Sim stuck at Secret Society - can't get home

[jolrei]

I've searched the forums (fora?  forae?) for a sign that someone else had this problem, and, while there are some similar issues noted previously, they don't seem to specifically address the problem that I am experiencing.  Problem is this:

When my Sim gets abducted and gets to the SS (La Tour Academie attached to a custom hood), he wanders around the place aimlessly for a bit, but can't get home.  No phone interaction allowed to call the limo from the SS to "go home" (the only phone interaction permitted is the phone hack "number of rings" option).  In the end, I exited back to the main uni hood without saving.  Back at the dorm, the limo pulled up (odd?) and he got out, but was not recognized by the game as being a SS member (no option to "call-go to SS"). 

Additionally, the whole time he was on the SS lot, he stayed in street clothes (no SS jacket offered).  When he got out of the limo at the SS lot, after being abducted, he stood on the street for a bit, and then just walked in (still in street clothes).  At one point, I hit "buy mode" to see if I could get him a jacket out of a wardrobe, and the game returned an error (was in debug mode at the time), and started generating SS members including most of the dormies in the uni.  I think there were about 20 dormies on the lot by the time I exited without saving.

Once back at the dorm, I used Insim's education adjuster to make him an SS member, and then had him "call-go to SS".  He got the limo fine, and went off to the SS, but when he showed up, he still had no SS jacket (not really familiar with SS abductions/inductions - how do they normally get the jacket?).  This time he could call for the limo to go home, and it arrived, but in transit the game hung (black screen) refusing to reload the dorm.

I have only awesome hacks, including the "no SS respawn", "no dormie spawn", final exam fix, and much of the rest of the director's cut for UNI loaded.  Additionally, I have Jenflower's woohoo teens and Insim.  I'm also running with all cut scenes/animations turned off (cos I get bored with them).

Anyone else noted this problem, or know of any conflicts with hacks/mods?  I'm thinking that it might be a computer memory problem (the game had slowed the 'puter down a bit, which is odd, since the bloody thing has more memory than I do, has never had graphics card problems, and has a late P4 3Gig processor).

I also recall that the abduction happened just as the Sim was supposed to run off to his final exam - he got the 1 hour warning as he was stepping out of the limo), which may have caused an internal game problem (but what do I know?).

I finally used Insim to remove him from the SS again, and will hopefully be able to recreate the scenario this evening (hope to get a new abduction), and see if it works better.  If not, hopefully I'll get an error log that can shed light on this.  The rest of the uni and hood work fine (as they should, being relatively new and built clean).

Any advice, speculation, or humorous commentary welcome.

[phyllis_p]

I don't know what happened, but I can address a few things ...

Once back at the dorm, I used Insim's education adjuster to make him an SS member, and then had him "call-go to SS".  He got the limo fine, and went off to the SS, but when he showed up, he still had no SS jacket (not really familiar with SS abductions/inductions - how do they normally get the jacket?).  This time he could call for the limo to go home, and it arrived, but in transit the game hung (black screen) refusing to reload the dorm.

How they get the jacket is, when they are kidnapped and first arrive, the members all come outside and cheer for the new inductee.  Then the inductee spins around and is wearing the jacket.  After that, you have the jacket available in your everyday outfits, but you have to select it yourself before you go to the SS house or else you'll just be in street clothes.

I also recall that the abduction happened just as the Sim was supposed to run off to his final exam - he got the 1 hour warning as he was stepping out of the limo), which may have caused an internal game problem (but what do I know?).

That might have something to do with it.  I know that sometimes I've had a student at the SS house close to exam time, and a few hours in advance I'll get a message that he needs to go home because he has a final coming up (or somesuch -- I quit going around exam time, so I don't remember exactly how the message goes).

[jolrei]

How they get the jacket is, when they are kidnapped and first arrive, the members all come outside and cheer for the new inductee.  Then the inductee spins around and is wearing the jacket.  After that, you have the jacket available in your everyday outfits, but you have to select it yourself before you go to the SS house or else you'll just be in street clothes.

