Magic lots replace hobby lots in Uberhood

[karmesinrot]

I'm currently playing an Uberhood using meetme2theriver's cleaned up neighbourhood templates (found here (http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/63030.html) ). I was playing with the Ramirez family and Checo Ramirez had a want to win a cooking contest, so I made him visit Sue's Secret Kitchen. Upon arriving at the lot, the dark magic castle was there instead of the actual hobby lot.
The name of the lot is Sue's Secret Kitchen, and it has the corresponding lot description, only the building isn't right.
I made backups of my neighbourhood folder and looked at the hobby lots for the neighbourhood in SimPE - it seems that both My Muse Art Studio (instance 2) and Sue's Secret Kitchen (instance 1) have been replaced by the light magic and dark magic lots respectively. The two magic lots also correspond to instance 1 & 2 in the magic subhood, so I suspect somewhere along the line this has caused problems. I checked the magic subhood for the Uberhood, and both magic lots are in place as they should be there.
I also checked the hobby lots for my custom neighbourhood and found that all 10 were displaying as they should be.

I'm not really sure where to start in trying to fix this, as searching for it didn't come up with anything, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

ETA: I have all EPs and SPs installed, and play with minimal mods to reduce townie respawn, nothing that should affect the lots.

[Mootilda]

Sounds like there may be a problem with the FreeTime Stealth Neighborhood template. When I get a chance, I'll take a look to see whether I can see any problems with the IDNO record.

In the interim, you should be able to replace the actual lot packages involved. First, backup your save game. Then
- Find the instance numbers of the Lot Descriptions for the incorrect lots in your attached FreeTime stealth neighborhood package (in your neighborhood save game).
- Find the instance numbers of the Lot Descriptions for the correct lots in your FreeTime stealth neighborhood template package (in your program files folder).
- The file name of the lot package is <neighborhood prefix_Lot<instance number>.package. For example, the lot associated with Lot Description instance 70 in neighborhood N001 is N001_Lot70.package.
- Copy the missing lots from your neighborhood template to your save game.
- Rename the bad lots to have a file extension of .BKP.
- Rename the new lots to have the file names of the original bad lots.
- Run your game and see whether the correct lots are now available.

[karmesinrot]

Hi Mootilda,
I replaced the files in my saved game with the appropriate files from my Freetime template lots and renamed them. This fixed the problem of being able to visit the two hobby lots, but unfortunately now when I attempt to visit the magic lots, I end up at Sue's Secret Kitchen and My Muse.
I have noticed that in my Uberhood, Sue's Secret Kitchen & the evil magic lot share instance 1 and My Muse & the good magic lot share instance 2, but in my custom hood the hobby lots are instance 1 and 2 whereas the magic lots are 13 and 14.
Thank you for your help

[Mootilda]

If Sue's Secret Kitchen and the evil magic lot share an instance, then your neighborhood has a problem. It sounds like the game had a problem when attaching the stealth neighborhoods. I have no idea why that would happen. Try this:

- Change the instance number for one of the two lots to an unused instance number. You'll need to change the instance number in two places in SimPE:
Lot Description / Resource View / Instance
Lot Description / Plugin View / Instance.

Then, make sure that the two different lot packages from Program Files have the appropriate file names in your save game.

[Peni Griffin]

You should probably also talk to the creator of that Uberhood. It's possible someone else has had that problem before and contacted her about it, in which case she may have additional information for you.

[Mootilda]

karmesinrot has another neighborhood where the same stealth subhoods attached properly, which makes it less likely to be a problem with the subhood templates. However, I intend to examine them, just to make sure that there's nothing obviously wrong with them.

In addition, many many people have been using those subhood templates without any problem. I would venture to say that they are the most popular clean subhood templates available today. Of course, it can't hurt to ask the creator, but I feel personally responsible because Tarlia used my subhood template creation tutorial.

The game occasionally fails completely when attaching subhoods. This is a very rare problem, but one which I believe that I've seen before. I've never seen these specific symptoms before, but all of the problems that I've seen have to do with lots not being copied and renamed correctly.

[karmesinrot]

Mootilda now that you've mentioned that I actually do recall the game crashing once when trying to create Hobbies the first time I loaded the Uberhood so that could probably have something to do with it.
I thought giving the lots different instances might have been a fix but the version of SimPE I'm using seems to not allow instance to be changed in plug in view - I read on some other threads that using an older version of SimPE is a way round this, is that correct?

As for the cleaned up templates they really are gold standard, the amount of work that has been put into them is very impressive :)

Thank you again.

[Mootilda]

Yes, I seem to remember that the SimPE team removed the ability to change the Plugin View Instance field in some of the versions, not realizing that it is actually a separate piece of data. An older version should solve the problem, as long as it still supports your installed EPs and SPs. You might also want to see whether there is a newer version than the one that you have installed; a newer version might also fix your problem.

The game will not work unless the Resource View Instance and the Plugin View Instance match.

If the game crashed while it was attaching a subhood, that would certainly explain the odd behavior that you're seeing. Again, I believe that this is a bug in the game, but one which very few people run into. I can only remember three people posting about issues with a subhood attachment going wrong.

[karmesinrot]

Thank you so much for your help, there was a more up to date version of SimPE which allowed me to change the instances of the Magic lots in Plugin View. This seems to have solved the problem as far as I can see.

As for the rarity of the issues I was having, I'm unsure if I should feel special or stupid that my game managed to mess up the subhood attachment :P

Thanks again!