Please help me before I get jailed for manslaughtering my game.

I've done the Game Help thing but sorting 100,000 items of CC . . . it freezes and crashes Windows Explorer when I try to open the folder. I'm on a Vista upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium (not a clean install either, sorry), with three harddrives adding up to 2 TB. 3 GB DDR2 RAM, and the computer's around 6 years old with no problems. My game had NO problems running in other neighbourhoods but I NEED THIS HOOD FOR A SERIES! I can't remake any of it - it'd take me ages and I don't have the time or patience to remake my lots to a tee.

Recently the neighbourhood I use for filming my series has started to go wonky on me. It's been going in stages for a couple months now. I clear my caches with every play btw. Also, I've switched this game from being an AnyGame to being my main game and back a couple times. Right now it runs as my main game. I find switching it between the two folders staves off some crashing. Why, I have no idea.

First, it started crashing on the school lot, but I had four separate backups with Maxis bin sims (the Newsons) in the lot that I installed and placed. I have a feeling this was a bad idea but I'd have lost the set I'd spent eons on if I didn't do that.

Second, it started crashing when I tried to load community lots - so I just avoided using them.

Third, it started crashing/lagging on apartment lots - sims would spawn on the sides of the apartments and using the batbox to clear 'em off did nothing. They would mysteriously go away during nighttime, but whenever I played more than 20 minutes or so, it'd crash on me randomly.

Fourth, whenever I tried to move a sim into a lot, even ones I made myself, it would crash at the loading screen or when I hit "Do you want to buy ________ for £________." My mileage varied.

Fifth, whenever I tried to scroll around the 'hood with my arrow keys (I'm on windowed mode, I find it crashes less that way and because I work off scripts it's easier) it would crash for NO reason.

Sixth, it just started crashing when entering the 'hood but not it's subhood.

Seventh, it started to crash in the subhood trying to move families into lots I made OR entering lots others had made to edit them. I have about 500 downloaded lots from here. I don't need them all but they're good and handy to have.

Eighth, every time I exit CAS even in the subhood, it crashes.

And finally ninth, I had managed to enter one of my occupied lots and build a bit but it crashed when I accidentally clicked too far on my recolours of a poster (I have one broken recolour that crashes all of my games across the board, but it does nothing else) and it crashed, and upon loading it back up even doubleclicking on that household insta-crashes my game. This is one of the houses I cannot, CANNOT afford to lose because one of the characters lives there and it's a very simple (read: 70's) but cluttered (read: hoarder's) home.

At this point (today) I got so fed up (episode five is supposed to be out tomorrow but I postponed it) that I went and got the AL-Critical Fixes from MATY, I ran and "fixed" my 'hood with the HoodChecker multiple times just to make sure (there was a lot of borkiness) as well as removing InTeen, deleting my thumbnails, disabling DEP and I'm going to scan my folders with the Clean Installer VERY soon. I use inSIM (the OBJ edition) and it gives me zero problems. Without it I couldn't make movies because SimBlender . . . ehh, I just don't use/like it. I also deleted the files from "A Long Time Ago" in the characters section of the 'hood. I have no idea if that helps or not but it's saved me in the past.

After I did all that I loaded up the game and it lagged a tonne but I got to getting a sim I had from before the crashing in the sim bin to buy a house when it crashed, again. Big surprise there.

What else can I do? Removing CC seems like it would probably cause my 'hood to keel over and die because nearly everything I use on everything is custom content. I have noticed that my defaults, even when removed, look like this on all sims (Maxis face, random custom skin):



What would be the best route to stop my game from crashing? Is it toasted? Can I save it? What are things I haven't tried? I'm DESPERATE. I am willing to work with SimPE. I know how to extract all of my characters but I need the lots is the thing, as well as the 'hood because I shoot in a way that establishes WHERE they are in a certain scene so much that if the horizon changed like from episode one to two (I had to shoot on the other school lot) people would point it out and be like "what happened?!"

Thank you so, so much.

Unfortunately, there's no way to fix deepset neighborhood corruption. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're only option IS to start over. Extract the most important sims, start a new 'hood, rebuild your lots, and carry on.

It won't ruin your story to do so. All you need to do is come up with a reason for the change. Something really bad happened to necessitate a wholesale evacuation of the town, and everyone has to start fresh elsewhere. Details could be a lot of fun to work with!