Yes, well, my sim got out of the limo after what seemed to be a glitch free abduction, but there was no "coming outside and cheering" and no "spinning around to get jacket" going on.  Seemed rather anticlimactic.  Hopefully a re-abduction now that the exam is past will succeed.  If not, I guess I'm going to have to continue my crash course in "error logs for dummies".

[miramis]

I'm also trying to work my way through a major issue involving the Secret Society in my own game.  It's not precisely like yours, but there are some similarities, this is what happened.

(This is on a greek house lot)
One of 5 sims living on the lot was spotted blocking the fridge doing nothing, I ordered her to move elsewhere which she did after a short hesitation, it was just after that I realised she was about to be abducted by the SS (this was the first actual hint of an upcoming issue), she should not have moved from the where she was for a start.  Anyway, she was inducted just fine, and while she was there managed to get her picture taken (I used the cheat to make one of the SS members selectable temporarily) and then she went home to the greek house as normal.

It was a few sim hours later when I realised that my legacy founder (also one of the sims living at the greek house) was missing some options on his phone, namely the 'Call Taxi' & 'Call Transportation' options that should have been there.  He also did not have the option to go to the SS lot like he should have.  I thought he might have been bugged (or his phone) so I set a driveway and car down.  All options were there except for the visit community lot ones, at which point I realised some bad S*** was going on.  I tried having sims running up and down the street looking for a possible stuck invisible limo, I forced errors on everything using the Lot Debugger (screwing up the 30 romantic photo's in his inventory which were his scorecard type of thing) but it did no good.  I tried using the 'Nuke' options on the debugger - all of them in the end, but it was still the same.  I used the 'stuck object remover' on the road.

When I tried calling for a delivery the mobile phone actually disappeared from his inventory    Immediately after trying the 'nuke - scenario controller' option, he was able to invite someone on a date (using the mobile), it went normally until the cab arrived, he could not get in it (not selectable) and it took off for the comm lot without him, actually loading the community lot in Build Mode, with no sims in sight.

I eventually moved them out (less than an hour ago now) and placed a clean backup of the greek house down after bulldozing the first.  They moved in, but while we now have the options back to call taxi's and go to community lots, the Secret Society options appear to have disappeared altogether.  I'm trying to find out why right now.  So yeah, I think there's some sort of issue involving the SS and abductions and transportation, but what is causing it?
*edited to add* The go to SS option is there, I was looking in the wrong place and all seems well here now - I'm wondering if it was caused by fact there are four other members who should be getting abducted anytime too. 

Jolrei, have you tried removing him from the SS, and then getting him abducted again the normal way? 

[jolrei]

Tried it all again yesterday.  Removed some mods from the system (not nossregen or ssfriendcountfix), and reloaded from saved position.  Made sure the chap was removed from the SS using mailbox.

He got abducted again just fine, but when he got to the SS, he got out of the limo and there was no ceremony, no cheering, and all a bit anticlimactic again.  He wandered inside, and hung out with some folks, who seemed happy enough to see him (he's a romance sim and had "really good" relations with several of the female sims there (romance mod working nicely there).

I had to cheat to make him a member of the SS again before he could use the phone.  However before I did this, I tried to switch into "buy" mode, and got a error: "Budget Inventory Check Failure".  I noticed that the SS had no funds (0 simoleans).  Additionally there is no SS jacket selectable in my Sim's wardrobe.

Error log is attached in case anyone wants to look at it and suggest anything.

The upshot of the thing is that I got a bit fed up with it in the end.  I decided to try to run a vanilla version of the abduction to rule in or out the possibility that a mod was conflicting.  However, just as I had saved, unloaded all my hacks/mods, and reloaded the game, my Sim graduated.  I decided to let him graduate and move back to the hood and will try the vanilla approach with my other couple of playable students at some future play period.  I'm sure they'll manage to get abducted, and hopefully get into the SS.

