More Awesome Than You!

Hello,

a couple of days ago Mootilda posted a test version of the LotExpander (v1.2.7.8 ) on mts2 that can not only expand but also shrink lots. With this, it is now possible to build edge-to-edge on a lot (by building on a larger lot first, and then shrinking it) -- something that some people, me included, have been waiting for since the base game.

We're experiencing an infrequent crash on those resized lots, and I'm posting here in order to solicit help in trying to figure out what's causing it. I have a strong interest in this because I want to be able to upload resized lots with a clear conscience -- however I'm not a modder myself, nor am I involved in the LotExpander development on a technical level. I can't make sense of a crash log either, needless to say .. I can only build stuff. Please help, so that I can spend the rest of my life building sim row houses. Thank you.


Here is all I currently know:

* A few testers have experienced a crash at exactly 7PM on the first day (Monday) after moving sims into a resized lot. I only crashed once; Rascal managed several times, Simsample several times. Another tester (aelflaed) didn't get a single crash no matter how hard she tried; several others said they haven't had any crashes either.

* All of the lots it occurred on were built by me, using LE 1.2.7.7 and 1.2.7.8 respectively to shrink them on the left and right side (There is no technical difference between those versions w/r/t shrinking, says Mootilda). I have never heard of any such crash on any of my other lots (I have more than half a million downloads) -- so I'm very sure it has to do with the resizing.

* The crash does not happen consistently. All that's consistent is the time, and the fact that it only ever happened on the first day in a newly placed lot. It is unclear whether it's actually caused by something in the lot package itself, or by something the game does on a new lot at 7PM.

It would be fantastic if someone could take a look at the crash logs and help us figure this out.


See also this post (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277183.html#msg277183) where I try to maintain a list of possibly contributing factors vs. stuff that has been ruled out. Maybe it's helpful.


Reports:

simsample -- posted below (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277113.html#msg277113), with logs

plasticbox:

original report (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1798760#post1798760) | repost (with lot attached) (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804654#post1804654)

This was with Row House 01 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804654#post1804654). Log attached below. I play on an ancient laptop, XP Home SP2, 1GB RAM, with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600.

My "second try" was the exact same lot, same residents, same position, same everything -- I restarted the game, went back in the lot and resumed playing at 8AM (I hadn't saved).


Rascal:

From report 1 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804023#post1804023) (the lot was Backdoor Lane 42 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254032); log attached below):

From report 2 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804053#post1804053) (using the same lot):

Further testing (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804188#post1804188):

"other shrunken lot house" is either Row House 01 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804654#post1804654) or Row House 03 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804674#post1804674), not sure. Rascal has an ATI RADEON X800GT. I don't know anything else about her setup. Can try to poke her if necessary. Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 1GB RAM, XP Media Centre Edition SP2.


Comments so far:

Mootilda says here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804101#post1804101) that the only difference between LotExpander 1.2.7.7 and 1.2.7.8 was an unrelated fix (fence posts).

Also (copied from below):

aelflaed on having no crashes (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804205#post1804205) (the EDIT is wrong btw, one of the test lots is base game only).

aelflaed (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804255#post1804255):

Rascal (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804270#post1804270):

Mootilda (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804346#post1804346):

niol (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804715#post1804715):
(the mention of lights may be with regard to a previous "blind alarm" about a street light that allegedly disappeared -- turned out that the tester had moved sims in and out, so it got removed along with the other furniture, which is normal)

plasticbox (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1805595#post1805595):

Mootilda, via PM:

Mootilda (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1805621#post1805621):



Linkdump:

R+D thread (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=250693) on lot resizing @ mts2 -- this is where all the action is, be warned that it's *long*
Lot Expander 1.2.7.8 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1801236#post1801236) "Lot Shrinker with Fence Post fix" (Mootilda) -- this is a TEST version
LotExpander thread (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=175884) -- current release

Row house tutorial (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254032)  -- build mode issues thread
Row house uploads (Backdoor Lane 42) (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254032) -- gameplay issues thread

Thread here on MATY (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=10087.25) on resizing lots -- no mention of crashes so far


Please post here with any ideas (not in the mts2 R+D thread, that one's a real challenge to keep on top of already -- we're struggling to keep the discussions readable). http://

Over in Peasantry, I posted a link to my own 1x1 row house for download.  It works fine for me, no crash at 7pm.

Now, some thoughts about what the problems might be for other people.

7pm DOES indicate something related to the change from daytime to night, something to do with lighting.  But could the change in lighting also be related to objects that appear outside the scope of the lot? 

I'll give you a couple of examples.

Lights.  Are there any lights on the shrunken SIDES of the house, hung from walls?  If so, then those lights are, technically, outside the lot itself.  I didn't try doing that, but it's something somebody else might reasonably try, so it's worth looking into.

Also, windows...  I have noticed something interesting about windows.  The windows that are backwards (that is, with the window sill on the outside -- you have to look very closely to notice this because I can't ever remember for the life of me which way placement arrow is supposed to point) -- the backwards windows appear just fine on my house, but the others are invisible with blank holes outlining where the window should be.  Is it possible that the frontwards/backwardsness of windows is having an effect on this?  Again, I have had no problems with my lot, and I played it for many Sim-days, and I have windows facing both directions on the shunken-side walls, but perhaps for those people experiencing problems, they could try changing that to see if that gets them past 7pm.

Another thought...  Could it be caused by having another property or row-house in an adjoining lot?  I had no adjoining properties on my lot.  Since these are advertised as row-houses, I wonder if people could be lining them up right next to each other before playing.  In that case, the change of lighting at 7pm might be related to some issue with overlapping that we didn't consider.  Try placing the troubled lots in an emptier place and see if the problem goes away.

No.

The only thing we think *might* be related is the street light in front, because the light it sheds is partly on the deleted part of the lot. But: Almost all my normal lots have a streetlight in exactly this location, and none of them crash. Also: the only reason we think there might be a connection to lighting is the time of the crash correlating with nightfall. It's only a hypothesis -- there might be something else occurring at 7PM on the first day. Like the gypsy, who also only appears on the first day (not at 7PM though).
 


There are no windows on the sides of any of my lots.


I was able to play with no crash, with adjoining lots. Neighbours visible, all graphics options set to High. Even if it plays a role, that can't be the only reason.


I'm not interested in making the problem go away .. I want to know the reason  :).

Thanks for your input -- I didn't think of mentioning the adjoining lots.

My game crashed while I was testing the last Backdoor Lane lot, just as described here. I moved in a CAS sim and let her greet her neighbors. I think she made them sandwiches. I'm sorry if this sounds like gibberish! I can't think of anything meaningful to attribute the crash to. Hope this helps.

behold_the_muse,

just to clarify: your crash did happen at 7PM, yes? (Because you mention greeting the neighbours .. in my game they appear much earlier, around noon I think)

Try this lot:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10087.msg276925.html#msg276925

Some additional information:

I am not deleting any objects during the shrinking process.  If an object, such as the window, disappears after shrinking, then this is being done by the game itself.

I am hoping that these crashes are issues with something in the lot file, and not with the game's inability to deal with walls at the edges of the lot.

I've been testing Pbox's lot on some sims. I created a clean hood and then placed several of the lot, obviously renaming them. Then I tested one with the Roseland family, one with the Ramaswamis. I added a few items to each lot and saved, then played.... nothing, no crash. Then I created a CAS sim and moved him into one of the lots... I added a few items, like a maxis stove and stereo, and then saved (without hitting play at all): the game crashed, giving me the Sims 2 exception with an 'Access Violation' error. I restarted the game, created another CAS sim, plonked her in another instance of the Pbox lot- this time I didn't add any items or save at all, I just hit play. At 6:59PM the game crashed. Again this caused a Sims 2 exception, Access violation. I reproduced this- create a CAS sim, plonk sim in clean Pbox lot, play without saving- three times in row the game crashed at 7PM or just before.
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/Screenshot.jpg)
I'm attaching the exception logs, plus a config log in case it's useful- one for the crash on save (CAS sim), one for a case of 7PM crash (CAS sim). Some things that might be relevant are as follows:
1) There were other sims on the lot in all cases except the crash on save;
2) This was a clean hood: each time I played I caused a crash, therefore the hood configs haven't been successfully saved. When I boot the hood back up, the game gives me the 'greeting' pop up- 'would you like to create a holiday hood' etc., as though playing for the first time. Don't know if this is significant.
3) I have a bunch of hacks and custom content in game, and I have all EPs, SPs and the holiday packs. Fully patched to my knowledge, unless they sneaked one past me.
4) I haven't managed to recreate the crash on save.
I haven't managed to cause a crash using the Maxis created bin families, just CAS sims- but I haven't exhaustively tested this. Perhaps someone could reproduce my conditions- fresh hood, clean Pbox lot and Cas sim, no saving- to see if they could duplicate my findings? I hope this is helping on some way, I'd love to see this working!

Thanks simsample! The CAS sim thing might provide a clue .. I guess most people who only want to test stuff won't go and make a new sim first, that might at least explain why it crashes for some but not for others.

I played with the Randoms though, not with CAS sims, when I crashed .. but I don't remember whether I had used them before, if not they might be equivalent to CAS sims.

Rascal says "I've twice managed to move a brand new sim into a brand new lot in a brand new test neighbourhood with no crash". "Brand new" would mean "CAS" to me, so this can't be the only thing triggering a crash.

I'll see if I can try this tomorrow with CAS sim + no saving.

Well, you guys are making me nervous because I am not using a test neighborhood.  I plopped my new house down in the middle of Pleasantview's Downtown suburb, so I have a game with many hundreds of Sims in the Characters folder.

Still, I'll give it a shot with Backdoor Lane tonight.

My 1x1 (link several posts above) has worked fine for me.  Many saves, no crashes, many Sims days played.  The Sim I moved in for its inauguration was a freshly made CAS-created Sim.  She has also made a few trips to community lots without problem.

My earlier suggestion about trying it again in a lot with no neighboring lots on both sides... I wasn't suggesting just making the problem "go away" without understanding it.  I'm just trying to help isolate the problem.  Find out IF it goes away when you leave empty space on the sides (and make sure the empty space is FLAT).  If it does go away, that's useful information to help identify the real culprit. 

Link address for my 1x1 row house lot:
http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/1X1furnished-a.Sims2Pack

Ok, I tried Backdoor Lane 42.  It crashed at 7pm,  right on time.  I saved several times without any problem, though.  The last save was at 6:54pm.

I'm going to try re-extending the lot and see if that fixes anything.

One other thing I noticed -- there are TWO garbage cans.  Is that deliberate? 

None of the lots I have shrunk are crashing.   I have tried shrinking them with lights on and without lights on.

Would anyone with a crashing pbox lot like to try one of mine and see if they can make it crash?  Meanwhile perhaps I should see if I can make a pbox lot crash.

Inge, mine above didn't crash either.  But this Backdoor 42 lot does crash at 7pm.

I just now tried using LE to extend Backdoor  42 back to 3x3 and trying again.  It worked.  It's 7:05 now.  Saved and quit.  I think I'll try re-shrinking it (in it's past 7pm state) and seeing if I can make it to morning or day 2, eh?

I'll try one of your lots Inge - where can I find them?


I have had a crash in an existing neighbourhood.  A fairly new neighbourhood admittedly, with no subhoods attached, but it had been played before.

I have also only had crashes with new CAS sims.  Moving an existing sim into the house has never caused a crash yet.  However, as Plasticbox pointed out, I have had lots that don't crash with a CAS sim so either this isn't the only trigger, or its a trigger that doesn't always work.

In other news, I shrunk a 3x2 empty lot down to 1x2, placed in the lot bin then moved it into various neighbourhoods and moved in sims to see if any would crash.  Out of 7 tests none have crashed.  I tried the lots on their own, sandwiched between two row houses and sandwiched between two other empty shrunk lots.  I have no idea whether or not this is significant but it could possibly point to the problem being walls on the boundries rather than the shrinking of the lot itself.

Of course it could mean nothing at all ... apart from the 7pm-ish time slot nothing is particularly consistant about these crashes.

I really hope walls on the boundry aren't the problem - its kind of the whole point!

Rascal, I have uploaded it here: http://simlogical.com/slforum/index.php?topic=916.0

You should not need to register in order to download it - let me know if you have any difficulty.

Okay, here's the deal.

I saved the game at about 6:50pm.  Restarted it and it crashed.  (As reported earlier).

Now, I EXPANDED the lot (still occupied) using LE, making it larger.  Resumed the game at 6:50.  It made it past 7 just fine!   Saved it.

Next, I RE-SHRUNK the lot (still occupied) using LE, making it it's original small size, 1x2.  Resumed the game at it's past 7pm nighttime state.  Worked fine.  I played several more days with it.  Nighttime and daytime passed, and it did not crash again.

So what conclusions can be drawn? 

1. Is it possible that the PACKAGE itself was damaged by the export packaging process, but repaired when I re-expanded and re-shrunk?

2. Is it possible that the problem is only with the very first 7pm event, that something special happens with new Sims or new lots the first time nighttime occurs?  Something special that conflicts with shrunken lots?  (I have a weird suspicion it could be related to property depreciation.)


If it's (1), above, then that might explain why most of us have had no problems with our OWN shrunken lots we created, but others do.  The export packaging process may not work perfectly with shrunken lots.

Possible solutions (that suggest tests):

If (1) is the case, then it should still be possible to manually package and install lots without using the export package process.

If (2) is the case, then it might fix things to play the lot past 7pm, use the move-out-stayer-shrub, move Sims out, then package it.

Oh, yes, my lot crashed at 7. I mention the neighbors because that's all she did all day. I haven't tried again yet, since I was in a bit of shock when the game crashed! Believe it or not that was my first time.

Pbox, I downloaded and tested two of your other resized lots- 'Row House 1' and 'Row House 3'. I removed all of my custom content and hacks this time. Again, I was consistently able to make the lot crash at 7PM using CAS sims- but using the Maxis bin sims or even townies, there was no crash. I also created a CAS sim and made the game crash with her:
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/CASsim04NoCC.jpg)
Then restarted the game immediately, and replayed the lot under the same conditions:
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/ReplayedLotCASsim04NoCC.jpg)
No crash, it played fine. It seems that the auto save on move in affects this somehow. Then I downloaded Inge's lot from Simlogical, and tested that with a freshly created CAS sim. I had to add items (bathroom, kitchen etc) but I couldn't make the game crash. I tested Inge's lot with five different CAS sims and a Maxis bin sim, but still no crash. I even tested several lots in different orientations- as I did wonder whether the shadow rendering or maybe impostor rendering was causing issues. However, I could find no correlation between location and direction- North, south, east or west facing- and adjoining lots (or lack of adjoining lots) with crashing. The only constant seems to be that the three PBox lots crash at 7PM when played unsaved with CAS sims. I attached the exception log from the crash in the first image.

But, still then all of us who play the shared shrunken lots should be having the same problem. And the same people are not having the issue every time.

Could it possibly have to do with furnishings? I stripped the place entirely and changed basically everything but the walls. I had no crashes on this one (tested by decendants of QC) or on a 2x1 I made myself (tested by CAS sims). I have an ATI Radeon x600, playing everything on the highest levels except for view distance, which is at medium.

And Doc Doofus, I can't get your lot from that link. I get an error page:

Simsample,

thanks so much for your efforts. One more thing you could test (since you seem to be able to get the crashes more or less consistently): I'm going to reupload the Backdoor Lane lot without the street light in front on the Backdoor Lane thread -- niol suspects that the street light is the culprit, "I really tend to think it's the light that should not be placed over to the trimmed region coz this may affect the lighting data", quoted from the R+D thread -- if this is so, the version without light should not crash, not even with a CAS sim. I have no idea, myself, what the connection would be between light maps and CAS sims, but as long as it's solved that way we'd at least know what to avoid.

ETA: Backdoor Lane 42a (no street light) available here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1806546#post1806546). From that post:

Forgot to mention: I did not save while testing.


Zazazu,

you say you "stripped the place entirely" -- do you recall, by any chance, whether you removed the street light as well?


DocDoofus and Inge,

what EPs do your lots need? I don't have all of them, so I have no idea whether I can test those or not.


DocDoofus,


Yes, obviously, that's a possibility. The whole thing only happens on shrunk lots.


This is a known fact. Crashes only ever happen on the first day. As far as I'm aware, depreciation is at midnight.


I crashed with my own lot myself. Without having packaged it. I had, however, moved it in the bin and back.


Yes. I almost always do that, hasn't caused any issues so far that I'm aware of.


Rascal, behold_the_muse,

thanks for your input =)


All,

If it turns out that this is all just because of that stupid streetlight I put there, I'm going to be *very* *very* embarrassed.  :-[


Also, there's a shrunk lot by aelflaed (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254686) now up @ mts2 that you can use for testing (base game only).

Well I shrunk a lot with the streetlamp on the corner (what was the corner after shrinking) and my lot didn't crash when I played it, so I would be surprised if that was the main factor.

I have all EPs installed, by the way and the lot at simlogical will probably need at least BV, not sure if it also needs the intermediate ones.

Inge,

to clarify: you put the light there *first* and *then* shrunk the lot, or the other way around? (on your non-crashing lot) Going though my old screenshots I can see that I put the light in *before* shrinking in the Backdoor Lane lot .. about the other ones I can't tell for sure, right now.

Ah, shame, I can't test your lot then. No BV here. Will give aelflaed's a try.

I shrunk a lot *with* the streetlamp on the corner - literally.  Yes it was there before the shrink.

If you're looking for up-to-date info, please take this post with a spoonful of salt -- check the last page of this thread first. I can't keep up with updates. Sorry.


Update: I just tested Backdoor Lane 42 against Backdoor Lane 42a. 42a is the version without street light, see above. Result:

Backdoor Lane 42a (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1806546#post1806546) (no light): Plunked down in previously unplayed hood, made CAS sim, moved her in, played until 19:15 without saving, no crash. Exited without saving.
Backdoor Lane 42 (with light) (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254042): Plunked down in the same hood, made another CAS sim, moved her in, played without saving: crash at 19:01.

Can anyone confirm this? -- Disproved by simsample (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277186.html#msg277186), the light-less lot still crashes. Not significant. Also, see below (Inge's lot).


Gah. To me this looks very much like my stupid light is the culprit. How embarassing. I owe you all a *major* favour if this turns out to be true. Edit -- see Inge's post above: "I shrunk a lot with the streetlamp on the corner (what was the corner after shrinking) and my lot didn't crash when I played it, so I would be surprised if that was the main factor" .. yes I agree, street lights on the lot edge can't be the *only* thing then that leads to a crash. Maybe something like street lights in conjunction with CAS sims, not saving, EPs used, moon phase, ..)

???


-----------------------
Rehash -- possible differences between scenarios that crash and those that don't:
-----------------------


Time of the crash:

* Always 7PM in-game, with no exceptions.
* "I tried changing to night view in buildmode pretty much as soon as the lot loaded.  It crashed straight away.  For me at least this proves it has something to do with the change of lighting from day to night." (Rascal (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277332.html#msg277332))

Day->Night change seems to play a role.


EPs used when building:

* Backdoor Lane 42 and Row House 01 have been built/packaged with Base+NL -- 7PM crash
* Row House 03 has been built/packaged with Base only -- 7PM crash
* aelflaed's lot is Base only -- 7PM crash
* Inge's lot is up to BV -- no crashes reported so far.

Rascal (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277379.html#msg277379) points out: "What I wondered about, and what I think Simsample was getting at, was that the lots made in a game with BV (ie Inge, DocDoofus) don't seem to crash, whereas lots made in a game without BV (yours and aelflaed's) do"

Good question. This may play a role.


EPs used during gameplay:

* I tested in NL only most of the time. All my crashes occurred in NL only.
* "As far as I can tell nobody with BV has had a crash. Simsample and I only have up to Seasons."  (Rascal @ mts2 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1807019#post1807019))

Not sure how significant this is -- needs doublechecking against non-crashing users (do they *all* have BV?)


CAS sims vs. townies/premade sims:

* "I was consistently able to make the lot crash at 7PM using CAS sims- but using the Maxis bin sims or even townies, there was no crash" (simsample, a few posts up (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277155.html#msg277155)) -- tested with all of my lots.
* "I have also only had crashes with new CAS sims.  Moving an existing sim into the house has never caused a crash yet.  However, (..) I have had lots that don't crash with a CAS sim so either this isn't the only trigger" (Rascal, this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277138.html#msg277138))

This seems to be a consistent factor.


First vs. replay:

* (After a crash in one of my lots, using a CAS sim): "restarted the game immediately, and replayed the lot under the same conditions: No crash, it played fine. It seems that the auto save on move in affects this somehow."  (simsample, a few posts up (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277155.html#msg277155))

This has been confirmed by others too: in the event of a crash, there was never a crash on replay. Seems consistent.


Stuff on the lot:

* "I shrunk a 3x2 empty lot down to 1x2, placed in the lot bin then moved it into various neighbourhoods and moved in sims to see if any would crash.  Out of 7 tests none have crashed." (Rascal, this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277138.html#msg277138))

The fact that only my lots have been crashing so far would seem to indicate there's something with the lots that I do differently from others. I mean, it can't be bad karma? nevermind. This lot (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=254686) (aelflaed) is crashing as well.


Street light at lot edge:

* All of my lots have a street light at the leftmost frontmost tile (seen from the street)
* Backdoor Lane 42 (with light) has been crashing, 42a (no light) has been not crashing. Only one test so far (by me), disproved by simsample (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277186.html#msg277186) (both lots crash).
* Inge's lot also contains a street light (same model) in the exact same location and has not been crashing so far.
* Aelflaed's lot has a different kind of street light (outdoor floor lights) and does crash.

No apparent significance (not on its own at least -- may still be a contributing factor).


Other possible culprits (objects on the lot, building methods):

* Driveways: There is a rotated driveway extension in the Backdoor Lane lot and two regular (moveobjectsed) driveway extensions in Row House 01. Row House 03, being Base only, does not have driveways. No correlation.

* Basement: Backdoor Lane 42 / 42a and Row House 03 have a basement. Aelflaed's lot does not, Row House 01 does not. No correlation.

* Foundation: All of my lots are built on a foundation, all of them crash. Aelflaed's and Inge's are not, no crashes yet. Zazazu's lots are on a foundation if I see it correctly in the screenshots .. no crashes yet, but it's the newest lot posted I think, so maybe there's an emphasis needed on *yet* in this case?

* Mailbox/trashcan moved off their original position: "Inge's lot (which did not crash for me) has the mailbox and trashcan moved just as Pbox's lots (which did crash) do..."  (simsample (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277219.html#msg277219)) -- no correlation.

* Second trashcan: There are one or more extra trashcans on all of the affected lots (from frillen's "229 in-game objects" (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=131127) collections @ mts2 -- this is the actual in-game can, not a decorative clone). The cans are nowhere near the lot border. There are extra trashcans on almost all of my Backdoor Lane lots + some others, no crashes have ever been reported. Maybe it's the combination of extra can(s) + shrinking that's poisonous? Sounds a bit far-fetched (what would the game do with trash at 7PM?), but who knows. I know that there must be *some* point in time at which the game decides whether the outdoor trashcan is full or empty (sometimes it can be salvaged, sometimes not), but I don't know what time that is. 7PM is as likely as any other time, for all I know.


