Great, thank you -- about to test it.

Are you sure that all of these filters need editing, though? filter_IsFriend_6E0DDA9F_00000000_0000000000018325.xml for instance does not seem to be involved in generating walkbys -- I only see it once in the XML, in _server_commands.relationship_commands_03B33DDF_00000000_2CB175D453787585.xml:



That looks like a "make friends for me" cheat thing -- if that's what it is, that would be player-induced (i.e. the user actually WANTS to create a sim there). Also the "isBusy" filter is needed for phone invites and such, far as I can see .. does this generate any sims?



Edit: I put this in my game after removing the following:

S4_filter_debug_caterer_6E0DDA9F_00000000_0000000000003E3A.xml
S4_filter_debug_bartender_6E0DDA9F_00000000_0000000000003E39.xml
S4_filter_IsBusy_6E0DDA9F_00000000_0000000000018A5E.xml
S4_filter_IsFriend_6E0DDA9F_00000000_0000000000018325.xml

(C+P from XML folder, not the actual mod, because I can't open the file right now (game still open))

and only had one new household after a bit more than a sim day (as opposed to the usual 20-30). Haven't been to any venues though, only at sims' homes in Garden district.

I don't think the IsBusy filter is used for that, there are 7 other SimFilters (not in this mod) used for Phone Invite, Phone Chat, PhoneAskToComeOver, etc. I decided from the SimFilter Tdesc that IsBusy and IsNotBusy would be used if the SimFilter is looking for a sim for any situation whatsoever, and if all the types of sim being looked for are busy or should be busy, would generate a new one, regardless. These two Filters thereby become maybe the two most important to remove the creation process from. This was just my thinking, right or wrong, lol. These two Filters still work just as all the others I've edited, they are supposed to find a pre-exiting sim and can still do that.

The IsFriend filter I was simply comparing to a few other filters like IsMarried and IsEngaged, all of which have this creation option turned off, so didn't see why this IsFriend should have it turned on. I didn't look further than that. The Tdesc for the server.commands,relationship also says this:
"Create Friends Command Quantity" description="The number of friendly sims to generate using command relationships.create_friends_for_sim."
So I think this must be that cheat you're talking about, yes, and why it has the creation option turned on, unlike those two I mention above.

So I should remove this IsFriend Filter from the mod, yes?

We just crossposted! See edit above -- I tested *after* removing four resources and it still works. Only did a very limited amount of testing, naturally.

The phone thing I looked up actually (stupidly I have closed that file meanwhile so can't quote) -- I'll look again.


Edit: IsBusy is referenced in the following resources:

S4_phone_Invite_Over_E882D22F_00000000_0000000000009198.xml
S4_relationshipPanel_Invite_Over_E882D22F_00000000_0000000000018964.xml
S4_Travel_DummyInteractions_Phone_TravelWith_E882D22F_00000000_00000000000185E0.xml
S4_Travel_DummyInteractions_Terrain_TravelHereWith_E882D22F_00000000_0000000000018A6B.xml
S4_Travel_DummyInteractions_TravelWith_E882D22F_00000000_00000000000185E2.xml

In the phone one, the context is



to me that looks like it's checking whether the target sim is actually available to be invited over, not like anything do to with randomspawn generation. Or can sims autonomously invite-over random towniefolk? (I have never seen that, but theoretically it would be possible I guess)

In other words, I would leave that alone, if only in order to avoid conflicts. Someone may want to make a tuning mod for "every sim is always available for invites" and that would collide.


Edit -- just to add, because this has been causing confusion elsewhere: most of the time, the references in the XML are given in decimal form, but the instances are hexadecimal, so one needs to convert between those in order to see which is which.

100958 (decimal; what it says in the XMLs) = 18A5E (hex; the instance of IsBusy filter).

There is no SimFilter to autonomously invite over people, no. Only 3 for Autonomous phone chat stuff.
About IsBusy being referenced in those resources: where do you find this referencing, how do you do it exactly? Something simple I'm missing as far as looking up stuff?
I can remove any of them we want, I tried to include as many as possible to try to get the largest effect! So if the IsFriend should be removed; and also the IsBusy, the IsNotBusy should be removed to go together with the IsBusy? Is there a fouth one, because you mentioned 4 up above.

i have this installed and still get a buch of one sim households, what am i doing wrong?

Did you have the Manage Households place emptied? Like everyone deleted, all the homeless sims? Because a certain number of single sims will always be generated for the Service Sim spots. If you have for example, 12 or 16 single sims generated, leave them in there and don't delete them unless it's an elder here or there or a specific individual you cannot stand for some reason. Then play your save game normally for 3 days, 5 days, a week or 2! And see what happens over time.

