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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 20th Jun 2018 at 11:39 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Free Time, Apartment Life
Default How are townies generated when making a custom downtown, uni or vacation 'hood?
After playing Sims 2 for more than a decade, I'm finally getting around to creating custom themed neighborhoods from scratch!

When I click on the plus sign to make a new downtown, vacation destination or university, how are townies generated? Does the game recycle default townies (like it does in new neighborhoods by giving them the Pleasantview townies)? Or does it generate new downtownies, vacation locals and dormies?

If I wanted to make my own townies for the subhoods, how would I go about doing it? I know of cheats/mods that allow you to turn a CAS Sim into a regular townie or downtownie, but what about dormies and locals?
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Alchemist
#2 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 12:22 AM
I recall there being a Tutorial in this site relating to this topic; not sure where or the member.

about changing Create-A-Sim/Create-A-Family sims to townie types; various hacks I take can do that.
dormies; from experience, their family instance is same as the one for regular townies. 7ffe. one difference is that dormies are Young Adults and that regular townies are Child/Teen/Adult.
have not checked on locals.
downtownies; if I remember correctly, their family instance is 7ffc.
Apartment Life's Social Group townies; their family instances are 7fdf through 7fe3.
have not check Freetime's hobby groups.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#3 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 2:27 AM
When you click create a new custom hood the game will give you all the Plesantview townies of Goopy, Jan etc. To avoid those you need to use empty templates. Depending which templates you empty will depend on which ones generate or don't generate. This includes vacation, Downtown, Uni attachments. In mine have all empty templates so I have to make every sim. Hoods that are already in instance keep the sims they have. So you can have an older hood with all the game sims and a new one with none or selected ones.

To make sims into townie I use the cat teleporter from Simlogical. I just click on it 'make me into a townie' and off they go.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
#4 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 11:45 AM
Quote: Originally posted by joandsarah77
When you click create a new custom hood the game will give you all the Plesantview townies of Goopy, Jan etc. To avoid those you need to use empty templates.

You could also simply rename the Pleasantview template folder to something other than N001. The game won't be able to find it then. You'll still get townies that way, but they'll be randomly generated instead of copies of the Pleasantview townies.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#5 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 11:57 AM
True, only I don't want any game generated ones, I prefer to make them myself and the OP says they would rather make them themselves too.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#6 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 10:14 PM
Quick overview:

A lot of the townies and npcs are generated on hood loading, some are generated when you add a sub-hood - UNLESS you use empty templates to prevent it.

On the initial hood creation and loading the game adds
Townies - they themselves are made by simply copying the Pleasantview folder in the game files - so you alway get the same ones (30*).
This also includes a lot of the NPCs (105)
You also get the bin families
And a whole pile of stray pets (61)
You will also get Hobby People (30), Tourists (48), Apartment Life Neighbours (50) plus some random sims here and there

Adding a university to your sub-hood will add
50 students - these (and the professors) are made to a physical template so they always look the same but have different names and personalities in different neighbourhoods
24 professors
and a bunch of NPCs (21)
Adding a second university will add a further 50 students made to the same template - so you will get two sims who look identical - 50 times over

Adding a downtown will add
54 downtownies (template again)
9 Tricous
and 15 NPCs

Adding a holiday destination will add
38 locals (template again I think - can't remember now tbh)

Other characters will get generated as you play - often in multiples of one type (e.g. Reporter, Garden Club, Tour Guide, Wise Old Man, Witchdoctor, Bigfoot (the befriendable one, not the template version), Captain Dregg, hairdressers and universal dog and cat if you use the Pet Displays. There are others I think.

*numbers are for a full set of EPs/SPs

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#7 Old 22nd Jun 2018 at 11:07 AM Last edited by RoxEllen1965 : 24th Jun 2018 at 9:48 PM. Reason: foggy memory made me post gibberish
Quote: Originally posted by maxon
Adding a second university will add a further 50 students made to the same template - so you will get two sims who look identical - 50 times over

University does not work this way. Each Maxis campus comes with its own unique student body, so if you add more than one Maxis university to your neighborhood, you'll get the dormies for each one, but none should be duplicates. If you randomly spawn dormies or create your own custom ones, all campuses will share the same group of dormies no matter how many university campuses you add to your game.

