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InfraGreen's avatar
InfraGreen
5 years ago

Unusual Bug: Inactive Children/Toddlers Getting "Lost" Instead of Aging Up

So to expand on the title: this isn't a case of those kids getting culled at all. These sims are still in relationship panels (albeit with a blank portrait), show up on party invites if stuck as children, can be chatted with on the phone, etc. They are still technically a part of their original households. But they won't show up if invited over for whatever reason and are essentially not in the world at all. If I install MasterController and go to Status -> Personal for that sim, they are listed as "out of world". Even worse is that the households they are in cannot be made active, and if attempting to move anyone else from the household into them, will cause the game to be stuck at "processing" the move. And that I don't have a good cause or solution for it.

It happens in multiple saves (all my testing has been in a fresh Moonlight Falls because it tends to hit the same few pre-made households within a week, but I also ran into it in Bridgeport, Sunlit Tides, and Appaloosa Plains in the past). The EPs I have on or off don't seem to matter. The cause: unknown, possibly CC. I have been working to figure out the problem packages but it seems to be multiple ones and even those that I've used without issue in the past (Colorbox's elder female clothing) or content that's reasonably popular now and not reported as problem causing (Ifcasims hair). Nothing shows up as corrupt or even a duplicate/conflict on Delphy's dashboard and yet the problem persists. So if anyone's experienced this bug and has identified problem pieces, lemme hear it. Or maybe this is a red herring. I can still do elimination tests but it takes up to a sim week of waiting.

The solution: I've only found one so far that fixes the issue after it hits and it is Overwatch and ErrorTrap. Well of course. But the thing is that I usually don't play with them for reasons and the solution isn't perfect anyways:

1. It seems to only kick in when I make the affected households active. I don't play mutiple households so this isn't just something I naturally would do anyways.
2. It doesn't always work (in my first save where this hit, I had both mods and others in the NRaas site and it wasn't able to fix my town's lost toddler, so I ended up transferring her genetics to a random "pod person" sim and manually attaching the new sim to her old parents and so on...it could have been a different issue but it had all the hallmarks of this)
3. If it does work, it has altered the face of the affected sim on more than one occasion. Not optimal.
4. It's better to not have the problem at all than to have two mods scramble to fix it.

For what it's worth I have repaired and fully reinstalled my game on multiple occasions in the time I've experienced this (for other reasons), I'm currently working from a new "The Sims 3" folder, and I've been on patch 1.69 since its release.
  • igazor's avatar
    igazor
    5 years ago
    What you are describing is exactly what happens when a sim is culled. They become homeless sort of like hibernating NPCs are with the MC identifier as "out of world." Eventually, if things worked as they should, their data will stop showing up altogether. The inability to switch active households would be a sign of game corruption. Of course the underlying question we are unable to answer at the moment is why children should ever have to be removed from the game this or any other way in the first place unless the child care social workers are involved.

    You are correct in that Overwatch and ErrorTrap shouldn't really be charged with fixing situations like this once they have happened and in many cases when added in after the fact they will not be able to. But if they were in play the entire time, as they are designed to be, they should be helping to prevent things like this from happening. Or at least that is the general user experience. It's fine if you don't like that solution but together with other forms of routine town maintenance like doing up a MC Reset Everything run from the Town menu on City Hall every few sim weeks, it's probably just about the only one out there for it.

    http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

    I've never heard of CC causing an issue like this one, but there is of course a first time for everything.

    It's possible that AwesomeMod offers some protection against this issue, but it's been so many years since I've used it myself that I wouldn't really be able to explain how or under which circumstances.
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    5 years ago
    For what it's worth, the same thing has happened in my game, even with ErrorTrap and Overwatch (and other NRaas mods, but not StoryProgression) present. But I can only remember two instances where a child disappeared like that. I didn't know how to fix the issue at the time for the kids. However, I did fix it for a couple of adults by using MasterController to Add Sim to a different household. It might be worth trying.

    MC doesn't run anything unless you tell it to, so it could sit in your Mods folder, or not in your user data folder at all if you want, doing nothing until you need it. And you could MC reset the sims after you move them back in, or the whole town if it's been a while.

