Deserted businesses and community lots

[Alwen]

Mary-Sue Pleasant owns a level 10 home business in my game but suddenly instead of the hordes of townies normally buying flowers only two customers showed up. It's the same on community lots there are the normal NPCs and 2 townies. I removed all of my downloads and tried again but still the community lots and businesses are deserted.

Any idea what could have caused this problem or how to fix it?

[jsalemi]

Did you recently change anything to do with your video card or drivers?  Sometimes the game mis-interprets the capabilites of new cards and/or drivers, and lowers the allowable number of visitors per lot.

[Alwen]

No as far as I know nothing was changed.

[jrd]

Add

Code:

intProp MaxNumOfVisitingSims 20

to your userstartup.cheat file

Also take note that some mods may negatively influence visitor count. Paladin's customer adjustor, if placed, is set to a default 3 for example.

[Alwen]

Jordi I wanted to try your suggestion but I couldn't find a userstartup.cheat file only some globalstartup.cheat files.
Is that a sign that my game is totally screwed up or do I need to do something to get the game to generate that file?

Also might updating my video drivers actually help for once in this case?
My graphic card is a  NVIDIA GeForce FX5700LE.

[jsalemi]

Jordi I wanted to try your suggestion but I couldn't find a userstartup.cheat file only some globalstartup.cheat files.
Is that a sign that my game is totally screwed up or do I need to do something to get the game to generate that file?

It doesn't exist by default, nor does the game ever create it.  UserStartup.cheat is a text file you manually create that pre-loads certain conditions for you, such as aliases for common cheat commands, and game conditions you want on from the beginning, such as turning on the testing cheats by default, or lowering the volume of the TV.  There's a couple of examples of what can be in a UserStartup.cheat file in recent discussions here -- just do a search on 'userstartup' and you'll find them.

[Alwen]

Thanks guys the stratup.cheat file did it. The townies are back fighting, playing pranks and generally annoying my sims. And I'm asking myself why I wanted them back.
Thanks for the fast help.