I've been expecting corruption to manifest itself at some point and it's finally happened - one of my sims has vanished.

I was playing one particular lot with testingcheats on when I suddenly got an error message. Nothing unusual there, excepting clicking on Reset only prompted it to reappear. Yup, it's the "Undefined transition" error. The pop-up notification referred to another sim, not resident on that lot, called Nimloth Rabbit. This was at a moment when a walkby was scheduled, so clearly he was the walkby and hence the source of the problem.

I quit the game (ctrl+alt+del, the only way I could get out), rebooted it and then entered Nimloth's household. He wasn't there. His portrait was on the left-hand side of the screen, along with his wife and the baby, but no sign of Nimloth himself. Any action I tried to give him was immediately cancelled.

His wife, for her part, just tried to initiate casual woohoo (via ACR of course).

I quit without saving, cleared the cache, and entered Nimloth's household again. Same result - no Nimloth. So I exited the house (again without saving), went to another household where a friend of Nimloth's lives, and had her invite him over. He said he would come, she waited, his portrait moved up in her relationships panel so he had clearly arrived, but no sign of him. I turned testingcheats on and immediately got the "Undefined transition" notification. Ctrl+Alt+Del again to exit.

I removed the last bit of CC I added to my Downloads folder (the only additional CC for some time). I also noticed that I had two Bigger Bills mods in there, for different billing levels, so took one of them out. Back to Nimloth's - still not there.

Here is the initial part of the error log that got dumped from the last notification. I'm not including the whole thing, it's huge, but if any clue as to the source of the problem is elsewhere in the log then I can post the relevant part. It's the "Unknown initiating object" bit that I find particularly perturbing, but I really don't know how to read these things.



I would be most grateful if anyone could point me towards a solution to this situation. If there is one.

I don't know about the error log but the first thing I would do is run hood checker, then open SimPE and check him in there.

I last ran Hoodchecker a couple of days ago, just before starting my latest rotation. Made my last back-up then as well.

I wouldn't know where to start looking in SimPE.

To find him in SimPE, load the program, then click the Neighborhood Browser and load the neighborhood where he lives. Once that's done loading, click the Sim Browser. This icon is right next to the Neighborhood browser and will bring up a table showing the sims in the game.

At the top of this table you can click and unclick boxes to define which kinds of sims to show. In this case, I would choose "Playable" and "Uneditable," because the sim is supposed to be playable, but the fact that you can't find him may mean something's happened to put him in the Uneditable" category. Deselect "Townies" to keep them from distracting you. Now you can look at the table.

By default, this opens in order by ID number, effectively, order in which they were added to the neighborhood. However, the table works like a spreadsheet - you can click each column header in order to rearrange the table. In this case, I'd click on "Name" and scroll down to the N names.

If you can't find him, he is well and truly gone and the only hope is to restore from backup.

If you do find him, check the thumbnail at the far left. Is the background red? Then he's missing crucial data and might as well not be there.

Any other color? Look in the Household column. Is he in the household you would expect him to be? Make a note of that. If he's in the Default family, he's in with all the dead people; if he's in another playable or townie household that is peculiar, but for now just make a note of it. Select his line of data and double click it to bring up details of his character data. These will appear arranged along the bottom of the screen in a series of tabs - Overview (name, days left in current age state, that kind of thing), Character, Relations, good stuff like that. Most of this is self-explanatory. Poke around in it and see if any questions or answers pop put at you. The More tab will lead you to other areas of SimPE, like Sim DNA, Memories, and family/household information. These areas may be confusing, so don't go there yet. Come back here and report your findings.

The Error-log says that the transition occured in BHAV 0x22A4 (8868) Function - Main - Set Skin in node (line) 4 which in Nightlife is prim (0x0001) Generic Sims Call(Set Skin Tone). This primitive has returned FALSE for some unknown reason. A guess is missing or bad SkinTone-package.

Well, I found him in SimPE (thanks for the clear instructions, Peni, though as it happens I do know how to find a sim there - though that's about as far as I can go). Everything seems okay. He's in the right household, he's listed as playable, the right age, most recent memories are what they ought to be. I didn't check every last detail but nothing jumped out as wrong.

You could try this, make a copy of your Sims 2 folder in My Doc's and then right click on the Sims 2 folder and chose properties then chose Previous Versions and chose one just before this happen and reset it to that one and see what happens.

Is there an option on the batbox to restore family or something about missing sims? Long ago I had sims start to vanish and they were not showing on family lists, that means corruption. An invisible sim that shows on family list, etc. might not be the same thing. I don't understand all that stuff, just mentioning something they may give a clue to what's happening or possibly a way to fix it. You would need testing cheats on, then check the various menu lists on the batbox, see what might be listed. (:

If his skintone's supposedly borked, try backing up and then SimSurgery him a Maxis skintone.

Well, I've restored the last back-up, and Nimloth was there, sitting at the table. Whatever happened, must have happened since then. Looks like I'm replaying the latest rotation from scratch - good job I was only four houses into it.

Only ... I don't feel like playing it now. Yeah, I know, if you fall off your bike you ought to get straight back on, but...

(With reference to the skintone thing, Nimloth doesn't have a custom skintone, just a Maxis one, and it was registered there in SimPE.)