#hoodchecker

IF MEDIEVAL NONSENSE BE SOMETHING YOU WISH... HEEKELVUARA or "the struggle of making a custom hood in the Sims 2, achieving game stability and personal musings and W's and L's of a lifelong simmer". ᛭᛭᛭

Initially I started this ongoing yuge scale project last September as a companion activity for my second full novel-length manuscript that's set in similar era and setting. Well. They both sorta blew up, as these things tend to.

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The neighborhood is called Heekelvuara, located somewhere in the Karelian region. It is set in an ambiguous time period, somewhere in the medieval era.

Why call it Heekelvuara? See, at the time, I was listening to a great audiobook monolith, an interesting albeit very frustrating topic of interpreting G.W.F. Hegel. What a head scratcher, that fella. So, naturally, after being personally attacked by him and having been spiritually assaulted by German philosophy... I turned that enigma of a man and book experience into a regional dialect, not dialectics, and made the 'hood appropriately called "the danger of Hegel".

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After spending a week downloading almost 15GB of themed CC, scourging the great wide webs for this...

First hood attempt was a no-go. No terrain matched exactly what I wanted, and what I wanted, was mountainous AND watery both. So I found a Hawaiian template (not pictured), and built the hood on top of it. The roads and topography were too simple for my uses, though, so rigorous Googling ensued. "How edit roads in game". "How edit neighborhood terrain in game".

The map had sharp spikes all over, almost like the Apartment Life duality subhood. Yet I persisted. I masked the simple roads with a buncha CC.

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Soon came a grim day and even more grim realization. I had moved my Downloads-folder to another drive, so the dang hood loaded empty. SHIT. All deco gone in an instant.

Off to rebuilding it was, or scrapping the project completely.

The roads and the layout of the altered Hawaiian map bugged me still, and while I don't intend to recreate any historical maps 1=1, I wanted the new hood I were to make to reflect the class struggle a bit. Yeomen and peasantry would need an inhabitable disctict, the churches would be in an elevated region, as would the castles.

The not-so-fortunate in my silly lil' hood needed to experience that rigorous Sunday walk uphill to the damn church, I decided.

So I fired up SimCity4, having never played that. Learnt the damn ancient thing just well enough. In approximately another week or so, I had a map, custom-made Heekelvuara 1.0, rather than the altered Hawaiian map.

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After that, I had to make it playable on my machine: the game itself. If anyone is interested exactly what I did to achieve relative stability on my setup (GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super + 13th Gen Intel Core i7 13650HX) w/ heavy cc, I kept notes and can answer later on.

I own both the Legacy collection and Ultimate Collection. I spent around a month on-off debugging various crap and testing the stability of the engine, having applied all the recommended patches and community fixes. CTD's and fatal errors were constant still. No wonder with by then 22+ GB of CC and hacks, many from 2005-2009 golden era. (Thank gosh jeepers for the Internet Archive.) This I didn't accept, as back in the day, I got a ton of CC as well and remember gaming long sessions no trouble.

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What actually mattered aka stability TLDR; I forced Vulkan, use the Ultimate Collection for stability + RPC by the amazing LazyDuchess, single core launch, and a ton of third party tools by legends like Mootilda for hack conflict detection and stuff like that.

Also, eliminating pink soup, which was a problem initially, was made possible by the TS2 MemCapRemover.

I also use a custom PowerShell neighborhood autosave-backup-script that I launch manually every time I do edits. It creates a copy of the neighborhood folder on a ten minute interval. (There's a reason it got created... more on that a bit later.)

Also my PC's got a huge pagefile set for other nerd purposes.

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My own custom-made Heekelvuara 1.0 lived, yet it did not stay for long. I took a half a year break in between the rebuilding + stability chaos and the another revival of this cursed thing, the 2.0 edition I'm currently at.

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I discovered some stupid seeds of corruption from the PleasantView townies through the HoodChecker by Mootilda. I hadn't installed the clean templates. I did exactly so.

Using HoodReplace by Mootilda again, I replaced the hood, now empty of Goopy GilsCarbos and Benjamin Longs, and started importing the lots and the sims from 1.0 to 2.0 via SimPe and BodyShop.

This required creating a custom .bat, that randomizes Finnish-Swedish-Karelian-Russian names, appropriate for that era. It works pretty great.

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Currently, I'm working on creating lots and new families and the populace, right now the monastery.

Any Q's, I'll try my best to answer, if this post reaches anyone. Anyway, here are some screenshots!

quick PSA/FYI for anyone new here or messing w/ mods that create NPCs - hoodchecker WILL tell you the above, there is no reason to panic or believe this is some kind of corruption - its absolutely not! but hoodchecker cannot and will not remove these "warnings" like it can still remove other stuff as you can see.

i downloaded and installed this mod which adds two (2) NPCs as the "entertainment". this can happen with other mods adding in NPCs too such as: Beck's animals, Multi PT mods, anything cloned from the remote control car

now what i DONT know is how you go about uninstalling/removing mods that add in NPCs. I've never messed with that really so I'll let someone more knowledgeable on this talk about it if they so wish.

edit with info from @brandinotbroke - thank you again!:

Here is a quite helpful (and must have) program made by Mootilda

that cleans the neighborhoods from corrupted files!

DOWNLOAD LINK.

Here is a simple tutorial on how to run the program and fix the hoods.

I get messages and questions relatively often (and still from people on anon, here's another reminder...) relating to problems with people's games, things not working correctly and questions along the lines of "how have you had Apple Springs for so long without it exploding in your face?" -- and I always try to help in any way I can, since corruption makes sad all around the world and I know how annoying it can be when the game can become unplayable if you just look at it the wrong way...

Personally I'm pretty structured when it comes to not doing all the things most of us know not to do by now (generally what I forget is to check if there are any sims on the phone before saving :p), but I still like to put the rest of my faith in Mootilda's HoodChecker; because... you should always trust in Mootilda.