Crashing Family

[lostsoul]

I have one family in my Prosperity neighbourhood that keeps crashing every time I try to play them. It just randomly started a couple of weeks ago for no apparent reason (yeah, I've been too lazy to do anything about it until now...). I hadn't installed any new EPs or hacks.

My brother seems to think it could be a corrupt file. Would it be worth moving them onto another lot to see if it's a problem with the lot, or should I try moving individual sims out to figure out if it's one of them causing the problem?

[jsalemi]

Do you have testing cheats/debug mode turned on?  Getting any kind of error message just before or when they crash?

[lostsoul]

Nope, none of that. They crash while the family is actually loading.

[jsalemi]

Turn on the testing cheats before you load the lot, and see if you get any errors.

[lostsoul]

Ok, I'll go try that now. Thanks!

[adelegarland]

I have the same problem.... it started with one family, they kept crashing at the same action everytime I loaded the lot.  Each time the lot loaded fine then when I sent the male to do an action, it crashed.."application has crashed will now terminate" I tried the same family and the same action several times and always the same thing.  I checked the error logs and found that it was an access violation.  Got tired of it and tried moving them to a different lot and was able to play them fine for hours...  great, problem solved... NOPE.  It started happening with a different family.  Today, if I get time, I'm taking all custom content out and trying the family again.  I think its a corrupt file too.  Will keep you updated.  Good luck and let me know if you find the bad file too.

[lostsoul]

I tried turning on the testing cheats, crashed as normal...

adelegarland, I get the same message! Mine crashes before I actually get on the lot, about halfway through the loading process. I think it always crashes at the same point, so clearly something there is borked. I don't think it's custom content causing the problem with mine, cos I tried it again right after I installed Free Time, since my game was custom content free (I get paranoid with new expansions) and it still crashed. It's strange...

[leaths]

I just had this happen with one of my families after they returned from vacation. I simply moved them into another house and checked to see if they crashed at the new lot. When they didn't I returned them to their old home and everything seems fine so far. Of course you lose whatever is in the house, but at least they're playable again.

[mistyk]

I tried turning on the testing cheats, crashed as normal...

adelegarland, I get the same message! Mine crashes before I actually get on the lot, about halfway through the loading process. I think it always crashes at the same point, so clearly something there is borked. I don't think it's custom content causing the problem with mine, cos I tried it again right after I installed Free Time, since my game was custom content free (I get paranoid with new expansions) and it still crashed. It's strange...

This is happening to me also, I can not load the Aspir family or the Monty family...both crash while loading, I tried everything I even contacted EA with all the info then they asked for more info which I gave them and they basically told me to update my graphics driver which I did and they still will not load....and I have never played either family yet...

[jolrei]

I just had this happen with one of my families after they returned from vacation. I simply moved them into another house and checked to see if they crashed at the new lot. When they didn't I returned them to their old home and everything seems fine so far. Of course you lose whatever is in the house, but at least they're playable again.

This seems to suggest that the crash was due to something (CC object perhaps) that was on the lot.  Once the family was moved out and the lot was reset (cleared) it may be that the offending object was removed and the lot was playable.

Is there something specific that was on this lot that was not on the lots that did not crash?

[FourCats]

downloaded custom careers did this to me.  I removed the careers and the crashing/freezing stopped.

[leaths]

This seems to suggest that the crash was due to something (CC object perhaps) that was on the lot.  Once the family was moved out and the lot was reset (cleared) it may be that the offending object was removed and the lot was playable.

Is there something specific that was on this lot that was not on the lots that did not crash?

Well, that's possible because it was a well-played lot with plenty of cc and when I moved them into another lot, it was just a maxis made unplayed one that I plopped down quickly just to see if I could load the family. However, I never had this problem before they came back from vacation. It crashed when loading the household during their return and continued crashing after that.

