AWOL

For those who don't follow me on Tumblr (and those who do, because its been a while since I've posted there, too), I haven't stopped playing again. Quite the opposite, I've been spending a lot of time on the game - just not in a way that produces anything here.

I've been re-creating my Bluewater Village in a better world than the very basic one I used when I moved from TS2. The first version was closer to the TS2 original, its now pretty much Bluewater Village in name only but I'm keeping the name for the sake of story continuity. And I'm really happy with the way version 3 is turning out.

Of course the switch didn't go smoothly as I would have liked.

As I mentioned on another post, before I started blogging again, I moved 30+ households with NRAAS Traveler to new versions of Richmond/Redwood City. It went fine. So I thought moving my eight Bluewater Village households would be easy. Nope. 

I discovered I could only load up the old and new versions of Bluewater Village. My other linked worlds would hang on the loading screen. Working through possible causes was a a slow and tedious process - load game (loading screen)/load whichever world I saved in (loading screen)/attempt travel (loading screen)/(wait reasonable length of time) travel fails/shut down game/change something/repeat (loading screen, loading screen, loading screen...). 

Special shout-out to Lily for standing in the dark and the rain and making the same phone call to book the same vacation, over and over again, in the name of troubleshooting my game!

I was afraid I'd have to go back to the save I made before I started moving anyone, although that really was a last resort because I'd changed a lot in my new Bluewater Village, and I didn't want to have to do it all again if I could avoid it. Fortunately it didn't come to that, although the solution actually made no sense.

Worlds I hadn't visited since I linked a new one suddenly wouldn't load. Solution = overwrite them with the .nhd file from the backup save I made before adding the new world. The .nhd file with exactly the same name, size and date modified as the one that wasn't loading. 

I am sooooo tired of seeing this!

Whatever works, I guess, but I'm still baffled. I only tried copying the old .nhd because I was running out of options and I figured I couldn't really make it any worse. Proves anything is worth a try. Anyway, back to my normally scheduled game, with the addition of even more obsessive backing up than usual, and a pile of save files I refuse to delete for a very long time.

And back to finishing my tweaks on New Bluewater Village, and then finishing the post I was halfway though when I started the whole business... It's almost finished now, and I'll put it up either tonight or tomorrow. Hopefully business as usual from there!

I'll probably take this post down after I've put up a couple of story updates and things are back to normal - it won't be relevant to anyone reading the older posts in future. Just wanted to explain the massive gap between posts to anyone reading now.