Hello, everyone!

I just wanted to post a PSA about a very serious problem that might have been affecting CAW worlds for quite some time now. I say it's partially solved, because I'm still trying to chase down lingering gremlins that are affecting my glitched world. However, I'd say that as of now, 90% of the cause has been pinpointed. Here's what happened:

Two years ago, one of my worlds developed game-breaking sound and TV glitches out of the blue, where everything was borked. I had no idea what the issue was, because the glitch turned out to be one of those super, duper rare events to where I had to exhaust every piece of solid advice and beyond (upgrading my computer!) to find out what was going on. To make matters worse, the glitching could've been anything from bad drivers or hardware failure to world corruption. There were so many roads to go down that it took me two years of exhausting every possibility to discover the problem.

What I learned is that there's an issue that can happen when using Master Controller to tweak a world in CAW before exporting. I am not saying that it causes this issue, but it's a piece of the puzzle. What happens is that when you make a sim to enabled MC's menu options ("makesim"), this generates script actions within the world. Every time you do this, they duplicate exponentially, to the point where routing, music, sound and the TV glitches out.

Absolutely none of the tried-and-true methods of fixing glitched worlds work. You have to flush these duplicate script actions using MC-->Town Stats-->Objects Not in Inventory. They will usually show up as white boxes but some of them are really tricky. You have to select certain objects before you can find the white boxes. (Like pools and fountains). Other objects, like the Gnubb Set, won't show boxes but "forwarders."

Like I said, I'm still in the process of chasing down all the scripts that cause this issue, but I am fairly certain that these are the objects affected:

1. Pools
2. Fountains
3. Gnubb Set
4. Staircases

I have posted a screenshot showing what happens when I selected pools in MC-->Town Stats-->Not in Inventory. These white boxes, marked by "should not appear in game" showed up. These will multiply over time and cause sound, TV and in some cases routing issues.

Hi, guys! I am back after doing more research into this massive glitch I ran into over the past two years. Here are several more things I just discovered that may contribute to the sound glitching in a custom world. I had to put everything in spoilers to avoid creating a wall of text, so apologies in advance.

1. Bike Bell Glitch


2. Potential issue placing lots from save bin with stereos and jukebox


3. Potential issue placing lots from save bin with pools and fountain jets


4. Overlapping


Keep in mind that everything I've posted so far is a working theory and that I'm still researching all this. In the meantime, I hope this has helped many of you who've been struggling with CAW and who knows, this might spur you to conduct research yourself and uncover some new findings.

Hello, everyone. I am back with another update, and with another PSA.

I think I finally fixed this issue, because as of this week, Pottersville sound glitches are gone. I am still giving the world one last go before official release. However, I believe the world is now good.

Now, I'm going to give one last PSA.

It looks like that the reason why I had so much trouble pinning down the problem is that the Origin 1.69 update made it so that CAW and EIG didn't crash if an error came up in your world.

When I went back to 1.67 this week because of the stupid EA App, that all changed. Pottersville, for the first time, would either crash or CAW and SuperCAW would crash. You would think that was a bad thing, but no, this was an amazing thing because the crashing finally told me whether the world had bugged and what might've caused the crash. This was opposed to what was happening before, when Pottersville was clearly bugged but the 1.69 patch made it seem as if everything had saved and exported OK.

What cleared out the last of the gremlins was going to the most recent backup folder, which regenerated a new .settings file.

Even though there's a huge shakeup right now, where EIG is unavailable, I'm posting this in the event that EA comes to its senses and reinstates EIG for 1.69 or maybe releases a patch version 1.70 that allows it to work with the EA App.

Hi, everyone! I finally discovered one piece of the last puzzle to this sound mystery.

Apparently, there's an issue with Showtime venues and showbiz sims in EIG. I don't know how and when this happened, because I'd been adding both to my worlds without any issues whatsoever until 2020.

What I learned is that if you populate your world and you have Showtime venues, make sure to have plenty of showbiz sims (acrobat, magician, singer) at various career levels to start with. The reason is that you can't trust EA's Story Progression to generate sims for SimFests. What'll happen is that the game will keep going back and forth between recruiting mixologists/bouncers/fireman, etc. as SimFest performers, and this will introduce the infamous "corrupt career outfit bug" almost immediately. This bug will both break the free will of the sim affected, and introduce annoying sound glitches.

Another very important thing as well--when you populate your world with these showbiz sims, use NRAAS to give them additional showbiz outfits. The reason is that there's a bug in Showtime in general where the default career outfit can go corrupt. Believe it or not, it can happen in EIG when saving so that when you play the game, you will sometimes run into the sound bug as early as Day Two, which is when showbiz sims start doing gigs in and around town.

Hoped this thread helped worldbuilders out there, and I'll try to create a much more detailed tutorial at my site.