Food in thought bubble = squiggly lines?

[pseudonymph]

Hi, y'all.

I own a restaurant in my game, and I have 3 employees (host, chef, server), but they all seem to chip in w/ trying to "sell" the food on the restaurant menu. Sometimes the food in their thought bubbles appear as squiggly lines though, assuming food is what's trying to appear. Has anyone else experienced this? It's driving me nuts, and I'd really hate to have to do a full reinstall.

I'm playing w/ a no-cd.exe crack, and my dumb ass tried to use Maxis' patch over it - could this be where I went wrong?

Thanks,
Totally Non-Awesome.

[J. M. Pescado]

Some of the foods are bugged and should not be placed in the menu. You will get squiggly lines and errors in-game if you allow those foods to be ordered.

[pseudonymph]

Thanks for your response.

Okay, I have about 4 on the menu right now. I'll take them off one by one and use process of elimination.

Question: I used the Lot Debugger to "clear gossip" and "clear trash"...this can do nothing but help, right?

Also, I only have like 5 items on the menu, and I've seen them all appear in thought bubbles perfectly fine before; does this not matter and mean that the foods could still be bugged regardless? Like sometimes they appear in bubbles and sometimes they don't?

[J. M. Pescado]

Clear Trash removes pointless spam memories, many of which can be out of sequence or the artifacts of trying to fix stuff. Clear Gossip wipes out the gossip tokens, which will reduce your sims' conversational topics for a bit. This isn't really good or bad, it just is.

[pseudonymph]

Gotcha. I ended up just turning headlines off; not gonna let that mess drive me nuts lol, not when Sims 3 is on the way. Thanks for your help.

[Elvie]

Which foods are bugged?