We've been discussing whether it's possible to create a clean occupied custom neighborhood which is safe to share with other people (ie, no corruption):
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=455350

Here's a first attempt at some rules. After some discussion, perhaps someone can gather together everything from this thread into a coherent tutorial.

- Decide which EPs / SPs you'll require. Make an environment for those EPs, using the AnyGameStarter or an alternative technique. The less EPs you use, the more people will be able to use your hood. Hints on making an empty environment:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=420196

- Decide which CC you'll include. Get permission from the creators, if necessary. Again, the less CC you use, the more people will be able to use your hood. Make sure that the CC that you're using works well together. Better to know whether there are problems before you spend a lot of time creating your dream hood.

- Install no-regen hacks, so that the neighborhood is not filled with unnecessary sims. (See post #9 for MATY no-regen mods) If people want generated townies, they can do it after installing your neighborhood. The no-regen hacks do not need to be shared with your neighborhood. It also makes sense to try to reduce or eliminate service sims where possible, unless they are an integral part of the neighborhood story.

- Install other game-fixing mods. We really need a list (see initial list of MATY critical fixes in Post #9 and list of Boiling Oil's mods in Post #34). Again, you probably don't want to share these with your neighborhood, but you should use them while creating to avoid hood-corrupting EA bugs.

- Always remember, the smaller the finished neighborhood, the easier it will be to share and the better it will be for everyone.

- Create a new neighborhood terrain, or pick one that you like. If it's someone else's creation, be sure to get permission to use it.

- Create an empty neighborhood in your reduced-EP environment. If any sims appear in your Characters folder, your neighborhood isn't empty. Start again.

- Create lots or install existing unoccupied lots from Sims2Pack.

- Create families, townies, etc. in CAS. Make sure that they are unique. No one wants a neighborhood populated with template sims.

- Don't install occupied lots unless you have cleaned them thoroughly and tested them for a long time to ensure that they are safe. Best to avoid occupied lots if at all possible. If you do install occupied lots, be sure to let people know. Occupied lots are one of the main reasons why shared hoods are corrupted:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...elp:Moving_Sims
You may also find the HoodChecker useful in making sure that occupied lots really are clean. Use it in your temporary neighborhood before repackaging your now-clean occupied lot:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=456523

- Play normally to get sims where you want them.

- Don't leave the lot in a state where a reset will cause problems, since a reset is almost inevitable. Basically, avoid saving while sims are using any objects including the phone, or while the taxi, school bus or other scheduled event is in progress.

- Be careful when using in-game and out-of-game tools, such as SimPE, to add skills, memories, relationships, stories, bios, etc. Incorrectly editing neighborhoods is another major reason why shared hoods are corrupted.

- If you are adding family ties, keep them consistent.

- If you are adding or editing memories, be absolutely sure that you understand every single data item in the Raw Data tab. Each memory has it's own Raw Data requirements. Unfortunately, I don't know of any complete documentation on memory Raw Data, so your best bet is to look at valid memories generated in-game while playing. Better yet, play the game to generate the memories, so that you'll know that they are valid. Invalid memories will spread quickly though your neighborhood via gossip. [Update: the wiki now has a description of all data items except one]
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...or_Memory_Items

- Don't ever delete sims or tombstones, unless you use the Deleted 2 technique from MATY. Again, it's best to completely avoid deleting sims and tombstones. Instead, try to avoid generating unnecessary sims in the first place:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s....php/topic,6205

- Avoid doing anything that will corrupt your neighborhood:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=394352

- Use the Lot Debugger to clear gossip, clear trash, wipe corrupt memories before sharing your neighborhood. This keeps the neighborhood clean and small:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...topic,72.0.html

- Run my HoodChecker program to ensure that there are no glaring errors:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=456523

- Run my LotCompressor on the entire neighborhood, to make it smaller and thus easier to share:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=426409

- Take a look at all of the pictures that you're including with the neighborhood. Remove any that don't add to your neighborhood storyline.

If you want to understand some of the things that people have done wrong, take a look at my journal. I downloaded a number of neighborhoods and then tested (some of) them. One person even recreated their hood to resolve the problems.
http://www.modthesims.info/journal....howentry&e=5285
http://www.modthesims.info/journal....howentry&e=5299
http://www.modthesims.info/journal....howentry&e=5300

Ah good - I shall have a good read and digest of the info you link to. Now do I understand you correctly in that you are suggesting creating a custom sub-hood to do this? Now I think about it, that would seem a good idea since people will be able to just add your sub-hood to their favourite neighbourhood (if they want to). I think I might be tempted to do that whereas it would be unlikely I'd DL a complete neighbourhood since I only really play one. But, then again, I think I'm a bit unusual in that.


No, me neither and I know and play around with memories a lot. It's not like I haven't looked.


