All very helpful. I will switch the numbers later tonight. I will also create back ups as well. Thanks!

Incidentally, following up something we were talking about a few days ago - there are currently 440 sims in your neighbourhood.

Umm...not sure what that means. Is that bad? Should I fix it? How?

You can't fix it without destroying the neighbourhood. I'm just pointing out that you loaded the neighbourhood with a full set of EAxis sims. The bin sims are in the bins as well (see picture). It means your neighbourhood will have a large file size and some people won't want to download it because they don't like the default townies. You will have to tell people this on the download page. Most custom neighbourhoods are made empty in AGS at first but they don't have to be I guess.

Anyway, I loaded your neighbourhood and here's a very quick report on the lots you have so far. It's not exhaustive because I've not played them with sims in. Just what I can see from looking round.

1. It's generally thought to be good practice to leave any lots on saving on the top floor with walls up and roof on/up too since the lot loads for your users just as you left it. If you leave it with walls down, it looks like it's in the middle of being played or built and, for me anyway, that's disruptive. I prefer to have the walls up and roof on because then you can see the building from the outside at first and get a sense of what it is like. What I got on loading 94 Cliffside Shores was as in the picture. Untidy.

2. Also the bathroom in that lot has no window or light and is dark.

3. Coastal diner - I don't think there is room here for the host against the stairs. Can't be certain without play-testing but I suspect that will be a problem.

4. Also the male bathroom has no window.

5. Also all the other lots you have are without lights. I'm guessing in some cases this is because you are still working on those lots but don't forget to add them. I usually leave lights till near the end and then go round and add them everywhere. You're less likely to miss something that way.

maxon, if I place this in AGS and then remove it, it wont leave those sims behind will it?

It means you haven't succeeded in creating an empty neighborhood. Which probably means you've loaded the stealth hoods. Which means you won't be able to upload it to MTS, if I'm recalling the Creator Guidelines correctly - I believe they don't allow the uploading of hoods with subhoods (including stealth hoods). You can't fix it in this version, because deleting 440 characters, in addition to being tedious in itself, would leave a lot of stray data behind in the form of corruption.

Go through your backups in Explorer (or whatever the file browser is called on your machine) and look in the Characters folders for different stages, and you can see at what point you went wrong. Universals don't appear in the Characters folder for the neighborhood, so it's easy to tell - any files in that folder at all, you've failed to suppress the game's eagerness to create non-playables. You can revert to the backup before the first character loaded, and rebuild from there. If you have packaged backups of the various buildings you can unpack them and replace them, but keep the browser open in the background and check each time to see if a file appears in the character folder - if it does, that building got saved with an invisible NPC in it and you'll need to discard that copy.

This is not a job that is tolerant of impatience. You have a tendency to rush headlong into things and to want immediate results, and that simply won't work here. Go through Mootilda's tutorials again and keep them open to refer to while working. Renaming the neighborhood files should have been among the first things you did. If you rename the empty, unbuilt neighborhood, you'll only have to rename a handful of files; once you start building, the files start proliferating, and you want them to proliferate with the correct number.

What about if each lot was packaged and all sim references removed, could they be reused?

I don't get the impression the lots have been used at all - just built so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem. There's a lot of work gone into decorating the hood though which would have to be redone.

I didn't know that about the sub-hoods Peni - so it will have to be redone. It is a full load as far as I can see including everything. OP get AGS. It's the best thing for building hoods (and lots and a few other things).


Don't think so - the sims are in the neighbourhood, not the game. But I tell you what, I'll pull the folder this afternoon and check.

All very good points! I didn't even know that if you leave the lot with the walls down it will stay like that. I will make sure to correct that. As for the cliff side house, what was the issue? I'm thinking many of the lots I've already built in the hood are subject to major change and even demolition. Bathroom Windows will be fixed, as for lighting in all houses. (I always forget!) The coastal diner will be looked at. Thanks for the help!

