Hi! I have a problem with my sims 2.
I have seasons and pets expansion packs, I was normally playing the other day with no problems, i stopped playing for like 2 days and now i start the game and my seasons neighborhood disappeared (or should I say all my families).. my sims arent there anymore, just the town with the default families, etc. (don't know if this belongs to "disappearing neighborhoods" or "disappearing families"), i remember accidentally clicking something on the keyboard and then it said something about a snapshot added to storytelling or something like that last time i played, don't know if that could be a problem..also when i start the game it's like im playing for the first time cause the tutorial comes up welcoming me. in the storytelling folders i saw snapshots of all my lost families and when i start a new family i still can see the dog breeds i registered...it's very weird, anyone could help? thanks!

Last edited by angiesan : 20th Oct 2012 at 05:38 AM.

This helps if your back up is really old and you want to salvage more of your neighborhood then you could with a back up.

Pleasentview suddenly stopped appearing in the neighborhood screen. I had made no alterations since last loading the game and as far as I knew the game closed out correcty. when I used SimsPE it showed it was called Unknown instead of Pleasentview. However, the sub-hoods remained intact (Downtown was still called Downtown, etc.). I ended up getting rid of 1 of the neighborhood files, since it was the most recently modified and seemed to deal with just the main neighborhood in particular, which was N001_Neighborhood.package and replacing it with the older versions of that file from my back ups. It seemed to fix the problem the problem of it not showing up and I can now play Pleasentview.

You do lose some information, particularly in Pleasentview. Some weird things happen in University. Characters will needed to be added to lots using the Tombstone of Life & Death or something similiar and you will prob need SimsPE to fix some relationships. But its a lot more fixable then losing months or more of the whole neighborhood.

I couldn’t help but notice that when I opened my game up today, my Neighborhoods files had all completely disappeared. I have DDE, The Best of Business Collection, and recently, Pets. When I open the game, I don’t even have a new Pleasantview/Strangetown/etc, just the New Neighborhood button. Now, when I open up SimPE though, it locates all the files as if nothing has happened and opens them near perfectly; when I save a copy of the SimPE neighborhood back into the Neighborhood file, however, the subhoods associated with the neighborhood aren’t following, which I’m not sure is intended or a system problem. The main hood then appears in-game, though the terrain file thumbnail does not. The main hood loads and seems to play properly, but the subhood and all the families/businesses I had in Bluewater Village are nowhere to be found. The game also re-created the Pets invisible neighborhood, leaving duplicated copies of the Crittur and Roseland families.

I hadn’t touched my game in a few days, since I was messing around with my TS3 families on a different computer. I had not made any changes to the system with TS2 installed, but had downloaded about ten hairs and a default replacement skintone, all local. And as far as I can tell, the last time I played the game saved flawlessly; the SimPE version opens and plays right from where I left it.

Do you have a recent backup? If so, you might want to consider restoring from your backup. If not, where did you get the neighborhood package which you copied over your existing neighborhood package?

The only honest back-up I have is about a month or so old. To be honest, I'm not really sure where the new package came from! I think it has something to do with me opening the EA Games/ The Sims 2/ Storytelling folder and copying a Neighborhood file from there, moving it up a level. Then, when I opened SimPE, the neighborhoods with all the data was present. I'm not sure if that data appeared because I moved the files in Storytelling or not since I hadn't tried SimPE before that. After opening SimPE, I just Saved As...'d and that became the file I tried to run. (Interestingly, when I remove the file that I created using SimPE, the neighborhood still showed up when the game opened, but as the Pets subhood with the Family Bin of the former file. Edit: Actually, just by exiting and re-entering, now when I load the game it's back to not seeing anything)

Last edited by Spamaccount : 23rd Mar 2013 at 04:25 AM.

I'm glad too see that i'm not the only one this happen too only
I still don't understand what to do to fix the problem--

I had just finished playing a household, I saved the lot and exited to the neighborhood screen. The program stopped responding and the neighborhood screen never loaded. I had to use the task manager to shut down the game (I waited 15 minutes before doing this). That was 3 hours ago. I just started the game and the Neighborhood was missing.

I've tried re-installing my games but I can't install anything after the original sims2 it keeps saying "Can't Copy to disk" or something like that pops up and un-install whatever expansion/stuff I tried to download >< Will I have to buy a new disk or something?
Any help is appreciated! T_T

That's because we don't know how to fix the problem. We don't even understand why it happens, in general. We started the thread to try to gather enough information to find a pattern to this problem, but there doesn't seem to be a pattern.

Instead, individual people have individual problems and some of those problems cannot be solved.

In general, the best solution is to restore from a recent backup, if you have one.

It sounds like you may have several completely different issues:
1) Your CD / DVD may be bad. You could try cleaning your disk. Here's how:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Install

2) Your neighborhood may have become corrupted when you were forced to shut down the game. If you don't have a current backup, there's not much that can be done. We can confirm whether or not your neighborhood is corrupt. We can help you to recreate your neighborhood from scratch.

Last edited by Mootilda : 6th May 2013 at 05:55 PM.