Request for help on moving towns in The Sims 3
I have seen some Sims stories where the family moves towns every once in a while because of glitches or anything else that might warrant a move. I was planning on waiting to move towns until Generation 4 because it would have made it easier to move the siblings of that generation together because I only planned on there being two instead of five like there are right now. Unfortunately when I loaded the game today and started trying to play, Lara froze, completely, for five real minutes, I couldn't even pull up the menu to quit until it finally finished doing whatever it was trying to do and I am not even sure what that was. Oddly enough, the other Sims went about their day just walking around her which is making me fear that this may be a slow corruption of the file.
So I figure I have a couple of options for moving the Legacy household itself. I can either place the lot that I have in the library currently, hoping that it isn't the lot itself that is causing the slow down. Or I can recreate the family in Create A Family since I have all of the Sims saved individually and other than having to remember to age up Belle sometime during this week of play it shouldn't really mess up the family aging because everyone but Belle is just about at the beginning of their age range this week and I don't figure a day or two off at this point is really going to make much of a difference. My thinking on this second option is that it completely removes the possibility that it is the save file that is causing the slow down (I can cheat to give them their money back and then recreate the home with the amount they should actually have although the garden would be restarted). The main draw back to the second option is that even if I managed to get the siblings all moved over, the main family group would not remember them. The minor setback to the second option is that Lara's very new pregnancy would also be lost, but considering the file is acting like it doesn't want to make it through the pregnancy, that might be a non-issue at this point.
Now if I did the first option, does anyone know if I packaged and moved the siblings, would they remember their family relationships? I would like to keep the family as intact as possible, but I realize that may not be an option. I have seen a couple of stories where it looked like more than one household was moved, but I don't know if they recognized each other as family after the move. If I have to loose the siblings, I loose them, I would just prefer not to loose them.
Update:
I am not sure if I have made things better or worse. After a chat with my husband we decided the best thing to do would be to make the new town (in this case Riverview) place the house (since they would keep all of their stuff and skills) and see what happens with the file size of the save. I did that and the first thing I noticed that was odd was that nearly everything Amy stole disappeared from the lot, which is making me wonder if that was part of the problem, lots of objects that were stolen from people who are now dead and the person who stole them is now dead. The other thing in game I discovered, and this made me happy, was that all of the stuff that had been locked in Hugh's personal inventory since the last patch could now be removed from his inventory and placed around the house (so there are going to be a lot of cut gems going all over the place now). But the thing that surprised me the most was that the save size for the game is actually larger by a good 10 MB than the Sunset Valley one. It did load at least twice as fast as it had been so I am hoping the increase in file size is not a bad thing. I'm not sure yet how to work into the story the lack of interaction with the siblings, but I am also not sure yet if this will actually work better.
Anyway, I now need to go refurnish their home because most of it had been stolen by Amy. I may change the wallpaper in some of the rooms because the all blue downstairs isn't working for me as well as I thought it would.
Second Update:
This is getting weirder. So I decided in my half asleep wisdom to make a copy of the original neighborhood and just check and see if the Patch for the game that I added in-between saving the house for Riverview and placing the house in Riverview was actually what solved my game play problem for now. I loaded up the game, I am no longer sure if it took more or less time than normal, I need a stopwatch and that is something we don't have and Kevin's iTune's account is completely borked and that is what our iPod is associated with so I can't even get a free stopwatch app if I wanted to. Anyway, the house loaded, all of the stuff Amy stole was there so I have no idea why it was missing from the Riverview house. I decided to play for as long as I could which ended up being 2 1/2 days (the length of the pregnancy) and made it through the delivery of the newest Berg and decided if that didn't bring the game to a grinding halt then the patch must have actually fixed something in the game for a change and actually worked on already borked files which I know they normally don't. There is nothing on the patch list saying that they solved this problem, the closest thing being the last item, polished up game play. If this keeps working as well as it did for the game play I just finished I may avoid patching again until the legacy is over because this is the smoothest it has run since I installed the last patch.
Anyway, I am not sure if it will be this great for others as I have no mods or non-Sims 3 Store custom content so it may not play nice with some of the mods in your game and it may just be a fluke that will never be repeated again, but I am going to run with it for as long as I can because I don't want to break up the family tree (although I am annoyed that the generation 4 Berg doesn't she Amy on her family tree, I have to click on Lara to see everyone which means by Generation 6 one level will always be missing no matter who I click on.
