Blue Squares in Build Mode

[Honeywell]

Does anyone know what causes blue squares in build mode instead of green and what (if anything :cry:) I can do to fix it? As far as I can tell I'm able to build as usual without any problem but it has to mean something is wrong. I've tried to search for it since I'm sure I'm not the first person who's had this problem but because of the blue lot fiasco with Sims 3 I couldn't find anything.

Details:
I'm using all the expansion and stuff packs. The house has a pool and is on a foundation. CFE was used through out the build--first for the attached garage, 1/4 height wall and for split level stairs at one point (they took up too much floor space so took them out).

It goes without saying I'd hate to have to start over but I'll say it anyway. Please :help:!

[motheranne]

This happens to me all the time:) Doesn't do anything differently as far as I can tell either. I believe it does have something to do with the cfe cheat. It could possibly be (don't quote me on it) the floor tiles you would normally NOT be able to slope without the cfe, go blue. I've never had the blue tiles when I wasn't using the cfe cheat.

[Honeywell]

Thanks for replying, motheranne. :) It's nice to know this has happened to someone else!

I did find out you can't build stages on the blue tiles--something about needing support I think the error was. But my real concern is that these blue tiles are an indicator that the lot is corrupted and it might eventually be unplayable. I'm still hoping someone knows how to fix the blue squares but if not (as much as I'd hate to) I'll rebuild to be on the safe side.

[motheranne]

I did find out you can't build stages on the blue tiles--something about needing support I think the error was. But my real concern is that these blue tiles are an indicator that the lot is corrupted and it might eventually be unplayable. .

I've had several houses (playtested) that had these blue tiles as I was building. They playtested fine. To place the stage I use the moveobjects cheat. They will place fine with this cheat.
The blue tiles have never interfered with my game play. Before you go and re build. Save your lot, stick it in the bin with the rest of your lots, re place it and throw some simmies in there to test!
This way your house won't change (all furniture goes with the sims when you move them) because you've all ready saved in the lots and houses bin:).

[Honeywell]

My house playtested fine too but I guess I'm a closet perfectionist or something because these blue squares are annoying me. lol I've been rebuilding and twice now at one point or another the blue squares came back and once they appear even exiting without saving won't fix it. After the second time that happened I started binning the lot in stages as I build but I'm just about ready to admit defeat here.

It's so frustrating that I can't pin point the cause and fix it. It just happened again sometime between adjusting roof angles, placing columns, floor tiles and exterior paint--no CFE involved. I don't get it--there's nothing about this house that's any different than other houses I've built. I really thought I caused this using CFE because I totally abused it before trying to get the look I wanted with the stairs but that's not the case now since I have the look and layout of the house figured out. Oh well, thanks again for holding my hand. I appreciate it. lol

ETA:
The blue squares weren't what was causing the stages not to be placed, it was the windows. Stages can be placed on the blue tiles even without moveobjects on. So I'm back to not seeing anything different other than the tiles are blue instead of green.

[motheranne]

Ya know what, the more I think about it, (and fool around TRYING to get blue squares now..lol) I think the blue comes up over the part of the house that has been sloped.
I could just mean that those blue tiles are "changed" from the origional height????
As for the windows...just place the stage FIRST and then add the windows..they'll show up fine:)

[Honeywell]

Ok, I give up. I'm rebuilding AGAIN and everything is going fine...check the squares and they're green, save and exit the lot. When I entered the lot the blue squares are back. Unless someone comes along to tell me something is corrupted that needs to be fixed I'm going to assume this is a non issue and just going back to finishing the first freaking house. Agree? Disagree?

P.S.
motheranne, I should have listened to you way back when and not worried about it. :p

[motheranne]

lol. I'm no expert so I don't blame you for wanting to double check...I would too.
I'm kinda interested as well (keeping my eye on this post) as you are right, There has to be a legitimate (game description) of what those tiles mean. :lol:

[Mootilda]

If you'd like to attach the lot here, I'll take a look and see whether I can determine what's happening.

[Honeywell]

That would be great, Mootilda, thank you. I'm attaching two lots. The first is the original build where I first noticed the problem. I also attached my last rebuild just because I have no idea what you might be looking for.

