Body Shop woes

[professorbutters]

When I open Body Shop, there is no mannequin or background, just a black spot, and the thumbnails show my saved sims with nude textures (not all of them, just some.)

I did a binary search, and it seemed to be some downloaded hair.  I had to put those into a special "move before using BodyShop" folder.  It really only calmed down after I deleted cigen.package.

Today I wanted to use BodyShop and I did remember to yank the hair.  Not enough, evidently.  I try to keep all new content quarantined in a special folder.  It's only happy if I yank *both* the "new content" and the "new hair" folder and deleting cigen.package if I've tried to run it with the files in.  ANYTHING downloaded on or after July 28, 2008 makes it choke.  The actual age of creation for the file doesn't seem to matter, either.

There do not seem to be any problems in CAS or in game play, only Body Shop.

I *can* keep yanking the "new content" folders, which is a pain, because I add to it from time to time,  or create a special "move it" folder.  But if it's fixable, I would like to fix it, because this is getting old. 

NB:  I'd appreciate help, but I can't follow instructions that begin with "did you use Clean Installer?" or "First, open SimPE," because neither program is available for Mac.

PB

[seelindarun]

Did you already try to eliminate the file limit issue as a possible cause?  It seems sort of an unlikely solution to me since that problem usually manifests in both the game and BodyShop, but I remember another mac user who seemed to have a lower ceiling in BodyShop than in the game.

If that's not it, have you tried to figure out if there is anything in common between the hair folder and the new content?  Do they share meshes, come from the same creator, or anything else like that?

[professorbutters]

I was actually able to add some new content from some specific trusted sites, All-About-Style in particular, without any trouble.  You may have a point about number of files anyway. The stuff that's causing problems is *recent* Parsimonius stuff, XmSims and Myos, Nouk---in fact, almost every new hair I added.  The clothing that's causing trouble are downloaded objects from SimsDesign Avenue (which might make sense)  and several files from The Dark Project on MTS2, which doesn't. 

I thought I had tried removing everything *except* the troublesome files and had the same problem, but I may try that again anyway.  The problem is that running that particular kind of test temporarily breaks my Body shop and requires cleanup (deleting the cigen package, pulling the thumbnails, etc) and I'm afraid of doing something that will permanently bork my game.

[seelindarun]

As a quick and dirty check, you can just see how many package files you have in your dl folder.  In Tiger or later, use a spotlight search in the finder for .package extensions in Downloads.  Depending on your specs, the maximum number of files allowed to be open for any single application in OS X is between 8,000 - 12,000.  Roughly.  I've heard of some people who hit the ceiling with slightly less than 6K; I'm sure available RAM has something to do with it.  YMMV.

You can search about the max file limit issue on macs here, or elsewhere, to learn how to get around it, if you feel like that would be less trouble than torturing your Bodyshop further.

[professorbutters]

It's 6667 (interesting number), and that is with the "difficult" files in. I'll check the topic you suggest.