Bon Voyage Patch and Anti-Redundancy Hack Not Working

[Charlee]

I've discovered my Bon Voyage is totally messed up.  I downloaded the patch, AND the Anti-Redundancy hack months ago, but when I tried to take my Sim on a mountain vacation, the following things happened:

1.  My Sim left home okay, but when she got to the vacation lot, it loaded in the Buy and Build mode.  Live Mode was grayed out, and my Sim was nowhere.  When I exited the lot and re-entered, same problem.  When I went back to the base neighborhood and tried to enter her home lot, it told me that she was visiting the vacation lot and wouldn't let me in.  The only way I could get her back was to delete the entire vacation neighborhood.  After the HOURS I spent designing it and setting it up!

2.  Deleting the neighborhood and starting from scratch put my Sim back into her own house, so I sent her on vacation again.  This time, for every single 'local' Sim my Sim met, the game suddenly spawned 3-4 copies of each.  I know, this is the redundancy bug.  But like I said, I've installed the patch and the hack, so it shouldn't be doing this!  (The hack couldn't be conflicting with the patch, could it?  To the point of cancelling it out?)

3.  At the end of her vacation, when the time bar said "Time to Go Home"  ...  nothing happened.  I kept expecting the shuttle to show up and take her home, but nothing.  She stayed an extra three days without the shuttle showing up!  The lot she was vacationing on was a remote campsite, built as a Vacation Home.  As such, there was no Community lot phone booth to use.  I hadn't given her a regular phone, either, all she had was her cell phone.  I finally discovered that I could click on her and choose Vacation-->End Vacation and Go Home, but when I clicked on that, she would make the call but still no shuttle.  And thus another day went by and she was still stranded at her remote campsite. I finally had to delete the vacation neighborhood AGAIN.  And now my base neighborhood is flooded with extra Sim files from the clones, and I don't dare try to send any of my Sims on vacation.  This really annoys me!  I have Bon Voyage because I wanted to USE it.  Now I don't know what to do with it.

Help??

[talysman]

I'm not sure of all the details, but it all boils down to Bad Design. I base this conclusion on two things:

After the HOURS I spent designing it and setting it up!

and,

The lot she was vacationing on was a remote campsite, built as a Vacation Home.  As such, there was no Community lot phone booth to use.

I'm guessing in the first instance, you put custom content on the hotel lot that prevented the game from working properly. And, in the second case, you either didn't really design a vacation home (making the missing phone booth a big no-no,) or left something out.

You should try two things:

(1) on your custom vacation home lot, when it comes time to leave, try calling the shuttle to take you home. Does that work?

(2) go to a Maxis-built vacation hood and hotel. Do the same problems occur? If not, it's something you're doing to the lots. If yes, check for hack conflicts in the standard way, do binary search, etc.

[Roux]

The OP already indicated that after calling manually for the shuttle, it didn't come and pick the sim up. For that lot, did you changelotzoning from residential to hotel? If so, load the lot, add a Community phone, and then try again. But you should also test on an original unmodified Eaxis-built lot.

I've had a couple buggy vacations that I don't think were related to bad CC, just Eaxis bugginess. But whatever the original problem was, I think it was made worse by deleting a vacation 'hood when sims were vacationing there. I'm far from awesome, but that just sounds like a VBT. Do you have a backup from a point before all this mess that you could restore?

Btw, the method I've seen suggested to recover MIA vacationing sims when you're locked out of their regular home is to load a different family, use Inge's teleporter to summon and move in the MIA sims, then move them out using newspaper/computer. At some point, this usually clears their regular home and they can move back into it, though you might need to familyfunds the money.

[talysman]

The OP already indicated that after calling manually for the shuttle, it didn't come and pick the sim up. For that lot, did you changelotzoning from residential to hotel? If so, load the lot, add a Community phone, and then try again. But you should also test on an original unmodified Eaxis-built lot.

No, the OP said that after three days of waiting for the shuttle, she tried to manually call the shuttle. Stuff was obviously broken by then. I'm saying try manually calling *first*. The point being: do something different to troubleshoot.

People come here constantly asking us to fix their game. But we can't fix their game, except in those few instances when it's a highly-recognizable, common problem. What we can do is tell them how to troubleshoot, so that they can figure out what the problem is and fix it themselves. And troubleshooting boils down to two things:

(1) learning how to duplicate the error, so that you understand exactly what conditions cause the error;
(2) trying something different, just one change at a time, to figure out what's causing the error.

That's what stuff like binary search, testing a different lot/hood, or trying a differrent series of actions is about. Doing something different, to see if you can narrow down what the problem really is.

The problem here is: charleeheart has a bunch of hacks and cc AND is using custom hoods, has used multiple custom hoods, in fact. That's too many different things at once. We need to eliminate some possibilities.

[Charlee]

Thanks for your, um, help.  I uninstalled my entire Sims2 configuration from my laptop and installed on my desktop, and it's working properly now on the desktop.