I wondered at the time if it had to do with something stupid I did on vacation. Only 2 of the 4 sims in this household went on vacation, but they took along 5 other sims from other households. I just got BV recently and didn't realize that these guests would be uncontrollable. I am an idiot. To keep them from dying and/or peeing themselves, I enabled pet controls on them, which worked to an extent. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn the cheat off before leaving and I just wondered if that messed up the return home for the family (all of the other households involved are fine). Also, I don't have the pets ep, so I'm not sure it was a great idea to use pet cheats.

So to make what should be a short answer to your quick question even longer, I'm not quite sure what the issue is. Now that I've moved them back into the same lot, it's playable again. However, just today I decided to package the lot to file because I really like the home and I was going share it, but when I opened the package with Clean Installer it contains files for cc that was not on the lot and character data for at least 20 sims none of whom have ever lived there, but are possibly in the family's contact list. I don't usually package lots with families in them so I'm not sure if this is normal or not. (I suspect it might be though, hence the VBT that is packaging household lots.) What's not normal though is after I installed the cleaned up lot (lot file only) and opened it in game it crashes when loading.

So, final conclusion is: I dunno, am stupid.

[mistyk]

downloaded custom careers did this to me.  I removed the careers and the crashing/freezing stopped.

hmm never thought about those, I think I may have a few ...I think I only have the LS ones though, but I will try removing them and see what happens

thanks

*edit: I tried removing the custom careers and it still didn't fix my problem

oh well ...no biggie I guess

[Sivany]

When my lots were crashing half way through loading it turned out to be because I'd somehow broken some of my custom clothes by running them through the Wardrobe Wrangler and doing something stupid. Once I restored the clothes from the backup the lots loaded fine. I'm pretty sure this was happening across the neighbourhood, but it's also possible that every family I attempted to load had the broken clothes file in the wardrobe anyway (I'm pretty certain I know which three files I broke with the wrangler and they were the underwear I give almost every male). Even if you haven't used the wardrobe wrangler it could be broken/corrupt clothes files or other custom content files causing crashes, not just custom objects.

[Jelenedra]

For those paranoid about CC: Does this include EAxis downloadable objects? There was a thread not too long ago with a crashing lot that had corruptted EAxis download content.

[witch]

What did you do with the Wardrobe Wrangler that corrupted files, if you don't mind my asking? I've just spent the last couple of days sorting through downloaded clothing. Down from 5-6 GB CC to 1.37GB now.

I fired up the game when I was about half way through and it seems fine so far.

[Sivany]

What did you do with the Wardrobe Wrangler that corrupted files, if you don't mind my asking? I've just spent the last couple of days sorting through downloaded clothing. Down from 5-6 GB CC to 1.37GB now.

I fired up the game when I was about half way through and it seems fine so far.

I split my clothes into different folders of about 50 files each labelled A, B, C etc so that I didn't have to update them all at once. During one cc organising session I went through three of these folders updating them as necessary (shoe sound, age group etc.) and whilst I was there I deleted three files with the wardrobe wrangler (I'd downloaded better underwear and was planning on replacing the not-so-nice underwear every male sim was wearing). Once I was done I hit the exit button in the wrangler and it errored three times saying something about the files I'd marked for deletion so I assume it was the attempt to delete these files that caused the mess.

I'm not sure why this might have been, the only explanation I can come up with is that I wasn't exiting the wrangler between each folder, I was just loading the new set of files and then editing them, so when I closed it down the currently open folder wasn't the one containing the deleted files.

Whatever it was it was probably my own fault, but luckily I had a backup of the folder on a CD (the backup on my computer had mysteriously disappeared, causing me to panic about losing 150 files of my favourite custom outfits). Once I restored just those three folders of custom clothes from the CD the game loaded up fine again.

[witch]

Hmm, I worked from one base folder, then mass moved files once I'd applied filters. I didn't have any errored files after deletion, but I would be in the original folder, so that would fit with your experience. I found it easiest to sort by gender, then by clothing type. It limited the changes in each type to certain sections and made it easier not to miss stuff. I also clicked save after every file because the Wrangler uses a compression algorithm.

