More Awesome Than You!

So I turn on Sims 2 and load my Nightlife neighborhood.  As I'm looking for the family I want to play with, I notice that there are no houses occupied and almost all of them should have sims living in them.  I don't even have any sims in the bin and I know there were about 4 families in the bin when I played last night.  I also noticed that my businesses in my business neighborhood are also vacant.  It's as if my sims in Nightlife never existed because they owned those businesses.  My other neighborhoods are no problem.  Please help.  I have a family of 4 generations that I really don't want to lose...

I hope I understood what you wrote, because I have the feeling, that you installed NL, after  you still had OFB in the game - i.e., the installing was done in wrong order.

If you want to install NL, you have to uninstall first OFB (I hope you saved the folders "Neighbourhoods",  "Downloads", "Collections" (if you have custom collections), "Saved Sims", and "Packaged Lots").

After you are left with only TS2 + Uni, install NL, dowload and install the Patch 2 for NL, install OFB, install patch 2 for OFB.

Now copy and paste your content of the saved folders (select all/copy/paste) - don't override a file that exists. Usually, the folders Downloads, packaged lots, and saved sims don't exists, so you can paste them as a whole.  Paste only the hoods you played (OFB and custom).

You have to copy/paste hood 4 (OFB), and if you had a custom hood - enter the game, open a new hood with the same name, exit the game, and paste your custom hood.

The order of the install is: 1) TS2  2) Uni  3) NL  4) OFB

I was sure to install them in the correct order.  Also, I just went into the game again and looked more thoroughly and realized that all of my sims are gone - no just those in NL.  The only sims that are in the game are maxis created.  None of the sims I created or downloaded are there.  I checked inside of the houses that I furnished and everything is in tack - the furniture, cars, etc.  Everything is the same except there are no sims. 

This happened to me. Are your character files still in your My Documents/EA Games/Sims 2/Neighborhoods/Neighborhood #/Characters folder? Mine were, but they didn't show up.

I had, though, been trying to fix something unrelated in SimPe and must take the blame. No one here could figure out the problem (though one person whose name escapes me right now tried desperately to help me). I never did get a reply at the SimPe site.

I know this isn't helpful to you, but I would like to add that this happened to me after I installed OFB. However, the rest of the games were already installed, patched and in the correct order. In my case, order of EPs had nothing to do with the problem.

I've had something like this happen to me once. Character filenames were having something tacked onto the end of them, rendering them unreadable by the game and resulting in vacant houses. The only thing that fixed it was a manual uninstall (deleting registry entries etc. instructions are on TS2 official site) and then reinstall of the entire shebang.

I really hope it never happens to me again. ~~; I went looking everywhere for an answer, and found a big thread about it on Variousimmers where they were complaining that this gamekiller wasn't fixed. It would be over a year old by now, if VS is still around...