If you're an inexperienced player who has just the base game installed, I 10/10 would not recommend adding Social Workers to the family. While they don't exactly corrupt your neighbourhood, they can and will permanently disable Buy Mode and Build Mode for every household they visit. The only way to fix this to my knowledge without using mods or hacks is to instal expansion packs. I'm not sure which expansion pack it is. But one of them definitely fixes the glitch where Social Workers disable Buy Mode and Build Mode for each household they visit. Other than that, I can't see anything that would suggest that any of the so-called harmful non-universal NPCs are capable of causing neighbourhood corruption. I was one of the players who enforced the theory that Carpool Drivers could corrupt your neighbourhood, but that was only because I mistook them as being responsible for the Buy Mode and Build Mode glitch when it was actually Social Workers who caused it. But all the same, I would advise players to interact with these NPCs at their own risk.
Thank you for this comment, I had no idea! I need to remember to always check older versions of the game when investigating those decades-old myths :) By the way, this totally explains why "Buy & Build mode being permanently disabled" has often been listed as one of the corruption symptoms!
ingame or on the internet? if it's online then don't believe it, there are tons of freaks writing on wiki pages and forums all sorts of lies about games, Sims being one of them, they have zero lives and spend years spamming and editing pages projecting nonsense Asuxality wasnt even a thing when the game was released, it's an recently accepted thing and even then projected and created to be abused just like anything else but that is an antire different topic and story anyway that I wont waste my time over. This NPC far as I can remember there was none of that mentioned in the game data at all, his data is simply incomplete as even shown in this video alone too so ofc he wont woohoo with you, do anything romantic or flirty or do ANYTHING other then what he is actually created for ... He is basically an animated decoration and his purpose is to just work on vacations as an interactive filler ... people put too much fiction and overall pointless garbage projections where it doesn't really belong ... So my suggestion is don't read too much into it and just work with what is already there, the actual data and common sense speaks for itself and that is enough.
I tried adding Wise Old Man to my family for science, and he actually behaves exactly like a normal sim ... if you serve him tea first. At least as far as I can tell. That is, after you've served him tea, you can controll him, other sims can interact with him as usual, his motives changes, and I even had a baby with him without cheats (exept the cheat that adds him to the family). His daughter Wise Little Girl seems like a completely normal sim too, but that wasn't very surprising since he has complete sim description. Wise Old Man knows the importance of tea, appearently. Edit: I did some more tests, and it seems like you have to serve him tea every time he appears on a new lot. If you just save and reload the lot he's on, he'll still behave like a normal sim, but you need to serve him tea again if you move him to a different house or if you invite him over as a friend.
I've played the family some more now, and one thing I didn't notice at first is that other sims, including his now wife, can't do most romantic interactions with him. He can still romance other sims as usual though. You can, however, ask other sims to kiss him on the bed, woohoo, try for baby, and propose to him. I assume they didn't remove that since there's nowhere to woohoo in Pagoda in the Shadows anyway, and you can't propose unless you're in love. I sort of thought that he would tell the dragon legend after I befriended him, but that hasn't happened yet at least. He doesn't have the legend scroll in his inventory, but he does have the map back to Pagoda in the Shadows.
watching your videos makes me feel like a game developer who understands everything about game mechanics yet I don't even know how to properly install CC
I don’t comment that much, but the fact that your deep dive basically opened a previously forbidden door of “Operation with Special NPCs” really impressed me. There’s no need to degrade your explanation of how the game assigns behaviours and pie menus to these NPCs (it was very useful and understandable IMHO). In fact, it not only answers a lot of questions, but creates a lot of new ones. For example, can the process of making NPCs playable be used the other way around? To create an NPC based on an existing playable sim? (which could be helpful for simmers making custom neighbourhoods) I guess this also answers whether custom NPCs (that come with a mod) can corrupt your neighbourhood if you delete the mod (and basically the NPC’s behaviour and pie menu). Does that mean that they won’t corrupt it, but they “won’t know what to do” and can’t be interacted with unless you fix their data? (I guess the soft deletion would be better option…) Thanks again for your contribution.
Good question, I'm curious about that too. Could you turn an existing Sim into an NPC if you give them the GUID of the NPC type you want to assign to them?
To create a NPC is faster and better to use the NPC and Townie maker from debug menu and use Sims Surgery with SimPE, but yes, you could do the other way around if you wish. As for the other question my guess is no, they won't corrupt your hood, but it will infect your game* with the Super Hug Bug because the game can't load your custom TTABs and will replace it with the Super Hug interaction. *That's not a bad thing, it will just make this interaction visible
Yes, that works exactly as you described - you can assign a Sim an NPC template, and they will act like said NPC :) Not sure about the mods that add custom NPCs, because I have never downloaded any. Certainly something to look into! I imagine the game uses some kind of fallback value if it can't recognize the template GUID, but it won't hurt to do a few tests :)
Imagine working for maxis in 2004 and having your code dissected and put on show for all of TH-cam to see 2 decades later 😂 I wonder if anyone from the game has seen this?
As someone who grew up obsessively reading about these NPCs on the wiki as a kid, finally hearing someone explains all their technical details is kind of magical in a weird way.
April - your videos scratch such a huge itch for me and I will wait years between uploads if need be, never apologise for taking time between uploads! The quality and detail in them is absolutely unmatched, and other TH-camrs who cover similar topics just do not meet the standards you are setting in each and every video. Thank you so much for what you're doing - genuinely one of the best (scratch that, THE best) Sims 2 youtubers out there.
When you asked if Im still with you I just nodded sadly. When I started making cc for sims 3 I had to learn real damn fast how the game understands what this new mesh is. assigning bones, which is streamlined a lot in milkshape 3d still makes me cry inside
@@RosesTeaAndASD I am currently working on making a set of pillars from scratch but the corner pieces are giving me Problems TM I did make a dining table, but I havent uploaded it yet because I want to make a companion table so there is one round 1x1 and one 2x1 rectangle dining
@@RosesTeaAndASD I finally uploaded the tables! I know its like 3 months late but! Theyre all free on my p atreon and always will be, and it shares my youtube name
Alternate Title : No, You Shipping Bella Goth with the Social Bunny To Make Mortimor Goth Miserable Will Not Make The Sims 2 Fall Into A Fetal Position And Cry.