Even with Deleted 2 there's some stuff left behind. It's (according to Pescado) safe and not likely to corrupt the neighbourhood but I'd say it would be best to not delete sims at all as a general policy.

No, I wasn't suggesting a custom subhood. I was suggesting that the techniques for creating a good environment for a custom subhood might be useful in creating a good environment for a custom neighborhood. Luckily, it's pretty easy to convert between a neighborhood (with no subhoods) and a suburb (Business District). If you want your neighborhood to be able to be used as a subhood, just make sure that there are no attached subhoods (including stealth subhoods).

Many of my suggestions are just there to ensure that your neighborhood is useful to the widest audience.

This is the main problem that I'm having with the HoodChecker. There's little documentation about the memory data, which means that I have to generate the memories in-game to ensure that I understand the parameters. If possible, it's best to avoid editing memories.

Agreed. It's definitely best to avoid deleting sims.

It's also important to have mods (like Pescado's nounlinkondelete) which fix critical issues with the game.

I didn't realize this was being discussed, but find it interesting because I just installed clean neighborhoods in my game using these tutorials (http://simgaroop.dreamwidth.org/36499.html and filling in the gaps with the clean neighborhoods here: http://meetme2theriver.livejournal....030.html#cutid1 ) So far, I'm working through Pleasantville and have no plans whatsoever to add a clean Belladonna Cove since it looked too daunting. I wasn't sure if you had seen these tutorials or not yet since I didn't see the links in your posts. Are they adequate? I don't understand the topic enough to know if you are suggesting something more, although it seemed like that....

The first link is helpful; the second link is great for clean templates, but not really helpful for this discussion.

What we're really discussing is how to make a clean custom neighborhood which is safe to be shared. There are a couple of main points:

1) Make sure that every single sim in your neighborhood is necessary to your storylines. Don't add any junk sims, either from the shipped neighborhoods and subhoods, or sims generated by the game. They will bloat your neighborhood and people don't really want or need game-generated sims. If people want some extra townies and / or service sims, they can always generate more after downloading your neighborhood. This is where the empty environment and no-regen mods are useful.

You should also avoid unnecessary pictures, subhoods, CC, etc. Anything that bloats your neighborhood will make it more difficult to share and will make it less useful to other people.

2) Don't do anything that will corrupt your neighborhood. There are a lot of things that will corrupt your neighborhood. Many of the uploaded neighborhoods documented in the wiki are corrupted, often in different ways. This is where you need all of the critical fixes (both from EA and from modders) and you need to understand everything that you should avoid doing, either inside or outside of the game, because it will destroy your neighborhood.

3) Clean up afterward. The Lot Debugger will get rid of unnecessary memories and fix some corruption. The HoodChecker will find and fix some corruption. If there are other tools for this, be sure to let us know.

If you create a clean neighborhood with a good storyline and with no extraneous sims, and you avoid corrupting your neighborhood, and you clean up afterward, then it should be safe to share your neighborhood with others.

Some people play this way normally and could share their existing neighborhoods without any changes. But, many of us are not as careful with our own neighborhoods as we should be.

That clarifies it - Thanks Mootilda! It should be fun to see what folks come up with. Thinking on what you said, I'm now worried that the one populated neighborhood I downloaded will be buggy. It's a recreation of neighborhood one from the original The Sims. Do you think if I cleaned out the character folder and put in my own Sims it would be safe? Memories are only stored in character files, right?

By the way, that first tutorial made some minor mistakes about where to find and place some of the documents in the program files. For some of the expansions you also have to go to the neighborhood template, not just the user files, but it's all clearly stated in the read-me files that come with the downloaded clean neighborhoods that the tutorial suggests for installation.

You cannot fix a corrupt neighborhood by deleting sims. In fact, we don't know any way to fix a corrupt neighborhood, other than to recreate the neighborhood from scratch.

Memories are stored in the neighborhood package and only some of the memories can be edited in SimPE; the rest are not displayed and cannot be fixed by the user.

I went through the mods at MATY to find Critical and Very Critical mods. Here's my list, based on Pescado's hack rating system:

Woohoo LTW Fix - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,6698.0.html
No Unlinkage On Urnstone Delete - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,2083.0.html (not labeled as critical, but it prevents character corruption, so it looks pretty critical to me.)
No Corrupted Death Memory *CRITICAL* - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,2368.0.html
Drama Professor & Met Self Fix - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,4616.0.html
Hygiene Bug Fix *NL ONLY* - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,1535.0.html
ZOMGPets Job Fixes: Because Maxis Screwed The Pooch Again - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,5957.0.html
Unofficial AL Patch - Assorted Fixes - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...ic,12892.0.html

MATY no-regen mods:

