I am having serious issues with two meshes that were posted here at MTS2.

I have PM'd the creator with my concerns, but haven't heard back. The meshes in question are located here and here . I have done a search of this particular problem but have not found a solution, and am not even sure if this is the right forum to ask. Note: I am still having the other issue that I listed in the one thread as well on 8-8-06 with no response from the creator, but this is an entirely different problem. I have Uni, NL and OFB installed with all patches. My system is well above specs for the game.

To sum up:
Custom top meshes and recolors of said meshes causes immediate termination of game and crash to desktop upon calling to purchase a community lot when the female sim is wearing the top. The female sim is never able to actually complete the transaction while wearing said top.

I have tried this in a clean game in a brand new neighborhood using maxis pants with no other items installed (all other downloads removed). I double checked to make sure I had the right meshes in my game. The meshes look great in game. All recolors show up as expected.

The game terminates and crashes to desktop no matter which recolor the sim in question is wearing when they attempt to purchase a community lot via the regular phone or the cellphone. I've tested the same sim with the same community lot in maxis-only clothing and they are able to buy the lot just fine, so that rules out the sim and the lot.

I went and then tested the same sim and the same community lot with the sim wearing top-only meshes by other creators with maxis pants and they are able to buy the lot just fine.

Each time, the game gives the error message that the application will terminate and it crashes to desktop when the female in question is wearing one of the tops. It is not affected if the sim owns the outfit but is not wearing it at the time.

Is there a quick-fix for this problem? Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix the meshes in question?

Thanks for any advice you may have to offer,

Ivy

Okay. Let's all take a deep breath and have a cookie. The disbelief at this issue is certainly, well, understandable... there's exactly 0 reason I can think of that the game would be accessing a sim's clothing for them buying a community lot. It -should not- be crashing.

But it does. I tried it myself and it appears dress tops, not just flyingpigeon's but my own made the same way he did and yet unreleased, DO cause a crash when buying a community lot.

Seems like the solution to this is pretty simple... don't wear a dress top when buying a community lot. The change made to the settings to create a dress top is a -tiny- one and shouldn't cause any problem, but, well, there's some line of code that's misplaced and causing this. There's nothing that can be done to a dress top to change this, I think... It is, quite literally, one little setting that makes a dress top, that should not matter at ALL for buying a community lot. Wear something else when becoming a business owner.

I was able to recreate the error. No offense but I kind of scoffed at first too. Clean download folder as well.

DiscordKitty did offer help, yes, thank you. My apologies to DiscordKitty.

I have been thru all that which is what landed me here. I'm sorry I did not note that specifically in my initial report. I did specify I did search and came up empty, but apparently I needed to be more specific. Next time I shall spell it out.

The problem still persists though, and that is that it has been isolated to these two meshes in my clean game. I need to know what non-obvious places to look into, whether it's coding specific to OFB, or somewhere in the mesh itself, or something in SimPE, that could be causing the crash, since other shirt-only meshes are NOT causing the problem.

And my computer does not hate me. In my regular non-clean game, I have more downloads than I care to mention, and I've never had the game crash on me.

EDIT: Ohmygoodness...THANK YOU...THANK YOU...THANK YOU...after two days, and feeling completely berated and like no one was reading what I was saying after the earlier responses here, I'm feeling so much relieved to know
that there IS INDEED a problem with these meshes when wearing them when purchashing a community lot.

I think a big sticky note should be made on the posts for the meshes in question so that anyone downloading them knows ahead of time that this will come up, so that no one has to go thru this ever again.

Ivy

After talking to hp about this, I've decided it has something to do with the fact that is based of a full-body mesh. I think maxis coded this improperly, causing your game to crash. Sorry! Just remember to change clothes when purchasing a community lot.

Having a permanent fix for the issue would be ever so much better, but understandable if it cannot be done.

Unfortunately, the neighborhood that these were meant for, buying and selling business lots will become quite a regular event, and most of the business owners at this point are female. Keeping track of all their clothing is already challenging enough...lol.

I shall be hopeful then that we can have more creations out there based off so little meshes that cover the belly button with any pants/skirts that we can mix and match as well as these were doing for me that won't cause a crash when buying a business lot.


Ivy

I don't think there's going to be any fix for the dress tops that will keep this from happening - dress tops are made by cloning a full body mesh, importing the 3d model for a top only, and then changing one line in the recolour file's settings to tell it that it's a top. It's really a very simple, elegant way of doing it... And in order for something to work like a dress top, that seems to be the way it has to be done. There doesn't appear to be an alternate dress top method.

