The good folks at TSR saved the day, and saved my sims as well. This made me feel much better in two ways - I had a solution, AND it was obvious I was not the first person to panic at this strange occurance. And as I have seen since, not the last either. Should this ever happen to you, save your panic for a much more appropriate time because here is the solution I was given. It gets corrupted or even disappears sometimes, causing the nearest zoomed sims to turn all black.
And now, here is my rant. This is the most misnamed folder in existence. Many people myself included at the beginnings of their downloading career are anxious to put the downloads in the correct place quite right too , and with this folder being in GameData AND called Lights, guess what I put in there.
However, this folder has nothing to do with table lights, wall lamps, floor lamps, candles or any other object that lights up - rather it is a folder which shouldn't be touched at all because it contains essential items for your game to run smoothly - such as your sims not turning black on the nearest zoom.
Ah, the wonders of our game, eh? You will find the Lights folder including the two necessary files in the Bunny Wuffles Troubleshooting Kit. Can't use the phone? Car pool doesn't turn up? Welcome to the wonderful world of Portals, my friends. And they are so unbelievably easy to delete or corrupt! A common occurance is moving the trash can and the mailbox too far from their proper locations or onto the editable lot and then bulldozing the house - which removes them very effectively.
Sometimes, you may find you have downloaded a house with a missing portal. Or even WITH your realising if you thought it was a neat idea to delete the mailbox or trash can. While in theory it sounds great not to have bills again, losing a portal will cause you major game problems, such as not being able to receive visitors or call the fire brigade or even for a pizza. In fact, The Rooke in his peerless list of cheat codes at The Rooke's Nest counsels us "NOT to make editable the following squares: Mailbox, Trashcan, or the invisible portals at the ends of the sidewalk or the squares on either side of the the ends of the sidewalks.
Even if you do not move anything or change anything on those squares: guests may not be to visit or leave, the mailgirl and gardener may not show up, and walk by neighbors may get stuck at the end of the sidewalk and die. Well, as you are reading this, I would guess it's too late for that advice.
But never fear. Help is at hand, or even at paw. Here is how to hopefully fix your problem. Bring up the cheat window by pressing and holding the Ctrl key, Shift key and the letter C from now on referred to as Ctrl-Shift-C. This prepares and resets your lot, telling you if the pedestrian or car portals are missing.
In some cases this can even restore the portals - but not always. It would appear that this was changed like many of the very old cheats between certain expansion packs. However, it still resets the clock sometimes to midnight, resets all object states to their defaults beds are made, dishes are clean, meals uneaten, etc. Once you know which portals are missing, you can then use the Bunker Sims PedPortal fixer to correct the problem.
This cheat can also be used to fix the "Mystery Frozen Lot" problem where nothing has been changed or added to a lot but it hangs up the game and your PC all of a sudden. Press Enter and all should be well. Included in The Bunny Wuffles Troubleshooting Kit with many abject and grateful thanks to Shogal, this ugly little table solves so many problems you can surely forgive its appearance. We'll take a closer look at how to use it below.
Two more utilities you might like to try are the:. These are also both included in the Bunny Wuffles Troubleshooting Kit with many thanks to SimsPlus for being file-share friendly and letting us distribute their objects while they are offline. But get online back soon guys! You may also want to try running your game in debug mode. This will tell you which portal or portals are missing. Place the table on the lot somewhere, and go to Live mode. Direct your sim to the table and you will be faced with four options:.
Let's have a look at them each in turn. Selecting "Ped Portal" will bring up the menu on the left. Selecting "Show all portals" will bring up a pop-up shown below left to confirm.
Though while it assures you they are chairs, they look suspiciously like tables. But who cares so long as we have some! Of course, you are using this fixer because you may not have some, so to replace a portal, choose "Add new Ped Portal" from the menu But don't worry, you won't have to play your game with ugly tables in random places.
They can and should be hidden during normal gameplay, and to do this you select "Hide all portals", and a pop-up will assure you that they are now hidden but not deleted. If you click on one of the brown portals, a pop-up will give you the option to leave the world in two different ways. Would you opt to leave the world because your house is not good enough? When Auntie Rosebud is there with just a few little clicks of the keys?
Selecting "Car Portal" will bring up the menu on the left. Again, you will have random furniture appear, and this time it IS a table in which case I don't need to add a new one.
Obviously if you need to add one you would know by now and that is what you would choose on the menu. Once again, choose "Hide all portals" to make the table invisible. The chair will disappear, but you will be left with a pop-up reassuring you that it is gone, but not forgotten.
