More Awesome Than You!

Last night I saved to a new name (we'll call this save slot B), then continued playing for a while, before saving again, overwriting B. After I saved, I decided to do a routine 'reset everything' (using Twallan's Master Controller) and saved again to a new name (call this one C).

Today, I loaded up C and very quickly realised something was off. To be more specific, every bit of progress in the game, between the first and second times I saved in slot B, had vanished. So I loaded up slot B and noted that my sim was in the middle of an interaction I recalled him having been in the middle of doing the first time I saved. TS3 was considerate enough to leave me with a backup, which I renamed to A. While I was in there I checked the time stamps; A had a timestamp of around 7:00, while B had a time stamp of 9:00 or so (I don't save more than every hour or two, since TS3 rarely if ever crashes for me, and usually gives warning before it does in the form of abnormal HDD activity). C had a timestamp just a minute or two after B. I loaded up A, and compared it to B -- and found that in terms of interactions, skill progress, etc. they were both completely identical to each other, and to C, with the following exceptions:

-The date in A was Sunday, while the dates in B and C were Monday.
-The sims were in their 'reset' positions and were not interacting with anything in C, since I had reset before saving.

If I'd just saved to B ("overwriting" the slot which was backed up to A), I'd assume it was maybe some kind of weird file system error or whatnot, although that doesn't *really* make sense, since the dates differ (even though my main sim is in the same frame of the same animation of the same interaction in both saves), but the other file I created with "Save As" rather undermines that theory.

So now I'm asking, WTF happened? I can't even really figure out how this would be possible, unless TS3 decided randomly to copy the data over from the first slot to the second, instead of dumping it from the actual game ... or is it possible the game had two conflicting versions of its own state internally? That makes even less sense. This is the weirdest save-related bug I've ever seen in any game.

Apart from finding that extremely difficult to follow, may have been just me though and someone else may find it easier to follow, I must say I have never had any issue like that, assuming my understanding of your problem is right.  I often overwrite old saves and use the "save as" option whenever I make what I consider a major change in my game, and might want to revert to an earlier time if I don't like the way things pan out, or if the game starts to develop the hiccups. 

In all the times I have done this, the ONLY time I have experienced any issues with saving was when using the "save and quit" option, as the game would often appear to quit/crash before the save was completed.  That was way back near the beginning and since then I always save, then quit as a separate process, that way if the game crashes while quitting it won't affect the saves.

I had it happen one time before, I believe -- that time I didn't have a backup or secondary save to compare between, so I just wrote it off as being my fevered imagination; now, however, I'm not so sure. I also have heard at least one other person on another forum mention having this issue, but no idea what the cause is or how to fix it.

This sound a bit like what happened in the old days of Sims 2, when paranoid people would mark their saves as Read Only.  But I don't really believe that's the case here, but it might be worth a check.

Well, TS2 has so many fun ways to go "foom", a little paranoia is tantamount to common sense.

I haven't ever marked anything as 'read only', although I just looked and saw all the save *folders* are marked read-only. The files inside them are not, though. Since this is true of every save I have going back several weeks, I can't imagine it being related; presumably TS3 does this when it creates the folder.

Did you have the Sims 3 documents folder open on the desktop when you were trying to save?  Not sure that would have allowed for a new time-stamp on a save without new information being created, but it does occasionally cause errors with saves loading.  Stands to reason it might cause errors in saves saving.

I don't think I did; however, I used to keep an explorer window pointed at the TS3 documents folder all the time while testing mods and never had any issues saving or loading.

Anyway, if that were the case, then the save C wouldn't have the sims in their 'reset' positions. If all three saves were identical, I'd simply chalk it up to some weird save-copying glitch, but since the sims actually did reset, that makes this a whole lot weirder -- since the game somehow reset the sims & objects in the game, but managed to drop all new objects and changes to crafting tallies, etc. at the same time.

Whatever this problem is, it's relatively new -- I played quite a lot of TS3 around the time LN came out, and again shortly after Pets, but it never happened then. Now it's happened to me at LEAST twice inside a week.

Are you trying new games/saves or an old save/game?  It is possible that the game could be corrupt, therefore the problem with saving.

The issue isn't consistently repeatable; it happened once, and again around a week later, which means that failing to observe it happen, after reinstalling or starting a new game, wouldn't immediately be any proof that the issue was corrected. I'll go ahead and do a full wipe/reinstall, just to get started, but it would take upwards of a month of continuous playing without a repeat of the incident, before I would be satisfied that the issue was 'fixed'.

In the mean time, I would like to know what kind of testing, etc. can be done to determine what in the world is going on, assuming that it continues to happen after the reinstall.