MIA Unsavory Charlatans

[PA]

I've got a pretty good idea what I'm going to need to do about this, but I am curious to find out if there might be a cause.

I had noticed for a while that there were no unsavory charlatans hanging around the vacation 'hoods.  They were there when I'd first started playing BV, and as I recall, I'd installed the Director's Cut before that and then updated it for BV, so I did have Awesomeware.  A good bit of non-Awesome as well.  Anyhow, point is, I believe I had nounlinkondelete at the time I saw charlatans in my game.

I just looked through SimPE and found out that all three of my charlatans are both unlinked and have no character data.  I understand this is Bad.  I'd never done anything unbecoming with them AFAIK, just normal game interactions.  No idea when they went MIA either, just that they hadn't shown up for a few vacations.  I very recently installed FT and had some issues for a few hours, though I believe now things are in order.

Might this be a clear sign of the coming apocalypse?  Could other, older missing character data have caused it?  These three Sims are the first that anything like this has happened to--I know where the other unlinked Sims came from.

ETA:  Some further investigation indicates whatever happened to them happened very recently, as my pre-FT backup contains them intact.  I've got more options now, though I am very curious about whether or not this might be something fundamental to my 'hood.  Hardly any point in going back to it if they, or some other Sims, are going to disappear on me no matter what I do.

[rufio]

I don't have an answer to the problem, but are there character files in your hood's directory ending in .1.package?  Since installing FT, I have actually had a number of playables (most within the same small range of NIDs) be marked as unlinked in SimPE.  Nothing was wrong with them, so I checked out their character files, and discovered that there would be, say, a "N00X_UserYYYYY.package" file, and then also a "N00X_UserYYYYY.1.package" file, the latter containing the resources SimPE couldn't find in the first.  Like you, I didn't do anything different with them, and almost all of them pre-dated the installation of FT and were previously fine.  I haven't seen anything blow up yet, and it might be fine, since the resources are there, but if this is related and someone has an explanation, I'd be interested in hearing it.

[jezzer]

"I don't have an answer to your problem, but let me throw a bunch of random filenames at you anyway."

Trying to be the next Shouty Vole, Rufio?

[rufio]

No, I asked a question to find out if my issue might be related; it should not be random and incomprehensible to someone who knows the basic anatomy of their TS2 save folder and can find neighborhood packages and open them in SimPE.  I've actually thought about making a thread about this in this forum in the past, but decided to wait to see if something actually blew up first.

[PA]

Can't say it looks related to what's happening with my game, rufio.  I do have one file that ends with .1.package--it's for a stray pet, and it isn't unlinked.  It's not duplicated either as far as I can tell.  It does pre-date FT.

I figure my game will make new charlatans when they are needed, though I certainly would like to know what nuked them in the first place.  I looked around a bit more, and saw a thread about charlatans specifically that apparently the game sometimes burninates some of them on its own...suppose that could have happened.  Would it be a good idea to use the lot debugger/Deleted 2 to delete them, or rather just leave them as they are?