I believe the issue in my game is now fixed, however I'd like to know what caused it so I can avoid it happening again in the future.
My sim Aiden went Downtown to Buy Espresso. To cut a very long story short, he could not buy espresso for himself. Every time he tried, at the point where the barista put the coffee down on the counter and the game extracted $15 from him, he would "jump" and reset, making the coffee disappear.
I found that:
1) Aiden could buy espresso for a friend and the friend received the first espresso correctly. The second espresso got made, but again the game jumped & reset Aiden at the point where he should have received his coffee.
2) Other sims were still able to use the same espresso cart, the jumping was unique to Aiden.
3) Other sims who
also had not previously met this particular barista (Ally Futa) were still able to buy coffee as usual.
4) Debug mode Force Error --> Reset and/or Deleting the barista and the espresso cart made no difference.
5) Buy Mode deleting of the coffee cart & replacing made no difference.
Reading the debug mode log, it seemed it was
'Soc&Rel: Set Familiarity Between Sims' and
'NPC - Add Encounter Relationship' causing the jumping. Aiden seemed to reset at the point in the coffee-buying process
where you'd usually add the barista to your Relationship panel. My test sim, an ex-Townie who's also an Elder, with very few memories, who also had not previously met this particular barista was unaffected.
I wondered if the problem was due to Aiden's spouse having died less than a sim day earlier. So I checked Aiden's memories with SimPE, Fixed some memories with Theo's plugin, and deleted irrelevant invisible memories. This made no difference to the espresso cart jumping. Went back in and checked Extremely's memories (Extremely being the dead spouse) and found he was lacking the "I am Dead" token, so I gave him that and also unchecked Aiden & Extremely's Married box, and of course Committed the changes. Aiden still could not buy coffee.
Then I checked all the hacks I have and pulled out the ones that are no longer needed for Nightlife Patch 2. Aiden continued to jump. I double-checked that I had the most recent versions of everything from the Nightlife version of moreawesomethanyou.zip (I did). Still no use.
Finally, I pulled out every hack including hacked objects, deleted groups.cache and cigen.package, and booted up the game again. This time Aiden was able to buy the espresso, gained a "Met Ally" memory, and had Ally Futa added to his Relationships panel. I tried adding hacks back slowly, but every time Aiden could still buy espresso. It's kinda a false test because of course he will be able to buy coffee, because he now has Ally in his Relationships panel. So the game doesn't have to create that memory or relationship, and isn't going to jump. I now have all the hacks back in, and coffee is still happening.
I am pretty damn sure I don't have anything that's incompatible with NL Patch 2, now. But clearly
something was wrong. Does anyone More Awesome than me have an opinion on what it might have been (other than that All Baratrons Suck)? I have logs if required, lots of them, all starting with
Error: Bad gosub tree number and going on to mention
'Soc&Rel: Set Familiarity Between Sims' and
'NPC - Add Encounter Relationship'.
[Stupid buggy game. I've been working on trying to fix this since 21:48, and it's now 02:44. Five bloody hours to fix an apparently minor problem, because I was worried it was symptomatic of a much worse problem, like corrupted invisible memories all over the Neighbourhood
.]
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