No generated townies?

[Le Carrera]

In TS2, it would take ages and ages to create a new neighborhood. We discovered this was because the game would piss away a crapload of time generating ugly, useless townies. As soon as said townie gen files were deleted from the game directory, guess what?! It took literally no time at all to create new neighborhoods! The loading bar would zoom faster than a cheetah.

...I assume the same thing is happening in TS3, creating a new neighborhood takes several minutes because it's generating all of those stupid, ugly, useless townies.

Is there any way we can stop the game from generating them? (just random nonspecific townies like in TS2, not the required service NPCs) Can we do something in TS3 that's similar to what we did in TS2? Can we create a clean neighborhood? (I have absolutely no use for townies, I don't care if my town is under-populated, I prefer to make my own).

[Srikandi]

Depends on what you mean by "townies"... world populations are classified differently in TS3 than in TS2. But, if you want to start a world that isn't pre-populated at all, you can just get a custom world that doesn't have any starting population. Not hard to find, since Create-A-World actually makes it pretty difficult to pre-populate a custom world... by default it will only output empty ones.

When you start with an empty world, sims will move in gradually if you have story progression on. So if you want to prevent other sims from moving in, you can turn off EA story progression, or use a custom story progression mod with immigration turned off in its settings.

Kinda lonely for your sims though ;) They won't have coworkers or friends in this scenario, unless you add the families manually.

Service sims, on the other hand, WILL be generated when you start a new world, as per the objects and game roles that require a sim.

There's a lot of info in this thread about how world population works and how to control it with mods: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=453677