Okay I have been away form Sims 2 for around 6 years only coming back to check on things but did not go to deep.

Now I see youtube vids saying what we thought was corruption like deleting sims from hoods does not cause corruption.
I see post about it also.

So can anyone here explain to me what was found out about this???

April Black has several videos about it, and she's done some thorough testing on most of the corruption issues/bugs/etc., including recreating them to see how they happen, how to trigger them, what each of them do, and if they actually cause corruption or if they're just an inconvenience.

The videos are a bit long but dig quite deep into the spesifics, so if you're interested, those are absolutely worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/@aprilblacksims/videos

Yes I seen one of them and is why I am coming here to ask what is going on.
I trust the people here at MTS more than someone doing youtube vids because I don't know if there doing them for cash or for real.

I'd think hers are the good ones, as she actually tests theories and shows her work in a way someone could replicate the results it if they wanted to see for themselves.

Any other videos... potentially not so much.

In at least one of the videos, I think she also discusses how some of the myths around game corruption came to be, mentioning among other things how info generates at for instance MATY and other places where knowledgeable people were sharing info, and got a bit corrupted on the way to the general TS2 public over time, due to differences in understanding. Once a wrong piece of information (or myth, if you like) gets a good hold, it tends to stick like superglue, even if those who know better try to turn it around. It was apparently known around those circles that several of the things didn't actually cause corruption, but the general public were one-minded on the bits about corruption, and kinda ran with it (1 feather = henhouse, if you will).

Some of the things can still screw up your game in a variety of ways, but if you're willing to try, most of it is probably fixable. And there are still reasons why the "not-quite-corruption" things aren't good methods, since there are better ways that are less likely to cause issues + need less tampering around in SimPE.

So I can make a neighborhood without thinking about anything by deleting sims and without clearing lots or anything and upload it without problems and pretend that other people's games don't explode? because that's what they seem to imply with those videos. XD

If I'm remembering right, between 2006 - 2009, "using deleteallcharacters and then resetting the creation index can cause corruption" (because the dangling SWAFs got attached to new Sims) got muddled into "deleting Sims by any method causes corruption." There was also some issues with the very early EPs having a soft limit of about ~1000 Sims (things started erroring out past then) which may have contributed.

I would think it unlikely that a feature for which there is an openly visible button would be so flawed.

I now know that I didn't corrupt my Veronaville back in February 2013, when I deleted two Sims that I'd just made (because I'd forgotten to make them sisters in CAS). I'd only been playing for about three months at the time. The stub files that were left when I deleted them contained enough information to make sure their IDs didn't get re-used -- exactly as the Maxis developers intended! They did know what they were doing when they wrote the code for this wonderful game!

But, apart from those two, I still don't delete Sims, for much the same reason as I don't walk under ladders. I now know it's just superstition, but it still feels wrong. I fear I'd be tempting the Maxis gods!

deleteallcharacters just by itself is bad, since it deletes the entire character file. I don't think anyone using that cheat back then was resetting the index, that was only ever recommended for using Pescado's deleted 2 method.

~1000 sims definitely isn't a hard limit, but there is a limit to how many sims a hood can handle, you're just extremely unlikely to ever reach it with regular gameplay (April cheated it in SimPE by giving a sim the highest number available in SimPE and then adding another sim, but I'm blanking on which issues it caused). I think it was roughly 30k sims or some such.

I'm not sure but it's possible the first version of the BG had a lower sim limit, and it got raised with either a patch or the first EP (I think April said something about this, but can't remember clearly). It's possible the ~1000 sims "problem" sprung up partly because of this in the early days, and then grew legs because some people's hoods tended to slow down and/or become a bit iffy when they had over 1000 sims ("forgetting" that they also had a plethora of CC/mods, low computer specs, and not enough knowledge about safe(ish) play, etc., and maybe also tried to "fix" things with SimPE for the first time, or poked mods/cheats the wrong way - maybe not at that point, but somewhere along the way, so the problems had time to develop).

First time playing video games, eh?

