More Awesome Than You!

Essentially, I've been getting the blank interface bug with France. No other destinations in my game seem to experience this problem, nor does the homeland. I've only visited France once or twice before on that particular save. It worked perfectly fine, but I lost progress due to repeated crashes to the desktop, so no France was ever actually saved. I decided on the third go that I would just simply leave it a day or two before visiting France, and lo and behold:

(http://i56.tinypic.com/108905w.png)

Although it's a little different to the normal variation of the problem. Everything actually works. France is not a ghost wasteland. Time passes correctly. Sims are all there, and they will operate as normal. View my sim takes me to the selected sim. The family appears correctly on the Map interface. The only actual problem is that there is missing UI for my sims, and no apparent way to force it to appear. Sometimes, it almost feels as though this save is generating a "bad" France though (although the question I suppose I must truly worry about is why exactly it generates a dodgy France).

I haven't played the game in a long time, until recently. Since replaying with a fully up-to-date game I no longer seem to experience the problem in any new saves (although in testing, one particular minute-old save refused to ever load again). So I decided to let the game generate a new France on a completely new working save (featuring a younger version of the same sims that I copied from the bin). As soon as they arrived in France, they left. I saved and quit, and copied the necessary France files from that save to my older save.

And it worked. Flawlessly. My sims can actually visit France and appear on the UI now. My basic testing last night suggests that everything seems to work just fine, and they are able to return home perfectly fine too. I just wanted to ask whether this is a VBT in the long-term? Am I heralding impending doom by splicing these particular files like this, or will I be able to get away with it due to the more isolated nature of foreignia? It all appears to be completely fine and harmless now, but I guess I'll give up if this is going to cause a future BFBVFS.

If France has not had time to accumulate changes, splicing MAY work. However, if you have played a significant amount of gameplay in France, and people have had a chance to die off, be born, etc, then this will result in dangling pointers to people who no longer exist and orphaned records of people who do exist but the game no longer recognizes. THIS IS BAD!

Ah, this should okay then I guess. France existed for literally 20 seconds before I spliced it in. I know for sure that no major changes have occured. I guess I was more worried about dangling references to the pawns I used to get to France in the newer save. Good to know nonetheless.