More Awesome Than You!

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pics at the time, but I ran into an issue with cars and "teleporting" sims. Also, unfortunatley, I hadn't been running debug mode, so I did not get an error dialog box/log. I don't remember if anyone has already mentioned this situation already, so here goes:

In my family, the father owned a car (the 2nd most expensive one). I was busy trying to satisfy one of the daughter's wants to get her asp level up before sending her off to school. However, she missed the bus. :P

Fortunately, the father had a day off, and thus did not need to use the car. So, I figured why not try sending the daughter to school using the car. I had the daughter drive off to school in the father's car (i.e. the Owner set to the father - I mention this because I don't know if this may be significant or not).

Anyways, when school was over, the two teens (the son/brotheri.e. my simself) had magically appeared at the front step. Admittedly, I hadn't been paying attention, but... the father was in the middle of socializing with the mailman right at the front door near the mailbox. :P So... I don't think I could have missed the fact that the school bus had come and gone. I received no indication that the teens were home from school (no messages regarding homework or bringing home friends). All of a sudden, I just noticed that the two teens were right at the front door, and annoying each other. :P The school bus did not show up, and the father's car was no where in sight.

I exited the lot without saving, re-entered, turned on debug mode in hopes that I would get an error if it happened again. I proceeded to play pretty much the same way, and with hardly any changes to what I did previously, this time the school bus came with the son getting off of it. And the car showed up with the daughter getting out. So... it appeared to have fixed itself. And I was fortunate enough to have saved just before these things happened (and didn't have to restart from farther back :P).

But... I was just wondering if anyone encoutered this, and could this have possibly been due to portals getting deleted?

I've also had some funky situations of timing with the carr and carpool. Sometimes the mother would be heading off to work, and I'd have the father drive off in his car. Or... sometimes the teens are dragging their asses getting onto the bus. As a result, the father doesn't really have room to back the car out the "normal" way (i.e. the car reverses out of the driveway in the direction of the mailbox, and then drives "forward" in the direction that the carpools and school buses normally travvel, from left to right, when facing the car from the side and left is the rear end and right is the front end, in an American game where cars drive on the right hand side of the road). However, whenever the father's car is "blocked" in by a stalled school bus or car pool, the car magically turns around and drives in the
"opposite" direction (i.e. the direction that typically NPC type vehicles arrive and drive away in, like the social worker, maid, babysitter, deliviery service, etc.). I'm wondering if this is "normal" behaviour or if this might have possibly contributed to vehicle portal deletion?

Has anyone had either of these situations occur in their game? Is this benign behaviour where the lot would have reset itself anyways, if I had saved, exited, and returned? Or would it have been majorly fubar'd with school buses forever never appearing again and the father's car lost forever in limbo?

Just wondering if there are things I should to to avoid this, such as maybe changing the Owner of the car to the sim that I want to use it. That bit kind of seems buggy... sims trying to use cars that they don't necessarily own. Anyways, any help or info shedding light on the situation would be greatly appreciated. :)

Ste

I think having sims drive to school is not good, I don't think there is any code for them to 'drive home'. Since they didn't take the school bus, they didn't have a 'relationship' (code term) with it, so they fell back on the failsafe code to return to the lot, which is to magically appear by the mailbox or front door. I don't think you fubar'ed anything, other than possibly losing the car. It might reappear at some point, or it might not.

I had my teen drive to school and he brought the car back home with him at the end of the day. Not quite sure how they accomplished it, but both safely reappeared at the end of the day.

As for the 2nd part, I've seen cars out and out teleport over another vehicle sitting behind them and into the road - to drive off in whatever direction they can. Cars can "blink" and aren't stuck with honking horns waiting for buses and taxis to move like car pools are. 'Course you get extra time from the late carpool and don't really from a car... you get dunned if you're late.

I've had many teens drive to school and make it back safely. I know in some cases they were the assigned owner of the car, but I don't know if that was true in all cases (doubt it). Also, whenever there has been something blocking the cars path (backing out of the driveway) I've had two different things happen: the car waits (sometimes a long time) for whatever is in its way (like the school bus waiting an hour for my slow child sim to go down three flights of stairs) or the car just fades out (like when it reaches the portal) right in the driveway.

