Head Shots Won't Appear (and other issues)

[Deklitch]

Hi,

Ok then, I saved my game normally before bed last night. I opened it up this morning and played for a bit and then saved as this morning and returned to main menu.

On my return, I reopened the saved game to discover the following
- Head Shots of my active family that go down the left hand side of the screen aren't there
- Family Funds are set to 0
- My Mood meter is blue
- I can't expand the interface at the bottom of the screen by clicking on that triangle.

I closed that game, turned off the computer, turned on the computer, cleaned the caches and restarted Sims 3.
I opened that same saved game and got the same result.
I then went to the saved game from the night before (same family) and tried that one, same thing happened.
I then went and tried to open the Oid family file, and got the same result on that one.

I do not have mods, I do have store content, but no custom content. I have not downloaded anything since ... some time ago.
I run it on Windows 7 with 8GB Ram and am patched up to the latest patch for sims 3.

It has impacted on both the Oids and the Specialists, and I suspect the rest of my saved games as well.

Any suggestions for me?

[LivvieLove]

Hi Deklitch!
I was reading your stories when I saw you were having some troubles!
I just want to make sure I have a clear picture of when this started happening, so could you answer a few questions for me?
Have you tried doing a factory reset?
I'm assuming these issues were out of nowhere (just one minute everything fine, next time you load it up not so much)?
Did you change anything at all in between when it worked versus when it didn't (anything from updating your computer to cleaning out certain folders)?
Does everything work normally on a new save?

I've heard of this issue happening before, so I'm going to do some digging and see if there are any solve-all solutions that others have found.

Edit to add: I found this, and it has a few solutions on it, give it a try and if it doesn't work we'll head back to the drawing board!
http://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/04/bug-missing-ui.html

[Deklitch]

Hi LivvieLove,

Thank you for your help and questions.

I'll answer your questions in order

Have you tried doing a factory reset?

I haven't done a factory reset yet.

I'm assuming these issues were out of nowhere (just one minute everything fine, next time you load it up not so much)?

That is correct, I was playing my Specialist Family. It was all going fine, I saved and returned to main menu (in Sims 3). I got up from the computer for a bit, when I returned to the computer, I reopened the saved game from before my break to be greeted with the issues that I mentioned in my first post. At that point I closed that game, and went into my most recent save of the Oids, to be greeted with the same things.

I tried earlier saves from both the Oids and the Specialists, exactly the same issue. I then tried a different game altogether, my Ghost Hunter scoring file. That did everything normally. So then I progressively went back through the saved games of the Oids and the Specialists. All of the Specialist files came out that same way. My Oid saved game with the h extension on it (Oid ID H <- the file name) was the most recent save that was normal.

Did you change anything at all in between when it worked versus when it didn't (anything from updating your computer to cleaning out certain folders)?

I made no changes at all to the computer between it working and it not working, nothing was updated, nothing was deleted or even moved. After that happened I turned the computer down and after starting up again, I cleaned the sims 3 caches before loading sims 3.

Does everything work normally on a new save?

I've started up a new saved game in Sunset Valley. I've saved it a few times already, as different file names. The screen all looks the same. I've saved and saved as the game, I haven't yet exited to main menu and returned, but I will do that right now as I'm typing this, it opened, looks and works normally.

I've done up a screenshot of what the screen looks in this current game, and annotated it to explain how it was different in those other files. That image follows:


This link takes you to a picture on the SimsWiki and it was rather close to what I was seeing: Messed Up Game however, there weren't empty green thumbnail boxes down the left hand side of the screen, there weren't any boxes there at all, and as I said, I couldn't get the interface across the bottom of the screen to expand out.

On your edit, I have tried the resetsim *, saved the game, exited and returned, and it made no difference to those games.

Thanks again for your help, LivvieLove.

Dek

[Tiamet]

Hi Dek,

This is pretty much what was going on with the Goblin King.  Here's what I did...

First, tried going back before the save error started.  No luck there, it just showed up again.
Then, tried removing the hair and eyes cc I had for Jareth, created a new factory reset, put last working save in there, and lo and behold, that didn't work either.
Then, I tried to evict and move them back into the house.  That made it worse.
So I took a copy of the last working save again, (I'm so tired of that file, you can't believe it), and ran it through Error Trap.  It cleared over 1000 errors, but the family and UI were still missing.  So when it was finished with that, I did the edit town trick again, which worked, and now had a clean working save.
Then I copied the save into yet another brand new factory reset file with no mods.  It seems to be working just fine.


Check with the team before if you try this, and make sure you move your food replicators into the family inventory before evicting.  Mine ended up getting bugged.

Break a plumbob
Tia

ETA: I had it in the wrong order, sorry, 

[Deklitch]

Hi Tiamet,

Oh thanks for your suggestion and advice.

In my new game, I was merrily playing away, when this suddenly happened:



And yes, this was in the game I just typed up about on the ID board. I'm almost wondering if this is Sims 3 telling me to give up on the ID challenge.

Dek