Chat/Jumping Bug Burninated The infamous chat bug is laid to burnination and lies crushed beneath our shiny black boots. Details of the hack can be found here
Well, what we did was we spliced a piece of code over the buggy chat loop, which would go into conniptions accessing sim memories to talk about, and restricted it to strictly topics, like when they use "Chat Online". For obvious reasons, there are no screenshots, because this hack does not produce any visible effects. It is the LACK of visible effects you should be grateful for, since a screenshot of the jumping bug not happening, isn't, well, news to anyone.
Just to help other JM, when you post hacks, be sure to describe it in detail otherwise people are completely oblivious on what it is .
Bah. Okay, it's simple: This is the hack which fixes the chat bug. The Chat Bug, or Jumping Bug, as referred to frequently in the official forums, has the following symptoms: 1. Your sim is unable to eat with other members of his family or guests. 2. Your sim is unable to talk on the phone with other people. 3. Your sim cannot relax on the bed with other people. 4. Your sim cannot sit on couches to watch TV or just talk with other people. 5. Your sim cannot play chess with others. 6. Your sim cannot use the hot tub with others. 7. When the sim tries to do any of these interactions, he, and often everyone else, will jump out of the interaction, and revert to a standing position with their action queues wiped. 8. These symptoms will occur infrequently at first, and you may shrug them off as a glitch the first few times, but will grow increasingly frequent until they strike within seconds or less. 9. All of the above interactions share one thing in common: Sims performing them use the Talk/Chat functionality to socialize with other sims while performing them. 10. The afflicted sim causes the behavior: other sims attempting to interact in the above ways with the sim in question will jump, but only when interacting with infected sims. 11. The problem is perceived to be contagious, although this is not concretely proven. If your Sims are not encountering any of the above behaviors, you don't need this....yet. If they are, and your Sims are becoming nearly nonfunctional, you know what this is, and this is this duct-tape fix for it. If nothing is wrong, well, you don't need this....yet. But you will!
Thanks JM and thanks too for adding a l'il text file of instructions and stuff to help those who are not as savvy as thee. BTW how does it work? Does it extend a sim's memory capacity?
Nope. There's actually nothing wrong with Sim memories. This "bug", isn't, technically speaking, directly related to memories at all. It only occurs because memory access takes too long to perform, so the operation "times out" as part of a failsafe system designed to prevent endlessly looping object code. The result being that the interaction is forcibly cancelled, the sim is reset to standing position, and the action queue is purged to prevent the game from locking up. The problem is, this failsafe system is a little too triggerhappy, and memory access with a bloated memory bank can take too long. So when memory access takes too long, the Sim is booted out by the failsafe system, and he "jumps". The fix, therefore, disables the memory access, forcing the Sim to only select from standard topics of conversation, rather than his memories, when he uses "Chat". Since selection of standard topic is performed in constant time, this will never time out. Note that this theory is no longer in the realm of idle speculation: It has, in fact, been substantiated through controlled testing. Read the proof here: http://www.modthesims2.com/forum_viewtopic.php?8.9816 The short, reader's digest version, basically, is that we suspected the thing was caused by a timeout, given that it closely resembled security behaviors I had implemented on my own game, and so as a hunch, I tested it: Instead of doing ANYTHING with memories, or chatting, I changed the chat topic selection function into a simple endless loop. If a failsafe system thus existed, it would fire and the sims would "jump", since this was a true endless loop. Otherwise, the game would lock up, because I had intentionally and knowingly coded an endless loop. And indeed, they jumped, exactly as if they had the jumping bug, except these were fresh sims with no memory, and I wasn't attempting to access memory, I was forcing an endless loop.
How easy is it to remove once we get the official patch? I mentioned it to the Maxis people and that was their main concern.
All of my hacks are as easy to remove as they were to install, as no modifications are made to any data files: All of them are simply procedural overrides, so removing the packages instantly restores previous behavior. This, of course, means your Sims would start jumping as before. There is no reasonable possibility of damage or side effects, as no data is added or removed from the game itself.
Thanks, JM. Some replace data by altering it, and I wanted to make sure that that's not what the case was with this one.
So if I'm reading this right, the "memories" of the sims become so bloated that it times out trying to decide what to talk about, and your fix is to simply avoid the memory search and have them go by a predefined set of topics? If that's the case, what are the odds that you could have it jump to the predefined topics AFTER the timeout, still giving the sims the ability to "chat" about their memories if the memories aren't too bloated? -Javin
This isn't really possible at this time, because not enough is known about BHAV coding, and because the timeout is an external feature to the coding which causes the entire script to be terminated with the resulting jump, preventing any further execution of code.
Another question, JMP... the 'timeout' thing. What time frame referent is being used, do we know? I'm thinking that if the memory access loop is timed off the cpu's clock then the fastest PC's will hit the limt sooner than the slower ones. I wonder this because the virtual memory of a sim has to be stored in the physical memory of the PC and access times to physical memory have not decreased in proportion to the rise in cpu speed ... or at least that is my empirically observed instinct. If this proved to be the case then an effective patch would merely involve scaling the timeout loop against the cpu's clock speed ... urrrrr.....
The exact metric used is currently not well known. We suspect it may be based strictly on BHAV instructional count per atomic burst. Alteration of the timeout system itself is believed to require access to hardcode, which is presently not within our resources and not expected to be so.
In that case perhaps someone with the appropriate knowledge/skills could raise this with Maxis directly ... it might help with the putative patch.
Well, if you know anyone like that, feel free to suggest this. I doubt it'll work, though. Maxis is not in the business of listening to their customers.
I've already passed on to Maxis what information about this you've put here. There is also information coming in from Neighborhood 99, which evidently also has a large hacking community.
Thx for the hack. Lol,this is even my 1st post. Many sims became problematic and i wasnt able to do some simple stuff like chat,playing chess.. etc This was a serious bug though since the aspiration meter dropped easily and i didnt had many options to imrpove it. This hack saved my game. Thx again
