Fool me twice...

[sabra]

Actually about five times now.   I have a consistent problem with houses not loading. I'll get into a lot, decorate the house, play for a bit, all is fine,and the next time the game will load and load and look exactly like it's doing something, but it just goes on in an endless loop and doesn't open the lot.

Yes, I do have the critical fixes for Uni (I don't have NL installed). Lots of downloads, but no other hacks (I've run everything through Clean Installer).  Brand new computer, lots of RAM, I don't know what else to report except that I'm about to take up knitting.

Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.

[sara_dippity]

I knit. It's a great thing to do while waiting for lots to load.

[sabra]

Huh.  I actually meant knitting as a substitute for this bloody game.

So no one has advice to offer?  And after I told you all about Pescado's senior membership discount???  Huh.

[angelyne]

I'm having my own problems with lots crashing on me.  Very annoying.  TS2 has always been so stable for me.  Drats.

Anyway, on to your problem.  Evicting the family might solve your immediate problem.  I have that happen to me a couple of times as well. 

[sabra]

Thank you Angelyne!  That's exactly what I've done, although the problem keeps recurring and I've somehow got to figure out what's causing it.

I just installed NL, which I've had hanging around the house for months, to see whether I just had some incompatibilities.  Now what's happened is that half of the objects in my houses have disappeared and have been replaced by some Gawd-awful Maxis stuff (yes, I did enable custom content, and no, I did not back up my pre-NL game).  I think I will have some tea and go lie down.

[BlueSoup]

When I first installed NL, I removed my Downloads folder and when I put it back most of it showed up as default Maxis items as well.  I think all I did to correct that was enable CC in the loading menu, then go into the game options and turn off that box, then shut down the game and restarted.  It seemed to be OK after that, and I didn't have to get rid of any objects.

I don't know about the lot hanging up, although evicting them sounds good to me.   

[Sagana]

I've had quite a few things turn blue on me since I installed NL. Some seem ok to start with and turn blue later. I'm happily deleting them (mostly recolors, I admit) and counting it as another systematic way to prune my downloads folder which is entirely too big. If it doesn't just work, it has to be really special before I'll play with making it work and I'm actually kinda surprised at how much I don't really miss when it's gone.

I haven't had any problems with lots as of yet <knock wood> so am no help there, tho I made use of the senior discount info...

[Ambular]

Actually about five times now.   I have a consistent problem with houses not loading. I'll get into a lot, decorate the house, play for a bit, all is fine,and the next time the game will load and load and look exactly like it's doing something, but it just goes on in an endless loop and doesn't open the lot.

Yes, I do have the critical fixes for Uni (I don't have NL installed). Lots of downloads, but no other hacks (I've run everything through Clean Installer).  Brand new computer, lots of RAM, I don't know what else to report except that I'm about to take up knitting.

Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.

I had this problem at one time with several houses.  One of them I managed to fix by deleting the file Groups.cache from my My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 folder (it's automatically regenerated when you restart the game.)  I gather this file can cause a lot of issues if it gets corrupted, which isn't uncommon.

The others were resolved when I realized I had inadvertantly stuck a bunch of old, unfinished and/or conflicting hacks and objects under that same folder, so the game was trying to load them all and choking on something.  *Facepalms*  Once I moved them elsewhere, everything started loading properly again.  So, you could have a mod conflict. 

[Swiftgold]

Make sure you don't have notowniechildrenregen in, too... that was the culprit for my long lot loadtime, especially downtown. The other noregens seem to work okay. No idea if that's the problem, but since it was for me, I figured I'd mention it.

[sabra]

Thanks for your advice.  I have no hacks at all at this point, so that's not the problem.  And as for the Maxis-reversion problem, it seems to be confined to one lot, and I probably  hadn't enabled custom content before entering it.  I still can't figure out what corrupts one lot after the other in my game, though.  My poor simmies will have to live out of suitcases for awhile, I guess.

[Sagana]

hm, I did read of two custom thingies that break NL lots - one is the pool lights and the other turned out to be, I think, a sofa that was breaking the House of Fallen Leaves for some people (pool lights is particularly noticeable on community lots. I think there's two lots several people had problems with). There's a thread on here somewhere about the issues with the custom (or recolor) sofa and House of Fallen Leaves. Just thinking maybe you have one custom item that's breaking and it's placed in several houses? Worth a shot anyway. From memory, I'm not sure it was a sofa, but someone else is bound to remember it properly.

[baratron]

I usually avoid giving advice off the top of my head at 6am when I've been up all night in pain ( ), but your problem is weird enough that I thought I'd mention the intermittent lot crashiness I had with Uni.

This may not help you in the slightest, but I had problems due to audio errors. Certain sounds in the game, such as five money trees all reloading at once, would crash it. (Three money trees was ok, four was dodgy, and five crashed every time. No, I don't understand why, either). I temporarily fixed the problem by downgrading my audio specs to the medium quality setting. Installing Nightlife and the NL Patch fixed the problem properly, and the game's automagic detection of my system capability turned the audio specs back up to highest quality.

Just wondering if maybe you save your game with the radio or TV on in the house, or just before a noisy event like money trees reloading? and then when you start to load the lot, it makes the audio go nuts and crashes?

[sabra]

Thanks, Baraton, and Sagana too.  I did save with the tv and stereo on, come to think of it.  *sigh*  I've never been able to play extensively without a  lot or two crashing at some point--I think I'm cursed.

Sorry you're in pain, Baraton.