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Instructor
#76 Old 13th Feb 2013 at 8:50 AM
Mootilda? In response to joandsara77 you said :
Quote: Originally posted by Mootilda
If you have the Chicken Controller, then you have the older version... the one that is NOT well made.....

...I can only conclude that the character data is spread out among several of the packages....

....However, if the character data is spread out among several packages, then that can't be done and my only suggestion is that you avoid uninstalling the mod.


I dont see any newer download of the chickens where there is a NPC at affinity..so sadly there cant be a "newer version" of that one. It would perhaps explain why my Hood Checker suddenly reported 3 (I think) more character file-missing sims when I added the chickens to my folder?
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Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#77 Old 13th Feb 2013 at 8:58 AM
Both the chicken and the pigs from Affinity sims have the controller, I linked to them on the last page.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Site Helper
#78 Old 13th Feb 2013 at 4:55 PM
I'm not quite sure what that means. Do you mean that they are poorly formed and that the character data is not contained in one package?

The names "Controller" and "NPC" don't actually tell us anything. They're just names.

Quote: Originally posted by gulhare
Mootilda? In response to joandsara77 you said : [...] I dont see any newer download of the chickens where there is a NPC at affinity..so sadly there cant be a "newer version" of that one. It would perhaps explain why my Hood Checker suddenly reported 3 (I think) more character file-missing sims when I added the chickens to my folder?
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Most of the animal mods that we've looked at add one new Unknown sim, but there's no reason why it can't add more. The same steps apply. Find the SimID for each of the Unknown sims. Look for an OBJD with each one of those GUIDs to find the potential character data. Copy that package to your Characters folder to verify that the data is self-contained.

If you can't find an OBJD with one of the Unknown SimIDs, then it seems unlikely that sim came from that mod. Some Unknown SimIDs come from Maxis, you can find those by searching for the GUID in the installation files (let me know if you need instructions).
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#79 Old 13th Feb 2013 at 5:07 PM Last edited by maxon : 13th Feb 2013 at 5:24 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by Mootilda
Unfortunately, this mod doesn't seem to be as well behaved as the animated animals from Affinity Sims, or the various multi-PT and multi-Plantsim mods that I've tested.

Yes, I was being lazy and just posted the version I knew was on here - I have the versions of farm animals from Affinity Sims too. Thanks for your work on this Moo, it's good to be forewarned not to just rip the mod out. I've only just started with a farm in Little Carping and the animals looks great and you can interact with them. Bit crude in the animation in places but that stuff is hard and I have a lot of respect for Becks in just being able to do that.

Quote: Originally posted by Sunbee
I wonder if a mod would be able to flag the old animal sets of Rebecah's with something like "Old, out of date, do not use: go to Affinity to get the new version."

It might be worthwhile to PM Becks herself since you can edit your own upload threads here and it might be helpful to her to know there's an issue with the mod. She might be able to do something about it. In particular, make sure she makes any future mods of this sort with the NPC technique she developed while making the existing ones. It wasn't a cut and dried process - she found out how to do it, I understand at least, as she went along.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#80 Old 13th Feb 2013 at 11:57 PM
I have chickens that just say "Becks" so that must be the one "from Affinity" talked about above. I also have horses & pigs from Simslice and expect the same problem there - especially since I've found (ahem)" problems" with lots of their stuff. Joandsarah77 mentioned "carnival clowns" is that differant from "ClairaTheClairvoyant" by "maybesomethingdunno" here on MTS? Reading the comments (most recent are Jan) it looks like others had questions, but I don't see a clear answer, or statement like "don't delete due to...". But creator is "site helper" - I dare not intervene.

And while looking up stuff and doing various magical gestures as advised is beyond me, I am just going to assume I'll be OK using all this stuffs as long as I don't delete them (in game or from Downloads).

Stand up, speak out. Just not to me..
Site Helper
#81 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 1:33 AM
Quote: Originally posted by grammapat
But creator is "site helper" - I dare not intervene.
I can't see how it hurts to ask whether a mod creates a new sim in your neighborhood. I also can't see how it hurts to ask whether a mod can be removed safely.

There's nothing special about site helpers. This isn't a class society (as far as I know). We are all human. I would be really sad if people felt that they couldn't ask me questions, or challenge something that I've said.

