Disappearing sims...

[Ayrell]

Last time I tried to play my custom hood it wouldn't load so I decided to reinstall and see if that fixed anything. After a bunch of trouble getting the expansion packs and the patches to install, I tried to load it again. It took a long time (10-20 minutes, it's usually less than 1 minute or 2) and after it did I noticed that some of the apartments where my sims had been living were now marked as non-occupied and that the sims were nowhere to be seen. I noticed that I could make some of the missing sims appear on lots using a teleporter or the phone, and thought that maybe I could just sent them to the sim bin and move then back to their houses, but then noticed that there were sims that where nowhere to be seen. Not in the memory tree of their family members, not in SimPe in the Sim Browser, nowhere.

Can this hood still be saved somehow? If not, is there a safe way to at least clone the terrain as it is now, decoration, lots, etc?

Thanks in advance and sorry about any mistakes in my English ( not my mother language).

[DrNerd]

If you have Sims that are invisible and no longer showing up in SimPE, the neighborhood's pretty much gone.  If you have a recent backup, you can try reverting to that to see if the character files are still intact in SimPE.

Sometimes you can get incomplete save errors, like a household doesn't save properly and the Sims become corrupted.  There's not really anything you can do to prevent that from happening.  The three things you can do to totally kill your neighborhood are to use the DeleteAllCharacters cheat, delete Sims from the Sim Bin, and move occupied lots to the Lots & Houses bin.  Those are the big three things to never, ever do, so if you've done one of them in this neighborhood, that's probably why it's corrupted now.

[J. M. Pescado]

DAC won't kill your neighborhood, other than the literal functionality but it also won't do a complete job of actually deleting everyone, so you will have to go back and cleanup in SimPE.

[Ayrell]

Thank you both for the input.

If you have Sims that are invisible and no longer showing up in SimPE, the neighborhood's pretty much gone.  If you have a recent backup, you can try reverting to that to see if the character files are still intact in SimPE.

Ah, I was afraid that'd be the case since things looked pretty bad. Thank you. Oh well... my last backup is pretty old but that's still better than nothing I guess. I can just cheat with the aging to get everything more or less where it was before. I will have to recreate some sims though, but no big deal. Could be worse.

I don't think I have done any of those three problematic things recently so it must have been a "corruption during saving" issue. Frustrating...I'll be sure to make sure that I have multiple working backups from now on.

Thanks again.

[Mootilda]

Last time I tried to play my custom hood it wouldn't load so I decided to reinstall and see if that fixed anything. After a bunch of trouble getting the expansion packs and the patches to install, I tried to load it again. It took a long time (10-20 minutes, it's usually less than 1 minute or 2) and after it did I noticed that some of the apartments where my sims had been living were now marked as non-occupied and that the sims were nowhere to be seen. I noticed that I could make some of the missing sims appear on lots using a teleporter or the phone, and thought that maybe I could just sent them to the sim bin and move then back to their houses, but then noticed that there were sims that where nowhere to be seen. Not in the memory tree of their family members, not in SimPe in the Sim Browser, nowhere.

Can this hood still be saved somehow? If not, is there a safe way to at least clone the terrain as it is now, decoration, lots, etc?

Thanks in advance and sorry about any mistakes in my English ( not my mother language).

Yes, you can use HoodReplace to clone the terrain and copy the roads, deco, trees, etc. from an existing neighborhood to a brand new neighborhood:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=279992

There's a thread here at MATY which discusses how to make these changes manually:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,151.0.html

There is also a way to copy the lots, let me try to find you a link to some instructions.

[Update:]  Well, I thought that I'd written something up, but I can't seem to find it.  Here's a tutorial which uses a similar technique:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=275135

Basically, you need to copy the lot packages and then copy the Lot Description (LTXT) from one neighborhood package to the other.  Since you don't want to change the lot numbers (instances) or locations (height, width, z), it's pretty simple.  Note that you can't use this technique on apartments.

Another alternative is to place all of the lots into the lot catalog and then place them by hand:
http://community.livejournal.com/thesims2/6049797.html

[Ayrell]

Ah, that will come in handy for sure! Thank you very much for taking the time to find all those links, Mootilda. It might be easier to clone the sims in the corrupted neighbourhood and place them in a cloned terrain than re-playing every single family until they reach the point they were at when everything went wrong.

Thanks again!