The 2nd is the last rebuild I tried where everything seemed to be fine. I checked the squares and they were good so I saved and binned the lot. But as soon as I entered the lot again the blue squares appeared which makes me think whatever was causing the problem was present in the house before I binned it but it just wasn't showing up yet--which is probably one of the reasons I can't pinpoint when/why it's happening in the first place.

Thanks again for taking a look. :)

[Mootilda]

I was just going to look at the various 2D and 3D arrays... since that's where most of the information on the grid is stored.

I've never heard of or seen this issue before, but it looks interesting.

Unfortunately, when I install the original blue square lot in my neighborhood, it looks just fine. Perhaps packaging and installing the lot has resolved the problem.

Could you zip up the unpackaged lot package (from your Lots folder)? I'd like to actually see the problem.

[Honeywell]

Doh. I'm an idiot--let me figure out which lots are which and I will.

ETA:
Attached lot.

ETA2:
It's not showing up blue at all? Could there be something wrong with my neighborhood then instead of the lot? I'm going to try putting that lot in a new neighborhood and see what happens.

I just re-read you post again and I thought binning kind of does the same thing as packaging but now I'll try installing the Sims2Pack file and see if that does anything too.

ETA3:
Well that didn't work for me. I installed the same package that looks normal in your game and it has blue squares in mine--just like the pics in the first post.

I also created a brand new neighborhood and placed the lot there and it still has blue squares.

Does that mean it's something with my game? I tried another lot and that one looks fine but it's not like this one starts out with blue squares so I don't think that means anything. And it's not CC. The first time I started to rebuild I did it without my downloads folder in and at some point the squares still turned blue.

[Mootilda]

Unfortunately, that didn't help... I still don't have a repro case. That certainly seems to indicate that the problem isn't in the lot package. I also tried it with your CC and without.

Let me know what happens with your tests. Maybe I'll have some other ideas by tomorrow.

Are all of your games fully patched?

[Honeywell]

Yes to your last question. My games are fully patched. :/

I thought for sure there was something wrong with the lot itself. What's so weird to me is that the ground level still shows green and there's tiny sections around the house at the foundation level that are green. If there was something just flat out wrong with my game I'd think all the squares would be blue.

[Mootilda]

I just managed to repro the problem. I had to flatten several areas before it showed up. I don't have any more time to work on it this evening, but I'll try to take a look at the lot internals tomorrow, to see whether I can see anything odd.

[Honeywell]

At this time I would have cleared out all my mods already; and then I would have removed my cc and do the same stuff with only Maxis stuff. Thanks for trying to help, Volvenom. But I'm pretty sure it's not CC at this point. I posted this a little further down:

"And it's not CC. The first time I started to rebuild I did it without my downloads folder in and at some point the squares still turned blue."

I can't help, but I wanted to say I can't wait for this lot! It Looks great! Thanks! :D

@Mootilda
I can't believe I forgot to say I used LotAdjuster on this house to change the road to add the garage pieces and the changed it back to make the garage. That is something I've never done before. But in my defense motheranne doesn't use it and her lots get these blue squares and I've got as far as starting to decorate a rebuild without issue--the garage is the first thing I build.

[Mootilda]

So far, I haven't found anything odd in the lot package, but there are still a lot of things to check.

Interestingly, I noticed that I am now seeing a few blue squares on one of my other lots, in the neighborhood which has your lot. Even more interesting, the location of the blue squares changes, depending upon the number of squares selected. For example, if I select an area, I get one blue square, plus a line of three which extends from side to side. However, if I extend the area selected, then the blue squares turn green and a couple of other squares turn blue, along with a line of 3 or 4 which extends from front to back.

I use the LotAdjuster and GridAdjuster frequently. I don't use CFE very often, but I'm reasonably sure that the two lines of blue squares are both areas where I used CFE on this particular lot; not so sure about the single blue squares. I suppose that I haven't seen this issue before because I rarely use CFE and it really seems to be associated with that cheat. I didn't see anything odd about your lot until I had flattened a few things with CFE.

At this point, if I had to make a guess, I'd say that this looks pretty harmless. However, I'd like to complete my testing; there's still a possibility that I can find something odd.