Used vs. new neighbourhoods:

* Most crashes have been reported from previously unused neighbourhoods (I think this could be just because people -- reasonably -- use (new) test hoods for testing?)
* "I have had a crash in an existing neighbourhood". (Rascal, this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277138.html#msg277138))

Not consistent.


Saving during gameplay:

* "I saved the game at about 6:50pm.  Restarted it and it crashed." (DocDoofus in this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277150.html#msg277150))
* "I tried Backdoor Lane 42.  It crashed at 7pm, right on time.  I saved several times without any problem, though.  The last save was at 6:54pm." (DocDoofus in this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277133.html#msg277133))
* Others have reported that they had not saved (I didn't, either)

Does not seem to play a role.


Lot orientation, adjoining lots:

* No significance found so far


Packaging/installing

* I don't package/install my own lots, and I had crashes. Sometimes.
* Everybody else obviously has to install my lots somehow -- some people crash and some don't.

No correlation.


Please let me know if you have any other ideas or if I overlooked anything. I'll try to keep this up to date. (I'll be here much less often during the week but I'll try)

Pbox, I tested your new version 'No Lamp' of the backdoor lot and unfortunately there is no difference. I placed the lot in a clean hood, created a CAS sim and caused a crash at 18:59. I tried this three times with consistent results. So the version with the lamp and without the lamp are no different for me, I'm afraid!
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/ScreenshotNoLamp.jpg)

I would be wary of using a non-test neighborhood at this time.  We have seen more than one example of the game expanding any corruption that it finds to other sims and other houses within the neighborhood.  The Ottomas family is a example - Maxis warned people not to play the Ottomas family because it might corrupt your entire neighborhood.

From the reading that I've done, it doesn't sound like there is only one crash here.  Unless I'm reading incorrectly, some people are experiencing another crash which occurs when they first attempt to play the house, which cannot be a 7PM issue.

Also, everyone please remember - an intermittent crash means that many people can play this house without any problem - the fact that you manage to play without a problem is no guarantee that the problem won't occur the next time that you play.

I believe that pbox posted here in the hope that someone would be able to do some debugging based on the mini-dumps.

Simsample,

thank you! I'll add this to my post above (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277183.html#msg277183) (rehash of possible factors / correlations / etc so far). I'll try to keep updating that post so that people can see what has already been tested/confirmed/disproved. Thanks, this was helpful.

Mootilda,


Yes -- however, reports of other crashes (on save, for example) have been so few and far between that I don't see how I can do anything about it. I get this kind of thing ("your lot made my game crash") with other lot uploads too, from time to time. This happens with every kind of upload (not only lots, and not only mine). I have no idea what kind of families people are using, what hacks they have etc .. in this thread I really want to concentrate on the 7PM issue *only*, otherwise we'll never see a result I'm afraid. Maybe, if we find out something about the 7PM issue, it'll fix those other crashes too, maybe not.

Agree with everything else you said.


Exactly. The crash logs have been downloaded, so I'm hoping that somebody is looking at them. Until then -- or even if nobody ever finds out anyting based on those logs -- I think it can still be helpful to try and narrow down the issue by testing. I imagine it might be easier to make sense of the crash logs when you know what to watch out for? Also, even if we don't find anything based on the logs, it would still be useful if we find out a consistent set of circumstances that leads, or may lead, to a crash. Or prevents a crash.

Many people have said that having row houses is more important to them than a possible crash, so whatever happens people *will* share this kind of lot. (Particularly since at least the time of the crash is known, so they can always save at 06:50PM and hope for the best)

(Moved from R+D thread)


No -- I'm sure about that. I made a screenshot last thing before exiting the lot. Daytime, light off.



Exactly, that's why I posted about it. No crash wouldn't have proved anything, I agree.



I'm not panicking  :). I'm prepared to look like an idiot when it turns out that it was something I did -- but that's going to be for a good cause, because then we will know what causes the crash and everyone else (me included) will be able to avoid it in the future. I actually hope that this is what's going to happen, as opposed to leaving the issue unresolved with a "shrunk lots may or may not crash depending on unknown circumstances". Again, people *will* share shrunk lots. There is no way around that.

Plus, it's a good thing that it's my lots that crash -- I have enough earlier uploads to be reasonably sure that it *does* have something to do with the fact that the lots are shrunk. Imagine that this would have happened to a first-time uploader.

I would like to be able to help you guys out, but I have not been able to reproduce this crash at all. 

Pbox, I have played two of your houses - the Backdoor Lane 42, and Row House 01, as well as several of my own shrunken row houses.  Both with my own Sims, and brand new, never-been-played CAS sims.  Both with saving and without.  All EPs, plenty of CC and mods.  I am using my regular (custom) hood at the moment.  7:00 PM comes around and everything is fine.  No crashing here.

Let me know if there is any particular scenario I could test.

I left the streetlight, mailbox, trashcan, and windows, doors, and walls exactly where they were originally. Did add a bit to the roof and filled in/flattened the basement.

I just got done with building four of my own townhomes. 2x1 (on edges) 2x2 (on edges) 1x1 (one from) 1x2 (one from). All playtested by playing through past 7pm and not saving, none crashed. All four had been placed in the lot bin and then placed in the 'hood again, but not packaged and installed.


OK, if anyone (especially those who have been having crashes) wants to test mine and see if they get the same, here are links:
All EPs required!
(http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7229/1x1kariphotork6.th.jpg) (http://img80.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1x1kariphotork6.jpg)  1x1 townhome NOT on the edges (1 space cushion)
Link: http://www.4shared.com/file/27671259/d927b61/1x1_Townhouse_-_Kari.html

(http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/417/2x1kariphotofh8.th.jpg) (http://img70.imageshack.us/my.php?image=2x1kariphotofh8.jpg)  2x1 townhome on right and left edges, 1 space cushion on back

Both are unfurnished. Maxis-only content. No streetlights. No basements.
Link: http://www.4shared.com/file/27671271/317f91d1/2x1_Townhouse_-_Kari.html

Inge's lot (which did not crash for me) has the mailbox and trashcan moved just as Pbox's lots (which did crash) do... the only difference that I can see is that, as mentioned before, Pbox has two trash cans on the Backdoor lot.
Could EPs be significant here? I have BV as does Inge, and I can play Inge's lots fine. Yet Pbox does not have BV and his lots crash for me.
Pbox, I'm also hoping that someone will look at the logs and maybe shed some light on them- although all of mine mention 'Access Violation' and a particular .dll file in the game folder, I'm not sure how to interpret the rest of the figures on there.

Zazazu,

I don't package+install my lots either, and I do crash. Doesn't seem to play a role. Thanks, I'll add that to the "list of factors" post.


Simsample,

EPs do not seem to play any role at all (see abovementioned list -- EPs all over the place, some lots/users crash and some don't .. can't see any pattern there).

There are two or more trashcans on almost all of my "normal" Backdoor lane lots, none of them crash .. *may*be somehow the combination of extra trashcan and shrinking is breaking the lots, but seeing as I added the second can *after* shrinking (because during the shrinking process, the mbox/can are moved anyway) I don't see how it can play a role .. maybe Mootilda or someone who knows more than I do about what the LotExpander actually does and does not do with the lots can comment on this. I'll add it to the "list of things" post, in any case. Thank you.

I have been playing families in shrunk lots for days now, and none of them have crashed.  I have had lots with no portals, lots with no bins or mailboxes, lots with extra portals and ones where the cars couldn't stop because the road was like a roller coaster after I finished deforming the lot to test it.

Pbox, are you patched up to date with the game you have?   Has anyone *but* pbox managed to make a crashing shrunken lot?

Not quite -- I use Seasons p2, not p3, because I like the crybabies. I have all other relevant patches.

That said, all of the crashing lots are made with the Base game / Base+NL using the Base Game Starter .. I would assume that those games have their respective patches (patches fiddle with the respective binaries directly, right?) but I'm not entirely sure. In any case, the crashing lots have never seen my Seasons game.

For what it's worth, aelflaed is also using the BGS base game and her lots haven't been crashing yet .. no idea how much of a role this plays.

Apparently not, so far. I'm hoping this means that it will be easier to figure this out .. I'm not doing anything with the lots that other users cannot possibly do, as far as I'm aware.

Again, I don't think it can be *only* something that I do (or have .. say, lack of patches) -- I would have to have heard of, or seen, this crash before, with the number of downloads that my lots have. I'm fairly certain it is somehow related to the shrinking. Most probably, at this point in time, something that I do (and that others can also do) that's not compatible with the shrinking.

Just thought I'd add my report from playing 42 Backdoor Lane over the last couple of days.

First go, moved in a CAS sim, who was a teen when created but is now an adult, with a pregnant, adult Tosha Go.  Everything goes fine until I decide to save at 18:54, in readiness for a possible 19:00 crash.  Unfortunately the game crashed just after I chose to save.  I reloaded and played, saving periodically throughout the first day, 19:00 came and went without incident.  I'm now on day 3 and everything seems to be ok.

Second try, moved in a different CAS sim, who was, again, a teen when created but is now an adult.  I decided, from reading this thread that I would delete the streetlamp straightaway.  I also decided not to save at all during the lead up to the first 19:00.  I have plyed this lot for two days now and so far, no crashes.

I'm starting to think that the crash I had was related to the saving during the first day rather than the time although I can't be sure of this.  I am planning to create my own shrunken lot within the next couple of days and will report back if I encounter any crashes with mine.

Also just for info, I have all EPs and all SPs and nothing is patched.

Saving does not seem to have an effect, so far. Maybe your crash was simply the regular "scheduled" 7PM crash .. ? (Also, after a reload, nobody has ever had a crash so far.)


That might be helpful I think. Thank you.

Just had something very, very odd with your lot, Plasticbox. I was in Badger Square playing a lot. Then moved to Fisher Roe and passed by the townhouse. No plumbob hovering above it. Play mode wasn't available. I went in under Buy/Build and all the furnishings were there, but Antwan and Lynn were nowhere to be found. Checked all the other houses, they weren't there. I finally ended up going to the house I was going to play in Fisher Roe and moving them in with the tombstone of life & death, then having them find their own place and moving them back in. On lot load, I sort of got the move in video...or at least the camera motion, but no taxi. The sims were exactly where I had last left them...Antwan eating breakfast and Lynn asleep.

What else happens at 7pm:  The lights turn on.

A couple of other ideas to test:

1. Does the newly installed and occupied lot crash if you go into build/buy mode and change the view to nighttime view?  I hadn't thought of trying that.  In many ways, that is similar to the 7pm changeover.

2. Turn on all lights before 7pm.  Or turn off all lights before 7pm.  That might make for an interesting experiment.  it would at least eliminate the possibility that it's something related to outdoor houselights turning on and off.

3. I can't think of anyway to change the hour by force to nighttime.  Can you think of one?  If you change the hour, you can only change it to an hour during the day, if it's daytime, or night, if it's nighttime.  I recall, though, somebody had a mod that would allow you to move vampires into lots at night.  Any leads on that?  That might make an interesting experiment.

Question: When you guys say you're moving townies into new lots, are you using the Sim bin or some other method?

For Zazazu or whoever had trouble downloading my lot, I don't understand the problem.  The link works for me.  Since you're getting an XML error, you might try doing right-click "save link as".

1x1 Row house.  All furniture is base game.  Paint, not so sure, but none of it is custom.  One floor tile is custom.  Stairs, not sure.  You can easily replace stairs if they are a problem.  I have all EPs but Pets, H&M, Celebrations.

http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/1X1furnished-a.Sims2Pack (http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/1X1furnished-a.Sims2Pack)


Question for Pbox: What are Seasons crybabies?

Seasons crybabies = the incessant crying that started happening in Seasons pre-patch - which I (unwillingly) lost when forced to patch installing BV (or maybe Glamour) and am still bitter about.

Are the people getting crashes using lighting mods (ie Gunmod's mod) and the people who aren't getting crashes not? or visa versa.

Sorry - these are just stupid questions. I haven't installed the lot for testing.

No lighting patches here, I'm afraid.

I'm still curious if my lot (1x1-furnished see link above), which doesn't crash on my computer, crashes on other people's computer.  But Pbox's Backdoor 42 did crash.

I downloaded aelflaed's lot from MTS2 and tried it out.  Crashed at 7pm - so it's not just your lots pbox.

Maybe there is something to the ep thing?  I don't have BV either so of course this means I can't test Inge's lot (after saying I would - sorry  :-[).


1. In a different neighbourhood with another brand new CAS sim I tried changing to night view in buildmode pretty much as soon as the lot loaded.  It crashed straight away.  For me at least this proves it has something to do with the change of lighting from day to night.

2. I've already tried turning on and off house lights and it doesn't appear to make any difference.

I also tried packaging and then installing my empty lot (previously I'd just moved it in and out of the lot bin).  Still no crashes.

  -- My son asked me what I was doing and I explained I was testing these lots in order to help some clever people work out why they were crashing.  His response?  Oh - so you're the crash test dummy!  ;D

ETA I don't have any lighting mods if that's any help.

Rascal,

thank you. Not what anyone wanted to hear :P  (that aelflaed's lot is crashing too) but enlightening. I've updated post #24, rest will have to wait until tonight.

It would be very helpful if someone could go check which EPs those who used my (+other) lots *successfully* are running. I admit I haven't really paid attention to that.

I used Base+NL, no lighting mods. 

(quick check before I *really* have to run off: according to their mts2 profiles, Mutantbunny and Conceited911 do not have BV (both had *no* crashes) -- but who knows how accurate these profiles are. KariMinger = Zazazu does have BV, she had no crashes. )

DocDoofus says above that he has all EPs (or that his lot needs all EPs), and Backdoor Lane 42 does crash for him.

EPs can't play much of a role, I would say. If at all.

What I wondered about, and what I think Simsample was getting at, was that the lots made in a game with BV (ie Inge, DocDofus) don't seem to crash, whereas lots made in a game without BV (yours and aelflaed's) do.

In other words the eps in the creator's game (rather than the end user's) may be important.

Perhaps the way the game handles the 7pm lighting change is different in BV?

I have installed plasticbox's Row House 1 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1804654#post1804654), dropped it into Pleasantview, and moved in  a couple of sims (born in-game, not CAS). The lot didn't crash past 7pm.

I have all expansions except for BV, and no object packs installed. The Seasons executable is a no-cd version. I also have an AMD cpu with hardware DEP enabled.


If you think the crash has something to do with the lot's lighting, have you tried to install a different lighting configuration? Gunmod's lighting config (and derivates (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9811.0.html)) changes the daylight transition timing, creating a dusk setting before nightime.

In my game, the lights turn on at 18:00, not 19:00.

I've skimmed through all of the posts.

If the crashes occur with lots made without BV and never occur with lots made with BV, then there is a possibility that there is an older record version which the LotExpander is not handling correctly.  Has anyone tried loading a lot which crashes in BV, making a build change to convince the game to regenerate all of the information in the lot package, and then saving?  This should change the record version to the latest one and might help to narrow down the problem.  If the BV-saved lot continues to crash, then it's unlikely to be an unknown record version.  However, if this fixes the crash permanently, then it may help point to the problem.

FYI: When a record type has multiple versions, it is usually because the data in the record is stored somewhat differently.  So, the LE might be trying to handle an X, Y coordinate in a record which actually has a string.

One thing that I can do is to provide a version of the LotExpander with some debugging code.  In order to help track down an unrelated crash in the LotExpander, I put code into the OBJT processing which prints out a hex and character dump (similar to the one that you see in the Hex Editor in SimPE), and then prints out each field in the record as it is processed.

This basically shows everything that the LotExpander "knows" about the OBJT records.  Someone would have to look over these records to see whether they could see anything anomalous - odd X and Y coordinates, truncated strings or strings which don't contain character data, etc.

Let me warn you that this would be a huge log file.  If people had specific objects that they wanted to check out (such as the trashcan), I could create a verion of the LE which would only print a log for specific OBJT instances; you would need to provide me with the instances that you want to look at.

I don't know whether this would be helpful or not, but if someone would like to try it, please let me know.  The OBJT record is one of the least-understood records that the LE is modifying, so I wouldn't be surprised to find some problem in the code.

If an alternative record type is suspected, I could probably do something similar for other records types, such as the roofs.

I will try to visit this thread again later today, or you can PM me at modthesims2.

I haven't been testing any of these lots and haven't even attempted to make a shrunk lot but I have been watching this thread with interest.
The lights come on at 6pm but it gets dark at 7pm. Also at 7pm I usually get a walkby in my game, whether that is a result of TJ's VC or not, I don't know. The walkby could either be a pet or a sim. Also if wolves are enabled to visit on the lot, that is usually the time they arrive.
Don't know how useful that is but that is what happens at 7pm in my game.

Emma, pioupiou, Theo -- regarding lights / time of crash:

Rascal says here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277332.html#msg277332):  "I tried changing to night view in buildmode pretty much as soon as the lot loaded.  It crashed straight away.  For me at least this proves it has something to do with the change of lighting from day to night."

Just to re-iterate :) I think this means it has something to do with nightfall.


Also, Theo: nobody (not even simsample, who otherwise very successfully manages to crash) has managed to crash with in-game sims or townies so far. Only with CAS sims.


Same here.



Ah ok, sorry, I misunderstood. Will rectify post #24.


Emma, re. wolves:

I don't have Pets and I crash.

Okay, I just thought I'd throw a few ideas in the pot :D

Mildlydisguised, your crash sounds similar to one I posted about earlier. Mine crashed on saving, too.
Rascal- that's exactly what I meant, maybe the creator's game version is significant.

More testing done- this time I entered Pbox's lot in build mode, and saved it. Then I moved in a freshly created CAS sim, and guess what? No crash. Mootilda, it seems like what you say makes sense- by saving it maybe I'm refreshing the lot information somehow. I tried this several times to make sure, and it works every time.

Doc Doofus- your test lot plays fine in my game.
Zazazu- your lots work fine in my game, as well.
Pbox- I can't find a correlation with nightfall/ dark build mode and crashing, and I only experienced the crash on saving once (as Mildlydisguised did). However, it seems that if I can save the lot successfully then there will be no crash. Maybe some other people could test Mootilda's idea of entering the house in build mode and saving before occupying the lot?

By the way, Pbox, Inge, Zazazu and Doc Doofus- these are all really great lots, I'll be using them for sure!

3 is possible using the Insimenator (OBJ edition). Spawn the Temporal Adjuster (or load it from the Catalog).

I'm in the process of testing Backdoor Lane 42 and it's boring me to tears! As a scientist, what I want to do is to change one variable at a time so that I'm certain what has caused the crash - but so far I haven't managed to get the fecking thing to crash!

My game environment is Sims 2 + Uni + NL + OFB + Pets. No stuff packs. Global hacks by FFS, TwoJeffs, Crammyboy, Syberspunk and the Insimenator (OBJ edition). Also a few other hacked objects.

All tests took place in N005, Clone of Strangetown - my nukeable Neighbourhood for testing & challenges. Debug mode was on.

Test 1: Moved Maxis-made sim family in from the SimBin - the Roseland family (Cyd + small dog Porthos). Went into the house, put the walls down, and looked at all three floors. Observed that the annoying bug (http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/misc/snapshot_f422f0d4_543256a5.jpg) with the Privacy windows (http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/misc/snapshot_f422f0d4_f432569e.jpg) that has bothered me since I got the game persists even now! Saved. Sim started working on Cooking skill. Missed seeing the newspaper get delivered, but it did arrive. Sim got a job and a pet job. 3 visitors came. Cooked lunch for them, everyone ate it, saved game again at ~15:00. Continued to play. Phone rang, invite Downtown - chose "Stay here". Lights came on just before 19:00, game did not crash. Continued playing until 19:30, saved and quit.

Test 2: Made another copy of the house - in a neighbouring lot, but not overlapping. Called it Backdoor Lot 43. Made a family in C-A-S: 2 adult sims, married couple. Went into the house, put the walls down, and looked at all three floors. Saved. Both sims started working on Cooking skill. Saw the newspaper get delivered, but it did arrive. Managed to greet a walkby, then 3 visitors came. Female sim got a job while male sim cooked lunch, everyone ate it. Guests decided to play fish slapping in the road (pillow fight). Saved again at 14:37. Sims skilled & socialised. Stray dog = Rover visited at 18:43. Phone rang, invite Downtown - chose "Stay here". Lights came on, game did not crash. Played until 19:40, saved & quit.

Test 3: Made another copy of the house - in a neighbouring lot, but not overlapping. Called it Backdoor Lot 44.  Played identically to Test 2, but this time RESISTED urge to save! Both sims skilled & got jobs. 2 walkbys & 3 visitors. Small dog Tucker walkby at 16:45. Still no saving, very difficult! Phone rang at 18:05, chose to "Stay here". Lights came on at 18:59, game did not crash. Played until 19:13, saved & quit.

Test 4: Placed new copy of the lot now overlapping with lot 44. (Lot 45 on the right hand side of lot 44 as you look from the road). Yet another CAS family, just like Tests 2 & 3. Again resisted urge to save like Test 3. 2 walkbys, 3 visitors, stray cat Noodle visited at 14:47. Observed graphical glitches (http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/misc/snapshot_f422f0d4_f432569e.jpg) on wall where houses meet. Phone rang 18:07, chose to "Stay here". Lights came on at 18:59, game did not crash. Played until 19:10, saved & quit.

I'm going to see what happens if the sim decides to "Go Downtown" & see if that makes any difference, but I'm doubting that it will. What I actually think may be making the difference are people's computer specs and settings. Like, for example, you can see in that screenshot that I have Texture Detail = Medium, which is why the neighbouring house is all fuzzy. (I only turn that up to High if I need to take photos showing neighbouring houses, as it slows my machine down too much). I know that some lots lag my machine to hell & back when the lights come on, and avoid playing such lots - however, in general my computer still has a reasonably good spec. Perhaps if someone's computer is struggling to run the game, the lights all coming on together causes the crash, and this is why only some people are experiencing problems?

My settings are as follows: (I'll include all the ones that I think are relevant to a possible graphics issue)
Graphics/performance options:
Shadows is greyed out - I can't select that option.
Lighting: Medium
Graphic Effects: Medium
Sim/Object Detail: High
Texture Detail: Medium
Reflections: Off (stupid Pets - I set this to "On" last time I looked!)
Screen Size: 1024 x 768 (windowed mode)
Refresh Rate: greyed out (I'm using a laptop)
Smooth Edges: Less (slider pushed all the way to the top)
UI Transparency: On
Use Square Pixels: Off
Object Hiding: On

Game options:
Camera Rotation: Sims 1 style (not sure why that would be relevant, but it's to do with graphics, right?)
Lot View Options:
View Distance: Small
Neighbors: On
Decorations: On
Clickable Neighbors: Off
Fade Distance: Large

I am not sufficiently awesome to tell you my computer specs off the top of my head - I'll do that when my geek gets home :D.

