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TRAVELER MOD QUESTIONs

First some details in case some of it is relevant for my questions:
I started two new saves. One in Midnight Hollow. The other in an empty world of Appaloosa Plains (note: this was downloaded as a stand alone world-not a save, without the need to have Pets installed). I edited some stuff (population mostly) in both saves.
After that, I copied the .nhd file of MH to the AP save folder, of course not while in game. Then, some of the sims from AP traveled to MH. then I switched to another household inside MH, before the original travelers had a chance to return home. The deadline to return home past and they all stayed in MH, as I wanted.
Basically I want to play this save "rotationally" by switching between these two worlds.
Now I have two problems:
1 - at certain point I noticed (don't know exactly when this occurred) -that the family relashionships (=the relatives in the other world, the ones in grey) do not appear anymore in the relashionship panel. However the family tree is complete. I checked this with few sims that have relatives in the other world.
2 - When trying to travel from MH to AP it gives me two options: Appaloosa Plains and Appaloosa Plains {1}. In both cases it brings me to an empty world... like a new save and not like the connected world...

What can I do now? Could someone please explain to me if I did something wrong and how to correct it? (I have a backup of the saves).
Can I have simple instructions on how to perform correctly the save/save as+ the rent stuff every time I travel? I'm a little confused...

Thanks in advanced for any help!
(I just hope my simmies are not stuck in any kind of sim-oblivion... :) )

Comments

  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    I don't know about oblivion so much, but the situation you have created is not how the mod was intended to be used.

    The Traveler mod procedure to move sims to a different world (more or less) permanently is to vacation them there, have them purchase a vacation home (change an unoccupied one in Edit Town to Player Ownable if you need to or else there might be no vacation homes to purchase), move into it fully so they are no longer staying in the free housing provided for by the mod, invoke Traveler's Change Hometown on them, save (as), quit to desktop or Origin, and reload.
    http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Traveler FAQ
    (see the Switching Homeworlds sections towards the end)

    If I know in advance that this is how I want things to go, I might have the vacationing sims "stay" on an empty residential 10x10 I would have set aside for this purpose beforehand, and have them purchase and move into the home I really want them to own almost right away after arrival. Then as above.

    The procedure is not to travel your sims to a new (to them) world and abandon them there by switching households and ignoring their vacation clock as it winds down. Nowhere in the documentation does it suggest doing that. What I believe happens then is that the connection between the instance of MH you are playing and the AP homeworld becomes broken and there is no way to return to it from where you are now, besides reverting to a much prior save and re-doing the ending of the original vacation another way. The game will be stuck somewhere between vacation and regular homeworld play mode and you are in unsupported territory by then.

    Edit: Actually, re-reading this now, it is okay to switch households briefly, not permanently, while in vacation mode. The Traveler mod should react by changing its Pause Travel setting to True and its Treat as Vacation setting to False for you since of course the other household presumably lives there already. But the step missed was that at some point relatively soon you must switch back to the household that was on vacation, unpause Travel and change Treat as Vacation back to True if this doesn't happen automatically, and then either proceed with the remaining tasks to switch homeworlds on them (buy vacation home, move into it, etc.) or else end the vacation by sending them back home.

    There are reasons we list these steps out as precisely and carefully as we have. The game is fragile enough as it is without adding more sources of "what happened to my homeworld?" to it by undertaking creative but less than supported actions on what should be connected worlds. I'm sorry if it sounds like I am scolding here, I really don't mean to be, but I just cannot understand why so many players ignore the documentation that comes with these mods and do things so totally differently. You certainly aren't the only one who has played their game into a corner like this over the years! :/

    I also don't know why you have two Appaloosas. I mean, I understand how that happened from the way you described things, but the game does not understand. As far as the game is concerned, you are either playing an ongoing save with the Pets EP in place and using the stock AP world designed by EA and installed by the Pets EP, or you aren't. As near as I can tell, you cannot do both. Maybe I misunderstood where the two .world files are coming from. If Pets is not in play at all and hasn't been anywhere along the line here, do you have two entries in your InstalledWorlds folder in the user game folder in Documents?