[Honeywell]

Interestingly, I noticed that I am now seeing a few blue squares on one of my other lots, in the neighborhood which has your lot. My lot is the plague? :blink:

I build in a construction neighborhood that, right now, is empty besides this house and various rebuilds of it. I did plop a few houses down to see if the problem showed up but I didn't see anything so just deleted them again. I probably use CFE to some extent on every build I do but nothing major. I usually don't think the compromise to playability is worth the look it achieves.

I definitely used it on a wider portion of this house just because of that length of 1/4 height wall. And I used it over and over again with the first version of this house creating spiral landings to go around the rotunda in the middle of the build which might have triggered the blue squares. So I guess it's possible that initial build is somehow contaminating my other attempts to rebuild even though in reality the new builds don't have that much CFE use?

[Mootilda]

The easy way to check that would be to start your next rebuild in a brand new neighborhood.

Again, I haven't seen anything yet which implies that this symptom is serious. It's hard to believe that CFE causes major problems; a lot of people use it.

[Honeywell]

The easy way to check that would be to start your next rebuild in a brand new neighborhood. Will do. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Even if this isn't harmful at all if I can build this lot without this issue popping up I'd prefer to go that route. Especially considering I upload to the exchange as well where the users tend to younger, less computer savvy simmers. There's enough threads about the viruses and computer destroying CC that inhabits the exchange as it is.

[Mootilda]

Unfortunately, the LotAdjuster isn't currently set up to check the 3ARY records in debug mode. I thought that those records were already being validated, but I was wrong. It will take a while to add that validation.

Here's another suggestion, though: use the GridAdjuster, rather than CFE. If the problem is associated with CFE, then avoiding CFE may avoid the issue.

[Honeywell]

I feel like I missed something reading your last post, Mootilda. Do you think it could be caused by the combination of the lot adjuster and CFE? Or is the bit about 3ARY records just something you found in checking this out but is unrelated?

I've barely started my rebuild but I can trash that, start a new neighborhood, and move the lot all over the map until I find the lot orientation that lets me turn the garage the way I'd like (it's what I've always done before) and use CFE like normal. That would be easier for me than trying to count squares and using GridAdjuster--which I've never gotten the hang of using.

[Mootilda]

No, the problem would appear to be related to CFE alone. There's no indication that the LotAdjuster has anything to do with it. Sorry if my post was confusing; let me try to explain more clearly.

My original offer was to take a look at the internal structure of your lot package. To do this, I intended to run your lot through a debug version of the LotAdjuster, to see whether it could find any problems with your lot. I thought that this might be helpful because I've added a lot of verification code to the debug version of the LotAdjuster. This verification code was added to help me to find the records which required changes when a new EP was released, but it has also been useful on occasion for finding arbitrary problems in lot packages.

I believe that there could be something odd in one of the 2D or 3D Array records inside of the lot package, primarily because those are the records which handle the grid. Unfortunately, there's no verification logic for those records in the LotAdjuster, so it won't be as simple as I was hoping to check your lot.

Does that make more sense?

Usually, I don't recommend the GridAdjuster to people; I understand that some people find CFE easier to use. However, my research so far seems to indicate that the problem occurs only with CFE, so I thought that the GridAdjuster might be a good solution in this case.

Your idea to test with CFE alone also seems like a useful test.

[Honeywell]

That makes perfect sense now--thanks for breaking it down to my level. lol

I think I'll continue the build in the new neighborhood I already started and if the blue squares appear with that build I'll try another neighborhood and build it without using the LotAdjuster for the side garage. I'll let you know how I make out, of course. Thanks again for the time you've put in looking into this. :)

ETA:
Nothing really new to add only that I'm so tired of building this freaking house I used one that was partially built and binned from my original set of rebuilds--which of course turned blue. But an interesting thing showed up, the few green squares that were on the foundation level of pic 1 one in my first post changed over to the garage side when I placed the lot facing the opposite direction in the new neighborhood.

So wouldn't that mean the blue squares aren't the result of what's actually built there? So CFE might not have anything to do with it?

ETA 8/5:
New neighborhood, new build, using lot adjuster to build the garage, blue squares. I'll try a new neighborhood and build without using lot adjuster to do the garage and see how that goes.