For the few of you who are wondering why I haven't updated this thread in so long, here's what's been going on.
First of all, my main computer system, the one where I play the game, broke down. To be more specific, it's suffering from something known as a "Partition Error". The data on the C: drive is inaccessible and remains so, and I presently have no way to fix it. Hell, I don't really even know what a "Partition Error"
is. I do know, however, that there is no way in hell I'm going to waste $300.00+ and two weeks time by letting the Idiot Squad at Best Buy get their useless hands on it, so I'm waiting for my brother to find the time to give me a hand. In the meantime, the C: drive is shot. Fortunately, by coincidence I had backed up all the game files the day before, so absolutely nothing was lost. Of course, all this happened while I was in the process of escaping from Retardo Land, so my attention wasn't focused on the game anyway. After I settled in here I briefly considered running the game on my laptop but that's not really an option; the graphics errors are horrendous. The game plays there, albeit slower than normal, but getting decent pictures is difficult at best. In addition, there was still the unresolved problem of the game crashing while playing on Community Lots, which was just plain unacceptable. So what I eventually did was to reinstall the game on my main system's G: drive, which took a few hours, and I started wiping out as much of the downloaded custom content as I could bear. After that I deleted most of the hacks I use and replaced them with updated versions; a lot of hacks need to be updated after every new expansion pack. After I took care of all that I fired up the game, ran tests in three different neighborhoods, and it worked. Faster load time, no more crashes. Overjoyed, I added the last expansion packs, and that's when the new problems showed up; specifically, stupid and pointless animations and Sim behaviours included by the nitwits at EA games. I am convinced that EA game designers all live in their parents basements and don't know much about how real people act. So off I went to MATY, Simbiology, MTS2, and other sites, intent on tracking down new hacks to correct such things. All found, all installed, all working. Nothing left to do but load Foster's Valley and see what happened. What happened was that I sent Amanda Blue to the mall where she watched TV and broiled some hot dogs while Terrence and Gabe the Valley Pest discovered a mutual dislike of each other. And, most importantly,
NO CRASH. Everything worked exactly as it's supposed to So, at this point it's safe to say that the game is
finally running properly again, and at last I'll be able to finish the story of Frankie's vacation. After that, we'll be having a chat about some of the new expansion pack goodies and what you want your Sims to do with them. And then it's on to the next stories.
Foster's Valley is back again.