uncheck the read only box and click apply and chose for all folder and files.

The way hood creation works in terms of numbers - quick summary though I still think there's something else going on here.

First of all, if you DL a custom hood. This is going to depend on what the creator did with the hood. The versions I work with I created in AGS and are completely empty except for the sims I put in there. When you do this, when another person uses it in their game for the first time, what happens is the game will create all the missing invisible sub-hoods (in other words it runs the 'Creating Pets', 'Creating Magic' etc. routines) on first load. Unless you have empty templates installed what happens is the game adds the regular townies and other NPC sims it usually adds by default to the neighbourhood (so you will get something like my description of a new custom hood below).

I don't know what meetme2theriver did - if they played the hood and did the set up beforehand, those files and folders should have been created already and I think the game wouldn't run its routines (it makes for a much larger download if you do this which is why I don't do this). Either way, that would account for the 360 or so files you got on installation. You need empty templates to prevent creation of the townies and NPCs.

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FYI: When you create a new hood for the first time, on initial load of that hood (i.e. the one you get when you actually create the hood), the game will create - with all EPs/SPs and an otherwise empty hood (i.e. not one of the pre-mades) and WITHOUT using empty templates - 362 sim files in your neighbourhood character files folders. It's actually 383 sims showing in SimPE but this is because SimPE includes the universals. This includes:

Maxis pre-generated families (the ones from the stealth hoods)
Townies
NPCs (maids, gardeners, shop assistants etc. and including the break dancer - and mostly 3 of each)
Hobby people
Pets
Tourists
Apartment Life neighbours

Adding a university will add a further 98 character files. These are:
Students
Professors
University NPCs (streaker, trainer etc.)

Adding a Downtown adds a further 78 files. These are:
Tricous
Downtownies
Downtownie NPCs (some of them - gypsies, waiter, cook, vampires, Mr Big, Diva, slobs etc.)

Adding holiday destinations (all three) will add 38 files. These are:
Holiday locals basically plus the fire dancer (why the fire dancer doesn't get created with the rest of the NPCs, I have no idea but that's how it is).

Other NPCs get created as you play (e.g. reporter, hairdresser, Captain Dregg and the holiday hidden NPCs like the Wise Old Man). Also, some NPCs from some expansions got shunted into the regular initial creation and are not associated with their particular expansion sub-hood being created. An example of this would be the masseuse or Unsavoury Charleton which get created when you first make the hood not when you add the holiday destinations).

Anyway, the point is that even with all those sim files being created and even in a hood that already has characters present, you would only get 597 sims plus any playables. This, obviously, is not over 1000 which is why my opinion is that something amiss is going on with your neighbourhood (sorry).

Marka, thanks again!

Maxon, that's certainly worrisome I'll try starting over, and see if I'll meet the same results (hopefully not). Is it okay to just take out the existing neighborhood folder and replace it with the same neighborhood, except one that's freshly unzipped?

Oh yes, should be fine.

So I re-did everything and checked the character count for the major steps. I started with 61 character files, had 336 after creating the hood. had 414 when I added downtown, 656 with all of the colleges, 694 after adding the 3 vacation spots. Since this is an uberhood, I ended up with 990 characters after adding all of the districts, then 1038 when I added the custom vacation lots I downloaded.

I tried checking which sims were generated for each step using SimPE, however, I didn't notice I only had playables checked when I looked through the sim browser. I was only able to realize this after adding all of the subhoods, so I don't know when townies started generating I did notice that I had a lot of NPCs again >_< I had 3 good witches and 3 bad ones! I wonder why the antiredundancy mod isn't working?

There are empty templates not just for Pleasantview, but for Uni, BV, FT, DT, Seasons, Pets, AL and OFB too, that's hundreds of sims and pets.
What are those custom vacation lots you're adding that are adding sims to the neighbourhood, though?

My Uberhood, which has three new babies and one new dog, has 724, using Tarlia's templates plus Peni's Widespot RFD.
I have hacks to block social townies from generating (the hack to have regular townies as apartment neighbors, specifically) if you haven't one of that sort you should have more character files than I. notownieregen and antiredundancy don't effect that type of townie.

You have custom content turned on and working before you put the new neighborhood into the folder the first time? That's what I do.

You've replaced the shipped stealth neighborhoods (AL, SNS, FT, Pets, BV) with clean or empty templates? You have cleaned templates for university? (else you get 3x dormies and professors, as I understand it. My numbers are with one full set of professors--there's a mod that can halve that--and no dormies.)

If you add three universities to a neighbourhood (without empty templates), you don't get 3x professors - you just keep the one set which were generated with the first hood. You DO though get a new set of students each time (50 sims each time). Even worse than that is the sets are all made with the same template so you will get sets of three students who all look identical but have different names. Even more infuriatingly, the game uses the same students as dormies time after time because it takes the dormie from the head of the list (the lowest NID, I think) everytime your game needs a new dormie. So it's very, very unlikely you will ever see sims from the third or even second set of student sims except perhaps as walkbys unless you make 50 or 100 or more playable at some point. It's needless file bloat and one of the reasons people originally went after the idea of creating empty templates especially as in those days (when Uni was released) there was an effective 1500 cap on the number of sim files possible in a niehgbourhood without it crashing and burning (now no longer a problem I hasten to add).

Lili975, I have Prometedor and Sunsphere Islands. Prometedor comes with a custom family, while for Sunsphere Islands, I noticed it generates extra NPCs like waiters and the hotel receptionist. I don't know about other NPC types though.

Sunbee, I have that mod as well - I downloaded all of the recommended mods that prevent extra townies/NPCs, that's why I'm shocked why I have more character files than the first time I played. I have CC on too, definitely. All I did was take out one neighborhood and replace it. As for templates, the ones I use all came from meetme2theriver's site. They're not completely clean, that's for sure, cause the templates have all of the pre-made maxis characters. I'm considering if I still want them in my game or not. The reason why I keep them is because I don't want my hood to be too empty! I definitely don't want as many characters as I have right now though >_< What mod do you use to lessen the number of professors? I have a lot of custom degrees and I get 1 professor for each. I think I have about 25?

Maxon, I think there's still a cap but it's a lot more than 1500. I forgot the exact number. If the cap's been increased, should I still worry about my current character file count?

No, the current cap is something like 32000.

Has anyone ever gotten close to that number, ever? Wonder how the game plays at that point.

Sloooooowly.