Does anyone know if the "nossregen" or "ssfriendcountfix" hacks cause any conflicts?  They're the only ones that I can immediatly link to the SS part of the game (suppose there could be others).  The budget inventory thing makes me think also that it might be something to do with moving money around the game, but I don't seem to have a lot of money hacks loaded.

Hey ho.  Everything else seems to work fine, and the SS is not really the most useful part of the uni, but now I'm a bit preoccupied with trying to get it to work.  I suppose I needed a project.

[syberspunk]

I've seen this error before.  Have you patched OFB?  I think it was an OFB patch that fixed the sslots.  The way they handled sslot funds was totally wonky.  What happens is... (Or what's supposed to happen ) when your sim arrives on the sslot, the game should switch funds.  It is supposed to store in memory (on a lot token) the household funds of the incoming sim.  It should then swap that number out for what the current funds of the sslot is.  If it is the first time that you ever showed up on that sslot, it creates some default number (I forget what it is, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $39k).  Then, when you are leaving the sslot, it is supposed to record the funds of the sslot, then swap out the original household funds, and save the sslot funds to that token.

There were two borked things with the original code.  First, upon leaving the sslot, the funds wouldn't get switched back properly.  So, when you went back home, your household funds were kinda screwy.  I forget the details, but I think it either overwrote or added up the funds instead.  In either case, it was buggy and you'd usually end up with more money.  Unless, your original household had more than $39k to begin with.    Second, it stupidly tried to record the current sslot funds whenever you went into Buy Mode.  This was totally retardo and didn't make any sense.  I suppose they were trying to prevent you from doing cheaty stuff possibly?  I'm not quite sure what the logic was supposed to be there.   In any case, when I fixed it, I pretty much disabled that BHAV altogether.  It's quite funny, because I only got around to fixing it just about the time, I think, that OFB and/or the patch came out.  In the end, Maxis EA actually fixed it!  They even did the exact same things that I did (disabling that borked Buy Mode BHAV and fixing the swapping of the funds).  On top of that, they actually did it more efficiently (they used the same token to swap the funds in and out of, whereas, I used separate tokens for the sslot funds and the incoming household funds).

Anyhew, if you haven't patched or you don't have OFB (or whatever EP/patch that fixed it), you can try using my fix.  The thing is, I am not sure if it will work for you now that your lot is kinda borked.  I mean, it should at least stop that BHAV from running whenever you go into Buy Mode.  But it most likely will not be able to recover the sslot funds.  You may just have to us a money cheat to reset it to some reasonable amount.


Ste

[jolrei]

OK, will try the hack - syberspunk, your message implies that it may work even if I don't have OFB (which I don't).  Anyhow, what's the worst that can happen?  I might have to reload a backup sometime.  Been there, can go again.

Not personally against using money cheats if necessary to continue the storyline.  Naturally would rather things worked to spec the first time, but if life doesn't work the way you want, you cheat (within reason of course).

I'm not sure the hood/lot is borked - I always exited without saving since my sim never successfully managed to leave the SS in the limo.  Hopefully the hack will solve things.  If not, I can always try the "vanilla" route and see if it seems to be a hack conflict. 

[jolrei]

To update:  I managed to find time to do the ss abduction thing again with another couple of students.  I tried removing any ss hacks I had and then ran a few abductions, adding them back in one at a time.  The nossrespawn hack is fine.  The problem seems to be due to either:

ssfinalexamfix
ssfriendcountfix

It may be that I do not have the correct "uni" version of these hacks, but one of them seems to bork the initial "join secret society" sequence.  Without them, the ss lot seems to work fine.  I think I can live without them for now, especially since the friend count hack never seemed to work in my game.

[syberspunk]

The ssfriendcountfix should theoretically be fine.  I believe that's Pescado's.


