This is a plea for help as I've spent over 120 hrs on my current community lot.
And suddenly on the verge of compellation I have a big problem.

It still loads fine in build mode though it's a bit slow due to size and graphical content. However when I try to take a test sim there via taxi it hangs on the
Loading screen for ever and I have to kill the sims2.exe via ctrl+alt+del.

I had the same problem develop near compellation of my last community lot
"The gazebo grand royal", which was also very large. At first I thought it was a
Resolution prob as I had dropped to 800x600 during construction and was playing
@ 1024x768.
I believe I ruled that problem out, though I'm not sure of anything rite now.
The other thing I did was to delete a few of the last things I added to the
Lot and it seems to have resolved the issue. (Though I still seem to have
Trouble bringing more than 1 sim there).

I've tried both of these things with the new lot to no avail.

I'm at a loss. Any ideas are much appreciated.
thanx -robbase :fallen:

Robbase, a couple of questions:

1. Are there any live Sims on the lot? If yes, visiting Sims can't enter from the taxi.

2. Are the trashcan and payphone in front?

3. Do you have more than 3 cash registers? I created a grocery store with about 8 checkout aisles...the game would hang while it generated NPC's to staff them. Ultimately, I deleted most of the registers.

I saw you didn't have any replies yet so I'm just throwing these things out in case you haven't covered them yet in your troubleshooting. I hope it helps.

I had the exact same thing happen to me for the first time last night.I can visit the community lot in lot mode but when I tried to send a sim couple to it at night,the lot had not loaded after a half hour.I ended up ending the game.I have 2 cash registers on the lot and since sims seem to go home at night,there shouldn't have been a problem with the number of sims there.It is a large lot with plenty of content,but it doesn't take long to load in lot mode.

I am also experiencing the exact same problem and can tell you what I think it is.... At the bottom I will post a picture of my project and you will no doubt notice it is a large, very complex structure with many elevations and stairs. I think lot size and complexity of the terain and structures we are designing are causing the slow loading and rendering.... I am going to try, tonight before I go to bed, to enter my community lot... I expect that when I awaken my lot will be loaded though my charector may be dead on the side walk...LOL If it is not loaded I will be convinced we are being kept to a limited size and complexity... This is just my theory and I will report back any findings A.S.A.P.... Before I am asked: I run a P4 2.8 mhz, 1 gig of ram, ati 9800 xt graphics card and Windows XP home edition fully updated... I don't think I have a computer issue but yet again a size and complexity problem...

Gorgeous lot, JWoods.

It would be great if someone could do some testing on the max "complexity" (# of walls, # of objects, # of textures, whatever the issue is) on loadable, playable community lots, so we can all build to spec without investing time on beautiful lots we can't play.

I'm very interested to hear what you discover tomorrow morning.

The outcome of my previous post did not make my morning coffee a good one...LOL. To my dismay I awoke, after 5 hours of sleep, to a computer still trying to load my community lot... I find this to be very discouraging due to the time spent and, the fact that on a computer with specs like mine and the care I take protecting and updating it it should handle these types of applications(Sims 2) with ease. If there are limitations I think it would have been up to Maxis and EA to document this(just a thought). I can say that I did push the above lot to the limits with elevation heights and depths. The bottom floor of the building furthest right houses a pool on the bottom floor which is sunken down another full floor. The rear buildings are elevated a full floor and with the single story building at ground level in the front it gives it the appearance of a 6 story building with the roof up. We know that without a foundation we can go up 4 floors and keep a roof intact otherwise our roofs will not be applied so these intricate elevation tricks could play a role. I am not a person to download a bunch of stuff as I tend to build all of my own custom parts I need myself. Occasionally I may download something that is exceptional so I also ran the "clean Installer" and checked all my files for hacks or corrupt files. I found a few empty packages from recolors I never finished and removed them otherwise my installation and folders are crispy clean.
This brings us back to square one... There are limitations, lets just hope we can find some documentation on this so we do not waste our time anymore then we have... I have packaged the lot above and will put it to the side until a solution is found. I am currently trying to recreate the lot in a less intricate manor. I am making it a practice as you all should, to enter my lot with a Sim after each building session....

keep us posted, good luck to you all...

Also, Thank you Draftzilla for the compliment on my lot, it goes a long way at such a discouraging time...

Hi Guys.
Thank you for your replies; we have some good dialog going here.
After many more hours of testing I think I have some useful info to add.

To Dratzilla2K Q1: Are there any live Sims on the lot? If yes, visiting Sims can't enter from the taxi. (I’m not sure what your asking here, do you mean Sims residing or working @ the lot? The answer to both is no.)

Q2: Are the trashcan and payphone in front? (yes)
Q3: Do you have more than 3 cash registers? I created a grocery store with about 8 checkout aisles...the game would hang while it generated NPC's to staff them. Ultimately, I deleted most of the registers.
(Good question and point. I had yet to consider this, but I have no cash registers.)

To JWoods Your experiment was worthy and helps us narrow down the problem.
Ok You guys have made points about limitations and after many hours of testing I believe these are limits within the game engine and not related to our system specs ect.

