Game lets me play once then gets ruined.

[hweldon81]

I'm having major issues with my game and "fixing" the issue inconsistently with the FAQ steps. Sometimes removing downloads helps, sometimes not. Sometimes deleting the temporary user files fixes the issue, sometimes not.

Each time I restore from a backup I am able to play for one session. The next time I try to play the game it will load to the neighbourhood screen but when I pick a hood to play it will either a. crash or b. finish the lights going across the top and then load forever. I have not been able to discern any differences between when it crashes and when it "forever loads."

I am getting really tired of needing to make a backup every single time I play. Also, a few times even the backup I've made has been already ruined in this way, meaning I had to go back to an even earlier backup and lose a couple of sessions of playing.

I know it will be difficult to help given the problem gets inconsistently fixed each time, but any suggestions? I have not recently added any new hacks.

This started happening after I started playing Pleasantview as well as my custom hood. Each time I switched hoods it would ruin. I deleted PV and got clean templates for all the maxis hoods (backed up originals of course) thinking my original PV was the problem. Even with the clean templates I wasn't able to switch hoods (either in game or after a reload). So I created two separate backups that I was switching between (one for playing PV and one for my custom hood). This was a lot of hassle but worked, for a time.

Now I just tried to play my custom hood. I last played it successfully yesterday and made a backup afterward. I have not played PV in between. It won't load. The backup I made yesterday won't load either. Nothing from the FAQ seems to fix it. I'm so tired of this garbage and I just want to know how to fix it (rather than forever bandaging the problem with backups).

[Mootilda]

This is definitely not standard behavior and is unlikely to be caused by anything discussed in the Game Problem FAQ.

I wonder whether your computer is underpowered or whether you are experiencing heat issues? Perhaps you should tell us more about your computer. Sorry, I can't give you instructions for the MAC (you are using a MAC, right?). Someone here may also know of a way to monitor your internal temperatures; I know how to do it on Windows, but not on the MAC.

[hweldon81]

My Mac is a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. My memory is 1GB 667 HHz DDR2 SDRAM. I am running OSX version 10.6.6. I don't think this is a heating issue because it even occurs right at computer start up. It also has not occurred in my past year and a half of simming despite some marathon 12+ hour sessions.

I have kept my earliest backup of my custom hood that exists just in case I ever can get it to load, but for now I'm playing a clean PV. This has worked out okay so far, which makes me think hood corruption in my custom hood was actually at play here (though not showing in the normal ways). Perhaps it was a temporal coincidence that it started showing right when I was starting to play 2 different hoods for the first time.

One thing I did notice: after my custom hood stopped loading and when I had to revert from backup, the character files got half deleted. I had 840 characters when problems began. Each time I'd restore a backup, I'd notice the ruined and not loading files had only somewhere in the 600 characters (612, 623 etc). Not a consistent number, but not random characters from throughout deleted either. Just as if the latest 1/3 of the characters were gone.

[Rebellina]

Hi,

I stumbled about your post looking for help with my issue.

My Mac is a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. My memory is 3GB 800 HHz. I am running OSX version 10.5.8

My issues started after I had played Sims 2 Basegame, Nightlife, OfB, Pets and Bon Voyage successfully for a few months and decided to install University. The game crashed while I added the colleges. My neighborhood was reduced also, which led to more issues in the neighborhood.

I assume this happens when the game tries to load and fails, at least this is what happens in my game before the reduction.

I uninstalled and installed twice. With Custom Content in my Downloads folder, the error keeps repeating. When I take the CC out, I am at least able to install the Uni sub-neighborhoods.

One thing I found helpful was to take out the Custom Content from the Downloads folder, use the Disk Utility Program and repair permissions, then move the CC back in the Downloads folder. This sometimes helped if all else failed.

Best wishes,

Rebellina

EDIT:

I spent the last two days researching the issue. It seems that the problem really is the file limit Mac OS has for any given program. I tried the 50/50 method to find problem content, but it seemed to change every time I tried it, meaning sometimes a package caused the program to crash, sometimes not.

I have not started the program now, but at least Body Shop functioned a lot better now.

Please follow this link to find a fix for the issue:

http://greymanticore.livejournal.com/25802.html

Hope this helps!