A hypothetical question about relocation I have a beautiful neighborhood that I teraformed with SC4. I understand that I cannot move the Sims I am presently playing to the new neighborhood without loosing their relationships. However, I am thinking seriously of relocating all the families from the pre-fab neighborhood to my hand-made neighborhood. If I did that, do you think the game would still clear out all their relationships? How about family trees? I have some Sims that are third generation now, I want them to recognize/be related to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Would all that be lost even if everone made the move to the new neighborhood? Has anyone attempted this? I hate the vanillia pre-fab neighborhood I started with because I was afraid to try out the one I'd so carefully made with SC4.
Yes, it would. Not only would it destroy all family ties, so the family members wouldn't recognize each other as family, but it would also make clones of them, so if you dig through the character files, you'll find each character is represented multiple times! It is, however, still possible to move your families intact. You just have to be very, very aware of their connections to each other. The procedure is, to say the least, complicated, with a high risk of hosing your game. Naturally, you can always make backups. Still want it? Here goes. First, you must (manually) identify every link: Starting with one family you want to move, identify all of the Sims which are connected to them by any family tie or major memory, like "made out", "kissed", "woohoo'ed", etc. Using SimPE, move that Sim out of his existing family, and into the family you want to move. It doesn't matter if this causes there to be more than 8: The 8-sim limit is not actually a set-in-stone-by-the-game limit for this purpose. Repeat this process on any Sim that moves in. In a densely connected neighborhood, you may find yourself packing the entire neighborhood into a single family. I hope your neighborhood is not too huge, because I really haven't explored the true upper limits of exactly HOW many Sims can be packed like this. Once everyone is crammed unhappily into a single house, move the house to your lot bin and paste it into the new neighborhood. Now everyone should then move out, and then you can SimPE them their money back, and go through the tricky process of stealing them their houses back, which they should receive with their furniture intact if you do the house-thievery thing well. That process is somewhat more complex: Identify which house corresponds to which lot file, then create an empty lot in the target neighborhood of the same size, and copy and paste the lot file from the original over the blank. It sounds simple. I assure you it isn't, and you might want to actually perform this step BEFORE the above. Or not. And you'll probably want to backup and restore the original neighborhood multiple times if you want to get everything right. This ain't an easy task. Alternatively, you accept the short version of the above answer, which is much more succinct: You can't do that.
Hey, ask for the impossible, get an impossible answer. You could just accept the simple answer given below the really hard one.
No Seriously, JMP, thanks for the attempt to help. You're right, can't do it. I don't even have SimPE, and don't plan on downloading it yet. I have enough trouble with occasional bugs, don't want to do anything else that might start more trouble or crash my game! But, I only have a few 3rd generation children, and it is worth it to me to loose the family tree to start fresh in the new neighborhood. I packaged 12 lots and relocated them tonight to the new, better, prettier neighborhood. I'll keep y'all posted on how it goes, getting ready to play them now.
I think doing that is actually a monstrous mistake, since the sims make it with their family trees intact...but those trees will be cloned 12 times over!
Nope, they lost their relationships outside the home. So they are no longer related, according to the family tree, to grandma, aunts, uncles, anyone not living in the home. So how could the tree be cloned? As for space, I have a 40 gig hard drive with almost nothing on it, only 10 gigs used, and a Pentium 4, so it seems to be running fine.
Answer: Because all connections are severed, when you import a family, what you get is virtual "stubs" representing those members of the family tree that weren't moved, so that you can still read the tree. But when you import MORE members from that same family tree, losing their relationships, the family doesn't recognize that their old family is already partially present. So instead of simply attaching them back to the tree, the game will instead generate an entirely new tree. Here's an example: Let's say you have a family tree which consists of two parents(A,B), their three children(in seperate homes:C,D,E), who have their own three children apiece(F,G,H;I,J,K;L,M,N) Now let's say we move C's family over to the new neighborhood: The result being that in the move of C's family, C, F, G, and H are created as "real sims", but the remaining members of the family are created as virtual stubs. When you move D's family in, naturally, D doesn't recognize C as family anymore, but it gets more insidious: The C represented in D's family tree is NOT the same as the C in the new neighborhood, but is, in fact, an entirely DIFFERENT stub. The same applies to all of C's children, and their parents: All are created as seperate stubs. So now you have 2 copies of everyone, but only one copy is actually playable. This only gets worse the more people you move in. So if entire extended family is moved in 5 lots, you're going to get 5 copies of everyone. Oh, and TS2 never does cleanup. Unless you plan to weed them out yourself with SimPE, those skeletons are going to be stuck in your closet forever.
Well, then it's a good thing I did it now when the families were mainly small and so it didn't clutter things up too badly. I had only 1 3rd generation family, and then of course my neighborhood "sperm bank" and his 5 children with three diffrent mothers. These kids now have no idea who their fathers are or that their related. LOL Maybe that makes it even more realistic.