The ssfinalexamfix is mine.  If you put that in, and turn on debug mode, let me know if you get an error log.  If so, please post it, so I can take a look at it.  I don't remember if it's backwards compatible with games that only have Uni, but I thought it should be.  I vaguely recall, but I think the fix was so that the money went to the sim's original household funds, instead of going to the sslot funds.  It's not a critical fix, but if you hated that the sslot would "steal" your sim's "hard earned" cash from their final exams, the hack should fix that problem.  I'll try and take a look at this sometime this week, and see if I can find the problem.


Ste

ETA: Doh!  I fixed the mistake.

[jolrei]

The ssfriendcountfix should theoretically be fine.  I believe that's Pescado's.

The ssfriendcountfix is mine.  If you put that in, and turn on debug mode, let me know if you get an error log.

I'm pretty sure you mean the ssfinalexam hack is yours - I can try to test this over the next week or so, and if I get anything I'll post error log as you request.  Can at least tell you whether it seems to have any visible impact.  I'll try to get back to you soon, but may not have a lot of time in game until the weekend.

[syberspunk]

The ssfriendcountfix should theoretically be fine.  I believe that's Pescado's.

The ssfriendcountfix is mine.  If you put that in, and turn on debug mode, let me know if you get an error log.

I'm pretty sure you mean the ssfinalexam hack is yours - I can try to test this over the next week or so, and if I get anything I'll post error log as you request.  Can at least tell you whether it seems to have any visible impact.  I'll try to get back to you soon, but may not have a lot of time in game until the weekend.

Doh!!!  See... this is what I get for waking up in the middle of the night (3AM), and then, instead of trying to go back to sleep, I decide to play Resistance: Fall of Man on my PS3 online, only just for a "little bit" (I attempted to convince myself ) but ended staying up several hours til pratically 5amish, almost 6am in the morning!  And then, coming to work on Monday, pretty much half-brain dead to the point that I can't really concentrate on, replying properly to threads on a site I shouldn't be browsing, much less on real work.

So yeah, I'll probably look at at this later in the week.  As I will most likely be too brain dead to really think about it when I get home after work today.  Heh.  I'm just looking forward to leaving a tad bit earlier today. God, can it be like 4:30 already!


Ste

[ZiggyDoodle]

I was just at the BBS site downloading the Pets and Seasons patches and noticed the following line in the Pets patch:

"Sims can now return home after visiting the Secret Society lot."

[jolrei]

...noticed the following line in the Pets patch:
"Sims can now return home after visiting the Secret Society lot."

Which suggests again that Maxis released an EP before all testing was completed or had inadequate testing - "What? You wanted them to go back to the dorm after being at the SS?  Well, OK." 

Anyhow, not running Pets at the moment (or anything else beyond Uni), so that's not the problem.  I took out some SS hacks, as mentioned above, which seems to have fixed things.  I'm in the process of narrowing down which hack was conflicting (well, I say "in the process" but really have not had any time in game in the past 4 days so it's a slow process).

[Zeljka]

For my game (where abductees couldn't leave except by exitting the lot and re-entering the dorm through the hood screen, also had the budget problem) I removed clothing tool global, (conflict with Inteen which you don't have, but perhaps there's also woohoo teen conflict?) added ste's lottery fix  and it seems ok now.

[syberspunk]

Ok, the file is actually sslotfinalsfix.package

I am assuming that is what you are talking about, unless you renamed the file?  I looked through the code, and I couldn't see anything that stood out as problematic... so, pretty much, the best way for me to try and debug it would be to have an error log.  So, whenever you have the time to try and run through it again to generate an error log, or if you have one already, it would be great if you could post it.


Ste

[jolrei]

Sorry syberspunk:  have honestly had no time in game in the past few days now.  RL rearing its ugly head again, I'm afraid.  Hopefully can get you an error log by the end of the weekend, if the error happens again.  This is annoying for me too, since I was hoping to turn a few dormies into zombie slaves by now, and have not had time to get to it.

