Sorry to double post, but I think you'll agree this justifies it.

I created an empty Downtown in AGS, following this tutorial, changing the zoning before building anything. Once built, I attached it to an existing neighborhood (after backing up the neighborhood, of course) to playtest the buildings before I decided if I wanted to try populating the original empty neighborhood. It contained no character files at all when I attached it.

After five sim days of active playtesting, moving a new family in and visiting community lots with main hood families, all seemed to be working as expected, with no new sims appearing except NPCs. Then I started seeing unfamiliar teens. I double-checked my downloads folder - I have notownieregen installed, but nothing except antiredundancy to repress spawning, and since the neighborhood I attached it to is Widespot and I haven't made any townies for it, I could easily have hit a trigger point for spawning townie teens. No worries. Last night the Master Vampire spawned, looking nothing like the Master Vampire I normally see in my primary playing hood - and so did a recognizable downtownie teen.

At first I thought it must be a random resemblance, face template and outfit matching the standard downtownie by coincidence, but when I looked closely, she was wearing makeup, which does not appear on randomly-generated sims to the best of my knowledge. So this morning I did some checking in SimPE.

She's in a six-person household consisting entirely of teens, O'Brien. She has no thumbnail. Four of the other people in the household are unfamiliar-looking and are presumably random spawns. The fifth also has no thumbnail. Looking at his data, the number of skills he has makes me suspect he's a cashier, but unlike the teens with thumbnails and like the one I saw last night, he has turn-ons/turn-offs. That could just mean he was flirted and rolled some randomly at that time (which I think is how it works), except that he has no relationships.

Theories? Suggestions? Things I should check? (I looked in the Default household and John Smith Tricou does not appear among the dead, for what that's worth.)

Those townies sound like they may be the Tricou teens from the Downtown template. You can see their pictures by clicking on the links from this page:
http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Tricou_family

If I'm right, then the question is: how and when were they added to your neighborhood?

Do you have Tarlia's clean and fixed Downtown template installed, or are you using the shipped version? I believe that the shipped version has these sims in the Downtownie family, but Tarlia's doesn't.

They're not. I'm especially on the lookout for Tricous because I cloned them as playables. I've seen the other one with no thumbnail, and he's a bald kid, obviously randomly generated; and the rest look like nothing I've ever seen before, either. Only the blonde short-haired girl (I can post a pic if it'll help) is identical to a standard downtownie, right down to the makeup. (I haven't actually compared stats.)

I have the standard downtown template in my installation files, with this (supposedly empty) template next to it in the same directory. I checked this morning and ran the hoodchecker (you saw that report in the hoodchecker thread) and it contained a reference to one character file apparently attached to the restaurant stove. As far as I can tell, given that a lot of the non-playable sims don't have thumbnails, the blonde teen is the only standard downtownie to generate, and she did it after the neighborhood was attached.

This is seriously weird. Is it possible the downtownie character templates are stored someplace besides the neighborhood template which is accessible when my game tries to spawn downtownies? Where would I look?

What is the family ID of these teens? Open your neighborhood in SimPE and find the instance number of the FAMI record.

You might also want to check out their NPC type, found in the Other tab of the Sim Description.

Are you aware that Downtownies spawn from a different set of face templates than the other hoods? I believe that it may be normal for Downtownies to spawn with makeup.

FAMI Instance # 0x00007FFC (32764) Dang, that looks high!

Rosalie's NPC code is 0000. And she continues to be the only one, though the game has spawned a few more, plus a couple of children, since then; and at least one of them has in fact spawned with make-up - and doesn't look at all familiar.

So I guess this is a fluke occurrence, the random cloning of a premade from the existing templates. That is extremely interesting. If (and it's a big if) I ever try to share this downtown, I'll have to be sure to mention this, so anybody else it happens to won't panic.

For my own purposes, though, I think I'll gussy her up a bit.

She's a downtownie. You can see the family instances at the bottom of this page:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=FAMI

I don't believe that anything is wrong. My guess is that the downtownie face templates allow makeup, and that's what you're seeing.

