A whole new level of borked! Yay. Points Break Primitive?

[Strangel]

Okay.. this is beginning to piss me off. I installed Family Fun, played for a day.. everything somewhat okay, no big issues aside from a small case of sudden lag.
Today, I go to change someone's appearance, and when he steps away from the mirror, I notice HE HAS NO FACE. The SIM's face is fine, the little avatar is nothing but chest and hair, no face, no neck. In fact, it's not even black, what I'm seeing is the hair BEHIND the spot where his face should be. I go "hoshit" and send him back to the mirror to fix it.. and the face that pops up in the "change appearance" menu is blank of all makeup, all accessories, and has a default (skin default, not Maxis default) pair of brown eyes. So.. I figure I'll exit lot without saving and he'll be fine, right? Go off to work on my Legacy house, same neighborhood, and send that sim out on a date with his intended. Midway through the date, Sims freezes. Not to mention the Gypsy actually *rang the doorbell* of the restaurant they were at..
I hard reboot, restart, boot up sims.
Figuring I'll get them both dressed in their formal for the storyline, I go into the intended's house, where everything seems normal except for the skinny pregnant woman (I'd played her house since the last save of this one, she'd given birth there). I get him dressed in formal and in doing so I notice something a bit wonky in the coloring of the makeup he's wearing, so I send him to the mirror. Big mistake. HE comes away with a no-face icon. Jump out of lot without saving, exit sims completely.. jump back in.
Now, he's got a face icon again.. but is constantly erroring. It says "Hit Break Point Primitive". Reset does nothing but pop up a new copy of the same error, cancel does the same, and delete removes him AND the error.
Since he has a roommate, I have her summon him back. Error - Nathanial is HBPP. Repeat, this time saving the lot and exiting sims.
Reboot.
Restart sims.
Re-enter lot where roomie is alone and doing fine, summon back... Error. >.<

Is this whole thing doomed? I have NO idea where some of the game discs are thanks to sharing them with the 12 year old simmer in the next room, I don't think I've changed anything in the game files aside from adding some clothes (although I did delete some hairs in BodyShop yesterday), I've tried all the usual suspects for deletion (cache, etc) and still nothing.

..and I can't turn off the damned tutorial tips thing either.

Edit: I have everything up to Seasons, haven't installed Seasons yet. That was the plan for today, but then THIS happened.
Edit again: Grabbed the error logs in the hopes it would help and give a speedier answer. One is the intended, the other was the first sim to lose face, whose lot I have not reentered.

[dizzy]

I hate to say this, but you might need to uninstall/reinstall Pets.

[Strangel]

Thanks for giving me a starting point.. Oh and my Pets isn't patched. Neither is my BodyShop.

Going to let this scan run and then I'll uninstall, reinstall, replace the hoods and see what happens.

[Strangel]

I know.. double posting is bad. But I thought I'd update.

I uninstalled, reinstalled, then realized I should have probably opened SimPE to read his file in the first place. I seem to be suddenly getting run rampant with No Character Data (red thumbnail) files. Last I checked, there were NONE. Now, I've got red thumbnails for characters I created, dropped in a lot, and haven't even played past a day yet.

Two are even showing as Unlinked Character. Any ideas?

[J. M. Pescado]

BFBVFS.

[Strangel]

Oh goody.
Any idea what might have caused it? The whole neighborhood is going byebye, I'm going to clone the main characters and start over elsewhere.
What I mean is.. is it possible for the game to massively break itself? I'm religious about doing things the MATY way, so I'm not sure how it happened or how to avoid it.

[dizzy]

My first thought was custom clothing and/or hair meshes, but I'm not sure what your custom situation is. I just assume something about Family Fun Stuff's install messed up your Pets data.

[Strangel]

I have a good deal of custom, but I haven't added anything new in a couple months, and I've been playing since then without a problem, this suddenly started the other day.

Husband's suggestion is that I uninstall ALL of it, then reinstall everything and see if that makes a difference. I'm beginning to think Family Fun did cause it.

[Sleepycat]

did you patch family fun?

