More Awesome Than You!

So I haven't been able to fix this and was hoping the whiz kids here can save my family.

I reinstalled after 1.3 (GRRR) and only installed 1.2 upon reinstall. Therefore I had no awesomemod and didn't get ISM.  
I was playing for about two weeks with no problems. I merged my house with the Wolff house in Sunset. Played MANY sims days. Quit and saved many times over several RL days. I installed the first Rose donation hairs and the shoes by Mel Calero. Go back into game to find these lovely tiles all over.

(http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h200/sisaly/QuestionMark1.jpg)

So I fixed them and played. Go back into the game again and see I have them again in different places and more of them.

(http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h200/sisaly/QuestionMark3.jpg)

So I start the process of removing my mods folder, deleting caches and moving other families into houses to test. AFAIK this house is the only one affected.

So now I reinstall for the umpteenth time and the tile situation is the same. My last back up was before I moved into the house, but I'll lose my Leader of the Free World and so many more hours of play, it's making me feel sick thinking about losing this family at their current progress.

Any suggestions would be......something, thank you.

Have you tried classic cache purging?

Yes. Plus don't forget the complete reinstall. And before I reinstall I use a registry cleaner as well.

Is that lot decorated as default, or have you altered the tiles/ wallpaper? I'm trying to figure out if this is an issue with installed content or the game data.

I only redid the inside and didn't touch the outside. Also I have no CC walls or floors, plenty of patterns, most from MTS and a few from TRS. But I've had them forever.

I don't have a screenshot, but one of my master bathrooms and the den, which are the original, are wonky.

I've been getting the same thing with floors and wallpaper only AFTER the last AwesomeMod edition.

I follow my sim to the park, when he gets back its like some frickin  The Riddler wallpaper and floors. 

Odd thing, I used the same tiles in all 3 bathrooms and 2 are Riddler floors and the 3rd is the tile I had before.

Oh and one time my bedroom walls were Riddler walls, fixed em...then went out and came back...now the OUTSIDE walls are Riddler walls!

Again, only after the latest AM was installed, never before.

I don't see the problem. That tile is pretty great looking.

har har har   :(

This happened to me once after exiting create a style. I changed the pattern to something random, changed it back, and it was fine.

I had this question picture in re-using lots from other neighborhoods. Lots that had this, usually showed more buggy gamebehavior like stuck sims too.

I thought it was a video card issue, cause I would get the question marks after playing for 10 - 13 hours and figured my poor card was at the end of its 256mb.

This is due to the last awesomemod update. It happened to me and I had to reinstall back to 1.3. That was the only thing I could do to cure it. I got lucky because a friend had not updated to the last one. She had the 8-6-09 update. Another friend of mine also had updated and it happened to them as well.

It's not just awesomemod. I don't have awesomemod running.

I have this too, on basic EA content wallpapers and floors. I currently have no mods installed and running, and it appeared after this latest patch (which also boned my game.)Thank EAxis.

I first noticed it when going into the Goth manor, which I hadn't touched at all. God knows what's going on there. I wonder if this is the TS3 version of the blue flashing annoyance, and if so, why are textures suddenly going missing after the patch. NO SENSE I TELL YOU! NONE!

I reitterate: It's not just awesomemod. I don't have awesomemod, and get the same thing.

This happened to my Sunset Valley Modert Art Museum, a building I liked so much that I had barely  ever touched it.
So no possibility of this being a removed-texture problem.

It happened after 1.3 and with a bucketfull of CC though, for what its worth.

 >:(   My entire city hall lot is The Riddler tiles and paint.   >:(

I move in and it goes back to normal.  wtf ?  I have the 1.3 patch and the latest AM.  
Again, it never happened until this latest AM.  It started all funky yesterday and it was yesterday I put in the AM.
 >:(

Not that I'm happy anyone has this problem, but I am glad I'm not alone.

I did NOT have 1.3 patch installed. I did a reinstall because of that crapppy patch in didn't update to it again. I also use CCleaner before install. I have the Pro version.

My specs are:
Windows (64 bit) XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP 3
Intel Pentium D 2.80 GHz
1 GB RAM (I know I need to upgrade)
Radeon 4850 HD 1 GB Graphics Card

This lot is a default lot. Wolff house in Sunset. 

I'm going to move them out and see what happens. I've tried everything else and it just keeps coming back.

Is it happening in all save games, or just one? For example, if the Wolff house is affected, when you create a fresh Sunset Valley game is the Wolff house there affected too? If so, does it still happen if you create a fresh Sunset Valley world after replacing Program Files\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3\ GameData\ Shared\ NonPackaged\ Worlds\ Sunset Valley.world with a fresh copy from the install disc? These tests would tell us if it is a savegame\ world problem or not. Also it would be worth testing with a completely clean Documents\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3 folder if you haven't already.

The question mark walls happened to me shortly after patching to 1.3. I had IS and AM both at that time, so this was before I dropped IS for the AM story driver. As mentioned by others, the wall patterns  were disappearing after returning from playing at a community lot or making changes in CAS. All I did was, as also mentioned previously, mess about with palette alterations for a minute, restore the pattern I wanted and voila, no more question marks. I've since played this same lot with no troubles.

Since upgrading to 1.4, I haven't seen the question marks again but that doesn't really mean anything. When it happened, I thought the problem was computer related, as in my game being corrupted by lost data due to less-than-optimal hardware. At the same time as the odd coloured walls appeared, I could hear my fans chugging and this, along with the usual big burst of hot air out the side of my laptop, tends to signal that I'm asking more of my computer than it can give me. 

Now a question for you; Did you install any extra files with the custom hair or only the hair? I just remembered that some cc comes with it's own resource.cfg. I doubt that's your problem but I'm trying to think of anything that could be causing a conflict.

i actually had the riddler paintings from a custom house i got from Mts i never seemed to run out of them, this was before any patch and i dont have awesomemod installed

I got the question marks after installing 1.3 patch, and that was after a complete manual unistall/reinstall of the game before I could even patch it. I've had 3 lots affected so far, the Wolff house, Goth house and Art Gallery, none of which were altered or played by me in any way other than a quick visit to the art gallery.
As for details, I had a couple mods in game at that point, AM being one and no other downloaded content except items I purchased from EA Store. As for the Goth house, I ended up demolishing the entire lot and replacing it with a new house and lot and haven't had the problem recur there. The Wolff house I tried cleaning off the entire lot and rebuilding because I didn't want to demolish the lot and lose the beautiful scenery buff, that didn't work because the marks came back after returning to the lot. So I demolished the entire Wolff lot and replaced it with a new house lot and haven't had the problem recur there. But with the Art Gallery, I demolished the entire lot and replaced it with an exact copy of the same gallery which I got from a fresh neighborhood and that one reverted back to question marks. So right now i don't even have an Art Gallery in the city since the question marks were a bit much to constantly look at. And that's all I know so far.

I got this problem briefly when I started to unlock my game houses. I had about 10 houses locked including the ones from the game self: Goth, Landgraab, etc. The problem was very serious when I moved the Wolffs out of their house (I hate it). Then almost all buildings and houses presented one, several or all tiles covered with ?
The problem disappeared when all houses were unlocked and I finally bulldozed the damn Lone Wolf house.  The question mark seems to mean "Is that f** locked or not?

I experienced this once, back when I was running 1.2 and a (then current) awesomemod.  Shortly afterwards, the game froze and crashed, so I assumed it was my video card misfiring because it was about to crap out.  I wasn't using custom content on the affected pieces.

I don't have any much ccs in my game except xml mods, replacement for the pudding skins, two hairs and AM. And I get all the issues reported here. My decision to not download any ccs for best look they can have, is just to assure that the issues are caused by the game bad programming, not anything that can be blamed on downloads.

It's just affecting one savegame (at a time...). I had my arts gallery turn into Riddler's Weirdshitorium lately and could easily replace it with one I saved from a fresh default 'hood.

I think it's kinda strange though that only the detailed view was affected. The low res "preview" looked ok so I have no idea when it occurred and if it was related to something I did or something.

So then this implies that your userdata is being affected as opposed to the game data- the in-game textures aren't being corrupted (so if you start a new game or use the same wallpapers/ floortiles on a different lot, it will be fine). It is curious that the same lots seem to be commonly affected- the Wolff house and art gallery for example. It would be interesting to see whether a backup suffers the same fate when replayed or not.

It's happening in my game too. I do not have awesomemod or any other core mod.   It started happening after patch 1.3.   Happened to my Sunset Valley Art Gallery.   I do have lots of CC and other minor annoyance fix-type mods.

Lock houses? Is this the lockable door, or some other terminology?  ???

I think they meant possibly the way of making a house "sacred" via Awesome mod...

