Hello everyone.

I have a somewhat strange occurrence in my game. I opened up a household I have not played since March, and found that my pregnant adult female was now a pregnant child Sim. She lost her career, which I assume is because child Sims can't have jobs, but she also lost her skill points which makes no sense.

I went through backups and she's an adult in my backup from july 31st and a child in my backup on august 3rd. No idea what happened, I definitely did not touch her household in that period.

My dilemma is this. I seem to recall someone mentioning Sims changing ages in the context of corruption, but I can't find anything saying so and my memory is known to be unreliable for these things. I have played a whole lot since the backup on July 31st where she is still an adult, and if I revert to that backup in order to counter whatever happened to her, I will lose all the playing I did since. Which is a lot of playing, that I'd have a hard time recreating. Seems small, but that kind of thing really bothers me and ruins my play mood for months.

I'm really torn on how to deal with this. I don't want to lose all the playing I did by reverting to backup, but I'm also not confident I can restore her completely with SimPE if I keep the current version. I'm sure I can fix the age, skills and career, but there may be more stuff messed up that I don't know about. Most importantly I am very attached to this hood, I've only gotten through a couple of rotations since I finished my many-year-long-rebuild of it. I'm worried that it is indeed a sign of corruption, and how I should handle it if it is. Anyone had this happen in their game? Anyone read anything on the topic of Sims suddenly changing their age? Thoughts in general?

Yep that is just one of the signs of corruption.

For the life of me I can no longer find that info or where it was.

What I don't understand is how my hood can be that badly corrupted when I've done nothing that corrupts things. I know we probably don't know all corruption-possibilities, but still...

It's possible that the game has rewritten her character file. If you can find which number file she has in SimPE, you can go and have a look at the characters folder in your neighbourhood and see if there are two (or even more than two) character files for her. If there are, you can TRY and experiment by deleting the later version and renaming the older version to the main file - OR - overwriting the character file with the one from the properly working version.

HOWEVER, I hope I don't have to say this to you but I will, use a copy of your neighbourhood NOT the original. This technique often doesn't work.

Personally, if it were me, I'd just go back to the old version and swallow the loss of gameplay. That's the least risky approach.

Thanks maxon. I'll check. I only see one with the character number SimPE says she has, but just to be sure, how would it look if she had multiple? Would they have the same name?

The extra ones would have the same number and then have (1) or (2) and so on if more than 1 copy.

With Windows 7 and above you have the option to revert to an earlier version by right clicking on the hood folder and chose the one you want to try but do this on a copy and not the org. hood.

I don't see why I should try to revert to a previous version using that feature when I have backups from before the error occurred, since a backup is much more reliable. And in my case I can't use that feature. For some reason it's broken on my windows, it deletes any and all restore points when the computer shuts down. Been meaning to figure out a solution, but haven't yet.

I started looking at what I'd need to re-do if I revert to backup and I had an idea. Since I haven't played the Sim that changed age since March, the only differences in her character file before problem and after problem are the corruption-caused things. Would it be a terrible idea to replace just her character file with the pre-problem one? I imagine in most situation copying character files is a bad idea, but since it's the exact same thing in the same hood with no differences other than corruption-induces things, I figured it's worth considering.

EDIT: I decided to just try it and see what happens, and somehow the backup shows as adult when it's the backup hood, but place the character file in the current version (deleting the original first) it shows up as child. I use SimPE to check in both cases. Which either means my hood has become allergic to pregnant adult Sims and convert them to children even if the game never opens, or the Sims age is not stored in character file, or stored in multiple locations where the second one overrides character file. Any ideas on which?

EDIT2: I decided to extract the relevant parts of the neighbourhood package and replace them in the latest version of the hood. Might not be a good idea, I don't know, but the game and her household loads fine, and she's back to adult with all her data seemingly intact. Since my game is already corrupt I figure a bit more won't hurt. I'll just keep playing and when it decides to break down properly, I'll do another rebuild. Here's hoping that it holds up for a long time to come.

Yes, that's one of the things I was suggesting. I have done it myself (NOT often I hasten to add) successfully but it is a risk.


Yes, that's what I would have suggested next. Very risky though. If you have problems, report back because that's something that is worth having information about.

This is 100% conjecture. All of this. Please take it that way. I admit I am no expert at all. But I find that when hardware issues happen in a game, sometimes, they may affect game files.