So the problem is really not so much with the dress tops themselves as it is with the code that runs when a sim goes to buy a community lot. For some reason, it's accessing what the buying sim is wearing when it does it... which makes exactly 0 sense. None, nada, can't see a reason it would want to do this... Which is why the initial reaction to this issue was disbelief - the idea that a clothing mesh would cause a crash with something completely unrelated is, well, unheard of.

Someone who has a bit bigger and squishier a brain than I might be able to go in and check what's happening when a sim goes to buy a community lot, and possibly create a hack that works around whatever is causing the crash... but until that unlikely event, it appears just remembering that dress tops = crash and changing clothes briefly while purchasing a community lot seems to be a decent workaround.

My guess, admittedly a total stab in the dark, is that it somehow pertains to animation bones. This process perhaps causes duplicate or corrupted animation bone assignments, and when certain animations are performed, the game throws a wobbly.

Also, cellphones are known for random crashes. Does this occur when using any phone, or just a cellphone? Does it affect other phone-calling behaviors?

It happens with any phone, every time you attempt to call to purchase a business lot while wearing either of these meshes. And no, it does not appear to affect any other phone-calling behaviors.

Ivy

Exactly. It seems that the problem is within the coding, not the mesh. I don't think its fixable. Sorry, again! This is a problem within maxis coding and I guess it was triggered by changing a full-body outfit to a top. HP also tested this with a dress top mesh she made, and it did the exact same thing, so I know its not either of our faults if we are both experiencing the same problem. Thanks for testing, hp. Just be sure to change the outfit when you purchase a community lot.

I have completed my investigation into the matter. It appears that the way this mesh is created is flawed at a fundamental level and corrupts some aspect of thumbnail-generation. ANYTHING that would cause your sim's thumbnail to appear in a manner that is different from his portrait thumbnail will crash the game. This includes, but is not limited to, the confirmation dialog for purchasing a community lot by phone, computer, or selectable deed purchase, getting a job, or anything else that would cause his dynamic portrait to appear as a Yes/No or possibly Yes/No/Cancel. Static portraits that occur during NID off-lot dialogs appear unaffected.

The problem is believed to be unresolveable and widespread, and will cause any number of apparently random things to crash both now and in the future, and the purchase community lot problem is merely tip-of-the-iceberg. The mesh is fundamentally flawed and corrupts the game in its present implementation. An alternative approach to creating "dress tops" will have to be found. It is my recommendation that all present dress-as-top meshes be immediately recalled from download and removed from service.

Thank you JM for digging into the matter further. I did not realize that it would cause the other issues as well, as I had not yet encountered them in my game yet since they had just been put into play when the error was discovered.

Since it is unlikely that my sims will go without getting jobs, or buying and selling real estate, or any other number of occasions that may be based upon yes/no or possibly yes/no/cancel options, both now and in the future, I shall be following your recommendation as listed and removing them from my download folder.

Thank you once again for your assistance, and good day to you!


Ivy

As you have said, it is unresolveable, and even though it seems that it is caused by bad maxis coding and techinically is not my fault, I will be removing the dress tops sometime within this week so no one experiences this problem. Sorry for the inconvience that these have caused everyone. It doesn't not seem that there is another way to make these meshes, as hystericalparoxysm has said. I'm very sorry again.

All Pescadoes suck, but sometimes they do manage to provide information which does not suck. Therefore I state equivocally that All Pescadoes Suck but This Pescado Doesn't Suck As Bad As Other Pescadoes. A lower level of suckage, if you will.

Thanks, Pescado!

OMG! I have been searching to find why my sims keep crashing, only the females, when they try to get a job. I love the dress tops and will keep them until somebody fixes them. I have to go get my sims back, esp. Beyonce. I wish I had the brain power to fix this. I wonder if you could make a mesh to fit the dress tops, or something? I love this top and the outfits recolors.

The 'fix' for the dress tops is to re-work their uvmap so that it sits on the top half of the graphic, no lower than any other maxis top does and make them as top meshes. This solution will lose some resolution for the texture vertically, and people will need to remake their recolors.

The other fix would be to make a few mesh variations of 'dress tops' that are full body meshes with several different pant choices. I know, a lot less variety.

