The Case of the Tree Breaks and the Missing Portals
dizzy:
I can't drive one block, it seems, without some lead-foot nearly rear-ending me on the street. They honk their horns and flash their lights as if I did something wrong by being in their way. :P
So, it seems that with the Sims 2, I can't play my game unmolested with this "Tree Break" happening. What is a "Tree Break", you ask? Well, I'll tell you: If you're a C-coder, you'll probably recognize this right away (code-monkey's best friend and user's worst enemy) as the SimAntics equivalent to a dreaded "Assert Failure".
In other words, the game hits a break point that the coder put in for debugging purposes. But they hadn't yet finished debugging, is why this usually pops up.
In my case, it was on the maid's minivan. It kept nagging me until I deleted it, and the error would not go away, nor would the maid appear ever again (even if I put the sims in the sim bin and moved them back in). And not just the maid, but any NPC.
I investigated this and discovered that the fault was due to a missing Car Portal. I looked, and there is no code in the game anywhere that tries to Remove car portals, and (more importantly) no code that lets you replace them once they disappear. Solution: bulldoze the lot and play the family elsewhere in the neighborhood.
It is disturbing, however, to think that either some code somewhere in the game is deleting random objects or that the game itself is failing to load them for some mysterious reason. If anyone has a clue to "who dunnit", I would certainly like to know.
ZephyrZodiac:
Have you tried reinstalling?
dizzy:
Hahahahahaha! :D
Reinstalling is just Maxis' way of telling you to fuck off. It's for suckers who believe that that will do something beneficial.
If you screw up your game so bad that you actually *need* to reinstall, then merely reinstalling is only going exasperate the real problem (i.e. virii, bad hard drives, bad memory, bad video cards).
No, seriously. What exactly is deleting random objects every now and then? I'm just curious.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: dizzy-two on 2005 August 05, 23:06:05
Reinstalling is just Maxis' way of telling you to fuck off. It's for suckers who believe that that will do something beneficial.
If you screw up your game so bad that you actually *need* to reinstall, then merely reinstalling is only going exasperate the real problem (i.e. virii, bad hard drives, bad memory, bad video cards).
Actually, there are valid reasons to reinstall things, such as if the game buggers up files and it's simply too much effort to track down which ones and find replacements Most of the time, however, reinstalling is peddled as a panacea for everything, which it isn't.
dizzy:
Yes. Well, I keep a nifty inventory of all my files, so I know how, when, and to what degree files get bugged. If a file does get walked on, I can simply go back to the zip file on the CD and replace it myself. I don't need no stinkin' installer to do it for me.
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