A little confused with this. So you're saying that I won't be able to upload my hood to MTS because it's already loaded townies and NPC's? If I do revert to a backup, how would I find the backup, revert to it, and prevent the characters from loading? Also, when I'm finished with the hood, Wouldn't I want townies and NPC's? When the hood was in WAY early development I did create a sub hood to test a SC4 terrain, is that when the 440 characters loaded? Do I have to revert to that? Please also mind that I'm very new to all this technical talk so forgive me if I miss a step here and there. I'm only human so if It looks like "tend to rush" that's wrong, I'm just very new and foreign to this, so cut me a little slack please!

The game, when you first load/create a neighbourhood, will add NPCs, townies, downtownies etc. etc. FIRST TIME. So it happened when you first created this version of the neighbourhood. Also it adds hundreds the first time - 440 in your version.

People get round that by either using empty templates, or better, creating the neighbourhood in AGS. In AGS, you can set it on (environment) creation to make the neighbourhood empty of sims. You have to be careful how you handle it and to keep an eye on what is happening because sometimes when you load the hood, it will go through the 'adding the NPCs/townies' routine anyway - you can tell because it tells you that, says something like 'Creating Pets' 'Making Magic' or whatever sub-hood it is adding (BTW, you also see this type of sub-hood referred to as stealth hoods). There are a number of hidden sub-hoods the game adds by default on loading a neighbourhood for the first time but AGS can bypass it. You can check every time you load the hood by looking in the Characters folder for the hood - it should be empty or only contain the sims you have made for the hood. If you play the hood for any length of time, the game will start to add NPCs and townies as you go.

To give you an example, Polgannon shipped with 53 sim files in its character folder (compared to your 440). These were 47 playable sims I made for the neighbourhood, four townies and two NPCs I couldn't avoid (a landlord and a driver). The neighbourhood, as shipped, has been played literally for a couple of minutes maximum on each lot in order to prevent the game generating NPCs and townies. That is not necessarily an ideal solution as there are some resultant issues (not game breakers but a little annoying). I think Peni played her hoods for a while (e.g. Widespot) in order to develop her stories and there are NPCs and townies in that neighbourhood. Because she used AGS (I'm assuming Peni), I don't think Widespot and her other neighbourhoods contain the full set of NPCs and townies though - in fact, probably not since Peni was able to upload that neighbourhood here.

Yes, many people would like townies and NPCs in their hoods but the thing is, if you give someone a neighbourhood without townies and NPCs, when someone else first puts that neighbourhood in their game and loads it, it will create all the NPCs and townies it needs (unless your user is like me and has empty templates). What you should get from that is that you don't need to supply the townies and so on and also, Peni says, there is a regulation on this site which means you can't include sub-hoods with a neighbourhood. Sub-hoods (or stealth hoods), as I said above, are a mechanism used by the game to add townies and NPCs to your neighbourhoods on first load. It also applies, by the way, I think, to any attached hoods to the main hood. So you shouldn't add a shopping district for example (which I think you might have done?).

Yes, I accidentally added a sub hood shopping district a while ago. All that being said, what should I do to fix this?

I'm afraid the likely answer is start again. With AGS. Sorry.

Edit to add: @joandsarah77 - I pulled the neighbourhood and loaded AGS. This is the version of Polgannon in my AGS and the sim bin. As you can see, no bin families.

I think you've got the UC, which AGS doesn't work with, which makes it more complicated. Even the parts of Mootilda's tutorials that refer to people who can't use AGS due to it not working with their compilation disks may not be 100% accurate for dealing with the UC. So you may well discover new and useful information about creating empty environments with the UC in the course of this project.

One thing you need to get into your head, Mike - nobody cares about anything except the result. This project is not about you and nothing anybody says here will be personal. You've undertaken a job and no one else is as invested in it as you are, so it's on you to do the necessary work and research to do the best job you can. We have guidelines and tutorials you can refer to (and which you should already have read, but if you'd read and comprehended them you'd have backups and know where they are, you'd know about the stealth hoods, and you'd have renamed your files) and we have experienced people who can answer questions, but you are responsible for reading and following the guidelines and tutorials and asking specific questions. And if nobody can answer the question you will have to figure out how to answer it for yourself by doing original research and testing.

