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Inventor
Original Poster
#1 Old 2nd Mar 2017 at 7:55 AM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 3, World Adventures, Generations, Pets, Showtime, Seasons, University Life, Island Paradise, Into the Future
Default Strange error when trying to travel
I got this and my game closed. What could be behind this?
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 2nd Mar 2017 at 8:55 AM
The most common causes are really very simple for such a horrible sounding error. One is having elements of your TS3 user game folder in Documents open in Windows Explorer while trying to load up a world (travel counts as a world loadup same as starting up the game does). Another is worlds or saves with unusual or too many characters in their names.

Other common causes are outlined here: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...or_Has_Occurred
Inventor
Original Poster
#3 Old 8th Mar 2017 at 12:07 AM
Then it's really weird because none of those applied. I'm so confused!
Inventor
Original Poster
#5 Old 8th Mar 2017 at 3:06 AM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
Is this a world you've previously travelled to?

In my case, it usually means the travel world savefile is damaged and borked. This is why I usually save before I travel.


Yeah I have. I just came back from China and this is when I attempted to go to Egypt.
Inventor
Original Poster
#7 Old 8th Mar 2017 at 8:29 AM
nhd file?

I have edited the home base in Egypt (and France and China) if that makes a difference. Basically I added more tents and redid the bathrooms, so nothing (that I would see as) important. Would anything like that be part of it, just in case?
Site Helper
#8 Old 8th Mar 2017 at 2:18 PM
You find the nhd file in your Documents Sims 3 folder in Saves. There are folders for every saved game you have. In each folder is a nhd file for the homeworld, plus another nhd file for any world you have visited.

Editing the base camp shouldn't have damaged anything, but I suppose it's possible.

I am Ghost. My husband is sidneydoj. I post, he downloads, and I wanted to keep my post count.
Group for Avatar Makers* Funny Stories *2017 Yearbook
Inventor
Original Poster
#9 Old 16th Mar 2017 at 5:30 AM
Ok sorry it's been a while but I'm finally ready to do this.

Should I delete the old nhd file to do this? And which save do I do this to, the regular one or the backup one? All of my saves have backups even when I've never actually made any.
Site Helper
#10 Old 16th Mar 2017 at 4:57 PM
From the instructions from Nitromon: backup your regular saved game. If you have one that the game made, that was your game from the previous time you saved, so everything you did in the next play session would be lost. (Put it someplace safe.) If you mess something up, you want to be able to get back to this point. The best way to do that is to restore the backup. If everything works nicely, you won't even need to look at your backup, but if something goes horribly wrong, the backup is the way to get back to this point so you can try again. It's an insurance policy, but it's an important one. (And it's a good habit to always have a backup of your files in their current state before you make any changes to them. If you improve things, great. If you make them worse, you can undo everything and start over.)

The nhd file from the regular game goes into the save folder from the new game you started. (That folder won't already have one because it's never seen Egypt.) Then start the new game and see if you can go to Egypt. If you can, send them back home and save the game. Exit.

Now copy the Egypt file from your new folder (which will have been changed by the trip your other sims took in the new game.) Paste it into your regular game folder and allow it to overwrite the one that is in there. This is effectively a deletion of the old file as it gets replaced by the new one, but it's slightly safer because if you aren't being asked if you want to overwrite the file, then you've got it in the wrong spot.

I am Ghost. My husband is sidneydoj. I post, he downloads, and I wanted to keep my post count.
Group for Avatar Makers* Funny Stories *2017 Yearbook
Inventor
Original Poster
#11 Old 17th Mar 2017 at 8:57 AM
It...well I don't know if it worked or not because as I was loading Egypt in the original (not the new) game, after I had replaced the file, the whole program crashed. No error message this time (well, other than "Sims 3 has crashed"). And as before it took almost an hour to load the original save to begin with.

And now I'm worried because I put the replacement file in the backup folder instead of the primary folder and I don't know how to fix it if I need to.
Site Helper
#12 Old 17th Mar 2017 at 7:16 PM
Ok. You were able to successfully go to Egypt and back home in your new game after placing the old Egypt nhd file in the game, right?

Then you copied the replacement file and put it into your backup copy of the game folder. Since the backup copy is (hopefully) one you made yourself, it's going to be identical to the real game folder which you backed up except for that one change.

Ok, so move the original game folder out to a safe place, move your backup folder with the replacement file into your game, and see if the save works with that replacement file in it. (And if you copied the original file from that folder into the new game rather than using cut and paste, the original save game folder is now your backup.)

I am Ghost. My husband is sidneydoj. I post, he downloads, and I wanted to keep my post count.
Group for Avatar Makers* Funny Stories *2017 Yearbook
Inventor
Original Poster
#13 Old 17th Mar 2017 at 8:53 PM
Haha I hate how it constantly links every time someone writes that word.

