Goodbye, my love: My Neighoborhood is FUBARed

[nikita]

I'm so effing despondent right now I could eat a whole cake.   

I rue the day I ever purchased Bon Voyage.  It has been endless problems ever since I first installed with only brief bouts of effortless gameplay.  And now this.  After a normal gaming session (of roughly 5-6 hours), my game crashed as my newly aged twins (my favorite family) were headed to a community lot.  As it was reaching 3am, I figured the crash was a good time to call it a night.  The next day, I went to play again and every single one of my lots crashed while loading.  Okay, not every single one as I haven't tried each and every one but out of 10 that I've tried, all but one has crashed.  Why that one that doesn't crash didn't crash is beyond me but I don't know what to do.  I spent all of Sunday and most of today checking, testing everything I could think of.  I've reinstalled twice (making sure to clear all mention of BV from my registry).  I've tested all my cc.  I've tested all my User Data files.  I was even desperate enough to install the patch.  Nothing.  I have backup hood files from almost every day I've played and all of them are with the same results.  I can't for the life of me figure out what happened and why my entire hood is crashing.

I figured I'd post here to see if anyone has had the misfortune of similar events.  I'm already resigning myself to one of two options.  Move every single affected family out of the lots (assuming this is a lot problem and not a Sim problem), bulldoze about half my neighborhood and download new lots, refurnishing them all.  Or just call it day and abandon the neighborhood I've played since spring of '05 and start anew.  Or (option 3) give up on The Sims 2 altogether and become obsessed with some other game or go outside and read or something.  Option 3 is kind of a joke born out of depression.  I probably won't be doing that.

[Lorelei]

Try removing your cache files and see if that gets you anywhere.

Failing that, go back to the backup of your game files that you made when installing BV.

[J. M. Pescado]

With such a rigorous set of backups, you should be in good shape. What probably happened is that your cache files are trashed. Delete all the thumbnail and cache files, which should resolve the problem. If this doesn't work, reinstall the game. Your neighborhoods are fine, and it's probably not download-related if they were working before and nothing was added.

[nikita]

I always delete my groups.cache before playing and I already tried deleting my accessory.cache files as well.  Still crashes.  Are their other cache files that need to be obliterated that I'm not aware of?  Which thumbnail files should I try deleting?  The Thumbnails user data folder?

[jsalemi]

Yes, delete everything in the user thumbnails folder under My Docs.  The game will rebuild them as needed, so you may see a small delay when you open something that accesses them (buy/build mode, clothing, hair, etc.).

[nikita]

Well, I tried that and it didn't work, which isn't surprising as I had already reinstalled my game twice and so I would imagine it would have been rebuilt the thumbnails each time I installed.

Any other suggestions?  I can't figure out what the problem is.  It's not a neighborhood problem because every one of my backups crashes.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, as you said, it's not your neighborhood. Corrupted downloads? Corrupted baser-game packages? Corrupted registry? Have you tried detonating the entire mess yet?

[nikita]

Corrupted downloads: no, tested all those already.  Corrupted registry: cleared registry of BV between reinstalls.  Corrupted baser-game packages: hmm, which files would these be exactly?  In the Program Files/EA Games folder or My Documents/EA Games folder?  And by detonating the entire mess, do you mean reinstall, because I've tried that twice already (having not checked to make sure that BV was completely gone from my registry so I reinstalled again). 

[jsalemi]

Pesc probably means the packages in the earlier game folders in Program Files/EA Games.  Are you just re-installing BV, or are you re-installing everything?  "Detonating the entire mess" refers to getting rid of everything, and then re-installing from the base game on up.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Have you tried replacing all the objects.package files with clean copies from the game discs, and then making them all read only?

[nikita]

I guess I will have to detonate the entire thing then as I reinstalled Seasons, H&M and BV with still the same results.  But I also tested my Strangetown and there was no problem with that neighborhood.  All the lots loaded as normal.  Can it still be a base (or baser) game data problem if it's just isolated to one neighborhood?

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes. I mean, we already ruled out the possibility that your neighborhood itself is corrupted. You've deleted all the crap like the "NeighborhoodPackageManager" and all that other cache junk already, yes?