I don't think you mentioned this directly in the video, but I started to figure it out when you mentioned the ones with static motives... of course their motives can't drain, as it would interfere with their intended behavior if they did!
I just wanted to say, thank you! Your section explaining the original GUIDs cleared up so much confusion for me. In my current neighborhood I've married a few NPCs in the main hood (cheerleader, waitress, bartender) and they kept exhibiting the same behaviors they had as an NPC. Admittedly the waitress and bartender weren't very different, they just kept randomly showing up as Sims houses, letting themselves in, making nuisances of themselves, but the cheerleader would still be showing up in her outfit and cheering at university well into her adult lifetime. Thanks to your sleuthing I was finally able to fix them and have them act like normal sims! Goes to show you never know when some information might come in handy, even if it's not necessarily fixing a "dangerous" NPC, because those behaviors still carry over even if they're made playable.
I'm not sure I fully understand the technical details but now I have some ideas how to turn my pet wolf into a Leader of the Pack or break my game completely. Time to back up my neighborhoods.
i mean, mayyyyybe, just maybe, if a new player back in like 2006 discovered they can add npcs to their active family and absolutely littered the neighborhood with ominously spinning food stand chefs and invisible sims they don't know how to delete it technically could contribute to the neighborhood accumulating errors and eventually failing to save normally or something... so maybe it made sense for someone to discourage people from doing it also OMG A NEW APRIL VIDEO //brain goes brrrrr//
Oh yeah, I imagine uncontrollable littering your neighborhood with those NPCs could definitely cause some chaos :) Maybe not full on hood corruption, but I'd expect some crashing/lots of object errors, and if a player is not experienced with using testingcheats, they might very well think that their neighborhood is completely fried. I absolutely agree that it made perfect sense to advise people not to add them if they don't know what they're doing.
I have no idea why watching an autopsy of the functions of a game 20 years old is so interesting. I'm not a modder, I'm not a programmer, I don't play TS2 in years. Yet I love seeing how cleverly (or not) the developers organized their code. Like looking inside the complications of a watch. Anyway, thanks for doing that autopsy for us mortals.
THE QUEEN POSTED THIS IS NOT A DRILL YALL This video was legit chef s kiss. It s crazy how this game actually behaves. I simply always found it hard to believe that the sims 2 could actually get corrupt that easily and i had my jaw dropped the entire way of the video. I m really really excited and curious as to how universal npcs work and i can t wait for that video! Good Job, April! Crazy how we find out things about the game YEARS Later.... This game is definetly stronger than it looks Amazing deep dive as always, can t wait for the next one!
Off topic but I have to let you know something very dear to me! Ever since the Kahramanmarash Earthquake, I couldn't sleep at nights (because nights and darkness triggered some flashbacks) but I eventually had to bear my fears and restart sleeping in nights. In order to do that, I decided watching TH-cam videos and fall asleep with their help. For more than one year, your Sims 2 videos are helping me sleep like a baby. I'm not even interested in the game, it's just that your videos feel soothing and they have a wonderful friendly aura. Idk, I thought you should know your videos mean the world to me. Seeing the notification of this video made my day and I excitedly waited for the night to watch it. I'm going to sleep now, LOL, thank you so much
I love your deep dives! It's nice to know corruption isn't that easy. Heck, when I played a prettacy in Sims 2 years ago, I got a DJ as a blind date and he was totally fine, despite the wiki saying they can't be playable without cheats. But despite your info, it's so annoying how people still think so much as blinking will corrupt your game and explode your computer.
"we finally reached that point in my special interest" is so REAL dont worry about long waits between videos! im more a fan of longer videos i can put on while i'm working on stuff since i like having things going in the background, so if that means having to wait between uploads, i vibe with it
Your videos are the ones that make me very excited - I like everything what is about TS2 from technical side and you are talking about things that no one talked about in the past! I'm looking forward to your video about Universal NPCs! I have experimented with those NPCs and never suffered to neighborhood corruption and was wondering if I am lucky or their dangerous nature is just a rumour. Some quirks you didn't mention about: 1) Social Workers have a weird animation when they complain about their low needs - it seems to be animation of taking a toddler from their car. 2) Repo men have no voice no matter what value is put in their voice field.
I do not care if it takes you half a year to upload new video or not: they are always very detailed, yet comprehensible, and even interesting to rewatch, over and over again, even if i know ZERO shait about programming, ¡They are simply amazing! I hope to see more content about this topics in the future, and that you answer all the possible questions i didn't even thought about this game's functioning! I love the sims 2 with my whole heart so knowing how it works makes me love it even more.
hey queen girl you have done it again constantly raising the bar for us all and doing it flawlessly i'd say im surprised but i know who you are i've seen it up close and personal girl you make me so proud and i love you
15:01 Can you do a short video sometime explaining what the common errors mean? Like “hit break point primitive” and all those and what’s actually going wrong
This has been a popular demand, so I'm definitely considering it :) I am planning a video about testingcheats, so maybe I'll mention something in there - we'll see!
Thank you for researching and sharing, I loved this! I was with you all the way, really well explained. Not that long ago I tried to age up my uni cheerleaders and mascots and have them behave like normal townies, I even tried some different things like Cyjon's debugger and also changing some kind of field in SimPe, sim type or something like that, to normal sim, and got so annoyed that they were still cheering all the time that I killed them off! So glad I know know I can simply spare them with those two easy changes. I also gave up on romancing a hair stylist once because the wiki slightly concerned me and it was also annoying that their interactions were somewhat limited like I don't think I could do every kind of flirt with them etc. so they must have a slightly different interaction type too I imagine that would just need changing to 129. Your cats are adorable btw thank you for that bonus footage! Can't wait to see what you find out next! I bet you could make some revolutionary mods if you wanted too!