Yes I only connected it to the saving when I read your post, I originally thought it was the 7pm crash even though it occured before.

Baratron, the lights come on at 18:00 in my game, so this isn't a factor in the 18:59 crashes. And if I save the game, it doesn't crash- so surely that means specs/ lighting isn't to blame? Or is my logic wrong?! I don't have any lighting mods in currently (I clean reinstalled a few weeks back), but in case this is relevant here are my specs:
I run the game with all graphics options on their highest settings. I can consistently reproduce a 7PM crash in the Pbox lots with or without hacks/ mods/ custom content, but only with CAS sims and unsaved lots.

Whereas I can't make the Backdoor Lot 42 crash whatever I do! I even whacked up all my options so that everything is maxed, and it still won't crash!

Test 5: Placed 3 new copies of the lot - 46, 47, 48 - overlapping with each other. Lot 47 is the middle one. Moved another CAS family into lot 47. Each time I've been making the families as identical as possible - two Family sims with Active personalities married to each other, no kids or pets. Again resisted urge to save. Played identically to Test 4. No crashes.

Test 6: Placed 3 new copies of the lot - 49, 50, 51 - overlapping with each other. Lot 50 is the middle one. Moved another new CAS family into lot 50. This time, when the phone rang at 18:06 to invite the sims Downtown, I accepted. The choosing where to go screen appeared at 18:57, I picked the Lulu Lounge, and the taxi arrived at 18:59. It drove up normally. Lights came on as the taxi arrived, still no crashes. Went to the Downtown lot - was very laggy with 8 sims in the party (dunno where they all came from) plus random others on the lot - but no crashing. Returned to the home lot, saved and quit.

Why do the lights come on at 18:00 in your game but 18:59 in mine? Do you have Seasons? Do the different seasons have darkness falling at different times of day? (I only have up to Pets).

My laptop specs:
Pentium M 2GHz (mobile version of Pentium 4)
2 GB RAM
NVidia GeForce Go 6200TC (graphics chip, shares system memory)
1280x800 display (running Sims 2 in a 1024x768 window with Opera & XChat)
Windows XP Pro SP 2

Apparently I don't have "hardware texture and lighting" (hardware T&L). My geek has looked up your graphics card, and yours does. He believes that if it's people with more recent graphics cards who are experiencing the crashing, it may be the hardware T&L to blame. Googling for your card suggests that Unreal Tournament will crash if people don't turn the hardware T&L off, although we doubt there are many similarities between UT and Sims 2.

I will try the other lot - Lot 3 - but after dinner. Been trying to make the game crash since 18:57 real time, and it's 21:53 now! One of my irc friends is referring to "Heisenbug's Uncertainty Principle". Argh.

I wonder whether this bit is relevant? Maybe the fact that you are playing without BV/ Seasons is the reason you can't get Pbox's lots to crash (they are created without BV or Seasons, I think). As for the light time- I thought 1800 was the default time for lights on since the base game? Maybe I'm wrong on that though, as I do have Numenor's updated version of Dizzy's Smart Lights in, to change the way the lights turn on. However, I can confirm that the crashes definitely happen without any hacks too- although I can't remember if the lights come on at 6pm without the hack! I'm thinking that we really need to find someone else who can consistently reproduce the crash, just to rule out any oddities in my game/ computer.

Not much time to post, just quickly dropping off some lines .. might not be very coherent, I'm about to fall asleep.

* thanks muchly for your testing :)

* I playtested with Base / Base + NL, and I crashed. Rascal does not have BV, she said "up to Seasons" somewhere (quote + link in post #24). 

* Newness of graphics cards can't be the only reason who crashes and who doesn't .. I have a Radeon Mobility 9600, several years old (laptop is from 2004 I believe), 64MB. Not shiny.

* Default turn-on time for outdoor lights, as of Base game, is 18:00. There are several hacks that fix this -- Baratron, you might have one of them?

* Rascal says (see post 24) that she crashed when changing to Night in build mode (no matter the actual time of day)

* Theory knitted together from several other theories:

Mootilda says that when shrinking, the LE does not do any cleanup of off-lot objects -- the game does that by itself. This could explain why Base/NL lots seem to crash, and BV lots seem to not crash: different game involved. Inge just said that stuff like careers and food ("global sim objects") are stored *in the lot file* (who'd have thunk?) .. here could be a connection to CAS sims vs non-CAS sims. They might have different stuff to store, or to access?

If "stuff" formerly on the (now shrunk) lot is not handled/moved/cleaned up properly by a base/NL game, and then you expose "stuff" to a CAS sim (or: it is stuff that only a cas sim needs/has), "stuff" timebombs at 7PM .. for whatever value of "stuff" (might as well be missing stuff that the game is looking for at 7PM). And "stuff" is replaced/cleared up by a restart of the lot in *all* games (Base/NL too), hence why no crash on replay. Something like that?

I have no idea on how to prove/disprove any of this, though. Maybe baratron has an awesome fix installed that takes care of this issue? I playtested with no hacks .. don't recall what Rascal was using (if anything - she does normally use a load of hacks she said).

The question still remains why only some people crash. And why rascal crashes in Build mode. Oh, but -- she did this on an inhabited lot, with a CAS sim on it. See link in post 24 (I love post 24!).

Simsample -- was your lot inhabited?


Other stuff:

baratron, 

- you called the filled in basement windows a "privacy window bug" -- do you happen to knwo how to fix this? I hate it (I see this with all sorts of windows, but only sometimes. Would be very happy to be able to iron it out).

- what do you mean by "overlapping lots"? Do you have a screenshot? That sounds very strange.

- your "graphical glitches on wall" link points to a basement window srceenshot -- would like to know what you mean :)

- re. graphical issues in general: this lot is no different, apart from the fact that it's shrunk, to *a lot* of other uploads of mine. I have never heard of this crash before, nor seen it. I'm really, really, really, *really* sure that my lot isn't simply overwhelming people's computers (my lots are generally built to not overwhelm). I can play all of my nonshrunk lots just fine, day and night, even in Seasons (my playtests were NL only), and I have a rather crap computer. It may *still* be an issue related to only some graphics cards, of course, but I think attributing it to general "too-much-ness" is a dead end.


All I can think of, right now.

Pbox, my crash on save was on an inhabited lot- but I haven't done enough experimenting to try to reproduce this. I was adding some (Maxis only) furniture to the lot, then I tried to save before playing... so at that point the lot had not been played at all since the CAS sim was moved in.
I tried to cause a crash on day/ night change in build mode, but I couldn't. So far I've just had the crashes at 18:59 and the crash on save. No crashes so far in build mode on uninhabited lots.

Re: the 'privacy windows bug'- I always thought this was caused by placing windows in situations that required moveobjects on. For example, if you enter the Specter lot in Strangetown, some of the archways are 'filled in' in this way- as they have curtains over them. With the Backdoor lots, the basement windows that seem to 'fill in' are placed in situations where the ground isn't level (can be remedied by flattening the squares either side of the window), or else have a smoke alarm placed above them with moveobjects. It seems that if you enter the lot with moveobjects on, the windows are sometimes okay, but entering with moveobjects off nearly always causes the windows to be filled in. That's been my experience with the Backdoor lots, anyway- I have a lot of them in game!

In a building frenzy for my medieval town - but I also test played some of the new houses. One was a shrunken lot made from scratch, and 2-3 were old lots, first expanded, then rebuilt (with sims living on them) and then shrinken to original size. I testplayed these lots a couple of sim days each to see if they would crash at 7pm. No such crashes. I have all available expansions.
The only lot that I had problems with was one that got corrupted because it was too close to some other stuff when expanded. I got an error message when using LE. It was changed when I loaded the game, I could enter it but it was not a beautiful sight, lots of blue and weird stuff. I moved the family out and built them a new house, much better suited for their village bakery anyway.
Again, this is so much fun! I agree with Inge when she says this is a major breakthrough. TY again to the creators!

What I meant to ask was (not very clearly worded probably), did you *try* a crash in build mode on an *inhabited* lot?  With a CAS sim? By changing to Night? (you only said "build mode", but that could mean a completely uninhabited lot too)

I was just interested if this was consistent, or if you can disprove it, or what. Because if cas sim + nightfall = crash, even in Build mode, we wouldn't need to look at anything that happens during gameplay anymore. I think. (MInd that it's insanely late here so I may not be thinking very clearly) Then it would also be more clear that the cas factor plays a role.


Random thought re. cas sims, might work be a factor? Stuff to do with careers that's stored in the lot? (or not stored)
Because the way the game is set up, sims can't go to work on a monday (all careers start on tuesday .. one really early on monday I think) .. that would be one thing that makes them different from non-cas sims. They have never been to work.

I downloaded the lot this weekend, but I hadn't tried it yet.

I'm running Uni+NL+Seasons.  I'm going to go in game and see what I get.

ETA:  Played two sets of two CAS sims on two of the lots placed next to each other to 7pm with no problems.

I used it in a fairly newish neighborhood, one I'd placed specifically to build a beach house over water...and I have a Bachelorette challenge in that lot.  Empty otherwise.

Running a cracked exe, have loads of hacks, probably standard for MATY but unstandard elsewhere.  Oh, and 2gigs of custom content.

Comp Specs, Dell Inspiron running XP
2G Ram
Intel Core Duo 1.86Ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 256MB RAM

Shadows, Lighting, Graphic Effects:  Medium
Sim/Texture Detail:  High
Reflections: On
Slight Amount of Smooth Edges
Neighbors and Deco:  On
View/Fade Distance:  Small

Can't think of anything else that would be relevant, but ask if there's something else that seems like it would be helpful to know.

AHA!

I have obtained crashingness!

With my Downloads folder removed and groups.cache deleted, and a fresh sim out of CAS just moved into a newly-placed copy of the lot, I obtain crashes in the following situations:
1. If I click on the Day/Night toggle in Build Mode.
2. If I allow the game to get to 7pm.

I do not obtain a crash if I save the lot prior to 7pm, and my game does not crash on saving. So the situation is not absolutely identical to everyone else's.

My belief is therefore that something in my Downloads folder "fixes" the lot and prevents it from crashing, as I could not obtain a crash with Downloads in no matter what I did - whereas it was every time without. However, I don't know what fixes it! Tomorrow I will put my Downloads back in one by one and see if I can identify the useful item. But it's 01.54 in my real-life timezone, and I need to be up in the morning.

Old stuff:
It may not be the age of the graphics card so much as the chipset. So far, I've heard of two people using Radeon chips that have crashed (you & Simsample), and one person using NVidia who can't get a crash (me). It is not unheard of for odd graphical glitches and even crashes to be caused by differing graphics chips & drivers - remember the blood-red water? They can also be caused by the audio drivers. With Uni, I had a consistent crash to desktop problem if I had too many money trees (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,921.msg32701.html#msg32701) (where "too many" was more than five (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2808.msg80491.html#msg80491)). The money tree crash to desktop was fixed by downgrading my audio quality to Medium, which is what gave me the idea of it being different people's graphics specs causing the problem here.

It's obviously not the main issue, if my game won't crash at all with Downloads in - but I wonder if this is why only some people experience a crash on saving the first time?

Ah! Ignore me, I was confused. I thought you were referring to all of the lights in the house. Yes, the single outdoor light comes on at 18:00, but the lights in the house all turn on at 18:59, as the game changes from day into night.

Oops! Should've been this picture (http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/misc/snapshot_94326554_943267de.jpg). Look at the left hand wall where the lot joins the next one (I believe this is called a "party wall" - what a great name!). There are around 10 tiles of fuzzyness leaking into my playable lot.

I'll upload the other screenshots tomorrow - too tired to try to find them tonight.

I used to pull down some nice money doing this on ancient mainframes.  Troubleshooting intermittent problems can be rather lucrative.  You're doing a good job of collecting evidence and trying to identify suspects, Pbox.  My hat's off to you.

More testing I did last night...  I took the same CAS-made Sim (Schubert) that I had used for my previous experiences, and decided to see if he could still crash a newly plunked down instance of Backdoor 42.  First I moved Schubert to the Sims bin.  Then I quit and rebooted the system, fired up Sims 2 again (I have BV and almost all eps).  First thing, I plunked down a new Backdoor 42 lot and moved him in.  Played him just as I had before, although with the difference being that he was about ten days older.  7pm came, NO CRASH. 

WTF? eh?  Schubert crashed the identical lot the first time... but not now.  Biggest identifiable difference -- he was zero days old the first time.  "Aha!" I think to myself.  "Maybe there is something to this CAS-made Sim business," which I was skeptical of at first. 

Oh well, I move on to other things.  I have another lot that I have played for multiple generations.  One of the Sims, an adult Twikki native Sim (Cara Nanale) that had joined the family by marriage, was getting old, so I moved her out of the house.  I decided to move her into Schubert's old lot, the one he had vacated without problem before moving to the new Backdoor 42.  Moving Schubert out had reduced the price by about 7000 Simoleans.  I moved Cara Nanale from the Sim bin into the recently vacated Backdoor 42.  KEE---RASH!

I restarted the game.  Cara was still in the Sim Bin.   I moved her into a new instance of my 1x1 row house, no problem, played her past 7pm.

If you're still reading all this, you have an analytical mind and love puzzles.  This is a nice one.

To answer a couple of questions, ask a couple of questions, and probably add to the general confusion:

I've managed to crash with and without my (many and varied) hacks so none of them at least play a part.  Which is not to say that something baratron has doesn't prevent crashes (that would be very handy).

The very first crash I had was on Plasticbox's Backdoor 42.  I didn't install the invisible driveway or the staircase as I have different versions of both these things already in my game.  Before I moved any sims in I entered the lot in buildmode, changed the staircase and recoloured the driveway and saved the lot.  So I have managed to get a crash on a lot that was altered and saved in buildmode prior to moving in sims.  Duh!  Nevermind - I just realised pbox meant if someone with bv had saved in buildmode prior to moving in sims.  I don't have bv.

With the eps in creator's game thing.  So far we have crashes on lots made in basegame and base+nightlife, and not crashes on lots made in games with bv.  Has anyone tried a lot made with seasons, or pets, or ofb?

If there is something different about the way the game deals with off lot objects and/or day to night change between different eps, it may be the relevant difference is present in pets, ofb or seasons as well as bv.  Does any of this make any sense?

I will try making a row house in my game (up to seasons) and see if I can make it crash.

Running basegame I just crashed my own 1x1 lot creation (2 story building with basement, 7pm, CAS Sim + dead CAS husband & 1 new baby). I've had no problems with my other shrunken lots, but this is the first of my 1x1's I've played.

So I have some more silly questions - are all the crashing lots shrunk in the same direction? Are they all the same size? Perhaps it is the truncation of the lot to 1x1 specifically that is buggy. Or the shrinkage of the back of the lot with mult-story buildings = long shadows.

The other one that has crashed...Aelflaed's...does it also have a basement?

None of mine do, and the very few people who have tested it haven't achieved crashiness. I didn't achieve crashiness with Plasticbox's, but I also had removed the basement due to the graphical glitch annoying me.

I was trying to upload the set of four at MTS2 for more testers, but MTS2 was being a bitch to everyone last night. It's prolly fixed by now.

My student this afternoon cancelled, so I have 2 hours in which to play around with different hack configurations and see if I can locate the factor which makes Plasticbox's lot stable on my computer. (The other thing I could be doing is my invoices because it's the end of the month tomorrow, but... meh. I hate invoices!)

One thing I've been wanting to say is this: I think it is very important that the lot doesn't crash if you go into it in Build Mode before moving a sim in, and save it. Every time there is a new EP, the way the game stores data changes - which is why, if you uninstall an EP, you cannot continue to use your existing Neighbourhoods. For years, people have noticed lot crashiness when they've placed a lot created in an earlier version of the game from the LotBin, and attempted to play it. So for years, Pescado has been recommending that you must always place a lot, then go into it in Build Mode, and resave before attempting to move sims in. This updates the lot to the new file format and prevents a... big percentage of wonkiness.

The problem is that lots that are present in your Neighbourhoods get automagically updated to the new file format when you install the new EP (which is why it takes forever to go into your 'hood the first time you enter it after installation), but lots in the LotBin are suspended in time and don't get updated. This means that people have experienced crashes with even Maxis-made lots that, say, came with the base game. As these lots have been made using the base game only or base game + Nightlife, this means that anyone running a different configuration needs to update the lot before attempting to move sims in.

My recommendation is that you do the following:
1. Install the lot in the usual way from the Sims2Pack file using the Clean Installer.
2. Check your Downloads folder to make sure that any new files have proper filenames and are not called 2qwoigoi542qgkjhsrgdkljn4wroiugfd.package. If you have gibberish filenames, delete any that are 1kB or less (as these will be empty packages), and rename the others using the information you have in the Clean Installer window.
3. Load your game, go into your test Neighbourhood, place the house.
4. Go into the house in Build Mode, make one small change (can be simply putting the walls up & down again with the walls up roof on/walls up no roof/walls down toggle, you don't actually have to move or rebuild anything). Resave the lot.
5. Delete the lot from your LotBin. This is because the version in the LotBin has not been updated to the new file format.
6. Close your game. This is to make sure that when you move the resaved lot back into the LotBin, it is the resaved version that goes in, not the cached old version that's still in memory. The more paranoid should delete groups.cache, and people with Pescadoean levels of paranoia should reboot Windows too to make sure the memory is flushed out. (Personally, I wouldn't bother!)
7. Restart your game, go back into your test Neighbourhood, and move the resaved lot into the LotBin. It is now safe for use.

I hope my instructions make sense - I was writing them in my head on the bus this morning :D. Now to try moving my hacks back in one at a time to find out what prevents the crash occurring.

Can you explain what you mean by "it was too close to some other stuff when expanded"?

Do you have the text of the error message available?  I'd like to try to resolve the issue, if possible.

This has not been my experience with tests done with the lot expander (which changes many, but not all, of the record types within the lot package).  Here's what I've noticed:

1) Installing a new EP doesn't update existing lots.  I have verified this by doing a bitwise comparison of lots within neighborhoods with various EPs installed.   However, I believe that installing a new EP updates the neighborhood package.
2) When a lot is added to a neighborhood from the lot bin, the game "marks" the lot with the newest EP, but doesn't change anything else in the lot package internal structure.
3) When you modify a lot and then save, the actual internal structure of the lot is changed to the latest EP.

Right. I have confirmed that it's possible to make the lot crash using Insim's Temporal Adjuster to change the time. This should speed up the testing process considerably!

As the Temporal Adjuster only has the options of Set Hour from 01:00 to 12:00, what you do first is Set Hour to 12:00. This makes it 12 noon. If you then choose 06:00, this is 6pm / 18:00 not 6am as would be expected! Therefore, you must play the lot for a mere sim hour on high speed.

Your idea is rather vague due to the whole middle-of-the-night-ness of it ;), but I do think it's related to the longstanding lots in the LotBin don't get updated to the new environment (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277680.html#msg277680) problem. Hmm.

Sorry :(. You'll see from my post on MTS2 that I have little idea about this either. All I know is that I have experienced it since the base game, and it persists even with no Downloads. It seems to be related to houses on foundations. If I'm trying to place those windows in a basement, they position correctly less than half the time - and I have now given up on them, because that the game doesn't use them properly for calculating the amount of light in the basement. (The light level is entirely unaffected by the presence of those windows.) If I'm building a lot with a foundation and put those windows on the ground floor (first floor for North Americans), I experience the bug sporadically - between 10 and 25% of the time.

There also exist two different versions of the bug - one where the "hole" for the glass is cut through on one side but not the other, and a second where neither side has a "hole". The first version can happen on any wall placed above a foundation on any type of lot (house, community, dorm), but the second is unique to basements in my experience. I don't believe I've ever seen this happen without a foundation present - on the occasions when I've made a basement by terrain work alone, the windows will place correctly and have holes to let the light through as long as the square of ground outside the window is flat and at the same height as the floor of the basement. I hope this makes sense?

I always figured this was some sort of unique-to-me problem, because Maxis keep using those damn windows in their houses, and I've never seen anyone else complain about it :(.

By "overlapping" I simply meant "terraced" - the left-hand wall of the house joins directly to & overlaps with the right-hand wall of the next house along. As opposed to placing the lots separately.

Baratron- is your problem with the 'filled in' windows different to what I described with the Specter house? I must say I've only ever encountered this with some obstruction to normal window placement. Interesting!
Pbox: More testing, I found I can sometimes make the game crash (inhabited) by going into night mode in build or buy mode, however this is inconsistent. I've managed to ascertain that the only times I have made this crash occur is when I've hit build mode (or buy) and then the day/night toggle immediately- if I browse the catalogs first then it doesn't seem to happen. I wonder if my previous crash on saving was actually caused by the transition back to day mode that occurs when hitting the (...) button? Just to clarify, because I got all muddled up last time, this is on your lots, inhabited under the following conditions: not saved and with CAS sims (I haven't made it happen with Maxis bin sims yet). It still remains that the only consistent crash I can cause is at 18:59 with CAS sims, and that if I save the game, or save the lot uninhabited before moving the sim in, no crash occurs. I hope this makes sense, I'm not good at explaining!
Mootilda, the work you've done on the lot expander is excellent! What you are saying about the lot information being changed to the correct game version upon save would definitely fit with what people are finding here.

Hello again :)


Congrats on your newfound crashingness. Waiting with bated breath on test results regarding your hacks. It would be so cool if it turned out that there already *is* a fix for this mess. Wish I could do some playtesting myself (I've a bit of a bad conscience actually, everyone else is doing all the work and I just come here and read stuff) -- maybe on Thursday, then we've a holiday here.

If anyone who doesn't crash and has hacks in their game, could test once again with no hacks, that might yield some interesting results. I'll try the opposite on Thursday (I use a ton of hacks normally, but not for playtesting lots) unless things change/clear up in the meantime.



This could be interesting .. in particular the catalogue browsing part. Although it's only "black box" kind of interesting to me right now ..  no idea what this means, but it might mean something.



No. No foundation either.



With "my other shrunken lots", you mean lots larger than 1x1 .. correct? Are they wider, or longer? Or both?


One of my lots has sun from back left, the other two from front right. -> No.


Not same size. My lots are only shrunk left and right, not back.



Not sure if I can follow. Can you doublecheck please?

* You are using BV
* You used a former BV NPC (not sure what "Twikki native" is -- I know that there is a vacation subhood called Twiiki Island or somehting, is "native" some type of NPC? Or new kind of townie? I don't know much about this, non-BV user here)
* You moved that former NPC (now a playable) into a copy of the Backdoor Lane lot that had previously been used, yes? Had it crashed? Or did you just move the previous occupant in and out again? Did you change anything about the lot on that occasion?
* Then what happened -- immediate crash? Were you able to enter the lot and then it crashed? Or was this a regular 7PM crash? Or some other crash?
* After that crash, the moved-in sim was still in the bin? So that lot never auto-saved?


I'm not even going to try and catch up on the basement windows issue right now (need sleep, and coffee, and then go back to work) .. will keep your posts bookmarked and write a novel about it on the weekend =). Thank you for your input -- interesting to hear how it looks like for others.