NoTownieRegen - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s.../topic,7.0.html
Anti-Redundancy *CRITICAL FOR BVp0* - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,9607.0.html (this is the no-regen for service sims)
NoDormieRegen - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s.../topic,8.0.html (only available as a part of the director's cut)
No Secret Society Respawning - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...opic,132.0.html
No Stray Respawns - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,6027.0.html

Here are a couple of other mods which reduce the number of NPCs:
"Calling in sick no longer generates a useless NPC to clog your data files.":
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,1479.0.html

Only one professor for each major:
http://drupal.cyjon.net/node/291

Use regular townies for apartments:
http://drupal.cyjon.net/node/220

a way to gt around having occupied lots with families would be to have families as a separate file give them whatever bios and when listing the families say what lots you would put them in.

What I can't understand, all of us are creating their own neighborhoods and they play with them...what happens if you share your work? I mean since it works fine in your game, why it will be corrupted?

How would you share a family if not on an occupied lot? Are you talking about sharing the appearance of each sim and having the user create each sim individually? That sounds like what Maxon suggested in the other thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...92&postcount=16

Downloading an entire occupied neighborhood is the easiest way to start playing a new game, since the user has to do very little setup. It should also be safe, as long as the creator started with a clean neighborhood and avoided corrupting the neighborhood.

The next simplest thing is to download occupied lots and then install them into a neighborhood; however, this is generally unsafe because it's difficult to properly clean occupied lots.

Downloading unoccupied lots and sim templates requires a lot of work to setup a neighborhood, but is still probably less work than creating the lots and sims yourself.

If your neighborhood is not corrupted, then there is no problem. An uncorrupted neighborhood is not going to suddenly become corrupted because you shared it.

However, there are lots of things that you can do in-game which will corrupt your neighborhood. There are even more things that you can do using SimPE and other out-of-game tools to corrupt your neighborhood. See the thread that I linked to in the first post for examples. Many people are not aware of how easy it is to corrupt a neighborhood and will do things which destroy their neighborhood without even realizing that there is a problem. Installing occupied lots is a prime example. Another is deleting sims from the sim bin. EA shouldn't allow people to do these things because they will destroy your neighborhood. However, since EA allows people to do them, people believe that they are safe (even though they aren't).

Unfortunately, there's no way to tell whether a neighborhood is corrupted or not. Since corruption can take a while to display symptoms, lots of people are playing with corrupted neighborhoods that they don't yet realize are corrupted.

Take a look at the shared populated neighborhoods in the wiki. A number of them are corrupted, but the people who shared them didn't realize that the hoods were corrupt when they shared them. I tested some of these neighborhoods and posted the results in my journal (links in first post).
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...d_Neighborhoods

Mootilda, Thank you for all of the links and the information. Do you know another source for the ZOMG Pets Job Fixes? The link leads to a weird 404 with a funny picture of black cat. I'd post on MATY's forum myself if I could register, but I've never been able to successfully do that (besides, J.M.P. scares me).

Try downloading the pets fixes as part of the Director's Cut from that thread. Or just wait a bit--I think that cat shows up when Pescado's doing server maintenance, doesn't it? Pretty sure I've seen it before . . .

That would make sense. It looked silly enough to be something JM would dream up. I'll check back in a day or so and maybe it will have gone away. Thanks. (p.s. I didn't find it in the director's cut, did you?)

All of Pescado's mods are available at http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ under your latest EP. If the file is not available as a separate download in the Hacks subfolder, then check the director's cut collection, which is named moreawesomethanyou.zip. If the file is not in the Hacks subfolder or in the director's cut, then it is not necessary for that EP.

Mootilda, I have been thinking (oh dear).

1. The files for these neighbourhoods are going to be very large. How do we pack them up and what, do you think, is going to be best way to distribute them? What do others do?

2. I have given some thought to neighbourhood stories and I think, for me anyway, the best thing to do is have a theme of some sort where I can fit multi-stranded stories together. The first things that came to mind were:

a. a TS1 neighbourhood. I'm pretty sure this has already been done but I have my own take on the TS1 sims and might enjoy myself trying to put this together.
b. a neighbourhood based on characters from old-fashioned crime novels - I could make a neighbourhood of sleuths and murder victims. I'm a fan of this type of book* and I might have a lot of fun with that.

I think it needs to be fun for the person making the neighbourhood as much as the people who DL it.

Anyway, what do others think of those suggestions - would you like that too?

*I'm a fan of a lot of types of book but whatever.