BV vacation neighborhoods DO work this way though. For example, if you add a second tropical neighborhood, you'll get duplicates of all the tropical locals.

BV also adds Tourists, but I forget how many there are.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#8 Old 22nd Jun 2018 at 6:55 PM
Thanks everyone for the information! I ended up downloading a couple of custom dorms to add to the supernatural neighborhood I'm making. One is Quadington University from MTS. These already have their own dormies and NPCs that fit into my theme.

I had renamed the N001 template folder so I didn't get the Pleasantview townies. I also disabled the default "stealth hood" templates to keep from generating the bin families, except for FT and AL. For FT I used Instructors with Personality and for AL I installed a clean template with the witch NPCs and secret witch lots only. So no extra families in my bin.

As an experiment, I renamed the template folder for Nightlife as well, generated a new downtown, quit and checked the neighborhood with SimPe. No downtownies.

Then I spawned the NPC/Townie maker and made a batch of Downtownies and one of Townies. (I have notownieregen and other mods installed to prevent the game making them without my input.) I might make custom townies later for story purposes, but I needed to start with a group as potential victims ... er, new neighbors for my supernaturals. I have face template replacements installed that the game uses to make townies instead of the Maxis templates.

Making a custom neighborhood requires a lot of advance planning!
Alchemist
#9 Old 22nd Jun 2018 at 8:57 PM
Quote: Originally posted by maxon
Other characters will get generated as you play - often in multiples of one type (e.g. Reporter, Garden Club, Tour Guide, Wise Old Man, Witchdoctor, Bigfoot (the befriendable one, not the template version), Captain Dregg, hairdressers and universal dog and cat if you use the Pet Displays. There are others I think.
Garden Club has more than one character when Season's "hidden" neighborhood (Weather) is added. at least one is generated if Weather is disabled; shortly after playing an occupied lot.

Pet Displays; I noticed 2 households for those in SimPE. "available" and "in use".
Pet's hidden neighborhood (Pets) started with characters in the "available" household; but not in the "in use" household. I guess game would like move characters from "available" to "in use" if Pets neighborhood is enabled; or generate characters if Pets neighborhood is disabled.
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#10 Old 23rd Jun 2018 at 12:34 AM Last edited by maxon : 23rd Jun 2018 at 12:44 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by RoxEllen1965
University does not work this way. Each Maxis campus comes with its own unique student body, so if you add more than one Maxis university to your neighborhood, you'll get the dormies for each one, but none should be duplicates. If you randomly spawn dormies or create your own custom ones, all campuses will share the same group of dormies no matter how many university campuses you add to your game.

Ah sorry - I should have said if you add custom universities. I never play EAxis neighbourhoods and usually forget about that. That's how it works with custom and it's with custom I did my experiments. I assure you the figures are correct - I ran the experiments a good number of times. It's always the same.

Quote: Originally posted by RoxEllen1965
BV also adds Tourists, but I forget how many there are.

Tourists get added at hood creation, as I indicated (48).

Quote: Originally posted by mdsb759
Garden Club has more than one character when Season's "hidden" neighborhood (Weather) is added. at least one is generated if Weather is disabled; shortly after playing an occupied lot.

I didn't say it was just one - just that those types get generated as you play. As I said 'often in multiples of one type'.

Quote: Originally posted by mdsb759
Pet Displays; I noticed 2 households for those in SimPE. "available" and "in use".
Pet's hidden neighborhood (Pets) started with characters in the "available" household; but not in the "in use" household. I guess game would like move characters from "available" to "in use" if Pets neighborhood is enabled; or generate characters if Pets neighborhood is disabled.

Yes, I was just talking about raw numbers of files in the characters folder not necessarily how the game handles them. In use, I think, are the strays, available would probably be those in the pet adoption bin - those all get added at hood creation (again as I indicated). But the displays are another separate set and only appear if you use the displays in game.