I mean hidden, but not deleted. Selecting "Phoneline" will bring up the menu on the left. As you have no doubt come to expect, random furniture will appear, this time looking something like this.
Again, if you don't have one, you need to add one, and if you do have one, select "Hide all phonelines" and a pop-up will assure us they are hidden but still there.
Selecting "Others" will bring up the menu on the left. Selecting "Add new trashcan" will cause a trashcan to appear next to your green table with the pop-up on the right announcing its entrance. So what do you do with your new portals once you have generated them? Once you have placed all your replacement portals and you are satisfied, instruct the neon green table to hide all portals, then you can sell it until you need it again.
Welcome, my friends, to the wonderful world of the Build Mode Bug, first spotted in late and not truly splattered until with the advent of Unleashed. The Build Mode bug happens when you have more than items in your Build Mode, and the item you place when you select something else is the one you have "too many" of.
So, if your fireplaces are turning into plants, you simply have too many plants in Build Mode. Obviously you can delete some plants if you really want to, but you don't have to. Shortly after Livin' Large appeared and more object makers had more bases to play with, sometime in late those of us who were merrily downloading every recoloured object in sight soon encountered their stairs turning into windows.
We plaintively posted about this at TSR, and Barb Tobykat from N99 was the first so far as I recall anyway to realise, after many experiments in her own game, that this was because we had downloaded too many windows. This seems obvious now in hindsight, but believe me, at the time it was believed to be all kinds of things. We had been more or less told by Maxis that we could have unlimited objects in our game so object limits were the last thing to suspect.
As more expansion packs appeared and easier versions of Transmogrifier appeared, so did more object makers, and subsequently more and more people fell victim to this bug. Thankfully, the clever bunnies at Maxis listened to us, and finally, the release of Unleashed allowed us to put objects into each Build Mode category before problems would arise.
Having said that, I have yet to hear of anyone with Unleashed or subsequent pack having the Build Mode bug, thankfully. Walls and floors are a different matter altogether; with the original game we could only have 90 walls and 63 custom floors, but with Livin 'Large this was raised to 65, of each. Incidentally, the rotations of the floors changed early on too - anyone remember the very first "area rugs" which were just floors placed like murals without each piece having to be tileable with itself like now?
Ah, happy memories! But at least Rosebud is easier to type than Klapaucius. I love this game and its creators for listening to us players and helping us mod our games!
So, you have the Build Mode Bug. The simplest solution would be to buy Unleashed or a subsequent expansion pack. As well as fixing the Build Mode bug, the advantages of getting Unleashed are:. The next solution is a little more involved. You may have noticed that sometimes, you download a door, window or plant and it appears in your Buy Mode catalogue.
This means that you won't get the Build Mode Bug from that particular object, and it is a simple matter now to recategorise plants and some other Build Mode items to go into Buy Mode. Along with that advantage though, as you might expect there are also disadvantages to doing this If you are using Transmogrifier, you don't need a magic cookie unless you intend making your own items.
Downloading Without Tears It doesn't take very long after downloading shiny and new add-ons for our game before things start to go horribly wrong. Download this at the Winzip symbol: Please note that all of these have either been included with previous permissions, are freely shareable or archive files from OldVersion. Some good places to go for reading and advice about gameplay and game problems are: The Official Site Sims Help Desk So much information here, it just HAS to be the first place to start when troubleshooting.
The Rooke's Nest The best birdy on the web has lots of nice sim things on his site, and in his Help! Has yet to be bettered; probably never will be. N99 Sims 1 Game Support all expansions More help to problems than you could possibly imagine. Start with the sticky threads for organising tips, and so far as technical support is concerned, basically anything Kgalgano says should be writ in stone. If you find something particularly useful, save it to a text file to prevent having to wade through 20 pages of gold dust to find it again - and this will also be a safeguard for you against the valuable information being lost in the EZBoard Page 20 precipice or the coming transfer of all EZBoard forums to Yuku.
Again, if you find it useful, save it. Who knows what might happen inbetween EZBoard's transit to Yuku? If your skins crash your game and File Cop doesn't tell you why, the Skin Doctor will.
An essential utility for anyone who downloads skins. The Sims Programs An archive of the best sims utilities for both Sims1 and Sims2, if the program isn't downloadable here it directs you to the site where you can get it from. Although part of The Sims Resource, downloads in this section are always free and you don't need to be a paying member to access them.
