Right now, when a person wants to recreate a neighborhood, they need to make a lot of manual changes. Many of these changes could be made programmatically, if the original neighborhood still exists. This should work even if the original neighborhood is corrupt, especially if there is some error checking.

There would need to be some way to identify sims, possibly by name, so that sims in the new neighborhood can be identified as identical to sims in the old neighborhood.

Many of these things could be copied:

- Family Ties. Ignore any sims who no longer exist.

- Important Relationships. Again, ignore sims who no longer exist.

- Interests.

- School marks, school type, and college degrees.

- Skills.

- Career and job level.

- Personality, zodiac, attraction to males and females.

- Voice type.

- Turn-ons and turn-offs.

- Predestined hobby. Secondary aspirations.

- Skills and badges.

- Memories arrays and Want and Fears arrays could be copied. However, this is somewhat iffy, since this is where corruption tends to reside.

Sounds like a cool idea, and definitely can't wait for that to be made.
Maybe by the latest instance recorded in SimPE, since some Sims have lots of duplicate files (with the blue background behind their faces).

What happens for Sims who are deceased? Or who are part of a family tree?

Also, perhaps there can be some instructions for the program to find the Sim's latest instance, and impliment it in the family trees and memories of people.

E.g. Sim's Name = Jane Doe
Her Sim IDs include:
- 0xB97AfB60
- 0x997AF5E3
* 0x597B199F
- 0xF97AF17A
- 0x597B09EC
- 0x397AFDB1
- 0xB97AFC81

* being the latest version of that Sim (with the grey background behind their face). If all memories, family trees, and social interactions can direct themselves to that Sim ID with the *, then that could help reduce redundancy and eliminate unneccesary Character files per neighborhood folder.

For college degrees, would custom majors/degrees create a problem, if the file is removed? Perhaps if the program doesn't find the major, the program can default it to some Maxis created degree major.

Might be a problem with custom careers too. Perhaps there can be a part of the program that if it doesn't find the custom job, default the Sim's career and level to one of the Maxis created base-game careers and their respective level.

About memories between Sims, again maybe finding the latest instance can help. For SWAF, perhaps that can be skipped and simply re-rolled to something else.

I think the second biggest problem would be family trees, since some players have multi-generation families.

I'm not clear on why a sim would have multiple Sim IDs. However, if you create brand new sims in CAS, the Sim ID isn't going to match any of the Sim IDs in the old neighborhood. Could you explain further?

My expectation is something like this:

- Discover that a neighborhood is corrupt.

- Extract the sims that you want to transfer to the new neighborhood.

- Create a brand new empty neighborhood.

- Re-create sims in CAS.

- Run the neighborhood re-creation utility to copy over additional information about the sims that you've decided to keep.

Multiple IDs because of installing expansion/stuff packs without mods/custom content, I'm guessing that's why there's multiple IDs. And something about family trees being linked to said Sims, although with different IDs.

As for extracting the Sims from the neighborhood, maybe the program can scan which Sims are living in houses, and extract those Sims, rather than scanning the whole neighborhood and extracting everyone (including Townies, Vacation folks, NPCs, etc.)

I honestly don't understand how an individual sim can have multiple IDs, The only way that I've found to associate the Sim Description in the neighborhood package with a User file is via the Sim ID, which implies a one-to-one relationship: one sim, one Sim ID.

Are you talking about different sims with the same name? If so, then it's possible that someone would want their new neighborhood to continue to have different sims with the same name. Certainly, the program could start by trying to match sims by name, but the user would need to be able to fix any incorrect associations.

Selecting by the latest Sim Description instance number would normally select generated townies over playable sims, at least in my neighborhoods. That's because I tend to start with clean or empty neighborhoods, add playable characters, then allow the game to generate townies.

I wasn't planning on having the program extract and create new sims. The user does that. I'm not sure what would be involved in creating a sim and properly adding it to a neighborhood, but I suspect that some (if not most) of the information about a sim is undocumented. If we don't understand the internal format of the User file, then generating that information from scratch is impossible.

This program would just do the grunt work of copying over additional information from sims in the old neighborhood to the corresponding sims in the new neighborhood. This seems to be something that people want, but often don't do because of the shear amount of work involved. I was hoping to automate that work so that it would be feasible for more people.

I think I found out the reason why it's showing multiple IDs. Years ago, I used to build in the two Maxis neighborhoods (Pleasentview and Strangetown). I moved the lots with Sims on the lots from their respective neigborhoods into this third neighborhood called "NCI".

Maybe that transition created several character files. Here's some pictures of what I see on SimPE:





So far, I'm deleting the Sim Description files, along with their respective Sim DNAs...one Sim at a time (the ones with the blue backgrounds). And every time I remove a Sim's Description and DNA, I run your HoodChecker tool to weed-out the Sim Relations, and check for memories of Sims who may have different Instance numbers. I also ran the game, and so far it's been stable. These Sims with blue backgrounds have no SWAFs, no Sim Scores, no clothing files, etc. Just SDSC and SDNA files.

The only time it remains as 1 instance number is for Sims created in the neighborhood (and not being transfered to some other outer-world like I did years ago).

Basically, the point is if this program is going to tackle transfering the old memories of the "corrupt" Sim to put onto the new "clean" Sim (as one of this program's many features), the program would first have to fix the integrity of each Sim's memories, and then do the copying of the memories (skipping the 'Meet-New-Sim' memories, of course). This would include memories between family members, living and dead. If the program becomes more complex by including memories between neighborhood friends, then the program would have to have the instance numbers of both Sims match their respective memories AND removing duplicate memories w/different instance numbers. It's a slow process to fix each person's memories, especially dead Sims, since they end up in the "Default" family. And that list is long WITH duplicate IDs too, lol!

Sure, J.M.Pescado's Lot Debugger can "Clear Trash", but that removes 'Meet-New-Sim' memories that may be interesting to keep (instead of getting rid of). There's also been a case for me so far where I had to fix a 'Made-Best-Friends-With' memory, although I don't know if the Lot Debugger gets rid of that too. Haven't noticed if it does compared to the 'Meet-New-Sim' memories.

I checked out that claim I made about the other IDs being linked to family tree data. Apparently it wasn't the case. I thought I read about that somewhere, but I guess that wasn't correct.

OK, that makes sense. Thanks for the additional information.