Wonky Colored Question Mark Tiles

[Ghost Sdoj]

Ok, I was never going to come out of lurkdom, but since nobody else seems to be reporting this I have had a couple of paintings turn into question mark tiles in Riverview.

I have a brother and a sister who are not allowed to move out of the lot, even though the sister is Good and is an International Super Spy and the Evil brother is the Emperor of Evil. Since they have to get along with each other and the best way to do that is to avoid each other as much as possible he was doing a bit of painting in the art gallery. A couple of times I have come back in to finish a painting after updating AM and discovered he's painting a still life of a question mark. (One was even a masterpiece!) But this is not always reproducible either, since there have been other times when the painting was unharmed.

[crunk]

Auestion mark tiles appeared at the art gallery about three hours into the hood's existence. They were there the very first time I loaded the lot. This hood has supreme commander running as well as family switching frequently.

[Druscylla]

Auestion mark tiles appeared at the art gallery about three hours into the hood's existence. They were there the very first time I loaded the lot. This hood has supreme commander running as well as family switching frequently.

We have established that the tiles are not caused by custom content, mods of any kind, graphics cards and computer configurations or what version you are running - not surprisingly this appears to be entirely EA's messed up files somewhere, and damned if I can figure out where. I am going to bulldoze in a new town I am making for the expansion pack testing of this and see if that maybe fixes the problem. I am (foolishly probably) hoping a patch or fix comes out for it or is even in the expansion because it's really obnoxious to log in to my house only to be blinded by the freaking museum my artistic sim insists she wishes to visit.

[Writin_Reg]

Actually a few nights ago an actual EA Guru stuck his nose into my posts with a noob regarding the Riddler. This noob thought her mom's pc  was on the fritz, so I was in the midst of explaining what little we have figured out about these 3 buildings, and in pop the Guru - to confirm it was not the mothers pc, and that EA engineers were looking into the problem as he spoke. He said it was an EA texture that was just used in those 3 buildings (that is not availiable to us) that had corrupted and they were trying to find out why.

In my head it now makes sense why we can recolor these buildings and the riddler will just return as it would be akin to us trying to recolor the rabbithole buildings. We couldn't. What I can't figure is why EA bothered to use any texture on buildings we are all higher apt to alter to start with. This also solves the riddle why even the sledge hammer could not delete a few areas on these buildings. So back to my first statement on the riddler about Voodoo. EA's got to stop doing things it apparently knows nothing about - just like Voodoo.

[Simsample]

Do you have a link for that thread, Writin_Reg?
The only wallpaper I can find on those three lots that isn't available in the catalogs is the interior of the foundation:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/Sims3UnavailableFoundationTexture.jpg
However, that foundation texture is used in almost every EA lot in Sunset too, so that wouldn't explain why the corruption would only affect those three lots. I'm guessing that for that foundation, the lots were probably made prior to the brick texture being coded as the default for the foundation walls.
There are some plain walls that have a strange issue though- in the art gallery for example, if I select some of the solid coloured walls with the CAST tool I can see that their wallpaper type is in the gallery ('flat wall') but if I look at the swatch, there is no material category (it goes to whichever category you had selected last). Instead of showing up as a highlighted pattern, or at the bottom as a 'custom' (recoloured) pattern, there is nothing selected. This screenshot shows the red wall, with the 'flat wall' wallpaper style highlighted, but no pattern selected (top right by my cursor arrow). I had had a 'miscellaneous' category item selected last, but if I selected 'geometric' or any of the others then it would remain on that category when I CAST selected the red wall.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/Sims3UnavailableSwatchTexture.jpg
Perhaps these walls were coloured before the game was finished, too- and maybe it is those patterns which are becoming corrupted. Doesn't explain why some people are seeing this in every instance of Sunset that they create, and others (like me) cannot make it happen.

[tizerist]

Something strange happened last night.
Whilst browsing through my hood, I thought 'sod it, I'll quickly tidy up the ? infested art gallery'. Has been 2 or three months since I looked at it. I tried to mass-recolour the floor, with the 4th one along in the floors > misc category. Dark concrete. The game hung indefinately everytime I tried this. I know sometimes it can involve a long pause when recolouring a lot of tiles (much more so in TS2) but the game froze.
When I tried instead to recolour individual floor tiles with the concrete, the game became ultra slow. When dragging the marker to recolour large areas, the game went slower than I have ever seen. It was like it was fighting against me. This is very weird.
Due to the slowness, I didn't  bother recolouring the whole lot. With so many diagonal bits, and no mass-recolour tool on this particular lot, you can imagine thats a good 1 hours work there so meh to that.
Can anyone else confirm this?

[simfan]

so there is no solution to this problem at this time? If a lot comes down with a case of the question marks its a lost cause?

[snowbawl]

so there is no solution to this problem at this time? If a lot comes down with a case of the question marks its a lost cause?

The best solution at this time is to bulldoze the lot and replace with one of your own design (or one you download).

[simfan]

The best solution at this time is to bulldoze the lot and replace with one of your own design (or one you download).

damn it was a pre-made lot i wanted to keep

[dolldrms]

Do you have a link for that thread, Writin_Reg?

Although I tried, I couldn't find the thread to which Writin_Reg referred.  However, another thread popped up tonight, responded to by a SimGuru.  It is here: http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/0/123775.page#1527153 .  His response really doesn't say anything other than they are aware of the problem, have duplicated the issue, are checking into it and that an update will be posted when there is more info.

[Druscylla]

Well at least they have acknowledged the problem. Its better than being blamed or ignored for it. I really hope they fix it soon. I don't want to bulldoze those 3 lots in every save, but I hate those rainbow tiles.