DJS Sims

Did you delete groups.cache? If not, you need to.

I have no idea about SimCategorizer though, you'd have to contact the author of that program.

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Collections and Saved Sims are fine, Neighborhood was also fine when I did it but you don't gain much space so there's not much of a point to it.

Core game files are those in the Program Files directory, yes.

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Ok, great... I will stay away from the Program Files. I have noticed increased speed since first using it, after using it again on the afore mentioned folders. Its a great program.

Awesome, glad it's being put to good use!

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Hi, first of all Great program Now the question Me and my company buildsters, build houses for our site and use furnish that is kindly allowed to include in the package by their creators, and now i wonder if there going to be problems for the downloaders if they download a house with compressed objectfiles and should i mention it or doesn't it make a difference in their use of those compressed objects. I hope you understand what i'm trying to ask Thanks in advance

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The Sorceress and Company

The "installer" version will install the program to your hard drive and make it an actual program whereas the "no installer" version is a version that runs from a folder you create and extract the files too.

Does this make sense. If not, just lemme know and I'll try and put it in simpler terms.

Benny Boy

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Shouldn't make any difference, no, these are just normal package files compressed using an EA algorithm, so there's no danger in sharing them once compressed with others.

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Hi. Thanks for the great program. It's saved a ton of space on my hard drive. I was also curious, once a file has been compressed is there anyway to decompress it? I've been playing around with a couple of random big object files that I downloaded but never put into the game, just trying to see If I could figure out a way to decompress them myself. I'm stumped . Thanks again.

Thank you Jfade, now i can freely enjoy the program. I love it So glad all those clever people make those great tools

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The Sorceress and Company

jfade, first I want to say thank you for such a wonderful program. It's made all the difference in my game, because I had a HUGE downloads folder and only 60GB on my laptop. I don't know how I ever lived without compressing all those horrible bloated files. However, I did want to mention that I've had some trouble with corrupted files. I use SimPE and SimWardrobe's Categorizer to "fix" text and sort issues to my liking (because I HATE downloads that still say they are a bowl of fruit when they clearly aren't). However, while playing I noticed a couple of files I'd compressed had spelling errors. So, I opened them, fixed the problem, saved and re-started the game. And it crashed during the loading screen. I narrowed down the problem to the compressed files I had messed with. So, the easiest work-around is to compress files only after you won't mess with them again, but I was curious to know if anyone else has had trouble editing compressed files, or if there is a way to un-compress them and work on them, to avoid the corruption? Again, this is really a minor issue, because there is a work-around, but I thought I'd ask about it. Thanks again for such a great program and all your hard work!

Yup, I always delete groups.cache file as soon as I exit the game. Still can't get in my game though. I am heartbroken. Any other suggestions.
-TM

Thanks on a wonderful tool.

I posted this program on the official sims 2 uk forums here and it has gone down quite well with alot of people. I have used it since beta and I think it would be cool if the actual creator posted on the thread there telling us more about it and hopefully answer questions that people have asked, if any remain unanswered that is.

If i was to suggest anything where do I post it?

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Hi, Yes, I have found that same trouble. If I want to change object names, and or prices with the Categorizer, it it best to do so before compression. And if I forget to do that, then the game crashes on startup. Which was very disturbing if I had already waited twenty minutes of loading. What I do, if I need to make changes, is to keep copies of uncompressed files for a couple of game plays to make sure all is well. That way if something crashes the game, I can to make the changes, compress a new copy and put it in there. I keep each set separate so it helps to narrow down the culprit since you get no hint which item is the problem. There isn't even a log file created. Gee what we have to go through to work around the Maxis programming, first some genius like jfade has to have the trouble to make tools to fix their code, then we all have to struggle to get it all to work right. If Maxis junk wasn't so lame, I would be able to just run without CC and then all would be well. Maybe they'll do better with Sims3 ...K

May I ask why you want to decompress them? There's really no difference between compressed and decompressed.


Thank you, glad you enjoy it!


I'd like to see the corrupted files, before and after compression please, to see what's up.


The best thing to do would be to remove all your downloads and start the game, the slowly start moving them back in until you find the problem file that's causing the crash. That's the easiest method.


Thanks for the link, I'll check it out when I get the chance.

You can post suggestions here if you'd like.


Sorry for taking so long to reply everyone, was out of town and the hotel didn't have free internet access. Needless to say, I was not amused.

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The reason people want to be able to uncompress files is some other utilities can't work with the compressed versions. For example Delphy's Download Organiser throws an error when trying to read compressed files, and Paladin's Sim Catagorizor corrupts a compressed file when trying to save changes made to it. It's all very well compressing them but they need to work well with other common utilities to be of any actual use. May I humbly suggest you contact Delphy at ModTheSims2 and Paladin at SimWardrobe and see if between you, you can iron out the problems. It may be as simple as sharing the code with them that reads a compressed file...

Hope this helps you, and that you can help us...

But the code that reads compressed files is already publicly available. This program uses an algorithm straight from Maxis/EA and it is well documented at MTS2. Therefore, the other people who make programs should be able to make their programs run just fine with these files, and if there are problems, it is their responsibility to fix their own code, not my job to make stuff backwards compatible for them. I know for a fact that at least one of the coders out there is aware of the problem but has yet to do anything about it, and the other one, I'm not sure about, but they've never responded to my attempts to contact them in the past, so I'm not inclined to try and contact them again. :-/

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Sorry if I'm a bother, but I want to learn to use this tool right. I decompressed all my files. I have 70,00-80,000 files of downloads. No matter what the size is of the download directory, I find if I go over 40,000 files my game crashes. I removed all of the downloads and put them back little by little. It still crashes over about 40,000 files. Any suggestions? I am desperate

I'm wondering if that's a specific limit to folders built into the file system and/or game for one particular folder. Try splitting downloads into different subfolders or something. That or clean up and purge content you don't use anymore.

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I've always had them in subfolders under the downloads according to site. And I do purge as I can...since I can't usually get in the game I have to use Sims Categorizer and that only shows the meshes... oh well, thanks for trying. Wish it would have worked