Well, I haven't tried your lot on my hack-free account, but I did test both my own sets (the one I've posted a bit of around here and the unreleased one I just finished last night) on my hack-free account. Neither crashed with the no-save, CAS sim combo. I'll try yours on that account tonight.

Does the 'setHour (0-23)' cheat not work to allow jumping to 19:00, or just beforehand?

I've not tested these lots yet myself, but I've used this cheat in game before.

Well, that didn't happen for me.  I have only been playing my own lots but everything is working as advertised (so to speak). 

In the two lots I played today, I moved in two sets of existing sims.  Because I like my neighbourhood synchronised, the first thing I did was change the day with Pescado's time warp.  Then I changed the time with the 'sethour' cheat to 6am and then I realised, damn it, I need to do some building bits and pieces and it would be easier to do this if I could see properly.  So I went into build mode and toggled the day/night lighting - it went back again once I exited build mode.  No problems.  Played the lot, saved several times and then noticed it was 8pm.  No crash obviously.  I do have all EPs up to BV though - I suspect platicbox is right that it's something to do with that.

OK. I have done a very large number of tests now - my test Neighbourhood is filled with copies of Backdoor Lot 42, all lined up in a row! Each house with its own brand new CAS family. (I gave up on creating couples as it took too long, and now there are many Family sims with Aries personality, Turn-ons Swimwear and Underwear, Turn-off Vampirism or Stink - these being the quickest options to click ;D).

During the course of this afternoon:
I pulled out all my Downloads - CRASH.
I put back all Downloads that were not hacks - CRASH.
I put back the Insimenator - CRASH.
I put back the Syberspunk and TwoJeffs folders - CRASH.
I put back the Crammyboy folder - CRASH. (I was really surprised at this one - I thought his Portal Monitor might well be the saviour of the lot, but no.)
I put back the Pescado folder - NO CRASH.
I pulled out the Pescado folder & deleted groups.cache - CRASH.

I looked at the names of all of the hacks in the Pescado folder, and got it down to a shortlist of eight that I thought might be affecting the lot. These were: the Lot Debugger, Anti Watch Out, Door Jam Fix, Manual Navigation, Move Out Bug Fix, No Driveway Shuffle, No Route Fail, No Teleport Puddle.

• I doubted it would be the Lot Debugger as it's an object hack and the object wasn't installed on the lot, but it's Awesome enough that I tried it anyway.
• I wondered about Anti Watch Out, No Driveway Shuffle, No Route Fail & Manual Navigation as they're all routing fixes, and I thought perhaps the problem lay in the sims' routing through the newly-shrunk lot.
• Move Out Bug Fix should be obvious - I thought that if it fixed buggy move outs, it might also fix buggy move ins.
• Door Jam Fix is a new hack that fixes doors that are marked "in use" - again, I wondered if this had anything to do with the problem.
• Finally, I went for No Teleport Puddle on the basis I know it has something to do with portals.

Guess which one it was? Yup, noteleportpuddle.package.

So... I have pulled out all hacks except for noteleportpuddle.package and deleted groups.cache - NO CRASH. I simply cannot make the lot crash even with this as the only hack in my game (no Critical Fixes or anything). The lot is stable to the day/night toggle in Build Mode, it survives the 18:59 time event, and it survives a save straight after move-in. Even when I completely ran out of graphics memory and had the weirdest graphical glitches going on, the lot would not crash.

I have no freaking clue what noteleportpuddle.package does apart from being something to do with portals, but I would recommend that everyone who is testing the lot puts that in their game to see if it makes a difference for them too. I am using the version of the hack dated 2006/12/17, from the 2007/10/15 Pets edition of moreawesomethanyou.zip.

Now I am going to have dinner and enjoy actually playing my game rather than testing this darn house! :D

Zazau, you have BV (meaning your lots have been built with BV) .. I believe this affects things.


baratron, you're a hero.  :-*

"noteleportpuddle - Puddles of water don't magically teleport to weird locations, like the other side of the fence." That's all the info I have on that hack.

I'll test with and without this hack myself. Hopefully, problem solved. :)

pbox: both - the other shrunken lots I've been working with/creating are 2x2's. Although I do have some 1x2's that I haven't checked yet.

noteleportpuddle.package - hmm. What info on puddles is accessed at 7pm in all game versions? I can confirm that this is not a mod I have in my basegame.

Pbox:

I do have BV.  All major EP's except Pets.  Twikki is one of the vacation hoods that come with BV.  A Twikki native is a new kind of "Townie."  They wear Polynesian type clothing and you only meet them when you are on vacation in Twikki.  They are more like townies than NPC's.

The Sim I used was a Twikki native that had married into a Pleasantview family, had children, was two days from Elderhood, when I moved her out of the house for posterity. 

The lot that I moved into was a used (or, as they say nowadays, "pre-owned") Backdoor 42 lot, one that had been played many days by Sim Schubert.  It had experienced a couple of crashes before everything settled down and the lot started to work.  Schubert was moved out.  Cara (the Twikkian) was moved in from the Sim bin. 

The game went to the blue BV screen with the blanking squares across the top and the Sim posing on-screen, as usual for a move-in.  However, it never finished blanking the squares and, instead, crashed to desktop.

It might not be a good example of a crash -- too many other variables are possible with this lot than with a fresh one.

'Twould most likely. But I'm back to throw a wrench into things.

I went onto my test account, which has no hacks and no cc. I plopped down two copies each of Backdoor 42 and aeflaed's (sorry, Doc Doofus, but I still can't get yours, it still says that the link leads to an XML document and saves as the same). I put in the three Maxis families I had in the bin. Immediately changed to nighttime from build mode. No crashes on any lot. Then put in three CAS sims and immediately changed to build mode. I saw my first crash on aeflaed's blue version. The other two lots did not crash.

I also do not have noteleportpuddles on my main account. Yay for more wrenches.  :-*

Well, if this mod is related to the portals, and if a visitor always arrives on the lot at 7pm (which is also related to portals), then I'm going to guess that this is a portal issue, not a puddle issue.

Another spanner... or wrench. Yes, despite having noteleportpuddle, I've had 2 crashes.

First crash - I placed Backdoor Lane 42 and made a new CAS sim. Before moving her in, I entered the lot to make a small change, but it crashed on saving.
Success! - Placed another Backdoor 42 next door and immediately moved in the CAS sim from the first attempt. Made it past 7pm and saved without problems.
Second crash - Entered the original lot again, made a small change and successfully saved and exited. Made another CAS sim but at 18.59 everything froze. Forced quit and crashed.

I have all EPs up to Seasons.

I didn't take out the rest of my downloads or delete groups.cache or a few other things... I just rushed in expecting it to work. Bah, I'll carry on testing tomorrow.

Sorry to report I have noteleportpuddles too - doesn't stop the crashing for me.

I intend to test the lot without my Downloads folder, to see if that is why I don't get crashing.  However, I don't have noteleportpuddles, yet I didn't experience any crashing.

This combined with the crashing some experience WITH that hack would lead me to...being confused.   ???

Rascal,

sure it's not a hack conflict/utility?

The effect that baratron is seeing may be something that noteleportpuddles does, that other hacks *also* do .. or that is overridden by other hacks if some are present (but not in a way that you would notice in-game) .. or that only has an effect with her specific game configuration .. or something. So, I think, it would still make sense for others to test with/without hacks in general, regardless of whether or not they have this specific one.


ikbod,

thanks for your thorough (and doubtlessly, very boring) testing.


DocDoofus,

I think so too. Thanks for the explanation.


Rushing off ..

Tell you what - and this is probably going to make me the biggest heretic on the planet - I am actually starting to develop a bit of sympathy for EA here! I have honestly spent about 5 hours testing the house with every combination of Downloads imaginable, and I am certain that in my game build (Sims 2 + Uni + NL + OFB + Pets), with my graphics card, it's the noteleportpuddle.package that stops the house from crashing. With that hack alone the house is stable:
* with a CAS sim just moved in, and hit the day/night toggle.
* with a CAS sim just moved in, and save.
* with a CAS sim just moved in, play through the day, and get to 18:59.

Without that hack - the house crashes:
* with a CAS sim just moved in, and hit the day/night toggle.
* with a CAS sim just moved in, play through the day, and get to 18:59.
I couldn't get it to crash on save, even when I completely ran out of graphics memory.

But if other people, with a different game build & combination of Downloads, don't experience protection from the hack... you have to wonder what's going on!

The one thing I haven't done is tried the game with every other of my usual hacks except that one. I have to go to work once I've finished this post, but I'll try that tonight. It's possible that another of Pescado's hacks also does "something" to lot portals.

I  have been reading all the different experiences people have had and thought I would add mine, see if it helps at all.

I made several different lots, but have tested only two.  One is a 1 x 2 terrace, the other is on a 2x2 lot making a semidetached house - that is I only shrunk in on one side.  There was no difference in what happened with these two designs.

I have all the EPS, including BV, but am playing with the unpatched no CD exe, in case that makes any difference.

I used, initially, new made CAS sims, and am using a custom neighbour hood for testing, and currently the only downloads are Inge's British architecture items - doors and windows etc.

The game crashes  when I toggle the day/night view in either Build or Buy.
The game crashes if I try to save the lot before trying the day/night toggle.

After re-entering the lot I can save and toggle at will, and the one house I tried played past 7pm and on to 9am with no problems at all.

I can move one of these new sims from his house post crash, and put him into another new house, with no problems, just as I can place, eg, the Ramaswamis, so it seems only brand new CAS sims are involved.

What I can't do is place a new CAS sim in the house that previously crashed, the game crashes while trying to load the house.  Post crash I can put him in it - I assume he's no longer new.

I added the noteleportpuddle hack.

I was able to place a new CAS sim in a new house, save, and toggle the day/night mode.
I was still unable to place a new CAS sim in a house previously occupied.  Possibly entering the house in Build mode and resaving it would fix that, I haven't tried it as I only just thought of it.

I don't know if that hack will help in my normal game - I shall put it in but it isn't good for testing, takes so long to load!

kat

Thank you, ladykatsim. Just to make sure I understand this correctly:

* you built a house using BV, and it crashed at 7PM - right? (There is a theory atm that BV houses don't crash .. which you would have disproved if this is the case -- unless there is a difference between patched and unpatched BV and all other builders were patched?)


With "post crash", you mean the *sim* involved (not the lot) had experienced a crash before -- yes?


What exactly do you mean by "unable" in your last sentence: crash on load? 7PM crash? Lot never loading? Something else?


Oh, me too. Developing for Windows must be a nightmare.



I think that could be helpful. Thank you. I hope I'll finally get around to doing some testing myself tomorrow.

D'oh, this is all getting very confusing! I downloaded the noteleportpuddles hack- the version from moreawesomethanyou-bv. I took all of my other custom content/ hacks out of the game and tested just with noteleportpuddles in. My CAS sims still consistently crashed PBox's lots at 18:59, and I managed to cause crashing on CAS sim inhabited (but unsaved) lots by toggling day/ night in build mode. As before, the following were true: saving the lot at any time prevented crashing; crashing did not occur with Maxis bin families; the build mode night toggle crash was intermittent; I couldn't recreate the crash on save.
I conclude that noteleportpuddles had no effect for my game.

That's right, I built a house using BV, unpatched, no CD version.  I didn't wait until 7pm, it crashed when I toggled the Day/Night view , first time in Build mode, other times in Buy, or when I tried to save the game first.



The lot had experienced a crash wih Sim A, whom I then moved out.  Trying to move in Sim B meant the game crashed trying to load the lot.  Subsequently I was able to move him in, load the lot and all was well.




The game crashes when I try to load the lot when moving the sim in.

Since I posted i tried playing with the noteleportpuddle hack aded to my normal game, with all downloads and hacks.  It made no diference, the lots crashed the game in the same ways.


kat

FYI, if anyone else with all EPs wants to be a tester monkey, click on the "MTS2 crap" link on my signature. I put the set of my first townhouses up there for testing. I'm not sure anymore if I tested those with CAS sims. I know I did with Maxis bin sims. My unreleased brownstones I tested last night with CAS sims and couldn't get to crash. I've got another set of adobes in my head that I'll try to crash once they are done and ready, most likely tonight. Then the three more sets I have in my head go through crash-testing.

I have all patches but the BV one and am cracked.

Um... either I'm missing something really obvious, or we've all been missing something really obvious ???.

If we know that the house can randomly crash the first time you move a CAS sim in - at 7pm, when hitting the day/night toggle, or on the first save - but after that it's perfectly stable... why not have the lot creator move a sim in and save, then move the sim out again? If the crash is due to some artifact of the lot shrinking process which gets fixed on the first save, wouldn't that fix whatever the problem is?

I know that moving the sim out would cause all the furnishings to be lost, but if that process would "stabilise" the house, the lot creator could then simply add furniture afterwards - and then package the "fixed" version of the house.

???

To me it looks like roofs are part of the equation. I tested the following in the base game:


Round 1:

Made a bunch of minimal lots, all of them 3x3, and built/put the following in the middle 10 tiles:
- Lot 1: Fence
- Lot 2: Walls (I haven't tested that one yet)
- Lot 3: Foundation (I haven't tested that one yet)
- Lot 4: One fridge
- Lot 5: One bed
- Lot 6: Long gable roof (walls left and right -- which is what I have in the Backdoor Lane lot)

* Shrunk all lots by 1 unit left and right, using 1.2.7.8
* Went into all lots and added one piece of wall, one piece of fence, etc (whichever was on the lot before); on the fridge/bed lots I added 1 floortile
* Moved a new CAS sim in each lot

* All lots except one survived Build mode night toggle and 7PM fine (no crashing), except for the roof lot -- it crashed when I clicked the day/night toggle in Build mode.


Round 2:

Made four new 3x3 lots, with 10 tile wide roofs in the middle of each: one long gable, one shed gable, one hipped, and one short gable roof respectively (short gable= wider than deep, so the walls are in front+back; the shed gable had its walls in front, right, and back). I put the long gable roof lot in the bin and back after this in order to rename it, the other ones remained where they were.

* Shrunk all of those lots as before; went back in and added one floortile each: the long gable lot crashed when exiting during the neighbourhood load screen. The other lots didn't.

* Moved a new CAS sim in each of the other 3 lots; all of them survived night toggle and 7PM. No crashes.


No idea at this point whether it was the move-to-lotbin-and-back, the renaming, or the type of roof that made the lot go wonky. Will hopefully test more tomorrow. I'll also need to pay attention in which direction I draw the roof .. haven't done that so far.

For those who don't remember the base game era anymore: in the base game, and in NL too, it was necessary to move a lot to the bin+back in order to rename it. Since I don't remember whether or not I moved any of the lots from round 1 during testing, I can't tell whether this played a role.

Roof code must have changed with NL, with OfB, with Seasons, and with BV (new roof types and cheats were added for each of those). I don't know about Pets and Uni.


Now how in the world is there a connection between CAS sims, roof types, nightfall, and puddle moving hacks? Borken rain code in the Base game? Borken plant sim code?

The problem I see is that if we don't know what causes this, we've no way of knowing how "perfectly stable" it actually is. No crash doesn't prove anything .. only a crash does. Also, we don't know whether it's a bug in the game or in the lot expander -- if it's the latter, it's possible that it can be fixed.

What you say is making total sense for everybody's *own* game -- if I had a month off to build myself a city to play with, this is exactly what I would do (or even simpler, save every new lot at 18:50 and let it crash while I go make a coffee or something). But we can't really *redistribute* lots that are known to crash people's games for unknown reasons .. if it crashes like that, who knows what else is wrong with the lot?

Now that you mention it, I did notice that the roofs on my terrace of BackDoor Lane 42s don't all quite look the same. Nothing much, just some are slightly higher than others and I think the piece of wall under the roof slope wasn't showing. This is all just in neighbourhood view however and with my graphics card everything tends to look a bit lopsided.

If roofs are involved though, would the flat roof (is it just flooring?) be able to cause a problem, as I've still had crashes with BlueTerrace?



Okay, just done quite a bit more testing. To be honest, it's only getting me more confused, especially after reading so much other feedback!
However, here's what I experienced.

I removed all downloads and deleted groups.cache to start with. I did leave in noteleportpuddles though. Just incase.  ;)

My first attempt ended up with a crash straight away - BlueTerrace lot.
>Place lot >CAS >Enter empty lot and attempt to save = crash.

Restarted...
This time I tried several lots - BlueTerrace, DocDoofus lot and BackDoor Lane 42. I tried different combinations to placing lots and using CAS because I thought the order might be a factor (CAS sims seem to be involved in more crashes than Maxis/pre existing sims do, from what I've gathered. Even just using CAS itself).
>Place lot >Open/save while empty >CAS >Move in/Play
>Place lot >CAS >Open and save while empty >Move in/Play
>CAS >Place lot >Open and save while empty >Move in/Play

But none of these produced crashes. I tried a lot but could do no wrong.
Sooo... the only thing I can think that was different, was that on my first attempt I had only just installed BlueTerrace and there were some files in the teleport folder. I couldn't remember if I ought to remove them myself. After the crash and before I reloaded however the folder was empty.

I quit and reloaded after removing nopuddleteleport (determined not to completely give up on the bugger) and successfully managed 2 crashes in a row.
BackDoor 42 >Place >CAS >Open/save while empty = crash
Then...
BackDoor 42 >Place >Open/save while empty >CAS >Move in/play >7pm = crash

However, after restarting again, I could not get another crash. Even doing exactly the same which triggered the last 2 crashes.

My head hurts and I don't know what significance this feedback is...  :P
What I will do next, is try out my own lots. Crash or no crash, I love what Lot Expander can do and the terrace houses look so fantastic! I hope everyone still enjoys these lots regardless.  :)


I'd love it if we all had to have a big "D'OH" moment.  ;D

Yes, roofs often look a bit odd in neighbourhood view. The game makes low-resolution models of every lot (the "lot impostors") that are shown in hood view and from neighbouring houses, so that it doesn't have to actually render of all those houses .. these impostors look less than perfect in many respects.



Not sure what you mean with "CAS" here .. you went to make a sim, but didn't move them in (left them in the bin instead)?


So far, *only* lots with freshly moved in CAS sims have been crashing.

Here is another shrunk 1x1 BV-created house for you to test. 

Two bedrooms, furnished, a basement, one custom ladder by Targa.  Price = Cheap.

http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/Doof%201x1%202-bed%20basement.Sims2Pack (http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/Doof%201x1%202-bed%20basement.Sims2Pack)

And from the same website (mine), here's some classical music to test your speakers with.  A short segment from Mahler's 8th Symphony,  (my daughter's favorite). 

http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/Mahler,%20Sym%208%20in%20Eb%20-%20209%20Blicket%20auf%20zum%20Retterblick.mp3 (http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/Mahler,%20Sym%208%20in%20Eb%20-%20209%20Blicket%20auf%20zum%20Retterblick.mp3)

Also, a USEFUL OBSERVATION:

You can place windows on the OUTSIDE of your lot, facing the shrunken sides, and they will look right, as long as you place them with the green placement-arrow pointing INSIDE, not OUTSIDE.  If the placement arrow is pointing outside, when you place it, you will only have a blank hole in the wall  after it's shrunk, and even the neighborhood view (imposters) will look funny.  Place the arrow pointing INSIDE and the neighborhood view will be totally fine.

I left them in the bin temporarily while I entered the still empty lot and checked to see if I could alter and save it. Quite often it would crash when I attempted this save and that was without the day/night change.
I thought that the order in which I was placing a lot, entering it while empty and using CAS might have some significance. I've only ever had an empty lot crash on saving when I used CAS between placing the lot and entering it while still empty.


I've been reading through so many posts here and on MTS2, I'd lost track.  :)

So I took out my downloads...crashing.  Put back in just the MATY hacks...crashing.  Put back in the other hack folder...crashing.

I have no idea.  Nothing else I have should affect game behaviors.

/me wonders whether the crash is caused by corrupted arrays

It could be there is a very good reason you don't put walls outside the normal bounds: because that would cause the handler to corrupt memory outside of arrays (possibly). I wouldn't put it past this steaming pile of crap they call code.

I said earlier that I had tried something similar.  I moved in Sim A, allowed the lot to crash, re-entered, ensured it could now toggle the Day/Night modes, and save, without crashing.  I then moved sim A out and attempted to move in Sim B, another CAS sim.  The game crashes while trying to load the lot.

After reading your post I thought that possibly an extra move might help.    After moving the first sim out I also moved the house back to the lot bin, then I placed it again, in another position.    I made yet another new CAS sim.  The game crashed while trying to enter the lot when moving the sim in, again.

Other than actually packing the lot, and reinstalling from the package, that's as close to what you suggest as it can be, but it didn't help.

kat

My suggestion is that when you are intending to use a lot that someone else has shrunk, you

1) Place lot.
2) With the lot still uninhabited load it and perform one Build Mode action (eg make a dent in the land, or move a door)
3) Save and exit.
4) Go back in and undo the changes if you didn't want them
5) Save and exit
6) Delete the downloaded lot from your bin, and replace with the one you edited
7) Place and use lot as normal.

I downloaded the two lots you posted in this thread and tried them out, as I also have all the EPs, patched except BV.

I put in new CAS sims.


The 1x1 townhouse behaved fine.  I was able to save the lt and toggle the Day/Night with no problems. 
The 2X1 townhouse I was able to save, but it crashed when trying to toggle Day/Night.




I tried this with the house above that crashed, but it made no difference.  It crashed again when changing to Night view.


Next, I downloaded Inge's TestShrunkTownHouse, and put a new CAS sim into that.  It was fine, no problems.  But, I had to make a change to the sim - he couldn't afford the house. I gave him more money using the familyfunds cheat.    I wondered if that might make a difference.  I made another sim and gave him more money in the same way and put him into another of the 2x1 townhouse.  This time it was fine, saved, changed views, no crashes.

So far it seems CAs sims are the ones with problems - as soon as I change them, all is well, in a new house anyway.  Second hand is still dodgy.


kat

Funny story. I just saw a perfectly normal dorm crash TS2 on my machine when it went from night to day.

Seriously, why should any program ever crash except for hardware reasons? It's possible that this bug you're looking for isn't limited to shrunken houses.

Ok. Both those lots were shrunk on the right, left, and rear sides, from Maxis default-size lots. The 1x1 was shrunk from a 3x2. The 2x1 was shrunk from a 4x3. Both have the rear wall one space from the edge. Both unfurnished, no lighting. (You didn't decorate, did you?) However...there's one big difference. The right and left walls of the 1x1 are one space from the edge. The right and left walls of the 2x1 are on the edge of the lot.

Did you place other lots directly on the edge of mine, or were they fairly free-standing?

Yes, this is one possibility.  I'm willing to admit that my understanding of the various arrays is imperfect, based on Andi's original code, the Sims2Wiki, and my own testing.  So, it's possible that the LotExpander is corrupting the arrays during shrinking.  It's also possible that the arrays are fine (based on the file specifications), but the game is still unable to handle various things, such as walls, roofs, etc, on the edge of lots.

However, if either of these things were true, I would expect the corruption and crashing to get worse as people play these lots, not better.  I think that it's very encouraging that people tend to get one crash, then everything is fine.