These really are some of the most amazing videos on TH-cam. "Corruption" in The Sims 2 is a topic that has always interested me because it really all seemed like one huge conspiracy theory, and it's really fascinating to see you finally explain how it all really works and how many of these myths have originated.
I know you were worried about it but the technical explanation was very understandable. I've never dealt with Sims modding before and understood everything you were talking about fine, you did a good job.
Tips: It’s actually very easy to find the Neutral Witch NPCs if you know what you’re doing. All you need to do is to use Magic as your main neighborhood instead of a subhood. Then their names won’t get randomized and you’ll find them within a few minutes! Longer version: If you copy the folder E002 from The Sims 2 Apartment Life/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplate and put it in your ordinary neighborhoods folder, Magic will show up in the main neighborhood menu. Load the neighborhood, create a residential lot, and move in someone from the Family Bin. Then spawn the Tombstone of Life and Death and use it to ”Add Neighbor to Family” as usual. Their names are Naenae, Amanda, and Lakshmi. I recommend Naenae or Lakshmi unless you want all three, because Amanda shares her first name with a socialite townie :)
I'd love it if you made a video about the pink soup. Like, where does it come from, does it cause corruption, is it dangerous in any way. It's kind of fascinating.
i love watching videos about sims 2 corruption because i've never encountered it despite messing with the game (using only ingame tools mind you) for years, the only one i came across so far was sims randomly disappearing if the game was forced to end while saving
The technical part was perfectly digestable. 👍 I'm so surprised about the universal NPCs though, it seemed like a huge oversight to me that meddling with them would modify your installation files, but since I can't check it out myself ATM I guess I'll have to wait for you to do it. :D Also, bonus cats is appreciated. (Edit : Spelling.)
I know that certain in-game events that could modify the objects.package have been patched out, because they are mentioned in patch notes (for example, I'm pretty sure a vampire biting Mrs Crumplebottom is no longer a thing), but adding universal NPCs via cheats will still make some changes to game files
@@aprilblacksims the Mrs Crumplebottom vampire issue was fixed with one of the exp packs. alternatively, making the objects.package file read only should prevent it (not sure tho if it would just end the interaction between her and the vamp or crash the game?)
It seems to me like the lag exhibited by the food stand NPCs might be rooted in something as simple as them having a script that checks for a food stand and tries to get to it, since one doesn't exist, an exception is thrown, and then it repeats it, sucking up processing power causing the entire simulation to lag out. If the script was modified to say, check once, and on fail wait X seconds to check again, they'd likely be just like the cheerleaders and just stand there doing nothing while not really making much of a difference. Can one place down a food stand, and will they then navigate to it?
Fascinating! I may have to try this de-NPCifying process sometime. As someone who knows only very basic SimPE and programming, I thought you did a very good job explaining it. Also, your cats are precious and I want to snuggle them.
I love your videos. I haven't played Sims 2 in at least a decade, but every one of them is such a fascinating deep dive into details I never thought about that I hope you'll never run out of secrets to share with us!
Don't ever worry about your explanation. I've kept up with your videos and I really like the way you break things down in an easily digestible manner. Easy for me to say.. I write a bit of JavaScript but still. You're the coolest code junkie around, I hope you'll continue to make these videos!
@@ravenID429 sorry, I should have write it more clearly. I mean their animations towards other Sims are inverted like in the mirror - for example when they are going to slap, they use left hand when normal Sims use right one.
Thank you for taking so much time and effort into explaining the technical aspects of this game. I'm not a programmer and this was still very entertaining to watch.
Thank you for all these videos. As a kid I also played Sims 2 (and later Sims 3 a lil bit) a TON and yet I never heard about any corruption at the time. We were kids playing games. Sometimes they were buggy but like, that's how videogames are??? Mostly it was minor graphical bugs, I don't remember families disappearing or anything of the sort. So when a couple years ago I decided to get the game again for nostalgia's sake, imagine my horror when everywhere I go I'm facing walls of text about how all the ESSENTIAL MODS to AVOID CORRUPTION like it's some sure bogeyman that will get you in a couple hours without those mods. It kept me from installing the game at the time because no way in hell was i researching and downloading all this anti-corruption nonsense. I think this really shows how casual the playerbase is, to have such widely spread dumb myths for SO LONG. Like, you don't see this shit on pokémon forums online and those games are intended to be for kids. And it makes it incredibly annoying to go look for weirder tutorials and cheats for the game because I search for "how to make a family with social workers" and all I get is "don't interact with the social worker at all, she will corrupt your game!!!!11!" which again just shows how ppl view this "corruption" like some magical thing. It's the correct technical term bc it's bad data or null data but ppl are using it in more of a layman way where it's some kinda plague. Anyway thank you so much for having the patience and enthusiasm to test all these things and explain them in such an accessible way. Like I lol'd when you started explaining what hexadecimal is but it makes sense for the kinda playerbase. Modding being so incredibly simple in this game also contributed to all of this i guess. Ah well
Thanks for another enlightening video! it's always great to gain more understanding into the technical side of this old game, and help others understand when they have these same questions. I managed to understand all the technical jargon too! Loved the cat footage at the end, your kitties are so sweet :3 Also, I noticed you still have Kashmire bumping around in your neighborhood files, were there anymore secrets like double neighborhood index resetting that those files contained?
Watched your video as soon as I had some free time and loved it!!!!! Your knowledge of the game's coding makes your videos much more interesting and helps us understand how amazing truly the sims 2 is. Is it a bad sign that my sim's friend wanted to share their number to Baby New Year because they thought they had a lot in common lol Also, I had a question on the topic of universal npcs. Bunch of my sims got into fights with each other and now hate each other but when they to the *standing angrily thinking of the hated sim* instead of the face of the hated sim popping up, I get the grim reaper! I really don't know how this happened, but it has already happened to a couple of my sims.
