Stuck Sims

[pne]

When I tried to save my game a while ago, I found that the controls for Save, Neighbourhood, and Quit were all disabled.

My guess is that this happened because they family's daughter (who's now in college), while visiting her parents' household, answered her cellphone and accepted the invitation downtown, then took off in a taxi -- and that the game is now waiting for her to come back, which she won't since I can't switch to her.

I found this entry which looked a bit similar to my problem (though I think Build and Buy mode worked for me), but since the solutions involved objects/mods I didn't have, I decided to kill the game from Task Manager and will have to play them again next time I start the game. Ah well.

(And her poor old dad will die all over again, I suppose, since he died during this recent session while she was there.)

Comments

[pleiades829.livejournal.com]

So, it was a one-time problem, and not something where you opened your game back up and it was irrevocably borked?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I haven't run the game yet since then (it was late and I just went to bed) -- I do hope that it was just a one-time problem, though!

[pleiades829.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure if you can use this to fix that particular problem, but SimPE (http://sims.ambertation.de/) is a program that lets you get into the guts of your files. Since you're really comfortable with computers, it might be something valuable to poke around in if you continue to have problems.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for the hint!

I shall have to have a look at it.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Looks like it was a one-time problem, fortunately.

I played the family again, and the father died again (right when he turned 76). Shortly afterwards, the girl got two phone calls again on her mobile phone (though the other way around - first a Contact, then her boyfriend), but this time I had her turn down both calls. (Even though I had installed the Lot Debugger which might have let me re-enable the controls, I didn't want to chance it.)