A veritable cornucopia of glitches...

[DrNerd]

I have all EPs through Seasons and the H&M SP.  Game is patched.  Pulled Downloads folder, nothing was fixed.  Minimal hacks, all from MATY.

Things were going swimmingly in my 'hood until my Gen 4 Legacy kids came back from Uni.  Then things started going not-swimmingly.  I suspect BFBVFS is imminent.  I have a backup I can revert to, but it's older than I thought (Bad, bad Nerd, go sit in the corner.  I have learned my lesson, I swear) and if I can fix my game, I'd rather do that instead.  Any help would be much appreciated.

Community Lots:
*I can no longer leave household-owned community lots.  I have three, and this happens to all of them--they drive to the lot, and when I want them to leave, whoever I click on car and Drive Home with will get stuck in the "everybody out of the pool" interaction even if there are no more non-household members on the lot.  The only way to get them to stop is to use the debug mode to Force Error.  Once I've forced error, they stop doing "everybody out of the pool" but will start again if I tell them to leave.  If I call a taxi instead, they'll do "everybody out of the pool" when the taxi arrives and it's about 50/50 whether they'll get in the cab if I Force Error again.
*This does not apply to community lots that are either un-owned or owned by a non-household member.  I can go there, shop, and leave without problems.

Glitched Sim or Lot:
*One of my Gen 4 heirs is behaving oddly.  It seems like she keeps resetting herself.  On the community lot she owns, she was unable to do any sales interactions with customers, and the non-sales interactions were iffy.  She walks over to the other Sims, and then "jumps" like they do when you reset them, and won't initiate any interactions (it's like she has no free will, even though Free Will is on).  She also couldn't leave her lot.
*The same heir, when on a lot owned by someone else, couldn't be interacted with--any time I tried, she'd toggle between "I need help" and browsing.  Eventually she froze and wouldn't leave the lot.
*On her lot, when I try to put one of the cats up for adoption, animal control will show up like it should, but when the cat heads for the door, it will "jump" and not leave.  Eventually the animal control officer will walk off the lot and the car will disappear.
*The lot had a couple of glitches that seemed relatively minor at the time prior to the college years--the youngest child, when he was a toddler, still had a baby icon in the side panel and became a solid black "shadow toddler" when I entered the lot after his birthday.  I grew him up and back down with the Sim Modder and hadn't had trouble with him since.  Following the "shadow baby" glitch, the oldest teenager's face glitched--it just flashed blue and black, but having him Change Appearance in a mirror fixed it.



If you need more information, copies of the error logs, whatever, just tell me what you need and I'll go find it.

[notveryawesome]

I don't have an answer for your sims being unable to leave their owned community lots, but a flashing blue face on a teenager usually means that you are using a custom skintone that doesn't include the teen age group in it's file, and thus will not provide a face when a child grows up to teen. If you are using a custom skintone, perhaps try removing it. The teen will revert to the Maxis S2 skintone.

[Nec]

Might try using the lot debugger to nuke off-world loiterers on your business lot - there may be some shoppers left that aren't really there. If there are ghosts on the lot, sims will try to shoo them until the cows come home, and won't leave the lot until the ghosts are at rest.

For the other one, try deleting her, save and exit to neighborhood. Then reload the lot.

If you updated all of your hacks, try deleting groups.cache in your My Documents TS2 folder before you load the game next time.

[DrNerd]

Nope, no custom skintones.  He had custom hair, which showed up fine.  He just came home from school one day with no face.

I deleted the .cache files; nothing changed.

I definitely don't have any dead-Sim ghosts on my community lots, and even if I did, they wouldn't be active during the day.  Don't know about "ghosts" of shoppers that have-left-but-not-really.  And the odds of that being the case on all three of my owned community lots has to be pretty slim.

[jolrei]

Nope, no custom skintones.  He had custom hair, which showed up fine.  He just came home from school one day with no face.

Try getting your teen sim to a mirror.  Change appearance to full face makeup (like the rainbow face).
Take him to the mirror again and change appearance to how you would like the sim to look normally.  Face should be back.

[notveryawesome]

Now that I think about it, two of my teen sims got a flashing blue face when they had the Re-Nu-Yu Senso Orb reward object in their inventories (I wanted them to each have one when they went to uni without using any more reward points). As soon as I removed the objects from their inventories and sent them each to a mirror to change their respective appearances, their faces were permanently corrected.

[DrNerd]

The flashing-face glitch was fixed within a day or two of it showing up by Changing Appearance in a mirror.  He'd never used a Senso Orb, didn't have one in his inventory.

I've had a few Sims show up with default faces that are most definitely not their own (Malcolm Landgraab's son should not look like a Face Two, TYVM), but Changing Appearance fixes them as well.

The appearance glitches aren't what's making me run screaming for my backup.  The inability to leave household-owned community lots and the constant resetting of one of my heirs are what's making the game unplayable.