I've recently noticed in my game that the only Sim I have in the Intelligence career from Free Time is not receiving money when she is promoted and in fact is notified of having earned a bonus of -$30,506! Nothing is subtracted from the family funds but the normal wage is not added either. This has happened for both promotions so far.

What I would like to know is how I would go about fixing this as I have no experience with making or altering careers.
Would it be similar to creating a text override, i.e. finding the incorrect part, extracting it, correcting it and then using it to make a new package with the original GUIDs?

If so, where would I locate the required file?

How odd...
I checked, and I couldn't see anything unusual in the Intelligence career.
According to the JobDataGlobal 0x203F ("Sub - Level Change"), the Budget Transaction is set to the following amount:
Local 0 (Pay Amount) + Local 8 (Bonus), where:
Local 0 = BCON 0x1000[job level] and
Local 8 = Local 0 * BCON 0x2001:00 (Value = 2).

In "human" words, the promotion from level 1 to level 2 should grant to the sim:
Wage = BCON 0x1000:02 = §310
Bonus = §310 * 2 = §620
Total = §930

Tha promotion to the following levels should grant in total (following the same method): 975, 1185, 1470, 1950, 3210, 4620, 9675, 11250.

The negative numbers sometime are used when a number - that is supposed to be positive - is greater than 32767 (hex 0x7FFF); but in this case, the largest amount I can calculate is 11250, that is way smaller than 32767.
I really don't know why this problem occur... Can you give more details? What job levels were promoted to, the sims?

The first time this happened to my adult female sim was while she was living on an apartment lot when she was promoted from Gumshoe to Private Eye. Here's a picture of the notification I got:


The second time was after she had moved to a regular residential lot and had been promoted from Private Eye to Crime Scene Investigator. She had about 14,000-ish simoleans in the house funds.

She lives with one other adult male sim who is unemployed and has no pets. I mention this as I know MATY has a fix for pets not getting payed for work or promotions with the second AL patch.

"Puke"?? Maybe this is the reason why she doesn't earn the deserved money

Jokes apart, I don't understand why it's happening, the conde is quite clear, but I may have overlooked something.

...Wait! You said the 2nd AL patch? I still haven't installed it! Maybe my game code hasn't been broken by the "updated", yet...

I don't know why this is happening either, coz I havn't looked
But I can say that it has nothing to do with the pets coming home from work bug.
That was to do with trying to access an out of range attribute on a pet. Humans came home just fine.

Ok so at least I know it has nothing to do with the pet problem.
She's called Puke, by the way, as she is the founder of my Fugly family for a thread over at Insimenator.

The negative-pay issue is caused by a bad or outdated hack. The pets issue is fixed in alfixes.

I'll have a hunt through my mods and hacks folder tomorrow some time then. Any idea what sort of hack cos I haven't downloaded any career related hacks?

There's always binary search.
However, when I suspect a bad hack. I open the EA objects package and extract the relevant semiglobal group to a new package. Dump that into my downloads folder and then run H2CDU to find the hacks that have edited code in that area.
As Numenor pointed out, the relevant group in this case is JobDataGlobal.
If "Sub - Level Change" appears in the list, start there.

Well I hope I understood those directions correctly.
I opened SimPE and opened the Sims 2 Free Time objects.package and then told SimPE to just show me the Global Data.
I then went through one by one to find all labelled as JobDataGlobal and extracted them to a folder on my desktop. I found a total of 62.
I made a new package and added in all of the extracted JobDatGlobal files. I saved the resulting file into my Downloads folder and then ran the conflict detector.
Although it found 8 possible conflicts, none of them had 'Sub-Level Change' listed.
So.... what now?

Delete everything and reupdate from the source sites.

You've found 8 possible conflicting downloads when you were pretyy sure you didn't have any hack related to careers?

Of course, deleting all of them is the safest way to get rid of the problem, but maybe you are curious to know exactly which one(s) are actually conflicting with the game.
Remove all the 8 and run a test; if everything is correct (no negative payouts), then reinstall 4 of them and check again until you find the outdated package. Of course, if removing all the 8 hacks doesn't solve the problem, then you must search elsewhere -

NOTE: even though none of them contain a modded version of "Sub - Level Change", they might contain a modded version of the BCON 2001; or they may be custom careers badly cloned from the Intelligence career.

