I'll be totally honest, I never really cared that much about Viola because I never concerned myself about her existence. As far as I knew, she was a deleted sim we didn't know much about that didn't make the cut. I never really went that far as insisting on her actually being in Verona... Untill I started cleaning the neighborhood. I came across all the references that maxis tried to delete last minute (and forgot along the road). These make it clear she was another member of the Monty Family, and they even forgot to properly remove her from the family tree. SimPE, at least the version I was using at the time, and HoodChecker both throw an error if you try to view it, because there's two improperly unremoved sims from it (they won't appear, but they're basically considered as... Half-there). We also have her leftovers in the lot file, but what clarifies she was a Monty is actually the picture where she's with Olivia and Mercutio. Maxis NEVER takes pictures of random townies: it picks carefully the angulation of the picture, the characters in it, their poses, even their speech bubbles. No way a random girl just snuck in a picture like that. Furthermore, I do not have remembrance of any townie being called Viola: Maxis, in fact, never lets townies generate with names premade sims already have. Do you recall any townie named Bianca or Patrizio? Although the name was indeed in live.package, it seems to have eventually been blacklisted as reserved for a premade rather than randomly generated characters.
Also, the memories: In VV they are a mess, but Maxis kind of shifted the Monty ones around and seems to have substituted Viola's memory instances with Romeo's, which makes some sims remember he was born before Mercutio.
So, what we know : Her relationships, her being the eldest sibling, where she used to live with her family (Stratford 111 street). But it's still not enough.
Bear with me, because the slightly more complex part comes now.
I tried to execute many different experiments to bring her back. Genuinely they weren't working because at the end of the day I was making a sim called Viola, slapping her in my game and pretending it was the real one. I wasn't actually giving Viola her old instance, character file and using the leftover data to my favor. I tried all sort of stuff like creating her in CAS, making her be born naturally... All were... I mean, again, it was "Viola", but never actually "Viola" where she was meant to be.
While experimenting, I figured out how the game creates new sims. Explained down below, because this will be important for later:
What dictates how character files are created and how sim instances are inherited are two separate mechanisms that work simultaneously. Instances are dictated by the SCID, or Sim Creation Index, while there's an "integrated function" (inappropriate name, I know) that cannot be edited by the player that spawns Character files in the Characters folder differently.
A new character is created, therefore the SCID needs to place its data in the index somewhere. At the same time, the integrated function creates a new character file and links it to the index the SCID dictates, thanks to the GUID system (called also "Sim ID" in the SDSC, or Sim Description). The integrated function reads ALL files in the Characters folder starting from N00X_User00000 and as soon as it finds an empty spot, the new character file gets placed there. If you, for example, create a new character in Veronaville, the first spot occupied will be N003_User00008 because it's the first one that is vacant.
The SCID doesn't do this. The SCID remembers the last spot it placed a character into, and it will read again from that spot. If the last spot was number 15, the SCID will start reading from there (that one spot included) and then continue placing characters starting from there. It never backreads, UNLESS its "memory" is modified to convince the SCID the last spot read was another. If it instead thinks the last spot read was 1, it will start reading again from slot 1 and onward. The SCID ignores instances that are already filled and it moves onto the next one that's empty.
Psst. If you're curious to know, the SCID can't read any value smaller than 1 (the first spawned character will always have an index of 0x0001) This is why once it reaches the max allowed instance and goes into overflow, it resets back to zero and the neighborhood crashes.
This kinda means that the risk of inheriting stray instances is slim to none, or, in vulgar language, close to being bullshit. The devs knew it could happen and implemented a failsafe to ensure you wouldn't end up with a toddler thinking they're someone's grandfather.
Now, I have heard words of the SCID randomly resetting automatically, but it has never happened in my testing despite how far I went. If this changes, I will document my findings her and modify given information.
This might be weird, coming from someone who does clean templates. Although this might make them seem like unnecessary, do know that they also fix many other things like inconsistent memories, weird relationships, missing or wrong genetics, and many others. (For example, Nina Caliente, in a non-clean Pleasantview, considers herself to be the mother of Alexander Goth and the sister of Cassandra Goth. If they meet, these relationships will trigger and We Do Not Want That).
But, back to Viola. Basically, what does this mean? Seth Bui, the character that took her spot, didn't just "spawn" in the game and took over her instance, because the SCID would've never allowed for this to happen. Viola got deleted in time to overwrite her character file with new data (opposed to the cloned Skip, Darleen and Michael in PV and Nervous in ST that got deleted last minute and there was no time to overwrite them).
This much likely means that the developers opened Viola's character file, changed everything inside of it, and then saved the character file with the new data. The instance was hastily modified. They forgot relationships, and I'm sure they didn't even have the time to touch many things that weren't necessary to touch. (The instance stores data such as the genetics, the personality, aspirations etc. Etc.) One thing I know for sure they touched is her personality, because it has been modified to follow the convention of that of townies. Everything else? Hmm, except for making the game treat her as male instead of female and as an elderly repairman, I doubt much changed.
So… We know how she's dressed. We know her hair color and skin color. But her face? Well, WE DO have her side profile. There's another beta picture where she's seen at 3/4 angle. Since it's much likely Seth's genetics didn't get modified, she might have light blue eyes as well.
I copied her side profile pixel by pixel for as many pixels I could count. I swear. It was exhausting, but I managed to do it. I replicated it in 3D, and that already helped with establishing more or less her full face. For the rest, I got some help from the person that's insane at making faces (carrit) and that's how I ended up with Viola's face. I would like to point out how mine doesn't look like those carrit uploaded. It's a different thing on its own, which is why I will upload her as a .sims2pack at some point.
So! Now, we have all this stuff. How do we put it together? Well, first of all, we need our 3D model, face geometry included, ready. Then, we have to do exactly what Maxis did 21 years ago. We need to open Seth's character file and replace every... single... thing. Bit by bit, instance by instance.
It was insane! I had to ensure every instance, every file, every little thing inside the package matched exactly. I had to be careful with not adding too many references the game would just reject. I had to make sure the instances would match the ones of the previous file I was overwriting, and so many other things that are so boring, easy in theory and requiring extreme precision in execution, but basically all identical to this. I usually like jolting down everything I do but trust me when I say I just did the same action 92 times. Oh, also, it didn't work on my first time! Took me so many attempts. As you can probably tell, it left me a little exhausted but I'm glad I succeeded in the end.
That's why it might seem like just a girl slapped there to someone external to this, but to me it is so so much more.
Restore her yourself here
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