As you rebuild your lots, by the way, make copies of them for the bin before they have any sims living on them. Binning the lot with the Newsons on it is no doubt at least one cause of the troubles you're having now. Don't risk the entire 'hood just to save one lot, which you won't be able to keep once corruption takes over anyway. Practice safe binning!

Along with extracting your sims, you should be able to salvage your lots by packaging them (unoccupied) and then installing them in your new neighborhood, unless the lots themselves are corrupt. You can also salvage the decorated neighborhood terrain using HoodReplace. There's no need to start over from scratch.

You should even be able to salvage the location of the lot in the neighborhood, using the technique explained here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...86&postcount=47

If Windows Explorer isn't up to the task of helping you with your CC, there are other options to find and move CC: the Clean Installer or a command prompt are obvious choices.

Yes it will screw up my story - the story's plot was set in stone (aka, all lines recorded and I have around 30 voice actors) and it has to keep with the mood - poor kids vs rich kids in the best school in the city, and then one day the REALLY poor kids are merged and totally screw things up.

I'll try to go through my CC today because I noticed it started crashing more after adding my friend's CC (which was mostly older stuff and had a different inSIM copy in it).

Packaging the lots is sure to crash my game, even clicking on the lots totally ruins it.

EDIT: Is there a tutorial on extracting lots out of game? These are a couple things I need to save. I think you'll see why I can't rebuild. There's at least 50 lots involved with this series and all of them I spent at least a year fiddling with.

I totally see why you don't want to rebuild, but what choice do you have? Once a neighborhood is corrupted to the point where it's unplayable, there IS no other choice, except giving up entirely. Heartbreaking, but that's the sad reality. Only other thing I can think of would be to revert to a backup from before you binned the Newson lot, if you have one.

I also don't buy that you can't allow for a change of scenery as part of the story, while keeping to the main plot you already have mapped out. Again, I understand why you don't want to, but that's not the same as "can't". Pain in the ass though it will be, you may find the stretch to your creative muscles to be a fun project, once you get going on it.

I don't know of any tutorials for packaging lots, and don't know how to do it myself, but I'm sure Mootilda can point you in the right direction. Keep in mind her caution about the lots themselves being corrupt, though. That's a distinct possibility.

I really am sorry this is happening, but you're by no means the first to be faced with this mess. Instability and easy corruptability is by far the biggest problem with Sims 2, for sure. It's very discouraging, but even if you need to take a break for awhile, I hope you don't give up altogether. What's another year?

I'm on a machinima network is the thing, my new deadline was the 30th. I cannot rebuild - as in, I will not, in which cannot is a secondary reflector of my "do or do not there is no try" attitude - either I get these lots or I don't, they can't be rebuilt. I'm a great builder when it comes to copying sets off of film, yes, but I can't take a year. Is there a tutorial to extract lots in simpe?

You don't need SimPE to extract lots. Just copy all of your lots into the LotCatalog folder and rename them to match the naming conventions in that folder: cx_00000001.package, cx_00000002.package, cx_00000003.package, ... DO NOT copy apartment sublots, just the main apartment base lot.

Once you've done this, they should all appear in-game in your Lot Bin. Place the lot in your neighborhood and then enter it and make one build-mode change (such as putting down a piece of flooring then deleting it, or picking up a window and then placing it down again). Then, save and exit the lot. This should 1) clear out any mention of sims and 2) ensure that the lot is functional.

Alternatively, use the Elsewhere technique that I mentioned above. Note that this is a somewhat less safe method than just copying things to LotCatalog, especially if the lots are occupied. This copies both the lots and the Lot Descriptions, which specify information about the lot in the neighborhood, including the location of the lot. DO NOT copy apartments unless they are unoccupied, and copy only the main apartment base lot.

To extract Lot Descriptions, just open the neighborhood package in SimPE, select Lot Description (LTXT) in the left pane. Select all of the lots that you want to extract in the right pane (<shift><up arrow> and <shift><down arrow> will select a range of lots, <ctrl><click> will add a lot to the currently selected list). Right click on one of the selected lots and choose Extract... from the context menu. Choose a location on your hard drive and click OK.

To import Lot Descirptions, open the neighborhood package, Right click on anything in the right pane and choose Add... from the context menu. Choose all of the files that you extracted above and click Open. Then, select Lot Description (LTXT) in the left pane and ensure that all of the lots appear in the right pane.

For the first method, would it keep the furnishings the same?