The thing with Toddler New Year is a very common bug in the game :) The developers forgot to exclude universal NPCs from this interaction lol. Thankfully the relationships don't edit objects.package, so you're fine :) Not sure about being angry about the Grim Reaper though! I've never seen this before 🤔 Perhaps some glitch during assigning the fury token
i'm not even a sims fan, and i've never played the sims 2, but i watched your corruption deep dive and video on the squiggly lines a while back. i just rewatched the latter, and now i'm watching more of your videos! they're very interesting to me, even though i barely know anything about ts2!!! :] keep up the good work! and this was actually pretty easy for me to understand despite my lack of coding knowledge, so don't worry about it!!
I've heard people claim that the social worker causes save to be disabled just by appearing on the lot, even if she isn't there to take away or bring children. Is that true at all, or do you know where the myth could have come from? TTAB stands for "tree table" by the way - functions in the game are generally called "trees" in the code because of the way that the true and false targets essentially arrange them into a binary tree.
Ohh, tree table makes sense, actually 😆 Thanks! I'm rubbish at deciphering abbreviations lol. Someone did mention the save file thing to me after I published the video, but also I've never had that happen to me 🤔 I'll try the unpatched base game, perhaps this is one of the things that was patched
Fantastic video. This kind of shit in games is the reason I became software developer. Was playing with level editors and these kind of game package editors back in 2000s. Keep up the good work!
I just had something funny happen to my game! One of the grand vampires showed up on the cuisine hobby lot. He bit the food judge and turned them into a vampire. According the SimPE this broke the judge and put her in the townie bin. Now I have a static judge occasionally appearing on my community lots in my neighbourhood lol!
I dont know where the corruption rumour started either, but its so funny how sure everyone is of it. Its like the rumour that a fire happened while the game was being developed and all the progress was lost, and thats the reason the sims 2 wasnt like the trailer lol
I think the BHAVs from character files might be overriding the BHAVs from objects.package, hence nothing happens when they're deleted from a character file. I haven't tested it, though.
If you're an inexperienced player who has just the base game installed, I 10/10 would not recommend adding Social Workers to the family. While they don't exactly corrupt your neighbourhood, they can and will permanently disable Buy Mode and Build Mode for every household they visit. The only way to fix this to my knowledge without using mods or hacks is to instal expansion packs. I'm not sure which expansion pack it is. But one of them definitely fixes the glitch where Social Workers disable Buy Mode and Build Mode for each household they visit.
Other than that, I can't see anything that would suggest that any of the so-called harmful non-universal NPCs are capable of causing neighbourhood corruption. I was one of the players who enforced the theory that Carpool Drivers could corrupt your neighbourhood, but that was only because I mistook them as being responsible for the Buy Mode and Build Mode glitch when it was actually Social Workers who caused it. But all the same, I would advise players to interact with these NPCs at their own risk.
Thank you for this comment, I had no idea! I need to remember to always check older versions of the game when investigating those decades-old myths :)
By the way, this totally explains why "Buy & Build mode being permanently disabled" has often been listed as one of the corruption symptoms!
Watching Calipers and Tongs, I learned that this game can take a lot more abuse than people think it can.
No Wonder people like this game so much, it has a lot with us humans in Common!
omg frrrr lmao!! when they had a sim give birth AND die IN CAS!!!! that video was so funny and so enjoyable
It’s masochistic.
Call me Kevin made me realize that a while ago in his chaotic videos but it is good to know that little things don't cause corruption and why
I think messing with TS2 as a child is the reason I ended up studying CS and working in IT now. Wild
“Wise Old Man is canonically asexual according to his Sim description” has to be the least expected bit of Sims 2 lore I’ve ever found out.
ingame or on the internet? if it's online then don't believe it, there are tons of freaks writing on wiki pages and forums all sorts of lies about games, Sims being one of them, they have zero lives and spend years spamming and editing pages projecting nonsense
Asuxality wasnt even a thing when the game was released, it's an recently accepted thing and even then projected and created to be abused just like anything else but that is an antire different topic and story anyway that I wont waste my time over.
This NPC far as I can remember there was none of that mentioned in the game data at all, his data is simply incomplete as even shown in this video alone too so ofc he wont woohoo with you, do anything romantic or flirty or do ANYTHING other then what he is actually created for ...
He is basically an animated decoration and his purpose is to just work on vacations as an interactive filler ... people put too much fiction and overall pointless garbage projections where it doesn't really belong ...
So my suggestion is don't read too much into it and just work with what is already there, the actual data and common sense speaks for itself and that is enough.
Diversity win! Wise Old Man is ace!
As a stupid young woman I feel represented 💜🖤
Win for the ace community
Yay 🖤🩶🤍💜
The Unsavory Charlatan's needs being static is intentional. Only someone who never eats or sleeps could be so dastardly.
Or perphaps hes sustained by dasterdly deeds alone 🤔
Dastardly oh baby that's a word I haven't heard in a LOOONG while
Lol Love it😂
I tried adding Wise Old Man to my family for science, and he actually behaves exactly like a normal sim ... if you serve him tea first. At least as far as I can tell. That is, after you've served him tea, you can controll him, other sims can interact with him as usual, his motives changes, and I even had a baby with him without cheats (exept the cheat that adds him to the family). His daughter Wise Little Girl seems like a completely normal sim too, but that wasn't very surprising since he has complete sim description. Wise Old Man knows the importance of tea, appearently.
Edit: I did some more tests, and it seems like you have to serve him tea every time he appears on a new lot. If you just save and reload the lot he's on, he'll still behave like a normal sim, but you need to serve him tea again if you move him to a different house or if you invite him over as a friend.
This was oddly wholesome to read. To think, The Wise Old Man is so misunderstood just because of his tea addiction. Thank you for giving him a home.
uncle iroh headass
It's weird AB didn't mention that, as that IS how you play with him through normal gameplay...
A cuppa or a meal?
I've played the family some more now, and one thing I didn't notice at first is that other sims, including his now wife, can't do most romantic interactions with him. He can still romance other sims as usual though. You can, however, ask other sims to kiss him on the bed, woohoo, try for baby, and propose to him. I assume they didn't remove that since there's nowhere to woohoo in Pagoda in the Shadows anyway, and you can't propose unless you're in love.
