Neighborhood Watch
Version 1.2
by Dave Sanborn
(n_watch@yahoo.com)

DESCRIPTION
Neighborhood Watch is a quick and dirty little program that I wrote with
Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion (http://www.clickteam.com) to overcome a
problem that I saw with Maxis' otherwise excellent game, The Sims: the
inability to have multiple neighborhoods simultaneously existing, without
manually copying in your data files before the game. While it's true that
there are other unofficial methods of doing this, I either couldn't get
those methods to work properly (in the case of command line switches), or
found them unneccesarily complex (in the case of certain game launching
utilities).

Using your currently existing neighborhood as a template, Neighborhood
Watch will create or delete as many extra neighborhoods as you'd like for
your game, will swap them in and out of the Sims UserData directory as
needed, and then launch The Sims for you automatically!

INSTALLATION
To install, simply extract the files to a temporary directory, and run
setup. A Neighborhood Watch group will be installed in your Windows Start
menu.

FEEDBACK & BUG REPORTS
Want to give me an "attaboy"? Want to tell me that I suck? Have some
suggestions for the program, or maybe just some bugs to report? You can
send it all to 'dsanborn@iname.com', making sure that you put "Neighbor-
hood Watch" somewhere in the subject of your message.

DONATIONWARE
Neighborhood Watch is donationware. If you use it, do some good in the
world, and make a donation to your favorite charity. If you don't have
a favorite charity, mine happens to be the National Kidney Foundation
(http://www.kidney.org) and I would urge you to donate to them.

CHANGES SINCE BETA VERSION
-- Compiled using standard Windows graphics routines as the default,
rather than DirectX. This should take care of the weirdness with
redrawing the Neighborhood Watch window when you exit out of The Sims.
-- No more batch files! All of the file copying/deletion routines are
done internally.

CHANGES SINCE 1.0
-- Added the ability to launch The Sims in 1024x768 mode
-- Made errors more descriptive; now, users are told when there's not
enough disk space to create a neighborhood, the UserData directory can't
be found, or when a neighborhood directory can't be found.
-- If a neighborhood directory can't be found, Neighborhood Watch now
fixes the NWatch.ini file automatically by removing the offending
neighborhood.

CHANGES SINCE 1.1
-- Fixed a problem with incorrect error messages appearing.
-- Fixed a problem where, if The Sims crashed or froze mid-session and
forced the user to exit the program in an improper way, Neighborhood
Watch wouldn't get a chance to rename the directories that it manipulated
for that session, and then wouldn't be able to find the directories in
the next session.
-- Fixed a bug where neighborhood directories containing files with the
read-only attribute would not actually be deleted.

LEGAL STUFF
This software is provided as is, with no guarantee of fitness for any
particular task. The user assumes full responsibility for its use. Though
the software has been thoroughly tested, the developer is not responsible
for any files that are deleted or damaged through its use. Consider yourself
warned, and back up those UserData directories!!!