I have no mods in my game and I get this when I remove walls tiles.  I have no other content other than "The Store" items.  I have also had this happen to some of the "portraits" that my Sim has painted. 

I've only recently had this problem which has occurred at almost the same time as I decided to play a farmer sim. I'm wondering whether this has anything to do with the memory leak problems that were supposedly fixed in patch 1.3.

that problem occurred when the fertilize interaction was used.

I tested my game without using any of the gardening interactions and the problem didn't re-occur. Also I had all the settings maxed out so I don't think its a general memory issue.

I'm just wondering if anyone who has had the problem had been using any of the gardening interactions when it first happened

I have it too. My entire Modern Art Museum is covered in those tiles....which I guess kind of works for a Modern Art Museum lol. But then I noticed it in the graveyard and pool of the Goth House. I changed them back and so far haven't had any problems.... I also don't have any mods, just cc, which I'm pretty choosy about.... def probably the update.

We must have downloaded the same house.  I just sold them all and haven't seen any question mark tiles again-knock on wood.

I've ruled out the gardening idea as it happened again to me without touching any gardening interactions.

I've done a bit more play testing with this and I think its something to do with the lots themselves as it only seems to happen on specific lots ie goth house, art gallery. deleting the lots and replacing them with lots exported from a clean neighbourhood didn't seem to work so I deleted the lots, saved the game with the lots empty then added the clean replacement lots back in. This so far seems to have fixed the problem.

Hey guys, save yourself the hassle of worrying if this is something you did or something you put in the game, as  it also happens in Vanilla games with no CC, and it does not seem to matter whether you have patches or not, or how great your pc and video card is. So far it seems to affect just EA made houses and buildings in which they used VOODOO to use the stair banisters as fence and deck rails. So if you go to use an ea house and you see rails, fences, etc that perfectly match the stair rails, yet none of us have them in our game except as stair rails - this can happen. Absolutely don't try altering the house anywhere near those rails, above the rails, or below the rails, as the rainbow hued questionmark pattern tends to spread to some floor and flat roof tiles as well.

In other words EA was too lazy to make the appropiate matching rails to their stairs - even though they obviously saw a need for it and instead warped their buildings by making the stair rails as fencing and the game obviously is not liking it. I also tried deleting all those rails and discovered some of them absolutely will not delete.

How to fix, I have no clue - but it makes those houses useless if you want your sims to use them and actually see the second floors as more than useable as having several bedrooms instead of sleeping for just 2 Sims. The minute you go messing with the walls out comes those freaky walls.

I downloaded a lot that also had non-deletable stair railings.
I eventually just left it.  ???

This has just happened to my game where it has affected the same lots as has already been reported here. Affected tiles appear as normal from a distance and change into lurid question marks upon zooming in. I cannot edit the tile but I can replace it with a wall or floor covering via build mode. Previous to this I had made some changes to two EA homes: 325 Oak Grove Road and 1 Sun Song Avenue in Sunset Valley. These homes had some furnishings (a shower - can't remember what else), walls, windows and floors that had apparently been styled or created using, as Writin_Reg put it, "voodoo".

I've purged my cache files but this had no effect on the issue. My game is up-to-date as are my graphics drives and my OS (WinXP Pro, SP3). I last updated my copy of Awesome mod and Twallan's Supercomputer yesterday. I have oodles of CC installed and I also have store items in my game. I don't know what caused this to happen but I suspect it was triggered by my attempt to edit the styles in those two homes I mentioned above.

That can't be exactly why it's happening. There is a res lot in my town that I've never stepped foot on and while collecting gems the other day, saw this house had the tiles on the seconded floor siding. Never messed with rails...no no no.

I just got infected with the 'Question Mark' walls for a second time, having read all the posts no-one seems to have yet come up with a solution so I decided to investigate the problem in a bit more depth myself and, although I have no idea what caused it or how to stop it happening again, I believe I have found a way to fix the corrupted lots - permanently (well, at least until the next time)

I was playing the 'Goth' lot when the game crashed whilst I was trying to access CAS via the 'Dresser' cheat, when I loaded the saved game most of my beautiful walls and floors were gone, I checked the 'Art Gallery' lot as it was this one that I had had problems with the first time I had 'Qustion Mark' disease and several of you mentioned this particular lot in your posts, I was not surprised to see that there was not a single wall or floor that hadn't been corrupted. I then checked the 'Wolf' lot which I hadn't played but was curious to see if it too had been given a new paint job after reading that this problem appears to only affect certain lots, sure enough, most of the exterior walls and several of the interior walls and floors were now a horrible shade of blue and red. After investigating all three lots I discovered the following problems:

1) The deign tool would no longer work on any wall or floor on the lot regardless of whether it had it's original pattern or the 'Qustion Mark' pattern
2) The eye-dropper tool did still work and not only could any remaining wall or floor designs on the lot be copied and pasted - so could the 'Qustion Mark' pattern (in case any-one out there REALLY likes it that much)
3) When selecting a pattern to copy with the eye-dropper the game should automatically highlight the appropriate thumbnail in the catalogue but this doesn't happen, in fact, it doesn't even show the right category anymore.
4) Although the eye-dropper tool will copy and paste any remaining patterns so you can cover up the 'Question Marks' it does not restore any functionality, the ?s have gone but the design tool will still not work.
5) If you use the eye-dropper tool to select a wall or floor which has had the pattern replaced by ? you will still get a tool tip telling you the name of the base pattern used (useful if you can't remember what was there before)
6) This problem affects every wall and floor on the lot, it makes no difference whether it is an unchanged base game design, your own unique concotion (saved or otherwise) or a download from the exchange.
7) As far as I could see only three lots are affected by the 'Question Mark' disease when it strikes:- Goth Manor, Lone Wolf Manor and Sunset Institute of Modern Art. (however I have not had time to check all lots yet)
8 The Sims 3 save game as well as its backup are affected and deleting cache files makes no difference at all, new games are not affected and nor are any other saved games

Fortunately the lots can be fixed but there is good news and there is bad news, first the good news:

If you are prepared to restore the lot to its original, unmodified, Maxis designed state, either because you haven't changed anything anyway or because you are more interested in saving the familly rather than their home then the fix is quick and fairly simple.
1) Start a new game and after selecting any familly EXCEPT Goth or Wolf go into 'Edit Town'
2) Click on either of the above families and in the pop up window select EVICT (option furthest to the left) leave belongings behind.
3) When the lot is empty click on it again and this time select SAVE COPY TO LIBRARY (just click OK on any warnings about interractions being cancelled)
4) Click on the evicted familly and get them to buy their house back again and then just do the whole thing again for the other familly
5) Save the Art Gallery the same way as the other lots (just no familly to evict first)
6) Click on options to return to MAIN MENU
7) Select your damaged game in the normal way and then go into EDIT TOWN
8) Change your active household if necessary and then EVICT the familly from the affected lot with or without furniture but make sure any irreplaceable rewards etc: are either in your Sims inventory or your household inventory
9) Demolish the affected lot with the 'Bulldozer tool' and then replace it with the saved one
10) Move the familly back into their new 'Question Mark' free house (repeat as necessary)

Now the bad news (and this is what I had to do)

If you have done a lot of customising of the lot and want to salvage as much as you can you are going to have to replace EVERY single wall and floor on the lot! If you just copy any of the original walls that are left and paste them over the ?s it won't work, as soon as you leave the lot or the game the ?s will return and probably in greater numbers!
1) Select the design tool and waft it over the lot to verify you need to do this, if buy and build mode objects 'light up' as you pass the tool over them but walls and floors don't then you're out of luck - read on!
2) Remember, do NOT copy any affected walls or floors with the eye-dropper, if they are not reacting to the design tool they are useless, instead, use the eye-dropper tool tip to identify the base game design used (not always obvious in-game if replaced by a ?)
3) Select the base wall or floor used from the relevant catalogue selection and paste it into the lot
4) Use any existing walls or floors as a guide to reproducing the design you want, don't forget that you may have customised objects in the room with elements from the wall or floor you are trying to recreate so use the design tool on the object and copy the pattern or colour back into your design
5) Once you have recreated your design on this new section of wall or floor then copy it with the eye-dropper tool and replace ALL the relevant sections on the lot, even if the original pattern hasn't been replaced by a ? it still needs to be replaced, and, just to rub salt in the wounds, you will have to pay for everything all over again, it's as if you are decorating bare walls!
6) When you think you have replaced all the corrupted areas use the design tool again to make sure you didn't miss any bits by repeating step '1' above. Waft the tool over the lot and you should now see that the replaced sections of wall or floor will 'Light up' as the tool passes over them, if you did miss a bit use the design tool first to make sure that the section you copy has been repaired.

