The question mark is over objects that might have been on the grid in the original lot, but are off the grid in the shrunk lot. Of course Andi didn't have this to worry about.

Mootilda I don't think we're ever going to agree on this, so there is no point in going round in circles

Yes, I agree with that.

What about the portals?

Same thing applies. If the lot gets bigger, and you don't move the objects, they are still on the lot but in the wrong place. If the lot gets smaller and you don't move the objects, they end up hanging off the lot.

Of course not. I'm saying that beach lots have more objects than an empty non-beach base game lot, that some of those objects didn't even exist when Andi created his lots - so they couldn't have been tested, that beach lots have more on-world objects which we know are being moved off-world...

Mutantbunny, I'm really sorry if what I'm saying is upsetting you. I'm not trying to argue with you. You're welcome to disagree with me.

Had some interesting things happen, which I thought that I'd just document here. I shrank a beach lot on the right and left without removing the beach and wave portals from the land to be deleted. Later, I expanded that lot on the right and left. 1/2 of the missing beach portals reappeared, bunched together on the back left corner of the lot. 1 of the missing wave portals appeared, on the right side of the lot in the water - basically where it should have been.

What does this tell me?

1) Things which move off-world can sometimes reappear on the lot, but not necessarily in the "correct" location. I suspect that these are objects which had non-negative off-world coordinates.

2) Things which move off-world may remain off-world. I suspect that these are objects which were given negative off-world coordinates during the shrinking process, since the LA has code which specifically keeps objects which have negative coordinates off-world. However, this doesn't explain the wave portal.

3) The game isn't "cleaning up" (ie deleting) at least some of these off-world objects.

As well, I mentioned earlier that I had managed to get some crashes with moved and expanded beach lots and that I suspected that the problem was a mismatch between the lot and neighborhood terrain. I took an expanded beach lot which consistently crashed on entry, and moved it (using the LA move feature) to a spot which had a beach for the entire width of the expanded lot. I was then able to enter and modify the lot without any further problems. This seems to confirm my suspicion that crashing can occur if there is a mismatch.

Mootilda, I don't mean to argue with you either! I am just frustrated with the lots being dead in the water and with your reasoning on this as it makes no sense to me. But that does not mean I don't respect it. You have the right to think what you will...just as I have the right to disagree lol

And again: what is it going to take for the lots to 'pass' if hours of play without any sign of corruption is not good enough? More testing? Then we need more testers. Without more testers we are going nowhere. More testers are not knocking on the door therefore if we want to move forward (my driving force) we need to find them. That means posting the lots someplace.

I agree with not posting them here as the crowd here has a much younger element and I know you are much concerned (overlyso IMO) with crashing peoples games. And even though I firmly believe each person is responsible for their own game and every time they hit a DL button it is a risk no matter what the file contains be it lot, clothing or whatever, I still want you to feel comfortable.

I think that MTS2 deserves the credit for them as Delphy is accomodating us, but releasing them here will be going too much against your comfort level (in simple terms: more whiners here uncapable of fixing their own games.) So how does one accomlish gaining movement forward and keeping the younger crowd's games safe and therefor you happy? MATY is my only answer. I'm open for other ideas.....

Here are two Word documents. One is a breakdown of pedestrian portals. See if it is enough to help you with the car portals too; if not I will do breakdowns of them individually too.

The other document is a detailed breakdown of compass points, axes, rotation codes, as applies to each of the U11 values.

Inge, are these docs aimed at me?

Lol sorry I should have said Mootilda You can have them if you want though.

Oh well, whew! lol. I know I won't understand them but I'm gonna look at them anyway. lol....

You are misreading my comfort level. I feel more comfortable "releasing" lots here than at MATY, because I feel more comfortable here than at MATY. As I've stated before, I think that it would be a mistake to share these lots without warning people about the possible dangers:

1) These lots may be corrupt. They may cause crashes and the lots may become more corrupt over time. There's some evidence that this is true.

2) There's a possibility that such lot corruption may spread into the rest of your neighborhood (including sims and other lots) as you play the lot over time. We don't really know whether this is happening, but it is possible.