I think the engine can support a finite number of polygons, 3D faces, vertexes ect..
And we are crossing that line plane and simple.

I’m very happy to announce that my lot is now Loading! It’s completed and I’ll be uploading it shortly.
I spent a lot of time reediting the lot with the Idea of decreasing the amount of polys verts ect.. and have found the absolute limit.
If I add any content to my lot at this point it will not load, unless I remove something as well.

JWoods your lot looks awesome and I believe you can save it by deleting some content. I think that’s your only answer. I just hope you don’t have to sacrifice too much of its integrity. I feel for you. (One small suggestion, consider the use of multi-story windows. They can cover the surface area of 4 windows using the same number of polys ect… as one.)

Draftzilla2K “It would be great if someone could do some testing on the max "complexity" (# of walls, # of objects, # of textures, whatever the issue is) on loadable, playable community lots, so we can all build to spec without investing time on beautiful lots we can't play.”

I think we are on the front line of that testing but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Delphy and Crew are working on a program that will allow the extraction and import of 3D mesh data from .package files. This may also allow us to create a database of all objects and the 3d resources used. (Perhaps we should talk to Delphy about this.)
With the info compiled we could talk to someone capable of writing plugins for
Sim PE to come up with something that will scan a lot and report back all 3D resources used including the landscape.

Thanks again to all who have replied. Let’s keep the dialog going.
Good luck to all. 

Well in the meantime hears the bugger that caused me so much lost sleep.

http://www.modthesims2.com/attachme...tid=17064&stc=1
http://www.modthesims2.com/attachme...tid=17065&stc=1

-RobBa$e-

OH MY GOODNESS, your lot took my breath away!!!! And I LOVE the WELCOME!!! A WONDERFUL touch!

I'm thrilled you've managed to save your lot, Robbase; and I hope that JWoods can follow suit to save his.

Your idea of scanning lots to figure out the limitations is brilliant--far beyond what I can contribute to the SimPE team myself, though, I'm afraid. Do talk to Delphy directly and see...

Couple of questions since I am dealing with about 30 residential lots and 4 community lots that people have sent me that have the same symptoms. These are being tested one of my most powerful systems and no game hacks; hacks removed from lots before install; all cc removed removed before install.

Actually these lots have very little in common except being one of the largest lot sizes, a lot of terrain and elevation detailing; high number of content items.

When the lot appears to hang, crawls to stop when reloading, will not deliver a sim to a lot and/or crashes is it creating a log or dump in your my documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/logs? I get logs for all these issues about 70% of the time (100% on outright crashes) and I would like to compare mine to others to see if the reporting of not being able to load from the core game file are haapening else where on large congested lots. These logs should also report the amount of free RAM left at the time the error occurs. Is it low at this time or is there still a decent anount of RAM available?

Since I`m a builder myself..I also have had this problem.

BUT I discovered that when I removed the lights.. spesialy the "fence-lights" I could still have a huge building on a 5*5 lot.

Well I have never had this problem but I refuse to build on the biggest lot at all for a start. I have downloaded a few HUGE lots (Nice stress test for the pc) - lots that had a LOT of lighting or a lot of cash registers = hang at getting out of taxis. Most of them if I just went away for 5 minutes and came back it was loaded, but they ran like poo and I don't see the point =)

I can run my very NOT top end pc with all graphics set to high EXCEPT the minute change the lighting value to high it locks up. I am wondering if the old invisible light like we had in TS1 would help :D

I have just begun experiencing similar problems. Yesterday I built a new community lot (for over 24 hours solid!) and for some reason it won't load. When any Sim tries to go there, I just get the loading screen with a yellow taxi in it for ages and ages. All my lots usually load fairly fast, especially if the game hasn't been running long.

The lot I created had lots of custom content and also lots and lots of residential objects in which I managed using the download from mod the sims 2 "residential items in community lots".

Is this why the game won't load it? Or is the file just so huge that I'll have to wait. I've waited about 10 mins so far and nothing. Just have to reset my computer!

The weird thing is, compared to the lots above, my lot isn't particularly over ambitious. I have a normal number of floors (four) but have lots and lots of custom content and lots and lots of residential objects in a community lot. I have beds and kitchen things, etc, because I was trying to make a hotel. I also used the moveobjects on to put a diving board on the roof! Just thought it would be funny, but maybe because it might cause an impossibility (i.e its obviously far too high for a sim to dive!) then the lot won't load? I'll try deleting some things and then report back.

In the meantime, please help, if anyone can...

Also, as an afterthought, I've been reading another thread on GUID conflicts, but it's far too technical for me to understand. It's something to do with the numbers that are alotted to objects in the package files and that different modders objects may have the same number of some of the maxis community objects. I think, like I say, it's a bit technical for me... but maybe worth a look if you understand this sort of thing? Sorry I haven't got the link, but just search the forums for GUID or something.

Hope it helps.

Hi again, here's the link for that GUID conflict thing I was on about....