I sort of thought that he would tell the dragon legend after I befriended him, but that hasn't happened yet at least. He doesn't have the legend scroll in his inventory, but he does have the map back to Pagoda in the Shadows.
This title sounds suspiciously like what a corrupt Social Bunny would say...
The call is coming from INSIDE the game…
make preparations
I figured the Unsavory Charlatan wasn't a universal NPC when he spawned with the 3rd face template in my Riverblossom Hills 🤔
Great deep dive!!!
Watching your videos is truly like witnessing the Library of Alexandria unburn itself and ancient knowledge come into our lives
So true
I used to worry so much about corruption, but after watching your videos, I'm really chill about it, lol.
lack of knowledge causes fear
I still get such anxiety watching some of the clips bc of all the anti-corruption guides I read as a clueless 10yo playing this game lmao
Good that you redeemed the Social Worker's reputation from all the slander thrown at them over the years.
Agreed! I'm sure she's always done her job with a heart full of sadness.
She's just a woman who takes care of neglected children and finds better homes for them. That's should be a good thing!
@@magentaspoon5319 But she has a scary tune when she appears! Only villains have a scary backdrop song D:
@@magentaspoon5319 Imagine tearing down a loving family and ruining their lives just because one kid got a low grade. Screw them
@@Metzli sometimes a villain is someone who has to do bad things because their role demands it :(
watching your videos makes me feel like a game developer who understands everything about game mechanics yet I don't even know how to properly install CC
I don’t comment that much, but the fact that your deep dive basically opened a previously forbidden door of “Operation with Special NPCs” really impressed me. There’s no need to degrade your explanation of how the game assigns behaviours and pie menus to these NPCs (it was very useful and understandable IMHO). In fact, it not only answers a lot of questions, but creates a lot of new ones. For example, can the process of making NPCs playable be used the other way around? To create an NPC based on an existing playable sim? (which could be helpful for simmers making custom neighbourhoods)
I guess this also answers whether custom NPCs (that come with a mod) can corrupt your neighbourhood if you delete the mod (and basically the NPC’s behaviour and pie menu). Does that mean that they won’t corrupt it, but they “won’t know what to do” and can’t be interacted with unless you fix their data? (I guess the soft deletion would be better option…)
Thanks again for your contribution.
Good question, I'm curious about that too. Could you turn an existing Sim into an NPC if you give them the GUID of the NPC type you want to assign to them?
yeah, I have the same questions too. I am going to test it in the closest days and see what will happen
To create a NPC is faster and better to use the NPC and Townie maker from debug menu and use Sims Surgery with SimPE, but yes, you could do the other way around if you wish.
As for the other question my guess is no, they won't corrupt your hood, but it will infect your game* with the Super Hug Bug because the game can't load your custom TTABs and will replace it with the Super Hug interaction.
*That's not a bad thing, it will just make this interaction visible
Yes, that works exactly as you described - you can assign a Sim an NPC template, and they will act like said NPC :)
Not sure about the mods that add custom NPCs, because I have never downloaded any. Certainly something to look into! I imagine the game uses some kind of fallback value if it can't recognize the template GUID, but it won't hurt to do a few tests :)
Can you make custom npc files?
"that's my job" MOTHER IS MOTHERING
Imagine working for maxis in 2004 and having your code dissected and put on show for all of TH-cam to see 2 decades later 😂 I wonder if anyone from the game has seen this?
Omg I'd be absolutely thrilled to talk to a dev who worked on The Sims 2 :D Maybe one day?
@@aprilblacksimsThat would be awesome, all I’ve done is ask the Patreon guy if he was really the voice of the teen boys and he hearted my comment lol
As someone who grew up obsessively reading about these NPCs on the wiki as a kid, finally hearing someone explains all their technical details is kind of magical in a weird way.
April - your videos scratch such a huge itch for me and I will wait years between uploads if need be, never apologise for taking time between uploads! The quality and detail in them is absolutely unmatched, and other TH-camrs who cover similar topics just do not meet the standards you are setting in each and every video. Thank you so much for what you're doing - genuinely one of the best (scratch that, THE best) Sims 2 youtubers out there.
Her: TTAB for short.
Me: Short for wha-
Her: Don't ask me where these letters came from.
Me: Okay then. '-'
It's so refreshing to always discover the reality behind the corruption rumors. It's like hidden knowledge finally being revealed
Sims 2 players are really like “omg if you breathe wrong the game will corrupt!! 😱”
"if a sim literally exists, your game will become corrupted!!!!"
After turning life stories into base game and adding expansions to it, corruption fears me 😂
have you added EPs to Life Stories? Is it possible?
this is the way
You did WHAT NOW
We *need* that tutorial
/Joking
I for one am not joking please drop the tutorial
Did you actually do this?? Id love to see any pics/videos from this !
thank u for feeding my obscure interests 🙏
Ngl you are really really making me want to make an entire neighbor of functional npcs
When you asked if Im still with you I just nodded sadly. When I started making cc for sims 3 I had to learn real damn fast how the game understands what this new mesh is. assigning bones, which is streamlined a lot in milkshape 3d still makes me cry inside
Do you still have CC on the internet? I use A LOT for Sims3.
Edit: You are brilliant.
@@RosesTeaAndASDOmg why do I see you everywhere lol
@@RosesTeaAndASD I am currently working on making a set of pillars from scratch but the corner pieces are giving me Problems TM
I did make a dining table, but I havent uploaded it yet because I want to make a companion table so there is one round 1x1 and one 2x1 rectangle dining
@@RosesTeaAndASD I finally uploaded the tables! I know its like 3 months late but!
Theyre all free on my p atreon and always will be, and it shares my youtube name
Alternate Title : No, You Shipping Bella Goth with the Social Bunny To Make Mortimor Goth Miserable Will Not Make The Sims 2 Fall Into A Fetal Position And Cry.
Omg the cat footage is so wholesome.