Showing a true community spirit from Steve Bonham and his Merry Men and women , this is an invaluable resource and one I - and many others - couldn't sim for very long without. Go even if it is just to look at the list of anagrams on his "The true story is finally told: Why "Transmogrifier"? Otherwise not for the fainthearted i. Wikipedia Lots to read including some fascinating trivia and a full history of our game.
Some inconsistencies, but as this is Wiki, feel free to correct any inadequacies yourself! The Sims Links It isn't pretty, there are no pictures, but boyoboy does this do what it says on the packet. Links, links and links aplenty. Some are gone but I will bet you find things here you didn't know were still around. Or even existed. Also includes technical advice on renaming and rezoning lots, enlarging families and changing music in your game.
Scroll down or use the shortcuts below: How do I get your downloads in my game? What folders do I use and how do I find them? How do I get your houses into my game? What expansion packs do I need to use objects downloaded from Architectural Supplies? I have all the expansions so why do I still get the "Missing Objects" message on your houses? Newly Installed objects aren't showing up in the game! It says it's a lion but looks like a topiary!
A bad object is crashing my game! How can I manage my neighbourhoods? My Sims have turned black! Cars and visitors don't come any more! My stairs have turned into windows and my fireplaces into plants! During installation select the option to install in Classic Mode.
You can also use WinRAR some sites use. Despite the warnings, there are no time limits on these evaluation versions. For Further Reading General downloading tips Beginner's illustrated guide to using WinZip Installing skins Troubleshooting skins If you have never needed to use folders before, you might as well be reading simlish when reading some downloading instructions. For instance, it is a good idea to organise your objects into separate folders for several reasons: You can find things easier when not if!
You will need to put them in the exact lot in the neighbourhood you want them in. You will also need to have downloaded, unzipped and installed all the objects first, otherwise you will get the dreaded "missing objects" pop-up and the house will look significantly different from the one you think you downloaded. I do not recommend over-writing your original houses. Before installing your new house, move your original one out to a safe place. You can safely rename them first I usually rename to OriginalHouse The main proponents of this method can be found at Green Sims and this link comes with my warning that not all who have tried doing this have had the same success.
It isn't perfect, as James "Sim Wardrobe" Sausville himself has said, but it certainly does help a great deal. EP Analyser This is a utility to try and weed out objects for packs you don't have. This small program reads an IFF file and finds all scripts used by the object s inside.
It then tries to find out by comparing the used subroutines and primitives to an internal table which expansion packs are needed to use it. Currently it's only got everything set up to Vacation, so it isn't ideal, but it's a start. Troll Sims My long-time friend Troll has compiled a list of what objects need which expansion pack.
The lists are not entirely accurate I hear, but for the most part if you don't have an elephantine memory as for which objects were added to our games when, this resource will prove invaluable. I then used my favourite utility to change the duplicate IDs. Because I have had my deco cash register in my game for ages and is used on many lots while the plant is new and I haven't used it yet, I changed the ID of the plant.
I put the plant in my house, offer my house for download and tell everyone quite rightly that the shopping list involves the plant as pictured and you are happily confident that you have it already. When some of my houses give the "missing objects" message it is because of a combination of the above plus the following: There are some object ID problems with my own objects even when nobody else's are installed. That is because before I knew more about this subject, I didn't have all my own objects installed when making a new set.
It is highly likely that there is a conflict problem with one of my objects and one of the thousands you no doubt have in your stash. I know that there is conflict with some of my objects and other people's work because I find that in my own game and I would be amazed if you hadn't found that too. Using Transmogrifier to change an object's description Make sure your game is NOT loaded up, nor any other Sim utility program. However, you might want to change the price on an object, and this you do by typing the price of your choice into the box marked, um, "Price".
You may find that although you put a new price in, when you go to buy the object in your game the new price is nowhere to be seen.
This all depends on how the object maker set the price when they made the object, and while a seemingly fixed one can still be changed, it does require a little more knowledge of the files that Transmogrifier splits an object up into for cloning.
I go into this in my Tutorials pages. To find out if you have a bad object, the following routine will help enormously: Firstly, I quarantine my newest downloads in a folder of their own.
If the game crashes, I know exactly where my latest downloads are and won't have to scour the entire downloads folder for them. Secondly, I move the main downloads folders out of User Objects into My Documents, leaving the two Today Tray folders in there all by themselves, and then run Bil Simser's wonderful utility Sim Explorer to check that none of the objects are corrupted.