This is not people setting up arbitrary hoops for you to jump through. This is the way it is. If you want to share a neighborhood, you have to think about the details and make decisions about how to fill your vision.

If you don't have an empty environment to build your neighborhood in, it will have the familiar Pleasantview townies. If that fits your vision, that's fine - but a lot of people won't download it who otherwise might have. They've already got the Pleasantview townies, and don't need you to give them yet another iteration. If your vision includes townies, it will be more marketable with unique townies you create yourself.

The vast majority of game corrupting factors don't kick in until that first character is added. You want the neighborhood to be as clean as possible, and you don't want to be constantly having to go back several steps in creation and rebuild a bunch of houses because of something that went wrong with the characters. So, building in a completely empty environment until you're substantially done is more efficient as well as safer than letting NPCs and townies generate during the building phase. (You'll probably tweak individual houses till the very last minute; this is normal.)

You will learn a great deal while doing this. Much of what you learn will be related to the game and to computers; you'll be much more tech and code savvy at the end of the process than you are now. But you'll also learn a lot of more personal stuff, about how you need to work creatively, about patience, about discipline, which will make your life a lot easier and more productive. And nobody can help you with those. Nobody knows or cares how you're doing the work. We can only look at the result and if it's a mess, we'll tell you in what way it is a mess, and it won't matter a bit to us why it's mess.

I suggest you start by going over the tutorial threads. This is the last time I'm giving you these links (my memory's dodgy right now, but I'm sure I've referred you to them before. I always do when people bring up this subject, unless somebody else beats me to it.) http://modthesims.info/t/455403
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=420196

Mootilda's not around to walk you through the tough bits anymore, but if you have specific questions or there's passages you can't make sense of, by all means quote them here and ask for clarification. But sometimes the only way to understand directions is to try to follow them. I do this all the time when I'm trying to follow a sewing pattern - sometimes when I get to the bit I don't understand, all of a sudden I understand it. And sometimes I have to sew it wrong four or five times before the penny drops and I get it and I can make the note on the pattern that will make the directions make sense to me next time.

But if you do something wrong often enough - eventually, you get it right, and then you've learned it, and can count on that knowledge in the future, and build on it.

I will take all of this advise to heart and really try to do my best at working on this. I am actually kind of happy and am thinking of this as a blessing in disguise so now I can make the hood even better than before. Last question before I get started; do I need to create a new SC4 terrain or can I still use the one I originally did?

Also, @peni griffin as the post by mootlida says "
If you have FreeTime installed, there is a feature in the AnyGameStarter which will incorrectly handle the stealth neighborhood. You will need to do an initial step to disable the stealth neighborhood which is automatically installed when you create a new neighborhood. You must do this before creating your new neighborhood in the empty AnyGame. Basically, we rename the folder so that the game cannot find the neighborhood.

1) Find the location of the F002 folder in your installation directory. Usually, this is:
C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 FreeTime\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\F002
However, if you selected a custom installation, then you will have to find the location where you installed FreeTime and navigate to the NeighborhoodTemplate subfolder.

2) Rename NeighborhoodTemplate to NeighborhoodTemplate_Stealth."

So if I do this, and then open up my hood for the first time, will it not have any sims/NPC's/Townies? How can I check to see if there are any sub hoods or townies or NPC's so that way I don't have to bother you every time?

You can reuse the SC4 terrain - it's only when you put the neighbourhood into the game that any NPCs/townies get created. The terrain is just the shape of the land with the roads (some trees and bridges etc.). A quick way to check on townies and NPCs is simply to look in the characters folder in the neighbourhood folder. When you first load an empty game that folder should be empty (and preferably stay empty throughout your building phase). Checking for attached sub-hoods even if empty is another thing.

But actually, before you go ahead, I thought Peni said you had the UC? I think that means you can't use AGS. Can you confirm that first?

Peni, you would be proud of me! I'm actually kind of piecing this together! I have a few questions if you don't mind;

1. It mentions not to make apartments and inhabit them, is this true? I noticed you wer able to in Polgannon

2. So how will I be able to build and populate houses when I can't load the hood? Or is it just the first time?

If you still have the original terrain file, there's no reason you can't use it again.