    As for the altered faces, that's the kind of thing that happens when the save has already lost the information covering a sim's genetics, as it eventually does with all the sim's data. The game will have to reassign some features, which may or may not have anything to do with the parents' features (it does with NRaas mods involved, at least). And maybe it "remembers" things like hair and skin color while losing track of slider positions, so the sim seems kind of similar. But it's essentially a reroll of the missing information.
  • deedee828thesim's avatar
    deedee828thesim
    5 years ago
    This is an odd coincidence, but I was going through a box of family photos recently and found several pages of notes from a Sims 3 game I played many years ago. On this paper I'd noted an odd instance of 'losing' a family in my game. I'd just recently moved a sim and her children out of the active home so I could move her in with the childrens' father. I think I used 'kick out' as I'd used it just fine previously.

    And it worked, or I thought it did anyway, as a bit later I saw her last name on a home in town. But then when I went to have one of her parents call her, her icon was in the relationship panel, but it wouldn't let me. I thought maybe she was just working or something, until her and her children's icons went blank. I was still searching for where the father was in town to get him moved in, and eventually found him, but when I tried to move him in via edit town, the game wouldn't progress the move or it would immediately crash! Until one game play when she was just no longer in the home and I couldn't find her or her children anywhere in town.

    It was after that I started experiencing crashes or stuck processing any time I tried to use edit town. I ended up just saving all the family I had left, some with missing family members by this time, to my library, as that was the only method I knew and didn't have any mods in my game to do it another way. But this was in a long-term game with me switching families repeatedly as I was playing the town, Hidden Springs, rotationally.

    It wasn't until I moved the families to Dragon Valley, to continue the game, that I started having issues again, quite quickly in fact. But this also coincided with me having cc 'tall boots' start showing up on my nooboos and toddlers! Getting rid of the boots themselves did not stop the issue from occuring. We finally tracked down the issue as the boots were attached to a downloaded cc sim! Once I got rid of that in the game, I no longer had the issue, in Dragon Valley, or in any of the other towns I played after that.

    But if you've tested all your cc, including sims, and it's not resolved the issue, I'm not sure that it helps you with your saved games or families.
  • InfraGreen's avatar
    InfraGreen
    5 years ago
    I'm not going to disagree on the virtues of mod usage and I'm sorry if it came off as disrespectful. Obviously I use them sometimes and always respect the work you and others running NRaas do. Anyways the "remnants" of these sims are more than the data leftover from truly culled sims. I'm very aware of what the game stores for every sim to exist no matter what their end fate is and how to access some of it. But culled sims don't show up in the relationship panel nor on party invite lists and nor do they have a household or show up in one. Meanwhile this is what happens when inviting the household containing one of my bugged sims over and also when running MC's "status" check on them:

    Spoiler
    https://i.imgur.com/76e1Ced.png

    https://i.imgur.com/Qvv5bOx.png


    Status compared to one who's family moved out in Week 1 (same for a sim who was killed in Week 1 but I'm not taking the same screenshot twice) Obviously I have no household to call in this case:

    Spoiler
    https://i.imgur.com/STTHWcG.png


    Like it's a weirder situation. I only went with the "but my CC" route because there has been some combo of packages that has let me avoid this bug. And yeah, in a fresh save, Overwatch and ErrorTrap did prevent it from going further (I forgot to mention that MC's Reset feature doesn't help this one bit, try as I might) but one of the bugged sims ended up with an altered face again. I'm not going to lose sleep over it again and thanks anyways. I probably had more to say but it got lost in the flurry of chores and dog wrangling, sorry.
  • InfraGreen's avatar
    InfraGreen
    5 years ago
    @puzzlezaddict: you got lost in a sea of unintended notifications...and I'm bad at writing OPs when I'm frustrated (so all the time) so I forgot to clarify that one of those instances happened in a modded game too. Overwatch, Errortrap, and several others. One confirmed missing kid (not fixed by adding to another household, she's the townie kid I had to recreate from the ground up) and a few I was suspicious about. But it was only in one save and I didn't feel like replicating it for science, it would have taken a while. MC reset didn't help me in any of those. As for the faces, I noticed that they did still look related to their parents but I wasn't checking slider positions.

    I don't know how much help either of us can give to each othr but I guess it's "nice" that this isn't a quirk of my game alone.
  • InfraGreen's avatar
    InfraGreen
    5 years ago
    And an update I guess: reinstalled Windows on my desktop, reinstalled TS3, started from a fresh Sims 3 folder, and decided to redownload my CC from the source instead of relying on backups I had (if some package got corrupted down the line, WHO KNOWS). It hasn't really been successful. I'm not sure what else can be done.

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