[Li'l Brudder]

Install it in the EAxian order.

TS2->Uni->NL->FFS->OFB->GL->Pets->Seasons

[cwykes]

I've had missing faces.  Jordi's fix works - you change them into full face paint and change them out again.
Sticking plaster on a major wound in this case I think.

[Strangel]

did you patch family fun?

It's been a while since anyone's talked about Family Fun.. I'd completely blanked on there being a patch for it. We pulled all cc, burninated the Legacy 'hood and held onto the wife's playground. Her's seems to be doing fine now, but something's rotten in one of my downloads folders, so I'm going to go through it piece by piece later and see if I can't narrow down the file. When we were looking for the culprit(s) I opened CAS. Two squares into loading, it terminated. This is the method we used to narrow down which file was causing that problem.. When I opened a Maxis neighborhood, faces showed properly after Change Appearance and when returning to the mirror for Change Appearance again, everything was still there.

I've had missing faces.  Jordi's fix works - you change them into full face paint and change them out again.
Sticking plaster on a major wound in this case I think.

You know something, that was the first thing I tried. LOL
I'd read about it here, so when the face in the status window poofed, I sent him back to the mirror, but when he arrived, it was showing a maxis face, no makeup, no custom eye color, not even a maxis eye color. Just the slightly off-brown eyes that were part of his skin.

Install it in the EAxian order.

TS2->Uni->NL->FFS->OFB->GL->Pets->Seasons

I was under the MATY impression that this was Lies and Propaganda?

[dizzy]

I suppose if you don't actually play the game in between installs, you could install them in any order. The problem is that you still have to share the actual neighborhood data between different installs (which is the part I assume has been clobbered).

[cwykes]

I've had missing faces.  Jordi's fix works - you change them into full face paint and change them out again.
Sticking plaster on a major wound in this case I think.

You know something, that was the first thing I tried. LOL
I'd read about it here, so when the face in the status window poofed, I sent him back to the mirror, but when he arrived, it was showing a maxis face, no makeup, no custom eye color, not even a maxis eye color. Just the slightly off-brown eyes that were part of his skin.

You probably already read it, but on the change appearance into facepaint, I got some sort of default face in facepaint, it was the change back that gave the correct face.  Disappointing that it didn't work for you.

Install it in the EAxian order.

TS2->Uni->NL->FFS->OFB->GL->Pets->Seasons

I was under the MATY impression that this was Lies and Propaganda?

There isn't total agreement I think.  EA say you can install in any order.  Best I've understood things, installing in EAxian order patching as you go, gives you the best possible set of code.  I think that's what Jordi goes with.   Patches fix their EP, adding new EP's adds new code in another directory and doesn't fix the old stuff because it's not using it any more.  I think it was Jordi who said a new EP fixed the old objects package not the rest.  So how high is your level of trust in Maxoids' ability to track what they changed and not refer back to unfixed code?   Me, I go with "install in order patching as you go" unless that's really inconvenient in which case don't bother.

[Sagana]

TS2->Uni->NL->FFS->OFB->GL->Pets->Seasons

Family Fun Stuff comes after Open For Business. I'm sure as I got stuck playing with the FFS CD - which worked out well enough because I could give the OFB disk to my daughter.

I also installed both FFS and GL out of order. I wanted to play with the OFB disk - don't like the opening for FFS, but it wouldn't let me. Then thought I'd try and play from the GL disk and give the Seasons one to my daughter but noooo, no luck there, either (yes I knew it was a lost cause but tried anyways). No ill effects from installing them backwards. All the EPs in order and patches between except the 2nd Pets patch which I haven't installed.

[notveryawesome]

There's a 2nd Pets patch? The list of fixes at the TS2 website does not include borked NPC genetics. Are you sure the patch has been updated?

[Sagana]

I *think* people are counting the Pets Bodyshop patch (which isn't on EA's site anymore) as pets1 and the borky one as pets2. So we're waiting now for the fixing in pets3

[notveryawesome]

Ah, that makes sense. Bummer. I'd really like to patch my game without borking the genetics.