More Awesome Than You!

Ok...so after installing the patch (not sure if it is the patch problem), I have a kid with blank wants and fears. And he develop a LTW of Marry off 6 children.

I tried resetting his SWAFs using ingame sim modder. Doesn't work.
I tried killing him and resurrecting him. Doesn't work. He retains his LTW of Marry off 6 children even though the aspiration icon changed to the "growing up" aspiration.
Strangely, bringing him back alive gives him 3 wants slots and 1 fear slots.

I tried taking out all my hacks. Nope, the blank slots remains.

I don't know if this is a dangling SWAF problem but I have not done any DAC on this hood.

Any ideas/help will be greatly appreciated. This is one of my fav kids and I will hate to lose him.

He is my only playable having this problem so I doubt this is a big issue? *cross toes and fingers*

Crazy. My sim kid just rolled the want for a Bar. The funny part is this child is the son of a Amish Farmer and i am playing the family as close as possible to real Amish life lol.

Has happened to me since the second patch also.  There's another thread about it somewhere, it's happening to quite a few people.  As I said on that thread, I have one toddler or child (can't remember) who is obviously a future Romance Sim going by the personality who actually wants to woo-hoo with 20 different Sims.  As it fits very nicely, I am quite happy for it to stay!

Have you deleted any sims in your neighborhood?  This happens sometimes when SWAFs files associated with one sim are left hanging and new sims inherit them.  See if you have more SWAF entries in SimPE than SDSC (Sim Description) entries for this hood. 

I got curious about the number of SWAFS v. SDSC, so I made a new hood, stuck in a DT and a Uni and without playing the hood at all, went into SimPE and took a look--number of SWAF outnumbered SDSC from the start.

This patch stuff...What is amiss with the programming?

No this is a very well maintained hood. So well in fact, no killing, no deleting of sims, nothing.Just normal gameplay save for the occasional Age Sims Cheat which I didn't apply to this kid.

I believe it should be the second patch because I don't have this problem and I have explore all possiblities I could think of.

Ancient Sim, can you please provide me with more info? Which threads?  Any solutions so far besides drowning the kid and making a SimPE clone and pretending this didn't happen? I haven't time to read all MATY threads lately.I want to solve this problem. It is disturbing me too much and I fear to play this family now....  :-\

Thank you.

Jysudo--I just gotta say this: when a person dies some folks say things like "The Lord works in mysterious ways." So when a sim dies you just have to accept "Maxis works in mysterious ways." LOL

You could try deleting the SWAF file for this particular kid.  It may have gotten corrupted somehow.  It should regenerate, according to what Jordi says in this thread:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4580.0

I would try doing that, making a backup first, of course.  ;)

Me, I go with the more succinct "shit happens".

I am too tired to curse at Maxis again so yeah, I'll leave it at that  :-X
Shit is too mild a word for Maxis.

Thanks Rainbow for the link. Very useful info there especially the part by Jordi. I'll see if that will solve the problem.
I did think of deleting the SWAF yesterday but was afraid it might blow up my sim. So I didn't do it.

Good luck and let us know how it goes [vilia crosses her fingers and then promptly has to uncross them so she can finish typing  :P]

I know the war room is really for game stuff.  but this clean up business is really asking for a good "HOW TO" somewhere.  I'm glad my missing icons and Jordi's replies helped.  I still have missing icons despite all the clean up, but now they seem to be only missing want kind rather than the blank icon kind.   Installing the patch reset the sims and a lot of sims had missing wants the first time I visited them.  Sounds like the reset isn't working as well as it should to me.   I'm looking to see if the problems come back once they've been played enough to give the game something to work on.  I think it's still there, but I've been distracted by building.  Anyway I didn't have any problems yesterday.

blank wants and missing icons.  Is that good terminology for what could be two different problems?

I just played the Larson twins for the first time after the patch, and Jason lost one of his turn-ons.  Completely gone -- blank space where the icon should be.  Never seen that happen before.  I'm going to go into SimPE later and check him out to see if it really disappeared, or just isn't being displayed for some reason.

I deleted the SWAF of my kid but the wants didn't regenerate nor did SIMPE reproduce a new SWAF for him ! I went into the game and there he is with a growing up aspiration instead of the "have 6 children."So that means the game did regenerate something for him but not the SWAF. Tried everything from getting him to call people, sleeping etc.

The SWAF remains empty.

Maybe I could try replacing the SWAF from an earlier version? This boy hasn't been played for sometime so my backup is updated. Any idea where to pull the file to replace?
I think it is not the character file. I replaced that and the same problem persists.

