Zoom and rotate camera stopped working

[faesutherland]

This is an ongoing issue with my Sims 2 game and I've yet to find a solution. Basically, my game and camera will be perfectly fine and then, for what seems to be absolutely no reason, both zoom and rotate camera will stop working. If I try to rotate using the buttons in the UI, it will rotate while I hold the little curved arrow button but when I release it the camera will jump back to its original starting position every single time. When I try to zoom in, whether with my mouse wheel or the keyboard shortcuts or the buttons in the bottom left of the UI, it will zoom in a tiny bit and then jump back to the original starting point every single time. It does this in both Neighborhood view and in the lot.

I've been playing all day and have done nothing different nor added any CC, changed any settings etc. I had closed my game for about an hour and when I loaded it for the second time today, the zoom/rotate were borked. In the past when this has happened, my only solution has been to uninstall and reinstall. However, I JUST did that two weeks ago (for this very reason) and I really don't want to do it again, especially since it seems it will just reoccur at some random moment for no apparent reason.

Has anyone got any knowledge of a glitch like this? In my googling for every combination of the words "sims 2" "camera" "zoom" "rotate" "problem" "glitch" "won't work" etc, I found several posts of people with the same issue but none of those posts had replies. I've tried everything I can think of - I pulled out my CC, it still did it. Pulled out my entire Sims 2 folder and let the game regenerate it, it still did it. Tried using the keyboard shortcuts, it still does it. I have no camera mods, so it's not that. I even changed my mouse out and it still does it.

Please, please, does anyone know what could make this happen? My computer is high-end enough and so is the graphics card/processor/ram so it's not that my computer can't run the game, because it can and at full graphics/detail etc without issue. I just don't know what else to do.

[witch]

Dunno about the sims, but one game I play (Lotro) has a really weird keybinding on the 'x'. If you hit it inadvertently, your camera keeps reverting to the toon's viewpoint. Very disconcerting.

I am wondering if the sims has a preset key that restores a previous viewpoint? I vaguely remember you can set and return to viewpoints. Is it possible this is happening? Or that you have managed to trigger a default camera position?

[faesutherland]

I'm really not sure if there's a way to lock the camera.  I couldn't find anything about it by googling, just something about angle presets that don't seem to involve actually locking the camera in place, just allowing you to find a previously used angle quickly.  It's possible I might have hit a button to cause it to happen, but I have no idea what that could be and since I haven't been able to find anybody else with the same issue whose gotten it fixed, I'm at a loss.

ETA: Actually, I was wrong, the angle preset info my googling found refers to a Sims 3 camera function, not Sims 2.  I can't find anything to indicate that this might be some kind of feature I accidentally triggered.

[DrNerd]

I am wondering if the sims has a preset key that restores a previous viewpoint? I vaguely remember you can set and return to viewpoints.

Use ctrl/4-9 to set camera angles. 1-3 are the speed controls, obviously, but you can use the numbers 4 through 9 to set your camera angle. If you set them in CameraMan Mode, they'll only work in CameraMan Mode, but if you set them during gameplay, they'll work any time. Once you've set an angle with ctrl/4, all you have to do is hit "4" and the camera will jump to the position you set. There aren't any preset default camera angles, though, so it's not something you could trigger accidentally.