More Awesome Than You!

Yes, it's me again.  I'm sorry to be such a pest, but I've been silent and lurking for a while, and suddenly my entire sims world crashed.

I have played the sims for over a year now, with little trouble.  Today, after starting my game, I went to create a sim and noticed that something was VERY VERY wrong.  The hair was white with colored numbers, and the skin and clothes were transparent, and oddly colored...  The whole thing was like a nightmare.

*I attempted to disable custom content, and that did not fix the problem.
*I removed all the package files from the download folder, and that also did not fix the problem.
*I removed the entire Sims2 folder, and that DID work.

My questions now are:

 1.  How do I manage my custom content and downloads to keep this from happening again.

 2.  Is there any chance that I can salvage any of my custom neighborhood I had been working so desperately on for the last... oh... month and a half?

 3.  What did I do wrong?  How do yiou locate a problem file once it finds it's way into your game?

 4.  Is it really so wrong to be so frustrated and disgusted with this turn of events? 

When I think about all the hours I spent collecting, sorting, and filing my custom content, I feel sick to my stomach.  When I think about having to do it all over again I can't help but get angry.  It sure would be nice if this damned game worked properly to begin with!

I am not professional, but still it seems to me some graphic card failure. May be some More Awesomes will know better.

I've seen the problem mentioned lots, but don't remember the cause or the solution.  You might want to do a BBS search, as that's where I've seen it, and I know people have fixed it, if no one here can help.

Weird numbers on textures usually means missing maxis textures.  It can be caused by a broken Objects.package.
Not sure in your case.

But if it's a corrypt download, and it's not in your downloads folder, but somewhere in the sims 2 folder, you should start by checking the saved sims folder, the teleport folder and the LotCatalog.
In fact, try removing everything except the neigbourhood folder and re-introducing the other things one by one.

Finally!

You're right, original Maxis content is missing.  I don't know how that could have happened, as I have not replaced any defaults with anything, and I have not deleted any Maxis content.

As you can see, in this photo:

(http://stono.no-ip.org/skye/lj%20stuff/photos%20for%20sharing/sims/misc/untitled.png)

there's SOMETHING wrong...  This only shows up in the catalog, and only on sims with default skintones... does this help?  What can I do now?

I've had similar problems to this, when I first got Uni some of my graduated sims had this "feature".  I searched for a fix but it was no use - in the end I just re-installed.

Bodyshop is also out of the question for me as this problem is a real pain in there!

Here's a piccie of Darren Dreamer after he graduated.

(http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n23/siggylove/DarrenDreamer.jpg)

It's horrific, isn't it?!  I just want it to go away!!   :'(

I just found another thread http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5774.0.html (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5774.0.html) about this, but still no real resolution.

It surely is horrific, at the time I had no custom content at all.  The problem went away afer I re-installed but I'm still dubious about sending future sims to Uni.

If you plan on getting the EP that shalt not be mentioned, maybe it's a good idea to re-install anyway?  At least you can then only put back the cc that you really want.  I've managed to make a separate folder of my "must have" downloads to make it easier but I still have a lot of crap to wade through and missing meshes and so on.

As someone pointed out to me here when I whined about something or other, it's good to have a virginal game where you can start from scratch and go on endless download sprees.

Hope you get it sorted, check back often as you may find someone has a solution eventually - just got to allow for those time zones ;)

Maxis files can get corrupted.  Objects.package gets corrupted a lot.  Have you tried re-installing?
You can try to replace the files in *whereever*\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Sims3D with the files from the CD.  Most of the skins are in Sims07.package and Sims10.package.

I don't think Uni has anything to do with it.  I had a sim in my very first neighbourhood ever, before any expansions and before I discovered the glory that is custom content, that had his arms go all numeral like in your picture.  I forgot what I did to rectify the situation, but I definitely did not unistall/reinstall and it did get fixed.  I think I deleted him, exited and restarted the lot. 

I had the 'head being covered with digits' problem before, but that was due to a custom skin I was checking out. Needless to say I didn't use it. :P

This happened to me a few weeks ago. I quickly diagnosed my problem as accidentally having two sets of default replacement skins installed at the same time. Took out the second set and everything fixed voila.

Now I think back...I think that's what might have happened to me...

This question probably has a very simple answer but...

How do you replace the objects.package?  ???

You put in a TS2 or expansion CD, open compressed.zip in your zip client, and extract the file to wherever TS2 or the expansion is installed under TSdata\Res\Objects\ .

Thanks, alot of help.

Also, is it possible to turn off autoplay everytime i put the CD in the computer? Its quite annoying if i just put the CD in (lost the case) and it loads the game, even though i dont want to play.

You can hold shift down when you close the CD-drive.
With newer versions of windows I haven't found a simple way to disable this kind of auto-play without disabling all kinds.

http://www.engadget.com/2004/06/29/how-to-tuesday-disable-autorun-on-windows/

If you want to disable all auto run you can also do it with TweakUI.

Backtracking to the original post in this topic and the question of how to organise your downloads, did you take a look at this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2841.0.html) and this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2974.0.html) for info on how to comprehensively organise your downloads?

I like it. It's Tron-esque somehow. I would annoy this piss out of me if it was happening in my game, though.

I just looked at them.  I had already seen the first one.  Unfortunately, I had missed the second one, and now the files are no longer there for me to download.  Anybody know how big it/they are/were?  Or have as link where I could still find them?