Yeah, I was able to travel and return on a new file.

I didn't make the backup myself. As I said, it just happened on its own.

By "original" folder do you mean the regular one? And what do you mean "move the backup into the game"? Do you mean get rid of the backup part and start the save from there?

As I said, the game crashed without an error message too. How do I get it to not screw up like this? How do I verify if this is related to the original crash or not?
Inventor
Original Poster
#15 Old 19th Mar 2017 at 9:56 PM Last edited by BlackjackGabbiani : 19th Mar 2017 at 11:27 PM.
No, I traveled to Egypt in the new file with a new NHD file, then closed out of that save and moved the new NHD file to the old save. I thought that's what I was supposed to do.

I didn't create a backup. There was a backup already and that's what I used. And that's where I put the new NHD file.

The family in the original save has traveled many times before, including to Egypt.


Edit--I tried again and it crashed again. Should I make a new save and move that NHD file to the main save instead of the main save's backup?
Inventor
Original Poster
#17 Old 20th Mar 2017 at 8:51 AM
I'm getting more and more lost. I thought I was supposed to make a new game and immediately go to Egypt, immediately go home, save and quit, and transfer the working Egypt file from there to the save with the faulty version.

And here's a wrench in things. I tried to travel to France and it crashed there too. I imagine China will give the same result.

I've traveled to all these places before.
Inventor
Original Poster
#19 Old 20th Mar 2017 at 9:43 PM
Yes, as I said, I was able to go to Egypt on a new save, from the same base map with all the same expansions.

How would the family be borked? They were able to travel many times before and one of them was close to getting max visa in China. Almost all of them have tasks based on travel. I can't figure this out! I don't want to have to start over because almost all of them have achieved their lifetime wishes (only my diver hasn't because holy cheese finding money stuff underwater is hard and it doesn't count when you catch regular fish).
Inventor
Original Poster
#21 Old 21st Mar 2017 at 2:25 AM
I've only played the one family in that save.
Mad Poster
#22 Old 21st Mar 2017 at 4:29 AM Last edited by igazor : 21st Mar 2017 at 4:53 AM.
It actually doesn't matter if you have been able to travel another family within that game to Egypt or the other worlds in the past. I believe Nitromon means can you do so now, or at least since the problems started. Start up a test session of this game with no intention of saving it, grab some other random household to make them active, and try to travel at least one of them to one of these problematic WA worlds. Then quit without saving, so it doesn't matter what happens to your intended playable family in the meantime. The purpose of this exercise and the others provided above are to help pinpoint whether the fault is with the WA worlds, your active household, or all of the above.

From what I can see you have two further alternatives, but that's probably about it.

1 - Add in NRaas Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Traveler, and MasterController. Let the first two clean up your homeworld for a while. Then do a MasterController Reset Everything on the homeworld. Hopefully, if it's not beyond help, this game will stop taking forever to load up each time as you have reported elsewhere and maybe it will start performing properly again. Finally, after saving through all of that, load up fresh and try to travel to see if Traveler in combination with OW and ET lets you arrive properly. From where you are now, though, there are no guarantees.

However, we know you remain reluctant to try any of those things, which brings us to...

2 - This ongoing game is toast, or at least nearly there. It's only going to get worse until it's totally unplayable, as is what tends to happen with unprotected and unmaintained ongoing games after a while. It's time to start a new one.
Site Helper
#23 Old 21st Mar 2017 at 3:26 PM
There is one further possible option, but it may not help and might make things worse.

Make your own "spare copy" of the save. As I said before, the backup that you find when the game makes one for you is a copy of the save as it was before the last time you played. You want a copy of it as it is now.

Move that spare copy somewhere safe where you will not be accidentally doing things to it instead of to the original. It doesn't matter where you put it on your computer, because if you are lucky you will never even need to see it again. It's just there in case you have not been lucky.

Now get Kuree's Save cleaner. http://www.simlogical.com/ContentUp...e/uploads/1532/
This is a stand-alone tool, kind of like the dashboard. Extract it to its own folder somewhere on your computer. (Mine is in a folder in Pictures, because I had been downloading Photoshop filters and forgot to change the folder I was extracting to.) Then run it and browse to your (original) saved game. Let it clean your saved game, and see if it helps. If it didn't help, that is what your "Spare Copy" is for. (And if "Spare Copy" also autolinks every time it's mentioned, I give up on finding a version of the B word that doesn't fill my post with autolinks.)

I am Ghost. My husband is sidneydoj. I post, he downloads, and I wanted to keep my post count.
Group for Avatar Makers* Funny Stories *2017 Yearbook
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