Edit: This is for everyone reading and contemplating using this mod, not aimed specifically at Fishyman: This mod is called "Reduced" for a reason, and it has always been named this. It is not named "NO Townies Ever!" lol.

Thank you so much Shimrod for your perseverance. It really pays off!! I played for two sim days and only got one household generated. I had 22 households in the "not in world" pool (of which I knew that some of them were already bar tenders etc.). After those two days there were 23 households. I will test this again, when I have time for playing.

I looked at the instance of IsBusy (18A5E), converted that to decimal (100958) and then did a text search on the entire XML folder (which contains all the exported XML resources). That gave me those five results posted above. Most resources are given in decimal form in the XMLs, I dunno why that is exactly but that's how it is =).

(Speaking of search, there is a text search tool for DATA files now too, should you ever need that. Is in Tools forum!)




I meant the four that I listed in my "playtesting report" (edit of my first post after you updated). IsFriend, IsBusy, and the two debug ones. Do you have IsNotBusy in there too? Maybe I missed that.

Oops, I missed that edit, now I'll go and look at those two. Stupid question: so how do you do a text search on hundreds of different files? Is this search this Folder or something? I use my program, which is Note Tab Light, and I need to have a document open. I cannot see that it will search a bunch of other documents, it will search this document which is open right now.

Text processors should have an option to find stuff in folders -- I normally just use the plain vanilla search that I have in WinXP. "Search for" - "A word or phrase in the file", with the top-level folder selected. Or in Notepad++ the "Find in Files" option.

Also, I just noticed that in your mod there's nothing regarding gardeners -- right now I'm in a household on the "Garden Essence" lot, you know the one with the public garden behind it? The game generates gardeners (in gardener uniforms) who water the plants there. I didn't pay attention right now to who these gardeners are exactly (it's not always the same sim) -- but maybe the one lonely townie that still was generated for me was a gardener.

I left the Gardener alone on purpose, because I'm thinking the game needs to create the Gardener for the very first time as a service sim. Just like the real Maid simfilter which I didn't touch or the GrimReaper for example.

I remember now my thinking on the DebugCaterer and DebugBartender. There are 2 other SF's for the Caterer and 2 other SF's for the Bartender, normal ones, not Debug. The 2 other normal Caterer SF's I left alone, because if you have a party and order the catering service, it's obvious that the caterer must appear or the player will be all bummed out, so I presume that one of these two SF's will create a caterer by force if necessary. So what is this debug filter required for?

All three of the Bartender SF's are included because the SF is still supposed to find someone applicable, and it should always be able to choose Pancake Bob, lol. So the creation of a new bartender right now because I go with my sim to the pub is less important than the caterer, because my sim can tend the bar at the pub. I'm unconcerned with if I go to the pub or bar one specific time and the bartender spot is empty, and then I, the player, am forced to do something or nobody will get any drinks. This is perfectly fine for me. But I don't know specifically what the "Debug" one is for, or the "Debug" caterer either.

Also the game makes LOTS and lots of sims to be Bartenders, because they work on shifts, around 6 or 8 hour shifts, then one leaves and the other one has walked into the place to take over the next shift; these are always new people, except that once you see one of them for the first time, the next day you will see the exact same sim at that exact same place generally.

V2 didn't work for me.

Saw townies walk by after 1 hour sim time. Saved the game and went to the town view after 2 sim hours. The list has 6 families with 17 townies. Some families have children.

Deleted all townies in the second tab.
Never left the home lot.
ShimrodReducedTownieGenerating_V2.package in mods folder
empty unpackedmod folder in mods folder
ShimrodReducedTownieGenerating_V2.package in startup mods list
Added DirectoryFiles unpackedmod autoupdate on Resource.cfg inside the mods folder

Thanks for the new version! I'm going to test it now :-)

@SAGO , what is your game version?

Update 2

Thank you for your work, Shimrod101 :-) I tested it and it worked fine; after 24 sim hours two new households - perfekt. The only problem I had was that there was not generated a bartender for my bar lot?!

Edit after a few more test: As soon as I go to a park I get a lot of new generated households, familys with children/teenager and single sims. But as I wrote before: No bartender.

Was your Household Management window place emptied of all the Homeless, or approximately empty, when you began with this new mod? There will always be some households moved into the Homeless list by the story.progression.system which I used in the previous version of this mod. As far as I can tell this is primarily the families with kids, this is where they are coming from, similar to the immigration in Sims3.

If you constantly delete everyone who is homeless from this window who are GAME GENERATED sims, not sims you downloaded or created yourself and placed there yourself, some new ones are always going to be generated and stuffed in there. This is the part which I was trying to stop with the first version of this mod. I would suggest you leave as many of these Game Generated households in there as you can stand, everyone who is not horrible, lol. I think that if there are a certain number of families in there alteady, the speed at which the game wants to make new ones will be slowed down.

