I’m zeroing in on the problem with my game crashing — I removed my Downloads folder last night and played the Ravelo college kids for a full 45 minutes with no crashing. Before, it was crashing after about 20 minutes pretty consistently. So it must be a conflict with some custom content. Now comes the hard (that is, time consuming) part — trying to figure out which download is causing the problem. I have something like 17,500 downloads, so that could take awhile, even if I do it in groups.
Playing the Ravelo kids without the custom content was hella freaky. When I first loaded the lot, all of the girls had the shoulder-length black hair, no eyebrows, and horrid lipstick. The ones that had been wearing jewelry had blue shapes, vaguely necklace-like, hovering above their heads. Poor Winnie Ternynck, who isn’t the prettiest of Sims even with nice make-up and hair, looked absolutely frightening. I should have taken a picture, but I was too scared. That said, I love Winnie — she has a 10 in Niceness and Outgoing, plus she’s Playful and Neat. Her only low score is Laziness, which is too bad, but at 35 personality points, she’s got the most of any Sim I’ve played, and that makes her cool. Especially that 10 Niceness. She’s a sweetheart.
The Boomtown Challenge is going well, but I haven’t gotten too far yet — I’ve put all of the Poverty class folks in their little cottages and built a community lot so they’d have somewhere to meet. That took most of a day (I’m sloooow building, even with very little custom content!), so I’ve only played one household so far. Anyway, I’m hoping I can get this crashing problem figured out, because I’m hankering to play the Ravelos for real and do an update! Thanks for all your patience with me and for continuing to check my blog while I iron out these wrinkles.
I agree, its super freaky when you delete custom content then play your sims who had been wearing it. They all have black hair and stuff! But im very glad you seem to have figured out the problem. Cant wait for a Ravelo update!
I was thinking of doing that Boomtown Challenge too. It sounds quite fun, I might have to go read the rules to that, and maybe give it a go myself…
I’ve decided to forego two things with the Boomtown Challenge. One is the ‘no cheesecake’ rule, since I hearts twins and will happily just skip the twin points. :-) The second one is the whole ‘all poverty level houses must always be occupied’: I’m changing that to ‘at least one poverty level house must always be occupied’. Otherwise I’d have to use CAS a lot, and I want to populate my town with the offspring of my first four families, not a whole lot of single Sim ones! Not to mention that my attention span wouldn’t be able to cope. o.@
Re: custom content, augh! I so sympathize. Maybe you could kind of narrow it down to whatever you had downloaded around the time you started having problems? Which reminds me, I should remove all these custom eyebrows I never use anyway. I hate it when people snazzy up their graphics to make something look good when it’s all fuzzy and ugly in game. :P
The Boomtown Challenge sounds interesting, if a little time-consuming. I actually like playing families through poverty and hard straits. My Thraces currently have $33,000 in the bank thanks to the fact that Mitch is finally kickin’ it at work, and… I just don’t know what to do with myself! Maybe I’ll move them to a larger house… or maybe I’ll do what you did with Cromwell House with the bed-sharing extravaganza.
Hey, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have custom content for a while; we love your blog anyway. In Winnie’s defense, I’ll say that she’s no CAS sim, for sure! :)
Haha, well i must say that I know what you mean when you say that everythign is weird without custom content. I had to clean out my dowloads because of the crashing problem that i had..(and that you helped me with by sending me that link..thanks!) and it was horrible. But WOW…you have 17,500 downloads. That would kill my computer even attempting to download a fourth of that haha. But I hope thats gonna change soon, I plan on buying more RAM. Poor me only has 256 GB with The sims 2 and two expansion packs. Imagine how slow that loads haha. But anyway, I cant wait to read about your Boomtown families. I always like to read about your challenge things..they are always so exciting!
Well, um, good luck with those 17,500 (wow!) downloads!
Love the title, ‘Eyebrows are Good’, haha. My blog is speeding right along, if anyone wants to read. I hope you don’t mind if I post a teaser, Jen.
Night had ushered a much needed sleep to the renters of the Pinenut dorm rooms, but not, fortunately, to Vamsi Cormier, the cafeteria worker. She was up unusually late, staring outside the cool glass window of the kitchen and wondering if she could have done better. If it weren’t for her, the police wouldn’t have made it in time. Vamsi sprang into alertness at movement in the hedges that lined the window of the building across the street. A fleeting shadow moved across the lawn.
Woah… 17,500 downloads?! I only have 3,776 (I broke the gigabyte mark the other day! …yay?), and I’ve been starting to think “wowee, I sure am starting to have a lot of downloads.”
Um… let me think. Usually it’s either the hacks or the feature-laden custom furniture that cause crashing, isn’t it? (I think the grammar in my last sentence was off… sorry about that.) I don’t know. Personally, I’d try taking out the hacks and putting them back in two or three at once. Sure, one at a time might be more exact, but three of them might save some time. Then it could be narrowed down to whatever batch of them had been installed most recently.
Then again, opening up Sims2PackCleanerInstallerWhateverIt’sCalled and letting it go through my downloads takes a good 7-10 minutes… eek. I hate to think of what it’d be like for so many more… man. x_x;
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of hair or makeup messing up a game, though. Which is kind of a funny thought. ATTACK HAIR! Rrrgh! This ponytail is out for bytes (hee hee) out of your game’s hide! Head for the hilllllls!
The Boomtown Challenge sounds pretty fun– too bad it requires OfB. (I’m perfectly happy with Nightlife, and Nightlife alone. That is, until they come out with an EP that reminds me of Unleashed… >_>)
I’m slow at building, too! ^^; I always end up going like “okay, I will make a new family! There, they are on their… empty lot. I will build them a house! Okay, the house is done! …oops, now all of my time on the computer is up! Oh, peas.”