I hope this will help some of you fix your games and also help someone much smarter than me to identify the cause of 'Question Mark' disease, by the way, I have the latest version of AM installed, my game is patched to 1.3 (still don't feel confident enough to re-install 1.4 after what it did to my game the first time) I have far too much custom content but can't seem to control my downloading addiction and my computer would be described as High End so, given that this problem has been encountered by others who don't use AM, have patched and unpatched games, no CC and numerous PC configurations, I think it must be something EA did - again!

Oh dear, this fix did work, but not for very long! Should have done a bit more play testing before posting. However I do have more information that may give someone more insight into what is causing this problem.
After replacing all of the corrupted walls and floors on the Goth lot I had no further problems and, in case the original save game had bad data, I did a 'Save as' and re-named it to something different so I got a completely seperate save game. When I re-started Sims 3 I loaded in this new saved game and the ?s were back! I re-installed the game and re-patched it to 1.3 in case any of the game files had been corrupted and tried again with the same saved game, the problem was still there so I deleted all of the wall and floor coverings that I could and replaced any floor tiles that I couldn't delete with an unmodified pattern from the catalogue, I then saved the lot to the library as both an occupied lot and as an empty lot.
I went back to the main menu and started a new game and I deleted the Goth lot and replaced it with my saved empty lot, there were no ?s this time but all of the new floors were again undesignable. I replaced all the floor and wall coverings for the third time and then saved the lot back to the library and moved the Goth family in, I noticed two single floor tiles with ?s but everything else was still OK so I replaced those and carried on playing without problems. After an hour or so I went to the main menu and checked out a couple of lots on an old Riverview save, then I went back to my earlier Sunset Vallry game only to find the Goth lot was once more covered in ?s.
I am going to try moving the Goth lot into a Riverview game to see if this makes any difference but I am beginning to suspect that this ? disease may be incurable once a lot is infected, sadly I may have to demolish the lot and the Goths will have to move in with the Crumplebottoms, they won't like that!   

Here's a bit more you can add to the confusion - by trial and error I have just decided not to play the Goth or Wolfe houses, and without playing them have had no further riddler walls, floors etc appear. I do notice though a lot of the Sims painted pictures and photographs in other houses become the riddler pictures the minute either are placed in a frame and hung on the wall.

Another thing I notice is in the 'empty of all Sims' hoods I added to my game that when ever I place any families in the Goth House or the Wolfe house, by the next game session I find either the families vanished from the game or at least vanished from their homes and listed as homeless. I first assumed it was due to a lack of family funds to handle their bills, but this fact is not the case when I installed some really wealthy families into these houses.

Not sure how this exactly coinsides with the riddler walls other than I edge closer to the belief these houses are so corrupt under the surface that even the game cannot support their use even if they are never played with a controlled family. I would be interested to know if anyone else experience the abrupt vanishment of families placed in these homes who are not played or other wise "protected" by being made sacred. I have repopulated my empty hoods with as many as 14 families on now my 7th attempt and it is always these two houses families vanish from. While families who by all rights should be vanished from the hood (like placing 6 people in a 1 bedroom house with a mimimum amount of money) - they are not vanished.

The Wolff manor in my current neighborhood has the riddler tiles, and I've never played, edited or entered it. I emptied the 'hood before I started playing it, and no family has moved there.
I do have a family living in the Goth house, I've never played them and they haven't vanished, but I named them 'Goth' so awesomemod would make them stay there. I've never played that house, but I did some fiddling with it before I moved the family in. No changes to walls, or anything involving CAST, I just added some beds & cribs for awesome story to allow them to breed. That house is now also infested with riddler tiles.
My art museum was also infested, but I bulldozed it and built my own art gallery, so no more riddler tiles for me there.

Hmmm, I didn't think to name them Goth or Wolfe - perhaps that helps.

I have noticed that once just one of those 3 building mess up, it seems to affect the other two. Like I said I have not touched any of them in my former empty hood, just moved breeder families in there, only to have them vanish by the next play session. It has happened repeatedly when I have retested and even used a completely new install of my empty hood. But on the other hand I have no riddler tiles on any of them. A few times I have had my Sims visit the houses to get to know the occupants - for all the good it does. I am getting the riddler sims painted pictures though in almost all occupied houses.

One of awesomemod's features is that if you name a house after a family, like Goth Estate or Wolff manor, the family won't move from the house. So you could rename Goth Manor after the family you move in, like Smith Manor, if you want them to stay. But it doesn't help with the riddler tiles. My Goth house is covered with them.
I haven't seen the Sim painted pictures get the riddler tiles yet.  The one family I played has made tons of paintings, including EA paintings, portraits of Sims, 'still life' paintings and 'memorized scene' paintings, and has kept at least one of each kind on the walls. Some of the paintings they've sold have appeared at the art gallery, and so far, no riddler tile paintings. *crosses fingers*

Naming the house/lot after the family has not been working for me for weeks now. Ursine's lot is called Ursine. The other night I took sacred off them and within 5 minutes the game had moved them out.

It's been working consistently for me (and I do update my awesomemod). I've never made any families sacred, though, so I wonder if toggling that on and off makes a difference. I made a Goth family for the Goth house and a Landgraab family for the Landgraab house, and both families have stayed put since I moved them in. The Landgraabs have barely enough money to pay their bills in that house, but they don't move. The other families in the neighborhood move around a lot as their families grow.

The very first time I got the riddler wall paper was after the first patch 1.27 that I noticed it.Couple of nights ago I noticed the riddler struck again at my Goth house.I have since bought a new computer and this is a whole new game.I say there is a problem with the game it self or the very first patch.

? says it all really.

(http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg160/tizerist/ts3questionmark.jpg)

The Riddler has struck again: this time in a game in which I had only played Agnes Crumplebottom and her home is the only one that I had re-decorated. I had installed a few houses I had downloaded and some lots I have created but had not meddled with any other part of the town. I didn't notice any problems until I decorated Miss Crumplebottom's nursery and covered over the unpainted walls of the house. Agnes' home is fine, however, the Wolff and Goth homes were infested with those tiles as was the Art Gallery.

I've just changed from Windows XP SP3 to a clean install of Windows 7 64bit so will start a new game and replicate my steps to see if I can trigger this again.

That is just a default texture for when the game can't
A. Load the texture
B. Find the texture
Made a purposefully borked recolor and it shows this texture in my game.

Some reasons it can't load the texture in another case:
Memory leaks- this game has a lot. It depends on your system's spec and how long you keep the client open for. A restart may not always fix it because everyone's system uses different type of memory resources, but it could help.

Using EAxis' "voodoo"' recolors- This is a fault of maxis as already stated in this thread but to recap, I think it shows more incompetence of the creators. Instead of applying the new repository system Create a style thoroughly for all objects they used the method of the Sims 2 as well. I deleted all the objects/bulldoze lots of this nature and they do not appear with ? mark texture any longer.

Missing pattern- you did not install a pattern that came with a custom house. I can only imagine the nightmare people download from crappy T$R. If you want to avoid this mostly completely, do not use any installers! Install everything manually! Learn to use your computer to save your life one day.

With the latest patch this does not appear to be a problem on my system, I do think they realize the memory problems and tried to fix it but not well enough. There is 2gb ram, and ATI card the game runs fast until the create a style is utilized. Then it became a constant crawl with the flashing ? texture appearing if I am in the middle of my town. This disappears on restart.

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, I have had this problem too.  I contacted EA and sent them my DxDiag report and they came back saying that my graphic card the is unsupported. They are so much help (not) here is some of the the report I would like to know if all of the people that have this issue has the same card. I do see that clampdairyola has the same card. Personally I think EA is full of s--t but that's just my opinion. I am about ready to go back to Sims 2
------------------
System Information
------------------
Time of this report: 9/22/2009, 15:00:59
Machine name: DCHY5HJ1
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
System Model: XPS 625
BIOS: BIOS Date: 12/10/08 16:41:28 Ver: 08.00.15
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+,  MMX,  3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.8GHz
Memory: 3316MB RAM
Page File: 976MB used, 4223MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.5512 32bit Unicode

------------
DxDiag Notes
------------
DirectX Files Tab: No problems found.
Display Tab 1: No problems found.
Sound Tab 1: No problems found.
Music Tab: No problems found.
Input Tab: No problems found.
Network Tab: No problems found.