Quote: Originally posted by grammapat
And while looking up stuff and doing various magical gestures as advised is beyond me, I am just going to assume I'll be OK using all this stuffs as long as I don't delete them (in game or from Downloads).
As long as you never remove mods, you won't have the problem of accidentally deleting character data for sims in your neighborhood. A reasonable solution.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#82 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 3:12 AM Last edited by joandsarah77 : 14th Feb 2013 at 3:33 AM.
Quote:
I'm not quite sure what that means. Do you mean that they are poorly formed and that the character data is not contained in one package?


Okay so back on page 3 you said
Quote:
If you have the Chicken Controller, then you have the older version... the one that is NOT well made.


I was trying to say I did have the older version at one point which I dleted. But now I have the ones from Affinity sims, but that both the chicken and the pig from there have the controller (I gave links to them) and that only the sheep from Affinity sims has a file saying it's an NPC. This is just what I see inside the rar files. I've had a headache and that post you refered me to didn’t look simple to me. I opened the chicken rar with Clean Installer and in there it just says Chicken packaged sim. In SimPE I can see at least 10 unkown adult sims with no character data or picture. They have a kind of grey square where the pciture would be.

Also I was saying I'm fairly sure all my hoods will be corrupt as I've had not only animals but cc human type statues that looked like clowns from an old carnival set from here by Echo. All these things I simply deleted from the catalogue as I have gone along. It might be that the rideable duck and cow were from another install, but I’m not sure on that. I probably have quite a few of these characters floating around.

I've never used the hood checker before so I'm not really sure what I am doing there. I did run it and top of the list are those babies that my antivirus ate and left 'had $subject' memories.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Site Helper
#83 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 4:51 AM
I'm sorry that the technique that I've been using isn't simple. It's just that I'm not really interested in these mods, so downloading all of them and checking them all is much more work than I'm willing to do. I spent almost three days researching them, even though I have no intention of ever using them. That's enough. I documented my technique for people who want to pursue this and I'd be happy if someone could figure out a simpler way.

I researched enough of these mods to convince myself that:
- It's unsafe to remove these mods unless you manage to keep the character data for the sims that are added to your hood.
- The character data can safely be added to your neighborhood, with the advantages that I documented.
- Not all mods are made in a way that the character data is available to be added to your neighborhood. If the character data is spread out between several packages, it's probably best to keep the entire mod.

That's a lot more than we knew before.

Bottom line: if you want to use one of these mods then you should either avoid removing the mod, or ensure that you keep enough of the mod to avoid corrupting your neighborhood. If you can't find out which parts of the mod to keep, just keep the whole thing.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#84 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 5:08 AM
Yes, I know now to keep them, but it's rather too late for that now as I've deleted at least half a dozen over the last 2 years of this current install.

I'm going to read up more using the hood checker once my head feels clear and see what I can fix and I guess just keep extracting sims I want to keep until it decides to blow up.

Thanks for checking these things out, at least we know now for the future.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Site Helper
#85 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 5:12 AM
With any luck, you won't see any symptoms of the corruption. Sometimes it can take a long time before the neighborhood becomes unplayable.

I hope that some of what I did was helpful to people, even if I wasn't able to come up with a simple way to decide which parts of a mod can be removed safely. I'd be sad if all I managed to do was confuse people more.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#86 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 5:36 AM
Quote: Originally posted by joandsarah77
Yes, I know now to keep them, but it's rather too late for that now as I've deleted at least half a dozen over the last 2 years of this current install.

I'm going to read up more using the hood checker once my head feels clear and see what I can fix and I guess just keep extracting sims I want to keep until it decides to blow up.

Thanks for checking these things out, at least we know now for the future.


If it's any consolation, I apparently did a whole crapload of VBTs to my original Pleasantview ... deleted Sims from the Sim Bin, deleted houses from the House Bin, added and deleted those older animals at will, etc. Like many, I thought that if EA let you do it, or a well-known Sims site or two said it was OK, then it was obviously OK. Oops.

It took six years for that Plesantview to go belly-up, though when it did, it did with a rush. I was amazed at how fast it degraded. No time to do much of anything but reset it.

On the other hand, as I think I wrote a long time before, my daughter did some VBTs with her Strangetown, and the neighborhood became DOA in two weeks.

Now I'm wondering what else I'm doing that is going to bite me in the butt years later.

Let's just hope your neighborhood lasts a long while. If we don't want to reset, all we can do is prepare and try to watch out for those animals/clowns/mutli-PT techs in the future.

I guess one moral of the story is that if you want to download animated animals, you had better want to keep them! Think very carefully before you add them, and if you need animals for a short-time challenge (like I did with the appendage-chickens), you might want to consider ones that stay still.

