Chatterbox French Pets Having Human Children?!

Translation help is here. For the mods. We're not teaching French.
theapoo
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Post by theapoo » December 11th, 2017, 11:17 pm

Lol Chain!! When I first saw the family trees I thought it was funny and freaky at the same time.

I am thinking about cutting back on a few mods. But it's so hard...! I think I can find a few, though. I need all my expansions, those aren't going anywhere. Saving and restarting the game frequently is something I've been utilizing too. Reducing graphics settings helps a lot, and you know what has helped the most? I recently deleted my TravelDB package in my save game folder. It was absolutely HUGE! I am already seeing faster load times, and it makes the game much less likely to crash while traveling. I'm also thinking of disabling memories.

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igazor
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Post by igazor » December 11th, 2017, 11:54 pm

I recently deleted my TravelDB package in my save game folder.
Deleted it rather than cleaned it up? Uhh...this is where, among other things, foreign sim data is stored while playing in the local homeworld. Might we have found a potential source of the borked family trees right here, then?

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Post by SkyDome007 » December 12th, 2017, 12:18 am

I hope I'm not hijacking this thread but what is this out of memory problem in sims 3. Is it because of RAM? Will it happen to me as well? I have more than 4gb RAM. I'll open a new topic for this if you want.

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TadOlson
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Post by TadOlson » December 12th, 2017, 6:13 am

I had this with my toddler's family tree where the family pets were showing up as his parents in his familty tree and his child aged sister was now his daughter in that family tree.His mum was the family dog and the cat was his dad.It didn't start until after the school became so overcrowded that Malcolm Langraab couldn't enter the building and started skipping school which led to him failing and being take by the social worker.His picture was showing in the girl's relationship panel as grey after he was taken and the sims started glitching out and shortly after is when that family tree glitched.
This was back when I only had base game with Pets and played with no Mods in a vanilla game.I had two other saves corrupted from social workers taking children away.It can happen if a sim goes missing at home or in a vacation world and mess that up.
I do currently have awsomemod and NRaas Mods installed and this hasn't happened to me for years.It had last happened in 2012 when I was new to the game and drove me to want to use Mods to fix the issues.

theapoo
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Post by theapoo » December 12th, 2017, 8:14 am

Good morning from NYC, everyone. :)

@ Igazor: I thought about that too! And the answer is: nope. I can say that because I tested it. The humonguous original TravelDB was in the recycle bin and I put it back where it was to see if I still had the issue. And I DID still have the issue. I'm about to test again right now to be sure.

@ SkyDome: It can absolutely happen to you. I also have more than 4 GB RAM. I have three times as much, in fact. Here is my understanding of why this happens, and others can correct me. The Sims 3 is a 32 bit game, which means that it isn't allowed to use more than 4 GB of RAM, no matter how much RAM you have. The danger zone is somewhere in the range of 3.7 GB used at a time. If your game tries to access more memory than it is allowed to and tries to go into that danger zone, your game will crash without warning. Memory intensive activities such as traveling, Create-a-styling, and switching households can push memory usage into the danger zone. Also, if you do not have enough memory to save your game without going into that danger zone, then you will get Error code 12. Or 16. Whether it will happen to you depends on a lot of factors. The more mods and CC you have, the more memory you're going to use. The higher your graphics settings are, the more memory you're going to use. The bigger your save game is...yada yada yada. So I really can't predict whether it's going to happen to you because I don't know your game.

If you want to continue this further I would appreciate it if we could start a new thread.

@ TadOlson: That's very interesting. So maybe those kids just went missing at some point while I was playing France? Also, the social worker can take your kid away if they are failing school? Wow...I thought that the social worker only came if they were malnourished and if they failed school all they got was a negative trait.

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Post by theapoo » December 12th, 2017, 9:05 am

...Aaaaand I checked. Putting the TravelDB file back in didn't change anything. The same three sims showed up as black and parented by cats and dogs *cringe*.

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Post by igazor » December 12th, 2017, 9:31 am

Sorry to not want to let this go quite so easily, but putting the TravelDB file back now, after the problem has occurred, and noticing no improvement doesn't really tell us anything. If the suddenly missing TravelDB was really the source of the problem, or part of it (and yes those are pretty big "IFs"), one would have to go back to a save from before the problem occurred, or more precisely to exactly when the file was removed, before restoring it. Or am I misunderstanding and is that what you were able to do as part of the restore test? I was under the impression that you weren't really sure exactly when this started happening, but maybe I got that wrong.

When you are playing in a homeworld, only one homeworld, the nhd file of the foreign worlds do not change at all. The TravelDB does, if there are any pending changes to be made to the real sims in the foreign worlds. When you next travel to that world, any changes held pending in the TravelDB then get applied to the "real" sims. But restoring a now stale TravelDB might actually confuse things further than be helpful.