--------------------
DirectX Debug Levels
--------------------
Direct3D:    0/4 (n/a)
DirectDraw:  0/4 (retail)
DirectInput: 0/5 (n/a)
DirectMusic: 0/5 (n/a)
DirectPlay:  0/9 (retail)
DirectSound: 0/5 (retail)
DirectShow:  0/6 (retail)

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
Card name: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x9442)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9442&SUBSYS_05021028&REV_00
Display Memory: 512.0 MB
Current Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: ViewSonic VA903 Series
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No.  I have recently experienced this problem for the first time, both in the Wolff house (which I had amended to include an extra bedroom for children) and in Goth Manor which I tried to redecorate a bit since I plan to marry off one of the daughters in my main family to Mortimer Goth.  It seems that there is a problem with these two houses which I've seen mentioned somewhere in this thread.

I have not actually played the game in awhile.  I have saved copies of my main family, the Goths, the Landgraabs, and Agnes Crumplebottom (along with a new potential spouse for her I created) to move to a new game once I m done setting up a new "Awesomized" Sunset Valley.  This is taking me awhile as I am downloading better houses, trying to conform them to Awesome standards, depreciating them with "wandhere" to make them more affordable, use combined community lots to create more vacant real estate, etc.  I think I'm almost done setting up and then will play test.  If it works out, I may upload a save file so that others can use it too.

I have tried numerous ways to salvage my Goth lot infected by ?s as I had spent a lot of time on a complete re-design, I have now come to the conclusion that this is an Impossible Mission! Nothing I have done has resulted in a permanent fix and I am now of the belief that the base lots, as shipped by EA, are corrupted and, whether you have AM installed or not, CC of amy kind installed or not or have never even played one of the affected lots or not, eventually the Riddler tiles WILL appear.

I have established the following facts about these lots while trying to salvage my own:

1) ALL wall and floor tiles on the lot become unselectable by the 'design tool'
2) Copying any remaining wall patterns or applying new patterns to affected areas is possible but only works while you stay on the lot
3) Repairing the lot by re-applying wall and floor coverings from scratch (ie: not copying and pasting from remaining walls) will return the design tool functionality BUT again only while you stay on the lot
4) Saving a lot to the library (with or without a familly) after it has been repaired as above may reduce but not eliminate Riddler infestation
5) Transferring a repaired and saved lot from Sunset Valley to Riverview has no effect, riddler tiles may be reduced but not eliminated
6) Repairing a transferred lot in Riverview has no effect, once you leave the lot the tiles will return
7) The Art Gallery has terrain under the foundations which is covered by floor tiles but after deleting the tiles a flat grey surface is left which cannot be modified or deleted
8) The Wolff house has no floor tiles below the foundations as the terrain is already covered by the same flat grey surface found under tiles at the Gallery
9) The Goth house does not seem to have this problem as there is only clean terrain below the foundations, but if you apply floor tiles and then delete them the same flat grey area appears
10) Although only some of the terrain below the Gallery appears to be affected applying floor tiles and then deleting them shows that, as with the Goth and Wolff houses, all terrain underneath a foundation is the same
11) All 3 lots reported as having Riddler Wall infestation also have Grey Terrain blight
12) The Grey terrain problem is linked to the house and not the lot, replace the house on any of these lots and the problem disappears, if the Grey terrain problem has gone so, I assume, will the Riddler tile problem have been cured
13) Grey terrain cannot be deleted even using the sledge hammer tool nor can it be modified using the terrain tool, it can be covered up but not eliminated
14) One other possible symptom of Riddler tile infestation I have seen is that ghosts lose their colouring and glow more brightly, their thumbnails assume an appearance like that of a photo negative (black face & white hair etc:)

As far as I can see there is only one possible cure for Riddler Tile infestation and that is to replace the three affected lots with duplicate lots not of EA origin each time a new game is started, any of you builders out there up to a challenge?

I am off to try an an experiment to see if replacing all the graves from an affected Goth house with graves from one not yet affected will cure the ghost problem. My Riverview Goths finally moved out of Goth Manor taking their dead relatives with them, they moved into another haunted house that came with the Riverview neighborhood and the already resident ghosts are fine but living alongside the overlybright, monochrome mutants imported by the Goths (which at least tells me it's not a graphics card problem)

I'm not so sure that the lots are corrupted; I've played Sunset for 10 sim generations (55 sim weeks now) and have not encountered these tiles. One generation of my sims lived in the Wolff lot and raised kids there- I even made an alteration to it after a while, and redecorated parts with no problems. Many of my sims visit the art gallery and there are no problems with that lot; and although I have not played the Goth house, a sim in the previous generation visited a friend there often, so I know that it is okay too. I'm thinking there must be something which causes the corruption, which has not occurred in my game, perhaps.

I had never experienced this problem until recently.  I am playing in Sunset Valley.  The tiles affect both the Goth & Wolff houses.  Unfortunately, I tried to make alterations to them (Wolff house - added an extra room for kids & in Goth Manor, just tried to redecorate) and now the Riddler tiles appear in both lots.  This seems to occur even when starting a new game.  Next thing I'll try is simply bulldozing & replacing both lots with different houses. 

I read that EA is blaming this on video cards, but that cannot be the culprit if so many people have the problem.  Typical.  I believe that when they built the lots originally, they did something that prevents players from changing them without this consequence.  Why they would do this is beyond me.

I wonder what changes have to be done to cause this? I altered the Wolff house with no consequence; just to check I switched to the family that live there now to be sure and there are no question mark tiles, everything is fine. Several generations ago I moved some walls, added some walls, altered a staircase and changed some of the wallpaper/ carpet. This is why I don't see how the lots can be inherently faulty; there may be something occurring in certain games that causes this corruption.

In the Wolff house, I actually added a kids' room and bathroom, which involved placing another staircase, placing floor tile, walls, etc., and then decorating.  I think I also changed the floor tiles in the kitchen.

In the Goth house, I basically redecorated both interior and exterior walls and floors on the interior.  I also redid that garden room (sunken) they had which contained plants into a sort of family room (which involved placing floor tiles on the foundation, level with the rest of the house).

It's very strange.

I had those tiles in the Wolff and Goth houses and the Art Museum/Gallery and I didn't do any alterations to any of them. In fact, I had never even been to the Goth house. I finally bulldozed most houses in the neighborhood and the museum. I didn't bulldoze the Wolff house because I heard that deletes the 'beautiful view' moodlet for those. I'm planning to tear down the Wolff house 'brick by brick' and rebuild.

There's program at MTS2, link here:  http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=366436 (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=366436) that replaces the Beautiful Vista moodlet now.

On another note, after you bulldozed the lots (specifically Goth Manor), did you put another house on the lot?  Did that eliminate the riddler tiles?  Just curious if they will reappear (perhaps somehow tied to the lot?).

I've heavily modified both the Goth and the Wolff houses and - fingers crossed - five sim weeks into the game I've had no problems.

Thanks for the link. I'd missed that one.

I didn't rebuild on the Goth lot but I have rebuilt the Wolff lot and so far so good.

ETA: I also rebuilt the Art museum on the same lot. It's okay, too.

I wish I was having that experience.  I even started a new game and they still appear on the unmodified version of Goth Manor.  It's very strange.  Let us know how it goes.  Otherwise, I'm just going to place new houses on the lot(s).

I noticed I had question marks in my newly started save today. Goth Manor, Wolff house and the Moderna Art Gallery are all affected. I have played the game since last spring so I don't think it's a question of the graphics card not being up to par. I did however download a truckload of cc from various sites yesterday, including from tsr (yes, yes, I know, it's bad!). Since I haven't checked the status of the aformentioned buldings before this morning I am not sure if the ?'s appeared after I added the cc or if it is something related to a mod. If a game save can become corrupted, then why would it only affect certain saves and so fast, i.e. in a day from creating it to playing it? This baffles me. I will continue to investigate the issue and if I find anything I will report back.

Please do let us know if you find out that certain cc causes this.  That's interesting.  It never occurred to me that a fresh (untouched) lot could be affected by cc.

Actually, this makes perfect sense.  I played Goth Manor through three generations with no riddler tiles whatsoever anywhere.  Now I have them in all three places (Goth, Wolff, and Museum), even in a new hood where I have never played any of the aforementioned lots of doom.  I do not download many things, so it actually is easy for me to try and narrow this down.

I also had this problem for a while affecting only my paintings that my sim made in a custom home. I deleted the paintings, and there was no problem for a while. Then I noticed the art museum had the problem, so I saved my custom families, and started a fresh new Sunset Valley. This was yesterday. About half an hour ago my sim visited the Goths, for the first time in this brand new Sunset Valley, and the Goth house is covered in question marks. Again, I had not ever played in that house nor touched it in any way, it's only existed since yesterday.
My specs are very good, more than good enough to run the Sims 3, so I doubt it's a problem with card, ram, etc.
I have the latest Awesomemod and the latest patch. In fact, I reinstalled the entire game two days ago.  
I have pretty much every custom hair that's available, as well as tons of patterns, everything from the store, and a few hacks.  Although someone here said that they had the problem with a vanilla game, so it's probably not one of my mods.