Thank you so much Mootilda. I know you're the expert in this exact field

Yes. Both methods keep the furnishings.

Thank you. I have one last question. I've done all you told me to (took me a while but I did it!) as well as extracting the sims, and I've followed the "creating an empty hood" thing on MATY, and it worked - but none of the houses that I made are in the lot catalogue, just a bunch of repeat houses that were already in there. I did the first option you gave me.

EDIT: Oh, and upon entering the corrupted 'hood now, the game just quits all of a sudden.

EDIT TWO: Did the second "Elsewhere" method. I think it worked. I took this as an opportunity to make sure that I got "Arbourdale V2" with more roads because in the original 'hood I ran out of space.

EDIT THREE: Scratch that, it didn't work either :/

Are you sure that you followed the correct naming convention for the LotCatalog? You need to have "cx_" followed by exactly 8 numeric digits.

Were all of your houses created from houses which were already in your Lot Bin? How can you tell that they are duplicates, rather than the original and the modified lot?

Yes, I spent time going through it and making sure. None of them are there. All of my houses are from scratch and very distinct - the ones that are duplicates were already in the catalogue to start with (downloaded) and all look identical with identical names and no changes - I went into a few and they're all the same.

Would it be viable to take the lots from my N004 Lots folder and put them in my N007 Lots folder to have them work? Your HoodReplace gave me the deco but that was it - I had Lots checked but none showed up. It'll let me enter the subhood of N004 and take some lots into the lot bin but the ones I crucially need are in the N004 main 'hood - and that won't load at all. Is there something I missed? I have a feeling I'm missing a huge step here but I have no idea what that may be.

I want to thank you again for all your help.

HoodReplace doesn't have an option to copy lots. You must have selected some other option.

No, you can't just move lots into another neighborhood's Lots folder. You have to follow the procedure documented in the Elsewhere thread. Specifically, you would also have to rename the lots to have the correct neighborhood prefix and a unique lot number as a part of the name, and you would have to copy the appropriate Lot Description (LTXT) records to the new neighborhood (by extracting from the old and adding to the new), and then modify the Lot Description if the lot number changed.

I can't imagine why the LotCatalog trick isn't working for you. It always works for me. The only thing that I can think of is that all of your lots have been completely corrupted, to the point where the game doesn't recognize any of them as valid lots.

Which EPs and SPs are you using for your neighborhood?

Why don't you give me one or two of your newly created lots in the LotCatalog and let me see whether I can see them in my game? I just need a few of the newly created cx_########.package files.

I'm using all EP's and SP's plus the Holiday ones. Here's two I renamed for the first method:

http://www.mediafire.com/?jrdtfdmg4x4wrqq

Would it be okay if I gave you my entire folder to look at if it doesn't work?

1) I can see the lots in the Lot Bin
2) I can add the lots to my neighborhood.
3) I can edit the lots.

Are these the correct lots? Of course, I don't have any of your CC.

If you want to give me your entire neighborhood, I'm happy to take a look at it for you.

Thank you so much. Yes, they are my lots, I hand-built them as dummies for background purposes. Here you go I added the entire LotCatalog folder too. N004 is the corrupted one. They're in two parts because, err, they're kind of large. Sorry.

http://www.mediafire.com/?b8fep87dmxd26rf
http://www.mediafire.com/?4cich7xjwzr9r7t
http://www.mediafire.com/?lf3iu0onri3i179
http://www.mediafire.com/?obydc1z2zhcd6v3

Also, would it be a viable solution to backup everything, reinstall, put the stuff back and try again? (I really don't want to but I will if I have to.)

I downloaded all of the files. Are you aware that you cannot rename parts of a multi-part file, or 7zip will not be able to extract them?

Reinstalling will only help if your installation files are corrupt. The fact that your other neighborhoods are fine indicates that it's probably not your installation files.

However, I'm still not clear whether you've removed all of your CC, or what happened when you did that.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The neighborhood comes up OK and I am able to scroll around, but things are very slow. I'm going to try to reproduce your problems.

1) Crash on school lot: I don't know where to find the school lot, so I'll skip this for now.

2) Crash on community lot:

Tried editing Western Boughs Shopping Centre. Errors generated for cash register and sectional sofa. Reset allowed me to enter the lot. Otherwise, no problem.

Do you run in debug mode? You might want to, since it may help you to find your problems.

See below for live mode.

3) Crash on apartment lot:

Played Ed Jenkins. No obvious problems.

