Ugh! WTF?

[ThexVillain]

Ughh. Okay so when I opened Sims 2, one of my neighbors was not there. You know N002, that desert neighborhood? And I had this big family there that ive been playing for awhile in it! But the main part is the neighborhood, it doesnt make sense. And not only that but in its spot is Downtown o_O

And when when I try to click Downtown, my game crashes! I REALLY need help because I have to get my neighborhood back because I had alot of saved and important families on it! Any suggestions? =/

[MissDoh]

Did you recentily install a new ep or add new cc in your game?  If so they might be responsible of this mess.  Make sure all your cc and mods are updated for the most recent ep you have install

I hope you made a back-up since I am not sure you will be able to get this hood back.

[ThexVillain]

The only EP I have is Nightlife, which I got like a year ago so that cant be it. BUT, I did install a new wallpaper before I opened the game. And I still have the N002 pictures and everything, its just not showing up in the game. What I really dont understand is why Downtown is showing up as a neighborhood. The most important part is getting this one family back. Is there anyway I could do that?

[BeosBoxBoy]

ThexVillain - I am afraid from what you are describing, the whole neighbourhood may be lost.  After an extended period of play (let's say anywhere from a month to a year, depends on you being hard core, or occasional) - there is a point where the cumulative risk of reading and writing information to the hard drive will go *bonk*frizzle*skitter*crash* and doom your game.

Even without that risk, there s a real problem with the game when a neighbourhood starts to get a lot of memories and relationship scores and all of the other little unseen parts of the game.  Sometimes it starts with a jump bug here and there, other times it starts locking you out of certain lots, other times it just total screws up the neighbourhood.

The first time I encountered this sort of thing, I was playing TS2 + UNI only; and suddenly my university neighbourhood buildings were scattered without regard to the roads on the Pleasantview map and all of Pleasantview houses were missing.  Even knowing what I do about the internal structure of the neighbourhood files, I was not able to save the neighbourhood or my Sims

It was a painful but valuable lesson.  I have since learnt to back-up my neighbourhoods every Friday night.  You can use SimPE to do this, but I have had mixed results using SimPE; so now I just drag a copy of the whole Neighbourhoods folder to a folder on the C: drive

   C:\Z\

I know this isn't the news you want to hear, but the odds of you salvaging the damaged neighbourhood and retrieving those Sims is very very low - I would say all but impossible

[ThexVillain]

It's okay, thanks for your help though and replying to my question!

Another thing I was wondering is how do I back up my custom content? Can I do that using SimPE? The only EP i have is Nightlife, but i'll be getting Seasons and Bon Voyage soon. Though, lots of people say when they download a new EP sometimes they lose all their custom content. And I want to make sure if I lose mine when installing new EPS, they arent lost forever.

[BeosBoxBoy]

All you need do is copy the user save folder from your My Documents:

~\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\

to a saving location of your choice -- depending on the quantity of downloads and the size of your saved neightbourhoods, it may take a while to copy all of this.

SimPE will make a back-up of your neighbourhoods, but not your downloads and sims you made with Body Shop - so it is better to do all-at-once if you have enough room on your hard drive.

If all of the files will fit on a re-writable DVD, then you might consider using that route instead.

[Shonie]

I always just pull my download folder out and stick in on the desktop when I get a new EP.  However, if you are getting both Seasons and BV, you will most likely have to get new versions of almost every single mod.  Any other custom content I would add in slowly and make sure it work

OOPS  Beo beat me to it

[ThexVillain]

I dont have a whole lot of CC, since I just started simming less than a few months ago. I have like 440 MB worth of stuff, which is still alot, but I heard some people had like 2.0 GB of it so I guess its not that much compared to them.

I only have 200 MB left of space on my C Drive right now so I have to buy a 20 GB external drive before I download any other EPs or even copy my downloads folder. So once I do that i'll probably make a copy of my downloads folder on the external drive