Who knows ... if the Plumbob Fairy smiles upon us, and our neighborhoods go pfft in four years or so, Sims 4 or some Sims competitor might be around, and it might be so intensely wonderful that most people wind up playing that.

I can hope.

Thank you for your help, Mootilda.

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

RIP Sunni ... truly a ray of light.
Mad Poster
#87 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:16 AM
Thanks from me as well, Mootilda. I seem to reset neighborhoods more often than 90% of simmers, so it's not that big a deal for me, but I'll certainly be more choosy about that sort of mod, like custom careers and foods. I'm just too lazy to do the work to save everything and restore my game exactly as it was, and I'm too hard on computers. (You all do reinstall your operating systems at least once a year because it's not working right, that's normal, right? )

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#88 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:26 AM
Oh yeah, I did all of that way back in 07-08, used delete all characters, moved sims between hoods, installed occupied lots, deleted sims from the bin and even had a challenge with a sim in a messy house that numerous people on the bbs installed into their own games. Huge SORRY! to all of them. That install ended up with white sims with blue writing as i had not a clue about how to even put a backup in and I pasted it in over the top haha. Fun, fun times. My guess is my second install went poof due to all these animals. I had them from 3 different sites along with rideable ones, animated birds those clowns and goodness knows what other odd things from simslice. I'd put them in just to look and delete them shortly after.

I mostly play custom made hoods so no resetting them. To recreate my legacy I had to extract and clone everyone, write down all of their stats, save houses, set them all back to just how they had been and I did that only about a year ago. I'll take a bit of that fairy plumbob dust.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#89 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:42 AM Last edited by gazania : 5th Mar 2013 at 12:26 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by Sunbee
Thanks from me as well, Mootilda. I seem to reset neighborhoods more often than 90% of simmers, so it's not that big a deal for me, but I'll certainly be more choosy about that sort of mod, like custom careers and foods.


After I had to reset two neighborhoods within a rather short time of each other because of corruption, I came up with the "three-year" rule. Only problem is that 50% of the time, I now reset neighborhoods within a considerably shorter time frame than three years. The last neighborhood, the one with the appendage-chickens, lasted only about a year, and while nothing quite so horrible happened with that one, I reset it anyway because it "felt" like the right thing to do. Little did I know what those appendage-chickens actually could do to the game ...

There are some very good things about more frequent resets. They keep my game from being too over-populated, which helps keep the game from getting too bogged down with loading time, allows me to switch different facial templates, fix annoying problems, and otherwise mix things up a little before the next reset; and most of all, makes me aware of mistakes I hope to NOT be making next time. I just wish we didn't come up with NEW ways to screw up a neighborhood!

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

RIP Sunni ... truly a ray of light.
Mad Poster
#90 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 7:00 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Mootilda
I can't see how it hurts to ask whether a mod creates a new sim in your neighborhood. I also can't see how it hurts to ask whether a mod can be removed safely.

There's nothing special about site helpers. This isn't a class society (as far as I know). We are all human. I would be really sad if people felt that they couldn't ask me questions, or challenge something that I've said.

As long as you never remove mods, you won't have the problem of accidentally deleting character data for sims in your neighborhood. A reasonable solution.


What I ment was that it seemed her creation fell into your catagory of "unsafe..should warn people about NCP & deleting", but I am not comfortable TELLING her that. And I join in thanking you, and hope that this info can be put somewhere (??) where everyone has to notice it, like the big thing about "what NOT to do even though Maxis said you could".

PPS: "space pony"? I'm now a space pony ... who knew...

Stand up, speak out. Just not to me..
Instructor
#91 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 5:36 PM
Yes. Thank you Mootilda for the solution (and the 3 days work) of putting "sims" in saved sims folder (wich I assume is characters folder you mentioned?)
And as for the chickens, I will simply avoid removing them as long as I dont intend to restart. I aim for at least a gen 5 neighbourhood so that will be some time.....
Site Helper
#92 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 5:57 PM
No, I meant the Characters folder for your neighborhood, where all of the other sims that are in your neighborhood are stored. The sims in the SavedSims folder are actually templates, not sims; they show up in BodyShop and CAS, but are not a part of your neighborhood. On the other hand, the sims for this type of mod are actually added to your neighborhood. Depending upon what the game decides to do with them, they can show up in your sims' memories, relationships, family ties, etc. It's those connections which cause the problems when the mods are removed.

Some good news: in the short time that I had all of these mods installed and removed over and over again, the HoodChecker couldn't find any signs of corruption other than the family ties and the missing character files. With any luck, the game doesn't create a lot of connections.