The most obvious example was in my recent hard drive failure. That messed up my files in a backup game. Had I reverted to that backup, I might have had problems. Fortunately for me, it was a backup, so I simply deleted it before I replaced the hard drive. It wasn't worth salvaging. Problem solved.

I had two instances when replacing a graphics card did weird things in my game, and I had to attempt to fix files, and not the video cards.sgr one. After installing one card, the inherent corruption in my game (nothing unusual here ... this was before I knew about VBTs) accelerated so rapidly to the point that the hood became entirely unplayable within a few days. Previously, it played just fine. That could have been a coincidence, but I now back up my game before installing any graphics cards, just in case.

I don't remember what happened in the other instance, but I do recall it was fully fixable, and I could play the game normally.

CC has done freaky, corruption-causing things in my game as well. Before I did my current policy of checking EVERY household I play when trying a new mod (memories of the Great Hood Meltdown of 2016 has not faded from my memory), I would occasionally find that a CC mod affected the one or two households I didn't test. And it would generally be a freaky, localized hard-to-explain thing. For all I know, it affected only Sagittarius Sims whose last name began with N. It was that bizarre.

I now back up before trying any new mods as well. (Actually, I usually do, but I didn't test thoroughly enough that time. Big mistake.)

Again, all conjecture.


EDITED ... Video Cards, not graphics.sgr. Oops!

Thanks for the input. I have to admit the graphics card was on my mind, because my game has been acting very strangely since installing it. Very interesting to hear someone else has had corruption-type problems from changing graphics card, wouldn't surprise me if that's the problem in my case too. Unfortunately I don't understand editing graphics sgr, and I haven't been able to find a tutorial that explains it in the way I need it explained, so for now the graphics will be what they are until someone more knowledgeable has time to help me out. I don't suppose you have any graphics editing for dummies tutorials gazania?

I'll do my best to report back on how it goes with the Sim, if I find any strange problems that could be due to the replacing. What I did find while fiddling with it was that you have to use the replace-function, you can't extract the resource and then add and delete the old one. It loses it's offset-value if you add rather than replace, and I couldn't find a way to fix it, but when using replace it seems to have kept all parts.

That'll be to do with the internal links. I don't know if Fix Integrity would help in that case (thought that was only meshes) but yeah, replace is the way to go.

Holy shit, that's specific.

if you're talking about using the Graphics Rules Maker, I had a lot of trouble with that as well. I tried this twice, and just couldn't get it to work right. It's probably some "duh"-ness on my end. Most people get it to work just fine.

I just wound up fixing the card manually, per the last post here:

http://modthesims.info/t/474394

This isn't hard to do. Even I did it, and I STILL can't figure out how to recolor something properly in Sim PE. I should note this is a basic fix. I believe Graphics Rules Maker repairs or enhances other settings, but I believe this is the one you need the most.

I didn't have the 7700 this time (that's the one I replaced), so I only needed to make one fix this time (the video cards file one ... I wrote the wrong file name earlier). As always, back up whatever files you're going to futz with.

Completely agree with Gazania, you don't have to do any of the VBT to have issues with your neighbourhoods so it doesn't have to be anything you did wrong. I've done a lot of VBT with my old neighbourhoods and they still work fine. Instead, the only times I had to revert to back up copies (that wasn't after I'd actively done something unfortunate myself) was after some kind of technical issue, like for instance I could no longer load the dorm I was playing when my power supply exploded, or weird issues after moving my files from their original home, my old XP desktop, to newer computers (Downtown map flashing pink, a couple of lots invisible in neighbourhood view, and so on). Migrating from one system to another can definitely go wrong and has to be done with a batch of back up copies available, and this is something I never read about.

Graphic rules - All I did was to use the Nvidia texture fix file on Leefish - I did nothing else (graphic rules fix program did not work either).
As for the revert back to child - I have never seen that one. Revert back to teen, yes, that I have seen in my former vanilla game - I just grow them up again by using grow up on the Sim menu Then they have to study for their skills again as well (although, if it should happen again, I may cheat).
As for a power supply failure - yes, it buggers up a lot of stuff on a system, I have had that one. Yet I did not have any issues from upgrading - and I upgraded everything a year or so ago, including graphic card (part by part )