And then, I’m also the type of person who hates downloading lots. (Only the occasional lot that just goes “Oh, man. I’m beautiful. *pose* Download me thrice!”) So, I’m basically sporked, unless I take one or two playing sessions just to build houses every so often. ^^; Ah, well!
Hope your game gets back up to speed!
I feel your pain. Custom content conflicts are a pain to handle, I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have clean installer. Normally I just disable the month’s downloads and hope it’s just something recent. If not, hoo-boy!
Because of all of my problems, once I got my game fixed,I actually worked on sorting through and deleting useless downloads and I have managed to trim down my downloads to 18,000 though I have yet to finish going through all of my objects yet. (Lazy.) That tutorial that I linked to on my blog is a lot of help if you haven’t started yet, though it isn’t complete *grumble grumble* it will get you through CAS relatively unscathed. You will feel accomplished, your game will load faster, and dressing and prettying up your Sims will become a relatively painless process. It would be more so if I actually went though and binned the hair that survived the massacre but I have yet to find a simple enough tutorial for that.
Maxis just came out with a patch that sounds like it fixes your nightlife orb problem. Maybe it will help with your problem too, it fixes one or two college issues as well. Good luck with working the kinks out of your game and my condolences that you upcoming Simming time will not actually involve Simming. :(
The crashing started happening as soon as I installed OFB, so I figured it could be ANY one of my downloads conflicting with the EP, hence the very time-consuming process of going through them group by group and playing the game for 30+ minutes at a time to see if it crashes or not. I’ve gone through the same semester with the Ravelos about four times now — it’s starting to feel a bit like the movie Groundhog Day. :-S
I have it narrowed down to about 3,000 downloads now. I also just installed the patch last night, so I’m thinking I’ll try it once with all the downloads back in and see if the patch fixed things. I also had a problem the other night with the game not even starting up — that was scary. I’d get the first OFB splash screen, my hard drive and CD drive would make the usual “starting up” noises, and then…everything would just stop. That drove me batty for awhile until I found something on MTS2 that suggested deleting my groups.cache file and restarting the game. Thankfully, that worked.
I tell ya, I’m almost regretting installing OFB in the first place — I’ve had nothing but problems with this expansion. But part of it was my own stupidity, and part of it is just the fact that I have too darned many downloads, so conflicts are bound to happen at some point. I’m optimistic that I’ll have things running smoothly very soon, though.
Oh, and Bitsy — if the tutorial you linked to is the one I think it is, I actually did start going through it about a week ago, and managed to clean out a lot of CAS stuff. I haven’t gotten to hair or clothes yet, though, so…dreading that. It’s enough to make me want to start over clean and just redownload the essentials, but I’d lose my various donation pack stuff and things that are no longer available, and that would be a bit sad. Maybe worth it, though, since I’ve already spent too many hours of my life just trying to clean up my game and make it run. I want to PLAY, dangnabbit!!!
And nice teaser, Katie!
Yeah, I’ve done that a couple of times in the past. I knew roughly what the things I ‘couldn’t Sim without’ were, so I saved those (mostly make ups and a few hacked objects) in a folder and just deleted everything else. It’s nice to get a clean start sometimes. :-)
We want to read Jen stories! :( *stomps feet*
Hey Jen;
I remember in one of your posts you had mentioned getting a file with exotic type of names generated for townies and npcs. What was the link to that site? Thanks :)
Hi PRMami, it’s the Mythical Name Hack from Bitsy’s site, and it’s totally awesome. :-)
…puff…pant…puff…pant…
Wow! I just read the last update and I’m kind of glad that it’s just the one, I hate reading loads and loads and waiting for what’s in store. I just came back from a very boring and educational trip to Dovedale (it’s a place in Derbyshire, and you’ll have probably heard about it if you’re a Brit like me). I have blisters all over my feet, and my hand is sore because I’ve written so much.
But at last I can sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy your blog and some of my other favourites. Seriously cool, Jen!
I hope you get everything sorted soon, Jen. We’re all agog for your next brilliant entry!
AE
As far as having lots o’ downloads…
Try moving your ‘my documents’ folder to the D drive. It CAN be done–search the forums on http://www.modthesims2.com, because there is a board that tells you how. My game runs really smoothly now and I can afford to download lots more stuff than I could before!
I think I remember reading the patch can cause more problems still, so still be careful with that, okay?
Man… it sounds like Open for Business has all kinds of problems. I hope that for the next EP, they do something like extend their beta-testing realms, or wait another month or so to keep fixing bugs. x_x Because, man. I know NL cause a good number of bugs, but with OfB, it seems a little out of hand. Man. A patch breaking a game more still. Kind of ironic.
I know exactly how you feel about the “wanting to dagnabbed play” thing– have been feeling the same way, lately, myself. (Dagnabbed NL patch kept messing up on me, turned out I had to redownload it. Have done so about five times now. *twitchtwitch* At the moment, most tree textures aren’t showing up, my objects.package has gone clinically insane, and it crashes before loading any families. Meh! A fie on you for not loading, game!)
Anyway, have to run. Really really fast. Because of time.
TIME!
Good luck.
But TIME!
Thanks for the link Jen :)
OMG that sux!! i’ve never seen my sims without custom content heheh. hey i’ve been reading this and some other sim blogs and decided to make my own, maybe you’d like to check it out. thanks! i’ll be waiting for you to fix this problem heheh. GOOD LUCK!!
Hi t-sims, I checked out your blog and left a comment!