Porter Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

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PlyPlay665
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by PlyPlay665 » September 19th, 2019, 3:46 pm

Is it possible to move an entire world's population from one world to a fresh (and empty) version of that same world? I started playing this version of Sunset Valley in 2013. It's taken me 6 years (I play on and off) to get to where I am. However, as I played and learned about Teleporter, I realized I didn't want my Sunset Valley to have all the features from the game for realism purposes (a subway? Nah). I've slowly reverted it back to the original albeit with a few changes, but this has meant deleting and adding back in lots via World Editor.

SO. It feels like my world has a lot of issues (like routing), and I'd like to start fresh but I don't want to lose my progress with the Sims.

It doesn't have THAT many issues, but my goal is to play all the EA Worlds to the timeline of Pleasantview in TS2; which requires Sunset Valley to be the primary world.

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igazor
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by igazor » September 19th, 2019, 3:59 pm

Theoretically yes on the entire town, but we have no way of knowing where the realistic limit will be in terms of numbers of residents portered and when or how low loudly your game will crash if the portered set is too large. Constraints will tend to be on how intricate the sims' histories, family trees, and family/personal inventories will be vs. strength of your computer system and how much RAM the game can call for before crashes or Error12s happen. It would not be reasonable to expect a town of 200 residents to be able to be portered up in one step. At half that maybe, different players will experience different breaking points. But there are also effective ways to split things up a bit.
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sittingbear
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by sittingbear » September 19th, 2019, 4:05 pm

Since that link you provided to the is really just a Save file of Sunset Valley you might want to TA the sims in that Save before moving your sims in.
If I'm wrong maybe igazor, knows a better way or if it's necessary.

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igazor
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by igazor » September 19th, 2019, 4:28 pm

I don't know that the TA step is strictly necessary, but if it's not done the result might be a population double the expected size as both the pre-made and the incoming sims will still be residents. And if there are duplicates, especially between the living and the dead if both worlds started out the same way but are generations apart in their respective timelines, that might not lead to exactly what was expected in the end either.

PlyPlay665
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by PlyPlay665 » September 19th, 2019, 5:02 pm

Wow. If I had read the FAQ more carefully this post would not have been necessary. I am hoping that my Sunset Valley whose timeline has only been moved forward roughly 2 weeks isn't going to be too tough on my computer. If I'm understanding this mod right, though, this is specifically what the mod was made for, and when I port my Sims into the new world, it will place all of the households in the respective lots that they were living in before?

I figure if I am going to do this, I should do this now and just figure it out myself, but for some reason I have a good bit of anxiety about it and don't know if the time is worth it.

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igazor
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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by igazor » September 19th, 2019, 5:23 pm

Well, that's about as far as I can go without admitting that I've never used Porter myself but have just been observing what other have been saying about it for years. I believe, and should be corrected if I've got that wrong, that the households will stay together as they originally were but there is no real control as to which residential lots they will land in. The mod is not strictly designed for World A to World A migrations, the target world could be anywhere and there would be no real linkage between households and actual houses.

As for the anxiety, that's understood but really the worst thing that can happen is that the first or second try might not work out as expected. The mod doesn't do a thing to the source world so you can retreat at any point and be exactly where you were when you started out, no better or worse.

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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by Turjan » December 21st, 2019, 9:00 am

I want to move my current SV population (or most of it) to a new copy of the town (from a savegame with one existing couple and a few initial edits). Does Porter get confused if I just swap out the version of SV in the savegame (after having saved those Porter "families"), as it's technically the "same" world?

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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by igazor » December 21st, 2019, 9:38 am

I don't see why there would be any confusion. The Unpack command is run in-game, when the target world is already loaded. Porter really shouldn't care if it's the same, similar, or completely different from the one the sims came from. Unlike with Traveler moves, the sims who are unpacked won't have any memory of where they used to live, meaning they won't "realize" that they have actually been moved to a new/different world, and they won't have connections to any sims left behind.

Speaking of Traveler though, if there are multiple (foreign) worlds in this ongoing game then swapping out one instance of a world that exists in with another instance of the same world will cause issues. Probably not so in the homeworld, but if you play (travel or transition to) the others, then the links that represent relationships between the sims there and the ones back in SV won't make any sense. Example: Grandma now lives in Twinbrook. According to the TravelDB, her grandson is sim number (some hex code number) who lives in SV. But in this different instance of SV, the sim corresponding to that hex code number is now the Uni Mascot, a puppy, or at any rate not who her grandchild was.

If there was no world travel though and no foreign worlds already generated and played in to worry about, then this probably isn't an issue.

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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by Turjan » December 21st, 2019, 10:32 am

Cool. As everyone who is related to others lives in SV, there shouldn't be any confusion. There was one trip to the future from the new world, but I'm thinking of deleting the current future world, anyway (it had spawned without the original inhabitants because I forgot to disable a mod that makes travel targets spawn empty). Or I produce a new start again.

Speaking of TravelDB, that one is rather large in my game, and I think the only worlds it should contain any relevant data for are Shang Simla und University City. Does the size of this have any negative impact on the game? I already cleaned out the image files from it (it actually contained a complete copy of those very old scrapbook images, besides travel photos, which surprised me). I think my issue is that I sent that many different sims to university and to China, and they all know lots of people there. I don't mind losing all those data.

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Porter to Move Entire World Populaion

Post by igazor » December 21st, 2019, 10:45 am

I would still be reluctant to delete it completely. How large is it, after cleaning out the SNAP files? On my system, even my older one, I've let it grow as large as over 2.3 GB before without problems, except of course for the extra drive space it consumes when one has many saves of the same ongoing game in place somewhere or other. Right now in my ongoing game it's hovering at around 900 MB. As for in-game, the TravelDB never gets loaded into RAM like the nhd files do. It is just used for reference and gets copied back and forth into and out of the CurrentGame folder and then back into Saves upon loading up, saving, and quitting. Of course a leaner TravelDB file will reduce the times of these copies and moves back and forth, but not by very much as it doesn't take long on most systems to copy a couple of GBs of data here and there. Especially on an SSD.

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