Gardeners make Pleasantview unplayable!

[Kukes]

Okay, some of you might remember my previous problem in Pleasantview - namely, that aging was impossible due to the game freezing every day at 5:59pm. So, that was sorted by using aging off and simply aging the sims manually. However - now Pleasantview is pretty much buggered. I thought that the aging problem may have been connected to the flood of gardeners I had just before that problem started. Well, I deleted the gardeners in SimPE, as well as the lot they spawned on. And I, stupidly, thought that was the end of it...

Obviously I was wrong. I hadn't played the game for a few weeks, so I started it up and got ready for a long night of play. Five minutes in, the game locked up for no apparent reason (I'd put aging off, of course). So I restarted the computer, and it happened again. I decided to check in SimPE to see if the gardeners had respawned. They had, despite being invisible and that I was playing a different family on a different lot from the last time. I delete them again, play the game again, it freezes again. Just then I check SimPE and they're back. About fifty, I believe, but they seem to be the same gardeners as before (same names, same looks - though that can happen, it's still slightly eerie). Is there any kind of fix for this? I have the barista fix but I don't think that really covers my problem. Or is the npc-spawning such a deeply coded issue that only Maxis can fix it? Any help would be very much appreciated! 

[RainbowTigress]

Check out this thread:

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=698928

It may have to do with missing portals.  Crammyboy discovered that sometimes they randomly get deleted, and it can cause this spawning which in turn can cause slowdowns.  If you find this is the problem, there is a link to another thread with the fix, although the download is missing from the thread for some reason.   Hopefully it will be back up soon though.

Hope this helps!

[Kukes]

Thankyou!  I downloaded the fix (I think it was contained in the one .zip, since there were two files in there and the readme seemed to say this was the full fix). I'll have another go and see if it works.

[Kukes]

No change, I'm afraid.

[miramis]

Kukes, did you download the fix from Crammyboy's thread, or did you follow the link from there to Erzengels thread?  The one on Crammyboys page is a Preventative, but the one on Erzengels is a Manual fix.  I'm guessing that 'manual fix' means that besides placing the download in the correct place there is something you will need to do ingame to correct the problem.  Take a peek at the readme that came with Erzengels download.

If the neighbourhood is already FUBAR with regards to maxsims (see overpopulation) you may as well scratch it and start a new one, since fixing the lot that is spawing the NPC's will only prevent more being added to the already full file.

[Kukes]

Actually, Erzengels thread was missing the download yesterday. I've got it now, but since I bulldozed the lot and the problem was not with car portals, but with a mass of gardeners suddenly appearing on the affected lot, I don't know how I'm supposed to use this fix. I have NO idea why these gardeners won't stay deleted; they're all the same gardeners, but keep reappearing (same names, same appearance, exactly). I checked in SimPE and several sims - for whatever reason - had relationships with them; I checked every file and deleted these relationships, however. They haven't returned, but the gardeners have.

My neighbourhood is currently sitting at 701 sims, minus these respawning gardeners. There's about 50 of them, so I haven't quite reached the 800 mark yet. I do have a previous backup, pre-Uni, so I can always return to that and hope this doesn't happen again. I'm just too attached to the neighbourhood - it's a year old and I've put so much work into it I'm loath to delete it, even if it doesn't work.

[J. M. Pescado]

800 is an arbitrary figure and has no real value other than an estimate: Your game does not magically explode with the 800th character, so 701 would be close to that mark. 700 would be close enough that you could potentially experience issues. Alternatively, nothing may happen: It's simply an arbitrary estimate based on past data points.

[Velax]

Have a look for the Teleporter Painting object. Think it's on Simlogical somewhere. It'll let you teleport out all visiting sims, including invisible gardeners. Might not fix your problem, but it'll at least make it easier to get rid of all the gardeners till you fix the problem.