I don't think you mentioned this directly in the video, but I started to figure it out when you mentioned the ones with static motives... of course their motives can't drain, as it would interfere with their intended behavior if they did!
I just wanted to say, thank you! Your section explaining the original GUIDs cleared up so much confusion for me. In my current neighborhood I've married a few NPCs in the main hood (cheerleader, waitress, bartender) and they kept exhibiting the same behaviors they had as an NPC. Admittedly the waitress and bartender weren't very different, they just kept randomly showing up as Sims houses, letting themselves in, making nuisances of themselves, but the cheerleader would still be showing up in her outfit and cheering at university well into her adult lifetime. Thanks to your sleuthing I was finally able to fix them and have them act like normal sims!
Goes to show you never know when some information might come in handy, even if it's not necessarily fixing a "dangerous" NPC, because those behaviors still carry over even if they're made playable.
I laughed so hard at the Polish pingwin meme. Caught me off guard. Next time I hope for bober cameo.
I'm not sure I fully understand the technical details but now I have some ideas how to turn my pet wolf into a Leader of the Pack or break my game completely. Time to back up my neighborhoods.
oh my god, you're a genius!
i mean, mayyyyybe, just maybe, if a new player back in like 2006 discovered they can add npcs to their active family and absolutely littered the neighborhood with ominously spinning food stand chefs and invisible sims they don't know how to delete it technically could contribute to the neighborhood accumulating errors and eventually failing to save normally or something... so maybe it made sense for someone to discourage people from doing it
also OMG A NEW APRIL VIDEO //brain goes brrrrr//
Oh yeah, I imagine uncontrollable littering your neighborhood with those NPCs could definitely cause some chaos :) Maybe not full on hood corruption, but I'd expect some crashing/lots of object errors, and if a player is not experienced with using testingcheats, they might very well think that their neighborhood is completely fried. I absolutely agree that it made perfect sense to advise people not to add them if they don't know what they're doing.
I have no idea why watching an autopsy of the functions of a game 20 years old is so interesting. I'm not a modder, I'm not a programmer, I don't play TS2 in years.
Yet I love seeing how cleverly (or not) the developers organized their code. Like looking inside the complications of a watch.
Anyway, thanks for doing that autopsy for us mortals.
THE QUEEN POSTED THIS IS NOT A DRILL YALL
This video was legit chef s kiss. It s crazy how this game actually behaves. I simply always found it hard to believe that the sims 2 could actually get corrupt that easily and i had my jaw dropped the entire way of the video. I m really really excited and curious as to how universal npcs work and i can t wait for that video! Good Job, April! Crazy how we find out things about the game YEARS Later....
This game is definetly stronger than it looks
Amazing deep dive as always, can t wait for the next one!
Off topic but I have to let you know something very dear to me! Ever since the Kahramanmarash Earthquake, I couldn't sleep at nights (because nights and darkness triggered some flashbacks) but I eventually had to bear my fears and restart sleeping in nights. In order to do that, I decided watching TH-cam videos and fall asleep with their help. For more than one year, your Sims 2 videos are helping me sleep like a baby. I'm not even interested in the game, it's just that your videos feel soothing and they have a wonderful friendly aura. Idk, I thought you should know your videos mean the world to me. Seeing the notification of this video made my day and I excitedly waited for the night to watch it. I'm going to sleep now, LOL, thank you so much
🤗 Sorry to hear that you've been through something so horrible! I'm glad my videos are helping a bit ❤
I love your deep dives! It's nice to know corruption isn't that easy. Heck, when I played a prettacy in Sims 2 years ago, I got a DJ as a blind date and he was totally fine, despite the wiki saying they can't be playable without cheats.
But despite your info, it's so annoying how people still think so much as blinking will corrupt your game and explode your computer.
I just realized you could pronounce BHAV as "Behave" and it would still make sense as an abbreviation of "Behavior Function"
OMG A NEW APRIL BLACK VIDEO LET'S GOOOOO! ❤❤❤
"we finally reached that point in my special interest" is so REAL
dont worry about long waits between videos! im more a fan of longer videos i can put on while i'm working on stuff since i like having things going in the background, so if that means having to wait between uploads, i vibe with it
36:25 literally the best ending to this video and any video I could have possibly asked for holy toledo thank you
Nothing makes my day better than a new sims 2 technical deep dive video
BABE WAKE UP NEW APRIL BLACK VIDEO
Exactly what i masseged to my friend who doesn't even play Sims 2, but like April Black's videos.
im sorry this is so off topic but your HAIR looks INCREDIBLE 😭😭😭🩷
14:03 The way they turn their heads reminds me so much of the operating room scene from the House On Haunted Hill remake.
Your videos are the ones that make me very excited - I like everything what is about TS2 from technical side and you are talking about things that no one talked about in the past! I'm looking forward to your video about Universal NPCs!
I have experimented with those NPCs and never suffered to neighborhood corruption and was wondering if I am lucky or their dangerous nature is just a rumour.
Some quirks you didn't mention about:
1) Social Workers have a weird animation when they complain about their low needs - it seems to be animation of taking a toddler from their car.
2) Repo men have no voice no matter what value is put in their voice field.
I think Repo Man gets their voice back once you assign them a playable Sim template :) At least mine talk haha
Oh yeah I saw that social worker animation in an old video about corruption (can’t remember whose), it’s really funny
I do not care if it takes you half a year to upload new video or not: they are always very detailed, yet comprehensible, and even interesting to rewatch, over and over again, even if i know ZERO shait about programming, ¡They are simply amazing!
I hope to see more content about this topics in the future, and that you answer all the possible questions i didn't even thought about this game's functioning!
I love the sims 2 with my whole heart so knowing how it works makes me love it even more.
When the world needed her most, she came back ❤
this channel is so underrated 😭 i love your videos sm, its so interesting and refreshing to hear about how this game works
I'm sure someone already said it, but your cats look like the Spectral Assistant and Stinky Skunk and that makes me happy
hey queen girl you have done it again constantly raising the bar for us all and doing it flawlessly i'd say im surprised but i know who you are i've seen it up close and personal girl you make me so proud and i love you
i clicked on the notification unconciously but i'm not disappointed
15:01 Can you do a short video sometime explaining what the common errors mean? Like “hit break point primitive” and all those and what’s actually going wrong
This has been a popular demand, so I'm definitely considering it :) I am planning a video about testingcheats, so maybe I'll mention something in there - we'll see!