I suggest you stop doing this, the game is always wanting to stuff new people in here like I describe in my message directly above. Leave some of them alone instead of deleting them all the time, and see if the speed of generating new ones doesn't slow down. BTW, if you have the first version of my mod you can use it at the same time as this V2 mod, that V1 mod does not have any of these SimFilter resources inside.
My V1 mod CANNOT be used at the same time as the MasterDinadan mod about the Genealogical Pruning system, those two mods use the same XML, the story.progression.system borkedBS XML.

thank you...it works fine in my game...now i can see my own sims walkin finaly...dupdidupdidu

Thank you for your mods, the aspiration rewards one is working perfectly. This one? I still cannot get it to work in my game, for the most part. I can see that the game is pulling more from my unplayed bin which is nice. However, it's exploding the population in my town.

I did the new instructions of unzipping it and adding the package file to the mods folder. I created the new folder and added the new line to the resource file. I am up-to-date on my patches.

In the first week, the game created 14 Sims (4 households of 2 female + 1 child). The second week, the game created 39 Sims (13 households of 2 females +1 child). The game is not creating any males, they are all females and in the second week it created nothing but female households.

I have not deleted any households, if you (or somebody) could please let me know what I'm doing wrong or what you have done to make this work? Should I have a completely empty unplayed bin and not use my own Sims?

EDIT: I went ahead and deleted all these female only households. I really can't stand having my game so skewed. I have 100 Sims in my unplayed bin and they represent a fair number of all ages and genders. I do expect the game to create more Sims but seriously? All females? LOL

ah right, so that was it, didn't think the game would let you delete the service sims, will re check now


are the sims that run across the screen the service sims? all the sims i made walk everywhere however some of the sims run, hovering over them reveils they are not sims i made.

I cannot tell you which ones are service sims or not; I have identified all the individual sims who I know for sure to be Service Sims because I saw one of them once in her Maid uniform, for example, so I recognize her there in the Management place. I've seen a couple of elder Gardeners doing the garden at the Park, so afterwards I saw them in the Management place.

In my current save game I have a relatively large number of these Homeless Households, maybe 40 or so. Most of these are single individual households. I have received a few more single sims who I have not identified positively as Service Sims, at least not yet. They may be simply Townie Spam Spawn, the issue I've been trying to slow down here.

But this is only 3 or 4 sims! During the course of days and days gone by in this save game! This is completely different than the vanilla game!!!!!!!!!!

In the vanilla game you get 20 households or something like that on day one, 20 more on day 2, the same number on day 3, it never slows down. Two weeks later in the vanilla game it still never slows down. My game is certainly not like that now.

After I got those 3 or 4 sims extra who I mention in the paragraph above, the people I haven't identified yet, I have played this same game 3 or 4 days more. There is not one single new sim in the Homeless Management place; everyone there, all the households, are the exact same people. As if my population has stabilized.

And Pancake Bob is still the bartender at the Rattlesnake Juice, he leaves at 2 am I think it is, and this other guy takes over for the next shift. This other sim is still showing up to tend bar from 2 am with this new SimFilter version of this mod installed.

Hi Shimrod, thanks a lot for the update.
If I'm understanding right, the game only generates Sims if a situation demands a Sim matching a certain filter, no Sim matching the filter is available, and the request filter has a Sim template it can use to generate one.
If that's the case, even without the mod, the unplayed household population would eventually "level out" as there are theoritcally so many of them that someone matching the filter can nearly always be found, right? The reason I ask is that I have seen players reporting that the unplayed bin has hundreds of sims with no sign of stopping. I was afraid of disabling or significantly increasing the max population tunable out of fear that this townie count would keep growing unchecked, but I don't think that is the case. With or without this mod, the supply of homeless should eventually be sufficient to meet the demand. Except, with this mod, that supply will be much less.

Thinking I'll drop the max population story action as well and just try to script a new story action specifically to deal with dead sims, and possibly a new version of max population that can only cull townies that have never met a playable (although I'm not sure how feasible that is).

It would probably be a lot simpler just to delete townies as soon as they "despawn" from the world, if they haven't met a playable. In that case, if the unmodded game happens to generate a walkby, and you just let them walk by without talking to them, then they cease to exist as soon as they are done walking by. This might not be desirable if you saw a sim walk by, missed them, and are waiting for the same sim to walk by again, but who honestly does that?

Are you looking into somehow fixing the issue where no sims show up to lots after 8pm?

I can look into it if I need to, there is a different group of XML files which will maybe do this. I need to find them again, lol, I only saw them once but didn't investigate them other than to read through one or 2.

If I take my sim to the Rattlesnake bar after 12 midnight there are still sims there and Pancake Bob is tending bar. Do you see this place empty?