I've played Strangetown for some time and never had any problems(well except a lot of graphic bug but it's just my laptop) with the neighbourhood. Can you guys tell me what's so problematic with Strangetown?

Okay, you see all those gravestones in Olive's graveyard? Lots of them have no or partial character data. You see those nice elaborate family trees, with the birth queens and the drones and the dead parents? Ditto. This means that there's loose character data bouncing around the hood looking to make trouble. When and how much trouble it will cause is random. There's plenty of people like you who've never had a problem, and then there's people like me, on whom the entire Smith family disappeared the second time I opened the hood during one of the three iterations of this neighborhood I've attempted.

Even Tarlia's cleaned hoods are, I believe, only cleaned as much as possible given our ability to access code. Certain places in the code cannot be reached or checked by any tool we have, and there's no way to guarantee a corruption-free hood. But Tarlia's Strangetown is less likely to go belly-up than the original version.

I'm still playing original Strangetown because at the time I decided to knuckle down and keep the promise I made long ago to Vidcund (whom I accidentally killed during my first experimental game) and let him have a good life, I was under the mistaken impression that the clean hoods did not retain the original scripted events, and I needed Vidcund to get abducted to fulfill the promise. In fact it is only the subhood versions that don't retain the scripted events, but I am disinclined to start over yet again, so I keep playing, and back up every time I play. That way, when (as has happened at least once) I get an unacceptable glitch, I can just replace it with a recent backup and lose only a few sim-days of play. If that ever doesn't work, I'll just have to go to the cleaned hoods.

I went and followed this tutorial " A summary of the illustrated tutorial by Celesta92059" found at http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Resurrecting_tips and gave all the date back to the deleted 1st gen. Sims in all 3 base game hoods and clone and extracted them to make them new.

This way there is no corruption to start with, all the Sims have never been played and still in the bin.
There is 2 Sims in Veronaville that have what looks like 4 foot long tooth but they play fine and it does not get past along to the next gen.
For more info I have them up at "Neighborhood 99 Sims Forum" http://starlightsims.yuku.com/directory but you need to be a member to see the forums.

I call them the beginning hoods and if you would like to see them there in my sig.

Loose or partial character data? So having these tombstone equivalent to deleting one? Like keeping the shredded data, and explode when someone gossip about them?

EA started over both Pleasantview and Veronaville after making significant changes to the game's code. They didn't start over Strangetown, though - resulting in Sims who are never meant to be played/interacted with. Take Melissa Sims for example - in everyone's game her ghost looks different - because her hairstyle has a bug that pulls a random hair. Also, by resurrecting her (not recommended), she'll look like an adult female with a (I believe) male voice.

And then keep in mind that there are these sorts of character files as Melissa's floating around Strangetown.

There's also the weird ageing problems that mostly seem to manifest when using InTeen. These include thing like adults being told they can't get a job because their grades aren't good enough, and adults being seen as teenagers. Nobody really seems to know why this happens or how to fix it other than spawning the biological clock for the character and so you could argue that InTeen causes the aging problems, but I rather think the problems were always there and InTeen just allowed them to be seen.

There are also sims with messed up DNA.

For various reasons, I've had to start playing all of the towns from the beginning. Up until the second to last time, it gave me no problems. The fourth time I played Strangetown, it suddenly was unable to open. It got so bad that my whole laptop froze when I tried to open it. After that, I got Tarlia's hoods. You never know when it will explode, it just will

But you might be done playing by then, O Sparkling Dragonfly! If I were you I'd just keep playing the established hood (with frequent backups, as I described) until done with it, or it explodes past the ability of back ups and available tools to repair. Run the hoodchecker, wield the batbox, save before rather than during exiting a lot - all of that, as usual, to prolong its life. It doesn't have to be perfect to yield hours of enjoyment.

Okay. So apparently tombstones causes the most of the problems because of their data. But I don't understand how these "floating"(literally?) data would affect a living sim. Since what I've known, only living sims can be gossiped with. And yeah they will get unstable when deleted from he bin and so on. But premade dead sim, I don't see how can the errors be spread. Floating?



Oh dear Saving during exit cause problems too?

It can, because it's easier for the save to be interrupted and not completed correctly. An interrupted save, in any program, will damage the data it was working on.

"Floating" is a manner of speaking. Think of codes as atoms. You remember how, in chemistry, different atoms have different numbers and types of places where they can bond with other atoms, making new elements? Codes are like that. They bond with data to make whole sims. As long as sims exist as complete wholes, they don't have any stray bonds sticking out in inappropriate places for codes to attach to and interact with. Incomplete data, however, will interact inappropriately with codes that are trying to do their jobs, and data from an incomplete or deleted sims will often hook up with a new sim during this process. I believe that the single biggest problem is that sims need unique ID numbers; but certain ID numbers formerly belonging to deleted or partial sims will not be recognized as "taken," and thus will be assigned to a new sim. This is how the famous "toddler with LTW" sign of corruption generally arises - the undeleted LTW data recognize the ID of its old sim and report for duty. After awhile you get babies acting as adults, adults acting as babies, dogs acting like humans, humans acting like cats, and bunches of data getting so confusing they can't interact with the code anymore and just sit there gumming up the works.

