Sims disappearing one by one

[Shiny]

Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm doing, so feel free to suggest the easiest/most obvious fix because I likely didn't try it. My custom neighborhood seems to be going up in flames. The computer I play on can boot from either Vista or XP. The game is installed on both. Today, I loaded the game in XP, and the neighborhood was full of new bugs, the most troubling being two houses that used to contain families are now listed as for sale, with no sign of the families that used to live in them. Also, a lot of sims were walking around pure white, which I've seen before and has resolved itself in the past. Finally, my main legacy house has a normal family portrait on startup, but two sims are totally missing when I load it, to the point that their own family members have no relationship with them, even in the family tree.

Anyway, the XP partition is being kind of screwy lately in general, so my first attempt to fix this was to move my files over to the Vista partition and load the game from there. This actually got the two missing families back in their houses, but the game crashed when I tried to load one of them. The two missing sims are still missing in the same way as before, and now a child from another family has gone missing as well, with her father still waving at her. The white skins problem seems to be gone, although the family portrait still shows that in one house.

Does the neighborhood sound salvageable? Are these sims retrievable? I have no hacks, and I did try taking out my custom content folder, which changed nothing.

[J. M. Pescado]

That's pretty messed up if your files are randomly disappearing.

[Shiny]

So, computer over?

[Li'l Brudder]

Yes.  Very yes.

[witch]

Do a scandisk on your hard drive.

[Sleepycat]

others have reported problems with sims going missing, no relationships to anyone anymore, nothing... as if they never existed.


I still think it is a game bug.

[ZiggyDoodle]

I had that happen but the Sim was missing from the family portrait.  SimPE revealed that Sim went poof; no memories, no relationship, no nothing.  I backup weekly so the fix was to restore my game and I've not had further problems. 

Shiny has more serious issues with missing families, once occupied houses now mysteriously for sale, and Albino Sims.  Spooky.

[Flamingo]

I've only had that happen when I use the lot debugger to delete Sims.

If you have SimPE, I would go look for traces of the missing Sims in the Neighborhood Browser. Look for their Sim Description. If these Sims are showing up and disappearing in game, maybe you could find one of their files, because their files probably wouldn't be randomly disappearing and reappearing. If the files are, your game is probably the least of your worries.

Anyway, you could try extracting what they look like using Sim Surgery, but I don't know of anything else you could do.

[Arina]

Do other sims still have memories of the missing ones? Something similar happened to me, and other sims had their birth/meeting/best friend memories with a blank picture (could have been mystery sim, was a while ago) and, where the name of the missing sim should have been, it was $Subject; or something like that. I reverted to a backup and, for the month that I continued to play that hood before deleting it for other reasons, it was fine.

The first sims to disappear were new ones - babies and then newer CAS sims. Then it got more indiscriminate. I'm not sure if any whole households went missing though, so it could be a totally different problem :/

[Shiny]

Well, I guess I'm stumped. I downloaded SimPE and used the neighborhood browser to look for the vanished sims. There is no trace, except in other sims' memories, where they will have memories of Unknown. Actually, the last I played the game, I did check memories and everything was as before - sims remembered the vanished sims, including their names, with the right thumbnails. When I look in SimPE, though, the names are definitely gone.

I figured out the missing sims ID numbers by doing that, but I don't think that does me any good. Does it? There are more missing sims than I realized - I think even some townies and dormies have vanished. I'm inclined to think there is some kind of catastrophic hard drive problem, but I haven't noticed any other kinds of files going missing! I did do a disk scan, nothing seems to have changed. It's not even my computer, it's my partner's. I'm getting a new laptop in a few days, so I guess I'll just use that one and get away from the computer of doom.

My last backup is a generation ago; I think I'd rather just start over than do all that again.

[kuronue]

I had that happen but the Sim was missing from the family portrait.  SimPE revealed that Sim went poof; no memories, no relationship, no nothing.  I backup weekly so the fix was to restore my game and I've not had further problems. 

Shiny has more serious issues with missing families, once occupied houses now mysteriously for sale, and Albino Sims.  Spooky.

It's worth noting that sometimes, sims not being in the portrait is perfectly normal... I had a "family" of unrelated people, one of them had triplets, she ended up holding a baby in each hand and the third was nowhere to be found. I figure, since she was unwed, it tried to stuff all three on her, but only can handle a pose with twins, so, the third vanished. It was there when I loaded the lot though.

[Flamingo]

I figured out the missing sims ID numbers by doing that, but I don't think that does me any good. Does it? There are more missing sims than I realized - I think even some townies and dormies have vanished. I'm inclined to think there is some kind of catastrophic hard drive problem, but I haven't noticed any other kinds of files going missing! I did do a disk scan, nothing seems to have changed. It's not even my computer, it's my partner's. I'm getting a new laptop in a few days, so I guess I'll just use that one and get away from the computer of doom.

My last backup is a generation ago; I think I'd rather just start over than do all that again.

Well, if you did find the number of their character files, you could try opening the character file directly, though I don't think there is much you can do even then. You could get their facial structure out of that, but I wouldn't have any idea of how to go about replacing that.  If their Sim Description file is lost, they are pretty much gone forever, unfortunately. The ones that are still there are salvageable enough, and you're probably going to need to start over, so I'd recommend using some of your favorite Sims as the founders of your new neighborhood.

[Shiny]

Actually, what I had found was their ID numbers in the form of 0xD35657CO. Later, I thought to use the sim browser to look at the N005_0001 package files in order to see if any were missing. I found that about a third of the character files were completely gone, confirmed by looking in the neighborhood folder. I don't know how long they were disappearing for, since I wouldn't necessarily have noticed that two out of three pizza delivery people had vanished. There was a whole chunk from 0210 to 0227 that was gone, and that's where the player sims that I lost were.

In happier news, I found a more recent backup that I didn't even know I had, which puts me much farther than I thought. That backup has all character files intact. 

[Zazazu]

It's worth noting that sometimes, sims not being in the portrait is perfectly normal... I had a "family" of unrelated people, one of them had triplets, she ended up holding a baby in each hand and the third was nowhere to be found. I figure, since she was unwed, it tried to stuff all three on her, but only can handle a pose with twins, so, the third vanished. It was there when I loaded the lot though.

It also happens if you have more than the normally allowed number of sims. I have 11 in my house now (6 sims, 1 servo, 4 dogs) and Harlin, one of India's child twins, isn't in the portrait. Jorel, one of the dogs, is cut off at the butt. It makes sense, but it did freak me out the first time I saw it.