Special-needs resurrection and a neighborhood question

[Kaylyn]

I have a project I'm working on that requires some really old Maxis sims resurrected. It doesn't necessarily have to be resurrection; SimPE will do. All I need is their DNA, I can still use SimPE to recreate their personalities.

Take, for example, Don Lothario's parents. I tried resurrecting them in game but when he called the Grim Reaper it said he didn't know anyone who was dead. Funny, you think he'd know his own parents. So I tried to clone them with SimPE but, while you can view their character file and personality traits and even what their hair color and eye color and traits they were most likely to pass down to children, you couldn't go into Sim Surgery and clone them like you can with the Goth ancestors (I'm assuming because the Goths still keep their tombstones around).

Does anyone know of a way to get Sims like these back? All I've found on the net is their character files become corrupted when you delete the tombstones and you can't re-clone them, and that these characters never really truly existed except as filler backstory for the Maxis pre-made characters. It's not a huge deal, I can always clone, say, Don, and modify the face to resemble the ancestor in question so that there's still family resemblance. But if there was a way to pull the DNA and recreate them exactly as they appear in their icons in SimPE I would be a happy camper indeed.

On a related note, is there any way to pull, for example, the Pleasantview template from the game? I know there's a neighborhood template labeled Pleasantview, and the street layout is really close, but not exactly like the Maxis Pleasantview (pay close attention to the area where Don and the Caliente sisters live for an example of the differences). I'd really like to have that exact street layout for my project. In case you're wondering, my goal is to have one large combined neighborhood using downtowns and shopping districts to have Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville, Bluewater Village, and Riverblossom Hills all interconnected. I'm gonna start with the oldest families and recreate them from the first generation in the family trees in order to really flesh out the saga of the families. Do you have any idea how many family sims are in the history that only had one kid? I can understand that happening once in a while, but usually family sims have around three or four kids on average in my experience. So I just wanna make things more realistic, and it gives me a goal to play towards. I plan on chronicling it, too.

[Miros1]

To duplicate Pleasantview (assuming you haven't done the scorched earth version of my "how to prevent ugly Maxis Sims" tutorial):

1) Rename your My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 folder.
2) Run the game.
3) Open up the Pleasantview 'hood and use the "deleteallcharacters" cheat.
4) Quit the game.
5) Open up the new My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighborhoods folder.
6) Rename the N001 folder [b]and all files and folders inside it that start with N001]/b] to "N004" or whatever number is unused in your original game.
7) Drag the renamed folder to a safe place.
8) Delete the newly created The Sims 2 folder.
9) Drag the original The Sims 2 folder back to its original location.
10) Run SimPE.
11) Run the Neighborhood Browser and choose your new 'hood.
12) I forget what the resource is called, but you need to change the ID to N004 (or whatever you used). Also click the "Make Unique" button to get a new GUID for the hood.
13) Commit.
14) Delete all the SCDC (Sim Description), SDNA (Sim DNA), SCOR (Skills) and (one more that I can't remember the name, but it's right there with those 3) resources.
15) Save.

You should have a second version of Pleasantview after your other existing hoods.

[Kaylyn]

That works for duplicating Pleasantview as a main hood (which is what I want as my main hood, actually). What about if I wanted said duplicate Pleasantview as a shopping district for another main hood? I haven't examined the templates for the other default neighborhoods or compared them to the actual base hoods, but if there's any significant difference I'd prefer to have the actual street layouts. Not a huge deal, just makes it more accurate for my project.

[Kaylyn]

Hmm, I mistakenly thought I wouldn't have any problems simply viewing neighborhoods with SimPE in order to get the character data I needed, even though I have Bon Voyage. Apparently I was mistaken. So I'm uninstalling BV just to have that functionality back. When SimPE is updated I'll probably reinstall it. Here's hoping I don't have too much old data that a complete reinstall is necessary. I really haven't played that much in a while, so we'll see...and maybe they'll have the whole SecureROM mess figured out by then too so I don't lag so much.

