Strangers in the Sim Bin

[Greg]

Now I'm wondering what I've done to myself. I cleaned out all ALL the files from SavedSims, but there are still a couple of dozen sims showing up in my CAS catalog.

Where the heck could they be coming from?

[Peake Preusse]

They're colonists from Neu Rheinland. j/k

[Miros1]

Do they have the Nightlife symbol? Nightlife includes a bunch that aren't in SavedSims.

I can find out where they're hidden if you want them to go away...

[Bloo]

Sounds like intruders in the Download folder sneaking in amongst the crowd. You need a sniper to go in and blast those babies out. Then clear your thumbnails from your thumbnail folder and any of those extra files hanging around outside of the folders and your intruders should be history.

[Peake Preusse]

As the Consul of the Neu Rheinland Consulate in Happy Valley, I take grave offense at the comment of shooting any citizens of the Bundesreich, Bloo. j/k

[Miros1]

Well, before we take any serious action, we need to find out if they're Maxis (NL or whatever) or custom Sims (with the asterisk)...

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Bloo

Sounds like intruders in the Download folder sneaking in amongst the crowd. You need a sniper to go in and blast those babies out. Then clear your thumbnails from your thumbnail folder and any of those extra files hanging around outside of the folders and your intruders should be history.

That must be it. I try to keep my Downloads folder organized, but that just means that there are all that many more folders to search through.

I was unaware of the Thumbnail folder! That might explain why I have so many thumbnails showing up that aren't the sims they point to! I'll clean that out and see if things improve.

Rose, no, the folks who are sneaking in are custom sims. I was trying to clean them out by moving the to a Free Parking directory so that it doesn't take a half hour for Body Shop and the CAS screen to load. Even though, I fear that the amount of custom content for makeup and accessories will still slow down the game.

[Miros1]

Ah, that's a nasty job... In most cases, you're looking for files with file names of the form 8 hex digits, an underscore, and 8 more hex digits.

[Greg]

Aha! Yup! I found 18 files just like that in my Downloads folder and pulled them all out.

I also took the file CASThumbnails.package out of \Thumbnails to see if this will cause the game to regerate it properly.

[Miros1]

So they've all been sent to Sim-Siberia.

[Greg]

Well, actually, to a folder outside my Sims 2 path called "Sim Bin Free Parking".

But hey, speaking of Siberia, I was just chuckling over the latest news. Some bright boy figures that the evergreen trees in Siberia are too dark. They soak up too much sunlight, and this is contributing to global warming. His solution is to cut down all the trees!

An alternative body of opinion believes that the real solution is to send this guy back to Golgafrincham.

[Greg]

Rats. I cleaned out all those folks and I'm still finding folks in the sim bin. I actually recognize them--these are sims that I downloaded and installed--but now I can't find the bally files.

[Miros1]

Lemme experiment a bit...

[Greg]

I'm wondering if they're hiding among all the alphabet-soup files.

[Miros1]

Shouldn't be. The ones packaged by BodyShop and installed by the Sims2Pack installer are normally of the form hhhhhhhh_hhhhhhhh.package, and you thought you'd sent them to Sim-Siberia already.

The alphabet soup files are things that hid inside packaged houses.

I'm thinking the creator renamed the package file before packing it up, so they're named something like "Joe's SimSelf.package"

[Greg]

You can also get a lot of alphabet soup from installing downloaded sims. I used to just remove all those files from my game until I discovered that it messed up my sims.

Now I'm day-dreaming about a really reliable installer and conflict checker. We need a program that will maintain an indexed database of all the GUID's you have in the game already and then check every new installation against that database. It also ought to give you full information about filenames, internal filenames, what's in each file, and everything.

Meanwhile, I still haven't found the strangers.

[Miros1]

Well, those are "parts," not the facial geometries that I'm after when I download a Sim.

I'm kind of working on an installer for Sims2Skin files that will simply rip a file apart and leave all the bits in one folder with the original file names, not the stupid Maxis "alphabet soup" names, so you can pick through and install what you want. Yep, the original names are inside the files, just like a Sims2Pack, Maxis just chose to ignore them when they built the installer.

I tried a couple different strategies (Windows searches, debug filenames on, etc.) to find the odd named Sims, but no luck yet.

The one thing I haven't tried is the SimPE scanner...

[Miros1]

Yes, the SimPE "Scan Folders" function will find them. You'll probably want to scan each subfolders of Downloads, because scanning a large Downloads folder will cause an "out of memory" error and the scan will stop prematurely.

Start with the folders you think most likely to contain the "strangers," such as InSim.

[Greg]

B'b'but... the SimPE "Scan Folders" function takes hours!

[Miros1]

Not if you scan one site at a time. Poking around by hand is gonna take hours too!