But yeah, it turns out a lot of the things we thought were irrevocably bad are actually fixable. The biggest problem with moving occupied houses between neighborhoods is actually that it creates a shitton of unnecessary character files in order to bring the entire family tree, so you should still avoid it, but in general it's a lot more stable than expected. There's another video on unsafe NPCs that I thought was really interesting, because it turns out those have the same situation - a lot of the ones that were thought to be unsafe are actually fine and fully playable with a bit of fiddling, it's only the objects.package ones that you really don't want to mess with.

The main issue with overpopulation used to be errors - there are a lot of places where the game has to loop through every sim in the hood (including sims that had been deleted and reduced to stub files), and if you have too many operations in a single function without idling the game throws a Too Many Iterations error. You would definitely hit a point where many things were throwing unresolvable Too Many Iterations errors long before you hit the maximum character file number, however, since Lazy Duchess massively increased the number of operations that have to happen to cause Too Many Iterations, that's not really an issue anymore.

Some of us never thought that the game was easy to corrupt. The game deals with deleted-in-game sims just fine, stub files are by design.

The real problem occurs if you physically remove files from the neighborhood folder, or if the game is prevented from reading or writing to them.

https://modthesims.info/showthread....562#post5798562
(BTW what I said here about the character file limit seems to be incorrect- April clarifies that in one of her videos, I think it was SDSCs instead).

Do you have a link to Lazy Duchess' fix?

If its the RPC program then here: https://lazyduchess.tumblr.com/post...-mansion-garden

Or you can use the RPC Lib if you don't want the launcher:
https://lazyduchess.tumblr.com/post...-non-rpc-sims-2

Oh nice, thanks. I didn't want the whole launcher. It says it needs a cracked exe. Does the UC count?

It'll work fine with (the real) UC.

"George" works if you've got the UC (it goes around having to log in, but the install is the original UC).
LD linked it in at least one of their mods that requires an exe (you can find it in the mediafire link in the RPC lib link above).

I watched all of Aprils video's and after seeing what was posted on MATY and the post on here we have know that using the sim bin to delete sims does not cause corruption but they still count for the number of sims in the hood for gossip and such.
Using Windows OP is way better than Mac users for the amount of sims in your hood and the game can call 1000 or even 10's of thousand calls on all parts of a hood.

Also moving a household from 1 hood to another is only bad if they know a lot of other sims because they will bring stub files of those sim over also. (April and other have said you still should not do this because of the bloat on your new hood.)

But making a clean and empty hood then building a house and add a family to it then packing it up to the house bin or packaging it up to share is ok.
Will MTS allow this???

Yeah, the early EPs had a much lower limit before hitting the "too many iterations" error, and I think getting around that is why a lot of people went around deleting characters and resetting the Sim index to begin with.

They have before: https://modthesims.info/d/275300/sc...rmals-here.html

Very special case, I'd assume.
It's easy enough now to use mods to make most of the paranormals, at least if the difficulty level is the issue. Servos are probably the only ones that aren't easy to cheat (I think there are some buyable versions, though).

There was another one with lab walls and lab outfits (+ a bunch of sims). That one could easily have been uploaded as clothes + walls, without the lot (the lot was just the wallpapers on a bunch of walls, not even a proper building). The CC wasn't too bad (I think I used it at some point), but it's really annoying to install package files via S2pack files that need the lot and sims cleaned out first
https://modthesims.info/d/43029/lab...nd-outfits.html

In most other cases you can upload the lot + the individual sims as regular CAS templates, being a bit less likely to cause issues (stub files, etc.) - the lot with the sims is going to live in the lot bin until removed, so there's that, too.

I can't imagine there's much cash in doing 2-hour long videos testing Sims 2 Hood Corruption


I have 1727 character files right now. No errors yet, just slower loading times. I just don't have my sims get pets as often to limit additional files. I do have RPC Launcher, so that probably helps.

In recent years, the only times I've corrupted my hood are stuff outside the game- like I recently deleted temporary files while my hood was loading, or when SimPE crashes while I'm doing something in it. I think now after 20 years, players are much more aware of mod compatibility and we're not having EPs and patches screw with our existing set-ups.

Springwater's Great Crash (the BFBVFS) was caused by running out of hard drive space while saving the game.

Oakbrook itself was actually mildly corrupted in a few places - some disturbingly incorrect SWAFs and also a transgender waitress (re-genned SDSCs always reset to adult male, but she kept her female appearance), but was relatively stable.