Re: Long distance?

by puzzlezaddict
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Original Post

Long distance?

★★★ Novice

Hi there! I had a Sim go to university with two terms. Immediately upon returning home, I went back for the second term and when she left the family home all was well. She finished the second term and attended the graduation ceremony with parents, brother, sister, and boyfriend. Everyone went home and again all was well. When I got back to SV, I split up the family girlfriend/boyfriend and parents/sister/brother were at the family house. At some point during the construction of girlfriend/boyfriends house, the boyfriend disappeared. I assumed maybe a glitch and I would add him back via over watch or master controller but that didn’t work at all. I decided to go visit the family home when I noticed that only the brother was at the family home. It shows in the relationships and friends bar that all four of them (sister, mom, dad, boyfriend) are now long distance but that shouldn’t be since we are in the same town. The other thing I saw was that no one was aging, similarly to how you don’t age when you’re in university. I reset both lots and nada. Googled everywhere and found nothing similar to this.

Message 1 of 8 (621 Views)

Re: Long distance?

@MsChristinaMD  What mods do you use aside from Overwatch and MasterController?  I'm wondering about NRaas Traveler, ErrorTrap, and DebugEnabler in particular, but a full list would be helpful.  And what happened when you tried to add the sims back via MC?

 

Please also let me know whether you have any backups of this save, and when they're from.  The game keeps the data from the second to last time you saved as well, but that may not help if you've saved a few times since the problem showed up.  (If you haven't saved more than once, please don't do so now, in case the automatic backup is in fact useful.)

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I don't work for EA. I'm just trying to help fellow players with their games.
Message 2 of 8 (611 Views)

Re: Long distance?

★★★ Novice
@puzzlezaddict I will get that information for you ASAP. What is the best way to send the list of mods? When I tried to re add them with Master Controller none of them were in the list.
Message 3 of 8 (602 Views)

Re: Long distance?

@MsChristinaMD  You can take a screenshot of your Mods\Packages folder if you want, or list the mods in a post.  Either way works, as long as I can read what's in the screenshot.

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I don't work for EA. I'm just trying to help fellow players with their games.
Message 4 of 8 (600 Views)

Re: Long distance?

[ Edited ]
★★★ Novice

Hope I did this correctly 

Message 5 of 8 (592 Views)

Re: Long distance?

[ Edited ]

@MsChristinaMD  Yes, you did that correctly.  I'd suggest removing the screenshots though: most of them contain the names of adult-oriented mods that raise the game's rating and therefore can't be discussed on this site.  (Pretty sure you'll know which ones those are.)

 

Speaking of adult mods, the one by Oniki is known to bork saves, often badly enough that there's no way to repair the damage.  I can't be totally sure that's what happened here—it sounds from your description that the travel transition might have failed, which is also a way that saves get borked and can happen without mods.  (It's usually prevented by NRaas Traveler, along with ErrorTrap and Overwatch.)  However, it's kind of a moot point, since you don't have a save from before the problem showed up.

 

I think the only possible good outcome here is if you can manage to save your existing sims to the library and start a new save with them without the problem mod present at all.  You can try using MasterController to add the missing sims to a different household in the same world, by clicking on an empty house or lot and selecting NRaas > MC > Add Sim.  You can try moving each household out and back in again; this does help bring back missing sims some of the time.  You could add NRaas DebugEnabler and run the Fix Homeworld command on one of your sims.

 

While doing all of this, it's a good idea to use "save as" and rename the save, then run an experiment, save, quit, delete the five cache files in your user folder, reload, and check the results, maybe with another MC town reset.  If whatever you did made things worse, it's easy to delete the newer save and revert to the older one.  For reference, the five cache files are:

 

  • CASPartCache.package
  • compositorCache.package
  • scriptCache.package
  • simCompositorCache.package
  • socialCache.package

And it may be too late, but I would strongly consider removing the problem mod and all its add-ons and adding NRaas ErrorTrap.  The mod's effects are going to remain even after deletion, but it's possible, if not guaranteed, that the NRaas mods will be able to repair enough of the damage that you'd be able to save your sims to the bin for later use.  If even that fails, you could bring them into CAS and save them as templates; when you're ready to start a new save, you could then use those templates to recreate the family.

 

I know I'm harping a bit on this particular mod, but it's known to damage saves beyond repair.  This can happen after two sim-weeks, or after a lot longer, but that's always the eventual outcome if you play long enough.  Or, if you want to keep using it, play with a spare copy of your save (in a separate user folder) that you don't mind breaking completely.

 

There are other adult-oriented mods that don't have this same effect, if you'd like to look into them.  I can't name those either, at least not on this site, but non-EA sites have more leeway.

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I don't work for EA. I'm just trying to help fellow players with their games.
Message 6 of 8 (555 Views)

Re: Long distance?

★★★ Novice

I did all of this and it worked so thank you very much. I have another question that is unrelated. Some of my custom content is disappearing. Is there a limit to how much the launcher can hold or how much the game can hole? Is there anything I can do about this? 

Message 7 of 8 (529 Views)

Re: Long distance?

@MsChristinaMD  There isn't a hard limit for custom content.  The game just slows down noticeably as you add more above a certain level; what that level is depends on a number of factors, including your computer's hardware.  Missing cc is more likely to be due to corruption in one of the .dbc files in DCCache: these are bundled cc you've installed through the launcher.

 

The launcher not displaying all your installed cc is a separate issue and due to the launcher itself being somewhat unreliable.  It's not really an issue if your content is loading, and if it's not loading, the issue isn't really the launcher so much as the files it's trying to read.  And just to be clear, the launcher won't read .package files; if those aren't loading, it's yet another separate issue.

 

Yes, there are steps you can take to fix this, but how to proceed depends on whether you're willing to uninstall and reinstall the content, whether you even still have the downloads, and how much of it you have.  Let me know how many .dbc files are in DCCache (they're numbered sequentially starting with zero), whether the original Sims3Packs are still in Downloads, and if it would be easier to reinstall the content or you'd prefer not to if there's another approach.

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I don't work for EA. I'm just trying to help fellow players with their games.
Message 8 of 8 (516 Views)