Quote: Originally posted by grammapat
I [...] hope that this info can be put somewhere (??) where everyone has to notice it, like the big thing about "what NOT to do even though Maxis said you could".
I've already added it to the hood corruption article in the wiki.
Instructor
#93 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:13 PM
Ah, thank you. I sometimes read what I think people write instead of what they actually do write. Doesnt help to re-read either. Unless someone correct my mistake...
Now I have to move some PTs.
Site Helper
#94 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:34 PM
I hope that you mean copy, not move. If you move them into a neighborhood's Characters folder, they probably stop being available to all of your other neighborhoods.
Instructor
#95 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 6:43 PM
I meant move them from saved sims to neighbourhoods character folder, where I copied them to
Site Helper
#96 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 7:09 PM Last edited by Mootilda : 14th Feb 2013 at 7:35 PM.
Just some additional information about recognizing these mods: If the character data is well-formed, the Clean Installer should recognize the package as a "Packaged Sim", which is the same thing that you'll see if you browse your Characters folder.

By contrast: If you look at the sims that you have in the SavedSims folder, it will probably say "Face Preset". Default replacement sims will show up as "Default Replacement".
Mad Poster
#97 Old 14th Feb 2013 at 8:43 PM
Gazania: "Who knows ... if the Plumbob Fairy smiles upon us, and our neighborhoods go pfft in four years or so, Sims 4 or some Sims competitor might be around, and it might be so intensely wonderful that most people wind up playing that." A Sim competitor; would you believe I lay awake at night imagining just that, what it would have, and the creators and modders it would PAY to develope! I do live in a dream world, after all.

Stand up, speak out. Just not to me..
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#98 Old 15th Feb 2013 at 1:08 PM Last edited by gazania : 15th Feb 2013 at 1:56 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by grammapat
Gazania: "Who knows ... if the Plumbob Fairy smiles upon us, and our neighborhoods go pfft in four years or so, Sims 4 or some Sims competitor might be around, and it might be so intensely wonderful that most people wind up playing that." A Sim competitor; would you believe I lay awake at night imagining just that, what it would have, and the creators and modders it would PAY to develope! I do live in a dream world, after all.


Sigh. Yes. Me, too.

But considering that PC games in general are a dying breed, and even laptops may be obsolete in favor of tablets, this probably IS an out-there fantasy. Although ... if someone could come up with a Sims-like game that plays excellently on both on a laptop AND a PC; well, I guess my wish does have a very remote chance of coming true.

But I'm invoking the Plumbbob (misspelled before ... sorry) fairy again. Alas. She will not come.

In the meantime, I'm STILL trying to figure out the "mystery" unknowns. It's amazing how several mods actually did make a new "character". The animals and PTs are examples, of course, but I see I still have some unknowns that, unfortunately, ARE unknowns. And I have the funniest feeling they're unknown because I downloaded them ages ago (2006 - 2007), and corruption wasn't quite a huge a concern back then, and many people just did not consider the potential problems re extra NPCs. (For instance, jo pointed out that the clowns in that Carnival set were NPCs. There might be one or two more in that set, part of which I also downloaded, such as the bumper cars, which are possibly based on a non-Sim NPC that you never classify as a "character". Now that I think of it, those cars DO remind me a little of the EA toy race car. Maybe those are one of the missing "unknowns".) Like many players, I thought, "Ooh ... cool ... a thingie that moves. Shiny!" and never thought what would happen if I wanted to delete the new shiny. And unlike an unwanted Sim, you can't kill it unless you reset. And now, it seems that a couple of NPCs are game-wide (not just restricted to a neighborhood) such as the Multi-PTs.

Download in haste, regret at leisure, I suppose.

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

RIP Sunni ... truly a ray of light.
Site Helper
#99 Old 15th Feb 2013 at 5:28 PM Last edited by Mootilda : 15th Feb 2013 at 8:28 PM.
It's so hard to tell. EA shipped a number of Unknowns, some of which are valid but SimPE doesn't recognize, and some of which are invalid... Tarlia removed those from her cleaned versions of the shipped neighborhoods. If you listed the SimIDs, I might be able to identify some of them for you.

[Update:]

Here is the list of valid Unknowns. Open the spoiler and sort by SimID:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...91&postcount=56

Here's the list of invalid Unknowns that were shipped with the game:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...77&postcount=54
Top Secret Researcher
#100 Old 4th Mar 2013 at 5:11 AM
Just noticed in my game this evening that Simwardrobe's robots seem to create NPCs. Would these files fall into the same category as the PT replacements, etc.?
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