Nope Sorry for the misunderstanding.
You're clearly familiar with SimPE, so my instructions were too vague.
I'll write idiotproof instructionsbelow, because if an idiot followed my last post, they could mess up their game :/ I'n not saying you're an idiot

I'm not exactly sure what you extracted. By the sounds of it you have 62 GLOB files?
I don't think that H2CDU looked for conflicts in GLOB files.
From Version 2.0 readme...
* Program now scans for BCON, TTAB and TTAs conflicts in addition to BHAV conflicts.

Or did you take a note of the group numbers and extract all 62 objects that belong to JobDataGlobals?
If you did that, and got conflicts, then yes start looking at those 8 hacks as Numenor suggests.
And I'll PM you with my email address because I want that file :D

---------------------
To extract a semiglobal group... (I'll use JobDataGlobals in this example)

Open up objects.package. (Use a backup version, not the live one)
Check that *all resources* are being shown ('AllRes' in the left pane).
Open the 'Filter Resouces' tab. It should be on the right hand side unless you've moved it.
Select the JobDataGlobals group from the 'semiglobal group' dropdown box, and press 'Set'.
Then highlight all the entries in the 'Resource List', right-click & 'Extract...'.
Create a new folder called 'JobDataGlobals', select it and save into this folder. SimPE tells you how many resourses were extracted (201 for JobDataGlobals inAL).
That's the extraction part done.
DO NOT save your objects.package file.

Choose 'create new package' from the file menu.
Right-click in the 'Resource List' and choose 'Add...'
Select the new folder you created, and choose the 'Files of type' to be 'Extracted package (package.xml).
Open the package.xml file.
Save this somewhere safe as JobDataGlobals.package.
Close SimPE.

You can now delete the new folder you created above.

Right, well I followed your instructions and I've attached what the hack conflict detector had to say as a text file. You can probably make more sense out of it than I can.

So I guess the next thing for me to do is remove all of my downloads and keep playing until she gets promoted again and see if it still goes wrong?

Ensure you have the latest version of the mods that conflict with JobDataConflictTest.package.

Seems petsp0-jobfixes and ijApartmentJobPatch were outdated. I've now updated and will see if the error still occurs the nexttime she gets promoted.
If it does than I shall exit without saving, remove my downloads and then play until she is promoted again to see if it still happens.

Well I eventually remembered to play again until she was promoted but I forgot to exit without saving. The error still occurred even with the updated hacks. I can also confirm that the minus amount IS being deducted from the family funds.



My next plan now then would be to play with no downloads I guess.

I have run the HCDU again and this time nothing relating to jobs is listed at all.

I recall this is due to an outdated hack somewhere. Rather than trying to manually make sure each individual hack is up to date, I suggest just deleting all of them and redownloading them from the original source.

Its at times like this that I wish I kept my downloads more organised than simply having a single sub-folder for hacks, mods and overrides.

I know exactly what cause it and how to solve it. Numenor was on the right track about this 32767 thing. I have the same problem with the natural science career track, when my college graduated sims got promoted from level 9 to level 10, they ended up having negative bonus, and their family fund were subtracted that exact amount. It happened to fortune sims, because fortune sims normally got a bigger pay for the same job (get 25% more), and it happened to college graduates because the bonus is also bigger (3.5 times of the pay check) for these type of sims, so my sims are both fortune sims and are also college graduates, the combined factors cause the promotion bonus exceeded this number 32767, therefore it wraps around to become negative. To proof my point, I created a custom career and play with different base pays, to avoid the promotion bonus of my college graduated fortune sims not to exceed 32767, I had to limit their base pay to about 7458, so 7458 x 1.25 x 3.5 = 32629, slightly below 32767, after setting the limit to 7458, my sims never get negative pay from my custom careers anymore. Since I don't know how to fix maxis' careers, I either just don't use those careers or change my fortune sims to other types such as knowledge sims to void the promotion bonus issue.