I've not had either of the problems you have described - all though, it would be cool to see the car drive the other way out of the driveway.  ;D

I have a house with 3 teens, one I assigned to a car. He safely drives to school and returns each day (leaving his homework in the garage!) and his siblings take the bus. Too bad they can pile in and ride with him everyday!

I had one house that I tried sending the teen to school in the car and he kept going to the driveway and then going to school would drop out of the queue and he would go do something else. Then go to school would requeue. This went on all day and all night! I finally  deleted the car, forced errors on the kid and reset and I don't remember what else and finally got him to take the busthe next day. I attributed this to any of the following: a custom car, and the driveway was blocked by a vehicle at the time of departure and the driveway was oddly placed on the lot (directly to the right of the mailbox).

Sims can drive home from school just fine. The PROBLEM is when the only sim on the lot is assigned to a car, and thus is assigned to drive the car to school (leaving no relationship to the bus), but the bus shows up anyway...and finds it has zero passengers, which confuzzles it.

Really? In my game, the bus will come, but it just leaves after a hour.

Well, I've had no trouble of this sort, even with custom cars (or at present, custom hansom cabs!)  But usually I don't assign an owner to the car when there are kids in the house as I've had problems when the car arrives back at the same time as the school bus, but behind it and everything has locked up!  I only assign ownership to a parent whose work schedule doesn't conflict with the school bus!

I had what I think is a similar situation today.  I have 4 Sims and a toddler living on a lot, namely Darren & Cassandra and their son, together with Dirk and his girlfriend, who'd both arrived from Uni the previous day.  They have 3 cars between them.  Darren went off to work in his car and an hour later Dirk left in his.  The day before Darren's car had belonged to Dirk's girlfriend, but as she wasn't at work that day I switched ownership to Darren.  Anyway, when Darren came back from work a message came up about an error with a sedan and I saw Darren sat in the middle of the road, but the car was parked in its normal spot.

Next thing I knew, Dirk was sitting down to eat, even though he wasn't due to get home for another hour.  No error message had come up about Dirk, but his car was missing and it wasn't possible to park another one there.  On top of that, he got penalised for not going to work.  It would appear he'd arrived home at the same time as his father and without his car.  The car Darren was using was a recolour, but the other two were normal Maxis ones.  All three are the ones that cost $6,250.  I've had Sims arrive back without cars before and they've either appeared spontaneously, or been there when I've reloaded the lot, so hopefully this one will be back when I next go in.  The whole car business seems pretty bugged from what I can see.

If Dirk works the same job, an error in the job object will cause everyone working that job to respawn in the center of the lot and forget what they were doing.

3 cars is a lot to have on one lot.  I never have more than two, and even then it causes a severe memory drain.

There's not a lot of practical value to owning a lot of cars: They take up a lot of space, and with the way time works when you drive off, nobody else can possibly go anywhere anyway since time doesn't pass, so the car will be back the same time it left. And you don't need it to go to work except in rare cases.

I mostly only use the car on the day a family move in and their car pool and the school bus don't arrive.  Take kids to school then carpool to work and take the rap for being late - at least they get paid!

I always have car pool issues in homes where a sim becomes pregnant.  The pregnant sim isn't required to go to work of course, but the car pool also fails to show for the non-pregnant members of the household -- all of them, even if it's supposed to show at different times.  This was occurring before I had any pregnancy or marriage modifiers installed.

The first time this happened I exited without saving then re-loaded the lot, and the same problem occurred.  Then I tried exiting with saving, but the carpool did not re-set.  Placing a driveway and buying a car (funds permitting) worked:  if after having a sim drive to work for one day I set the car ownership to <nobody>, the carpool started arriving again for everyone who needed it, and I could sell the car and driveway.  In those households that could not afford a car having just one sim quit the existing job and find a new one also caused the carpool to start arriving for all who needed it.

Other than this, I have no school bus or carpool issues, unless I do something really silly (only once, please be sure) like having sims that work different hours drive to work together.  The one that was due to return home later never showed up, and could not be retrieved with the FFS Debugger "retrieve missing sim" option, or with moving the entire family to the bin and moving them back in again.  I had to overwrite the game with a backup file, which thankfully was taken right before playing that day.