As mentioned above, I have nossrespawn loaded now and things are still working, but sslotfinalsfix.package is not reloaded yet.  I'll reload it again before I go back in game and will report any success or errors.  If errors then errorlog will be posted.

Addition: OK, I got a few minutes in game yesterday evening.  I loaded sslotfinalsfix.package and shipped one of my students off to the SS.  No problem.  All appeared to work fine.  She arrived.  Buy and build mode worked fine.  No problem with SS funds.  She was able to call the limo and go back to her dorm.  Her personal funds were fine upon return to the dorm.  In sum, no noticeable glitch.

I exited TS2 and loaded sslotteryfix.package.  Back in game, I took the same student and sent her directly back to the SS.  Error messages came up immediately and the game hung.  Had to force exit back to Windows.  Removing the sslotteryfix hack resolved the issue.  It seems fairly conclusive from my point of view that the sslotteryfix is the cause of the problem.

This could be for several reasons, I suppose.  One is that I believe sslotteryfix was developed to respond to a problem specific to OFB and the fix is not compatible with UNI.  In fact, since there was no problem with funds in my game (Base and UNI only), I'm not sure that I should have had it loaded at all anyway.  However, I seem to recall that there was some interest in checking whether the hack was backward compatible, so this might help, I suppose.  Anyway, it's staying off my game now.  This seems to suggest that the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" holds true, and that I should probably keep that in mind when loading new hacks (even awesome ones) from now on.

Anyway, syberspunk, error logs are included if you are interested.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[jolrei]

The one thing I now recall that I did not test was how things worked with both ssfriendcountfix and ssfinalexamfix loaded together (i.e. sslotteryfix may not be the main problem).  I'll try to test that as well and if there's a problem, I can post another error log.  If that results in an error, it would point to a possible incompatibility between those two mods.

In any case, it appears there is no conflict between ssfinalexamfix and nossrespawn.  Test yesterday did not come up with any errors when just those two were loaded.

Update: Now I'm confused (or more than usual anyway).  I checked my earlier posts on this and my downloads folder.  My earlier problem with secret societies occurred when I had nossrespawn, sslotfinalsfix, and ssfriendcountfix loaded.  Playables would get abducted, but would be unable to actually join the SS, or return home from the SS.

At this point, with all those same hacks loaded, the SS functions fine.  My only conclusion is that since then I cleaned out a couple of other hacks that I no longer wanted.  These had nothing to do with the SS however.  I have no playables just ready to join the SS at the moment, but when I do, I can test whether the "join secret society" action works properly.  Still, bit of a mystery to me how it can not work 3 weeks ago, but work fine now. 

Sorry syberspunk, not particularly helpful, I know.  I'll try to retrace my steps and figure out what changed (might be a long process), but I think it's probably not your lottery hack, since that was not loaded in my game at the time of my original problem, and the sslotfinalsfix is now not causing difficulties.

[syberspunk]

I'll still try and take a look at the error logs when I get home.

I will take a peek at the Uni code and see if the funds issue was a problem.  I don't recall exactly when the problem surfaced, but it had been pointed out, and I managed to come up with a fix, but definitely recall, shortly after, Maxis EA coming up with a fix in one of their patches.  I thought this was an OFB patch.

I am uncertain if the Pets patch is referring to the same problem, or if it was entirely unrelated.

The "problem" or bug that someone had brought up (I can't recall who) which made me come up with a fix, was for the funds.  It wasn't so much a problem of sims getting stuck on the sslot, but rather, the funds would get all screwy.  However... related to the same code that manages the funds, if the funds get screwed up badly, to the point where the game can't find any funds, it could end up puking on errors.  Because the game always expects to be able to find the funds and/or manipulate them properly, it should theoretically never error.  However, in that same code, if, for whatever odd, flukey reason, the funds get zero'd out or become negative (possibly due to number/buffer over/underflow), the code will just puke an error log and dialog.  Thus, potentially causing a sim to get stuck at the sslot, unable to return or properly arrive there.

