Well, the neighbourhood is brand new, so chances of corruption are-- wait, this is EA we're talking about. Yeah, I'll take "fucked up beyond all repair" for $800.

nraas ErrorTrap caught an exception inside AM code; error log attached.

Well, if 1.66 ends up being the final patch that would open up some potential avenues for improvement . . . provided anyone is still interested/masochistic enough to pursue them.

On another note, was that bug where ghost hunters capturing spirits counting for > 1 towards job completion ever figured out?

Also new to this version of AM / TS3 is a script error when trying to help investigation as Ghost Hunter. Caught/notified by ErrorTrap.

Non-critical conflict error with latest patch/AM. No other CC installed of any kind.

The issue isn't consistently repeatable; it happened once, and again around a week later, which means that failing to observe it happen, after reinstalling or starting a new game, wouldn't immediately be any proof that the issue was corrected. I'll go ahead and do a full wipe/reinstall, just to get started, but it would take upwards of a month of continuous playing without a repeat of the incident, before I would be satisfied that the issue was 'fixed'.

In the mean time, I would like to know what kind of testing, etc. can be done to determine what in the world is going on, assuming that it continues to happen after the reinstall.

Is this happening only in one specific world?

I don't think I did; however, I used to keep an explorer window pointed at the TS3 documents folder all the time while testing mods and never had any issues saving or loading.

Anyway, if that were the case, then the save C wouldn't have the sims in their 'reset' positions. If all three saves were identical, I'd simply chalk it up to some weird save-copying glitch, but since the sims actually did reset, that makes this a whole lot weirder -- since the game somehow reset the sims & objects in the game, but managed to drop all new objects and changes to crafting tallies, etc. at the same time.

Whatever this problem is, it's relatively new -- I played quite a lot of TS3 around the time LN came out, and again shortly after Pets, but it never happened then. Now it's happened to me at LEAST twice inside a week.

I haven't ever marked anything as 'read only', although I just looked and saw all the save *folders* are marked read-only. The files inside them are not, though. Since this is true of every save I have going back several weeks, I can't imagine it being related; presumably TS3 does this when it creates the folder.

I had it happen one time before, I believe -- that time I didn't have a backup or secondary save to compare between, so I just wrote it off as being my fevered imagination; now, however, I'm not so sure. I also have heard at least one other person on another forum mention having this issue, but no idea what the cause is or how to fix it.

Last night I saved to a new name (we'll call this save slot B), then continued playing for a while, before saving again, overwriting B. After I saved, I decided to do a routine 'reset everything' (using Twallan's Master Controller) and saved again to a new name (call this one C).

Today, I loaded up C and very quickly realised something was off. To be more specific, every bit of progress in the game, between the first and second times I saved in slot B, had vanished. So I loaded up slot B and noted that my sim was in the middle of an interaction I recalled him having been in the middle of doing the first time I saved. TS3 was considerate enough to leave me with a backup, which I renamed to A. While I was in there I checked the time stamps; A had a timestamp of around 7:00, while B had a time stamp of 9:00 or so (I don't save more than every hour or two, since TS3 rarely if ever crashes for me, and usually gives warning before it does in the form of abnormal HDD activity). C had a timestamp just a minute or two after B. I loaded up A, and compared it to B -- and found that in terms of interactions, skill progress, etc. they were both completely identical to each other, and to C, with the following exceptions:

-The date in A was Sunday, while the dates in B and C were Monday.
-The sims were in their 'reset' positions and were not interacting with anything in C, since I had reset before saving.

If I'd just saved to B ("overwriting" the slot which was backed up to A), I'd assume it was maybe some kind of weird file system error or whatnot, although that doesn't *really* make sense, since the dates differ (even though my main sim is in the same frame of the same animation of the same interaction in both saves), but the other file I created with "Save As" rather undermines that theory.

So now I'm asking, WTF happened? I can't even really figure out how this would be possible, unless TS3 decided randomly to copy the data over from the first slot to the second, instead of dumping it from the actual game ... or is it possible the game had two conflicting versions of its own state internally? That makes even less sense. This is the weirdest save-related bug I've ever seen in any game.

I just noticed a few child sims' school status reads "Snow Day" and has for about 20 sim days. Changing schools and resetting them makes no difference. Even enrolling them in a boarding school and withdrawing them a few days later didn't have any effect.

I've noticed parent sims going to let their toddlers out of their cribs a few times -- without the action appearing in their action queue, while other actions I've input are visible therein. Is it conceivable AM is causing this? Or is it a bug in TS3?

This. A thousand times, this. RSVP => nr=nty

Another little bug: the opportunity to defeat Dong Huo magically completed itself as soon as he opened his sarcophagus. He was still wandering around, and I was able to defeat him like any other mummy, but the game gave me the text about having done so before he had even fully emerged.

I'd like to to request some examination be given to the Ghost Hunter job completion code. I'm not talking about the broken Ghostly Presence and Ghostly Invasion jobs (that's already well known) -- what I mean is that, in my case, I did a simple XML tweak to cause my ghost hunter to receive more jobs per night; I figured a high ranking ghost hunter should be in demand, and get more jobs than some nobody just starting out, so I changed the number of jobs to go from 1-3 at rank 1, to 3-5 jobs at max rank, per night.