Quote: Originally posted by LovelyRita13
Making a custom neighborhood requires a lot of advance planning!

Yes, indeed

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#11 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 12:47 AM Last edited by RoxEllen1965 : 24th Jun 2018 at 9:49 PM. Reason: foggy memory made me post gibberish
Quote: Originally posted by maxon
That's how it works with custom and it's with custom I did my experiments. I assure you the figures are correct - I ran the experiments a good number of times. It's always the same.


I didn't say that your figures were wrong. I only said that adding more campuses will not add more dormies. This is the way it's always worked in my game. If I use the Townie Gun to batch spawn a complete set of 50 random dormies for my neighborhood's first custom university campus, those dormies will be the only ones in that neighborhood unless I deliberately create more of them. No further dormies are added if additional University campuses are attached to that neighborhood unless those universities come with dormies of their own like Peni Griffin's "Land Grant University." I'm pretty sure it's always worked that way in my game. I have testing towns with multiple campuses attached and I've never seen any extra or duplicate dormies - only those first 50.

Would clean templates prevent the game from autospawning townies and dormies? I vaguely remember townies being auto-spawned years ago, but they don't do that now. I removed most of Pescado's anti-respawn hacks except for antiredundancy and nossrespawn quite some time ago and the game doesn't automatically make townies or dormies even without the mods that prevent them.

It's been some time since I made a new custom Uni campus, so I went through the process in an almost totally vanilla game and did it again. If I'm misunderstanding something about this process, I want to know about it so that I don't pass out wrong information.

Newly generated vanilla game, no mods in Downloads folder (might be some in Program Files, but I don't think they would affect this process), all clean templates. I added an empty new custom hood and added a new custom uni hood to it. I exited the game and added basic mods - nounlinkondelete, batbox, blender, inge's cat, merola's mirror, simwardrobe's visual teleporter (to quickly & easily see who's in what category). NO townies, dormies, etc. were spawned during this process.

I used a test sim on residential Uni lot to spawn all 50 dormies via the Townie Gun. I confirmed them with the Visual Teleporter. Exited the game and confirmed 50 dormies with SimPE. (The stray pets were also present.)

I re-entered the game and added another Uni campus. When it finished, I went back into the test sim's lot. The visual teleporter still showed only the 50 dormies that I had previously created.


I've used clean templates for so long that I've forgotten how a totally vanilla game works - would that have made a difference?
Mad Poster
#12 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 1:22 AM
I think Uni dormies are randomly generated - if you have an additional university, you get an additional randomly generated 50 dormies. I used to have a hood with all three universities and it did have about three times as many dormies as my current hood with only one, but there were no duplicates. Additionally, my test hood, which has a university, has dormies I have never seen before in any of my neighborhoods and the dormies in my current play neighborhood are different than ones in my previous play neighborhood.
Mad Poster
#13 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 2:54 AM
You're probably right. I think it must be the clean templates or something in my game that keep the game from randomly spawning dormies on its own.
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#14 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 1:18 PM Last edited by maxon : 24th Jun 2018 at 1:35 PM.
It's been a while since I did the last numbers test so I thought I would go through it again and confirm my findings (which I did). Here is the full process in pictures for anyone's information (I had to put back the original templates for this, you know). I've done these numbers checks ever since we started getting worried about numbers and corruption in neighbourhoods. I used to post quite a bit on MATY back then. The earliest file I have is for Pets where I did the test with Uni, NL, Pets and OFB installed. I've played this game on at least 4 computers and the behaviour on hood loading and the numbers has always been the same.

