Can't see my neighbourhood anymore

[Daphne]

I'm in dispair! Yesterday I went back to play as usual and Pleasantview was gone. No traces of it within the game. The folders are intact in Explorer, but I can't even open the N001 package in SimPE - it shows it as complete empty. It physically shrunk to 96 bytes.

I tried:

• replacing the neighbourhood manager file with the one in the Progs folder
• renaming the neighbourhoods folder, running the game to recreate the standard neighbourhoods, and exchanging the new N001 with my old folder
• exchanging the old N001 package file and the new one

But nada. The only thing I had been doing before this is creating new outfits based on Warlokks meshes via body shop.

I have all EP's installed. My last backup is weeks old.

Please, don't tell me this is the end...

[Dullahan]

You said you tried replacing neighborhoodmanager.package with the one in the programs folder, but have you tried replacing the N001 folder with the one found in
Computer > Programs > EA games > Sims 2 > TSData > Res > Userdata > Neighborhoods?

This will restore the neighborhood to its default settings.

[Daphne]

Thanks Dullahan. But that file looks very much like the one generated by the game recently. It's dated 2004.

However, there are a series of recently updated 'suburb' packages in my N001 folder and a N001_Neighborhood.bkp file dated May 2011. I wonder if I could use those files to reconstruct the N001 package file with SimPE.

I hope somebody could share any experiences or knowledge about this.

[Theraven]

It might be that your game somehow found it funny to reset itself to default settings without your knowledge. If you (as an example) move those folders out of the TS2 folder, the game will automatically reset itself to factory settings by replacing the files with the default files.

If I were you, I'd move the entire neighborhood folder to someplace else (in case it is salvageable later), and use a backup from weeks ago to restore it. Dullahan's method is how you restore it to factory settings.

If you have Windows 7, you might also want to check the orphan "EA Games" folder it creates in the Documents folder. 

[Daphne]

Thanks, Theraven. I received confirmation from Mootilda that there is no reconstruction possible from individual files. You gave me a good idea with the orphan EA Games folder, but I can't find it anymore. I remember having seen it a couple of times in the same folder like the real one and asked myself how that could be! Unfortunately, I don't see it now and I have the hidden and system files setting to visible.

[Daphne]

Ok. I used the backup file with the newer folders and it sort of works. The last memories are lost though.