Took taxi to Shopping Centre. Several more errors generated for cash register. Reset allowed me to play the lot. Lot lags as townies arrive, but no crashes.

(Remembered why I hate weather, witches and strays.)

4) Crash on move-in: Moved Ed Jenkins out and into another lot. Moved various sims from the Sim Bin into lots. Lots of lag; no crashes.

5) Crash during scroll: Unable to reproduce.

6) Crash when enter neighborhood: Unable to reproduce.

7) Crash on subhood move-in: Unable to reproduce.

8) Crash when enter CAS: Unable to reproduce.

9) Crash on specific occupied lot: I wasn't sure which lot, so this will have to wait for more info.

Conclusions:

A) Your neighborhood is not corrupted beyond repair. Without CC, I was able to play it without too many problems, other than some objects which required a reset. However, you might benefit from recreating your neighborhood with less stealth subhoods, townies, etc. Just keep the stuff that you need and get rid of the rest.

B) You should turn on debug mode and reset, or delete and replace, any objects which generate errors.

C) There may be a problem with your CC. What happens when you run without any CC? Do you still get these errors? If not, then your problem is in your CC and you'll need to find some way to find the problem CC and remove it.

D) You have a lot of sims, large families, large lots, subhoods, etc. Are you sure that your computer is up to playing this neighborhood? It lagged a lot on my computer, especially with large lots, witches, rain and lots of townies. Mind, I don't have a great graphics card because I can't stand the noise of higher-powered cards. Still, I wouldn't want to play this neighborhood for any length of time on my computer.

What happens when you turn the graphics down to minimum? Can you play longer before it crashes?

What happens if you reduce the time that you play in any one session? Do you get less crashes?

Do you run the game by itself, or do you have a lot of other things running at the same time? Have you considered disconnecting from the internet and turning off your anti-virus while you're running? Have you gone through your processes and stopped anything that isn't needed?

Have you tried checking your temperatures? Are things more likely to crash the longer that you play? Are things less likely to crash when you first start your computer?

Sorry for the double post, but there's a lot of information.

I tried browsing your LotCatalog using the Clean Installer and ran out of memory.

In game, I can see 532 lots out of 539. Assuming that the lots with higher numbers and later dates are the ones that you want, I tried adding the last few lots to the neighborhood. Of course, I don't know what the lots are supposed to look like, but there were no problems editing the lots, changing them, or saving them.

If I were you, I would try to reduce the number of things in that folder. First, get rid of the duplicates. Then, reconsider whether you need all of the rest of the lots available all of the time. Perhaps your less popular lots could be moved to backup storage. You should even be able to create several backup LotCatalog subfolders in your The Sims 2 folder, organized by category. For example, you could create LotCatalog_SmallLots, LotCatalog_MediumLots, LotCatalog_LargeLots, or perhaps LotCatalog_Starters, LotCatalog_MediumPriced, and LotCatalog_Expensive, or perhaps LotCatalog_Modern, LotCatalog_Victorian, LotCatalog_50s, etc. Then, when you want a lot, just rename the appropriate backup to LotCatalog to make those lots available in-game.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. The school lot is right across from the shopping centre.

A) How would I go about doing that?

B) How? Is that testingcheatsenabled? I have that on by default. I've never had errors on the registers before. Weird.

C) I have played without CC with the same crashing occurring.

D) My computer's up to playing it (I've done bigger, more CC'd out 'hoods with no crashing or lag, and rarely if ever does it lag for me anyways), and I use the Visitor Controller every time to eliminate visitors, and the weather vase to eliminate weather. I have a really great card (that's also as you mentioned noisy) but the 'hood ran fine (no lag or anything) for me before.

Answers:

1) No. It crashes the second I try to adjust anything but I remember when I switched it over to an Anygame to test if it would crash in that environment and the settings defaulted, I put them to minimum and it still did the same thing.

2) I'm a filmer, not a player - I usually set up an 8-hour-straight filming session every few days because my episodes are around 40 minutes long. If I just want to whip in and whip out for a couple things, it still crashes in the same amount of time.