    Having said all of this now, I will also point out that besides all the procedures not exactly being followed, some custom worlds just do not work well with Traveler because they are not set with a unique ID number in their creation stage. So travel away and back again to/from these worlds just does not work and new instances of them are always created upon re-entry. The latest versions of Traveler (v87 or the current beta testing v88 version) help cut through some of that, but it's not always going to be successful. It's best to test custom worlds off to the side with some test regular vacations and moves back and forth first, before using them on a "real" game to be so connected, so that you would know in advance whether the worlds even have a chance to work out well in an ongoing rotational back and forth type of game. Given the other variables above though, it is impossible to say if the custom AP you are using is contributing to the problem or not because of this exact issue.
    Post edited by igazor on
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  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    @igazor
    First of all thanks for reading it all and taking the time to answer and to explain.

    The .nhd "trick" is something I read here somewhere and I thought it could be cool, appearently I took it one step too far :grimace:
    igazor wrote: »
    I just cannot understand why so many players ignore the documentation that comes with these mods and do things so totally differently. You certainly aren't the only one who has played their game into a corner like this over the years! :/
    I can speak for myself that I often get lost in all the technical details of how everything should be done [though if I may- mods at MTS, with all the pics and icons are feeling more intuitive]. for me, technical stuff/understanding systems in general are learnt better via practice, I take it under consideration when using any mod and do back ups for "real" saves for that reason. I really don't have the capabillty to be a mod expert beforehand (especially when talking about complicated mods with many functions).
    Just to clarify, I have no complaints about the mod (this one or any other) or its creators, on the contrary, I admire the modders work. But that's just a little percpective from the user end.

    Regarding the two AP - it is an empty version of the original AP from Pets, it works as a CC world, it does not require Pets to work. (I do have Pets, but it was disabled in the launcher).
    igazor wrote: »
    do you have two entries in your InstalledWorlds folder in the user game folder in Documents?
    igazor wrote: »

    some custom worlds just do not work well with Traveler because they are not set with a unique ID number in their creation stage.

    I should check that.


    Thank you very much !
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    In case this helps at all, I have just spruced up that section of the Traveler FAQ so that it lists the essential switching homeworld steps to take in order, one at a time, after the general discussion. We should consider doing an illustrated version of that FAQ like one of my predecessors did with Porter, but not until after our move to the new site to make sure such an effort doesn't get wasted or lost in transition.
    o550pjoa47rpxo63g.jpg
    NRaas has moved!
    Our new site is at http://nraas.net
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    igazor wrote: »
    In case this helps at all, I have just spruced up that section of the Traveler FAQ so that it lists the essential switching homeworld steps to take in order, one at a time, after the general discussion. We should consider doing an illustrated version of that FAQ like one of my predecessors did with Porter, but not until after our move to the new site to make sure such an effort doesn't get wasted or lost in transition.

    Thanks and good luck with the new site :wink:
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    edited May 2018
    quick updates-
    I did have two entries of AP in the InstalledWorlds folder. I deleted one.
    another thing I checked now is whether my sims' relatives occur as foreigners in NRAAS and they do! so worst case scenario I'll add them to MH and "lose" the builded AP. UNLESS it can cause an issue too? :grimace:

    additional question is there a way to extract the nhd file of the "other" world, and to turn it into a new save? I mean by coping the files/directory, outside the game.
    [I also checked the nhd of AP using s3pe and my foreign simmies are totally there... so I lost the connection between the worlds but maybe there is another way to save some of this?]
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    Hmm. If it's just a custom world and it's going to start behaving itself properly now that the duplicate .world file is gone, unless I'm missing something it seems to me that the only thing to worry about is the originally vacationed household that never got through the Change Hometown procedure entirely. If you can revert and replay that bit, then you might be fine with the two connected worlds as intended. The sims themselves should be fine regardless as long as you can "reach" them, they don't seem to be the cause of any issues here.
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  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    igazor wrote: »
    Hmm. If it's just a custom world and it's going to start behaving itself properly now that the duplicate .world file is gone, unless I'm missing something it seems to me that the only thing to worry about is the originally vacationed household that never got through the Change Hometown procedure entirely. If you can revert and replay that bit, then you might be fine with the two connected worlds as intended. The sims themselves should be fine regardless as long as you can "reach" them, they don't seem to be the cause of any issues here.