The game is supposed to generate default funds if it doesn't find any to begin with, and the patch may have fixed this (as well as sorting out the funds properly).  I should take a look at my notes and see what I did.  As I essentially tossed my personal version aside (well, archived it I think) and tried to extract and backport Maxis EA's fix.  I think I compared the Uni, NL, and OFB code, and they were all still mostly the same, if not identical, which should mean that the fix would still be needed for those versions.  Anyhew, I'll try and take a look at it this week and see if the errors in your logs are due to the hack.

Incidentally... the sslotfinalsfix and the sslotteryfix installed, if you scan your hacks, do you find anything that conflicts with either of them?


ETA:

Ok, so I looked at your error logs... and as far as I can tell, the code there doesn't seem to match the version of the hack/fix that I created.

Object id: 535
name: Controller - Secret Society
Stack size: 3
Error: Illegal owner field in data reference.
Iterations: 126
  Frame 2:
    Stack Object id: 7
    Stack Object name: Portal - Pedestrian
    Node: 0
    Tree: id 512 name 'Soc&Rel: Test - Either Sim a Resident' version -32760
    from global
    Prim state: 0
    Params: 768    Locals: 0 0
  Frame 1:
    Stack Object id: 7
    Stack Object name: Portal - Pedestrian
    Node: 0
    Tree: id 4154 name 'Sub - Assign Funds To Secret Lot' version -32755
    from DormController
    Prim state: 0
    Params:    Locals: 0 0 0 0 0
  Frame 0:
    Stack Object id: 7
    Stack Object name: Portal - Pedestrian
    Node: 70
    Tree: id 4117 name 'Function - Main - Secret Society' version -32746
    from DormController
    Prim state: 0
    Params:    Locals: 7 0 535 0

As shown here, in Frame 1, the code is running through the Sub - Assign Funds To Secret Lot BHAV that is modified by my hack/fix.  However, at node 0, it appears to run some global BHAV named Soc&Rel: Test - Either Sim a Resident in Frame 2.  This doesn't seem to match the code in my hack/fix.  This also does not match the official Maxis EA code.

At first, I wonderd if the first line in the hack/fix might be a new function that isn't in Uni.  The first line is:

0: Local 3 := Global(Budget Div 10000); true: A, false: error

I thought that maybe this global function might be new and only found in later EPs.  However, I did a search through the disasembled code and I did find instances of this global function being called in other locations.  So, it looks like this global function should still be valid in code even as 'old' as Uni only.   So... it looks like my hack/fix should still work, even in Uni alone.

I would suggest scanning your hacks, with my hack/fix installed, and see if you find any other hacks that conflict.  Something seems to be changing the Sub - Assign Funds To Secret Lot BHAV, in a way that my hack/fix doesn't, and it appears to definitely be different from even the Maxis EA original code.

Please let me know if you do find something that conflicts, and list it here.  That way, I can edit my RTFM so that it lists whatever it is as incompatible. Thanks.


Ste

[jolrei]

Incidentally... the sslotfinalsfix and the sslotteryfix installed, if you scan your hacks, do you find anything that conflicts with either of them?

At this point, doesn't seem to conflict.  Forgive some residual non-awesomeness - would scanning with clean installer show the conflict if there is one?

Please let me know if you do find something that conflicts, and list it here.  That way, I can edit my RTFM so that it lists whatever it is as incompatible. Thanks.

OK, will see what I can find.

[jsalemi]

At this point, doesn't seem to conflict.  Forgive some residual non-awesomeness - would scanning with clean installer show the conflict if there is one?

No, clean installer will only show if you have more than one copy of the same hack in your downloads.  You need to get a copy of the Hack Conflict Detection Utility (HCDU as it's commonly referred to here) from over at Paladin's Place (http://www.simwardrobe.com/).

[jolrei]

You need to get a copy of the Hack Conflict Detection Utility (HCDU as it's commonly referred to here)

Yes.  Yes I do.  Will get it now.  Cheers.