I think my hood is trashed :(

[blackcat]

Something really bizarre has happened to my Richmond hood. Over the last few days I've been sick and haven't felt like playing but I used the time to sort out and seriously cut down the amount of cc in my downloads folder - don't know if this is relevant or not but it might be. Before I started I made a backup of my hood and of my downloads folder, in case something went wrong (SHOULD have backed up the whole EA Games/The Sims 2 folder but hindsight is 20/20 )

After feeling very satisfied with my cleanout I started playing again. Had one problem of lots crashing that I eventually attributed to a particular piece of cc (that had been in my d/l folder for months and hadn't caused a problem until now). I got rid of it and all was well. I started playing a household in Bluewater Village, and played them over 2 r/l days... so I didn't look at my base hood over this time.

Went onto the base hood tonight - and half my lots are gone!! There is no apparent reason to which lots have disappeared - some are residential, some are community, occupied/unoccupied, owned/unowned... it seems just random. They are definitely gone as opposed to invisible - I can't click on them and I can place new lots over where they belong. Don't know where the sims are gone - the remaining owned businesses still appear to belong to the correct sims even if the owners' households have vanished.

Tried loading without the downloads folder. Then with the old version of the downloads folder. No change. Loaded a backup from two days ago - same lots missing. Now here is the really strange part - I loaded another backup, from June 10, when I knew the game was fine - and half the lots were missing from that, too! But not the same lots - it appears that what is visible in one version, is missing in the other - almost exact opposites.

The lots folders of all three versions of the hood have the same number of houses so they are actually still in existence, they just don't show/exist when I load the hood.

So unless someone here can suddenly go 'hey, I had exactly the same problem and this is how to solve it' - which I think is highly unlikely - my hood is trashed. I'm actually not too stressed about this - its an old hood and I did all the wrong things with it at first, like deleting sims and the like, before I knew they were wrong.

I've kept detailed lists of all the sims etc and most of them are exported into CAS via SimPe, so it shouldn't be too hard to recreate the hood using other hacks to recreate the family ties etc, although it'll be slow job with over 100 playable occupants. The other good news is that I can export my lots from the two versions of the hood so that means that between them, everyone should get to keep their houses, businesses etc.

The bad news is the timing!! I always expected I'd have to do this at some stage and have thought about how I'd do it, but I didn't want to have to do it when I just started blogging, and when I have Samantha Bradshaw here who needs to move on in reasonable time. I think the best way to do it is just to continue my blog with my existing storylines, recreate the necessary sims/locations as they appear, and sort out the rest of the hood when Samantha has left. Hopefully, I can make the transition to the new hood fairly seamless as far as the blog is concerned. I've already got screenshots for 4-5 entries, then I'll just work out the rest from there.

Just... Aaaaggghhh!!!

[thelunarfox]

Oh no! That's horrible! I thought that Carla (Sullivan) had something similar happen. In her case, ALL of her sims disappeared. When she restored to an older back up, they were still gone.

Here's what she did:

Mar 23, 2010 22:12:28 GMT -5 somuchsong said:

OK, putting my back-up into a clean folder (made by renaming the Sims 2 folder). I'm discussing it with a couple of people at N99 and the consensus seems to be that the neighbourhood manager probably stuffed up somehow. I'm guessing it changed itself once it couldn't find the right files when I load the hood, because I didn't touch the folder that file is in.

Sigh. Anyway, fixed! So happy!

So try renaming the Sims 2 folder, making a new Sims 2 folder, and putting the back up in that.

[laura]

Oh, how awful! Yes, that does sound a lot like Carla's problem, so maybe she has some insight. I've never experienced anything like this before.

I'm glad you've got copies of everything though. In the end, Sims are just Sims and their stories live all in your head. But ugh! All the hours and weeks and months and YEARS we put into making these hoods, and it really sucks when something like this goes wrong!

I hope you can resolve it quite easily!

[somuchsong]

Yikes! Nothing more to add than what Laura and Lunar have said but yes, this does sound a lot like my problem. In my case, all my lots and Sims were gone. On reading about your problem, I thought "neighbourhood manager!" immediately.

The good news is that if you've got a back up of your hood (and it sounds like you've got at least a couple) and this is your issue, it's really easy to fix! All I had to do was put my backup into a clean game folder and I was playing again that afternoon.

I really hope that's all that's wrong here and you've got Richmond up and running again soon enough.

[blackcat]

Thanks, Lunar and Laura!

I was thinking along the same lines as the thing you cut and pasted, Lunar... something wasn't right about thinking that the problem was with the actual hood, and I realised that it was the fact that the backups displayed the same problem - as far as the game is concerned, they should have each been a separate, self-contained hood. So the problem had to be with something outside the hood, ie the game itself.

I tried replacing my Sims 2 folder with a backup from early this month. More of my lots showed in the backup, but there were still some missing. That left me one other option - I uninstalled the entire game from my computer, and spent this morning reinstalling it. By 'spent the morning' I mean I had to hover close to the computer to change disks and type in registration codes... and even doing it as quickly as I could, it takes three hours(!!) to install the game with all eps and sps.

