Shared user made neighborhoods and missing graves problem

[lechapeau]

This is a question to anyone who has ever used swapped or downloaded neighborhoods made by other people.
I've put together a neighborhood with a group of people at TSR and it's been available for download for a week now. Over 207 people have it but four have issues with their other neighborhoods gravestones disappearing.

Obviously gravestones are known to glitch, but from what we can see when they've installed this neighborhood and gone after to check other neighborhoods have found graves gone.
More than obviously this is bad.
So, why only a few, one is too many but could be put down to a random incompatability we couldn't be sure Beacon Falls was the cause.

Most of the installed families were sent as sims2packs, so I put them together, the others were checked before putting them into the game.
I did use the death creator hack on sims to be ghosts...

I thought that putting a neighborhood in couldn't affect the others, does anyone know what this could be?
It could still be coincidence, but if there's a reason we would like to know. And I know how annoying it is to lose the work we put in.

One person got it working by making a new EA Games folder and putting her back up in, but still can't use our hood in her game, another had her game crash each time a sim died.
She seems to have fixed that now by reinstalling and testing out her hacks, but it's scary to think that could happen.

Thanks for any help advice and knowledge you can give...

[J. M. Pescado]

Tombstones have been known to go spontaneously missing. To avoid damage from this, you should install "nounlinkondelete". THen if they go missing, it's easy enough to respawn them.

[lechapeau]

Hope is the wrong word, but I did hope it was that because we've tried to replicate it and had no luck.
I had nounlinkondelete in my game when I made it ( I do have your hacks in anyway in my normal game) 'just in case' because people did send sims to be killed for varying reasons to show as ghosts and I didn't want anything untoward to happen while I still had it.
Like I said, one seemed a coincidence but it grew to five that are affected last night and just saying 'it happens' is too harsh without checking things out.
One of the team were looking here for advice and saw that if the ghosts were out and haunting it may affect them while patching and we know one set were. Maybe there's a connection there and I guess it only needs one set for that to make a difference.
If there was anything we could do to stop it or warn about that they should or shouldn't do then that's what I was wanting, I'll go tell to use nounlink and warn against ghosts being out anyway.
TY anyway...Lol on the button, thought I 'behave' and press instead of saying it and I should've known and expected something like that from you!

[SaraMK]

I strongly recommend that people NOT attempt to insert a new neighborhood into an existing set. Simply renaming the neighborhood does not always work, since there is currently no way (even with SimPE) to change the internal numbers that the game uses (in part) to determine which neighborhood is which. One example of a potential problem scenario would be if someone had 5 neighborhoods, and then you gave them N005, and they renamed it to N006. They would be more likely to suffer problems than someone who had 4 neighborhoods and simply added yours, or even someone who had 3 neighborhoods and renamed yours to N004. I ran into various problems while working on my method of merging the three Maxis neighborhoods, and they mostly seemed to be the result of internal numbers clashing. Having one neighborhood affect others was generally a symptom of this clash.

In the future, I would recommend that you tell people to backup all their neighborhoods before even attempting to install yours, and that you strongly recommend for people to create a completely separate game set for the downloaded neighborhood. This would avoid all potential problems relating to clashes between internal numbers.

[lechapeau]

People are advised to back up, some think it's not needed or didn't see the instruction and we could say it's then their fault, but that doesn't mean we won't try to help.
Our hood was made as N007 which seemed to suit most people. We asked them to make a placeholder neighborhood and delete that when this was to go in or drop it in at the end of a string of their own neighborhoods.
I helped in a neighborhood project before and we had none of this back then, but there were no graves there if that was any kind of issue because it was pre Nightlife and the tombstones and ghosts sent didn't show up at all on the lot, and for me that caused trouble with then unlinked characters.
We tried to avoid unlinked characters in this one, but didn't bargain on this happeneing. But in that other hood people were renumbering often, and we were also renumbering the neighborhoods for them if they asked with still none of this happening.

For this people have been given links to file renaming programs...are you saying that this is wrong?
It's been suggested to play in another account or game for those with trouble, for some they choose not to and that's theirs to decide.

We are trying to find a common link between those with the problem but while some fit with one or other, others don't...

[SaraMK]

It isn't necessarily going to cause problems. From what I've seen in my tests, neighborhoods get some kind of identifier inside the ID Number entry in the N00# file. SimPE lets you access that entry, but apparently not all of it, and sometimes one neighborhood severely clashes with another. Ripping the ID Number out of another neighborhood fixes it, while attempting to change the visible numbers in SimPE does nothing. I finally had to conclude that there is some other number involved, that we can't see.

I don't think that renaming neighborhoods is going to cause problems in MOST cases. I'm fairly sure that the game creates a random number for each neighborhood, and the chance of two being the same is low.

The reason I wouldn't recommend anyone do it, is because I've run into several glitches that destroy neighborhoods completely, with no way to fix. They become corrupted and that's it, all you can do is delete the whole thing. I would rather take simple precautions to avoid any chance of problems.


