Game hanging during 'Change Appearance'.

[Reluctantly Human]

Some info: All expansions and all stuff packs, EXCEPT for Family Fun.

Hacks: Definitely some in there, mostly SimLogical, Paladin's, and some MATY. I have Inteenimater and InSiminator, but neither are currently installed until they are updated.

The problem: Tonight I loaded up the Burb's, and the Caliente family. Neither has been played (at least no more than a Sim day) since I installed the game last (several years now). I was switching Lucy Burb's hair, when the game simply stopped responding. My mouse moves, num lock can be turned on and off, but it simply sits there 'reading' what the next page of hair is. Specifically, it's about my fourth brown hair page. I only noticed it tonight, but I do not remember the last time I went through the female brown hairs.

The attempted solutions: First up, I moved my cache files to another hard drive so the game would make new ones. I also rebooted. I had recently gotten Delphy's Organizer, and moved a bunch of Orphans and Duplicates to another drive. I put the duplicates back in Downloads. I also went through about ten pages of Female Red hair with Nina Caliente, and did not immediatelly crash, so I tried brown. Same problem.

I know I am reaching here, but I'm trying to find the most hassle free method of tracking down my problem. The game crashes before I see the offending page, so I cannot just hunt down the bad files. I know Body Shop loads faster, but I assume it wil create the same problem. I could move file by file, but the game already takes fifteen minutes to load each time as it is.

Will the Clean Pack Installer help at all? I remember the original Sims having a program that cleaned up 'bad' content, but I figured the Clean Pack installer only looked for 'hacks'.  And of course I cannot find exactly what I most recently added to the game since the date on the file is not necessarily the date I downloaded the items.

Argh, it's late and I'm just frustrating myself. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

-KEvin

[scalad]

Have you tried the 50/50 method? Try this thread: http://www.modthesims2.com/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Finding_Problem_Custom_Content
Unfortunately it's not a hassle free way but you might find your problem.
Does it crash when you just let the brown hair page just hang? And how long does it hang for before it crashes?

Just want to add: make a neighbourhood called: Test. Then test the brown hair in that neighbourhood. That way if the game crashes it might only effect that neighborhood.

[AjiDivine]

I had that same problem with my brown hair in change appearance. I used Clean Installer to go through all of my files and I found some duplicates of the hair. I used Delphy to organize everything nice and neat. Once I removed the duplicates everything has been fine.

[Reluctantly Human]

I just used Clean Installer, and disabled some duplicates, in case that might be the problem. I will only have time to load the game once before I have to go to work, so I'm going to do that now and see if it affected it.

The game does end up having a crash message show up, but I left it at the brown hair loading screen for about ten minutes last night without anything happening. Only after I CTRL-ALT-DEL'ted out did it show up. So perhaps the error message shows up immediately, but it might not pop up through the game.

Time to find out.

EDIT: I forgot something that is probably important. My game has been acting a little strange lately, independent of the crashing. Two things I've noticed. While waiting through the 'main loading' screen with the string text along the bottom, a few times the game has minimized itself and dropped me to the desktop. It hadn't crashed, and I can alt-tab back, but as far as I can tell there has been nothing forcing it to desktop.

Also, I've only played Pleasentview lately, but the opening movie is acting funny. It now starts off showing me far far to the left of the neighborhood, actually staring off into the 'void' outside of the neighborhood, before swinging back in to see the rest of it.

[Supernatural_Vixen]

EDIT: I forgot something that is probably important. My game has been acting a little strange lately, independent of the crashing. Two things I've noticed. While waiting through the 'main loading' screen with the string text along the bottom, a few times the game has minimized itself and dropped me to the desktop. It hadn't crashed, and I can alt-tab back, but as far as I can tell there has been nothing forcing it to desktop.

That happend to me and the problem with mine was that I had to turn off my cable internet modem because it kept opening up pop up windows or something, so I reccomend that you enable all popup blockers and make sure that your virus protection software is turned off, that sometimes has something to do with it.

[Reluctantly Human]

Alright, so I just got back from work, and I had to leave the game running the entire time I was gone, because it'd taken at least 15 minutes for CAS to open this afternoon. I finally figured I'd just let it run while I was at work, and see if it was still up when I returned. The game had not crashed, but it had minimized and when I brought it back up, it was still in the blue loading screen for CAS. I left it along for a few minutes and to my surprise, when I came back it was loaded. So I messed around in there, and I managed to get almost halfway through the brown hairs by skipping large chunks of 'pages'.

Somehow this convinced me that maybe it was fixed, so I loaded up Caliente and went to Change Appearance, and it locked up. So it definitely appears to be one particular item in that category. I'm going to double check my 'duplicates' in Delphy and Clean Installer, and if that does not work, will start removing some directories. Thankfully some of the latest hair I added I DID put into seperate directories, so I can just move one at a time and then recheck it.

Thanks for the help everyone, and Nascar I'll see if I left any virus protection software on that might be causing any problems. It's always funny to me that one thing games tell you to do if they are running slow is to turn off virus protection, and then they also ask you to connect to the internet to verify this, or download that.

-KEvin

[Tenshii~Akari]

I seem to be having the same general problem with a brown hair... problem is, it's extremely difficult to truly pinpoint which hairs are really "brown" hairs with the Download organizer.  It only scans and organizes them by the 'Hair Tone XML' type, and not the actual color bin it's in.  :?   I believe the Wardrobe Wrangler scans it by color bins, so that one may work better for finding whichever hair might be crashing the game.  (Still trying to pinpoint that one file, but I think I'm getting close, though.  :smile bi:)

[Reluctantly Human]

I actually do not know if I've fixed the problem yet or not. The game is still loading funny, but I was getting so stressed about the game hanging, that I actually ignored the problem last night and just played the game instead. It was refreshing. I know once I get back into it, I'll become obsessed with trying to fix it to the detriment of my actual playing, so I wanted to wait until today.

I find the Clean Installer's thumbnail's help determine the color of the item (mostly). And there were a bunch of duplicates that program found, and they all looked brownish to me. So you might try that program if you have not yet.

EDIT: So I finally just started moving whole directories of recently downloaded items that I thankfully had the foresight to seperate and now my game is working again. I lost some good hairstyles, but I managed to live without them once, I can do so again. Thank you all for the help.
-KEvin