@@aprilblacksimsYay😄
Thank you for researching and sharing, I loved this! I was with you all the way, really well explained. Not that long ago I tried to age up my uni cheerleaders and mascots and have them behave like normal townies, I even tried some different things like Cyjon's debugger and also changing some kind of field in SimPe, sim type or something like that, to normal sim, and got so annoyed that they were still cheering all the time that I killed them off! So glad I know know I can simply spare them with those two easy changes. I also gave up on romancing a hair stylist once because the wiki slightly concerned me and it was also annoying that their interactions were somewhat limited like I don't think I could do every kind of flirt with them etc. so they must have a slightly different interaction type too I imagine that would just need changing to 129. Your cats are adorable btw thank you for that bonus footage! Can't wait to see what you find out next! I bet you could make some revolutionary mods if you wanted too!
These really are some of the most amazing videos on TH-cam. "Corruption" in The Sims 2 is a topic that has always interested me because it really all seemed like one huge conspiracy theory, and it's really fascinating to see you finally explain how it all really works and how many of these myths have originated.
My day is automatically improved the moment you upload a new video about obscure Sims 2 technical details
I know you were worried about it but the technical explanation was very understandable. I've never dealt with Sims modding before and understood everything you were talking about fine, you did a good job.
35:57 The whole video was great and informative and all, but the cats? Perfection ❤
I noticed, when I used some cheat that make me able to call every sims I managed to find statues and social bunnies but not grim reaper of therapist
I never played the Sims 2 and I know next to nothing about programming but I'm so fascinated by your videos, you're great at explaining things
Tips: It’s actually very easy to find the Neutral Witch NPCs if you know what you’re doing. All you need to do is to use Magic as your main neighborhood instead of a subhood. Then their names won’t get randomized and you’ll find them within a few minutes!
Longer version: If you copy the folder E002 from The Sims 2 Apartment Life/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplate and put it in your ordinary neighborhoods folder, Magic will show up in the main neighborhood menu. Load the neighborhood, create a residential lot, and move in someone from the Family Bin. Then spawn the Tombstone of Life and Death and use it to ”Add Neighbor to Family” as usual. Their names are Naenae, Amanda, and Lakshmi. I recommend Naenae or Lakshmi unless you want all three, because Amanda shares her first name with a socialite townie :)
I'd love it if you made a video about the pink soup. Like, where does it come from, does it cause corruption, is it dangerous in any way. It's kind of fascinating.
The pink soup is just texture/graphics errors, I guess it could indirectly cause corruption if the game crashed at a bad time because of it
i love watching videos about sims 2 corruption because i've never encountered it despite messing with the game (using only ingame tools mind you) for years, the only one i came across so far was sims randomly disappearing if the game was forced to end while saving
I love your videos so much! Can't wait for the universal NPCs one :3
You uncovered the hidden mechanics of NPCs in a 20 year old game. Damn I love the dedication of niche content creators. It was a fun watch!
22:03 I like the “Nuke Kids” bhav lmao
Ooooh Ninja, you're coming home with me now
😆😆
just right when i'm learning how to tweak the mods with SimPE, the way you explain "Group" is so helpful 😭
OH MY SWEET BEJESUS i was adjusting the volume on my speakers and you went SIP. SIP. SIP. on that tea and made me sh!t my pants 🤣
Saaaame 😂
Lol
😆😆sorry
The technical part was perfectly digestable. 👍 I'm so surprised about the universal NPCs though, it seemed like a huge oversight to me that meddling with them would modify your installation files, but since I can't check it out myself ATM I guess I'll have to wait for you to do it. :D Also, bonus cats is appreciated. (Edit : Spelling.)
I know that certain in-game events that could modify the objects.package have been patched out, because they are mentioned in patch notes (for example, I'm pretty sure a vampire biting Mrs Crumplebottom is no longer a thing), but adding universal NPCs via cheats will still make some changes to game files
@@aprilblacksims the Mrs Crumplebottom vampire issue was fixed with one of the exp packs. alternatively, making the objects.package file read only should prevent it (not sure tho if it would just end the interaction between her and the vamp or crash the game?)
It seems to me like the lag exhibited by the food stand NPCs might be rooted in something as simple as them having a script that checks for a food stand and tries to get to it, since one doesn't exist, an exception is thrown, and then it repeats it, sucking up processing power causing the entire simulation to lag out. If the script was modified to say, check once, and on fail wait X seconds to check again, they'd likely be just like the cheerleaders and just stand there doing nothing while not really making much of a difference.
Can one place down a food stand, and will they then navigate to it?
Fascinating! I may have to try this de-NPCifying process sometime. As someone who knows only very basic SimPE and programming, I thought you did a very good job explaining it.
Also, your cats are precious and I want to snuggle them.
I love your videos. I haven't played Sims 2 in at least a decade, but every one of them is such a fascinating deep dive into details I never thought about that I hope you'll never run out of secrets to share with us!
Don't ever worry about your explanation. I've kept up with your videos and I really like the way you break things down in an easily digestible manner. Easy for me to say.. I write a bit of JavaScript but still. You're the coolest code junkie around, I hope you'll continue to make these videos!
excited for this already
I’m very glad to be falling down this Sims rabbit hole I find myself in courtesy of you and Plumbella
The repo man also has no voice if i remember correctly, despite having a present hexidecimal value for his voice type in SimPE
I only want him to speak to go around the neighbourhood and apologise lol
yeah, they are just speechless lol
and if I remember correctly, they perform interactions on other Sims in the mirrored way (like Firefighters, Gypsies)
@@dummyanWhat’s the mirrored way
@@ravenID429 sorry, I should have write it more clearly. I mean their animations towards other Sims are inverted like in the mirror - for example when they are going to slap, they use left hand when normal Sims use right one.