I added two residential lots to one of my towns earlier today and noticed that one of these pesky tiles had appeared on the road! In case it matters, I don't have any customised road mods in my game.

(http://i36.tinypic.com/ek5bf5.jpg)

I have used these lots in other saved TS3 games without incident for the past two weeks.

Would you please, Snowbawl, and let us know what you find?  Perhaps we all have the same cc download file that is causing this.  I'm afraid I have too much already.  I love custom content (since the Sims 2 days, when I had tons more than is currently available for Sims 3) and hence have probably overdone it again!

Thanks in advance!

I have no clue if I get the ? tiles at the Goth's or Wolfe's, but I know that the art gallery is full of them. I can help narrow it down in cc (if that is indeed the case). I have only downloaded:
- most of the store hairs
- some hairs from MTS (all by HP)
- penis mesh
- nude mesh (HP)
- some patterns from MTS (stone and granite)
- buyable fish spawners from MTS
- twallan's pollinator
- buzzler's mirror
- lockable door from MTS
- male pregnancy clothes from pudding factory
- teen pregnancy clothes from MTS

That's it. I'm not much of a cc accumulator. I'm at work, but I can get the exact list in the morning.

I think we can rule out the cc then. Unless it does something weird to the game files, which I do not believe is the casem but I'm not much of a modder and as such have no idea what is happening. But, compairing LVRuggers list with my own compiled list of cc, we have no cc in common at all. It must have been something else that was causing this. A new plague? Plus, according to gelfling the tiles even appears on the road. I don't have any mods changing how the roads should appear.

If there is a file that has become corrupted somehwere in the game, how do you find it? Deleting the caches didn't seem to work; I did that yesterday. Neither does reinstalling the game, according to some people here. As I said before, this baffles me to no end.

There have already been people in this thread with no CC except for store content who have said they've had a problem, so I don't think it's CC either. It might be helpful though to know what game version people are running, whether the hood is started from a 'clean' template or not and whether they have in the past had any custom content or core mods in game. I'm trying to think of the types of situations which could possibly cause data corruption of any kind. For example, I am fully patched (1.4.6) and my game contains only store items, but I recently added Twallan's supercomputer which I used to 'fire all NPCs' and remove a stuck car. My 55-week old hood which has no problems is started from the original Maxis templates, and has no 'riddler' tiles, nor have I ever had error 12 or 13 when saving (in case it's relevant). All subsequent hoods seem to suffer from no riddler tiles too, although I have not played another for so long. I have altered and played the wolf house, but only visited the Goth and Art lots.
Also I just thought of this: Sunset Valley by default uses the Sunsetvalley.objectcache in Program Files \Electronic Arts \The Sims 3 \Caches. It is worth deleting that one and replacing it with a fresh copy off the install disc; I think the size should be 979kb 979Mb.

My game is fully patched. For me the riddler tiles did not appear until after the latest patch.
I used awesomemod to 'destroy all humans' before I added any families of my own. I have riddler tiles in the Goth and Wolff houses, and had them in the art gallery until I bulldozed it and replaced it with a gallery I built myself. I've never seen the riddler tiles appear anywhere else except for the Goth and Wolff houses, and the art gallery. My new art gallery has never had the problem. My Goth house is occupied, my Wolff house is not.
I also have a Sunset Valley I use just to build houses. I emptied that hood with awesomemod and have never placed an families back into it, and it also has the riddler tiles in the Wolff and Goth houses, and had them in the art gallery until I bulldozed it.

I have never even entered the Wolff house in these neighborhoods. I haven't entered the Goth house in the build neighborhood, but I did in my play neighborhood. I added some beds to it before I moved a family in, but I didn't touch the walls or floors, or alter anything in CAST.

My game and my copy of Awesome mod are fully patched and up-to-date. I also have the following mods installed: Twallan's Supercomputer, the No Intro mod, Absimiliard's Realistic Aging Mod and No Mosaic. These are the only TS3 mods I have used and I have the latest available versions of each of these.

The riddler bug has so far struck two of my five worlds - one of which was started after I installed the latest patch. I did not see any riddler tiles before I installed the latest patch. I recently switched from Windows XP Pro SP3 to Windows 7 - 64 bit where I still have the problem as evidenced in my previous post.

Could you both also try replacing your Sunsetvalley.objectcache file as I mentioned in my previous post? Also delete the four cache files in your userdata folder. I'd be interested to know if this affects any currently corrupted lots. It's worth a try at least.

Its not a Terrain this are Floortiles.
And you could delete them but you have to remove the foundation first. If Floortiles are covered with a foundation you could only remove the Pattern but not the tile. You get the default Pattern on them.



The have no missing colors, the simdata file is corrupted and the real skintone the Gostsim had while he was alive gets inverted causing with the Gost overlay this photo negative effect . You could see this if you use the editsim command on the Gost.

For what it's worth..
I do not have the latest EA patch.  I've visited the Goth house, remodeled the Wolff house and have been to the art gallery several times.  I have several mods (not AM), some cc and all the store stuff.
I think I'm in week 30 something and I do not have the riddler tiles anywhere.

I just started a new hood, plonked down a family and have been playing for about three sim weeks. No sign of any ? tiles yet. I have awesomemod up to date, latest game patch plus various cc. I haven't encountered any shifty ghosts. I do not have Twallan's supercomputer, so it can't be it. Well, at least not i my game, anyway.

Some of you have stated that the tiles haven't appeared until after the latest patch. By patch, do you mean the game patch or the awesomemod update?

I mean game patch.

Okay, I'll do this first.  FYI, my game is fully patched to 1.4.6.00001 and I am running the latest AwesomeMod (I update before each session).  Also, I've been starting my new neighborhoods from Twoftmama's Awesomized version of Sunset Valley, downloadable here in the Pudding Factory (but I believe all she did to this neighborhood was to add the cribs to the houses required by AwesomeMod for reproduction to occur).  That should not affect anything. EDITED TO ADD:  The Sunset Valley object cache file on my disk is 1,003,277 kb (the same as the one I would be replacing).  I am trying it anyway. Nevemind, MB/kb.  It is copying over and correctly states 979 MB.

D'oh, sorry coconnor- I meant Mb not kb! Thanks for pointing it out. It does sound as though your cache is intact, though. The other possibility is that there is some corruption in the game data files somewhere, as opposed to the savegame itself. I wonder if anyone is willing to zip up a fresh savegame that has the wonky tiles so that I can test it in my game? This will tell us whether it is a savegame error immediately.

Will do.  After performing the actions requested, I still have the wonky colored tiles at both the Goth & Wolff homes.  Will attach here when I have zipped the file.

Edit:  Having a problem attaching the zip file here, so here is a link to get the file @ 4Shared:  http://www.4shared.com/file/136359234/3279776a/autosave1.html
 (http://www.4shared.com/file/136359234/3279776a/autosave1.html)

Okay, I can confirm that the problem is with the savegame as I can see the 'riddler' tiles when I put your savegame in. The Art Gallery looks normal in low res, but the 'Riddlers' show up when it renders fully.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Screenshot-37.jpg
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Screenshot-36.jpg
The same goes for the Wolff lot. However the Goth lot seems to have more severe corruption and the 'Riddler' pattern even shows up from hood view.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Screenshot-38.jpg
So I would say that the best thing to do would be to bulldoze the lots, and see if you can rebuild without any reocurrance. For those people who are saying that they are getting the corruption in a fresh game, as soon as it is created then it may be a good idea to replace the SunsetValley.World file in case there is some corruption in that. It is located in Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3\ GameData\ Shared\ NonPackaged\ Worlds. However, I think it's more likely that there is some problem with the way the game is handling the save file, so perhaps relating this to the error 12 & 13 problems.

Just FYI, I just recently got the riddler tiles at the Art Gallery after patching to 1.4.6. I decided to play an older neighborhood that started lagging for me pretty badly, but didn't delete it in the hopes that someday I could go back to it. I also recently remodeled the Wolff house to add a bathroom and two small bedrooms on the second floor. After that I noticed the Art Gallery with the Riddler tiles when my sim sped by it on its way somewhere but did not go check Wolff or Goth afterwards to see if they were also affected. I haven't played that 'hood again lately so I'll have to go check it. I've also been building an "ideal" neighborhood (which had taken me about a week!).

BTW, I did a search on the EA tech help section and one person claimed that it was related to the fences railing (indoor) they put on those lots. The developers used railings that matched the stair rails, but these fences/rails are not available in the game. Hence, the theory was that they created them using some kind of method that would eventually bork those lots. I take that with a grain of salt, but an interesting theory regardless. If you check, all three of these lots DO have railings that match the stairs, and they are not styles that are available in build mode.