In each and every house I try I buy one cheap folding chair, I don't really know why, other than when I started testing I was buying stuff for my own sims in my own houses, and I'm trying to stick with a similar situation. 

The lots were free standing, no others nearby.   I could line some up and see what happens if you like. I think that space all the way round the 1x1 house could have something to do with it working ok.  I have made some which a space on one side, but the other is to the edge - they crashed.


kat

The LotExpander needed new code for the new Pets roofs, as well.  I don't know about Uni.

I'm wondering if we're all getting too bogged down in this issue.  As it turns out, belatedly, the people who made crashing lots experience crashes when playing their own lots.  So if they had played them thoroughly during testing they would have known not to share those lots, or at least play them till they've passed their crashing period before packaging and sharing them.  From time to time people do share content that causes the game to crash, and ideally it should have been tested more thoroughly.

For example, most hacks and new objects are made using SimPE.  A lot of these hacks and objects cause problems in people's games.  No one is suggesting Quaxi should lose any sleep over it, or take stuff out, we just swap information with each other over how to work round it and what bits to avoid under what particular circumstances.

All I am saying is, maybe the development of the LE can move forward and this doesn't need to be a complete obstruction.  It's not entirely unthinkable to say "shrinking can only safely be used with BV upwards" if necessary.  It's better than taking out the feature or spending so much time on it that you simply run out of time and energy for the project.

No, that's ok. The reason I asked about neighbors was just that I had the thought that it could be something with encroaching shadows from neighbors. I tested them relatively far apart as well as together, but like I said, I'm not sure now that I did CAS sims. I think it was before the CAS difference was noticed. Anyways. Will test my unreleased brownstones (all are on the edges) with CAS again and see what they do, as well as the four adobes I did last night, plus the 2xX's from that set. If I get crashes, then I can save past the crash, repackage, and retest on my other account. My problem, even when testing others' lots, is that I've still only gotten one crash on Aelflaed's blue lot.

Just thinking.

Not a problem.  Development is continuing.  I've implemented adding and removing roads, a brand new UI for the advanced features based on everyone's feedback, changed the name to LotAdjuster, and am working on displaying the lot rotation / sun location.  plasticbox is overseeing the crash issues on shrunken lots, so that I don't have to worry about the issue until there's something concrete that I can do.

Good, good!  :D

Has anyone made lots that are adjusted down to a standard maxis size, such as a 3x3 reduced to a 2x2 or a 4x4 to a 3x3 etc, etc? Maybe it is because they are reduced to non-standard lot sizes that causes them to crash.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. You are making this sound like "the people", read: me in the first place, carelessly posted corrupt lots all over the place, and now it turns out that people experience crashes, what a surprise .. this is NOT how it was, and you should know it (you're reading the R+D thread).

I did playtest my lot -- I crashed before anyone else did. Since I didn't (and couldn't) know about the CAS sim issue, I wasn't able to reproduce the crash. I posted in R+D about it, asking for playtesting assistance. Nobody was able to reproduce; Mootilda was asking whether or not the shrinking code was ready for public release. This is why I uploaded the Backdoor Lane lot in the first place -- to find out whether or not shrunk lots are safe.

I checked back on R+D several times before posting it, I labeled the lot very clearly as a *test*, and a lot of things we know now we know ONLY because of the feedback that people gave. Like, for example, the CAS sim issue. Like the fact that lots only ever seem to crash once. Like the fact that it's not in-game time, but nightfall that triggers the "7PM crash". Like the fact that it's not only my lots that crash, and that BV lots do crash as well, and that your suggestion on how to "make lots safe" does not work for everyone (see the posts by ladykatsim).

How is this "bogging down development"? You wouldn't know any of this if it weren't for the effort of all the people on here who went through endless boring testing sessions and took the time to report back. Quite likely, you wouldn't even know that there *is* a problem with shrunk lots in the first place.

Like Mootilda said, development of the LotExpander can continue just fine -- this thread is specifically about the shrinking feature, which is only one small part of what you can do with LE. For people who want to share lots, however, it's a very important small part.

She just doesn't want the shiny taken away. And considering that some of those (moi included) who have put up lots for testing who normally don't do so, she has no frame of reference to know that we do playtest things beforehand.  :-\ I've just never playtested a lot with a CAS sim. Random hacked objects, sure.

I think maybe Inge didn't mean that quite the way it sounded - I hope not.  Pbox your lots have been very clearly labelled as experimental and you've posted links to the R&D discussion.  That's how I found out about your first crash - your subsequent testing and failure to reproduce.  And that's why I posted about my first crash despite the fact I couldn't reproduce it either (to start with).  I don't think anyone thinks you've been irresponsible posting the lots - in fact I am very grateful to you for the time you have invested in trying to help solve this.  Thankyou!

Moontilda's work with the LE is incredible (thankyou Moontilda!) and it there is no reason to delay progress because of this issue but I don't believe we have wasted time on this.  It may be there is no solution and the game simply can't handle walls/roofs on the boundries but as you say, without this testing we wouldn't even know there was a problem.  For me, having walls on boundries is the whole point of shrinking lots and I will continue to use this feature in my own game.  I still hold out hope a solution will be found that allows lot sharing, and if a solution is found I am sure that this thread will have contributed greatly to it.

I don't think so either :). That she really meant to say "there is no problem, my lots are fine, let's move on" .. Inge knows too much, technically, about the game, to arrive at such a position I believe. I just felt I had to disagree, because her post can easily be understood in a way that's just discouraging for everyone.

We probably should distinguish more clearly between two things we're trying to achieve: one is, find a reliable workaround in order to be able to share shrunk lots safely (perhaps the simple advice "do not move CAS sims into this lot" may serve as such a workaround?), and the other one is to figure out what's actually wrong; firstly to see whether the problem is fixable, and secondly to be able to tell whether the workaround is really sound.


Zazazu, good point with the frame of reference .. that's the expression I was looking for before (for a slightly different context): Inge's lot has been downloaded 19 times so far, mine was at 800 last time I checked.  Of course mine appears "more broken" with that many more testers.

About shinies taken away .. I think for everyone with their own site, and for everybody's own games, it's totally OK anyway to fiddle with slightly unreliable procedures such as shrinking lots (which may never be totally reliable -- there's probably a reason Maxis don't do edge-to-edge building). Therefore, I see no reason for the 1.2.7.8 version to be taken down (not that I could decide that -- just my opinion). It's just not the same thing for public uploads, like on mts2 or wherever .. for that we need a solid workaround at least.

I am glad by the time I returned to this thread it had been sorted out what I meant :P  I try to post neutrally - it comes from my observation training - however you'd know all about it if I was actually blaming you for something :)   I have on several occasions released buggy hacks due to insufficient testing, I can hardly complain if other people do similar.

Yes I was just trying to get everything into proportion and illustrate that the tool maker (Mootilda in this case) does not have to shoulder the full responsibility for anything that can ever go wrong as a result of using a tool.

Can I just clear up this confusion I am still obviously suffering from over the facts... I felt sure I read that at least *one* person who created crashing lots also went on to discover later that they crashed in his or her own game too.  So it wasn't you, Pbox?  Hasn't anyone other than Pbox and Aelflaed made similarly crashing lots?

If the problem is corrupted memory, the crashing will occur at random intervals. There is nothing any of us can do without the source code to the game to fix that. If my surmising is correct, then the only thing we can do is to tell people to add more RAM and pray real hard.  :P

I haven't posted any for anyone else to try, but the lots I created have been crashing in my game.   

Strangely, today none have crashed while trying to save, and that includes at least one that did yesterday.  I have also had some house work fine today - and then not work the next tiime!


kat

But it doesn't seem ro be random intervals .. the crash, or at least one of the crashes (the "7PM" one), only ever occurs with CAS sims and is triggered by a change to Night. Or do you say "random" because it doesn't occur for everyone, all the time?

Where I still can't get any of my lots to crash. *smacks them all* I just mass-created CAS sims, tested nine lots of mine (those are just the ones out of my now three sets that are on edges). Plop down the lot, move in CAS sim. Immediately go into buy/build and toggle to night. No crash. Plop down lot, move in CAS sim. Fast forward to 6:45ish and then slow-speed to 7:00. No crash.

Actually, I would think it was a generous gift if somebody uploaded a lot that they KNEW would crash, as long as they said it was for testing.  For debugging purposes, if you can change an intermittent problem into a reproducible one, it makes everybody's life easier.  I don't think anybody here has produced lots for mass consumption by the naive public, which would be a totally different (and bad) matter.

I feel satisfied that, at this point, I know enough for my own use.  I know that I can make a shrunken lots in my game that will work in my game.  (At least until the next EP upgrade, eww...) I know that I can download buggie shrunken lots from others and get them to work eventually through tinkering.  I'm having fun with these lots in my game as we speak. 

The wider issue, though, is whether it's possible to make these lots safe enough for wide distribution.  Doesn't sound like we're close to that point.

You know, PBox (or Mootilda?) uploaded some crash logs a while back that we haven't heard anything back about.  It seems to me that analysis of those logs by somebody with more inside knowledge might clear matters up quicker than all our diddling (which has been massively fun, by the way).  Perhaps that needs to be pursued more aggressively.

It might have been me? Like I said above, I wasn't able to repro my crash at first, because I recycled my tester sims -- we only found out about the CAS issue later. I think aelflaed has had zero crashes herself, so far, neither with her own lots nor with anyone else's. But her lots do crash for other people. Testing stuff in one's own game only goes so far .. that's part of the problem.

Really? Sure - you can have a link to 14 Dry River road - I've not actually been trying to crash it, but a fresh version of it always does for me (5 out of 5). It also (one attempt) does not respond well to the change and save to prevent crash move. I'll just go upload it to my site and then come back here with a link.

http://www.genensims2.com/guest/MadameMim/temp/14 Dry River Road.rar

This is a 1x1 lot made in base game. It has Marvine's animated ladder and Numenor's coal stove - both of which have not been stripped from the Sims2Pack

Dang - copy and paste the link. The spaces in the file name seem to have bodged the auto-linky-thingy.

I have a different question: Were these lots shrunken BEFORE, or AFTER, somebody attempted to build something on them in any way? Perhaps the shrinking process imperfectly updates the lot's structure and geometry, and if one were to shrink the lot while it was still simply a green square, or methodically stripped it of all objects, including invisible controllers and portals, this problem would not occur post-construction?

After, in my case, and I'm pretty sure in most (if not all) of the other cases. It is (after all) an attempt to circumvent the games prohibition on building to the edges of the lots. So we build to where the edges will be and then shrink.

AFTER.  It has been done BEFORE quite successfully, and not just with the latest Lot Extender.  The original Lot Extender (was that for Nightlife?) was able to shrink empty lots quite well.  There is a package that has been around for a LONG time, now, of pre-shrunk empty lots by Andi.  After OFB, Lot Extender became flaky and wasn't updated for new EP's, so I, and probably other people, just used Andi's pre-shrunk empty lots in the bin.

One work-around for the crashing problem that I have found works for me (perhaps for others...) is to actually OCCUPY the *unshrunk* version of the lot, let it get past 7pm, and THEN shrink it.  The relevant threads suggest there can be risks to this, but I have tried to keep things simple when doing it and it worked for me on the Backdoor 42 lot that others are crashing on.

This is exactly what we want to know .. is this so? And if yes, in exactly WHAT way does it break the lot? Do you think there might be any clues in the crash logs, and/or in the shunk lot packages?

FWIW, I'll also second/third/fourth what everybody else has said .. building on pre-shrunk lots obviously works fine, but we can't build edge to edge on those, which in this case is the entire point of the shrinking procedure.

Also, have you seen this post (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10117.msg277768.html#msg277768)? baratron claims that noteleportpuddles is preventing the (otherwise consistent) crashes for her .. any idea why this could be? What is noteleportpuddles actually doing? (apart from "moving puddles", obviously)



Did you try this with only one household in the lot, or also with moving out the occupants after shrinking and then moving in a new CAS sim?

Pbox, I actually posted about this before, but not in one chronological narrative, so let me do that now.  And remember that I have BV.

I installed Backdoor 42, plopped it down in my downtown neighborhood (not a special test neighborhood.)  A CAS created Sim (Linus Schubert) was moved in, the game saved before 7pm.  At 7pm, he crashed.  Rebooted, restarted, crashed again at 7pm. 

I UNshrunk the Backdoor 42 lot  (Schubert still living there) on three sides using Lot Extender.  Went back to Backdoor 42 with Linus Schubert still waiting.  Let it run past 7pm.  No problem!  Ran it a few more days.  No problem!  Went back, *re-shrunk* the lot (Schubert still there, just a few days older), resumed play... No problem!

That's an awful lot of steps for anybody to have to go through just to play one particular lot.  Hopefully, you'll find something simpler. 

My own designed shrunken 1x1 lots work fine every time with CAS and non-CAS sims.  I think Ikbod said she got a crash with it in her game, which if true, makes me wonder again if there might not be some inter-EP conflicts.

I finally got one of mine to crash! Now why....  ::) who knows. One of my 1x1 brownstone corner lots (there's a sort-of pic in the thread about interior foundations). Rear and left walls on the edge, right wall two spaces from edge. I decided to use long-term testing as my impetus to start the rehash of a legacy challenge I've been planning. Made a CAS sim based off my partial unreleased set of face templates. Made a dog for her. Plopped them into the lot. On a lark, I went into buy mode and switched to night view. CRASH! Went back into the game and repeated, no crash. Gah. Now I'm playing the lot as I normally would to make sure that the initial crash isn't followed by more. I've gone two more days and so far no more crashing.

Yes, I remember that. But from what katenigma said, it sounded like the *sims* were fine after a crash, but not necessarily the lot .. she moved her sims out, moved in a fresh cas sim, and it started crashing again. That's why i was asking, have you tried the same lot with different sims?

If this is the lot you describe here:

then it is actually not a solution, for obvious reasons.

I've been lurking in this thread for a few pages, and my first inclination with errors in shrinking lots (I've not tested anything, mind) would be that the game is trying to access something that is no longer there- because it's outside the new lot size. for instance, the portals where walkbys appear - aren't they usually on the edge of the lot? But I assume the LotAdjusterthingummy handles that, since people have walkbys just fine on adjusted lots.

But the no teleport puddles thing has me suspicious - if puddles are randomly teleporting, and the game thinks it has an extra row of squares that have been chopped off, could the puddles be teleporting outside the bounds of the lot, causing them to write code into weird spots in the game, causing it to crash? Could the adjacent bit of memory be something happening at 7pm, so it's causing a buffer overflow, so to speak? And if so, maybe the people who are crashing with noteleportpuddles are having something else try to write to the now-chopped-off spaces, therefore, they're still getting the issue, just not with puddles?

My suggestion is that you should stop the lots first, THEN build on them. Maybe if you didn't insist on doing things in the wrong order, you wouldn't have these problems. Horse before cart and all.

Silly fat grey Pescado :P  You have completely missed the point.   The reason shrinking was asked for in the first place was to make row houses.  Where you can have walls right up to the edges of the lots.   If you shrank the lot first, you would still have those two last squares that would not allow walls to be built!

Ok here is another idea of why some lots crash and others don't:  Did the people with crashing lots ensure that the gradient of their lot between each major vertex was absolutlely even along the line that would be the new edge?   That means either starting with and keeping 100% flat terrain, OR flattening the lot to road level and shrinking on all three non-road edges, OR doing maths to make sure your intermediate vertices create a completely regular slope between each 10th (terrain-stitched) vertex.

If not, it is just about possible the shader didn't know what to do with the unstitched edge as the light changed.

Ok Pbox, you got me to do some more testing.  I have a Backdoor 42 village in its making.

(By the way, this would be a lot cuter if we could have a neighborhood terrain with circular cul-de-sacs:  A tight circular loop of road big enough for about ten houses facing inward and a single road leading into it.  It would be quite attractive.)

Here's what I did.  I plopped down a brand new instance of Backdoor 42.  I moved in Linus Schubert, who seems to have no problem with these kinds of lots anymore.  He lived there for a couple of days, no prob.  Then I moved him out and back into the Sim bin, cashing out the furnishings.

Now I created a new CAS Sim.  I tried to move her into the lot (now unfurnished), and BLAMMO -- the game crashed to the desktop before it could even do auto-save.

As you recall from the previous post, this happened to me before,  but we discounted it because there were too many variables.

I restarted the game and opened the now unpopulated lot in build mode.  Interestingly, it was night time.  Linus Schubert had moved out at night, so that might explain that.  Perhaps the initial nighttime condition had some bearing on the instant crash of my new CAS Sim.

I got the lot to work.  I simply repainted it in build mode, left the lot, moved the CAS Sim back in, and it worked perfectly, even past 7pm.  End of that experiment.

I decided to try it all over again with ANOTHER brand new instance of Backdoor 42.  I moved in Schubert, played past 7, moved him out.  Now I tried to save a step by editing the empty (and now unfurnished) lot in build mode before repopulating it.  I repainted it, laid down a blank piece of wall in the middle of the room, saved and exited.  I SAVED AND EXPORTED a copy of this lot, in this state, and you can download it below.

I created a brand new CAS Sim, moved her in and... tada, no crash!  Played her past 7pm and the next day and the next, no problem. 

[One very curious incident occurred, though.  When she put a leftover in the BRAND NEW refrigerator (remember, the furnishings were cashed out by Schubert), she found that the refrigerator still contained Schubert's leftovers.  Is this unusual for a new lot?  I don't usually reuse lots, so I have never had a chance to see this happen before.  I'm going to guess that it's an EA thing.]

The slightly diddled post-Schubert lot is here:

http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/BDL42%20fixed.Sims2Pack (http://webpages.charter.net/ronunderwood/BDL42%20fixed.Sims2Pack)

Also, I have a question for you about Backdoor 42.  The stairs.  What stairs are those?  It says "Steadfast Empty Underneath" when I mouse over it in build mode, but I can't find it in my stairs build mode catalog.  When I choose Steadfast Stairs, it always fills it in underneath.

The answer is yes, everything flattened by a previous bulldozing.  That was in the instructions.  Backdoor 42 is definitely flat on all edges.

EWWWW!  That's gross  :o


And that's a crashing lot, yes?

Ditto on the 100% flatness of lots before and after creation/shrinkage still resulting in a crashing lot. As Doc Doofus said - it's in Mootilda's instructions and I (for one) am one of the very sad people who read the instructions first.

My backdoor42 7pm crash seemed to be audio rather than graphics errors, according to the logs.  What happens soundwise at 7pm?  Crickets start chirping?  Wolves start howling?  I suppose the person who said they had a hack to make it get dark at 6pm only has their lighting affected, not the time the crickets start?

But the walls can't be put up against the edges of the lot for a REASON! If you did this, things which overhang the edges of the walls, like the ROOF, would hang over the bounds of the lot! This is why fences are permitted on the edges of lots, and walls are not: One cannot put a roof on a fence. Perhaps all the crashing lots have roofs, which are thus illegally extended off the bounds of the lot?

My shrunk lot has all those things, and it hasn't crashed anyone's game so far.  And if it was what you said they would crash all the time those things were still true, not just the first day at 7pm.

I thought of that last night and built a little house with concrete flooring for a roof, rather than an ordinary roof.

It crashed.

I've been using it for testing since then, but that's still in progress.

I also made a pair of semis where on the adjoining side the roof is straight up/down.  That worked ok 3 times out of 4.

kat

Lol, my tests in BV all work like a charm, and I had only 1 exception for the base game in which I had a crash for long-played lot.  updated:
 just got a lot made with LE 1277 to crash . by clicking to the build mode and night mode after moving in a family.
The lot has only walls and a roof, except the hidden objects.

So, this shows that there's at least a problem when a shrunken lot has walls and roof.
Note I"m not saying other objects won't cause a problem even if they existed.

They are these stairs by crocobaura (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=233769) :)

I do and I don't, but I did for these. The 'hood I'm building on over on my test account was created from the .png on up... flood filled the same color so as to create a completely flat region in SimCity4, then added roads to one of the cities and imported the terrain file to Sims2. That's where I ran the tests on everyone's lots as well. My terrain in Queen's Cove is far from 100% flat, but Hummingbird Court, the urban section, is flat within the blocks I've got the townhomes placed in.

So I played my 1x1 corner brownstone a good five sim-days before I moved Brooklyn Ridge (gotta love the Randomizer, sometimes I get the best names) and her new hubby into their permanent house, the 2x2 next door. The 1x1 never crashed after that first time. I did the buy/build toggle and clicked on night view immediately after moving her into the 2x2. No crash. It is on the right and left edges, and the final 10 spaces are sort of house-free (there's a little 3x3 treehouse, but it was built after shrinking).

Additional difference: The 1x1 was plopped down and left. Not built on or saved after being taken from the lot bin but before moving in the sim. She also was technically CAS at that point. The 2x2 was plopped down, the back yard modified (I like decorating the complexes), saved. Then she (no longer fresh and CASy) was moved in.

I was getting those Audio errors too, Inge- and a Sims2 exception in EP6.exe. The only other Sims2 file mentioned is Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Bon Voyage\TSBin\ijl15.dll (I don't know if that's relevant).

Exception module:  D:\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSBin\Sims2.exe.
Exception address: 0x008d3fd5. Section:Offset: 0x01:0x004d2fd5.
is what I got .

Blank lot won't crash after a new CAS sin moved in when night mode is selected in the build mode,

Quite likely it's the wall and /or the roof.

But after all, this problem can be "avoided"

Pffft .. if we only did things we "can" do, according to EA, we'd all still be playing with vanilla Maxian games. You "can't" have custom objects either, and yet we can. I want to know what this "REASON" is you're speaking of -- why does it only crash at nightfall? Why only with CAS sims?

Inge, good point about the sound -- I don't play with sound on (I'll admit I don't even know how to turn it on in general), so here's a question for those who do: does the sound change with a build mode day/night toggle too? Or only when it really becomes day/night in-game?

It doesn't change in build/ buy upon day/ night toggle, but the ambient sound does change at nightfall- from daytime sounds (dogs barking etc) to night sounds (insects chirping). The sound also changes with the weather if you have seasons, too. The sound errors I'm seeing, however, are DJ booth, Sink filling and dining chair noise. Not sure how that ties in!

Thank you, simsample. I think we can conclude from that it's not the audio stuff that's triggering the crash -- otherwise, why would it crash in build mode where the audio doesn't change?

Wait. I may have just had an epiphany, or I may be remembering things completely incorrectly.

What happens at 7:00 PM with a CAS sim and only a CAS sim?
The random phone call from a downtownie to go out on an outing.

Random phone call comes at 6.

I don't have downtowns attached to my testing hoods so don't get these calls.  Good thought though.

Someone might like to try these  - they are puzzling me.  Note - I made these with base game plus all EPS, and no downloads or hacks.

First up, a rowhouse I made with no roof - just a concrete floor on the top.

http://www.the-kat.org/rowhouse.rar

There are two in the file.  The first one crashes every time.  The "new" one I made by making an alteration inside, and saving back to tthe lot bin, and it has always been fine.  At least, fine through placing a CAS sim in, saving and toggling day/night.  I haven't played through to 7pm. 