I admire your love of the game and your ability to present the material in an interesting way. Great video, as always!
Thank you for taking so much time and effort into explaining the technical aspects of this game. I'm not a programmer and this was still very entertaining to watch.
thanks for the bonus at the end
That wasn't a deep dive that was hitting the bottom of the Mariana Trench, so fascinating though for us Sims 2 addicts
April Black: Tech Wizard of Sims BS-Busting
The things that you explained are pretty interesting, thanks! I'm looking forward to your video about the universal NPCs
mothering activities, your technical deep dives are my absolute favorites
Thank you for all these videos. As a kid I also played Sims 2 (and later Sims 3 a lil bit) a TON and yet I never heard about any corruption at the time. We were kids playing games. Sometimes they were buggy but like, that's how videogames are??? Mostly it was minor graphical bugs, I don't remember families disappearing or anything of the sort.
So when a couple years ago I decided to get the game again for nostalgia's sake, imagine my horror when everywhere I go I'm facing walls of text about how all the ESSENTIAL MODS to AVOID CORRUPTION like it's some sure bogeyman that will get you in a couple hours without those mods. It kept me from installing the game at the time because no way in hell was i researching and downloading all this anti-corruption nonsense.
I think this really shows how casual the playerbase is, to have such widely spread dumb myths for SO LONG. Like, you don't see this shit on pokémon forums online and those games are intended to be for kids. And it makes it incredibly annoying to go look for weirder tutorials and cheats for the game because I search for "how to make a family with social workers" and all I get is "don't interact with the social worker at all, she will corrupt your game!!!!11!" which again just shows how ppl view this "corruption" like some magical thing. It's the correct technical term bc it's bad data or null data but ppl are using it in more of a layman way where it's some kinda plague.
Anyway thank you so much for having the patience and enthusiasm to test all these things and explain them in such an accessible way. Like I lol'd when you started explaining what hexadecimal is but it makes sense for the kinda playerbase. Modding being so incredibly simple in this game also contributed to all of this i guess. Ah well
ty for your research and more importantly the cat footage
Thanks for another enlightening video! it's always great to gain more understanding into the technical side of this old game, and help others understand when they have these same questions. I managed to understand all the technical jargon too! Loved the cat footage at the end, your kitties are so sweet :3
Also, I noticed you still have Kashmire bumping around in your neighborhood files, were there anymore secrets like double neighborhood index resetting that those files contained?
I just kept it in in case I need to investigate some corruption-related things :)
Watched your video as soon as I had some free time and loved it!!!!! Your knowledge of the game's coding makes your videos much more interesting and helps us understand how amazing truly the sims 2 is. Is it a bad sign that my sim's friend wanted to share their number to Baby New Year because they thought they had a lot in common lol
Also, I had a question on the topic of universal npcs. Bunch of my sims got into fights with each other and now hate each other but when they to the *standing angrily thinking of the hated sim* instead of the face of the hated sim popping up, I get the grim reaper! I really don't know how this happened, but it has already happened to a couple of my sims.
The thing with Toddler New Year is a very common bug in the game :) The developers forgot to exclude universal NPCs from this interaction lol. Thankfully the relationships don't edit objects.package, so you're fine :)
Not sure about being angry about the Grim Reaper though! I've never seen this before 🤔 Perhaps some glitch during assigning the fury token
@aprilblacksims Wow you replied very fast! Thank you very much!! Love your videos ❤️❤️❤️
You're a true game changer. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and busting some more myths.
You're cats are absolutely adorable ❤
Fascinating dive into the Sims 2's coding! You expained it all very nicely. Thank you for sharing :)
i'm not even a sims fan, and i've never played the sims 2, but i watched your corruption deep dive and video on the squiggly lines a while back. i just rewatched the latter, and now i'm watching more of your videos! they're very interesting to me, even though i barely know anything about ts2!!! :] keep up the good work!
and this was actually pretty easy for me to understand despite my lack of coding knowledge, so don't worry about it!!
I've heard people claim that the social worker causes save to be disabled just by appearing on the lot, even if she isn't there to take away or bring children. Is that true at all, or do you know where the myth could have come from?
TTAB stands for "tree table" by the way - functions in the game are generally called "trees" in the code because of the way that the true and false targets essentially arrange them into a binary tree.
Ohh, tree table makes sense, actually 😆 Thanks! I'm rubbish at deciphering abbreviations lol.
Someone did mention the save file thing to me after I published the video, but also I've never had that happen to me 🤔 I'll try the unpatched base game, perhaps this is one of the things that was patched
Recently got back into playing S2 and I really appriciate breakdowns like this, its a complex game and the messy code is really interesting.
Fantastic video. This kind of shit in games is the reason I became software developer. Was playing with level editors and these kind of game package editors back in 2000s. Keep up the good work!
Is simPE a lot like professional tools? It looks like what I’d imagine they used to make the game in this case
The Queen is BACK!!!
I just had something funny happen to my game! One of the grand vampires showed up on the cuisine hobby lot. He bit the food judge and turned them into a vampire. According the SimPE this broke the judge and put her in the townie bin. Now I have a static judge occasionally appearing on my community lots in my neighbourhood lol!
i miss social bunny i loved bunny hes better than the sadness hotline in TS4 100%
TS4 is so lazy with everything omg
the goat has returned ‼️
🐐
I just randomly started the sims 2 yesterday and here you post❤
April, how is this "Woohoo with Grim Reaper" video going? 👁️👄👁️
Still during the research phase, but I'm getting there!
I dont know where the corruption rumour started either, but its so funny how sure everyone is of it. Its like the rumour that a fire happened while the game was being developed and all the progress was lost, and thats the reason the sims 2 wasnt like the trailer lol
She's back! Been looking forward to you covering this subjects ever since your announcement in the previous video
I think the BHAVs from character files might be overriding the BHAVs from objects.package, hence nothing happens when they're deleted from a character file. I haven't tested it, though.