Thanks Simsample!  I will try that with this game, and eventually try to rebuild Sunset Valley to both Awesomized & my standards (I can't stand most of the existing houses).  When I have started a game in the past with Twoftmama's Awesomized save file, though, I have not noticed the problem.  This is only recently after actually trying to revise the Goth & Wolff houses.  Subsequently started a new game with the same file and the problem is still there, even though these are the original houses, which makes it seem that it is a cache issue, but I deleted all of those files and replaced the Sunset Valley object cache file.

I am also going to try your other suggestion to replace the Sunset Valley World file.

I have used Coconnors Savegame and repainted the Library. I saved the Walls and Floors used on the Lot from a fresh created Hood into CaSt, and repainted the Library. The Lot is fixed with doing so.
It looks like the Lots are corrupted and have lost the information what Floor- and Wallcovers are used. You have to replace all tiles on the whole Lot not only the riddler tiles.

Thanks for the info, Havelock!

Rosharley mentioned this fix in #38, however there is also indication that this is a temporary fix (toward the end of the post).
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,16410.msg486123.html#msg486123
It would be good to find out why the corruption is occurring, and prevent it.

I have loaded several times the game now and looked into the affected lots they are fine. But as i mentioned in my post you have to replace all Wall and floortiles with new ones because they are corrupted. If you use the CaST tool on any tile even they one who stay with the pattern visible you get the popup there is nothing to recolor.

Edit: Have read the post you mentioned. Then it must be a difference between my game and the other ones who get riddler tiles, because i have never seen them in my Game and i have played Goth Manor and Wolff house in many different hoods and never got them.
My last hood has a complete renovated interior and facade at the goth manor but i have only used the CaST tool on the original walls and floors still no riddler tiles.

Havelock, I'm thinking that whatever caused the corruption in the first place must still be present in these people's games to make the issue reoccur. So we really need to find the cause and fix it. I'm not having the issue in my game, which is why I can't test for a solution. It is difficult even to discern whether it may be caused by custom content, as there are so many variables involved and so many people with the issue. I've been attempting to eliminate causes but so far I can't even pinpoint a commonality between these people's games.

Coconnor i have repainted the lots in your hood, cold jou look if they stay intact if you load the lots? Hood has now about 4 Sim hours timeprogress caused by me switching between lots. I have saved in edit hood mode.

Get it here: autosave1.rar (http://www.4shared.com/file/136605623/60f4da2f/autosave1.html)

Yes, I will load it, look, and let you know what I find.  In the game that I have continued, I decided just to bulldoze the lots and replace them with other lots.  Hopefully, the tiles will not appear on totally different lots.  I will also report on that, since you and Simsample have kindly taken it upon yourselves to investigate this matter.

Thanks again to both of you!

EDITED TO ADD:  Havelock, just went in and entered all three properties.  Goth Manor and Lone Wolff Manor look fine.  The Art Gallery also looks fine, but I noticed that there were still some question marks on the roof within the top red elongated pillar and two quarter tiles in each of two pillars on the ground floor.  So, I used the method described to find the correct original flooring tile and replaced those as well.  Other than that, the changes have held so far.  I shall continue to check this and let you know here how it goes.

I've been having the same problem also.

Is anyone here playing Riverview?  It would be interesting to see if to see if that problem showed up there. So far I have only heard these reports from Sunset Valley.

They are not new, sorrry i have missed the groundtiles at the roof Pillar and in the two Pillars under the yellow room have them also in my save game. Art Gallery was the first lot i repainted.

No problem!  At least they didn't spread!  I will keep looking in on that save file each day to ensure it remains "riddler tile" free and let you know.  As previously mentioned, in the game I am currently playing I decided to just bulldoze both lots and replace the houses with different ones.I've been playing Sunset Valley, but IIRC I believe other people have mentioned playing Riverview.  If you scan the thread, that may give you the answer.

Here's the latest from my game. I play with lots of mods and CC but nothing new recently except the latest AM update.  I completely bulldozed the art museum and Goth residences. I rebuilt the art museum on the same lot and it is okay. I don't remember exactly where the Goth house was but I know I haven't built anything near there. I rebuilt the Wolff residence after tearing it down wall by wall (didn't want to lose the beautiful vista moodlet) and rebuilt it. I had removed all walls, floor tiles and even went over the entire lot with new terrain paint. I just went to play that house and nearly every surface, floors and walls, are riddler.  >:(   Apparently, bulldozing works, tearing down doesn't. I'm going to evict that family and bulldoze the lot as I now have the vista moodlet restorer thing.

Havelock, I've checked this again today and all is still well.  Perhaps completely repainting with originally used tiles will work in addition to bulldozing lots.  In my current game, on the lots I bulldozed I am also still "riddler tile" free.

I transferred the Goth lot into Riverview AFTER having replaced all the riddler tiles which appeared during play in Sunset Valley, riddler tiles re-appeared almost immediately and continued to appear even after cleaning them up yet again in Riverview, I have since then bulldozed the EA lots and replaced them with my own lots (in Sunset Valley AND Riverview) and have had no further problems. I think this is the only way to purge the Riddler tiles completely.

So if all I have that has this screwy problem is the art gallery do I have to redo my whole neighborhood? I don't want to loose any family I have made. I just want to make sure and I have never really understood about doing anything to the town outside of whatever home I am playing without starting something new. In that way I miss the way they did TS2. And my art gallery seems to have went bad after the last AM update too.

The best way to rid yourself of the problem seems to be bulldozing the EA lot and replacing with one of your own manufacture.  In your case, bulldoze the art gallery and build a new one.  Keep an eye on the Goth and Wolff lots, and bulldoze accordingly if you intend to play them and they show signs of corruption.  You do not, however, need to re-do your entire neighborhood.

For those of you who think that EA's use of fences or rails not available in the game might be the cause of the corrupted lots you may be interested to know that these very objects have now been extracted from the game and are available at MTS along with some recolours, click on link  http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=372486
Personally I still believe the lots were corrupted in other ways but I have an open mind and would be interested to hear if installing these cures anyones riddler tiles, I have installed them myself but not yet tested them out as a potential cure.

I have them in my damn art gallery too.

I replaced all three riddler lots with custom made ones yesterday, and haven't seen the riddler tiles come back yet.  I'd like a different fix though because I liked the original Goth house and I can't find a custom house that matches it enough. And I'm no good at building lots.  So in the meantime I'm using a custom made house that's actually a replica of the Goth house from the sims 1.  Brings back memories.

After I went in to play my game last night I went and searched for the Goth and Wolfe houses because to be honest I didn't even know which they were. And sure enough it isn't only my art gallery which is fubarred. However where the art gallery is totally gone the two houses are only partially bad. But being in use it won't let me fix them either. And I didn't see any railing in the art gallery that weren't already in the game. ( I read that one post about ea putting railing that weren't in the build mode, which was supposed to have corrupted the lots). But I have never entered the Goth or Wolfe house so I have no clue as to what is inside them but I could see the some of the walls and floors were doing the ? multi color thing. I will probably go find homes to replace them too. I also do not have the greatest ability when it comes to building homes. I kinda suck actually. No imagination at all. So Thanks for the info it was very mostly helpful everyone. :)

Lady

I was the one who noticed the stair rail turned into balcony rails both at the Sims forum and here. Seeing I have already added those rails from MTS, I thought I should reply to this query, along with disputing all the others as a big NIL in my game.

So to answer you first, nope - it did not make a difference to have these extracted rails added to my game.

As to the one claiming a total repaint of every single wall, floor, and even roof, terrain paint, and adding paint where there was none at all (like inside the square columns and their floors - did NOT stop the riddler from reappearing. It did delay the riddler, but for only about 2 Sims weeks. I did notice that not playing one of those hoods kept the riddler wall at bay though, as I made 2 "save as...." copies of the repainted building hoods and called one -save as played and the other as - save as unused. It actually took playing the unused hood approxiamately the same amount of time I played the first hood to make the riddler reappear. One thing interesting I discovered in both - is from a distance the buildings looked fine, new paint job intact. As I slowly loomed closer the art gallery would flash back and forth between total riddler and total repainted. Before the repainting it just hung steadfast to the riddler wall, floors, and ceilings.