Anyway, after doing this, my ghost hunter suddenly became very successful at completing spirit invasion and poltergeist jobs -- a little too successful. Or in other words, if I had to capture, say, 5 spirits for a particular job, capturing one would cause the tally to go from "0/5" to "2/5" (or "3/5", "4/5", or even complete the job entirely). It looks like something (probably the ticket drawing) is somehow interacting with the tallying, since every successive night I get jobs, the number by which the tally increments is prone to increase -- so if every job gives me two points for every captured spirit, the next night I'll get either two points, or some value greater than two -- but it will never, in my experience, go back to one.

Anyway, I'd like it if the Ghost Hunter profession can get some attention, and maybe even fix the Ghostly <Noun> jobs as well, if that's possible.

That's why I said 'fails to fix EA' and not 'AM breaks' -- I believe EA managed to break cross-world quests, probably in 1.42, and StoryProgression does some kind of housekeeping which mitigates the problem.
Noted; it's new behaviour, so I figured it should be mentioned -- I also felt like being unnecessarily vulgar. <Witch_Hazel>Call it a weakness.</Witch_Hazel>  (Also I don't know how much pushing/sim tampering your story driver does; I do know twallan's is very pushy indeed.)

As of two days ago, there was an issue with AM where cross-world opportunities were being blocked.

To be more specific, the adventure stage (opportunity) "The Diary of Sin Pah" calls for a sim to "Travel to France"; when the sim arrives, they're supposed to get a few visa points or whatever and a subsequent task to talk to the nectar merchant.

With the EA story driver (or AM) the "Travel to France" stage completes as expected, but the subsequent step fails to appear. If one attempts to forcibly add it (China->EP1_Quest_France1, if I'm not mistaken) with twallan's DebugEnabler, the message "Unable to fulfil requirements for EP1_Quest_France1" appears; trying to add various other China opportunities while in France simply does nothing -- no idea if that's relevant or not.

If one uses twallan's StoryProgression instead of AM or EA, it's possible to progress in the adventure and complete it normally.

Speaking of AM story brokenness, there seems to be a *serious* lack of consideration in AM code for sim traits and relationships; I had a "Good", "Proper" sim, married with an LTR of 100, who was flirting like crazy a while back; another time her spouse was flirting (or being flirted with) several other sims as well, while she was in the room, and, until the "rumour" got around, she didn't appear to notice -- she kept flirting with him in between him flirting with everyone else until that occurred.

While I can see a sim with low LTR or shitty traits (neurotic, diva, evil, etc.) engaging in rampant autonomous infidelity even while having a high LTR value with their spouse, the behaviour I observed is simply stupid -- and I hesitate to imagine what manner of exposure to dog-humping gutter sluts would cause someone to omit basic trait and relationship weighting and/or gating for actions leading to marital infidelity.

An interesting side note: if the game stuffs a foreign mailbox full of Omni Plants and you return home, they end up in your inventory. At that point I was unable to get them out of my inventory even with Ctrl-Shift-Click->Nuke->Object -- but using NRaas->Master Controller->Basic->Sell allowed me to remove them.

Agreed. It's especially egregious when my 'eternally faithful' sims are constantly bombarded by date phone calls and letters from other married sims.

On another note, I'd like to see something done about the plants going dormant indoors during Winter. It's especially weird when there's a heat source in the room (a fireplace, e.g.) and the plant is frosted white from the "cold".

More accurately, the "Modify" button functions -- it brings up the post edit screen; hitting "save," however, does nothing.

I'm sure there is.

How about making sure it actually works before cunt-yapping about how it ought to be used; at least in Firefox 4b7, it does not.

Presumably a simple mod: make rabbit hole objects have a non-zero cost; I suspect it's to avoid allowing users to simply drop a new store down to increase a property's value (which is stupid, if true, because one can just hide a bunch of expensive crap in a closed basement to the same effect), but the notion of being able to drop a new 4-storey building down on any community lot, at zero cost simply grates on my nerves.... even if I have never had much reason to use such a thing myself.

So I had some odd happenings when I tried using the Porter (the duplicate removal function appears to be completely non-functional), but I did migrate my extended family to a new game (I didn't really care about the rest of the town anyway; the family I actually liked had died already), and loading times are infinitely better.

I'm still very confused about exactly *what* was taking so long, especially since the new save file is almost as large as the old one, but whatever was going on has been fixed.

I'd still like to know what sort of accumulated crap is causing the problem, if anyone knows... I have the sneaking suspicion it has to do with the player behaviour tracking built into the game, but of course that's purely unfounded speculation.

If someone who actually knows anything about the structure of save files (what exactly they contain, what kind of indexes or such can get oversized easily, etc) I'd be interested to hear their thoughts.

Very useful information, all in all; when I finally get pissed enough at the loading time to bother with the export/import I'll let you know how it works out.