It would be nice if we could find the downtownie face templates in the game; it should be possible to change them as we change the other default face templates.

Supposedly, this mod will remove the use of the Downtownie templates, so that Downtownies will be generated with your default templates instead:
http://simmanipulator.forumotion.co...mplates-be-gone

Me again. Having completed my downtown, tested it, and tweaked it, I decided to populate it with playables who would be turned into ghosts to populate the graveyard - which looks lame with no headstones in it - and some playables to have connections to them in case anyone wants to resurrect them (because players are like that). So I went back into my Anygame, made some, played some, and backed up the folder at the point at which I felt I needed to proceed in SimPE, because I was playing with an underpowered card and the new one hasn't arrived yet. SimPE is treating this folder oddly. I can load the neighborhood, and open the data, but the only sims it allows me to access through the neighborhood are the Uneditable NPCs (which of course I'm not touching) and Phil Brown, the cook who apparently semi-spawned on a community lot when I placed a stove. Phil and other essential personnel spawned completely when I was taking my future ghosts around checking on my last batch of lot tweaks but only Phil appears: no other NPCs and none of my playables.

I can, by going to Open File and navigating to the relevant Characters folder, open the package files for these characters, but these files don't contain (or at any rate I cannot locate) any of the things I planned to tweak with SimPE, such as Family Ties and jobs.

Presumably this is the result of SimPE recognizing the game as a Downtown and not wanting to work on it without a main hood attached - when it opens the browser to let me look at Phil, it even gives me a warning to that effect. I am reluctant to open the game long enough to change the hood type, given that the last time I loaded the game on the card some of the higher-poly base game clothing was shattering, and that card is now returned to the vendor while I run the machine from the chipset on the motherboard. And the ability to look at Phil's complete data despite the warning encourages me to hope that there's another option, but I have no clue what it might be.

Suggestions gratefully accepted.

My only suggestion is to change back to a primary neighborhood temporarily. I'll add this to my SimPE to-do list, although we don't currently have anyone doing SimPE programming.

Hi :-),

I'm finished creating a suburb (business) template and populated it.
I also created custom townies with the teleporter cat (I think)

I wanted to move my suburb in the NeighborhoodTemplate folder (where Bluewater Village is) but before, I did a check in SimPe.
Since I can't use AnyGameStarter, I did the method you mentioned in the tutorial (by renaming NeighborhoodTemplate to NeighborhoodTemplate_stealth)

Anyway, I noticed that 3 unwanted NPCs has been generated while I was creating and populating the 'hood (I think) (I read somewhere, that the game creates NPCs when they're needed.)

These NPCs has been generated:
Repairman
Nanny
Stray

How can I delete them without messing up the neighborhood?

It's far safer to leave them, or to quit without saving as soon as they are spawned and then restore from a backup if the character files remain.

If you absolutely must delete them, this is the best known method, but it's not exactly safe:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=504497

Well I only have a back-up version without sims.... but a full neighborhood

It's ok to have a nanny and a repairman but I don't want that stray because I can't hide EPs and I only want to use Sims 2 Basegame with OFB and no other EPs...

You can also use this tutorial to safely remove all sims from your neighborhood:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=468987

A neighborhood created with Pets will not be able to be used with just OFB. Your neighborhood and lots will require all of the EPs that you had installed the last time that you opened the neighborhood.

Is it also the same with SPs?
Is there also a way to create a neighborhood without EPs and without AnyGame?
Because, I use Origin.

Without the AnyGameStarter, your only options are to require all EPs and SPs installed when the neighborhood was created (including the Store Edition, if you have it), or to uninstall some of your EPs and SPs to reduce those requirements.

It may be possible to tweak the AGS to allow you to use the AGS with Origin; however this is not for the faint of heart. We've managed to get people with the collection packs running the AGS and I expect that something similar could be done with Origin (although it may not work). Here's the thread. The most important thing is to backup your registry before installing the AGS, and to keep that backup until you are absolutely sure that everything is working correctly.

