Hmmm. So, I have this community lot. It's the One-Twenty-Five Cafe, a Maxis Downtown lot that I edited soon after I got Nightlife. I've been playing this particular lot for months - it's one of my three "default" lots to send sims when they go Downtown. And all of a sudden, it's started making the game crash to desktop.
I've tried many things to diagnose and fix the problem:
1. deleting groups.cache
2. sending sims from different families to the lot to see if it's family- or sim-specific - it isn't.
3. sending sims in different modes of transport (owned car vs taxi) to see if it's transport-type specific - it isn't.
4. replacing the lot file with a backup version.
5. going into the lot in Build Mode and editing it just a little then re-saving.
6. moving the lot into the Lot Bin and back out again.
The crash happens immediately after loading as the visiting sim/s gets out of their car or taxi if it's the first time I've tried to enter the lot since deleting groups.cache, or midway through loading (on the lot loading screen) if I haven't deleted groups.cache. If I have debug mode running, the log file that's written is a Sims2Exception log that starts off with the time & date, then
Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION. My local friendly sysadmin says this is a "standard Windows error that means an application is trying to access a bit of memory that doesn't belong to it". But I don't understand why it's just started happening
now.
Other salient details:
1. I noticed when I replaced the lot file with the backup that the file hadn't been edited since January -
neither copy had been.
2. I installed the Nightlife Patch 2 about a week ago and updated all the Pescado hacks that needed updating.
3. I haven't added or deleted any custom content apart from those hacks.
4. None of my other lots are affected, that I know of. And I have visited this lot a few times since installing the Patch.
5. This is the weirdest part, and is possibly completely unrelated... when I was looking through my lot files in SimPE to try to find the file ID number of the lot that kept crashing, I found that
the house I built most recently has completely fubar-ed jpg/tga/png Images.
Every single one of the 11 Images, that normally show variants of the house with walls down/up, roof on/off etc, are all the same image. This:
That looks profoundly broken, doesn't it? It looks kinda like the game camera got stuck on one of the neighbourhood decoration towers. But that file is
N002_Lot148.package, a residential lot that plays perfectly well. My broken One-Twenty-Five Cafe was previously
N002_Lot54.package and is now, having been lotbinned,
N002_Lot150.package. So I can't see how or why the residential lot being broken would affect the community lot - especially as, despite having all those photos the same, the residential lot is playable! But the fact I built the house
after the last time I could get into the One-Twenty-Five cafe, and haven't been able to get into it since makes me wonder if it
could be related?
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