Gossip is a problem because it is designed to move around and duplicate itself from sim to sim. If you look at how gossip is expressed in memories (which you can easily do with SimPE) it's easy to see how easily it could accumulate damage and spread it through the hood.

Gossip can be removed via the FFS Lot Debugger, or by manually hacking and slashing via SimPE. It's recommended that you clean out gossip every once in a while, or get a mod that stops it completely.

Also, I've heard that saving and exiting will cause issues, but I've never experienced a problem with that in my game. I know that saving with a Sim on the phone is bad, and if your game files aren't set to read-only and your game isn't fully patched, saving with a remote control car in use is also bad. There are "issues" that have been debunked as silliness, such as leaving testingcheatsenabled on for too long causing game crashes (it doesn't).

And thank you Peni, for that incredibly descriptive answer. That cleared away a lot of questions that I had.

You can stop a lot of these memories from even happening and help stop a lot of the corrupted ones to by getting "BO - No Sim Loaded" and "BO - No Trash Memories" mods and they will help your game last longer to. http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php?topic=7875.0

I know that saving on exit can cause problems, as I used to do it - click the next house in the rotation, click "yes" to the save, and away I'd go.

But one day it didn't save the sorority properly, so that its save point was in the middle of a date during which one of the sisters had brought her fiance home and had her first woohoo. Next time I opened the sorority, I would arrive in the middle of the date, but with no fiance in sight, and it would be tanking - deep in the red, fiance furious, as if she'd cheated on him during the date, but invisible - just a bright red dialog and fury.

The only way to fix this was to play the fiance's house, invite the sorority girl to move in, then send her out to a community lot by herself - where the date timer and her fiance appeared, and she was able to finish the date, then return home alone to a happy fiance. I eventually figured out that (though I couldn't see either of them) the game detected two copies of the fiance on the lot, one on the date and one not, and they were catching her cheating with their doppelgangers - or something like that. Finishing the date by herself allowed the doppelgangers to sort themselves out - somehow. In code this complex, it doesn't have to make any kind of human sense.

Ever since then I've been conscientious about saving as a distinct action from quitting. It's the only way to be sure.

That seems to go more of the "Don't save your game when this is happening" category, and saving and exiting has little to do with it. In a nutshell, never save the game whilst a scenario is going on (such as a party or headmaster) because that can screw up the scenario controller (the FFS Lot Debugger has an option for this, I believe)(Be sure you save before the scenario. That makes more sense because you can always go back and retry if your sloppy Sim burns the headmaster's dinner). Also, don't save the game with an off-world loiterer on the lot that isn't a member of the household (such as a phone call), because if the game is reset, the Sim on the other end isn't sent home correctly.

For the remote controlled car issue, make sure you have all the patches and that the game files are set to read-only. Although I would still avoid saving with the damn thing in use, because I don't trust EAxis anymore.

You misunderstand - the date wasn't ongoing when I exited the lot. It was finished and the girls were each and every one in bed. But when the save on exit failed, it referred back to the most recent save - the save when the sim left the community lot with her date in tow, to finish up at home, a perfectly safe procedure - and gummed things all up.

Also, on one occasion I failed a headmaster scenario as soon as he walked onto the lot, and I was informed that this is a glitch that occurs if you save between calling the headmaster and the headmaster showing up, you will automatically fail the scenario. So when you advise people to do that, make sure they understand that you need to make the save before making the headmaster call.

Hmm, odd. Never experienced those issues before, but just to be safe, I'll use the "Save" option before using the "Quit to Neighborhood" or "Load another lot" options. Which means I'll have to cut down on the CC I have, because the long load/save times from the CC is why I only use save on exit.

You should not use save and exit game either. Finish saving, then leave the lot in whatever way you intend to.

I've had a bunch of problems in my genderswapped uberhood where some of my sims have had their memories wiped, relationships nuked and ages messed with. I made a backup before I ever started playing with the hood and every time I find a problem, I check it against my backup to see if it's a problem I need to fix there too and the original, unplayed version has always been fine. This lead me to conclude that something was happening during my gameplay. And my computer crashed shockingly often when using 'save and exit.' There's no way at all I can be sure the crashes caused the problems, but they're a very likely suspect and I now always save, THEN quit.