    Thanks @igazor I'll check what's the end point of every backup
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    edited May 2018
    Ok I still have a problem. I tries to do the Switching Homeworlds tutorial step by step.
    I'm afraid the following section is not clear enough-
    2 - Vacation them there. If they do not already own a vacation home in World B, choose some random place for them to stay as provided for by the mod or use a Base Camp if one is available. If they do own a vacation home, have them stay there and skip to Step 5.
    3 - Ensure that the home you want them to own is set to Player Ownable when viewed through Edit Town.
    4 - Have the sims purchase their vacation home, move them into it, and wait for the move-in animations to finish.


    Here is what I did- when arrivng the destination world (MH in this case)
    I placed my sims at the lot (free rent).
    I chose a house for my sims to move to (I made sure they have the funds to purchase it) and changed the lot type via edit town to "ownable lot"
    Then one of the sims went to the computer, I clicked >real estate and travel services> purchase vacation home (and purchased the house I chose before).
    Then I got stuck - by moving them into the house what is the meaning? I don't have an option to move them to be their new home: not using Edit town, no Move option in their computer and no Move to this lot in map view like in regular saves when they have real estate...
    I started to think maybe they should just visit the other lot so I actually tried it too (and then clicked on city hall>Change Hometown), saved and exit and started the game all over (from the launcher) but it didn't work...

    I honestly don't understand how to proceed, I think this section could really use some screenshots to be more clear. I'm willing to contribute mine as well as simple instructions - once I just figure out this hole thing myself :lol:
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    I'm sorry, but you seem to be getting stuck on the part that isn't usually the most complicated. Let's see if we can get you past that.

    My sims are vacationing in Dragon Valley, I did this up real quick so the screenshots are not going to be very pretty. They are staying, as offered by the Traveler mod, in some cheap not very nice looking house. I want them to purchase a vacation home and move into it so they can then make DV their permanent homeworld.

    I have changed the lot type on the home I want them to purchase to Player Ownable. They can purchase it from the Real Estate and Travel Services menu by smartphone.
    85hvkt1hgkcpqz34g.jpg

    Once they do so, they are still living in the cheap rented house but the map tag for their new vacation home looks like this with the star icon that wasn't there before.
    ziy0k3rjj8o69t74g.jpg

    Back on the smartphone, this is now what the Real Estate and Travel Services menu looks like. I will select Move To.
    sq42h5m6dzulbww4g.jpg

    I am presented with a map showing all of the possible properties they can move to in that world -- there is only one, the vacation home they just purchased.
    4tepxd1lw9fj1r94g.jpg

    I am then asked for confirmation that this is what they want to do.
    q5uw7jb9au2zd674g.jpg

    Once I confirm, the move animations start and my sims begin making their way over to their new vacation home to stay thus leaving behind the cheap not so nice one forever. In Map View (not Edit Town), I can see my sims are still just outside of the cheap rental about to make their way to their new vacation house. The vacation house they are moving into shows up with a regular "this is your home" type of map tag.
    9e899w9cf5kwgwl4g.jpg

    Once they actually move into that vacation home and the animations finish, this is where I would expect Traveler's Change Hometown to work, if it's going to work with the two worlds that are in play at all.
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  • KarritzKarritz Posts: 21,908 Member
    I always have difficulty following instructions too.
  • Nikkei_SimmerNikkei_Simmer Posts: 9,404 Member
    Can you do this with the WA worlds too? I want to buy the lot that had the large tower like structure that Yasunobu got to stand on in Champs Les Sims. :D
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    Always "River McIrish" ...and maybe some Bebe Hart. ~innocent expression~
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    Can you do this with the WA worlds too? I want to buy the lot that had the large tower like structure that Yasunobu got to stand on in Champs Les Sims. :D
    To live there permanently as a homeworld? I think so once you get past the visa requirement one way or another. But WA worlds are not designed for great playability. The locals have no jobs other than those working Role type positions in markets and places like nectaries, there are no schools or City Halls, the built-in demographics do not favor babies or toddlers. They kind of exist as backdrops for the sims we vacation there to loot the tombs, go up the adventure quest chains, pick up new skills, find mates, or whatever else we have them do while there, then get out of town again.