Then there are a pair of semis

http://www.the-kat.org/semi.rar

I have placed CAS sims in these 4 times each.  All 4 times the right hand side ( as you look at them from the road ) plays fine though that save and toggle routine, while the left hand one has crashed 3 times out of 4.

I tried pbox's BackdoorLane lot - it crashed first time but not the next 3 times.


kat

That's my experience too.  A Pbox lot inhabited fresh from the bin crashes at 18:59.  The same Pbox lot with a build tweak before moving in a sim doesn't crash at all.

I must try doing a day/night toggle in build mode.

What exactly do you mean with "3 times": 3 different inhabitants, or 3 different attempts to load/toggle nighttime/save?


In other news, I conducted a few more tests with minimal lots (roof only / foundation only / wall only) and I think the roofs indeed pose a problem. I didn't even playtest the roof lots anymore as they appeared too broken to bother. Other than that, the only conclusion I have is that I see no significant correlation between crashes during building and crashes during gameplay -- one lot that had crashed 3 times in a row during building, had no crashes at all during gameplay, and vice versa. Complete report is here: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1810485#post1810485 -- however, most of it may not be directly related to the so-called 7PM crash, as a lot of the crashes happened while loading or saving a lot, and not when switching to Night. I have no idea if they can have the same reason at all.

One more test that might be remotely useful: in order to disprove the theory that previously played, "pre-crashed" lots are safe, someone could play those and see if they can get them to crash. I have attached all of my test lots to my post in the R+D thread at mts2 (link see above) -- could somebody download "lot03+04+05+05_post-play.zip" and test lot 3, 4 and 6 to see if you can get them to crash? Those have been crashing for me, in two different ways (see report, phase 3 and 5)), and according to the "pre-crashed" theory lot 6 in particular should be safe now.


Also,

I think that might speed up things =) in my experience, lots that don't crash with a day/night toggle don't crash at 7PM either.

It might help if you upped those lots to a site that can actually host those files too.  :P

Ah! The MTS2 page says:
I had been wondering why they just appeared as the normal iron stairs in my game, despite my having installed the .package file correctly. I guess that means they shouldn't be included with premade houses, as the installation instructions require tinkering with game files?

Also, the fact that to put anything under them requires moveobjects on explains why the "privacy window" bug occurs - those windows hate moveobjects on! They randomly go buggy in basements anyway, and if you have to use moveobjects to place them, they almost never work.

In my game, this most definitely occurs between 18:05 and 18:09. It's happened every time. I even tried going on the outing in case it was a portal problem, and the arrival of the taxi which was triggering the crash! Sorry :(.

To everyone:
I'm willing to test more people's lots, but when you post lots for testing, please say what combination of games you have installed - or if you used the BaseGameStarter to make them. I don't want to add spurious data by crashes that occur because I don't have Seasons or BV yet! With the thread being up to 7 pages, it's rather hard to go back through everyone's posts to remember how they made the lots.

Dizzy, the files *are* in the mts2 thread .. I'm not sure what you mean, do you have difficulties downloading them?


Baratron, sorry for the confusion -- I've only just realised that I forgot to put the standard stairs blurb into my last 3 Backdoor Lane posts. Here goes: "If you want to install the stairs properly, please follow the directions given in the thread linked above. This lot will work just fine if you don't, but you won't be able to select or change the stairs or use them in other lots (they won't show up in the catalogue, which is what the installation procedure is for)." Will go and fix this, thanks for the heads-up.

Clear now? The stairs *should* show up fine, they're included in the lot file after all -- you only can't select them. (The ones in front *are* the regular IronSomething stairs -- crocobaura's I've only used inside, for the stairs that lead upstairs).



I think, if I hadn't forgotten the info, it would have been perfectly fine. You don't need to tinker with game files in order to have the lot show up OK. 

The "privacy window bug" has nothing to do with the stairs or the moveobjects cheat (although it results in the same glitch) -- the windows look filled in because the ground outside is sloped (stairs or no stairs). In my game, I only see filled-in windows maybe 1 time out of 10 and it often goes away next time I enter the lot; apparently for some other people the windows look glitchy *all* the time -- I had no idea about that, until simsample (I think?) mentioned it here. For the record, I don't use moveobjects to place the windows: I flatten the ground outside, then put in the windows, then move the ground back up.

Hope this clears it up. Thanks for the feedback about the windows .. like I said, I never knew that they look consistently broken for others.

I can't even get the crashlogs, let alone the lots. That's after an hour of trying both the chii and freya servers.

EDIT: Never mind. It's just Firefox being bitchy again.  :P

So you have them now? I can upload them elsewhere otherwise, or email them or something. (Sorry about that, I keep forgetting that I'm on the speshul server and the site might suck for others, downloading-wise .. it's saturday night after all)

Thank you for looking at this =).

Yeah, I have them, but I'm really more interested in what's causing the game to crash than in trying to get walls on the edges of lots. I'm just morbidly curious. :P

Ok, Plasticbox.

Lot 3 - Toggle = crash,  Natural progression = crash
Lots 4-6 - Toggle = no crash, Natural progression = no crash

Just placed CAS sim and did the test, no other changes.

Thanks Zazazu =)


I just had an idea about the CAS sims (that all the crashes have been happening with CAS sims so far) .. from what Mootilda says here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1810418#post1810418) about memory possibly being corrupted, qutoe: "If I am correct and the problem is that some objects are off-the-lot, then the game could easily corrupt other things by just accessing whatever happens to be in these off-the-lot memory locations. (..) The one thing that mitigates this somewhat is that I believe that the game only loads one lot at a time. However, if you save multiple lots during one run of the game, then all of those lots can be affected"

-- maybe it's not so much the fact that they're CAS sims, but the fact that they're NEW (= made in the same gameplay session) that makes them crash? The game has just saved them somewhere, and then during/after the shrinking it meddles with that same somewhere? Still doesn't really explain the night thing, but .. roofs do block light, and if it's saved roof code where sim code should be (or the other way around?), I can see how something would go wrong at that point.


(Mind that it's rather late in this timezone again and I'm all decaffeinated, so no warranties on the logicalness of the above)

I downloaded & unzipped lot03+04+05+05_post-play.zip. I played:
lot 6 until 10:00 on Wednesday
lot 5 until 14:46 on Tuesday
lot 4 until 14:00 on Tuesday

In each case I moved in a freshly-made CAS sim & added basic objects needed for the first few days. I began each test by toggling Day/Night mode a few times, then proceeded to play through the day normally, without using the Insimenator to advance the hour. I can tell you that a game with no hacks is freaking unplayable - the sims are so unbelievably moronic! None of the "pre-crashed" lots crashed in my game (Sims 2 + Uni + NL + OFB + Pets), with no Downloads and groups.cache removed before beginning test.

I haven't tested lot 3, and I haven't tested the files in lot03+04+05+05_post-shrink.zip to see whether they will crash my game or not. (After all, if the "pre-crash" lots do nothing, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the "post-crash" lots were safe!). But it is officially Too Late in this timezone for me to want to try any more considering I have work tomorrow morning. I'll test the rest tomorrow sometime.

Pescado:
But the walls can't be put up against the edges of the lot for a REASON!

Pbox:
Pffft .. if we only did things we "can" do, according to EA, we'd all still be playing with vanilla Maxian games.

I feel like I've heard this dialogue before.  Don't they always say things like that in horror movies just before the hockey mask guy impales them?

Okay, my curiosity is satisfied. What I'm getting here is what's called an Access Violation error. It's caused by something giving a negative index. The code simply loads a dword blindly out of a table with said index without bounds checking, and kaboom. So, there you go. You can't do this.

 :D


So shrinking lots so that the walls are on the boundary is not safe to do?

...and if so, what about one space from? The difference between having houses 4 spaces apart and having houses 2 spaces apart is considerable.

I have been placing objects outside the boundaries for a long time.  Who hasn't?

Haven't you ever tried to set up a home bowling alley?  They take up an enormous amount of space, but if you use the moveobjects on cheat, you can put them right on the very edge of your backyard so that they extend about six squares out into imposter-land.  Looks pretty cool.  And it works just fine.  I've been doing that since Nightlife came out.

I haven't tried doing it on a shrunken row-house, but I suppose you could, using the same principle, lay a bowling alley right into your neighbor's bathroom. 

I haven't ever tried that, but I will now :D

I'm saying it's probably unsafe. If the index (-192 in my case) is coming from the lot data itself, you may be able to do something about it, but this value changes in different instances of the crashing. In some cases, it's the multiplier (81 in this instance) overflowing (the value 19496 in one of pbox's logs). In either case, it's the same EIP, so this suggests to me that the errant value is being calculated. In other words, the bad offset is probably not coming straight out of the lot file, but rather as a result of a miscalculation because of the walls and their situation.

If you are not getting the error, it is not safe to assume that this miscalculation isn't occurring. In fact, you may well be corrupting valuable data (highly likely, considering the visible corruption of shadows and such at the outset).

In my experience, one errant bit can cause a program to crash, so how much more damage if we're talking 32 errant bits?

So by downloading a shrunken lot and adding it to your game you may be corrupting your game data files?

[edit] What about if you are shrinking pre-existing lots,and never moving them or putting them in the lot bin-does that have the same potentially damaging effect?

Yesterday I was working on my castle courtyard (3x3 lot, set as a park, placed in the middle with no road access) and tried to place a pedestroan portal 1 level up, on the top of the stairs. Not good. Made the game crash every time I tried to save. Moved portal to ground level, saved fine. 

This is a red herring.  All my lots with walls along their boundaries are working fine.

And I think it is safer than feared from the point of view of neighbourhood corruption.  As soon as the game detects the data is attempting to write to space it's not meant to, it crashes with an access violation.  If it was allowing corrupt data to overwrite other parts of the file, you'd be more likely to get your errors or crashes when you loaded another lot, not while you were updating or saving the faulty one.  So I think there are inbuilt defences.

So, you can explain the crash?

No, but unless you think elimination processes are meaningless we have eliminated walls on the edge of the lot as being the culprit.  If it takes walls on the edge of the lot AND some Other Factor in order to crash, then it's the Other Factor we need to winkle out, which will leave walls on the edge of the lot innocent and cleared for use under most circumstances.

/me thinks the "Other Factor" is the Real Red Herring (tm).

Well it depends on your main reason for wanting lot shrinking.  If you dearly wanted to do the Other Factor on your lots, then you'd need to avoid the walls on the boundary (IF and only IF it turned out to be implicated).  However for many of us, the idea of proper joined up row houses was the main reason we ever asked for shrinking in the first place.  We are obviously therefore very interested in tracking down the Other Factor.   What we do know without any doubt at all is that walls and/or roofs and/or floors on boundaries are not a no-go by themselves.

I seem to have a reliable way of avoiding the crash on my lots. 

1. Plop down the lot.
2.  Go into build mode and modify it.  (Repainting it and changing roof color is a good idea if you're setting up a little colony of row houses).
3. Move in your sim whether  CAS or other.

I tried to repackage one of the crash-y lots (Backdoor 42) immediately after step (2).  I plopped the packaged copy of the fixed lot down and moved in a CAS sim.  It crashed.  Apparently the packaging process undoes whatever tidying-up and housecleaning that first build-mode edit does.

Whatever.  The lots looks really cool and the crashes haven't borked my neighborhood yet, so I'm happy.

You know, I've been playing this game for years now, since the first release, and I've never messed up a neighborhood so badly that I had to stop playing it or couldn't use it.  EA really improved on the lousy QA they had with Sims 1, which was not robust at all.

Plasticbox, I'm getting inconsistent results with these lots. I could make none of them crash at 7PM or by day/ night toggle, but I did have lots 3, 4 and 5 (but not 6) crash upon loading.
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/Bluefunk_001Nov031107.jpg)
I placed each lot several times and in several situations in the hood, and they didn't crash all of the time- so these results aren't really conclusive. One of the placements of lot 3, I tried 4 different CAS sims to move into it- but each time it crashed. Then I moved the Ramaswamis in with no trouble. However, placing a fresh instance of that lot elsewhere in the hood allowed me to move in and play a CAS sim with no troubles. The only link I made was that the times I had a crash, the lots were placed adjoining another lot which had wall on the boundary- but just placing the lot next to a boundary wall didn't guarantee a crash. Confusing!
I've attached to logs for different lots that crashed upon loading (lots 5 and 3), and here is an image of the graphical glitches I have with the boundary walls:
(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Errors/Bluefunk_004Nov031240.jpg)
That's lot 6, which I couldn't make crash!

Dizzy:

Can you see any significant difference in the error logs depending on what lot the error occurred on? Or can you point me at where to look in the logs, so that I can see that for myself? (it's probably not very interesting reading, going through 25 logs all over again) This could be interesting in order to see whether there's any difference in what is *on* the lots (walls, roofs, foundations) .. you said


I can see where it say's "EIP" in the logs but I have no idea where/how to look for an index or overflowing multiplyers, if you'll forgive my ignorance =).


Also:

I think it's not impossible that this is *exactly* what happened during my test run yesterday. I have never seen so many crashes on load/save before.

The "inbuilt defences" might vary with the game version you're running (and possibly other parameters; RAM?) .. which might explain how some users *see* less or no errors, even though they would still *exist* just the same.


(Also, could someone explain "red herring"? Wikipedia says "In literature, a red herring is a plot device intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, usually a twist ending" .. this what you mean? (Non-english person here))



Did you try to see what happens when you modify the freshly re-plopped-down lot *again*? Does it work then?

In any event, I'm afraid that no crashes don't prove anything. I don't mean to scare you, but only because it doesn't crash it doesn't mean there's no data corruption going on in your hood. I'm going to take down my uploaded lots from mts2 as soon as it's back up, so if anyone still wants them you'll have to be quick =). Please do not redistribute any of my shrunk lots without a dire warning that using them may corrupt neighbourhood data. I don't want people to fuck up their games just because they think the house looks cool.


Simsample (and Zazazu and baratron), thanks for your testing. There's no need in trying to make *all* of the lots crash -- one single crash is enough to prove that we can't assume a lot is "safe" just because it did or did not crash during building/playtesting: There is no correlation. This is what I wanted to know. Thank you.

(Simsample, your screenshot doesn't show up for me, but I think I know what you mean -- vertical lines on the border walls?)


Also:

How so?

In case you're referring to my test run: only because the wall lots didn't crash for me 3 times in a row, it does not mean there's nothing wrong with them. Again, no crash proves nothing.

The only thing this test run really showed is that there's definitely something wrong with the roofs -- but right now, we have no way of knowing whether the crash on the wall lot (lot 6, phase 5) occurred because of general data corruption of the lot/sim/neighbourhood due to the borken roof lots, because of the walls, because of the moon phase .. all I can see is that it did crash. Simsample crashed with lot 5 (walls), Zazazu with lot 3 (foundations) .. they didn't even download a roof lot; how are the walls "not the culprit" then?

Inge,

I'm not up to date with the portal stuff -- this:


is something that's already known? I believe there was some talk about z levels of portals on R+D .. not sure though. Is this a new thing that Mootilda should know about, or is it old hat?

Game version, yes definitely that's a high possibility - as they (hopefully) improve on their code as time goes on.


Pretty much, but of course in this case I am not suggesting a person is trying a distraction technique, simply that we may be distracted by the fact walls on the edge of the lot are a very obvious difference from lots before the lot expander so we keep thinking of them.

My primary concern since the beginning has been that the lot package is actually corrupted (based on the game code) and that this corruption may spread to the rest of the neighborhood.  I'm very sorry if I was unable to explain this adequately.  Sounds like dizzy has managed to explain it so that some people now understand the problem.  Thanks, dizzy!

However, people really want this feature, so I am willing to put some time into getting it to work.  The current LotExpander may be creating a lot package which the game is unable to handle, but that doesn't mean that we've run out of ideas.

My initial attempt at this feature was to shrink the various arrays without attempting to delete "off the lot" objects, or to keep objects on the shrunken lot.  When pbox put out her test lot, I was hoping that we might be able to narrow down the possible culprits (roofs, portals, foundations, ...).  Part of my problem is that I am completely new to modding and am unsure of what's possible.

Here are some of the things that I can try:
- Delete any roofs which go past the lot edge.
- Move any objects which are outside of the new shrunken lot, so that they are back on the lot.

If anyone else has any ideas, please let me know.


I don't believe that you understand.  An access violation occurs because the game became so confused that the corruption was completely out of control.  An access violation is the operating system's way of stopping a program which has become "insane" and is trying to change memory which doesn't even belong to the program.  IE, the Sims 2 is trying to write into your open Word document and Windows won't let it.

An access violation is absolute proof that the game has no inbuilt defences.

The reason that these lots do not become more and more corrupted is that the game never gets a chance to write the file after the corruption is completely out of control.

1) would be devastating unless it was optional.  I make gable-end roofs for terraced houses (that's the normal roof type) and they always hang over the end a little.  If you got rid of those there would be holes in my roofs.

2) yes I have a hunch this would be very worth trying.  Some of those deleted objects may be holding sound and graphic information.  Missing sound and graphic information is usually what causes CTD in this game, in my personal experience.

Again, I'm a newbie to modding, but are you sure that this would create holes?  My plan was to try to cut the roofs at the very edges of the lot, so that there would be no overhang, but the roofs would line up with the walls.

For both of these, the answer is the same:  Until we know what's causing the problem, we just don't know what's safe and what isn't.

I don't think there would be holes -- I guess if Mootilda does that, the edges would look like they currently do on the "high side" of half shed roofs: roof stopping short at the wall edge.

This may even be a good thing for gameplay, because it would increase visibility in narrow lots that are between other lots with this type of gable roof. Right now, the neighbouring roofs visually poke a little bit into the current lot where they overhang.


However, I'm not sure if "simply" deleting the overhang would solve anything: from my experience e.g. with snow in Seasons, the game thinks of a tile under the overhang as "not under a roof" (snow will pile up there, regardless of the overhang), so I would think the overhang is purely visual and has nothing to do with the "footprint" of the roof. Other purely visual things can poke into neighbouring lots without any problem -- think of trees for example: if you put the large willow tree right next to the edge of a regular lot, it pokes into the neighbouring lot by a considerable amount. No problem at all (except visually, if the tree branches end up in the neighbour's bedroom).

Still, it may be worth a try to change the roof code, do another test run with minimal lots, and see what happens. Something about the roofs is definitely broken right now, after all.

Is there any difference between "roof code" and "roof wall code", by the way?

This type of thing is not my main area of expertise, but I would have thought the overhang was built into the mesh.  The modularity seems to be a panel of roof has a floor/ground grid intersection at its centre, so if you remove the panel that is overhanging the wall, the next panel would not begin until half a grid into the lot.   Now it is possible that you can find a panel fraction to substitute, because after all, when you put a dormer on it does cut the roof at a gridline, though it could be using masking, but this is not something I know much about.  Maybe Niol can help here.  But the overhanging roof in any case belongs to the same position as the wall it is sitting on, rather than a position off the lot, so in theory it is as much part of the shrunk lot remainder as the border wall is.

I think those roofs are only like that because a roof panel/module mesh is positioned so as to line up with the grid at its top edge.  Otherwise it would intersect the panel the other side of the ridge when you are making a ridged roof making a strange teepee effect.

Got it, thanks =).

No, the logs tell you very little. In fact, I wish they had outputs on the FP registers as well as some other stuff, but you take what you can get. I did a very preliminary analysis using a debugger, and that led me to the conclusion of bad pointers due to screwy offsets. Basically, they are trying to load a value from [EAX+ECX] after doing a multiply using EDX. I assume there is a boundary error considering you are getting an Access Error from the CPU/MMU, however the code itself clearly does no bounds checking of its own (due to some compilation optimizations, no doubt).

Interesting hypothesis (that the compiler optimization is removing the bounds checking).  What do you base that on?  I've been assuming that the developers are using a language without bounds checking (nobody really writes software with C#, do they?) and that they are too rushed in development to add bounds checking on their own.

[Update:]

Did a quick check with friends in compiler development and game development and they agree.  Games are likely written in C / C++ and have no bounds checking unless the developers add it themselves.  Compiler optiimizations would never remove bounds checking unless they were fundamentally broken.  Let's not blame the compilers for the fact that the game developers are working too hard fast to do proper bounds checking.

(Sorry about the rant, but I work on program development tools for a living.)

I suppose they never reckoned with us writing these tools.   So if it's not the game protecting its own data, I am pleased with the job my operating system is doing!  I have not yet had a totally borked hood and you should see some of the things I get up to!

Let's not change the subject, Mootilda. I don't think anyone else cares about the details of how compilers work. My point is, whether you believe compilers are involved, the program is severely lacking in what I would consider common robustness that is taught even at the college level.

Absolutely.  What we've doing with shrinking of lots to allow walls at the edges is well ouside of normal game play.


Agreed.  However, that doesn't stop us from modding.  We just need to be careful to avoid doing things that the game can't handle.

All this focus on roofs being on the edge being the issue feels wrong. The only lot of mine I've gotten to crash consistently is my 1x1 brownstone, unreleased. It doesn't have a roof in the traditional sense. I never used the roofing tool. It's a multi-level floored surface.

If anyone wants to test it, here's the link: http://www.4shared.com/file/28206022/94ab3616/Corner_A.html  (requires all EP)

Well that's pretty much how I feel about the wall issue.  Usually once a computer-related problem is tracked down there is a Eureka moment when you realise that it is totally reproducible once it's properly defined.  The walls on edge of lot is not a repeatable cause of a crash in isolation, even related to EP.  Else I would be able to run all row houses without problem, while someone without whichever EP would be able to run none of them.

My bets so far are on the deleted object idea being a better trail to follow.  Maybe in BV the core objects and controllers are not put in the same location as they were in earlier games so they're not getting deleted to the same extent.

I don't believe that roofs are the *only* issue.  However, the roofs seem to be *one* issue.

There are several possibilities:

1) There is one issue which is causing all crashes - unlikely, but it would be wonderful if we could find such an thing.
2) There are a finite number of issues which are causing all of the crashes - I'm still hopeful that there are a finite number of fixable issues, but we just don't know yet.
3) This is a black hole.  All energy put into the issue will be sucked into the void, and in the end there will be nothingness.  If so, then we are wasting our time.

The question is: which of the above is true.  I'm reasonably sure that there isn't just one issue.  I'm willing to spend some finite amount of time on trying to resolve multiple potential issues.  But, at some point - if we haven't found the answer - it just won't seem worth the effort.

I took a quick look at the roofs and I now know that I don't understand roofs well enough to do anything yet.  The Roof record type for a shrunken lot doesn't contain any coordinates which are off of the lot.  If someone had some idea of what to try, it would be helpful.  Record types, instances, etc would be the most helpful information for me.

If you have other suggestions as to (relatively) quick things that I can change in the LotExpander to help narrow down the problems, I'm very open to doing them.  My main criteria are that I don't spend too much time and energy on something really nebulous.

I hope that this doesn't sound too harsh.  I'd love to be able to provide this feature, but I have very little experience with modding - just my work on the LotExpander.  That's why I was hoping that testing might shed some light on areas of interest.

