More Awesome Than You!

Tonight, I got home from work and Sims2 (with all expansions, including FFS) would not start up. It would freeze in the load up screen. The music would keep going like everything was normal, but the screen was frozen and it wouldn't load up. Left it for five minutes and it was still on the same loading message (you know, the reticulating splines type thing).

Things had been running fine with the game until this past Thursday when I had a couple of crashes. I've been playing a little more cautiously since and haven't had one since Friday.

I've tried uninstalling drivers and intstalling new ones, but I'm guessing that doesn't have much to do with the game loading up.

I've also tried taking the disk out of the machine to make sure it doesn't have any schmutz on it.

Any advice on what to try or look at? The computer is only a couple of months old, but it was put together pieces-parts. I'm wondering if its possible to copy the disk contents to the harddrive and run the game from there to rule out a problem with the disk/dvd drive.

That happened to me on Saturday, I removed the download folder to test for a bad download.  Put them back in subfolder at a time (there's over 200) and started it up.  By the time the last folder was in, everything worked fine.  No bad download, no explanation either.

I seemed to have gotten it working, and smoother than it has been running. I basically disabled all other programs - ran msconfig and disabled all unecessary services and all start-up programs. Game came up fine and ran smooth as a nooboo's bottom. I have no idea what could have been causing the problem, but I guess I'll slowly turn things back on and see what's what.

As a side note, is it okay to make subdirectories in the downloads folder? Can I make a 'hacks' folder and a 'furniture' folder and still have the game read the content? (so it would be c:/.... sims2/downloads/hacks and c:/.... sims2/downloads/furniture?

Yes, you can do that. You can have a seperate folder for bodyshop content if you have NL or later :) If you do not, those downloads have to be left loose in the download folder.

I have some that are 4 and 5 subfolders deep.  The only problem I've had is that the hack conflict tool won't read the hacks that way.  Moving them back out fixes that problem.

So, I can put them in different folders and they'll work... but if there's a conflict, I have to figure it out the hardway. Right? :)

Yes, but organization helps locate problem files.

Most of your files in hair? Put the entire category and see if it works. If successful, do your next biggest folder and so on and so forth. That way when the game fubars again, you know what folder to look in first.

Makes it SOOOO much easier.

One of the first things I tried when I started having this problem last night was to take out all the cc, but leave the hacks behind. While some of the cc was easily identified, some was just a long string of arcane numbers and letters and I had no idea what the heck it was. I'm glad I can put some of the cc back in, but it'll be nice to keep track of it better.

Sims2Pack Clean Installer is a great help in sorting your cc.  It doesn't always show the GUID (the long number) but names the item and usually has a picture of the mesh or recolour so you can tell what it is.

Just a general update. I *think* I found my problem.

The game kept crashing or running into issues because of a 'display adapter' error that I was seeing when it would crash, but never long enough to read what it actually meant. In a moment of inspiration, switched my screen res to match my desktop res, and suddenly the game is running smoother than before.

This is something I never thought to do because every single other game I've ever had insists that it can only run at 800x600 or at the most 1024x768. I never even dreamed of bumping the game res up to match my computer res of the next one up (1268x1024?).

You know about deleteing groups.cache and the cigen package right?  Maxoid Tom said they get corrupted and if you delete them new clean ones will generate when needed. If I've got a problem I always do that 'cos it's easy and it might help!  It's possible there's a problem in one of the 'hood files rather than the Downloads - I usally tell people to take out the whole Sims2 folder as a starting point for problem location and put that back in bits before starting on Downloads.  If it's a new problem another suggesion is to test downloads grouping by the date you installed them.  That's actually easier if you haven't subfoldered anything!  Mostly I help less techier simmers - so this is probably suck eggs... but I'll add screen resolution to my list of possible solutions.  thanks

What is the cigen package anyway? 

I knew about the groups.cache, but what's the cigen package? That's one I may have missed.

cigen.package is for BodyShop.  When you restart BodyShop, it will respawn.

Aaah. I never use BodyShop. I've never quite figured it out, but then never had much reason to.