stormwench wrote:
The only way I can imagine you plopped a driveway on terrain with a tree on it was that you had moveobjects on set so that the driveway ignored the tree. If not then there is something set wrong with the driveway that allows it to be placed on a tree.
If you did not have moveobjects on set then there is a likely possibility that you have some lot corruption issue that popped a tree up after the driveway was there, as a symptom of the corruption and at some point you may see more. Usually when something like that happens spontaneously I bulldoze and remove the lot and set down a new clean lot to get rid of whatever is going on and start over. Once there is a sign of corruption its a good chance that no matter what you try and do to solve it it will continue to corrupt at some pace and eventually you will just have a bad lot. It happens to me on test lots a great deal when I have tested numerous thing over a period of time and hit a few problems.
I tried both my driveways, where a tree was, even pulled back where the object (tree) was hidden and the driveways stayed red and could not be placed. I tried with moveobjects on and the driveway could be placed and I got you lag/freeze symptoms. Usually the worst that happens when you use moveobjects on is that the sim routing to an object that is layers is blocked or they interact with one one time and the other another time but then move away and it does not cause game problems.
Why a tree planted in a driveway or a driveway planted over a tree would cause issues I am not sure except it may cause a glitch when then trying to place a car and that started some corruption going on the lot.
Two things I try to be careful of with moveobjects on when testing or building is to make sure no two objects that I overlay have a third thing they can do - including a an interactive slotting - such as driveway that holds a car and then shifts it to teh street (car disappears and reappears). With a tree there the game might have had an issue with that. Decorator slots don't seem to cause issues.
Its a good idea when building or testing to turn off moveobjects on until you need it and then accidentally these things don't happen. I would watch that lot carefully and if you get any other symptoms consider bulldozing the lot completely and setting down a fresh lot to use for testing so you know for sure when you have an issue in the future whether its really the object you are testing or old corruption rearing up again since it happened once.
I think this is how we get, now and then with an EP a lot that is corrupt after install for some people who play that lot, but not everyone. Something went wrong when the EP team was building the lot and they fixed that problem and continued to build but the lot already had on instance of corruption, that depending on what a player did later cause the corruption to continue on, while it did not for other people. I learned this back in my big building days for lots I uploaded to my site and backed up my game and saved manual backups when building so if I did something that caused a corruption - even tiny - I could go back to an early backup before I did that part of the build and just not repeat what I had done - saved me from losing all the work I did up to that point and kept me from releasing a lot that had corrupted once.
This is all good advice. And yes, MOO was on. I wasn't testing for viability, at that moment, but for making collection folders. I had just built a room for the Club Casual set, and had used MOO for making a group of plants look good together. I never even thought of turning MOO off, because I was just comparing two cars. I deleted the cars, and simply forgot to delete the driveways, as I had intended to do. But I thought nothing of it, being unaware I had plopped the driveway on top of a tree. It was just one of those silly things that happened under unusual circumstances. But I'm glad it happened, because otherwise I would never have learned all these other things that are going to make a big difference in the health of my game.