Is it possible the files were set to read-only?

[Sivany]

No, they definitely weren't read-only, I'm pretty sure it's because I wasn't in the folder when I exited the wrangler. The files I'd just edited were ok because obviously I'd been pressing the save button after everyone, but if you want to delete files you must have to make sure you're still in the right folder when you exit the program.

I never thought about using the filters in that way to limit what I needed to do to each group. I'm going to have to go back through everything and use the filters though because some of my children's clothes were set to both genders when they were clearly only suitable for one and when I was putting them right I've set one to male that now I see it in game should definitely be female!

I will also soon be embarking on the huge task of deleting the extra hair files from my custom hairs, the only problem is I can never remember which ones aren't needed once I see them in the wrangler, I can never work it out from the thumbnail pictures.

[witch]

I used a combination of Bodyshop and the Wrangler for clothing - I haven't done the hair yet either. I'd get a group of files, eg female everyday, and put about 100 at a time into my sims downloads folder. (I put all meshes into one ginormous folder in downloads). Then I'd go through in Bodyshop and delete the clothing I didn't want at all. (I had to remember not to delete meshes until I'd done all files.)

When I opened the Wrangler straight after Bodyshop, I remembered pretty much what each item was even if the pictures didn't always show. This made it easier to work through in chunks.

I was planning on a similar method for hair - maybe by gender, then colour, then age. It's much easier to manage these files in batches than in one hit. I haven't tried doing hair in the Wrangler yet, so I guess there'll be a bit of trial and error. I do know there are a zillion grey hairs that match the gorgeous young long curly styles - I know I don't want all those for a start!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Those grey hairs are such a nuisance!!!

[Sivany]

I hate having to scroll through all those grey hairs, it will be such a relief when I've only got one of each and thankfully that part of the task is pretty easy.

The problem with the hairs is that sometimes it's difficult to tell from the thumbnail pictures whether the hair actually has a custom design for every age group or whether it is sometimes using a game default. That makes it awkward to work out whether you can delete those resources from the file. I tried splitting my hairs into batches of about 20-30 files but it's still difficult to remember which ones need deleting since recognising hair from the thumbnails is a lot harder than the clothes.

[ZephyrZodiac]

One reason I haven't tried!  I've just about worked out how to use the color-binning tool, although sometimes they don't show up correctly in game, which is annoying, but as for deleting all those grey hairs for a hair which I downloaded that claimed to be color-binned already, that is doubly frustrating!

[Sivany]

I find deleting the extra grey hairs really easy using the Wardrobe Wrangler since it just involve clicking one button in each file then saving it. What's harder is working out if the hair you're looking at works with every age group or whether you can delete say the toddler files because the hair just uses a default style for that age.

Currently I've removed all my bodyshop content from the downloads folder and replaced about a quarter of my hair files, making sure I have an exact copy of the files somewhere else on my computer. I then open bodyshop so I can see what the hairs look like in game and open up the wrnagler using the copy of the files located elsewhere on my computer. I can then compare the two and delete/edit hairs as necessary. Once I'm done I close down bodyshop and replace the hair folder in downloads with the one I've actually used the wrangler on.

It's a very long process though because I'm taking the opportunity to add in all the missing grey hairs (from the custom hairs where people just copy the normal coloured hair over to the elder age) and to edit any hairs I don't think are the right colour (like purple hairs that are meant to be black or other hairs that I just don't think look right). Since my photoshop skills are somewhat limited (Image>Mode>Greyscale is my friend when making black/grey hairs) this takes a while.

[witch]

Oh that's way more dedicated than I plan to be!

I'm more into pruning. I don't need 3 or 4 types of blonde for a style I'm not that fussed on anyway, and so on and so forth.