O Sims, how you vex me!
Remember how when I installed Celebrations, everything good and wholesome was apparently destroyed and I couldn't exit the game without it crashing? Well, even after one and a half complete reinstalls, the problem still remained, but I got around the problem of not being able to turn off the CC warning, so I decided to just leave it alone and ignore it, as long as I could play my game.
Well, then over the weekend, I got the hankering to do some building, so I figured I would go in and tear down my Ishkabibble main house and redo it from the ground up. However, I had not played my Bibbles since well before Season was installed. When I tried to open the neighborhood, it loaded fine until it got to the "creating weather" part, and then the game crashed. With the same ferocity as exiting the game crashes. This had officially become Not Good.
Soooo... after much futzing about and poking around on the various forums looking for anyone asking about similiar problems (and finding nothing) and trying the game without CC and then without mods or hacks and other futile strategies, I was forced to admit what I didn't want to admit. Something was wrong somewhere in my saved games. Taking out CC and hacks made no difference, the game still crashed in those two instances (exiting and trying to load a non-Seasonized neighborhood). However, running without my saved games resulted in no crashes, even after adding back CC and hacks. The only possible conclusion - one of my neighborhoods was screwed.
So that was the first bad news. And then came the long arduous process of removing all the neighborhoods from the game and then putting them each back one by one, then testing each twice (first to see if the game would exit properly, and then to see if the neighborhood would load past weather creation). Which naturally meant lots of loading and exiting of the game, all of which was very mind-numbing but extremely necessary. However, all the work paid off, because I found the corrupted neighborhood! And that's the good news. Having removed it from my game, everything runs smooth and crash free once again.
Which brings me to the final bad news. The corrupted borked neighborhood is Eridanos.....
*wail*
I don't even know how to begin to tackle this. Of course, I've saved the entire neighborhood, it's currently sitting safely on two different hard drives and I might burn it to disc just to be absolutely sure. But... if I can't even open the neighborhood, there's no way for me to get in and look for what's corrupted to try and fix it. I can't think of anything that I might have done there that would cause a melt-down like this in that particular neighborhood, not anything that I haven't done in other neighborhoods that remain un-corrupted. I could try to recreate the neighborhood, but I'd never be able to get it exactly the same, and I'd need SimPE at least to clone off some of the characters that hadn't already been cloned (Kiley and her dad, Dominic and his mom, MacKenzie and her family, Copeland and the Bates family...). And how do I recreate from memories some of the buildings that I built specifically for that neighborhood and that storyline? No, it would definitely be better if the neighborhood could be fixed as it is, though whether it can be or not I can only hazard to guess (and I'm not really optimistic about the likely answer).
For the time being, I need to just calm down and let my frantic mind settle. And once I've gone through all the options I can confidently try myself, then I'll probably try posting at MATY or the Sporum and see if anyone in either of those places has any suggestions for recovering a lost neighborhood.
If worse comes to worse, I'll just write the story without the damn pictures. I'd actually considered doing that anyway, once I got beyond a certain point in the story, because of the limitations of the game. Sigh. We'll see.
In the meantime, I removed and saved a number of superfluous neighborhoods that I haven't used in awhile, and the entire game is running much faster and smoother as a result. And thanks to this corruption mess, expect a lot more work to get done in Strangetown (and maybe the Ishies too, but no guarentees there) then I otherwise would have, because now that I've lost my Eridanos kids, I have to lavish more attention and love on the kids I have remaining.
As for right now - cripes I need to get to bed... x_x