What I tried after that is I totally removed the Sims 3 folder from under My Documents, then started the game and let the game replace every single folder under My documents. This removed everything in my game including patches - which I thought was odd, as the game was telling me updates were availiable. I had no Riverview, no launcher downloads, nothing as if I had reinstalled the game. I left it like that and decided to test out the theory on seeing if the riddler came from use of patches or downloads, as I apparently had neither of those but I did still have all the stuff in my mods folders, so I had to remove those physically as I knew most would not work without the patches, especially awesomemod.
 I played the hood with one of the EA families from the library - the one with the most kids. Sure enough about midway into the 2nd Sims week the riddler roared to life on the art gallery on just a few walls and a few floors. By the following day the building was nothing but riddler. So far the Wolfe Mansion and Goth Mansion were showing free of the tiles.
I played 2 more Sims days and those two buildings stayed clear of the riddler, but the Art gallery was covered still. So I repainted it completely, including floors, including the foundation like walls around the building, everything and every nook and cranny. Three sims days past and I noticed that the Lone Wolfe Mansion had a few scatterings of the riddler on a few wall and the roof. The Goth Mansion I thought was okay until I actually zoomed up close to it and discovered the floor at the door entrance also was covered with riddler tiles, but the rest of the house seemed intact. I moved the Goths to the clipboard to further inspect the house and discovered that the entire foundation under the house was covered in riddler tiles but only on the inside. This was especially odd as before I had noticed the inside foundation of the Goth house in a different game was that black stone and cement look the Sims 3 foundation comes with as I cannot purposely paint a wall like that foundation, so I assume it is by design. Well I tried repainting the entire foundation with a stone pattern byt just under the house on the inside. When I did this I noticed some walls did not cover and even individually painting them caused previously colored ones to revert back to riddler. To further the disappointment some of the upperfloor interior walls and even paintings on the wall had the riddler squares scattered here and there. I went back to the under foundation and removed all the paint and found all the riddler squares inside the house had reverted back to normal.

I could go on and on about things I've tried, including installing hoods that were totally remade, and the art gallery had been repainted, the Goth house was the Goth house from Sims 1, and the Wolfe Mansion was another Ultra modern house. I do not know if these creators bulldozed the lots before placing these buildings, but the design of the business area was reworked and the Art Gallery was even in a different spot than it had been, yet yesterday my new Art Gallery suddenly is covered in riddler walls. I have now been playing this particular hood about 5 real time days, which is about 15 Sims weeks.
  So far I have tried every suggestion made to no avail. None of the fixes last longer than 3 Sims weeks, but absolutely replacing the building period with none EA buildings, because the new Goth house and the New Lone Wolfe are staying riddler free. I have a sneaking suspicion the problem is the building itself, as I have not yet tried a totally new building on that lot. Also adding patches finally after the fact did nothing but make the building look normal from a distance, but flash back and forth between normal and riddler up close. Now it seems the angle at which you view the Art gallery can make it look normal or riddler just by changing the camera view. This has to be the oddest glitch I have ever experienced.
Just wanted to add - I have never had a save 13 error or save 12 error in any of these hoods, in fact I have only had one of each ever since the game came out and those were both in the first month. So apparently the corruption doesn't go deep enough to cause either error. I also do not crash, lag, have any speed problems, or anything. I use the fps limiter and the 3 booter to start and play my game. Also it does not matter whether or not I play with Awesomemod either. I have played the game both with and without - so awesomemod is NOT a factor period. It's definitely an EA problem because I also have the problem in a strictly vanilla game with NO CC at all.

Just now I made a new Sunset Valley and selected the Goth household and the game crashed while it was loading their house.   ::)

I just got these in my game last night, but only at the Goth mansion so far. The first time I noticed the question mark tiles, they were only on a few sections on the wall closest to the graveyard. The next day, there were more along the side as well as lots in the bottom of the pool. Now the entire house is covered in them. I was planning on replacing the mansion with a new one anyway, so I might just do that. Actually, the Goth house was the only original house I kept. The rest were bulldozed and replaced with lots I built or downloaded.

I got the riddler tiles on the front entrance of my art gallery a few days ago for the first time. I've been playing sims 3 since it came out and this is the first time I've seen these, except for when I read this thread once before. I noticed with the tiles at the art gallery, when you use the eyedropper tool and click the riddler tile it pulls up the actual tile it is and lets you add more riddler tiles anywhere. It's as if you were using the eyedropper tool for any other copy and paste jobs. I just repainted over my tiles hoping to fix it, as I read in here that no one seems to have figured any way to stop them.
Then I went to the Goth mansion. And as ShortyBoo said, mine were on the wall closest to the mansion, then more scattered all the way up towards the tower, and some on the pool bottom. I don't play with the Goth mansion so I just repaint if I notice some.

I got these on the paintings my artist sim did. I just deleted all of the paintings and made him start over.

I also am having Riddler infestation and as for EA tech claiming those of us with 4800 series Radeon cards are out of luck, that's bull. My case says right there, ATI Radeon 4870. My game runs utterly flawlessly beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that when the riddler pops up, its completely eye-bleaching. I first noticed that the entire museum was corrupted in one save. It showed up and I figured it was some CC I downloaded and I forgot about it to be honest. Then it went away again and didn't show back up till a week later. I made a new save where I have been playing the Goths, and it seems to be the pool and Mortimer's room that were the most infested. I have no idea what is causing it, but I am noticing a lot of people having problems have ATI cards...not sure if this is really the case though. And I am extremely doubtful about it being a memory leak issue since it starts the second I start my computer and game up.

Here is an interesting piece of information however. It was NOT displaying riddler tiles on my notebook. My notebook is slower and also uses an ATI card, and did not have riddler tiles when opening the same save (I have the game synced over 3 computers). So I am really baffled as to what is causing this.

As are we all, Druscylla. I am currently enjoying my Geforce 3700 LE, and has been ever since Sims 3 came out. No riddler tiles until a few weeks ago, which says to me it has nothing to do with the graphics card itself. The tiles have sprung up on new saved games I started. The first one shows no signs of the riddler tiles, which I think it should have if it was the card that was the problem. I bet it is just EA trying to place the blame somewhere else, as usual. And yes, the graphics card is enough for Sims 3 since the graphics are wonderful apart from those pesky riddler tiles.

I started with a clean town of all but the community/job buildings, so the Riddler only struck the art museum for me.

I found it pretty easy to just bulldoze the art museum and build another.  It's a pretty easy thing to build; all you need are lights and decorative objects.  People don't go upstairs in the museum anymore even though I put the best art upstairs, but that's pretty minor.

If you have fambly homes being infested by the Riddler, as apparently happens with default Sunset Valley, doing the same would be somewhat more tedious (assuming you're like me and dislike building homes you don't intend to play much), but I expect it to be a permanent fix.

I am reluctant to start bulldozing as the problem comes and goes. EA keeps blaming me for the problem saying I got a bad download or my computer isn't up to playing the game.

They gave me the same bullshit until I slowly explained that my computer is very much up to playing the game and it was EAxis content that was borking, not just custom. Then all I got was silence.

I bulldozed the Goth hoouse and replaced it with another home I downloaded and so far, I haven't seen any other riddler tiles.

I went to EA again with this and was directed to the AMD website to download a hotfix. http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Hotfixfor3DGames.aspx I am installing it now and going to try it, but since it isn't just AMD card users, I have doubts this will fix anything. It specifically claims it fixes graphical corruptions in Sims 3 for ATI Radeon 2000, 3000 and 4000 series cards.

Edit:
The fix is a lie.

That's the same fix they told me to try to stop the game from freezing in CAS with my Radeon HD 4850. It didn't work, so I had to go back to my x1900. My graphics look horrible, but at least there's no crashing. I have had that fix for awhile and I got the riddler tiles anyway, so, no, it's not a fix for it.

i also got the same reply from EA I'm guessing they just don't want to own up to their stupidity and their inept programing skills. They tried to say that my AMD 4850 was not a supported card and that it was too fast for this game (absolute B**l Sh*t) I ended up bulldozing all of the offending lots. I replaced them with downloads from MTS I replaced the Art Gallery with "Wrensday Art Gallery by calisims"  the Goth House with "The Sims 2 To The Sims 3 Series-The Goth Mansion by Hraklis943" and the Lone Wolfe with a nice house called"Felicity by romagi". That was several Sims weeks ago and so far I haven't had any more ridler tiles show up (touch wood). I am  so ticked off with EA they have totally ripped us off with Sims 3. I have even contemplated going back to playing Sims 2 again. It really pisses my off when EA blames the user for their errors, especially when I went out and brought a high end gaming computer so that I could play their game. Shame on you EA.