3) I have NOTHING running at the time, and I end all Task Manager goodies that try to secretly take my memory such as leftovers from iTunes and Sony Vegas, as well as unneeded stuff like Windows Update. I use Windowed Mode on the highest resolution, 1600 x 1200, because my computer's resolution is 1680 x 1050 and it looks the most "decent". On fullscreen I switch it down to 1280 x 960 to keep everything around the same size. Thus me having two boot icons created for the game - one linked to the fullscreen, one linked to the windowed mode. I've never considered the internet bit because when I try to do anything to my connection it stops recognising the connection when I want to come back to it and I have to take the long backdoor route to get it to work. I had the guys at my provider's company stumped for hours. Don't kill me but . . . I don't use an antivirus program at all. Sure, I scan my computer regularly for viruses with my defrag program (it can do that) but nothing ever comes up because I also use a Chrome extension that finds and kills all viruses in downloaded content AND I'm very cautious. I've tried a few programs but all of them either bluescreened on me, blocked websites like Facebook and YouTube, or refused to uninstall (I'm looking at you, Norton).

4) I have a temperature reader and I do remember having a fan break on me in August during a heatwave - that's around when the crashing started too, but I fixed the fan and got another one for higher up. My computer's regularly cleaned out and I run everything off a clean restart when I go to start my game.

For the doublepost:

How can I tell which lots are which? All the lots I crucially need are oldish ones because I started building my 'hood from the ground up a very long time ago with very little CC.

This whole thread has been about recreating your neighborhood from scratch. Recreate your neighborhood using HoodReplace. Extract the sims using SimPE and recreate them in your new neighborhood. Copy the lots to the LotCatalog and then install them into your new neighborhood.

You might want to move your bad neighborhood out while creating your new neighborhood. This may minimize problems.

Yes, debug mode is testingCheatsEnabled. My problems may have been because I don't have your CC.

I wonder whether something in your computer was broken by the heat when your fan broke. Heat can fry just about any component in your computer and bad hardware can cause crashes in unexpected places. Bad hardware can be intermittent, tending to be worse when over-stressed. Also, if a component was hurt, it could get worse every time that you use it, which would explain why the problems seem to be escalating. You might ask in the computer forum to find out how to test your various components.

I can think of several ways to identify a lot. There are probably more.
1) Run the Clean Installer, Browse to the LotCatalog, and look at the pictures. The Clean Installer has an option to move CC to another folder.
2) Open the cx_#.package in SimPE. Look at the images to identify the lot.
3) If you can run the game, you can add one lot at a time to the LotCatalog, then identify it in game.

Thank you so much Mootilda. You deserve an award for most helpful person of the year.

I remember having a fan break in an older computer and over time the mobo actually started to melt, so I'll definitely take it apart to have it checked out. I build and repair computers out of my basement I know two USB ports went on it but I guess another check would be a good idea.

I'll try option one right now. I could see it being CC related as I did mention taking in some of my friend's CC before she went over to get her harddrive recovered (her computer overheated around the same time mine did and totally killed her harddrive, but she got some stuff off of it as she's a filmer too) so it could be that. I'll remove that for sure, as well as any suspicious stuff I see like adsa38921jdksj030.package and so on.

To find duplicate lots, you can either open the LotCatalog in the Clean Installer and look for pink files, or you can open the LotCatalog in Windows Explorer, choose Details view, and sort by size. Identical lots will have identical sizes.

To be sure that they are identical, you can compare them. For example, I went into your LotCatalog and looked for files with the same size. Then, I opened a command prompt and typed:

cd /d "C:\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\LotCatalog"
fc /b cx_00000453.package cx_00000469.package

This says to go to my LotCatalog folder and then binary compare the two files. The result was the two files are identical. So, I could delete either one.

You can use any binary comparison program, but FC comes with Windows XP. Be sure to use a binary compare and not a textual compare.

Sorting by file size can have other benefits. For example, I can tell that cx_00000503.package is useless, because it's only 1 KB. You can try opening the file in SimPE to be sure, but that's just too small to be anything useful.

Good advice. I've cleaned up my entire Lot Catalogue folder and I'm about to run the game - I got the jist of the "pink files" thing pretty fast after there were about 30 of the same lot - "Townhouses". I've also removed every 'hood except for the one I'm starting over with, and I'll be monitoring my temperature, load, and how much RAM is being used (I found out that some crashes can be caused because the computer can't give the application enough memory, so it bottlenecks and crashes).

EDIT: You win the most helpful person of the year award Everything you told me worked and I got what I needed! Thank you SO SO SO much for saving my series. Credit is all to you!

I'm so glad that you got it sorted out. It's terrible to think about losing a neighborhood.