    It would take some work to make these worlds more playable as homeworlds, at least for those of us who keep trying to manage entire towns as we play.

    Some players who want this experience find it better to play custom worlds that are designed with a WA world theme to them. Not sure if these custom worlds tend to have the tombs all ready for exploration in the same way, though.
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  • KarritzKarritz Posts: 21,908 Member
    Can you do this with the WA worlds too? I want to buy the lot that had the large tower like structure that Yasunobu got to stand on in Champs Les Sims. :D

    Have you tried saving the lot you like to the bin and placing it in another world that works like a world sims can live in permanently?
  • Nikkei_SimmerNikkei_Simmer Posts: 9,404 Member
    I'll try it and see. I've never really tried going into Edit World in a vacation world before. :) I guess I need to try that.
    GYZ6Ak9.png
    Always "River McIrish" ...and maybe some Bebe Hart. ~innocent expression~
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    edited May 2018
    Thanks @igazor for the screenshots!
    Update -
    I found out what the problem was before - I did not have the "Move to" option because the household was more than 8 sims (note to self: don't travel with more than 8 sims). So I started all over from AP (the original hometown), travelled with 8 sims only, I did everything according to the instructions (managed to move them to the other vacation home, waited the animations to finish, then- clicked the city hall, change hometowns, save, and exit). After the saving- the icon in the left corner of the other town was not there anymore as before (only the one of University). They icons of all connected towns *should* appear in Edit town, right?
    after I started the game all over (from the launcher) I tried one of the sims to travel to AP - he got to the empty town again... It is important to mention that after all this process- the relatives who live in the other town *do* appear in the relationship panel in grey, and in the family tree.
    So maybe the problem (now) is with the CC world itself*???

    btw I hope it's ok I'm writing all the details, it is important to me to figure which step exactly went wrong (maybe it will also help other simmers too...)

    ---
    * if this is the problem and I must start the original town all over - that's OK, but I want to make sure before I do that...
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    I believe that only foreign EA worlds that were originally intended to be traveled to and back (WA, Uni, Oasis Landing) will appear in Edit Town for transitions while editing, so that part should not be concerning.

    Have to admit that I have never traveled with more than 7 sims so I never even thought to ask about that. But if the block is on moving with a controllable household of that size, it sounds like you do not have NRaas Mover in play or it isn't working as expected. The mod is supposed unlock moves and splits with, into, and out of overstuffed households. Allow Greater Than Eight > True is a default setting for Mover. Or it's possible that Mover just doesn't work with vacation homes, but I've never seen that reported before.

    I would suggest trying this all over again very quickly with a test game not using the custom world. Load or start one up in an EA homeworld, make some obvious change to it (add a bowling alley or change something that's very easy to see), vacation let's say one or two sims to another EA homeworld (not from WA), go through the purchase and move procedure, Change Hometown, save quit and reload, and travel back to where they came from to see if the already played in world loads with the bowling alley or whatever you have added. If it works as intended, then we have to conclude that the issue is indeed with the custom version of AP that you were starting with.
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  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    igazor wrote: »
    I would suggest trying this all over again very quickly with a test game not using the custom world. Load or start one up in an EA homeworld, make some obvious change to it (add a bowling alley or change something that's very easy to see), vacation let's say one or two sims to another EA homeworld (not from WA), go through the purchase and move procedure, Change Hometown, save quit and reload, and travel back to where they came from to see if the already played in world loads with the bowling alley or whatever you have added. If it works as intended, then we have to conclude that the issue is indeed with the custom version of AP that you were starting with.
    Alrighty, so I tested it now with a few EA worlds and one CC world
    [including the MH world from this thread, including an .nhd file of Sunset Valley from another ongoing save, just for testing purposes. Quick it was not- I think I broke a record in the number of times the game was launched per one day :lol: and also one saving took a really long time, the one with the SV save, assuming it's because the SV file is very large, I don't intend to use it for travelling in general) ]
    --> it works well!!! :smile:
    Now I am sure that the empty AP world is not suitable for travelling purposes... At least I finally understand now how the hole thing works :relieved:
    igazor wrote: »
    I believe that only foreign EA worlds that were originally intended to be traveled to and back (WA, Uni, Oasis Landing) will appear in Edit Town for transitions while editing, so that part should not be concerning.
    You are right about that, I noticed now that in all worlds, the hometown icon disappear and the Uni. stayes once it becomes the homeworld.