Pictures as follows
1. First picture shows the folders for the test hood on hood creation. As can be seen the characters folder is empty. It should be, I use empty templates and only replaced the university templates for this test
2. Second picture shows the folders after the first university has been created and attached to the neighbourhood - there are 98 files in the folder now (also behind you can see the file and neighbourhood picture for the sub-hood)
3. In SimPE, characters show as 121 but that includes the universals - that's 23 instances for universals (there are no files because they're in the objects.package - they still show as present in the neighbourhood though - they seem to need to be initialised in order to work)
4. There are 24 professors
5. and 50 students including these two chosen as an example - a blond female student and a biker male student. There are also 8 types of NPCs added to the characters folder (3 of each type = 24). Hence 50 dormies + 24 profs + 24 NPCs = 98 files
6. Next I added a second university to the hood. As can be seen there are now 148 files in the characters folder (and new sub-hood files added to the neighbourhood folder). This is exactly 50 more than before
7. And the 50 files are a new set of students. As can be seen here, they are made to the same physical template as before and so they look the same, but the names are different. Here they are Barbara Kalson (female blond) and Jay Hsu (biker student) though before they were Phoebe Shankel and Quinten Adams respectively
8. Lastly, I checked which template the game is using - it's U001 (as you might expect) - as can be seen, the blond student this time is Betty Domingo

In summary, the numbers went like this:
First University Added - 98 files

24 Profs
50 Students

NPCs
3 cheerleaders
3 chinese delivery
3 trainers
3 cooks
3 lama mascots
3 streakers
3 baristas
3 cow mascots

Second University Added - 148 files

+50 sims - all students, a second set made to the same template, different names

I should add, as RoxEllen reminded me, that this is for custom hoods. The EAxis hoods behave differently in that they all have their own templates.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#15 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 9:47 PM
I feel like such an idiot. I keep forgetting that my game has templates and mods and etc. in it and does NOT behave normally. It's been that way for such a long time that I've obviously forgotten what "normal" function even is.

After roughly three days of this, the lights have started to dimly flicker on. Let me know whether I remember this right.

Back when I had a vanilla game, if I made a new custom base neighborhood, the game copied all the townies, NPCs, etc. from Pleasantview into the new custom neighborhood.

Similarly - if I made a new custom University, the game would copy all the characters from Sim State University into it. And then, just like the BV vacation hoods I mentioned - if I added another custom University, the game would add all the same characters again. So, for every custom Uni that you add, you'll get the Sim State dormies dumped in your neighborhood again. If you add four custom universities, you'll get four copies of all the Sim State dormies.

Are these the dormies you're seeing duplicates of?
(the sims listed under "Townies" about halfway down the page - ignore the names because the game randomizes them)
http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Sim_State_University
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#16 Old 24th Jun 2018 at 11:20 PM
Yes, that looks like them - guy with red bandana, girl with blond maid hair, that biker guy, long-haired blond woman in the blue business suit etc. etc. Dormies are a variety of townie really. If Sim State is U001 (sounds likely), then those are the ones the game is copying.

I would only add that I think you can still only add three universities so you'd only get three copies of the students. Only eh? It's one (of the several) reasons I banned all EAxis sims.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#17 Old 25th Jun 2018 at 11:17 AM
As I said, my game is heavily modded so your mileage may vary. You may want to test with your own setup to see if it works the same way. My game happily let me keep adding blank campus after blank campus to a testing neighborhood. I got bored after adding six of them so I stopped there. I made another test neighborhood and clicked on "Add remaining" to see if it would add all the template universities in my game (I have 9). It added all of them and was willing to let me keep adding more blank ones.

I use Mootilda's "Fix subhood selection" - I don't know whether that makes a difference as to how many campuses can be added to one base 'hood.
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#18 Old 25th Jun 2018 at 3:04 PM
I thought it was universities that was restricted - or maybe downtowns? I dunno, there was a restriction at one point. Maybe it got changed. I only play one neighbourhood (Little Carping). It has one downtown and two universities and so I have no knowledge of adding extras.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#19 Old 26th Jun 2018 at 11:35 AM
The problem with Downtowns is that if you add a second Downtown, any sims living in the first one will be deleted. I accidentally did this with a testing town awhile back. I had Tarlia's Downtown version of Belladonna Cove attached to it. I later forgot about this bug and added a default Downtown as well. All the BC playables were deleted although I think the ghosts are still there - they show up on Inge's teleporter anyway.
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