Another thread where someone was trying to get the AGS working with Origin:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=508616

It was me who tried to start AnyGameStarter with Origin games
but like in the thread I mentioned...

It asks for a CD which I don't have.
I only have an Origin account with my purchased games and if I want to start the game, I select Mansion and Garden (in Origin under My Games) and double click it ... then the game starts.

P.S. If I select an other EP/SP under My Games...this pop-up appears: (translated to English)

Please select The Sims 2 Mansion & Garden Stuff Pack to start the game...
(Even if I try with AnyGame)

Then it sounds like the AGS isn't an option. Your neighborhood will require all of the EPs and SPs that you currently have installed. If you want to use the OFB game engine, then you need to uninstall everything after Pets.

Anyway, I imported my subhood into my game.
But I have a question.
Everything works fine, I only noticed that some sims had interactions like playing piano, talking to each other but not much...(free will was on on these families)

Does it matter, if they have some interactions (only one per sim)?
Can it affect the (suburb) neighborhood?

It depends completely on what the interaction is. For example, saving while a sim is on the phone is a bad idea. Saving while ghosts are active is also unsafe.

This is getting very far away from the topic of this tutorial. If you want to understand which interactions are safe, you might want to ask in the Sims 2 Discussion forum. I'm not an expert on the topic of saving while a sim is involved in an interaction.

Hi me again, :-)

I want to recreate Garden Heights from Sims Pet Stories with its Sims and Houses as a subhood template.
So before I deinstall all my EPs and SPs except Pets + Seasons + Open for Business (of course)

I'd like to copy all the trees and other neighborhood decor with the HoodReplacer but create the lots myself (because I'm sure they won't work - it would crash if I open them up, right?)

Anyway, can it be done?

I honestly don't know. I don't have Pet Stories installed. You could certainly try it with a temporary neighborhood (without uninstalling anything), to see whether it will work.

I know that it was possible to get the Life Stories lots into TS2, so I assume that the same thing could be done with Pet Stories, but again I have no experience or advice.

Your questions don't actually seem to have anything to do with the topic of this thread. If you can get the Pet Stories neighborhood as a working Sims 2 neighborhood without any subhoods, then it should be possible to change that TS2 neighborhood to a subhood template.

I hope it's okay to post there, but I'm having an issue with the AnyGame Starter. I followed everything to the letter in creating a new empty AnyGame, but when I run the game in AnyGame Launcher, there are neighborhoods present even though I did everything properly over and over.

None of my games are downloaded, I have The Sims Holiday Edition (2006) all EPs, Teen Style Stuff, Glamour Life Stuff, and Happy Holiday Stuff installed.

Did you just use the AnyGameStarter "Create empty game" option, or did you rename the neighborhood folders directly? If the former, can you attach the AppFiles folder?

Does anyone know what the problem is with this stealth neighborhood exactly, and how to fix it? I'm trying to make a stealth FT neighborhood that only requires FT, but it's hard to test without AGS!

ETA: Figured it out! For some reason, simply adding a lot to the FT Stealth neighborhood stops it from crashing!

I have been making various subhood templates lately, and keep having trouble with some of the lots randomly vanishing.

The lots disappear from the hood, and SimPE no longer lists a Lot Description (LTXT) for the missing lots in the Neighborhood.package. (The files are still present in the neighbourhood's Lots folder.) Manually replacing the LTXT in SimPE did not make the lots appear in-game. The only way to fix it after the fact has been to reassemble the hood - new map, place lots again, transfer hood deco, etc. Annoying.

I think I found a workaround. Posting here so others may be able to search and find in the future...

When working on a subhood template in AnyGameStarter, disable the corresponding Templates folder in your Program Files.

I do this by renaming the folder temporarily. This seems to have worked for my Uni subhood, allowing me to replace lots with their later versions and keep SimPE properly updated. Probably the same technique applies to other types of template/subhood as well.

So I don't know why we were not able to fix the lots once they had disappeared, but it seems I now can prevent it happening in the future. Hope this may be useful to someone else as well!