Dopplegangers, Bone Hilda about town & more-oh my!

BSIRegina

I'm used to the occasional bug popping up from time to time but today is beyond weird. Today when I loaded my town save I got a message saying there was a serious error and it was strongly suggested I restart the application. So I did that. However, I've since quit and reloaded my game and sometimes get this message when loading the town and sometimes not.

I've had a couple of books in Sims' inventories where the titles just went blank. One was in the inventory of an IF and the other in the inventory of an NPC recently moved into the household. I was able to delete them from their inventories without problem so I did that.

My Sims bought a Bone Hilda, tried to activate it and got a script error and I never did see Bone Hilda (I'm sure by now I no longer have that error message). Finally I used the interaction to return Bone Hilda to the box (again, never did see her) then stuck the box in family inventory. Today I discovered Bone Hilda out and about in my town like a regular Sim. She was on her way to visiting the graveyard, which of course seems an appropriate place for her but I don't think this is something that should be happening.

Sims that the family have relationships with are showing up in multiples in their relationship panel. Some of these Sims are part of the family, some are Sims that live in the town. The doppelgangers show with the grayed-out panel like they are in a foreign land. With the Sims in the household, the extra is of a previous age stage, like the wife just aged into Adult and her YA picture shows grayed out, and their dog is an elder and her grayed out portrait is from when she was an adult. I sent my Sim off to socialize with another Sim in town and after he greeted him, he also now shows up with two portraits, side-by-side, one grayed out and the other normal. I thought this righted itself when I restarted the save but as soon as I set the game to running I saw it wasn't fixed.

This is my NIF Challenge town and I really, really don't want to lose it so I need to know if there's a way to fix this mess or not. I was also getting a lot of script errors upon loading the game.

TreyNutz

Sounds like Bone Hilda is on the loose creating doppelgangers of your sims.... :P

I would zip up those script errors and upload to NRaas, then open a thread on the Error Trap page (unless the script errors are from other NRaas mod, which you can tell from the script error at the top). That might be the best source of help for something like this.

BSIRegina

Ooh, @TreyNutz that would be scary! Still, it may be what I have to do. Ah well, I'm off my computer for a little while and will check back later.

igazor

(hides under desk, trembling)

igazor

The Serious Error Has Occurred thing hits most of us from time to time. One cause we do know for it is attempting to startup the game with the TS3 game folder and its subfolders open in a Windows Explorer window; for some reason that tends to hold hidden files in some of the subfolders "in use" and sometimes the game doesn't like that. But sometimes it just seems to happen randomly. I wouldn't play through it, though.

I believe another known cause is lack of free space on the drive where the game is running.

The rest of this, including the freelance Hilda, sounds like a corrupt save to me. Have you tried reverting to a slightly older one from before all this started?

BSIRegina

@igazor oh goodness I have my game folder open a lot--that's at least easy enough to avoid. Based on my years of computer use I am now wondering if a failed load like that possibly corrupt a save file?

I have a 500GB drive with 290GB free so I don't think there's a problem with free space.

I do have a former save not horribly long before all this started happening but I didn't feel like trying it this evening. After all the wonkiness started showing up today I only restarted it to see if deleting cache files would make a difference and saved some lots I had built to the Library. It's obvious something is very wrong there so I didn't see any point in trying to play it further.

Thanks so much for your input. I'll try going back to that earlier save tomorrow and see what happens.

TadOlson

I've had game saves get corrupted to the point where I get that error message or a UI failure in my old game before NRaas Mods after social workers took children from families in the game.It happened with Claire Ursine's baby and I got that error message on reploading after a few sessions.I got worse issues when it happened to my active family in aother attempt and their baby got taken by the social worker.That save got so badly corrupted I had to delete it.
@BSIRegina -I suspect the cause of your corrupted save could've come from a social worker taking an inactive family's child away.I've had save corrupt from that happening.It deletes the sim like TCE does and leaves broken bots of the deleted sim's data behind to cause save corruption if you don't use Mods to fix the issues.

BSIRegina

@TadOlson I do use the most commonly used NRaas mods including Overwatch and Error Trap and I don't think any of the other families had children taken away by the social worker as their families were intact last I checked but that is still good information to have in my arsenal.

BSIRegina

I've resorted to the earlier save. Even trying to get that one to load was touch and go for a while because I think Windows Explorer was hanging onto some stuff it shouldn't have been (this isn't the first time I've seen that happen) so after I closed out my game I restarted my computer it loaded and what a relief not to have fifteen Script Error messages pop up! I've lost some headway but not nearly as much as if I had to start all over.

igazor

Good news. Given how in tune you are with your game and careful about backups, that sort of thing shouldn't be more than a temporary setback. Not worth stressing over if you can get past/around it.

BSIRegina

Well, except for I wasn't real careful with back-ups because I get lazy that way. At least I had that one! We all have to relive making IFs real and finishing off some major skilling of a couple of Sims but there are a couple of things I should have done before but forgot so maybe I'll do those this time.

Oh, and I just thought of something I should be finding out about. My lot has an old newspaper on it that through shenanigans which can be blamed on no one but myself isn't able to be interacted with. Of course I can pick it up with MoveObjects on but I can't delete it. Is there a safe way to delete it?

igazor

If you have MasterController plus the MC Cheats module, click on the ground of the lot and NRaas > MC > Object Stats > Non-Inventory. If the item appears on the list, you should be able to select it and Flush.

BSIRegina

Oh, thank you! I'll try that today and see if I can get rid of the pesky thing.

BSIRegina

At least I finally got rid of that annoying newspaper, so thank you @igazor !

After playing for a few Sim days in the earlier save I have run across another Sim that's throwing out Script Errors. This is a different one than the ones doing it before and it has not turned into anything horrible--yet--but I'm concerned that it will. Should I use Total Annihilation on that Sim or does this mean this save file was already corrupt at the point at which I restarted? And if it is corrupt would it be safe to move the Sim families excluding the one throwing up script errors to another town? And if I can do that can I use Porter to move them? There are only about seven families in that town so far and I've worked too hard to get them in order to leave them all behind now.

BSIRegina

This is sort of an addendum. I am going to pick up and move everyone (aside from the Sim with the script error that was only recently moved into play) to a whole new world and make a brand new save. As I was playing I found a few things that I wanted to fix on the world level anyway so this will give me a chance to do that. There isn't a huge number of families.

igazor

I'm afraid we can't really give advice on what should be done with sims who throw script errors until we actually see the errors. Some of the scariest sounding ones turn out to be something simple that can be fixed easily. And sometimes their shoelaces are just too tight.

BSIRegina

igazor wrote: »

I'm afraid we can't really give advice on what should be done with sims who throw script errors until we actually see the errors. Some of the scariest sounding ones turn out to be something simple that can be fixed easily. And sometimes their shoelaces are just too tight.

Of course, that makes perfect sense and I'd imagine I'll end up with Script Errors again at some point so when I do I'll upload them so they can be thoroughly examined. In the meantime I did the fixings I wanted to do to the world and will just save the families to the Library without Porter since none of them are related outside their own households. I can use MC to fix up relationships with my Sims and everyone else then leave all the ones I don't play up to SP to sort who should be friends with whom.

Thank you so much for your advice.