I'm now launching it for the first time (without my hood, yet) to see if it works. I want to tell you guys if it I can save the hood, but I have to go to work in less than an hour and depending on how long this takes I might not get the chance yet...

It had better work, after all this!!!

Watch this space...

[blackcat]

Thanks, Carla - just saw your reply now. The neighbourhood manager might have been affected but something else was going on too (see my reply above). The June 3 backup I restored from my portable drive included the whole EA Games/ The Sims 2 folder, and it still displayed the fault... and it wasn't even stored on this computer when the thing went wrong!

Am now loading up the game, with my backup hood moved in... and getting ready for work because I can see myself switching off the computer and running out the door at the last minute today...

[thelunarfox]

I really don't think you had to uninstall, but I hope it works. The suggestion wasn't to replace your current hood with a back up, but to start a clean game by renaming the old Documents> Sims 2 folder and then letting a new clean version take it's place then placing the back up in that.

Uninstalling should work the same though, so if the Neighborhood manager was the issue, then that'll solve it. Hope to hear some good news!

[blackcat]

I figured I'd have to uninstall because replacing the whole EA Games/The Sims 2 folder with one that I know worked would have had the same effect - it would have come with its own Neighbourhood Manager. That didn't work so the next thing that made sense to me, was the possibility that something in the game itself was corrupted and affecting the N-Manager/lots/etc whenever it was loaded.

Anyway, as you say, I have a clean everything now, so hopefully it works even if I did do it the hard way!

[somuchsong]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you! Let us know!

[blackcat]

Yay - I have Richmond back - and possibly not just the backup from June 3 - I may have Richmond from yesterday!

I tried putting yesterday-Richmond into the EA Games folder that the new install created (it started out as Pleasantview, so I just removed the new N001 and replaced it with Richmond N001) but the same houses were missing. So I replaced the whole The Sims 2 folder with the TS2 folder from June 3. Loaded it, it was perfect - I had my hood back.

I found that not much had changed between June 3 and now, but there was one house that I had extensively renovated. I decided to reload yesterday-Richmond and package the house to put the new version into my recovered hood (risky, I know, but not hugely so - a copy of the June 3 backup is still on my portable drive so at worst, if by loading yesterday-Richmond corrupts my new clean game, I know now how to fix the problem. Even a 3 hour reinstall won't seem so hard when I know it will have a positive outcome).

To my surprise, when I loaded the game, all the buildings were back! I went to the renovated house, and this is where it gets interesting... this is the Bluewater house I played over the past couple of days. Family consisted of couple (not yet married), baby, 2 cats. The game crashed at some point, and when I went back into it, the woman and one cat had disappeared from the house! I teleported them back in using a teleporter that displays like the phone book (ie I didn't need to know which 'family' they'd gone to), added them back to the family - which took a few tries, it didn't work the first time and I don't actually remember how I did make it work - but all was well so we kept on playing.

They got married on a community lot, she was pregnant with baby #2 when I discovered my buildings gone (they're not in my hood storyline/timeline yet, and I covered several sim-years in the play sessions). The interesting part is, when I loaded the house it was in the same state it had been in, after the crash - woman and cat missing. I definitely saved it after that - and if nothing else, the act of going to a community lot would force a save. So that is where things went wrong, and somehow my hood didn't save after that...

I'm going to try to get her and the cat back again. If it spoils my game again, well, now I know, and I'll just have to go back to the June 3 version. But very strange...

One thing this tells me, is that I NEED to start that new version of my hood, no matter what - these weird bugs are happening too often. I can just start putting buildings down in the new hood (good winter weekend project ) while still playing the current hood, and maybe I'll only have to recreate the sims when this one finally does become unplayable.

Lesson #2 - Back up my whole TS2 folder, weekly!

I'll let you know what happens with my experiments with getting the family back. Either way, I'm happy, I have my hood back I'd be satisfied with the June 3 backup but I'm going to see what happens here, anyway, out of curiosity now... so long as I don't do anything I won't mind losing if it fails again, I really have nothing to lose from it.

[blackcat]

Update...

I figured it out last night! The woman and cat weren't missing from the game when I reloaded after crashing - they were missing when I reloaded after enlarging the lot with the Lot Adjuster program! And apparently the game didn't save at all after that.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the Lot Adjuster, only that it apparently doesn't work in this hood any more, or it didn't work in this instance... but I'm soooo glad because my main worry was that I'd accidentally repeat the circumstances that triggered the problem...

I put the June 3 hood back in and its fine - no missing houses or anything so it doesn't seem to matter that I briefly put the other one back in. I'll keep this one and just replay/use hacks to get back the gameplay I lost. There's not much anyway - I was lucky that this happened when I was focusing on storytelling for my blog/not playing much. Most of what is lost is the couple with the problem... I'm not going to import the buggy lot since it was definitely the cause of the problem, I'll just redo the decorating.... and they can keep their small yard this time!!

Thanks for the help/support everyone