More Awesome Than You!

Here, awesome ones, I'm having Sim issues and am coming to you to check if they can be overcome without the dreaded "starting over from scratch" solution.

A couple of weeks ago, in BS, some of the Maxis defaults started being indicated with a star as if they were considered as CC.

Well, of course, I accidentally deleted an ugly Maxis mesh, the ugly blue sporty adult female dress, and my game isn't too happy with it.

Both BS and CAS crash after that.

I've tried doing a reinstall of the last EP (pets), and the game works fine, but as soon as I add back my CC in its Downloads folder, boom it crashes again.

Mmmm, I just don't understand why BS would crash after adding back content, if the problem comes from the fact that I have accidentally erased a Maxis item in BS.

I don't have any CC recolors of that ugly dress either!

Does anyone have any ideas to try and solve this stupid problem? I can't imagine playing without any CC!

Is it even possible to delete a Maxis mesh without deleting a bunch of other stuff, too?  I thought all the meshes were in one big file.  Sounds more to me like you inadvertantly installed default replacements for those meshes.

Anyway, try deleting the files groups.cache and cigen.package from your MyDocuments/EA Games/The Sims 2 folder.  They'll regenerate when you run the game and BodyShop, respectively, and that can clear up a lot of unexplained wonkiness.  If that doesn't help, start putting your CC back incrementally and trying to load the game until you find the one(s) that's causing the problem.

As of Pets, all Maxis clothing which is modified by a download can be flagged as custom content, and indeed be deletable. The important factor is if the property set has a product (dtUInteger) set to one of the following:
1 for base game,
2 for uni,
3 for nightlife,
4 for OfB
5 for FFS
6 for GLS
7 for Pets

Christmas packs are set to 1 as well. Any missing value or other value will be flagged as custom content, and be deletable!
Deletion actually deletes the clothes from the 3d packages...

Windkeeper fixed his downloads to take care of it, but any other downloads you have that modify clothing (such as YA to A enablers) must be checked for this property.

Magic cookie will have to restore these packages somehow. I don't know off hand exactly where all is stored, so best of to reinstall everything.

Will anything bad happen if you make the big package files read only?  Will the game and/or BodyShop helpfully make them not readonly when you're about to destroy them?

No -- many of us make the 'objects.package' read-only just to protect it from having anything accidentally deleted.

I saw somewhere a mention to an Overrides folder in Pets, so what is the difference from the regular downloads folder?
Can it be related to that behavior?

Thanks for all your quick answers, I'll guess I'll have to manually check which CC content can be handled by the game after my delete, though it doesn't seem to be much at all.

This issue is really weird, for example all the Maxis default eyebrows started being indicated as CC as well, although I haven't downloaded any eyebrow files in six months!

There must have been one bad apple which caused problems with a whole bunch of files, then, I'll check but I haven't downloaded much lately, except for Peggy's hair and clothes.

Theo: no, not really. Stuff in override simply won't be seen as custom content even though it is.

The important thing is the product string. Most EAMaxis content contains this anyway, but not all. Before Pets it never caused any problems, but since Pets people making overrides or changes to EAMaxis clothing must be on the watch for this.

O_o  Well, I must say that's just an accident waiting to happen!  Could someone perhaps work on making a list of exactly which packages are affected by this?  And will making all of them read-only in fact fix the problem?

I did a search for *.package on my Program Files/EA Games/The Sims 2 Pets directory and made all 390-some files read only.  Will report back after I get my error logs posted. (errors not related to deleting base game files or making things read only.)

I think you need all the packages in \TSData\Res\3D for each XP and SP as well as the \TSData\Res\Sims3D folder from the base game, as these contain the actual textures and meshes. Can't be certain though. EAMaxis like to put stuff everywhere.

Good point!  I'll go make the other thousand or so package files read only too...