More Awesome Than You!

I had a problem with a lot crashing the game... Tried taking out downloads, which made no difference,  moving the family out into a new house, which also crashed, and then restored last week's backup. It worked fine for a little while, then the same thing happened to a different lot.

Looking at the family in the lot with SimPE while backing the game up, half of them had red thumbnails... I'm assuming that's bad, although I can't see any info as to what's up with them.

I haven't done anything differently recently, added any new hacks or whatever. This happened to my last neighbourhood (after I installed OFB, and this just after I installed Pets) as well, so I think I'll have to trash it like I did that one. So, any help as to how not to mess up future neighbourhoods or even fix this one, would be appreciated :)

Red thumbnail = lost character data. So yes, very bad. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to fix it. Only one of my sims ever mysteriously got a red thumbnail, and a friend fixed him for me.

Sad for you.  Can't help on fixing the sim, but if you want to prevent damage to your hoods, you need to learn about the game files and maybe change the way you play.  When I messed up my first and best-loved hood it was because I'd managed to delete the whole neighbourhood memory while trying to clean up the mess I made moving sims in lots into the simbin.  that's a very big no-no.  There are some good threads here - Pescado's how to delete a sim should help you work out what not to do.  Jordi's how to create a clean hood should help as well.

Ah. Thanks for the explaination of the redness, I hadn't been able to find it out from anywhere. Any idea what causes it? I really don't mess about with SimPE or cheats that much... Only for changing sim names or recolouring stuff.

I've been lurking about here for a while, and I used Jordi's tutorial to create this hood, so I thought I'd got it sorted xD I'll blame Pets - everything was running smoothing until then.

Thanks for the advice, anyway. I'll look about and see if I can find out which stupid thing I did.

meant to add in, delete those two caches, they get fouled up regularly and if you are changing what is in your game....

groups.cache for the game
 the other one is the cache for bodyshop - forget the name, I'll edit when I find it

Thanks for the advice, but I tried deleting the caches already. It didn't seem to help at all.

I see no one has mentioned moving families into the housing bin, putting sims into new neighborhoods when they've already met people in their old neighborhood, or deleting families without being extremely carefully about cleaning up memories of them in SimPE, all of which can corrupt your neighborhoods.  Have you done any of those things?

As I read in the Manual (Prima guide) - *never* install previous expansion pack after the last one.
You should uninstall Pets, install OFB, then install Pets.  That, because the last installed EP CD-Rom has to be in the driver, and it's Pets.
If you installed OFB after Pets - OFB CD-Rom has to be in the CD driver.

Just speculation: put OFB in the CD drive, enter the game, and package your family with the house to preserve it.
Save your Downloads, Saved Sims, and Packaged lots folders on the desktop, and uninstall the two last EPs, then install them in the right order, then install your packaged family. May be it helps.

That's crap, gali.  It was utter crap in the days of sims 1 and it's still utter crap now.

If you install OFB after pets, you'll still need the pets CD to run the game, but it's not going to somehow not actually work.  You don't need to uninstall pets to install OFB either.

cigen I think is the name for the bodyshop cache. you might have a corrupt file in the saved sims file try removing that and starting the game if it doesn't crash the problem is in there. to fix the problem copy the folder to a safe place. delete the files inside the saved sim files . then one by one test each file by restarting the game until you get to the file that is corrupt.it is safe to delete the corrupt file.

I am not sure, ness - it's worth to ask the EA Tech Support.

Which will tell you to uninstall and re-install thats there answer for every bug or update your drivers. ;D

EA's technical support is also utter crap!

Reinstalling the game would not help because it would not uncorrupt the character files. They need to be fixed from an earlier backup, but I don't know how this would be done. However, reinstalling the game my help it from happening again.

I have lots of backups, so it's fairly easy to just set back to last time I played each time it happens, I just wish I knew what was causing it. I haven't done any of the things BlastDawn mentioned,  except for deleting a family I used for sim surgery on NCPs, but none of my other sims had any memories of them. Could that still have messed it up? :\

I've tried removing Downloads and Saved Sims folders to check, but the problem occurs rather randomly, so I'm still not sure if that's the cause.

Also, I've been having trouble with my sims want slots for a while... Lots of blanks, although they did fix themselves after a few days. Would that be related to the character file corruption at all?

I don't really want to try re-installing, since last time it didn't fix the problem and it's a hassle on my computer. If all else fails, maybe.

Did your sim-surgery family meet any townies or other non-playable sims?  That could also corrupt the neighborhood.  Further, there are apparently weird issues with making sims and deleting them.  From what I've heard, each created sim gets a unique ID number which holds their aspiration and wants, among other things.  If you delete them (as opposed to killing them and leaving gravestones behind), the ID number can get used again for other sims, which isn't normally supposed to happen.  If that occurs, you might wind up with toddlers in your game with wants like "buy a bar" and adult lifetime aspirations -- something that happened in one of my games before I learned that the cowplant is the best way to get rid of unwanted sims.

If you deleted the files of the sims you used for sim surgery, you also needed to deleted the SWAFs (Sim Wants and Fears).

I'm sure none of the other sims met them. I created them, exited the game and did the sims surgery, then loaded the game back up again and deleted them, so I didn't play any families while they were there, and they never left the families bin.

Thanks Lythdan, I'll do that. I haven't had any toddler weirdness though, thankfully.

If the want slots are blank, can you hover over them and see what the want is?  There are two different problems - blank icons and missing wants.  If the thing is completely missing, it means the game can't think of anything sensible to roll based on what it knows about your sim.  If often happens after a reset and doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong with your Sim.  Pesacdo says the blank icon is more serious and is an indication of mess of some kind - that's when you can't see the icon, but the want is there when you hover over it.  If you search on blank icon - you'll find posts about it including some where people are explaining things to me.  Pescado eventually wrote a whole thread on deleting sims completely and put helpful functionality on the lotdebugger.

I don't know when the game creates the SWAF file.  If it creates them while the sims are in the Simbin, then they need deleting after you've deleted the sims.  It must create the genetics info when you make sims in CAS, so I'd guess it does the swafs then too.