3) If these lots are corrupt, there's no guarantee that they can be fixed in the future. The lots may remain corrupt. If the corruption has actually spread to other game files, those files may also remain corrupt.

I think that Inge has one or more shrunken lots available at a website which is not MTS2, and I'm not mad at her and I haven't tried to stop her... I don't even know what warnings she has. I'm very comfortable with this, even though Inge and I may disagree about how "dangerous" these lots are. If she started to see major problems with these lots, I'm sure that she'd remove the uploads or increase the warnings. I also hope and believe that she'll share any information she gathers about the shrinking process.

pbox and aelflaed decided to remove their shrunken lots from the public forums. I didn't force them; they made the decision themselves. I believe that some of the things said on MATY convinced pbox, and that aelflaed was convinced by things that pbox quoted from other people. (Note that I could easily be wrong about what convinced them.) They may also have been influenced by things that I said. Ultimately, the decision was and is theirs.

I also seem to remember someone at MATY who was concerned enough about lot corruption that s/he decided not to share lots. I may be able to find the quote, but it was something like "crashes are OK, but long-term corruption is not".

There are about 150 people who have a version of the LE / LA with the shrinking feature at this time. I don't have any control over what they do with that feature. I just hope that they understand that the feature isn't complete, and that we believe that it's corrupting lots.

I certainly have not! I *did* have until you asked us to promise not to. I can take a certain amount of "professional differences" in the approach to this work, but, well I typically become ruffled when someone thinks my word can't be trusted.

If you can see a shrunk lot of mine that has I have posted and forgotten about, please let me know.

[QUOTE=Mutantbunny].....And again: what is it going to take for the lots to 'pass' if hours of play without any sign of corruption is not good enough? [QUOTE]

Please answer this.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Inge. I do trust you. I believe that I asked people not to share the LotAdjuster with the shrinking feature enabled. I don't remember saying anything about sharing lots, except that I thought that it was a bad idea and that I believe that we should warn people. If I actually insisted that people promise not share lots, then I've completely forgotten about it, and I'm willing to reconsider.

Here's what I remember asking for:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1815911
"I'd also like an assurance that you won't share any LotAdjuster that you download [in the private forum]."

[Update:]Inge, I just checked the PM you sent me about the dangerous downloads group and I see that you DID promise not to share lots. Since I didn't ask for that promise, I'd forgotten that you made it. Please accept my apology. I never meant to suggest that you were breaking your word.

You keep asking me to answer a question that I don't understand. I have no idea what you are trying to "pass".

Ok. Fine, Mootilda.

Wow, here's something I can (hopefully) give a clear answer to (unlike most everything else in this thread at the moment ..):



Sounds like something I could have said =)

The reasons I removed my lots were

1. dizzy's comments on MATY, in particular this post: "If you are not getting the error, it is not safe to assume that this miscalculation isn't occurring. In fact, you may well be corrupting valuable data" -- note that he says this with regard to logs/dumps from crashes with *my* lots, and I have no way of telling which other lots this may apply to;

2. my own conclusion from his (and Mootilda's) comments, as well as various test runs, that this crashing/corruption can't be prevented on the side of the builder or the player, which in turn meant to me that there's no use in running more in-game tests with those lots;

3. the fact that my lots got a lot of exposure/downloads, which under these circumstances we didn't need any more -- it was great for a start, to draw attention to the matter (hi Rascal!) and not last to confirm that there *is* something wrong, but at this point in time it turned into an unnecessary risk.

(Here is my post on MATY about removing my lots, for the record)


Personally -- note that I'm not a BV player and I'm not following the whole beach portal moving etc discussion --, I don't plan to publish any shrunk lots unless Mootilda releases a version of the LE/LA with fundamental code changes that she believes will address the issue, plus lots of private testing that seems to indicate it is fixed indeed.

But this is everybody's own responsibility in the end .. I don't claim to be doing the right thing, only what feels right for me. (I also have to consider that I don't always have time to properly take care of things if people have problems with my downloads .. it would make no sense at all to release something for testing, and then go offline for a week.)

