What I'm still wondering is, is there really no chance to get anybody from EA to just TELL us what these weird objects on the global layer are? I mean, I can understand that they will probably not be willing to give us an explanation for each and every file type that can be found via S3pe, but since they gave us CAW - and since these objects are clearly detectable in CAW - really, could we not ask somebody about them?

Oh, what did I do wrong in my test then? I definitely tried this with some EA worlds and found that it didn't remove the sims. Maybe I did it wrong!


You could ask on Twitter- the best people to ask are probably Graham or Sarah:
http://twitter.com/simgurugraham
http://twitter.com/SimGuruSarah
Or perhaps someone else will know a good one to ask.

Then I'll have to wait for someone else to go ahead, cause I'm not on Twitter yet. Barely able to keep up with the social net as is right now ... ;-)

I think we can actually work out what the objects are ourselves to a degree - it's clear that they are gameplay files. The global layer contains:

- A saved game associated with the world (which we're exploiting to get sims in).
- Information on all the sims in the world.
- Information about the state of objects that are not on lots (for example, if you have an uber dive well off lot with settings applied (you can CTRL SHIFT + click off-lot tomb objects from build mode in CAW), then cleaning the global layer strips away its settings).
- Stores of outfit resources.

Obviously CAW can't render these as they're not all models. The watermelon and various random objects that they appear as are just misinterpretations of the gameplay content.

None of this stuff is essential to making an unpopulated world, and the game will fill it all in if you clean the global layer.