[Greg]

Hmm... did you check to see if the Pleasantview map is available when you create a new neighborhood? I have never created a custom shopping district so we're out of my league here.

[Miros1]

Kaylyn, I'll send you a PM. You have to go to the Bad Place for instructions...

Greg, Kaylyn sez the neighborhood map called Pleasantview is just a hair off...

[Zirconia Wolf]

The (empty) maps for Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville & Riverblossom Hills (if you have Seasons) are all on the list of maps you can choose when adding custom Base Hoods, Shopping Districts, Downtowns & Universities. So is the (empty) Bluewater Village map.

Not that anyone cares, but here is how things currently stand in my game:

PLEASANTVIEW
Bluewater Village (default OFB hood)
Sedona City (custom NL hood using the Sedona map)
Sim State University (default UNI)

STRANGETOWN
Desert Shores (custom Shopping hood using Bluewater map)
Midnight Oasis (custom NL hood using Oasis Valley map)
La Fiesta Tech (default UNI)

VERONAVILLE
Hamlet Hills (custom OFB hood, BW map)
Capp-Mont Canyon (custom NL hood, can't remember map name)
Academie Le Tour (default UNI)

RIVERBLOSSOM HILLS
Tulipvalley Village (custom OFB, BW map)
Crystal Springs City (custom NL hood, Crystal Springs map)
Arbordale State University (custom UNI, Arbordale map)

SAMPLE CITY (custom base "testing" hood, Sample SC4 map)
Sample Shores (custom OFB, BW map)
Downtown (the default NL destination does live!)
Sample City University (custom UNI, not sure about the map name)

Pleasantview, Strangetown & Veronaville were all booted up (& "opening" stuff" played through) on a fresh up-to-UNI install. After placing everyone in the respective Sim Bins (& using a very elaborate cheaty way to give all the Adults & Elders a retro-active Diploma) I then gave each hood 1 of the 3 pre-made Maxis Colleges & placed/loaded all the YA Sims.

Then I exited the game, made a backup & Scorched the base & college game folders.

Next I followed a freakishly overly thought out & time consuming chain of events wherein I added each EP/SP (in order) booted up the game (& loaded each household) after each pack was installed & then Scorched any scorch-able folders. Sub hoods were added after their relevant EPs were installed, & each pre-made hood got to "live" (be placed) once before saving & scorching. I am (finally) back to my happy all-packs-including Seasons/Celebrations & am now preparing for H&M, Bon Voyage & Teen Style.

My reasoning for the compulsive use of the BW map for any & all OFB shopping hoods is that I am setting the stage for adding Bon Voyage to my game (soon?) & after chatting with some BV users, I have learned that- as far as Maxis made maps go- the Bluewater Village map got the best rating as far as "maps you can add beach-front homes to after installing BV." (Found some spectacular user made ones for that purpose too...)

I have rambled too much (again) & need to quit now! (Got an unexpected family crisis, actually...)

[Kaylyn]

Blargh. Thanks for all the effort, but to keep it simple I'm gonna just use the templates the game provides. Had enough trouble getting the Goth house empty and ready for Victor and Gretle Goth and kids to move into without losing the furniture last night. Just moved the house to the new neighborhood, killed off the family starting with Alexander, then reloaded N001 so I could clone who I needed. SimPE at one point would let me load up my BV stuff strictly for viewing, but I guess it decided it didn't want to anymore, so I uninstalled BV and sticking with Seasons right now. The minor differences between the classic Pleasantview map and the blank neighborhood Pleasantview template aren't worth a huge dance just to prepare to play my game. I'll work around them, just chalking up the different street layout to something to do with the space-time continuum or something. It's always the space-time continuum. :P

Now if anyone has a solution to extracting the necessary DNA info from the incomplete character files of the ancestral sims, I could still use that help...

[Miros1]

Lemme see if Theo sez what resources he moves with the SimSurgery plugin... Or I could clone one of my in-game Sims...