Or it could, of course, have been caused by something else entirely. I've just never heard of deleting the entire TravelDB as a means of improving game performance unless the player has no intention of ever playing their connected worlds or the sims in them and is planning to delete all of their nhd files as well.

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Post by Chain_Reaction » December 12th, 2017, 2:29 pm

Oh, yeah, that wasn't wise. Don't do that. Sims store minisim id's when they are generated into that file. The family tree uses these because it has to work cross world. If you deleted them then it would generate them again reusing id's. The id's stored with the sim are now pointing to another sim because their old id has been reused by another sim.

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Post by theapoo » December 13th, 2017, 10:41 am

I see now that I didn't test the save from before I had removed Travel DB for the first time. Let me try that.

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Post by theapoo » December 14th, 2017, 6:20 am

Okay. I have some things to report back. It's a really long story.

So first I tested with a save from before I ever removed the TravelDB file. I sent the same household to the same copy of France they had been to before, but with the TravelDB intact and never having been removed. Remember how I had noticed that three sims had the problem? This time, one Sim had the same problem (being black with a borked family tree), and the other two Sims just didn't exist. At all. Then I tested with an even earlier backup, again with TravelDB never having been removed. This time, there were two affected Sims and one of them didn't exist. There seems to be an element of randomness to how this problem manifests itself.

Next I tried sending a different household to a different France file that only THEY had been to. I wanted to see if the problem only persisted in the previous household's French world. If the problem only existed in the previous household's world, then I wanted to see if I could recreate the problem in this household's world by removing the TravelDB file. I saw that all of the new little kid Sims that had aged up looked normal, and so I made the mistake of thinking that the problem didn't exist in this world. This was with the Travel DB file already there. Then I tried again without the TravelDB file and the sims looked normal this time too. Then I happened to look at the family trees of all the little kids and while two of them had normal family trees, one of them was parented by animals, even though the Sim was NOT black.

Now I wasn't sure if this problem had existed the first time around with the TravelDB intact, because it hadn't occurred to me to look at the family trees at that point (because the Sims all looked fine). So I quit the game without saving, put TravelDB back, deleted cache files, and checked again. The problem was the same where all three Sims looked normal but one Sim had pets for parents.

The last thing I did was I loaded the earliest backup I had from over a game year ago (30 Sim days = 1 year in my game). This backup was with the second household in which one French kid was part cat/dog but looked fine. In this world, the problem did not exist at all. All of the kids and their family trees were normal (one of the kids apparently has an older half-sister on her mother's side that ended up marrying and reproducing with the kid's father...and that baby is the kid's half-niece and half-sister...).

So I was able to draw a lot of conclusions from all my testing. Deleting the TravelDB file was not the cause of the problem. That particular France file was also not the cause of the problem. Now in the first France that corresponded to the first household, three kid Sims were vulnerable to both appearing black and having a messed up family tree. These children had not been alive the last time this version of France was loaded. How this problem manifested itself among those three Sims varied each time that game was loaded. All children affected, if they existed when the world was loaded again, appeared as both black and raised by wolves.

In the 2nd France that corresponded to the 2nd household, remember that part of the problem affected only one child. That child looked normal but was raised by cats and dogs. The other kids had the proper parents. In my earliest version of that same world, the problem did not exist at all. I think that the Sims looked normal (despite one of them being raised by wolves) because these kids existed the last time this France file had been loaded, over a game year ago. So their normal appearances were generated and saved back when the file was uncorrupted. In the case of the first French file, in which the affected kids were both black and raised by wolves, those kids did NOT exist before the problem began. They were born in game after the problem already existed, so their appearances were borked too.

In both worlds, the family tree problem manifested itself somehow, even if the black appearance problem did not. I think that the family tree problem can be attributed to corruption due to having a different French world for each household, even though the TravelDB file remained. The reason why I started doing this a really long time ago was so that I could play the adventures AND the fresh tombs over again with different Sims. I didn't think it was causing the family tree and/or black appearance problem because the previous times I had gone to France with the second family, the kids appeared normal--so I never noticed the problem was there. It was only when I visited France with the first family that I noticed the problem because the kids appeared black. So that prompted me to check the family trees and notice that problem--which existed in the other world but I didn't know it. So it seems clear to me that swapping out two different French worlds, depending on the household I was playing, while keeping the same TravelDB file, caused some sort of corruption. Some data regarding these kids born in-game was getting mixed up somewhere. And I never knew I was causing corruption because everything looked fine on the surface until I loaded up the family with the invisible French kids.

That sucks but honestly, that level of corruption is tolerable to me because the problem has not occurred in the homeworld, which is what I really care about. The French kids aren't particularly important to me and the worlds are still completely playable thanks to Overwatch and ErrorTrap. I believe I can use MC to fix the kids and I really like being able to replay the adventures and tombs with different households. If the corruption spreads (I don't think it will), then I guess I will have to revert to my oldest backup from before the problem began.

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