My best suggestion is to keep your neighborhoods as small as possible:

- Use the minimum number of EPs and SPs. Also, the earlier the latest EP, the smaller the neighborhood will be. For example, a base-game neighborhood will be smaller than the same exact neighborhood ported to Apartment Life.
- Use the minimum amount of CC to achieve the desired result.
- Avoid creating unnecessary sims, especially townies and service sims.
- Do not attach unnecessary subhoods.
- Don't include anything else which is unnecessary, such as backup files, extraneous pictures, etc.
- Use MATY's Lot Debugger to clear out unnecessary memories and gossip.
- Compress all of your lots using the LotCompressor
- It may also be possible to compress various package files using the Compressorizer. Be sure to backup before running any compression algorithm on your neighborhood.

No matter what you do, though, occupied neighborhoods are large. 7zip has the best compression algorithm of the compressed file types allowed on MTS, especially if you are willing to experiment with the 7zip parameters. For example, 7zip was the only compression algorithm which allowed Brainania to fit into the maximum allowable file size here on MTS.

Because occupied neighborhoods are large, it's possible that you'll have to split the compressed file into parts. Any good file compressor will allow you to split a compressed file. The size of the parts is dependent upon the maximum file size allowed on the site where you intend to upload.

Many people will share the Downloads folder separately from the neighborhood itself. If you include CC, be sure to let people know whether it's required or optional. If the CC is optional, then people like me may decide to download the neighborhood only and avoid the CC.

If you look at the populated neighborhoods currently available for download, you'll see that some neighborhoods are hosted on standard sims sites, while other people use a file-sharing website. The smaller the neighborhood, the easier it will be to find someone to host your neighborhood. If your neighborhood is hosted on a file-sharing website, then I would recommend that you document the neighborhood at a sims site. Again, look at the list of populated hoods on the wiki; this should give you an idea of how other people are doing things.

Neighborhoods with multi-stranded stories are certainly my favorite type of hood. Beacon Falls is one of my favorites because of the stories which are weaved through the neighborhood and subhoods. Strong interconnected storylines can really enhance a neighborhood.

Yes, there is already a TS1 hood (The Sims 2 Old School Final under Apartment Life). Or, perhaps you are thinking about the DIY (do it yourself) neighborhood by Madame Mim: http://genensims.com/guest/MadameMi...bourhoodsS1.htm

There is also a murder mystery hood (Crystal Heights under Bon Voyage), although the creator didn't do a very good job of hiding the murderer. Don't let that stop you, though; I'm sure that there are lots of people who would be interested in new interpretations on those themes.

If you really want to create something unique, look into making a custom controller for your neighborhood. Beacon Falls (under Open for Business) and Larksville (under FreeTime) both have custom controllers, which can really enhance the gameplay for these neighborhoods.

Custom controller?

I read right through this thread, thinking you were talking about the stuff I do with Kailacat and lauratje86 ("multiplayer" neighbourhoods) and intending to say "hey, we've done all that already" until I realized you were talking about customizing for uploading. *is embarrassed*

Custom controllers tend to guide gameplay. Sort of like Sims Stories. Definitely for the advanced modder, though.

The best way to understand what they do is to download a neighborhood with a custom controller and play it for a while.

I imagine that you have some of the same issues. How do you keep your neighborhoods small enough that they're easy to share? How do you make sure that no one corrupts the neighborhood?

If anything, Mootilda, the very nature of a shared neighbourhood makes it easier to stave off corruption. We have a small amount of CC - 10MB max per player - making the rounds with Illusion Bay which includes stuff like the FFS Debugger. Since we're constantly keeping each other updated, we can track every noteworthy change that's been made and perform maintenance on the fly: everything from clearing out corrupted memories to restoring wrongly deleted Sims to fixing borked families.

Since shared hoods are constantly evolving, the size is something we can't exactly control. In fact, there were file storage and downloading issues early on that were eventually solved by packing the hood into a zip file and uploading it to Mediafire where proceeding players could download it at their leisure. If a copy of the hood shows signs of corruption, fixing it can be as easy as tracing it back to the event, correcting the error and reuploading.

This is just to say I'm going on holiday tomorrow and won't be around for a week. I'll try and have a think about developing a story for a hood but I'm not promising anything. We're going to be taking James to the beach for the first time. This is James:

Oh man, that's going to be a HOOT! How do you think he'll like it?

Like the mad dog he is - I'll tell you about it when I get back.

So, say you wanted to create one of these neighborhoods, or just a family for your own use, with a supernatural theme - ghosts wandering around haunting their relatives and so on. Starting from CAS, could you make an eight-person family with the relationships set up as you like them, move them in, and then go into SimPE or some other game code editor and change the status of some members to "ghost?" Without creating problems?

Come to that, could you start with a pregnant single mother without creating the father by marking her as "pregnant (desired stage)?" I realize that would create an opposite-sex clone, but nobody minds that with Brandi Broke.

I'm not actually planning to do this, but I have Important Other Things to do so of course my brain is finding other stuff to ponder.