But I don´t have Radeon. I have Nvidia Geforce 9800GT. :-[

I think that what he/she is saying is that it doesn't really matter what sort of video card you have, since EA is still full of bullshit and will do whatever it takes to put the blame somewhere else. I have a Nvidia Geforce 7300 LE and I also have the riddler tiles. I bet that if I would go to EA and ask for a solution they would encourage me to update my drivers. At this point in time I'm not able to do that though, since "Bertha" kicked the bucket a week ago and I'm currently waiting for a new OS so I can give the old hag a facelift. I highly doubt it that all of our videocards, all different from eachother, would all of a sudden become obsolete because of some new drivers. The fact still stands: The base game came out several months ago, most of us has played the game during this time and it wasn't until about a month ago the riddler tiles started to show up. How is that an indication of a graphics card not being up to date? I would understand it if it had happened AFTER we installed the new expansion pack, or if it happened simultaneously for all just after the last patch. I r disappoint and confuzzled.

My point exactly, EA kept telling me it was my ATI card that was causing the problem even though I had pointed out to them that people with other cards were having the same error. They are so full of sh*t. they need to own up to their mistake and fix it.

I occasionally encounter these riddler tiles. These are my observations on what's causing it during my gameplay.

Most of them on my custom paintings (portraits, memorized shots, still life, sim painted paintings not CCs). From what I noticed from the paintings, there is a link from the image library within your save game that gets broken which causes. Mostly when the painter or the subject (for portraits) sim description gets bugged the ownership tags gets broken. Also moving portraits to another neighborhood via the bin also removes the links even if the related sim is present with the move.

Also unplayed lots with custom paintings does get broken links a lot more often than active lots. It's my guess that inactive lots tend to have less or no refresh sessions to manage and maintain link stability.

For walls and floors tiles, usually it happens when I load patterns over default floorings and wallpapers, somehow the custom pattern overlaid does not save and during the next texture refresh session of the game the unsaved pattern is replaced by these riddler tiles. In rare instances default patterns in my game also gets these tiles when my cache is full (during Error 13 instances).

I am now getting a new type of riddler tile. Specifically in the Goth house again, the riddler tiles will show up lightly underneath the texture and colour of the walls or floors. For example, in the bathroom closest to Mortimer's room, I noticed that the tiles on the wall which used to be grey have turned an odd shade of pink with a faint green ? in the middle. This also happened to the wall paneling. The shade became more pink and the ? showed thru faintly.
What I tried to do was to go to another save game and save ALL the textures of every surface and wall of an untainted Goth house and then repaint my Goth house with those same paints. The riddler tiles still returned the next time I loaded the game. I experimentally changed several rooms with my own combination of paints and flooring. These rooms have remained fine without ridder tiles.

The only way to remove it completely is bulldoze it seems, repainting is working for me but I doubt it will be a permanent solution. $5 says this will not be fixed in the EP.

Along with all the other problems that have occurred with this game, I finally got tired of putting up with the "riddler" tile infestation, and bulldozed Goth Manor, Lone Wolff Manor and the Art Gallery and replaced them with custom buildings.  No problems with riddler tiles since then.  So, that seems to be a "permanent" (I hope) solution.

@Jordi:  I'm still getting Error Code 12 even with a virtually new game (a few days old).  It's the most annoying thing.  I've been using Pescado's fixes (fixall, towderelicts, etc.) and Twallen's Supercomputer to try to play past them.

Jordi, any theories as to why it affects just those three lots?
Edit: Hey, where did Jordi go?

He threw a hissy fit, deleted all his posts from this year, and souped.

Interestingly, I just had this problem pop up in a more or less blank-slate version of Sunset Valley-- meaning that all the EAxian community lots were there, but the houses were all built from the ground up. The only place I have seen this happen in so far was the art gallery, but apparently Goth or Wolff manors aren't needed to develop this problem. I'm off to bulldoze the art gallery and hope for the best.

I bulldozed all three lots.  I replaced the Art Gallery with one from MTS2, which only came with a few paintings (you need to hang your own in the rest of the space). Strangely enough, one of the existing paintings was a "riddler" tile, but I just deleted it.  I attributed this to the fact this it was probably a custom painting which I don't have installed.  No other riddler tiles have appeared on the replacement art gallery.

Ok, I was never going to come out of lurkdom, but since nobody else seems to be reporting this I have had a couple of paintings turn into question mark tiles in Riverview.

I have a brother and a sister who are not allowed to move out of the lot, even though the sister is Good and is an International Super Spy and the Evil brother is the Emperor of Evil. Since they have to get along with each other and the best way to do that is to avoid each other as much as possible he was doing a bit of painting in the art gallery. A couple of times I have come back in to finish a painting after updating AM and discovered he's painting a still life of a question mark. (One was even a masterpiece!) But this is not always reproducible either, since there have been other times when the painting was unharmed.

Auestion mark tiles appeared at the art gallery about three hours into the hood's existence. They were there the very first time I loaded the lot. This hood has supreme commander running as well as family switching frequently.

We have established that the tiles are not caused by custom content, mods of any kind, graphics cards and computer configurations or what version you are running - not surprisingly this appears to be entirely EA's messed up files somewhere, and damned if I can figure out where. I am going to bulldoze in a new town I am making for the expansion pack testing of this and see if that maybe fixes the problem. I am (foolishly probably) hoping a patch or fix comes out for it or is even in the expansion because it's really obnoxious to log in to my house only to be blinded by the freaking museum my artistic sim insists she wishes to visit.

Actually a few nights ago an actual EA Guru stuck his nose into my posts with a noob regarding the Riddler. This noob thought her mom's pc  was on the fritz, so I was in the midst of explaining what little we have figured out about these 3 buildings, and in pop the Guru - to confirm it was not the mothers pc, and that EA engineers were looking into the problem as he spoke. He said it was an EA texture that was just used in those 3 buildings (that is not availiable to us) that had corrupted and they were trying to find out why.

In my head it now makes sense why we can recolor these buildings and the riddler will just return as it would be akin to us trying to recolor the rabbithole buildings. We couldn't. What I can't figure is why EA bothered to use any texture on buildings we are all higher apt to alter to start with. This also solves the riddle why even the sledge hammer could not delete a few areas on these buildings. So back to my first statement on the riddler about Voodoo. EA's got to stop doing things it apparently knows nothing about - just like Voodoo.

Do you have a link for that thread, Writin_Reg?
The only wallpaper I can find on those three lots that isn't available in the catalogs is the interior of the foundation:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/Sims3UnavailableFoundationTexture.jpg
However, that foundation texture is used in almost every EA lot in Sunset too, so that wouldn't explain why the corruption would only affect those three lots. I'm guessing that for that foundation, the lots were probably made prior to the brick texture being coded as the default for the foundation walls.
There are some plain walls that have a strange issue though- in the art gallery for example, if I select some of the solid coloured walls with the CAST tool I can see that their wallpaper type is in the gallery ('flat wall') but if I look at the swatch, there is no material category (it goes to whichever category you had selected last). Instead of showing up as a highlighted pattern, or at the bottom as a 'custom' (recoloured) pattern, there is nothing selected. This screenshot shows the red wall, with the 'flat wall' wallpaper style highlighted, but no pattern selected (top right by my cursor arrow). I had had a 'miscellaneous' category item selected last, but if I selected 'geometric' or any of the others then it would remain on that category when I CAST selected the red wall.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/Sims3UnavailableSwatchTexture.jpg
Perhaps these walls were coloured before the game was finished, too- and maybe it is those patterns which are becoming corrupted. Doesn't explain why some people are seeing this in every instance of Sunset that they create, and others (like me) cannot make it happen.

Something strange happened last night.
Whilst browsing through my hood, I thought 'sod it, I'll quickly tidy up the ? infested art gallery'. Has been 2 or three months since I looked at it. I tried to mass-recolour the floor, with the 4th one along in the floors > misc category. Dark concrete. The game hung indefinately everytime I tried this. I know sometimes it can involve a long pause when recolouring a lot of tiles (much more so in TS2) but the game froze.
When I tried instead to recolour individual floor tiles with the concrete, the game became ultra slow. When dragging the marker to recolour large areas, the game went slower than I have ever seen. It was like it was fighting against me. This is very weird.
Due to the slowness, I didn't  bother recolouring the whole lot. With so many diagonal bits, and no mass-recolour tool on this particular lot, you can imagine thats a good 1 hours work there so meh to that.
Can anyone else confirm this?

so there is no solution to this problem at this time? If a lot comes down with a case of the question marks its a lost cause?

The best solution at this time is to bulldoze the lot and replace with one of your own design (or one you download).

damn it was a pre-made lot i wanted to keep :(

Although I tried, I couldn't find the thread to which Writin_Reg referred.  However, another thread popped up tonight, responded to by a SimGuru.  It is here: http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/0/123775.page#1527153 .  His response really doesn't say anything other than they are aware of the problem, have duplicated the issue, are checking into it and that an update will be posted when there is more info.

Well at least they have acknowledged the problem. Its better than being blamed or ignored for it. I really hope they fix it soon. I don't want to bulldoze those 3 lots in every save, but I hate those rainbow tiles.