Open the Neighborhood folder in your file browser and look at the contents. When stealth hoods are attached, they appear as extra neighborhood package files. A brand-new Neighborhood folder should contain empty folders for Characters, Lots, Thumbnails, and Storytelling, a package file called NXXX_Neighborhood.package (where XXX stands for the neighborhood number), and a .png file with the same name, which at this point will only show the terrain (or a random grid, depending on whether the terrain you used comes with a .png).

Stealth hoods and subhoods load with the naming protocol NXXX_Suburb00X and they will also have .png files, which may give you a hint as to what stealth hoods you haven't suppressed - i.e. N004_suburb005.png on my machine has a picture of a castle, which tells me that the stealth hood containing the witches and secret witch lots has been attached to Drama Acres (my N004).

The first thing you do during a work session should be to open up the file browser and take a look at the folder for the neighborhood you're working on, to confirm that it's all in order. Once you load the game and the neighborhood, you can tab back to your browser (or leave it open in the background if you work in Window mode, which I don't) periodically to check that it hasn't done anything sneaky - that way, if it does do anything sneaky, you'll catch it in the act and can abort, or examine the problem for clues as to what caused it.

The last thing you do during a work session should be to make a copy of the neighborhood you just edited - just an ordinary copy of the NXXX folder - to store someplace safe, such as an external drive. That way, you can easily restore from the previous session, or backtrack several stages if necessary, if something goes wrong, whether because you made a mistake or because the computer got struck by lightning; or you have a Better Idea and decide it'll be easier to implement starting over from an earlier point.

That being glad to start over because now you can do it better? That's absolutely the proper attitude to revision. It can feel like a disaster to lose a lot of work; but you don't lose the experience the work gave you, and you're going to do it so much better the second (or third, or fourth) time, it'll totally be worth it.

It was me who built Polgannon and I ignored that advice. They do work but there are some issues with them. I'd not create the complex apartments I made for Polgannon again. The reason I did it was because Polgannon is a stand alone hood and therefore any problems with it remain in the hood. It's not a sub-hood or anything like that which can affect other hoods.


You can populate as normal - it's just the first run through that the game creates from the stealth hoods. However, keep an eye on it. While I was building Polgannon I had a couple of hiccups in AGS which forced creation of the stealth hoods. I had to go back to a back up. Back up ALL THE TIME. At some points, I did it daily or even more often than that if I was doing a lot of work.

Yes because I can do it better thanks to you and all your help. So I can understand this a little better, I disable all stealth hoods etc...load up a new version of the hood, and get to work? Then when I'm done, create a copy of the previous save file (backing up) and then save, quit, and I should be okay? Basically (correct me if I'm wrong) I disable stealth hoods, then go about my normal business creating my hood (while backing up periodically) and populate/inhabit hood and then I'm all set? After I'm finished and upload the hood I can re enable the hoods right? Do you have a link to how I can create custom townies and NPC's ?

Don't worry about that until you're ready to do it. There are various methods.

@maxon I don't want this to be a sub hood...is it the same or similar process?

I think I'm getting the hang of it! Man it was much more difficult that I originally intended. Here's what I got out of it. If @maxon @peni griffin can let me know if I'm right, that would be great

1. First I will start by backing up my game, then I will delete all neighborhoods in the main neighborhood folder

2. Afterwards I will disable stealth hoods using the tutorial without AGS

3. I will load the neighborhood terrain ( it is my understanding that upon loading the hood first time there will be absolutely no sims in the hood?)

4. While backing up periodically, I can continue to build, populate, etc my neighborhood until I'm finished

5. Once it's done, I'll create townies and NPC's

So that's what I've gotten from all the tutorials. Do I seem to have it right?

Yes, though check for sub-hoods added after point 3 and before you go on. What you want is the absence of files like Peni described.

If you play your playables for any length of time beyond 1-2 minutes or call up for an NPC like a maid, the game will make one. You also need the noregen hacks in your Downloads folder before you start anything.