We'll take a closer look at this utility below. Thirdly, once I have checked the objects for general corruption, I then close Sim Explorer and load up The Sims so I can test the objects in-game.
That way, I can see if any disappear because they were cloned with an expansion pack I don't yet have. I can also see what they look like in-game and if I don't think they will go with any of my themes, I can pull them out to archive I never delete an object these days!
Fourth ly, I close the game and check for object ID conflicts. Again, I do this every time I download and unzip a batch of objects prior to installing them in my final game folders. I then run my favourite utility program to check for any duplicate IDs and change where necessary. There is more information and help on checking ID conflicts below. Fifthly, I then recategorise the new objects if necessary, then sort them into folders according to my preference I give details of this in the Housekeeping section Checking objects in these ways after every downloading session is a very good habit to get into and it gets quicker each time.
Sim Explorer Using SimExplorer is so easy! Basically, every object maker makes their objects in Transmogrifier, some with a special code magic cookie and some without.
The first version of Transmogrifier even caused duplicate IDs despite the creators having their own unique magic cookies, but later versions fixed this glitch. Now, you are less likely to have problems when a creator uses a valid magic cookie than not. And if that isn't enough, another cause of Object ID problems is the large number of object makers who don't have a valid Magic Cookie they ran out a while back and therefore use an invalid cookie that doesn't work properly ones higher than may create a duplicate ID , a random set of numbers or even just plain ol' 0.
This increases the chances of object ID conflict massively. The Magic Cookie group is a useful database to know about - this keeps track of cookies currently in use, but can't really do much about this problem other than try to monitor it. If the conflict is between a Maxis object and a hacked object meant to replace it, leave it alone.
If the conflict is between a hacked object and a non-hacked object, change the non-hacked one. If the conflict is between a hacked object with dependent files e. Here are my favourite links on solving the Object ID problem: Rick Halle's SE Object Manager Here I am counselling you to spend some of your hard earned cash again though there is a 48 hour non-repeatable free trial.
A free download, he gives full illustrated instructions here. Clever bunny that he is, he also gives a tutorial on how to check and change ID conflicts using a hexadecimal editor and you will find this here along with a link to download one.
Be warned though - this method might be free but it will involve hours of poring over figures and feels more like office work than game troubleshooting. Having said that, there are people at N99 and at TSR who have used this method successfully for years and a quick search through the help forums there will find you hints and tips. For me, I ended up changing ID codes on skins, go figure.
The Sims Transmogrifier This has got to be the simplest way of changing an object's ID to be compatible with all your other objects. The drawbacks are that you have to know which object is causing the problem in the first place, know its filename this becomes so much easier if you have a system of organising and testing your new downloads and you need lots of free memory space on your computer. Here's how to use it to fix your problem!
Press OK Here are my favourite links for utilities to help in organising neighbourhoods: EliSims Not the first, not the last, but certainly the best! NeighborhoodStart Easy and simple, does what it says on the packet. It allows you to select the neighbourhood you want to play, add a custom description for each neighbourhood, ie.
Basically all it does is converting the line-breaks, which tend to cause some problems sometimes. Very simple, very little, very handy Back to top KeyCode Lister Among the little nifty tools, here's another one for developers. Basically it simply shows the number a press of a key returns, for instance if you need your program to respond to specific keys.
Tiny and simple nearly anyone can make this , and occasionally useful too. Click here to download the source 22 Kb.
Back to top Overhoor Dutch! This is a Dutch tool for all those who still go to school and need to study their languages. I made it a few years ago. The idea is simple: enter the whole list of words in the program, save, and then test your own knowledge.
Every word will be asked in random order. In case you type the wrong answer, too bad. Type a word right 5 times in a row, and it won't be asked again until you reset the list. I've used it don't need to anymore , my younger siblings use it, and you should use it If you're Dutch anyway. English version might come sooner or later Back to top Autoscroller For developers only!
Colours and fonts can be changed. Source not available. Often times when your clone is destined to be significantly different from the base you'd be better off starting with an entirely new empty iff and building your object up from scratch. At this time Volcanic's Clone object feature has not yet been implemented, but you can use the old third party programs that The Sims TS1 community uses for making custom content.
Volcanic's "Create New Object" feature IS implemented already, but it currently only creates single tile objects. It should be noted that neither T-mog nor IffPencil are capable of reading most resources after they have been edited using Volcanic, so you'll want to make sure you are done with the TS1 programs before relaxing into the easier to use Volcanic.
0コメント