You already came up with the idea that seemed good to me - not deleting objects that are on the shrunk bits.  Obviously I don't know how well that fits in with your idea of relatively quick, as I am not aware of your implementation process.  I have already given a concrete reason why I think this is a good idea, earlier in the thread.

Now this could result in actual visible objects like wall segments and windows being plopped into weird looking places, but the instructions to the user were to make sure no visible objects were on the deleted part of the lot first.   If instructions have been followed, that *should* just leave a few invisible objects and controllers being moved onto the part of the lot that is remaining - which I think is a good thing because of the resources these things can contain.

I can say what I've seen so far on the visible elements of a roof.:

known from Materials:
1. RoofTop
2. RoofUnder
3. RoofEdges
known from wall.txt
4. attic walls

From my experiences and observations, attic walls is added by the roof tool only at the perimeter loci of a roof product and is not added for those sides where the roof edges reach down to the grid layer the roof is on.  The latter observed condition is the reason why rooms by the roof tool alone are not a closed room to be considered as "inside" although graphically it appears so.

Note, a build tool can add >1 components into a lot for a given use.

As for whether Mootilda can utilise her first approach to reach the goal to trim off the over-hangs depends on whether the over-hangs are a part of the mesh group that occupy grids at the in-roof side or the out-roof side (the extra one grid outside the roof body predefined by the roof tool and user's drag).  If it's the former, I think, the trimming may be completely unnecessary when no other settings is actually affected.  If it's the latter, we're likely to see a hole gap but we can add the attic walls to fill those gaps in advance.

But at least, such optional trimming may help analyse the roof.


There're different types of roofs.  Some have attic walls at some of its edges while some have no attic walls at all.
If one doesn't count this, it's harder to draw a conclusion if any is deducible.

Please forgive me for my still learning some programming things and my wondering about different "crazy talks". I didn't major in that field, nor I learn them enough to tell.


I'm looking forwards to the new LE version that may ensure all objects to be in-lot to see if that is a factor.

But shrunk lots for row houses are still much more stable and tolerated by the game than wall-at-the-edge lots by means of the fence-based default replacement on Wall1.  The latter crashed at lot-loading.


After all, to say the least, should all fail, we can share lots before shrinking, and let those who want row houses to shrink the lots by themselves for uses in their own testing neighbourhood(s) or even custom folder or game copy to set aside from those they expect to be relatively safer.  In such given cases, the users know the risk that their neighbourhoods can absolutely go bonker corrupted, but they're willing to use them in such a way.

Thanks for the list of roof elements.

I agree with you about the stability.  In spite of the problems that we've been seeing, these shrunken lots are working a lot better than I originally feared.

Yes, this is Not News. How the hell could pedestrians walk into the lot one level up? That doesn't make any sense!

Ah. This does actually make some sort of sense. The game is confused about where the lot ends due to the "overlapping" wall (called a party wall in British English), and so is attempting to write to the wrong lot based on that? Yeah, I'd always thought that could be the problem... But damn, that's really annoying :-\. I'd been hoping we could manage semi-detached (http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=semi+detached&btnG=Search+Images) houses even if we couldn't manage terraces, and that's disappointing. I live in London - detached houses barely exist here! >90% of the houses in my town (Kingston) are either semis or terrace.

I have believed the amount of RAM and/or graphics memory is an issue from the beginning. Did you see the videos I made when the game went completely screwy while I was testing the lots? At the time, I ascribed this to the fact both Sims 2 and Windows tend to leak memory like a sieve; and having booted up the game and quit/let it crash more than 15 times in one session, the memory was a mess.

I am also certain that a game patched with Awesome Fixes (a.k.a. "third-party patches") is far more stable than one without. Prior to testing these lots, the only times I'd ever experienced crashes to desktop were pre-Critical Fixes from Pescado or TwoJeffs, or if I had old versions of hacks after an EP.


I'm not bothered about the lot package corruption spreading to the rest of the Neighbourhood as I've been testing everything in a throwaway 'hood. What worries me is the example of The Sims 2 trying to write into a Word document. Could someone who understands the way the game works please confirm whether it is possible for it to be confused enough to randomly open another Neighbourhood and write into that? I'm under the impression that it only opens one 'hood at a time, while the others remain unchanged on disc, but I now want to confirm that is the case.

Well they don't walk into the lot.  They are instantiated out of world (ie not on a grid coordinate) and then the game tries to find a spot in a position relative to a pedestrian portal to locate them so they can begin their fade-in.  There is some flexibility in where exactly they appear relative to a portal.   Any level where there is floor grid present is considered a valid place for the purposes of "find location for".   So when I had my pedestrian portal in the roof space, the sims happily appeared in the attic.    I didn't provide any stairs to this area, so after they had wandered about a bit they either found another pedestrian portal up there to walk over to in order to start their fade-out process, or if I had already stolen it, they poofed out of existence after they got a bit fed up.

I have terraced housing populated by families in my game.  Overlapping walls and all.  Why don't you try the lot I made in a row of several and play it?

I think there has been so much information and speculation about which situations are causing crashes and why that it's impossible to keep sight of everything.   At the moment for every person who reports a crash in one situation there is another person or another time when that situation didn't cause a crash!   Maybe we need a chart for every situation saying with columns for always, sometimes and never :)

Please bear in mind though, that I only tested each of PBox's lots about five or six times- so it isn't conclusive. If I played some more it's always possible I could find crashing on lots with no adjoining boundary walls.

During all of my testing on 2007-11-02, all lots had 1 unit free space in between. I had crashes left and right. I see no correlation there.


Dunno .. look at the file timestamps, perhaps? I have absolutely no clue about memory management under windows, but that's what I would do .. assuming that if it writes into a file, the timestamp *will* change.

I'm not trying out any more terraced houses until someone can confirm whether or not the game can get confused enough to randomly write into another Neighbourhood file. Also, having hunted through the 9 pages of the thread for the link (http://simlogical.com/slforum/index.php?topic=916.0) :P (Search on the top of the thread for "Inge" didn't find it), I see it requires BV which I don't have & don't plan to get for some time. (I prefer to obtain EPs only after they have been thoroughly patched.)

I don't have noticeable problems with Plasticbox's original Backdoor Lot 42 as long as I have all my hacks in place, but I'm worried by the potential for corruption to other lots/families within the Neighbourhood. For all I know at the moment, I could play this lot a dozen times without observing anything bad, and then I could open up some other lot to find it full of garbage?

You're surely not playing these in your real game yet are you?   I'm still in my test hood so if it craps on another lot I just vape the hood and make another test hood.   I don't advise anyone to play these for real yet!

I am playing them in my main 'hood, but if everything bombs out it bombs out. I knew that was a risk when I first plopped one of Plasticbox's down in Queen's Cove. I have two sims in Backdoor Lane 42, and three + dog in one of my 2x2 brownstones, plus have plopped down a good 10 of the gray townhomes I first made and the entirety of the brownstone complex. I think that's 13 lots in that complex. If I end up having to recreate the 'hood from scratch, no biggie. I have plenty of pictures for reference and I don't give a rat's about memories, so a simple sim cloning works for me. But for now, I have the pretty.
(http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4931/snapshot94365f0d3438bf1fk9.th.jpg) (http://img442.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot94365f0d3438bf1fk9.jpg)  (http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/3492/snapshot94365f0d74368fdbu3.th.jpg) (http://img442.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot94365f0d74368fdbu3.jpg)

Well that's ok for someone for whom every hood is potentially a fun experiment, but some people are *really* involved with their sims and would be devastated if anything happened to them.  So it was worth giving a reminder.

Considering the multitude of warnings given, that type of person would be a bonafide idiot if they were playing these in their main 'hood, and most likely are old hat at losing 'hoods in BFBVS.  :o

Depends what you mean by "real game". I only have one Sims 2 game, because I don't have enough hard drive space to create dummy Windows XP accounts to make multiple, separate copies of the game.

I am testing the lots in a throwaway Neighbourhood, as I said 6 posts up from yours. However, I've just looked at the files within Neighborhoods/N00whatever, and it seems that every single Neighbourhood.package, University.package, Downtown.package and Suburb.package get rewritten each time you boot up the game :-\. In fact, the file stamps on those packages correspond to when I quit the game last night, not when I last chose a 'hood to play.

So I'm really quite worried about the potential for bugginess from the game writing to the wrong part of memory getting into the wrong Neighbourhood file, and corrupting one that I actually care about. Anything can happen to N005, but I've worked hard on N004 and don't want it corrupted.

You dont have to make another windows xp  account- just rename the sims2 folder in documents - for example to sims2-realgame - and then restart the game - voila, game created new sims2 folder, and that one can be used for testing. When I want to play my real game, i change the name of the new folder to sims2test, change sims2-realgame back to sims2 and go play. Very easy, just a few letters to type, no extra programs - only thing needed is the extra space for a sims2 folder in my documents. My absolute vanilla-game folder takes up 512MB (I have all expansions and I use the Clean Templates, so I dont get any extra hoods/character files and such.) The test one has the needed downloads added, atm building stuff.

Yes, I did try.  It works.  In fact, this is the most consistent thing I have found in this whole experience.  Making a lot crash is dependent upon several variables:

1. CAS-made Sim or non-CAS sim.
2. Which EP was used to make the lot.
3. Packaged or hand-built lot.

Yet, CONSISTENTLY, if I tweak the lot in build-mode from the neighborhood BEFORE moving in a Sim, ANY sim, I have experienced no problem.  Not me.  I'm using unpatched BV.  I have only experimented with your Backdoor 42 lot and with my own designed shrunken lots.

I like consistency.  Of course, your results may vary, but I hope not.


I'm reluctant to say never, but it is EXTREMELY unlikely to ever happen that a document in another program could be corrupted by an array index problem.  Those kinds of problems were actually commonplace before virtual memory architecture, which was, uh, years ago.  Since the Word program has a separate memory space, it would take something far, far more catastrophic than a Sims 2 crash to do that.  (Sez Doof who once used to T.A. college Operating Systems)

If you're nervous dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, maybe you should find something safer to do.  I hear Minesweeper is fun. ;D

I don't have BV, so I can't test this myself .. however, other BV users (namely ladykatsim) do crash with their own lots, so I wouldn't think this can be used as a general recipe.

It seems to work like you say for Simsample:

and in a similar fashion for baratron, only that she has up to Pets only (no BV).

Rascal also does not have BV (up to Seasons), and for her it does *not* work:

So, yeah. I for one can't conclude anything from that. I just hope that for you it's really as consistent as it looks like.



baratron isn't asking about Word, but about other TS2 hoods. (Like anyone here would care about Word files ..)

I got it, but I haven't looked at it yet.

I tried something out to see if roofs could make a difference.  I built a house on a 3x3 lot but didn't put any roof on it at all. atthat point I saved and put it onto the lot bin.  I then made 4 versions, one with no roof, one with a floor for a roof, one with gables at the sides, one with gables at the front.  I shrunk all versions to 1x2.

I made 4 blocks, each with 3 houses of the same roof type.  I put CAS sims in the left hand and middle of each sort, with no crashes, and finally I put CAS sims in the other end of each sort and played them through several days.  Not one of those 12 houses crashed.  I can't see that the roof can be causing the crashes, certainly not alone anyway.

A couple of days ago just about every house I did crashed, now they aren't, and the only difference I can see is that right now I don't have even the few downloads I had before!

kat

Well, as I said, I changed the roof pattern (and the color of the roof sides)  That might be a significant difference.

Rascal, if you're up to it, please try it again: Backdoor 42.  Repaint and change the roof tile pattern in build mode, save, then move in a CAS Sim and wait for 7pm.

Actually, I think the easiest thing you can do to make sure your other hood is safe in situations like this, would be to simply move the entire N004 folder to the desktop before starting the game.



Unless I am totally misunderstanding what dizzy said: the problem we're facing is not that it's crashing. The problem is that the game is trying to write stuff where it shouldn't, or read stuff that doesn't exist, and the only thing stopping it at the moment is the OS. This is REGARDLESS of whether or not you see any crashes.

To reiterate:


Right now, I don't see what we could learn from more in-game testing. Because if he's right, the goal is not to prevent crashes -- the goal is to prevent things going wrong like this in the first place. And you can't see that from within the game.

Maybe there'll be an updated version of the LotExpander that handles off-lot objects differently, or does something else in a different way, or someone writes a fix: then it makes sense to make some new lots and test them, in order to see how it all behaves in-game. Until then, in my opinion the entire shrinking business is ONLY for people who do this in a throwaway neighbourhood that they're prepared to see blow up at any point.

The whole thing is a bit like moving sims between hoods, in my eyes, or deleting all characters: there is no indication that anything's wrong, until it goes all pear-shaped.

In my opinion, it would be far better if we could determine a way to overlap lots rather than put walls right up to the edge (given the flakiness of build mode).

Perhaps utilizing some of the same methods in which the new BV rocks are able to be placed on lots?

I've taken my lots off my thread at MTS2. Some silly bum said they were going to use them for their new 'hood, showing the complete inability of people to read warnings.

dizzy,

overlapping lots is already possible (by sticking two lots next to each other and expanding one of them) -- but the flickering is unbearable in-game. Unfortunately.

(Not sure if you know what I mean -- it's the same kind of flickering that occurs when you put e.g. a fence and a hedge next to each other and look at the lot impostor when moving the camera, or when you moveobject two meshes into one that almost match but not quite .. or when walls and halfwalls meet, etc.)

I went back to testing on Backdoor 42 again... and decided that this might not actually be the best lot to use as a test case.  While tinkering with it, I finally took a closer look at that backyard car driveway, which I had just assumed it was a non-issue because nobody else was bringing it up.

I'm not so sure now.  When you grab at it with the hand tool, you can see a lot of squares that are going off the lot.  Was this placed on the lot BEFORE the shrinking process?

I also tried to remove the parts of the foundation and walls on the edges for another test.  Unfortunately, you can't do that because it's impossible to remove foundation at the edge. 

What I think might be a better testing situation with fewer variables would be a lot that has no custom items on it, no foundation, no driveway, fewer advanced tricks.  I can make a lot like that for myself, but the lots I build ALWAYS work for me.  This new test lot would have to be made by somebody who can make one that crashes.  I would gladly test such a lot, if I knew it crashed under the usual circumstances.


Well, I assume he is right, and that there's a register being blown somewhere with uninitialized data.  However, I think we all guessed that there had to be some reason EA took those precious two-extra squares away from us, and that they weren't just trying to dicks.  It would seem very likely just on the face of it that there may be an important problem associated with using those squares that EA never bothered to code for because it couldn't happen without a third party tool like LE.

However, part of the fun of hacking anything has to do with finding the boundary conditions (software-wise) of what can and can't be done.  I have experienced several crashes now, but none of them were corruptive.  MORE IMPORTANTLY, to me, I never experienced any visible on-going corruption during the game, which would be the really frightening prospect. 

Total crash to desktop -- fine.  Little glitches that accumulate and destroy the game database -- not so fine.  The bug in the Ottomas family is an example of the latter.  Two different types of problems, and this seems to be much more benign, really.  I haven't heard of anybody else having a catastrophic failure.  In a way, I'm kind of hoping for one. 

It would be cool.  Sort of like the way watching the comet hit Yucatan 65 millions years ago would have been cool.  Sure, you're a goner but before you croak, you're like, "Whoa, dude, do you see what I..."

I did that two days ago (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=10117.msg278628#msg278628). Which was what dizzy replied upon. You don't need to bother testing those anymore .. they very clearly are broken.



How do you know that?

I suppose you never really do until you see evidence of it, which could happen quite a ways down the line.  But I have been playing with these for several nights now and I have seen no suggestions of on-going corruption.  And I'm going to continue playing it for the foreseeable future, so I'll report back if anything unusual comes up. 

Have you had reports of any corruption?  You have been posting these on the net for a while now (I haven't been following the MTS2 thread) so you would know if anybody has experienced that.

So, skybox and non-skybox blends in a funky way depending on the camera angle? I don't know because I haven't tried this, but maybe there's a way you could reduce the flickering.

That's how I used to make row houses.  The graphics look horrible like that though, and it's hard to stop the sims using what is meant to be their neighbours' land.


No, it's the graphical fighting of the lot imposter mesh next-door with the lot terrain and objects of the current lot.

I crashed it the first time, the next 5 times it was fine through a save and a day/night toggle.

kat

baratron,

Also, may make a back-up copy of the neighbourhood,package file @ the \Neighborhoods\ folder.  You'll need that if anything goes wrong.



There're already a couple of fallback alternative ways to accomplish this pretty stably in some early testings.  What really matters is if the most "ideal" and "easiest" way to work (for users) can be made.  "flickering" caused by graphical competition between the lot terrain and the imposter terrain can be fixed with null floor tiles on the extra lot terrain pretty well while sims can be blocked by invisible fences.


May delete them by ctrl-drag from the inner lot regions.  And if in your cases it fails, mod the wall.txt for the foundation to be deletable by the wall tool.  The tile can then be deleted by staircase with the moveobject on cheat.  Please attach a pic if the above suggestions didn't work in your cases.

This is also actively in testings, too.

Yeah, the reason is that EA messed it up in the first place and "didn't have the time" to fix it because of an "efficient" and a "pragmatic" scheme and a whole bunch of rushing alpha-buyers.

I have no evidence that it happens, no. But, more importantly, I have no evidence that it does *not* happen -- and until I do, I'll have to assume that it's a possibility, in the light of what dizzy said yesterday. I'm not in a position to draw my own conclusions here.



Exactly, thanks Inge. Words were failing me yesterday =).

I've been playing the 2x2 version of my brownstones for about a sim-week now. The family is up to the founder, hubby, a child, and twin babies, as well as a mastiff & mini-mastiff. Just had a crash on me at lot-load, which is actually the first crash on the lot. She wasn't fresh and CASy on move-in. Very, very rarely I have that on normal lots, so I'll see if it happens again.

EDIT: Didn't repeat.  :-\

To remove stuff out-of-reach after shrinking, did you try to use the demolition tool? I demolished outer walls with that, didnt try it on foundation, yet.

THANK YOU!! *hits Thanks button repeatedly and listens to the cacophony of bleating*

I knew this really, it dropped out of my head because this is the first time I've ever done "dangerous" testing. OK, problem solved :). Will move N005 over to a spare version of the game, where any amount of crap can happen to it :D.

I suspect I'll delete all of the unnecessary parts of the other Neighbourhoods. Hrm. If, after creating a vanilla game folder, I delete all but one of the Neighbourhoods, am I right in thinking the game will spontaneously recreate them again? So it's necessary to use the Clean Templates to stop 101 random sims from spawning?

Yup. Actually, I believe that number is over 200 if you have BV. I know that in Queen's Cove, I have one uni attached and one downtown, plus all three vacation 'hoods. Just generated townies twice and the downtownies once. I have 25 playables (including pets), 1 tour guide, no charlatans, and a total of 378 character files.

Flickering and other graphical problems...

One problem with the shrunken lots (not overlapping lots) is that you will get some minor glitchy graphics from the next door impostor in the winter time.  White loopy lines on the floor inside the house that, I guess, outline the shape of snow drifts from the impostor next door's two-square border. 

Another interesting test case idea:

Has anybody tried shrinking a lot that DOESN'T have walls at the edges?  I would like to know if those crash at 7pm.  I can't test it because lots I create don't crash, only lots by others. 

Many of us have all played with Andi's shrunken empty lot package for a long time now, without problem.  Those were created with the oooold LE program.  I wonder if the problem might be in the new LE itself, and unrelated to the actual placement of walls.  I remember using the oooold LE a couple EP's back.  I managed to bork a couple of my lots with it before I decided it was unsafe to use with OFB.

When I was talking about this on irc last night, Hook pointed out the problem is probably to do with the way the game displays shadows. Based on real world physics rather than knowledge of the game, wouldn't a shadow normally extend past the edges of the lot? This isn't something that would even normally occur to me, because my default graphics setup has shadows off. However, I wouldn't put it past the game to do the computations for displaying a shadow even if it then goes on to not display it!


My partner Richard came up with an idea which may help. Please forgive scanned-in bits of paper, I couldn't figure out how to create an image quickly enough using Adobe Photoshop Mickey Mouse Edition (a.k.a. Elements - it came free with my computer).

Richard suggested that we should not build lots with an overlapping or party wall shared between the houses. Instead, we should build the wall 2 squares in from the edge of the lot as usual. However - we could then use either a real wall or a fence that looks like wall along the front edge to give the idea of continuity.

Top-down views:
(http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/MATYstuff/scan001.jpg)
(http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/MATYstuff/scan002.jpg)

Corresponding front-on view:
(http://baratrons.mustbedestroyed.org/MATYstuff/scan003.jpg)
The black lines show what the player sees, the blue line shows the true start of the house. The green shaded area is "limbo". It is probably ok to place objects into this area as we have done so for years, but players should be warned not to try to move the true walls. Also, placing windows into the true walls would spoil the illusion of terracing.

It definitely seems worth trying this idea, because it might avoid the problem. Consecutive lots would share only a vertex, not an actual edge of wall, and this might make the difference. Someone could try this with the Base Game Starter and the Lot Adjuster, and put their lot up for testing. Even if it doesn't work with real wall, it could be possible to do it with a fence that looks like wall.

Do we have fences that look like walls yet?

The problem with fake walls is that you'd also need a fake roof, and that would probably be beyond the scope of this project.  :P

So far, I've never had a crash on one of my lots with a space on every side, and I've never heard that anyone else has had a crash on them either. They don't look like a true townhouse set-up, but do look very much like what we have going on in my subhood (well, in most subhoods) in Chicago. And, of course, there is no graphical oddity on the shared walls. My next set will be a bunch of pseudo-colonials all with at least a 1-space cushion.  Hummingbird Court/Queen's Cove is becoming very ecclectic:
(http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/2600/snapshot00000011743a52dor9.th.jpg) (http://img517.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot00000011743a52dor9.jpg)

Yes, fake walls do exist. See sticky in mts2 Build Mode forum for link. If you're happy using fences, you can completely ignore the whole shrinking business and do that, since they're allowed on the edge of lots anyway. Reasons I'm not happy using fences:

* You can't recolor them -- you'd need a clone for every single wallpaper you're using
* Fence colours are very difficult to match with wallpapers
* You can't stack them -- you'd need a separate clone for 1-, 2-, 3-, etc story houses, plus variants for every possible foundation height
* You can't put windows/doors in them -- this makes realistic building impossible; what kind of row house has a 4m party wall?
* Plus, what dizzy said .. roofs would still not work  (although I believe there are some fake roofs at mts2, from the base game era)

So, yeah. Not really an alternative for me, personally, but ymmv.

Eta, another point: they don't collapse with the walls .. so they'd be horribly in the way during gameplay.


With "Consecutive lots would share only a vertex, not an actual edge of wall" you mean when the front and back walls go all the way, but the side walls are 2 tiles in from the border? That could be worth a try, yes. Then at least we could do something that *looks* like a row house.



