I bought the Village Sim online two days ago for my Palmone T5, and I love the game and have been playing it for two days. However, something very strange just occurred in my Village Sim world! Hopefully someone can help me...

To begin the story:

Last night, a pregnent woman (name Meka with perfect health) disappeared with her baby, when other villagers were burying their deads. When I counted the number of grave stones, it is definately one more than I would expect. In addition, Meka and her baby were counted among the deads in the population figures.

However, I ignored this incident, life goes on in my Sim Village......feeling sorry for Meka.... hoping no such thing would happen again......

Since then, I got all my village man to do all kinds of works and the woman for having babies only..... things were looking really good, populations was 25 and going...

Then, my Palmone Tungsten T5 showed a Fetal Exception message during my game play ten minutes ago, a message from the Village Sim software saying: "no shadow found!" Then my palmone restared........!

When I turn the Village Sim back on....my God! Meka is BACK! population is down to only 12? Is it back to the past? No, it isn't, some of the 14 and 15 years old before the restart still there, but other babies are gone! And! The dead bodies are back on the field!

To make the matter worse! a storm just struck and wiped out all foods, so I have no time to think about what happened! Just try to get all villagers to get fish and crops....

Can the LDW developers tell me what's going on?

I'm sure Barbara, or one of the LDW team will come up with a better explanation when they get online later, but from what I see here, there is nothing too strange going on.

People have been reported as disappering in a number of scenarios, especially when people are being buried. I assume Meka was one of these. Strangely, these disappearances (and babies being carried when mothers die) don't normally get reflected in by tombstones, so I can't explain this part. This disappearing problem is being addressed by LDW as we speak.

The fatal exceptions have also been reported, but I do not know what the progress is on these being fixed.

However, when a fatal exception occurs, you do go back to the last time a game was saved....and a game is saved only when you exit VS and re-enter. I haven't tested what happens here much, but know that villagers would probably age, due to the time between last saving, and playing currently

I'll leave it to the experts to fill in any holes here

Savi

From your point of view, Peter, the things you experienced do seem strange. But, as Savi said, they have their explanation in two bugs that are receiving a great deal of attention from the development team.

The first bug, which resulted in the disappearance of Meka and her baby, seems to occur when villagers are being buried, or at some point after that. It's a memory management issue related to how villagers are handled in the game. The safest thing to do (until the update is released) is to avoid 'touching' any villagers while burials are going on, and to exit the game after the burials are finished. That will do two things: save the game (which will help with your second strange thing), and cause the game to 'rebuild' your list of villagers when it loads.

The phenomenon you described after receiving the 'no shadow window found' error (also a high-priority bug) is also easily explained. The game is saved only when you exit to another application or to the launcher. If you soft reset the device for any reason, the game does not have the opportunity to write to the savegame file (and, thus, record any babies that had been born, tech levels that had been purchased, actions that you initiated, etc.). When you launch the game again after the reset, Village Sim will load the existing savegame file (which, in your case, was probably saved many hours before the crash). Upon launch, the game calculates a new game state based on the previously saved game state and the time that has passed since the game was saved (it's a 'real time' game). Villagers will age, tech points will be accumulated, the available food supply will change, construction projects that are in progress will be more complete, etc. However, anything that you initiated during that period would be 'lost' in the process of the reset. Meka and her baby 'came back' because their disappearance had not been saved. I usually exit my game periodically just to save it. You can launch it again right away, and continue from where you left off.

It's unfortunate that you hit the two nastiest bugs. Rest assured that they will be fixed (and there will be some enhancements in the game) when the update is released.

Thanks, I do feel a lot more calm now......hopefully the patch will be available soon.