I am not sure if one could make the extension for the top as an alpha part to a top mesh, and then people could recolor it as one piece... but that's a complicated mesh fix, if we can build alpha meshes for tops... :S

UV mapping in the normal shirt area, while doable, is not gonna work too well with those outfits. The loss of vertical resolution and the stretching it would cause would make for, well, a much less recolourable mesh.

Pescado had mentioned in chat that doing them as an accessory might work, and I tend to agree there that it might be something to look into for future meshes. There may actually be some advantage to doing it that way, as opposed to as a clothing mesh... Extremely easy alpha-editability is one advantage, certainly... and being able to have a dress top without error is another.

YES the method used to create the current dress tops does cause problems. These are not problems I think ANY mesh creator could have forseen. Who the hell has ever heard of a -top mesh- causing game crashes? Nobody, that's who. So let's try to go easy on the pigeon, shall we? He's a great, innovative young creator who tried something that, by all rights, SHOULD work just fine without problems, but for some reason, you can't do certain things in the game without it accessing your clothing for some stupid reason. I know Pescado posted an explanation, but it still seems like a pretty stupid reason... and certainly unforseeable.

flyingpigeon, please don't pull your dress tops just yet - meshes have ALWAYS been beta, use at your own risk. Anyone getting too bent out of shape about it needs to remember that we're all just mad scientists, experimenting here, and sometimes things go a little wonky. A big "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!" warning is certainly in order on the existing meshes - and get with me in chat or on AIM... I can help you convert them to accessories if you want.

As to who has heard of a top mesh causing game crashes, issues were reported in the original thread with crashes on the 2nd of August and the 6th of August with this mesh, but apparently the issues were never looked into further.

Well what we've learned can certainly be used as a guideline for all creators to do a few simple tests in game with all new meshes before posting them to verify they don't cause crashes in game.

It doesn't take but a moment or two to check to see if the clothes you are wearing causes a crash when purchasing a community lot, or getting a job from the newspaper. Getting a job from the newspaper is one of the core game elements, especially for those of us who play Legacy-style!

I am only glad that I was able to narrow it down by thoroughly testing it, repeatedly testing it, having a 3rd party outside of here test it as well, and document it as best I could (even though I didn't know all the ramifications behind it at the time), notifying whom I thought should be told, and sticking to my guns knowing that I'd narrowed down the problem items.

In the long run, this saves a lot of "mystery crashes" that will now be prevented.

Ivy

My point was that before this dress top issue, the idea that a mesh would cause a crash was unheard of - the disbelief that a dress top could be related to a crash was understandable, as nobody had ever heard of a mesh causing crashes before. To be quite honest, just about everyone who heard of this problem thought you were nuts. People report all sorts of weird problems. Nobody had any reason to believe that a body mesh would be causing crashes... and I know as a creator I get all kinds of weird reports of problems that couldn't possibly be related to my creation, so, while it would have been nice to get on this issue a little earlier... I don't think anyone can fault flyingpigeon too much on this. He had no reason to believe that it would cause a crash, and he'd mentioned the issue to me when it originally came up, and heck, I said I thought you were nuts. This is a REALLY WEIRD issue and doesn't make a lot of sense. Either way, we're getting it resolved.

Body mesh creators don't run a sim through every interaction in the game when testing their meshes. They make them dance, sit, jump on beds, etc., to check animations, but the idea that a mesh would cause a game crash had never come up before. With most meshes, there still isn't any need to extensively test like you describe.... and the idea that it -would- have been necessary with this wouldn't have come up as, again, this problem was unheard of. The changes between making a normal top and making a dress top would have -never- occurred to a body mesh creator as being a possible cause of crashes. Regular meshes still shouldn't require extensive testing of interactions and such... but seeing as there is a crash happening with a small modification, certainly checking a few more things in future on non-standard meshes may be in order.

Nice to know that my original PM is being thought of showing me as 'nuts'.

Here is the full copy of me being 'nuts':



Apparently I wasn't being clear enough in my description of the problem and that is what qualified me as 'nuts'??? *scratches head*

I would imagine next time a little suspension of disbelief at 'nuts' PM's as written above may be in order before simply dismissing, mocking, berating or otherwise ignoring them. Lesson learned by now I would hope.

I know for myself I will be testing every single clothing item that has been created with a mesh that I download with these two tests from now on prior to putting them into play.

