Did I fix it or make it worse?

[moondance]

I attempted to load one of my regular lots, and the game crashed.  I tried again, and it crashed again.  This has happened before--lots gone bad for no apparent reason, so I did what I normally do--I moved the family out of the lot, bulldozed it, and attempted to move them into another lot.  However, the new lot also crashed.  I tried this several times, with no luck.

I'd already had reason to suspect that I had a "bad" sim in that neighborhood someplace, due to recent random crashes that I believed might be caused by the "bad" sim being about to do a walkby, so I thought "okay, maybe I've found my culprit."

The problem was, I now had a family of three sims in the sim bin, and I couldn't move them out of the sim bin, and didn't want to just delete them, because I know that doing this is a Very Bad Thing.

My solution (it was 3 in the morning and I was getting over the flu) was this: Since I needed to know which sim was "bad" (or if none of them were)  I loaded up another lot and used the handy dandy teleporter shrub to attempt to teleport each one over for a visit.  The two adult parent sims teleported in just fine, but when I attempted to teleport in the teenage son, the game crashed.  I tried this once more, just for the helluvit, and it crashed again.  I then went into SimPE and turned the teenager (poor Kato) into a -dead- sim.

I was then able to move the parent sims out of the sim bin and into a nice new house with no problems.  Kato (poor kid) now shows up on their family tree as dead, and everything seems okay--but I'm paranoid, cuz I basically have no clue what I just did. 

Is this as "fixed" as it seems, or did I mess things up even worse? Is there anything else I need to do? FWIW, the sim in question was using custom hair and skin, but other sims are using the same hair or the same skin and seem fine.  The game hasn't crashed since I killed poor Kato.   

(Poor guy, since the last time I'd played him, his girlfriend had grown up and married his best friend--I guess I can't blame him for losing the will to live, but damn, he didn't have to try to take the rest of the neighborhood with him when he went.)

[syberspunk]

(Poor guy, since the last time I'd played him, his girlfriend had grown up and married his best friend--I guess I can't blame him for losing the will to live, but damn, he didn't have to try to take the rest of the neighborhood with him when he went.)

Lol. Well... with a name like Kato... what do you expect? Greedy, selfish, limelight stealin sleaze.

I don't know much about game crashin, but if it is a specific sim... typically that is due to custom content they are usin. Are you sure that every bit of custom content that Kato had has been used by other sims without problems? Maybe you had custom eyebrows, make-up, or somethin else that was unique to him?

Other than that, it seems like you have staved off problems for now. But just to be sure, I think a dead sim must have a dead token, and should also have the Is Ghost property checked. Someone else who knows more about sim data might be able to help you. If the InSim were working with Pets, I would recommend using that to set a sim as being properly dead. If you don't have Pets, then by all means use InSim. If you don't want mega hacks like the InSim in your game, then just temporarly load the game up with InSim installed, and then when you're done using it, delete it from your game if you're worried that it might mess things up, which it shouldn't. But I can understand why ppl get paranoid about it. Besides, so far, reports have shown that InSim doesn't kill puppies, it just makes them pee and poop objects.

Ste

[moondance]

hehe, I have no idea why I named the poor guy Kato. Most of my sims have disgustingly normal names because i tend to name 'em whatever name I heard last on tv.  I liked him though, he was fun--a very neat sim with a complete slob for a mom, he spent most of his childhood cleaning the shower doing the dishes--it was fun to feel sorry for him.

I only have the base game--my computer is a P3 500mhz, I'm fairly amazed the base game runs, and haven't had the nerve to tempt fate with an EP.  And yeah, I'm pretty sure the sim had no other custom content that other sims aren't successfully using--I don't use make-up on any of my guy sims, and he was wearing the maxis clothes that he transformed into when he grew up from a child.  The only other thing he <i>might</i> have had were custom eyes, but I don't think so.

Yes, I did give the dearly departed a dead token and checked Is Ghost, so that's all good.

I DO have Insim--I like to sim dangerously and all that--but what can you do with Insim to set a sim as properly dead when the sim is stuck in the sim bin and can't be loaded into a house Kato was?  If there was something more simple I could have done I'd love to know about it, because whatever happens to me once will no doubt happen to me on a semi-regular basis, especially if it's annoying.

I dunno, maybe I can export what's left of him with SimPE and try to open him with BodyShop and see what happens---if that crashes, would that prove that it's some custom content, or would a generally corrupt sim crash BodyShop in some way also?