Thursday 25 October 2012

Anonymous commenting is off

Hey all,

I've had to turn anonymous commenting off. I just received four spam comments within two minutes and that's pretty much the last straw for me. I have been getting multiple notifications a day about spam comments, all anonymous, and it's just got to be too much. Blogger is very good at identifying them as spam, so they never get published but the constant email notifications are tiresome.

So. From now on, if you want to comment, you will no longer be able to do so anonymously. I'm sorry to the legitimate commenters this will affect but I hope you won't let it stop you from leaving a comment if you'd like to. It doesn't take long to sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account (these are probably the two easiest ways of commenting) and there's no reason you actually have to use the blog for anything. I have a Wordpress blog I only ever use for commenting. :)

Once again though, I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might cause. Blame the spammers. ;)

Saturday 20 October 2012

Clean templates in...the rebuild begins!

Because I can be a bit of a moron, it took me a few days to get my clean templates installed properly. Pro tip: it really helps if you follow all the instructions!

I really didn't discover anything especially exciting during this process but just in the interest of keeping you all up to date, I'll share what I did find out along the way, through my own fiddling around and with the help of some of the people at N99 and on Twitter. I'm not going to go through the instructions here as they're quite simple. Any advice I give below assumes you've already read the instructions and have at least a vague idea of what you're doing.

Friday 12 October 2012

Crashing update

This is going to be sort of half update, half tutorial. :)

After playing with the uberhood for several days and not seeing any of the issues I had with Sullivan, I'm even more convinced that it's the hood, not my CC or my drivers, or anything else.

So I've decided to rebuild Sullivan. I'll be posting updates about where I'm up to here, in the hope that it might help others or maybe even help me. If I'm going down the wrong track, I'm hopeful someone will pull me up and say "hey, there's a better way of doing this".


Friday 5 October 2012

Crashing problems once again!

I've been suffering from some crashing problems again, which is the reason there hasn't been an update. I've also been getting some pink flashing objects/sims, which I suspect may be related to the crashing.

The pink flashing is very odd. I'll go into a house and a sim or object will be flashing pink, or even several sims/objects. I'll exit out to the hood screen and go back in and everything will appear normal again. Or I'll go into my options and adjust the anti-aliasing up or down. Sometimes that fixes it, sometimes it makes it worse and sometimes it crashes the game. It's a bit of a mystery.

The crashing is also a bit enigmatic. It can happen on any lot, residential or community. Sometimes it happens just as I enter the lot, sometimes it'll be after a good while. Sometimes it happens on the first lot I load, immediately and sometimes it takes a few hours. Sometimes I can successfully go back and forth from a community lot with no crashing and no pink flashing but just often, I can't. If I was crashing consistently on a certain lot or after a certain interaction, this would be a lot easier to solve!

So I'm trying to figure all this out now. Currently, I'm testing out my theory that it might be a hood corruption issue. Even though I started Sullivan in 2008, I still made some mistakes along the way which really aren't great for the health of a hood. So corruption is definitely a possibility. Everything is backed up but if I end up having to rebuild, that's still going to be a big job. Just the process of transferring everything over and cheating everyone up to where they were will be an enormous task and that's assuming it all goes smoothly.

I'm playing the Uberhood with all my CC in and seeing if I get any of the issues I get when I try to play Sullivan. It might take a while though, because I have to be sure that the game isn't crashing and that I'm not just going through a lucky patch. So far though, I haven't crashed or seen any pink flashing.

Honestly, this game is just ridiculously finicky though, isn't it? So many things can go wrong with it and you really don't get too much of a clue about what it might be without going through a hell of a lot of trial and error! It's very frustrating.

But anyway, please bear with me while I try to get this fixed! I hope to be back playing Sullivan and sharing it with you all as soon as I can. :)