(no subject)
so, let me tell you a story about the things I've done to my game. this is not a pretty picture post, it's a bunch of text which is me partially loling and mostly recording things I don't want to do again.
Some time before I created the hood for my RKC, I got hold of and successfully installed Empty Templates, mostly for the purpose of avoiding those damn pleasantview townies when I created my game. I've played the maxis hoods a handful of times, tops, so this seemed like a good thing to do. I kept on with my games, and all was good with the world. At some point I noticed that my vacation hoods (the ones attached to the Krow hood at the very least; possibly also Coloursand's?) seemed to be corrupted in some way, because visiting a lot with a sim of mine would result in my game loading a blank lot that was uninteractable with and void of all sims. If I had a screencap I'd show you. But I wasn't that worried, because I didn't have plans to really go back to those hoods (certainly none that hinged on my doing so), and I carried on. All was well.
Two weeks ago (ish) I went on an enormous general downloading spree, followed by a very meticulous default replacement spree that so far, seems to have been 100% successful. I even got rid of some borked cc!
Then last week, I got this cool story idea. I wanted to get stuck right into it, but I wanted to use the premade maxis sims. Here's the thing though: empty templates. So after a bit of googling I tried deleting the neighbourhood folder from My Documents, and allowing the game to respawn it. It did, and among my premade hoods was one called Driftwood (my custom hoods were of course taken out and put back in; they appear to be just fine). It had the little animated thumbnail and everything! Thinking this was a premade hood I'd never noticed or even HEARD mentioned before, I got terribly excited and loaded it. There's a tumblr post commemorating this.
When Driftwood loaded, it was a totally blank terrain. Thinking that this meant the empty templates were still installed (which made sense, since I recalled them being much harder than that to install in the first place), I did some more googling and concluded that reversing the process was the best option. Remove the empty bits, replace them with the backup bits. That's what it's all for, right? Well, except when your backups are incomplete, which mine were, as I discovered a third of the way through the process. So I did the dumbest possible thing: deleted not only the EA folder from My Documents but also the EA folder from the Program Files folder, therefore managing to incompletely uninstall my game. Whoooooo. Restoring would be/was of course a useless option, so I did a manual uninstall of the remaining files, including a clearing of the registry, rebooted, and set about re-installing every single EP and SP. (Again, kept my custom hoods and my downloads folder nice and safe through all this.)
So now it's all reinstalled and patched appropriately, but here's the thing: Driftwood. Driftwood's blank template is where Pleasantview is supposed to go - which in retrospect, seems to be where it was when I first saw it in my Neighbourhood Chooser.
So I deleted the contents of the neighborhoods folder and took out my downloads, which unsurprisingly results in a loaded game with zero hoods to play. So I delete the actual neighbourhoods folder, reload the game. There they are! Pleasantview looks and behaves exactly as it should. Now I've dumped in two of my three custom hoods (coloursand, would you believe, has a number of N002, so I want to be sure I don't want anything from Strangetown for this ~idea~ before switching them), and my downloads folder, and with any luck, I'll still have Pleasantview on the other side of the x4 load time.
Moral of the story: If I'd have known this would've taken six hours I would've just downloaded bodyshop versions of the premades.
~the end~
Some time before I created the hood for my RKC, I got hold of and successfully installed Empty Templates, mostly for the purpose of avoiding those damn pleasantview townies when I created my game. I've played the maxis hoods a handful of times, tops, so this seemed like a good thing to do. I kept on with my games, and all was good with the world. At some point I noticed that my vacation hoods (the ones attached to the Krow hood at the very least; possibly also Coloursand's?) seemed to be corrupted in some way, because visiting a lot with a sim of mine would result in my game loading a blank lot that was uninteractable with and void of all sims. If I had a screencap I'd show you. But I wasn't that worried, because I didn't have plans to really go back to those hoods (certainly none that hinged on my doing so), and I carried on. All was well.
Two weeks ago (ish) I went on an enormous general downloading spree, followed by a very meticulous default replacement spree that so far, seems to have been 100% successful. I even got rid of some borked cc!
Then last week, I got this cool story idea. I wanted to get stuck right into it, but I wanted to use the premade maxis sims. Here's the thing though: empty templates. So after a bit of googling I tried deleting the neighbourhood folder from My Documents, and allowing the game to respawn it. It did, and among my premade hoods was one called Driftwood (my custom hoods were of course taken out and put back in; they appear to be just fine). It had the little animated thumbnail and everything! Thinking this was a premade hood I'd never noticed or even HEARD mentioned before, I got terribly excited and loaded it. There's a tumblr post commemorating this.
When Driftwood loaded, it was a totally blank terrain. Thinking that this meant the empty templates were still installed (which made sense, since I recalled them being much harder than that to install in the first place), I did some more googling and concluded that reversing the process was the best option. Remove the empty bits, replace them with the backup bits. That's what it's all for, right? Well, except when your backups are incomplete, which mine were, as I discovered a third of the way through the process. So I did the dumbest possible thing: deleted not only the EA folder from My Documents but also the EA folder from the Program Files folder, therefore managing to incompletely uninstall my game. Whoooooo. Restoring would be/was of course a useless option, so I did a manual uninstall of the remaining files, including a clearing of the registry, rebooted, and set about re-installing every single EP and SP. (Again, kept my custom hoods and my downloads folder nice and safe through all this.)
So now it's all reinstalled and patched appropriately, but here's the thing: Driftwood. Driftwood's blank template is where Pleasantview is supposed to go - which in retrospect, seems to be where it was when I first saw it in my Neighbourhood Chooser.
So I deleted the contents of the neighborhoods folder and took out my downloads, which unsurprisingly results in a loaded game with zero hoods to play. So I delete the actual neighbourhoods folder, reload the game. There they are! Pleasantview looks and behaves exactly as it should. Now I've dumped in two of my three custom hoods (coloursand, would you believe, has a number of N002, so I want to be sure I don't want anything from Strangetown for this ~idea~ before switching them), and my downloads folder, and with any luck, I'll still have Pleasantview on the other side of the x4 load time.
Moral of the story: If I'd have known this would've taken six hours I would've just downloaded bodyshop versions of the premades.
~the end~