Pointers:

Not sure if this is useful, but here and here are dizzy's last 2 comments on MATY about this (since I'm already looking at the MATY thread)


You may be thinking of Zazazu(KariMinger)'s post here, about her own shrunk lots: "I'm getting a crash on load every other time (..) now. As much as I'm all for living dangerously, there's just a point where it gets too damn annoying to play the lot. I was playing it for about 9 sim-days before it started doing this, and I'm one who has barely gotten anyone's lots to crash."

I believe what Mutantbunny wants to know is if there's a way to *prove* that a lot is not corrupt ('pass', as in 'pass the safety test') .. am I right?

I may be mistaken, but I think I've learned that there is no such test. The only thing we can prove by testing is that a lot is corrupt, not that it is "clean".

Perhaps you changed your mind and edited it after I first read it. I only responded with the formal application PM I was asked for. Well anyway I don't have any shrunk lots on offer since that time.

Did you get a chance to look at the documents I uploaded? If you can get back about that before you go offline tonight, I will be able to make a start on what else you need before you wake up tomorrow.

I repeat my suggestion from yesterday - create a thread in the building R&D forum for shrunk lots - creators, users and all support together.

It's public, but not in the standard downloads section, so users should be more aware of the risks. Also, this option may not be asking anything more of the moderators? No new forums to create/oversee.

As for removing my public download, I mainly followed Plasticbox's lead and the various comments here and on MATY. I have no wish to share lots which are PROBABLY broken, as much as anything because I can't tell people how to fix them when trouble occurs. I'm sensitive about my quality of work too!

Like Plasticbox, I would like to share shrunk lots in the future, but not until it looks a bit safer. I'm waiting for Mootilda and Inge to create a breakthrough.

In the meantime, if there are things that a wider audience could be testing, be it shrunk lots, beach lots or anything else, you have my suggestion - an open but fairly knowingly-accessed thread on this forum.

I'm gonna go play.

Thank you. That's the post that I was thinking about. If I remember correctly, no crashes initially.

That's correct. There is no test. If we knew the internal data structures, we might be able to write something to check that the data in a lot package follows the rules. The crashes that we've seen make me believe that the LA is "corrupting" the files, ie it's changing the files in a way that the game can't interpret, sometimes producing a crash.

I suppose that it's possible that I changed it (I've been keeping it up to date with the member info), but no one else promised not to share lots so I must have changed it really quickly. You were the first person to apply... maybe I saw your promise and realized that I needed to reword my post? Anyway, I'm really sorry for the misunderstanding. I hope that we're OK now... I'd really hate to lose your contributions to the group.

Update: Just FYI: I found an archive of my original message and it looks like I never asked for people to avoid sharing lots. Just to avoid sharing the LE / LA.

Yes, I've been changing the LA to add the info that you gave me. I'm running into some rotations (during automated testing) that weren't included in your list, here is the list of all values in my current test set. Note that the bytes are reversed between the way that you listed them and the way that they are used in the source code:

000000003F800000
00000000BF800000
33C00000BF800000
3EC3EF153F6C835E
3EC3EF15BF6C835E
3EC3EF17BF6C8360
3F3504F23F3504F4
3F3504F2BF3504F4
3F3504F33F3504F3
3F3504F3BF3504F3
3F3504F43F3504F4
3F3504F4BF3504F4
3F6C835E3EC3EF16
3F6C835EBEC3EF16
3F6C835F3EC3EF13
3F6C8360BEC3EF14
3F80000000000000
B33BBD2E3F800000
B33BBD2EBF800000
BEC3EF183F6C835E
BEC3EF18BF6C835E
BF3504F33F3504F3
BF3504F3BF3504F3
BF3504F43F3504F2
BF3504F43F3504F4
BF6C835F3EC3EF13
BF6C83603EC3EF10
BF6C8360BEC3EF10

Did you ever figure out the OBJM record format? I know that you were having problems finding a count, length, or version number that would explain the difference in data size and field location.