Ivy

If you have read my posts, you would know by now that other meshes should not do this. Why? Because these meshes were based off full-body. Since maxis coding is not perfect, this causes certain crashes. I believe it is because the game thinks that the sim is wearing a full-body and a bottom, setting off some reaction. As HP said, a mesh she made, using the same technique caused these same crashes. You don't need to test every single mesh you download. Basically, the only solutions to this are to either delete the dress tops from you game, and don't wear them when using those interactions. I'm working on a third solution, which I will test. I'm going to try to make the tops into an accessory. Hopefully this will work. Just use separated meshes from full-body to tops, like a few of mine, at your own risk.

Let's be fair about this: FP isn't a code hacker. He couldn't reasonably be expected to spend 3 hours dissecting code to track this down, that's just not part of his skillset. Even if he *DID* confirm it, he would have no way to know how serious the problem was, since the easy workaround would simply to be switch uniforms when buying a community lot....which doesn't happen too often. He would have no way of knowing how truly serious the problem is without knowing what the rooted cause was.

Ivy, I'm not saying you ARE nuts, just that it was such a weird problem that you gotta see why people would have thought you were... Obviously this IS an issue, and it's good that you brought it to our attention. I'm not trying to insult you here, I'm really not... I'm just trying to explain why you got the initial reaction you did... because this is a freaking weird fluke, two things that should not be related.

It's as if you'd called up your mechanic and said that when you went to make toast in your kitchen, your car exploded... Even if it does turn out that making toast DID cause the explosion, your mechanic is still going to think you're crazy.

I didn't read the full text of the initial PM, just got a short description of the issue second-hand - I was just trying to explain why it was not immediately looked at as an issue... because creators get all kinds of weird reports of things that are not related. I've had people report issues with my hair meshes, and it's turned out that the items they were having trouble with weren't even made by me. Folks report all sort of weird stuff, and I gotta be honest... the great majority of downloaders are, well... I'll be nice and call them... just not techy-heads.

The relatively tiny change in creating a mesh to make it a dress top could not be expected to effect the game in such a massive way... and a mesh creator could not be expected to know that beforehand. We know the issue now. It sucks, but it's the way it is, and will start looking for alternate methods of doing the same thing that don't cause crashes.

Testing each and every mesh for this issue shouldn't be necessary - it's only arisen on full-body outfits switched to single-piece, like the dress top. I don't know of anyone else making outfits using this method. Either way, the workaround seems to be to not wear the item under circumstances that will cause a yes/no dialogue until a better method of creating them has been found. If that workaround is too much trouble (as you said, you're doing a legacy family) then wear something different.

Modding this game can cause unexpected effects: meshes are and have always been beta items, use at your own risk. Please understand that we're all unpaid volunteers, doing this in our free time as a hobby and a challenge to our brain power. Meshers try to support their stuff as much as they can, but, again, we're hobbyists. Yes, there was some initial, understandable disbelief that your car exploded when you went to make toast - we've traced the problem, with Pescado's help, figured out its cause, discovered what the workaround's going to be for now, and need to work on alternate methods.

(Aside: Pescado, have you been taking your cat's antidepressants again? You're all cheerful and helpful and... sticking up for someone, even. I'm rather pleasantly surprised to see it. )

Thank you HP. The acknowledgements that you have made make me feel better about the whole deal. I was starting to get the feeling that no one around here even cared that I had brought forth this issue.

No, FP shouldn't be expected to hack any code...that is JM's realm. We don't need two of him .

Yes, I do realize how much it takes to do something for free. I too have sim hobbies of my own (running the Legacy Group for instance) for which I do not get paid and know how much work goes into them. I have dealt with my fair share of non-techy heads as well over the past 3 years or so.

I have already acknowledged how much I was enjoying the clothing, and was so hoping they could be fixed. You are correct, however, in that it would be too much trouble, given the style of play that we do when playing the Legacy Challenge.

While testing each and every mesh shouldn't have to happen...as evidenced here, and admitted by all to be beta/use-at-your-own-risk, well you never can tell. With who knows how many creators out there, and loads of sites to download from, well...my risk factor is now set back to "very low". I shall be extremely cautious from this point forward, and extra detailed at any feedback reports of problems that I may put forth.


Ivy

I suspect people won't like this post, but...

ya'll should pull those meshes until you can work out something that doesn't cause game crashes, imo of course.

They're lovely, and because they are lovely they will end up on the exchange and/or in some fileshare forum and/or included on some sim upload that some 12-year-old girl will download and have random computer crashes and not know why (and possibly upset parents as well) and never have been here to read the warnings. I know they shouldn't, but they will, it's just the nature of the beast.