Sob!!! Okay, here is the developments so far this evening. (1st time I've set down to the computer all day. Wow, has this been a loooooonnnggg day. The weather is calling for snow and I'm praying their right so I can have the day off to work on this!) If I remove the downloads folder the game boots fine. If I put one file, even a hair or clothing file that I didn't change (only the recolors), the game crashes. The icons had changed to simsPE icons. No longer were they sims package files. So, I uninstalled SimsPE. The computer now says the files are "unrecognized file types." Ran Sims2 and it crashed again. I've about given up. I moved the downloads folder out and put a new, empty one in it's place. I'm going to redownload some things and see what happens. Oh, JMP, that is great advice. I just wish you'd have replied when I asked about it a week ago in another thread. :(
Hmm ... that isn't really supposed to happen, Kristal. I have just been playing around with the lastest version of SimPE and reading your story made me yelp and rush to run the game to see if I had similar trouble. I haven't. My downloads folder still shows up with icons to indicate that Windoze doesn't know what to do with them. I "installed" PE by downloading the .rar archive and just decompressing it to My Documents. I then opened the folder and plopped a shortcut to simpe.exe on my desktop so, in effect, SimPE has not actually been installed by windoze. I did this because SimPE is described as alpha and so I do not consider it nearly robust enough to allow it to play with the OS settings. If you cannot get it to work again you may have to reinstall the game ... :( [Postscript 30 minutes later] Coo! This took me 30 minutes. I did not go overboard on image quality but I just tried the new SimPE object manager plug in to recolor the Club Distress seating ... A quick in game testing shows that it works perfectly ...
Well, look on the bright side, you haven't lost your saved game. That would have been something to cry about. My .packages are associated with SimsPE and it doesn't cause any problem whatsoever. There were once associated with Clean installer and that didn't cause any problem either. I've changed the association manually a few times for convenience sake and the game doesn't care. So I don't think this is your problem. I'm surprised that your unchanged (are they really unchanged?) files are causing the game to crash. So your idea is the right one. Try re-downloading one original file that is now causing your game to crash to test. If it does crash the system, you should reinstall the game as Mirelly said
I have the day off!! We didn't have snow, but my oldest son came down with a sore throat. So, his scratchy throat warranted a trip to the Pediatrician because the school wanted him tested for strep so they could send a homebound tutor! LOL It was not strep, just a virus, he'll go to school tomorrow (could have today, Dr. said) he's happilly laying in bed watching cartoons, and I still got my day off to keep him company. Okay, back on topic. Last night I downloaded about 50 files and they worked fine. Now that I have calmed down, I'm not panicked, not bleary-eyed, and have the house quiet (little kids at preschool/daycare) and I had a second to look REALLY hard, I noticed some strange files in my downloads folder. Copies of files. Copies of copies. Plus all those .bak files. So, I deleted the copies and moved the bak. files. I couldn't tell you how I made the copies, or even if the baby did it and I didn't see it. (He catches you with your back turned and pushes keys). Still, not taking any chances. I am moving my favorite files to the new downloads folder. I move a few, boot up the game to see if it works, then move a few more. It's slow going, but at least I won't loose my favorite files, and I'll have fewer downloads clogging up my folder and making my game move slower. My new graphic card is supposed to be here later this week and Hubby is buying more RAM for the computer to. By next Tuesday, I should be set.
Ach, all this downloads stuff has me worried. What would happen if I did nothing? If, when I install University, some of the hair/eyes/clothes files I've downloaded aren't liked by the expansion, will they just be written over/deleted and replaced with a default file already in the game? I'm just concerned because I want to have as stress-free an installation as possible, given my computer's already tempestuous nature. And slighty off topic: will the Expansion Pack require another 3.5GB of disk space? Or is that something I've misread on a website?
Things made with Homecrafter and Body Shop are not going to be a problem. The problems come if you have downloaded *objects* since those were not made with a Maxis tool. Same with clothes which were made with a new mesh, since the new meshes weren't made by Maxis but from a Beta tested tool.
So; - if I have clothes which have used new meshes not affiliated with Maxis, presumably I'm going to have to find them and do something with them? (related to the previous posts) - or, can I just leave them there? I want to know whether leaving them there will cause the game to: a)crash or b)simply not let them be available in the game any more, but for the game & expansion to work properly. I know, since no one has the game yet, a definite answer may not be available, but I want to know whether a purge of the download folder is required.
I suspect that new meshes should be removed prior to installing the EP, just like we're supposed to remove any hacks before we install an update or EP. As of now, we don't know what will happen when the EP is installed regarding the non-Maxis objects and meshes. They could work just fine. They might just be unavailable. They might cause flashing. They might cause crashing when you try to load a lot, or they might cause the game not to load at all. Since none of us has had enough experience with the EP (and that includes people who might have had the opportunity to try it out at Maxis invitation), we just don't know. Better safe than sorry.
I had this happen earlier this week. I thought the download folder was the problem one. It turned out that it was some other folder. My game refused to load when I put in my saved folder. I completedly reinstalled. Then I started putting the subfolders (downloads, Saved Sims, etc) in one by one. I got the downloads folder, Saved Sims, Neighborhood and one other (can't remember which now) back in with the game working fine. The problem must have been in one of the other folders that I didn't replace (like Storytelling, music, etc that I don't normally use anyway, so their loss was not a problem.) Now it's working fine. But it wasn't anything that was in the downloads file that was a problem, since it worked fine with that folder in (and fortunately, all the ones needed to keep playing my saved games.) I wasn't willing to look further once I had determined nothing important to me was lost.
The games working okay now. I am having some of my files doing the blue blinky-blink thing. But, my game loads and plays fine, so I will worry about the blinky-thing later. Only 4 more days until the Sims2University is released. Yahoo!!!
According to Maxis, the blinky thing is due to the game not finding the needed texture. The blinky ones which don't get fixed by finding them again in the design tool are probably not going to do anything but blink in the game once TS2 is installed. (I nearly cried when the Maxis folk told us that. Some of my favorites are now blinking.) I'm glad you got the game back going though. I know how frustrated I was while I was trying to figure out where the problem was (and it turned out not to be in the downloads folder at all!)