[HTML]http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=32743[/HTML]

i had a similar problem before and i mentioned it here:

few things to note:

in my case, i was able to enter the lot when i had boolprop testingcheatsenabled true provided that i choose "cancel" at the prompt, which would create an error log; choosing "reset" and the game would prompt you again; choosing "delete" and the game would run in an infinite loop on the loading screen (which is what basically like when you have testingcheatsenabled false).

in the error log, consistently, it was an item called "Controller - CLP - Community Lot - Populator" that caused the error. the problem was that it has overflowed the ten thousand iterations limit. as of now, the only solution i know is to eliminate things from the lot for it to load properly. on a technical note, however, the amount of stuff you deleted does not actually reflect the amount of "objects" you take away from the overflowed stack. for example, i found out that a flight of standard staircase apparently take less "objects" than a flight of modular staircase of the same height, and that a two tiles wide door uses up to 2 flights of modular staircase worth of objects, while a vase only take around 1/10th of the amount a flight would take. alas though, i have no hard and fast rule to advise anyone with as to what to eliminate in order to get the most beneficial result.

before i finish, note again that the item which generates the overflow was a populator object for community lots, so i suspect that this problem does not exist for residential lots as the game probably wouldn't try to populate a residential lot with wandering npcs like it would for community lots. i didn't tried it out because i didn't download the collection thing that has the mailbox (sorry, no clue on which thread you can find it either), so it is only my speculation.

Gonorio, are you entering the lot from the neighbourhood screen (i.e as if to edit it) or entering from within the game (i.e. by taking a sim there in a taxi)?

I can enter my lot from the neighbourhood screen but not rom within the game. I tried the testingcheats enabled code but didn't get any such option to "cancel", "reset" or "delete". The lot just loaded from the neighbourhood as normal. I saw some weird black boxes stretching from some tables to the horizon, so I moved all the tables back and they disappeared. I also deleted a lot of objects and about four staircases but my Sims still can't enter the lot. it just hangs.

If anyone has figured this out yet please let me know. I wanna test my lot out!!!!

Twisted Disco ~~~~*

Twisted Disco,

like you, i only had that problem when I enter the lot in play mode (the mode where your sim enter by a taxi). That problem never occurred when I enter the lot in build mode.

be sure that the cheat code is actually working before you tell your sim to hop on the taxi, just in case you had a typo. You can shift click on the mailbox to know if the cheat is working (a pie menu will appear with a bunch of options not normally available).

if however, given that you're sure the cheat is working, there's still no prompt, then it probably has nothing to do with your lot having too many objects - the reason why you'd be prompt was because the game has code to monitor the object stack if it were to reach the preset limit, if it doesn't flag you on that error, then either there's something else that occurred which halted everything before it even gets to load any objects, or it is simply unrelated to the number of objects.

if it doesn't appear to be a problem with the number of objects, my next suggestion would be for you to check and see if there're any hacks that might be of suspect or any new meshes, recolourings etc that you have put in the lot in question which you have never put into any other lots you have built previously.

of course, it might just be a long loading time rather than an infinite loop the game has run into after all. anyway, hope the suggestions helps.

Thanks for your swift reply. I have deleted a lot of recoloured objects (that use new meshes etc) but haven't tried sending a sim yet, but I will and report back.

So you want me to enter the code, then send a sim in a taxi, while I'm actually playing the game? As before I was entering the code and then just going in from neighbourhood (in edit/build mode). Is this maybe why the options didn't show up?

thanks again.

Twisted Disco~~~*

I also have this problem, contacting EA doesn't help.
They only keep pointing at virusscanners and other "hidden" tasks...

However the part I hate the most is the fact that I can build a 20 story building -skyscraper if you will ;-)- on a residential lot without any problems (except CPU usage)

While I can make a cab ride hang upon a 1 to 3 story shop (depends on furbishment)

Twisted Disco,

yes, you enter the code only when you're in play mode, because the cheat code "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" basically make your game go into debug mode and will prompt you if any error should occur, and you get to actually choose what to do, which is cancel for your case, rather than have the game choose the default option for you, which in this case seems to be "reset" ("delete" would produce the same problem but i don't think that's what the game chooses).

the build mode doesn't actually load any npc populator objects since no npcs or their interactions actually get loaded when you get into the build mode - that's why i suspect that residential buildings would not suffer the same problem as they also do not seem to load npc or npc interactions during load.

I have the same prob.
Exept for the lot i'm loading is a one-story, smallest lot store.
It has 2 registers,It has a telephone booth,and with boolprop testingcheatsenabled true on it shows the controller error.I can access buy the build mode way.

Note: 2 lots of small 1 floor size won't load

avihappy,

are your lots jam packed with stuff? do they have many stair cases, a lot of windows or many doors?

i'm asking since i'm quite sure the error involving the community lot populator, that i experienced, was not related to the speed or resources available to the computer, but rather to an artificial limit, namely 10,000 iterations, that was coded inside the game.

Sorry for the delayed reply, I have just been getting on with my game instead. I put the cheat code on and sent a sim in a taxi and yes, I did get the populator 10,000 iterations error code or something which sounds like what you described.

I have a lot of flowers and a lot of bushes - do these take up many iterations? What would you recommend as possible objects to delete and how do you know how far over the limit you are?

Thanks for your help.