My Sims can't buy books - error message

[pearlbh]

I know you're supposed to be able to sell books individually by marking a bookcase for sale.  But when any of my customers try to buy a book, they take the book off the shelf, stand up (because for whatever reason, Sims always choose a book from the bottom shelf), and then the book just disappears.  After watching this happen a few times I turned on testing cheats and the error message I get is "Animation name is empty string."  So... I probably have a hack that's causing this, yes?  I have Monique's learn all skills from the bookcases hack, but I took that out (it was the first one I suspected) and I still had the problem.  It happens with Maxis bookcases too, not custom ones.  For some reason it's bugging me immensely that I can't sell books.  Magazines work fine, and other buy-one-from-the-display items, like cologne.  It's just the books that don't work.  Help!?

[MissDoh]

I am sure it would help a lot if you could joined the error log to this post as a file to download.

[J. M. Pescado]

Are you using custom bookshelves? Those probably lack the proper object codes for the book-buying actions.

[pearlbh]

No they're Maxis bookcases.  I've attached an error log. 

[attachment deleted by admin]

[simmiecal]

I didn't think you could sell books when the customers take the book off the shelf. It was my understanding that you had to have your sim remove the books from the shelf and put the book down or use a collection like Carrigon's wierdo collection which has the individual book in it, and then mark the individual books for sale. Has anyone been able to sell books straight from the bookcase?

[pearlbh]

No you're definitely supposed to be able to sell individual books from a bookshelf just by marking an entire bookcase for sale, in fact I got it to work after removing my entire download folder.  Then I started the process of putting my downloads back in little by little to figure out which one was causing the problem.  It appears to be a certain custom bookcase I had that was causing the problem by simply being in my download folder.  You can't sell books from custom bookcases (at least older ones that were made before OFB), but you can have them in your game, except that one.  It was called "My Favorite Books" and it appeared to be just a recolour of the Maxis Bibliofile bookcase, but in Clean Installer it came up as a game object.  But anyway now it's gone, and all the rest of my downloads are back and I can sell books. 

The thing about having to take one book out is a rumour that's been posted around but it's not true, all you need to do is mark an entire bookcase for sale and Sims buy individual books from it.  And you can't mark an individual book that's sitting out for sale, at least I can't. 

And now that I have this working, let me tell you, Sims will buy books like they're going out of style!  And when you check their inventory after they've bought one the books have witty and amusing titles, though all they can do with them is read or study like usual.