Try forcing a wants controller reset.

Enable debugging cheats, and shift-click the aspiration icon. Either new wants will roll up (meaning it will auto-correct), or you'll get an error in the wants controller. If you get the error, choose delete. Then re-roll the wants and repeat if necessary. Eventually it will stop throwing errors and regenerate proper SWAFs.

Thanks Jordi for your advice. So that means after deleting the SWAF in SimPE, we still have to force the new SWAF to be recreated as what you described?

I used another method. I investigated the kid. He hasn't been played since May and so I used a previous May backup and extracted his SWAF file and overwrite the original one. That seems to have worked. Everything seems back to normal. His wants will roll to new ones when they are fulfiled. But I haven't played much  to check because I don't have time.

But I don't know if this method of file replacement will actually result in any file corruption/hood corruption? I am not very awesome and I don't know if it is ok to change files like this. Any idea?  Thanks to anyone who can provide some answer  :P

I didn't even know you could do that!  I managed to delete the genetics of one of my sims in the big clean up - I was just going to live with it, but if it's fixable.... I'd like to do it - could someone tell me what to do?   

I've been trying this...  nothing happens!  And yes, I do have debug on.

I should have said I couldn't get that to work when I tried it either - Ctrl click and shift click didn't do anything - it's like there was nothing there to click on.   I've kept playing affected sims satisfying the ones I could see and eventually they woke up with wants.

Huh... weird. In any case replacing the corrupted SWAF file with a backup should also fix it.

I know this is a basic, stupid question, but where is the SWAF file?  How do you get at it to replace it with a backup?  It's not a file you can see in Windows is it?  (If it is I shall feel reaalllly stupid!) 

No, I'm pretty sure you need to look at it in SimPE -- I belive it's part of the nxxx_neighborhood.package. You can export the info from an older backup and then import it into the current package.

I don't know why, but shift+click never works for me.  Ctrl+click works just fine.  Make sure debug mode is enabled, though.  You may have to save and reload the lot. 

Don't worry, you are not stupid and I will try to answer your question.

First of all, you must have a backup of your neighbourhood with the sim (let's call him Jim) where Jim's previous SWAF is uncorrupted and functioning well. You put that hood (N002_Backup) into your games folder > Neighbourhoods. After which, to get SimPE to recognise this hood, you must relabel the current one you are using to something else. For me, I do inverse naming...renaming the N002_backup to N002 and N002 to N002_backup.

After which, open up SimPE and that N002. The SWAF of all your characters should be in a left hand column. Seek Jim's SWAF by looking at the "instance" (I assume you know where to find the instance data in SimPE).  After which, right click on the file, choose "extract". Extract everything to the desktop or where you fancy. Close SimPE.

Go back to the game folder and inverse name your hoods again. After which, follow same process above but you select "replace" to replace the corrupted SWAF with the uncorrupted one which you earlier extact.

That will solve the problem. Hope this is helpful.

Disclaimer: I have not played since doing this. So I don't know if there are any implications to the hood for replacing the file like this but Jordi said above, it should be ok.

The renaming bit isn't really necessary, though.  You can open the backup neighborhood package file directly from SimPE by clicking the Open icon or clicking the File menu, then open, and then navigate to the directory where your backup is stored.  Then do the extracting from there.  Then you can open your current neighborhood as usual.  Making a backup of the current neighborhood first is always recommended, of course.  :)

Or you can double-click the neighborhood package file to open in SimPE if you have them associated with SimPE like me.  :)

Thank you guys - I'll go give it a whirl.  I've always worked one hood at a time before.  I'm seeing problems in simPE when I change hood without quitting, like it hasn't closed down the old hood before it opened the new one.  I cleaned all the townies out of my current testing hood and when I changed to strangetown, no memories came up when I click on 'hood memory. Or opening simPE and finding all the sims are unknown.  Maybe I'm doing something stupid here as well, but that was a bit scary!  My files are OK in game.  If I see anything like that today, I'll do it Jysudo's way.

OK next question - I've got a sim without a  DNA file - can I add one from a backup using the replace trick?   (I deleted it by accident in the great SWAF/DNA cleanup last week - oops)

Oh really? The first time I tried doing that, SimPe (latest version) does not recongnise my hood. It is only till I renamed it to N002, then it recongnise the file. Or is your backup file named as N002 too?

I did the same thing but I didnt add any subhoods and the SWAF still outnumbered SDSC without playing. 

I just wish to add that the file swop really works 'awesomefully.'
My simmie and the hood are still perfectly normal after 3 hours of gameplay and he is now a teen.