I need to try and sleep again now; I am getting more and more red lines under my words and the spell check is having a harder and harder time finding suggestions.
So I figure I have a couple of options for moving the Legacy household itself. I can either place the lot that I have in the library currently, hoping that it isn't the lot itself that is causing the slow down. Or I can recreate the family in Create A Family since I have all of the Sims saved individually and other than having to remember to age up Belle sometime during this week of play it shouldn't really mess up the family aging because everyone but Belle is just about at the beginning of their age range this week and I don't figure a day or two off at this point is really going to make much of a difference. My thinking on this second option is that it completely removes the possibility that it is the save file that is causing the slow down (I can cheat to give them their money back and then recreate the home with the amount they should actually have although the garden would be restarted). The main draw back to the second option is that even if I managed to get the siblings all moved over, the main family group would not remember them. The minor setback to the second option is that Lara's very new pregnancy would also be lost, but considering the file is acting like it doesn't want to make it through the pregnancy, that might be a non-issue at this point.
Now if I did the first option, does anyone know if I packaged and moved the siblings, would they remember their family relationships? I would like to keep the family as intact as possible, but I realize that may not be an option. I have seen a couple of stories where it looked like more than one household was moved, but I don't know if they recognized each other as family after the move. If I have to loose the siblings, I loose them, I would just prefer not to loose them.
Update:
I am not sure if I have made things better or worse. After a chat with my husband we decided the best thing to do would be to make the new town (in this case Riverview) place the house (since they would keep all of their stuff and skills) and see what happens with the file size of the save. I did that and the first thing I noticed that was odd was that nearly everything Amy stole disappeared from the lot, which is making me wonder if that was part of the problem, lots of objects that were stolen from people who are now dead and the person who stole them is now dead. The other thing in game I discovered, and this made me happy, was that all of the stuff that had been locked in Hugh's personal inventory since the last patch could now be removed from his inventory and placed around the house (so there are going to be a lot of cut gems going all over the place now). But the thing that surprised me the most was that the save size for the game is actually larger by a good 10 MB than the Sunset Valley one. It did load at least twice as fast as it had been so I am hoping the increase in file size is not a bad thing. I'm not sure yet how to work into the story the lack of interaction with the siblings, but I am also not sure yet if this will actually work better.
Anyway, I now need to go refurnish their home because most of it had been stolen by Amy. I may change the wallpaper in some of the rooms because the all blue downstairs isn't working for me as well as I thought it would.
Second Update:
This is getting weirder. So I decided in my half asleep wisdom to make a copy of the original neighborhood and just check and see if the Patch for the game that I added in-between saving the house for Riverview and placing the house in Riverview was actually what solved my game play problem for now. I loaded up the game, I am no longer sure if it took more or less time than normal, I need a stopwatch and that is something we don't have and Kevin's iTune's account is completely borked and that is what our iPod is associated with so I can't even get a free stopwatch app if I wanted to. Anyway, the house loaded, all of the stuff Amy stole was there so I have no idea why it was missing from the Riverview house. I decided to play for as long as I could which ended up being 2 1/2 days (the length of the pregnancy) and made it through the delivery of the newest Berg and decided if that didn't bring the game to a grinding halt then the patch must have actually fixed something in the game for a change and actually worked on already borked files which I know they normally don't. There is nothing on the patch list saying that they solved this problem, the closest thing being the last item, polished up game play. If this keeps working as well as it did for the game play I just finished I may avoid patching again until the legacy is over because this is the smoothest it has run since I installed the last patch.
Anyway, I am not sure if it will be this great for others as I have no mods or non-Sims 3 Store custom content so it may not play nice with some of the mods in your game and it may just be a fluke that will never be repeated again, but I am going to run with it for as long as I can because I don't want to break up the family tree (although I am annoyed that the generation 4 Berg doesn't she Amy on her family tree, I have to click on Lara to see everyone which means by Generation 6 one level will always be missing no matter who I click on.
I need to try and sleep again now; I am getting more and more red lines under my words and the spell check is having a harder and harder time finding suggestions.