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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 16th Jan 2018 at 10:06 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Free Time, Apartment Life
Default What's wrong with my BG neighborhoods?
In December, I had to replace my computer tower. The hard drive was successfully cloned and my game for the most part runs as well as it ever did, sometimes better. It still crashes occasionally, but I've primarily played Original Strangetown and dear old corrupted Drama Acres since that happened, so I tend to regard those as a natural hazard of playing hoods I know to be broken.

I have a Retro Sims folder with defaults, a narrow selection of downloads, etc., in which I've built an early-20th century Pleasantview with Widespot attached. I got all the households set up and played through one round; but when I attempt to enter the Dreamer house in the second round it crashes to desktop. I went into the Strangetown for that folder and the Smiths did the same thing. After various tests I decided the whole folder had corrupted somehow, took it out, and generated a new one, with a copy of the downloads folder etc.

This new one did not have any of the base game hoods, even though Tarlia's cleaned versions were still where they belonged in the program files. After trying a couple of dodges to force them to generate, I downloaded new copies of the base game hoods and placed them directly into the Neighborhoods folder in the data files. These loaded up fine.

However, the new one crashed on the Dreamer household, too, so I moved them to a new lot and they played fine. But now it's repeat-crashing when I try to load the Pleasant house. And out of curiousity I tried to open the Smiths, and they're crashing, too!

This problem only occurs in the Retro game; everybody loads great in the original. I suppose the crashing could be a CC problem - presumably in the defaults, since it's not letting me open some households at all, and I will be testing that. However, the problem with the base game neighborhoods not resetting on generating a new Sims2 folder can't possibly be a CC issue.

But I also want to know whether symptoms like this might indicate that the hard drive was imperfectly cloned, and that I may need to get into the installation files and fix things, or even (heaven forfend!) actually reinstall? Because if that's so, the sooner I do it, the better.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
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Scholar
#2 Old 17th Jan 2018 at 1:40 PM
In my opinion, uninstall and re-install now. Otherwise every time your game glitches you're going to be wondering if you should have.
I reinstall from disks for testing A&N quite often, at least one per month, usually on an old Pentium 3 computer.
If you're installing from disks it takes around two to three hours to do them all, ignore any rubbish about patching or running the game as you go, every EP will patch every earlier EP as you install them and there is no patch for M&G. After installing all the disks delete the Sims2 folder that some EPs create as they install and let the game build a fresh one.

It does make no sense that the game fails to copy basegame's neighbourhoods to a new Sims 2 folder, if there was a fault in Windows registry and the game failed to locate basegame then it just would not run.
Mad Poster
#3 Old 18th Jan 2018 at 11:39 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Chris Hatch
ignore any rubbish about patching or running the game as you go, every EP will patch every earlier EP as you install them and there is no patch for M&G.


This was true of the original "The Sims" series, but when Maxis/EA discovered that not all players had or wanted all the EPs and thus were not getting all the patches, they decided to do it differently for Sims 2. If you have all the original disk releases like I do, NO patches are included with any of them and NONE of the EPs in that set will ever patch any other EPs. The patches were separate downloads that were originally available from the official web site and are now available here.

I think the compilations (Double Deluxe, Fun with Pets, etc.) are already patched and do not need anything further. The Ultimate Collection is also completely patched.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#4 Old 19th Jan 2018 at 2:27 PM
I went ahead and did the uninstall/reinstall yesterday and tested the Retro CC after getting a good reset Sims2 folder. I think the cloning must've been faulty, because a couple of times during the uninstall I got a message that a particular pack wasn't fully installed and had to be installed properly before it could be uninstalled. This was on SPs, not the Deluxe disc from which the BG neighborhood setup is derived, but I gave up expecting this sort of thing to make sense at the human level a long time ago. Now I'm wondering if I should uninstall/reinstall my word processor, too, just to be sure. Sims2 and word processing are all I do on this computer anyway.

It turned out a CC coffeetable I recently added was crashing the Pleasants, Dreamers, and Smiths - but only them. Which makes no sense but see above.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
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