As you probably know from my recent posts in Stupid / Random Questions, I am having serious problems with my Veronaville just now, such that I haven't actually played it this month. While it doesn't have the bad reputation that Strangetown has (probably because of Maxis starting over as described in DJ's post #5), Veronaville also comes with lots of unlinked Sims (53 if I counted right). Plus I've managed to unlink two more.
So, instead of playing, I have just been considering my options, from restoring from a very recent backup, to restarting completely and then trying to import the likeness of my Sims to Tarlia's cleaned up version. So it's heartening to know you're successfully playing a Maxis Strangetown. Mootilda suggests I delete all my SWAFs, but I'm a bit reluctant to do that, as I fear that losing their learned behaviour would seriously alter the character of some of my Sims. My first thought was to restore from backup. My recent backup is only about 2 Sim hours before I started losing wants and fears, so, inspired by your experience, I think I'll try using that one, and if that doesn't work, I'll try a slightly older version. I can always try deleting SWAFs if that doesn't work. I presume you just replace the N002 folder (N003 in my case) with the one from your backup. There's no need to do anything with your NeighborhoodManager.package, is there?

How long have you been playing Strangetown like this? And, have you only had to restore from backup once?

Sorry for taking the thread a bit off-topic and away from Strangetown!

It's not exactly off-topic, as all the base game hoods manifest corruption in similar ways that need to be addressed with the same techniques.

To restore from a backup, delete the current folder, copy the backed-up folder into its place, and you're good to go. The Neighborhood Manager will sort itself out. Never copy/replace, as the replace function may not overwrite newer information with older information, and you could easily wind up with an even more broken hood than you started with.

It's hard to say either how long I've been playing Strangetown or how often I've had to restore it. My oldest surviving backup is from November last year, but I don't play it nearly as often or as long at a time as Drama Acres. If we assume that I always remembered to back up after every session, I retain 17 backups (which is probably excessive, but I want to be able to retrace my steps by several sessions if problems recur), so that would be 17 sessions, some of which would be shorter than others, as I do my rotations differently. Pascal's daughter has been a child for three days, so in terms of forward progress that's not very long; but there's an LFT attached which gets played longer at a time than the main hood.

Even if I could remember how often I had to restore it, in that time, some of those restorations would be due to experimentation. I had to restore a couple of times when I made Crystal Vu into a playable; and a couple more when I tried to make a streaker playable and age him down so he could go to LFT legitimately and join the frat. That one I gave up on; I couldn't tell if the borkage that followed apparent success was a result of the experiment, or Strangetown hiccuping. And of course I make backups every time I have to take out the Downloads folder to troubleshoot.

But I have restored after Strangetown borkage at least once and the problem did not recur, which underlines the fact that corruption is operating under Chaos Theory rules. There's too many variables, too many of them determined randomly or by contingent circumstances of play, to predict how it will manifest, and returning to an identical pre-manifestation state and proceeding as before has a good chance of not manifesting a problem - or, of manifesting a different one.

We've had people on here who were routine neighborhood jumpers, who did all the VBTs except the ones that break the installation files, and it didn't matter because they never played a neighborhood long enough for the corruption to bother them. It's us long-term players who get invested in our characters who need to be conscientious about it.

As for deleting the SWAFs - I think that my aspirations glitch, the one in which the LTW scrambles and the wants/locks collapse back to a pre-University state, may involve damage to or (apparently) spontaneous wiping of the SWAFs, because even after I fix it with the batbox, I get a day or two of the sim producing new-adult wants - generic Get Job and Meet New People wants that have nothing to do with their established characters. But the established characters regenerate quickly under my playstyle, because I am still playing them as the same person, only free-ranging them less, directing them to do the things that I perceive to be "in character" that I otherwise would have left to their spontaneous behavior. I am fit to be tied every time this happens to a pregnant lady or expectant father, because it means I have to teach them to love their babies instead of them spontaneously doing it - but because I do actively teach them, the situation resolves itself relatively quickly. Since you have such a close relationship to your sims, you'll probably have a similar experience if you have to wipe the SWAFs.

Many thanks Peni! That's all very reassuring. I do indeed have a close relationship with my Sims. I have been looking wistfully at their pictures in my Storytelling folder, wondering if I'd ever see my Simmie friends again. I'll get ahead and start playing them again from my last backup.

I had no idea Strangetown was so problematic I started playing it as it's my favorite hood and hope to go as long as I can. I realized eventually it would stop running probably but I didn't realize it could happen soon and suddenly. I do have batbox, I just recently got it, I can delete memories with that? I can start making frequent backups. I guess i'll just do all that and hope for the best. I know it's time will come but I hope to get a decent amount of playing it first. I suppose when it does go belly up when/if I restart it i'll go with the cleaned hoods as I didn't know such a thing existed or that it was pre-corrupted.

Yes, you want to periodically clear gossip and trash memories with the batbox. There's a pie menu option for "Memory." You can clear trash (mostly "met sim" memories) from the active sim, clear gossip from everybody on the lot, and if there's a corrupt memory you'll get the option to "wipe" it.

I like to clear gossip when an NPC, like the paper and mail carriers, is on the lot, because they carry a lot of gossip around the hood. They see all, remember all!

Or as I said up in post 13 and get BO's 2 mods and they will stop most if not all gossip and trash memories.