    Many many thanks @igazor for the patience to answer throughout the thread !!! :smiley::+1:
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    edited May 2018
    Karritz wrote: »
    I always have difficulty following instructions too.

    :smile: I feel like all mods' instructions should be very visual, because to me, just to understand what "a vacation home" or "ownable lot" meant in game was a brain cracker :wink: Are these terms derive from WA or unique for the specific mod? because I havn't played WA yet, and in a regular base game / University life game all the real estate issue works very differently...
  • KarritzKarritz Posts: 21,908 Member
    edited May 2018
    Avatarit wrote: »
    Karritz wrote: »
    I always have difficulty following instructions too.

    :smile: I feel like all mods' instructions should be very visual, because to me, just to understand what "a vacation home" or "ownable lot" meant in game was a brain cracker :wink: Are these terms derive from WA or unique for the specific mod? because I havn't played WA yet, and in a regular base game / University life game all the real estate issue works very differently...

    I think a lot of the problem is when writing instructions assumptions are made about what the person reading the instructions already knows about the process and essential details get skipped. Every so often I decide to settle down to read the instructions carefully. Sometimes I can work out what to do but it tends to make my head spin more often than not. So I think very long and hard about how badly I want to do something before actually heading off to follow instructions.
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited May 2018
    Glad you made significant progress here and came to what seems to be the right conclusion about that custom world.
    Avatarit wrote: »
    also one saving took a really long time, the one with the SV save, assuming it's because the SV file is very large, I don't intend to use it for travelling in general)
    This has been reported a few times and I've experienced it myself with no rhyme or reason as to when it might happen. But sometimes the first time we return to a connected world we have moved sims from, or load one they have moved into, it does take a very long time to load or save. Just that one time. A couple of them took something absurd like 40 minutes for me, but I could see that the TS3 program was thrashing around in the Task Manager the entire time so it wasn't frozen. I tend to walk away when things like that happen, and (for me) they always recover eventually and then they don't happen anymore. Our developer is aware of this issue with establishing connected worlds and it's on the list to investigate. He thinks some processes must be trying to run involving the TravelDB file that don't really need to and ultimately timing out, but the timeouts are taking something like 5 minutes each which is unnecessary. It's all behind the scenes though, so the player of course has no idea what's going on if this happens, they are just happy when it stops doing that the next time.

    Avatarit wrote: »
    to me, just to understand what "a vacation home" or "ownable lot" meant in game was a brain cracker :wink: Are these terms derive from WA or unique for the specific mod? because I havn't played WA yet, and in a regular base game / University life game all the real estate issue works very differently...
    I'm afraid there is a history involved here that some of us take for granted. Until a recent version of Traveler, v86 in particular, WA was required for any of this changing hometowns and world connecting to even work. So up through then there would have been no players using Traveler for this function who did not already have WA installed, and presumably tried some gameplay in the WA worlds first. Time has passed now, so we'll have to look at making the documentation a bit more user-friendly for those who do not have WA and have never played it.
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  • TreyNutzTreyNutz Posts: 5,780 Member
    igazor wrote: »
    Have to admit that I have never traveled with more than 7 sims so I never even thought to ask about that. But if the block is on moving with a controllable household of that size, it sounds like you do not have NRaas Mover in play or it isn't working as expected. The mod is supposed unlock moves and splits with, into, and out of overstuffed households. Allow Greater Than Eight > True is a default setting for Mover. Or it's possible that Mover just doesn't work with vacation homes, but I've never seen that reported before.

    I've relocated households way over 8 via Traveler and have had no problems moving them into vacation homes, with Mover installed. Mover works fine in vacation worlds in my experience.
  • AvataritAvatarit Posts: 836 Member
    Thanks @TreyNutz I'll try that
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