I don't envy you the job of trying to figure out what went wrong for those people. I swap neighborhoods also (round-robin style), and it's a huge pain when someone messes up the neighborhood and we have to determine what exactly they did. It's hard to account for all the different computer setups, EP combinations, and hacks that people may have.

[lechapeau]

Exactly...
That would make sense for other neighborhood related problems as well that we hear of in 'help' threads. It's just the people it got changed for seem to be OK but figuring out the 'thing', if we can, that caused it for these others is not easy.
I also swap neighborhoods myself for various reasons very often, and know some people swap between them also with seemingly no problem.
The best we have at the minute is two people had it saved with ghosts out haunting at the time the new hood went in so that is maybe a likely reason for those. And while ghosts/tombstones appear to be a common problem, maybe the reason behind it is not at all connected and that part is coincidence.
Also that as graves are already buggy, that's where a problem could be most likely to show itself...
The first person who had this is sending her affected back up neighborhood for testing.
We'll see from that, if it works on another computer it has to be system/download/hack related. If it's the same, who knows if it will get pinned down, but we are trying...
Thank you for the input.

[MaximilianPS]

do u need a graveyard ?


plz, kill some townies to fill it with tombs 

[gjam]

This won't help lechapeau's problem, but reading this thread got me thinking. 

I use an alternate Sims 2 folder for testing that has been stripped down to load fast.  I created a custom neighborhood, then deleted the three premade neighborhoods.  It has only a handfull of downloads, and minimal hacks.  But looking at it I think I could delete even more--is it safe to delete the Tutorial neighborhood folder? What about the contents of the LotCatalog folder, the SC4Terrains folder (would you need to leave in the one you are using for the custom n'hood?), and the premade pictures in the Storytelling folder?  With all that gone it wouldn't be much larger than the neighborhood folder alone.  (Umm, talking about deleting all that from a newly generated set of files, not from the main game files, of course.)

So I'm wondering whether that would be a safer way to do a round robin or shared neighborhood--passing a sims 2 folder, rather than just a neighborhood folder.  That way, a defined set of downloads and hacks would be included--obviously more than I have in my test setup, but still fewer than most of us have in our main game--as well as no problems with changing the neighborhood number.  I guess it would make the issue of everyone having the same EPs and patches more critical, though, because of hack compatibility.  The round robins I'm familiar with have been limited to 4 or 5 players anyway, so that doesn't seem like a such huge obstacle, but maybe it could be in some situations.

[SaraMK]

is it safe to delete the Tutorial neighborhood folder? What about the contents of the LotCatalog folder, the SC4Terrains folder (would you need to leave in the one you are using for the custom n'hood?), and the premade pictures in the Storytelling folder?

Deleting Tutorial does no good. It is perfectly safe to do, but the next time you run the game, the damn thing will be back. DO NOT attempt to delete it from Program Files, by the way, as this will cause the game to crash horribly.

You can delete everything in LotCatalog. Those are just the lots in the bin. However, don't delete the folder, or else the game will regenerate it and the lots will be back. Just keep it empty.

You can safely delete anything inside the Storytelling folders.

So I'm wondering whether that would be a safer way to do a round robin or shared neighborhood--passing a sims 2 folder, rather than just a neighborhood folder.  That way, a defined set of downloads and hacks would be included--obviously more than I have in my test setup, but still fewer than most of us have in our main game--as well as no problems with changing the neighborhood number.

When I do round robins, all we pass is the Neighborhoods folder, which ONLY has the NeighborhoodsManager file and the N001 folder inside. We also don't pass around the contents of the Storytelling folder - we upload the pictures to an album instead. Pictures take up a lot of space.

Agreeing to keep the neighborhood in it's own game set is a very good idea. It prevents soooo many mistakes.

I realize what you are asking is how to make it EASY for people to install the neighborhood, so here is what you need to do if you want to give people the entire The Sims 2 folder rather than just the Neighborhoods folder. You only need to keep the Neighborhoods folder inside The Sims 2 folder! Everything else will simply regenerate when they run the game for the first time. SC4Terrains - it does not appear that it is necessary to keep a custom terrain (or the Maxis ones) inside this folder once it has already been used to create a neighborhood. I haven't done any extensive testing, however, so personally I like to keep the custom tertrain in there... just in case.
 
Inside the Neighborhoods folder, you can delete Tutorial, but everything else needs to stay. You don't need Storytelling if you want to do somthing else instead of using the in-game albums. Everything else is critical to running the neighborhood, so don't delete.

Also remember:

Cameras - if your neighborhood has lots on the edges of the terrain, you'll want to make sure everyone has the hack that lets them see more of the neighborhood.

Downloads - I think it's easier to just agree what custom content is being used. When I play, we pass along a "shopping list" -- if we add something new, like a new outfit for our just-turned-teen sim, we simply tell everyone where to get it.

I guess it would make the issue of everyone having the same EPs and patches more critical, though, because of hack compatibility.

EP and patch compatibility is ALWAYS critical in round robins. Once a neighborhood has been played by someone with an EP, it can NEVER be played by someone without that EP. So, it is critical that everyone have the same EPs installed.