This has come up in R+D a few times -- empty lots don't pose any problems it seems. But since, as you say, we already have Andi's mini lots, there's not much of a point in shrinking empty lots is there? (Actually, if I recall correctly, Andi created those more or less manually though, not by shrinking with the LE .. there is a post in the old LE thread @ mts2 that explains how. Hang on. Here: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1376196#post1376196 -- I see no mention that he ever released a version with a shrinking feature. Pointer?)


Eta:
That might be a good point. Do you happen to have any idea whether turning shadows on/off in the options might make a difference? On the builder's side, the user's side, or both? Or does the game calculate them regardless (and fall over its feet), just not display them when they're turned off?

Ah.  I thought Andi made those with LE.  At the time, people were saying you could skip the download package and just use LE. 

I tried doing that, with mixed results.  I ended up with one lot that had a huge gaping blue hole in the expanded side (as seen from neighborhood view), where apparently you could see the sky underneath the hood.  Another one just borked the whole neighborhood.  I had to manually delete the lot and keep my mouse cursor away from it thereafter.  Those were commercial lots -- at the time OFB had just come out, and smaller lots were very attractive for people setting up very small businesses.

Andi's package works great.

Until someone can make imposter and neighbourhood views of fake roof and fake-wall fences, these won't give out the graphical illusion as wished even for NL or above EP.

To confirm that oneself, may use 11dot arch-fences or others to try this approach out. But, I'm sure it takes more for this to work.  I've read that lod 90 may be a key to it.

But, this won't allow more usable space for building on a 10x20 or 20x10 lot.  The buildable area left will be "6 full grid wide plus 2 half of the diagonal grids" wide times the 8 to 9 full grid long/deep.  Lol, it's the last 2 lines and the grid row that are not buildable.  The diagonal walls and perpendicular walls can form on the last second grid rows to the edges.



pbox,
Actually, they can as long as the graphical parts are well adjusted.

As for the fake roof, I think if it's just the walls that can't be on the edge, how about just floor tiles at the edge to act as roofs?

As for blank lot stability, testings on the shrunken blank lots can help support the point that the newer LE/LA are actually working well probably except the usages breaking the build tool limits.  And that's why there were tests on that posted in the MTS2 R&D thread.

I've not read any info about Andi had released any shrinking code before a person claimed to be his daughter announcing his death.


All,

I've got a few 1x1 lots for testings if anyone is interested. This series has all 4 directions for both the residential and community for lushy neighbourhoods.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=1791006&postcount=291

If anyone wants to use fake row houses made with fake walls that's been available for some time, and you can make them on a small lot template such as Marylou offers.  The whole point of asking Mootilda to give us shrinking is so that we can have real row houses.

A compromise is to have the front and back walls stretching the whole width, but to set the side walls into the lot by one tile.  The house will be narrower inside than it appears to be from the front, but its appearance once set into the row will be preserved.

OK, so you could have yet another huge set of fences with window cutouts I suppose .. one set per window type.


No floortiles above level 0 at lot edges, unfortunately. For that you'd have to shrink again.

For me the risks involved are worth it. I am having a blast constructing houses that fit together, for the realistic look and to make playable small lots of all kinds. Fake walls/roof dont do it for me, I am sorry.

Ingeli, I'm getting a crash on load every other time with my 2x2 brownstone (on right and left edges) now. As much as I'm all for living dangerously, there's just a point where it gets too damn annoying to play the lot. I was playing it for about 9 sim-days before it started doing this, and I'm one who has barely gotten anyone's lots to crash. So now all my on-edge lots will just be deco. Which is fine, in the long run...there's no way I'd ever fill all the lots in the now four built blocks out of eight I have to do. Anyways, I wouldn't play them unless you like throwing things. I'm moving the Ridges for the third time in a generation to the new colonials I made last night, all of which have a 1-space buffer and are 2x1's and 2x2's. Which means that they will now have a 5-bedroom house big enough to support the 10 kids Randolph wanted, but Brooklyn's too old to have more than a couple more. I don't do elixir.

Of course, the keyword is "playable" - maybe I will agree with you when I playtested the houses more. But its good even if you can make them for deco. Time will tell.

Omg, I think I killed the discussion here somehow as well.  :-\

I'm still playing them, although i'm past just 'testing" them.

Interesting observations: If you can just get past that first day in the house, everything works fine thereafter.  I had a great deal of trouble, though, getting past the first day on a vacation lot using one of my own packaged 1x1's.  I tweaked the lot a couple of times in build mode, but it still crashed when I moved a family in.  Finally, I tried repainting and changing the roof, which I Had done before successfully.  Strangely, that worked.  I haven't done an exhaustive test on this, but I wonder if just changing the roof in unoccupied build mode is enough to fix the lot.

This might sound silly, but why don't you try packaging the lots without roofs, no 'roof flat tiles, anything. Leave the lot open at the top. Then when the lot is placed, whoever has downloaded it can go into it in unoccupied build mode and add a roof. Might just work if what Doc Doofus is saying about changing the roof colours is all he needs to do. ;)

It's very unlikely that this condition would corrupt anything, because the game simply crashes and burns spectacularly, preventing the data from saving.

There is only one condition under which this could potentially damage the game saves, and that is if a character was created in that session: I have noticed that the game will write out character files for characters that should not have been committed to disk yet, as can be seen when doing CAS on totally deleted neighborhood, and if the game were to terminate unexpectedly, those files would get left behind, gunking up your data.

A-ha .. thanks for that info. Might that be an explanation for why only CAS sims seemed to crash? The game writing those character files before/during/after the shrinking business, I mean?



Firstly, I'm not going to package any shrunk lots (and I hope nobody else will either) before this isn't fixed; secondly you can't add roofs edge to edge on any lot (except allegedly hipped auto-roofs), so it wouldn't work anyway.

I honestly don't know why CAS sims crash. Does this only afflict CAS sims fresh off the boat, or does it also afflict sims that, at one point, may have originated as CAS sims, but have been played for some time? What about born-in-game? It is entirely possible that the CAS-sim issue is purely a red herring. I would imagine the true issue is still objects being placed in illegal places on the lot. Clearly, there is something about walls that is bad for the game when the wall is placed flush with the edge of the lot. Does the problem entirely go away when the wall is set one tile in (the game normally insists regular walls be two tiles in, but greenhouse walls can be placed at one tile)? Clearly fences do not trigger the problem. What about if the wall is placed such that only the edges run into the side? You could simply leave that "edge" unsealed, as it is offworld anyway.

Pescado,

Actually, I've manually made a 14x20 lot as the smallest overlapping lots for rowhouses.
Since it's done manually, I can't be expected to edit the arrays chunk by chunk to go to both the left and the right of the lot.

So, in this instance, the 4 block rows are on the left hand of the lot.

Here's the link to reach that lot download "Moi_DR14x20_LightdeFL.rar"
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=1791493&postcount=295

Also just in case for those who may be interested, that post has shown how the lot terrain is easily switched.



As for lots with just walls @ the edges, I've not come across a crash at all so far personally.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=1811531&postcount=859

However, the roof tests got me in questions.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=1814222&postcount=963
http://www.modthesims2.com/showpost.php?p=1815065&postcount=989
Only the half gabled roof with 3 attic walls at the edges had crashed by the day/night toggle @ build mode but then no more crash on newer instances of that same build feature and the only difference is the saved fixed lot was then rotated in the same neighbourhood.  Gonna test if that's a factor.

Roofs crossing the trimmed and the reserved absolutely caused crashes on loading in all cases in my experiments.   That fits in pbox's roof test results.
However, new CAS families can still move in and played well for at least a sims day!  There's at least the shadowing problem.  The arrays for it was clearly messed up.

Please note I "clamped" the neighbourhood.package file and sometimes even the lot package file with simpe to avoid over-writing on these files in the experiments.  I might delete the tmp files as well or let them replace dependent on if the testing resulted in a crash.

The reason for the 2-square limit on walls (but not on fences) might have to do with things like box windows, which can extend out from the window an extra space or two.

I have had crashes with NON-CAS Sims...  But the problem is more reproducible using CAS Sims, so it makes more sense to test it that way.

This may be bullshit speculation, but I think the problem has to do with something not getting initialized correctly.  Perhaps tweaking the building just the right way causes the game to do some necessary housecleaning that removes the problem.

The ones that I build in my BV game work fine every time, but the ones that I plop down as new copies from a PACKAGED version of that same house seem to have problems that require a build-mode tweaking to correct.

PBox or somebody said that there were reports on MTS2 of somebody having problems with a house that had a flat roof.  I haven't tried that.

I didn't mean offer them for general download, I meant for testing purposes. I can't see these lots ever working anyway and I wouldn't ever either 1) make one for general download or 2) download one for playing with.

ps. You came across as very rude and terse in your post. All that was lacking was a emotie giving me the finger or saying 'you suck'.

Is that a legal lot size? I thought neighborhood terrain was parceled out in 10x10 blocks as a minimum size quantum? So how is it that you can make a *14* size lot? Wouldn't this still be a 2x2?

It can be done.  I accidentally made an L-shaped 11x10 lot when I was testing shrinking manually.

What does the game think of this, though? Is this treated as 2x2 or an oddly-shaped 1x1?

Have you forgotten where you are, EMMA? But anyway, ALL EMMAS SUCK.

*smacks forehead

Of course, this is Maty-all good manners must be left at the door before ye enter :P

Pescado,

It's the neighbourhood presentation limitted to 10x10 tiles scheme in terms of the scale measurement in lot (lot grids).
so, a lot can be 30x30 in its size in terms of lot grids while its presentation in the neighbourhood  can be 1x1, 1x2, 5x6 or a matching one 2x3 or 3x2.
Or even vice versa, 7x7 in the neighbourhood can represent a 20x20 lot.
Note the lot's actual location can be switched or tweaked from its original location.



The 14x20 lot I made has 1x1 presentation in the neighbourhood view, so you can see how the rowhouse illusion can be approached.
Since there'll be no after-build or after-play lot shrinking, it's assumed to be as safe as the mini plain lots.  After all, manual resizing relies on the game engine to do the rests to fix the arrays by itself, so we assume the game engine can presently fix better than adding or trimming arrays.

But if we can figure out all the essential precautions, LA may eventually do a better job with more features.

The expected largest and most stable lot is still 64x64.  I'll release it once tested more and longer in more instances... 

But so far, these manually resized plain lots are working fine just like the mini lots in my experiences.  Surely, anyone if interested can download them to test.  They're all attached in the MTS2 R&D thread.  Search "14x20" and/or "64x64" in that thread.

Yet, to get the "ideal" type of row-house, we're still looking forwards to any solution to the shrinking method.

As far as I am concerned the feature is completed and working, in my game :)  It hasn't yet crashed for me, and frankly I don't mind if it does, I will just load the game up again.  I might move the family out of that particular house if I can't play it :)

This is an interesting area for study, as an alternative to the current LotExpander shrinking feature.  However, I don't believe that we can consider this to be safe, just because these lots aren't shrunk.  I'd need more evidence that the game is able to properly handle lots with mismatched sizes.

Lol, the walls at the edges are all working fine with me personally just like Inge's experiences.

Most roofs are working well in my base game as well except the one in question.

I guess people can just build their walls, foundations, half-walls and roofs (those can't built on the whole last grid row at the edges) before lot shrinking and build the rests (including windows, doors, garages, etc...) after the lot shrinking.  That should be a safer approach than trimming a fully built lot.  Crossing walls, roofs, halfwalls on both the trimmed and the reserved is still regarded as a no-no unless it's for experiments.

lol, 14x20 and 64x64 lots are working well in my experiments and so I personally think they're safe... :D in my game copies, settings, and usages.
Sorry, there was a defect in that 14x20 copy but now fixed. please re-download that one for testing.
Please note that currently, any new 2D array added may use 41 instead of 57, and now I'm considering to make the 2D arrays values to follow the next 10x scheme for foreseeable additions.


After all, I'll test them further... :D  I shan't test them in EP4 or SP...  Those I shan't buy and personally don't want them unless someone give them to me as gifts so then I may have a copy of them.

the greenhouse fence may just well support that the last 2nd lining may not be as significant to be limitted to built on. After all, there might have been fixes on this since EP5. remember, EP 5 is actually a big-fix patch to improve and enhance the game interface and that's what Maxis should head on.  Maxis needn't create beautiful meshes or texturing, modders know what they like best and do their arts.  Maxis needs make the object bases to facilitate modders' creations or arts and  improve and enhance the game interface.  I guess I said this over and over.  And seemingly, Maxis has picked this up by chance or what.

PS. the sauna room is an interesting object to study for walls.

All in all, I personally still want the row houses by means of shrinking the lots.

Just tried playing your 14x20 lot.  Crashed within a minute or so of starting to play.  Tried again, crashed again.  It really doesn't like adding maxis-made terrain paints.

Mootilda,,

Sorry for a defect in that copy. My mistake...
I've updated the post for the download, and I'm now pretty sure the lot texture also affects the terrain painting.
Please re-download it for further testing... :)

eek, I can't replicate what I did now...
The shadowing doesn't go the way it was...

Now, I doubt myself too about these lots ...

Now... is *that* possibly what's causing the crashing?  Terrain paints on the shrunk bit?   I know terrain paints have been implicated in crashing in other contexts.

Not a problem.  Thanks for the update.  I'll try it again, when I get a chance.

In general, I think that these mismatched-size lots are an interesting area of study... I'm just not sure that the game will like them any better than the shrunken lots, in the long term.  I was really pleased to see that I could add a wall to the left lot edge without any problems at all - this would be cooler than shrunken lots (since the edges are buildable), if we could get it to work.

No, I doubt it.  After I got the crash with niol's lot, I tried adding terrain paints to various of my shrunken lots without any problem.

Then again, I've never added terrain paints *before* shrinking - that's an completely different test.  Could someone see whether there's a correlation between terrain paints on the original lots and crashing on the shrunken lots?

I'll go test that now.  I have just tested a width-shrunk beach lot and that worked fine in spite of some wave machines stranded off-lot trying to animate invisibly without a location to do it in.

Nope - no crash even with shrunk-off groundpaint.  :(   I feel as if I don't fit in!  Everyone else has managed to make at least *one* crashing lot

Not me.  No crashes with any of my shrunken lots.  Then again, I haven't been trying very hard.  I've probably only played a few hours in the last 2 months.

Not me.  I haven't had any crashing at all.  Not with my lots or anyone else's.

lol, I could only make a crashing case with ambiguous result for the half gable wall in the base game with LE. 127B.  But then the rest are fine.

only with LE1277 did I get some crashing cases.

I guess I've already stated the procedures of my approaches in the testings, so I can't think of reasons other than the HW and OS.

I personally still think there's at least a conflict with the shadowing... probably the arrays for it may not be not interpretted as the way LE/LA treats them or it's interpretted in more than that way..

My standing points are:
1. day/night toggle is related to the sun lighting and shadowing: the direction and coloration (RBG ; more yellowish during daytime while bluish at night) are simply switched
2. 1900 is the time when these switch.  If we can start a lot before 0600 to check out the 0700 change, we may further confirm it something in the day/nioght switch that caused a crash.
3. out of tests for the roof crossing the trimmed and the reserved, it shows the shadowing has problems.


I'm making a 20x20 in a 1x1 lot to see if any additional array added will follow the manual preset values.

But one person said they had a mod to make nighttime start at 6pm, and they still got their crashing at 7pm.  That's how the 7pm walkby rumour started (I think)

so, what's the mechanism to get the game to switch to the night around 1800?
Does it affect other settings?

If that reported case is true, then my suspected cause is false or that can be an another factor for a crash.

Pretty unfortunately, it can have more than 1 factor.  :-\

1. Shadowing,
2. nighttime sounding,
3. what else happens around 1900?  Maybe, we need a list of that... :D

Many things like vampires awakening happens at 7pm, plus there are range checks that will come up like IIRC exterminators stop showing up if you call after 7pm.

Yes, but all those things are softcode. It is extremely unlikely that they are the things causing the crash given how isolated they are. Codes like that are all isolated on objects which are not even commonly present on the lot.

I can quite easily make the game crash with soft code. In fact, it's pretty easy to crash the game with Lua code.

I really have to disagree with this.  What JM says is true: if the game crashes, then it won't have time to save the corrupted data.

But, my concern is this:  The game seems to work most of the time.  However, at least one person has experienced increasing numbers of crashes over time.  I'm concerned about what the game is doing with the "corruption" when it doesn't crash.

The access violation means that the game is accessing random memory.  It could easily be corrupting random stuff in its own internal memory without causing an access violation.  The O/S isn't going to stop the game from doing whatever it wants to with memory which belongs to the game - it only really stops programs when they try to access memory which is outside of valid memory space.  So, anything that's loaded into the Sims 2 memory space is in danger of being corrupted.

We know that the game doesn't have strict checks for data corruption.  It could be blindly continuing on, corrupting little bits of stuff as it goes.  If our suspicion about out-of-world objects is correct, the game is only trying to access memory which is "a little bit off" from where it should be.  Given the huge amount of data in a lot file, the most likely thing being corrupted (at least initially), is the lot itself.  So, no crash and the user saves the lot to play another day.  The new bits of corruption are saved with the lot.  The next time it's run, the game corrupts the lot a bit more.  Over time, perhaps it corrupts the neighborhood, or other lots being played, or sims.

I'm not saying that this is happening.  I'm saying that it's a possibility.  That's why someone said that it's better to have a spectactular crash than to have a little bit of corruption which grows and grows.

Some of us have been playing these lots without any sign of corruption or crashes.  Perhaps the shrinking code doesn't corrupt all lots.  Unfortunately, we don't have a LotAnalyzer which will check a lot for corruption and tell us what's corrupted and whether the corruption is spreading.  That's why I consider all of these shrunken lots potentially bad - even if they've never had a crash.

My suspicion is that the person who has nighttime starting at 6:00 doesn't truly have nighttime then. With Gunmod's Radiance Lighting, dusk falls at 6:00, and true dark doesn't start until 7:00. It's actually a bit darker internally between 6-7. On the couple of lots I could get to crash consistently (oddly, neither of them mine, although I did eventually achieve crashes on my own), I crashed both on day/night toggle from build/buy and on natural progression using the lighting mod - at 7 pm.

Now with my lots that have 1 space on each side, I've still yet to get a crash. Granted, I'm not playtesting at this point with a CAS sim, but I did get crashing around Day 7 on lot load with non-CAS sims on a lot with walls at the edges. The 1-space colonial I'm playing now is at about Day 22.

I just skimmed most of this thread again and can't find any such statement. Inge, are you really sure? Do you have a pointer?

All I've seen seems to indicate the opposite: lots of crashes happening when people (me included) toggle night in build mode, regardless of in-game time. Lots with no lights have been crashing too.

I believe what you're thinking of might be the lights: there are a few fixes that turn on outdoor lights at 7PM (when it gets dark) and not 6PM (as per default) -- people have been talking about this in this thread. (Or, as Zazazu said, a lighting mod that makes use of the dusk and dawn stuff)

It just occurred to me that maybe CAS sims tend to crash the game because they tend to be at the edge of a contiguous memory pool (I'm assuming that the way they allocate memory is using a pool technique). If this is the case, then maybe the errant pointer is corrupting the sim character file (or nearly so).

It was that his lights come on at 6, not that it gets dark at 6.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this:
(snipped from Zazazu's Simsample quote above)

support that theory? As in, if the game gets to write those corruption-prone sim files to disk, they don't get smashed (or: get in the way) when the light/shadow change occurs (because they're safely out of reach)?

If this is so, or perhaps even if it *might be* so, the cas sim issue would be perhaps be reduced to a side problem .. they suffer the results from a problem with redrawing the night scene, but they aren't the cause of it.

Does this make sense?

(I have seen crashes with no sims involved -- in a completely empty hood, clean templates and all -- which in my eyes also means the sim files aren't causing anything)

This tells me that if what I surmise is the case, then saving the game does some memory-juggling which causes the said character data to plunged into the middle of random allocations, thus rendering the errant pointer harmless with respect to generating CPU-interrupting exceptions.

All of which is to say that indeed CAS sims are merely a possible correlation to The Problem Factor rather than part of the causation.

My own suspicion is that there is some field (a square, a field, an index variable, a whatever) that would be normally initialized by the game is sometimes NOT being initialized because walls are on the edges.  However, the flawlessness of the gameplay once you achieve 7:01pm makes me think that when the game gets the opportunity to do some normal housekeeping procedure, things get cleaned up.  That is why I find it interesting that tweaks to the house in build mode so often fix the problem.

Mootilda, I'm not as worried as you are about the corrupted data from the hanging pointer.  Until we know what the problem is, there's no way to know for sure, but nobody has had that kind of corruption yet.  I'm much more worried about the kind of corruption that could be caused by a half-written file interrupted by a crash, or a character file out of sync because of interruption by a crash, as J.M alluded to.

The game's Simantic code interpreter is a virtual machine, written in C++.  Interpreters tend to be more robust than native-code programs when it comes to things like hanging pointers and uninitialized variables.  They do crash, but usually with more grace and little damage. 

So, new CAS sims are more advised to run on empty blank lots and get saved first to be older sims before getting evacuated out of the blank lot and moved into a built lot, especially a shrunken lot?

Just wonder.


2 years ago, I downloaded a set of custom windows which crashed my game copy completely dead including both the custom folder and the game files.  I lost my favourite sims at the time and lots.  (No, they don't work any more even with a new game copy or a new custom folder.)

Since then, I don't download windows from those I can't know a bit from.


As for whether walls at the edge is a major cause, I think we need shrunken blank lots and wall at various different locations to help make a point on it.
But in my base game copy, all lots of plainly "wall at the edges" by LE/LA127B didn't get a crash at all. So, I conclude it's at least not a sufficient cause itself.

Simantics is not your average interpreter. There is almost no type checking done (outside of an Expression primitive), scope and privacy are completely user implemented, and your only clue to when you pass a bad Id to something like GSC or a Dialog is the Windows Error dialog.

Ooh Dizzy, I see you're sporting a proud pair of bonfires there :)

Well, none of us can really know how well or poorly Simantics was implemented, because we don't have source and neither of us worked on it.  I'm simply making a general observation about interpreters and virtual machines.  I've implemented a lot of interpreters, mostly for AI friendly languages like Lisp and Prolog and Logo, which are all very similar, and more basic procedural languages like Basic in its many flavors, and a couple of new languages of my own weird design that were used for proprietary in-house systems.  One of the unique things about interpreters is that they (generally) never have direct access to any machine memory, even through a pointer, because all pointers and variable bindings are managed by the machine.  The machine usually has its own memory management and garbage collection system.  That's why, for instance, when you crash a Java program, you will get a nasty message from the Java machine, but not from the OS.  I take you at you word that Simantics doesn't have the quality robust error-checking that a language like Java has, but they still (VERY likely) have the similarity that memory addressing is indirect and layered.

This is all just to make a bullshit speculative argument that if the virtual machine itself is crashing, it's probably TOO catastrophic to do much damage.

It pretty much goes without saying, and even in Lua (which is pretty low-level for a script language) you do not access memory directly. I can make Lua crash also, but only the Sims 2 implementation. You see, that's the common element.