Super Duper Hug Bug
The Super Duper Hug Bug, or the Super Hug Bug, is a game bug that affects some installations of The Sims 2. The bug manifests itself as an autonomous reaction where Sims will repeatedly engage in a "super duper hug" with other Sims. The super duper hug is a debugging interaction and isn't meant to be usable by players. The bug arises from a poorly-written game mod (or hack) that adds one or more custom interactions. When the mod is removed from a player's game or otherwise stops working, the game defaults to using the super duper hug in place of the lost interaction(s).[note 1]
The bug itself is not known to cause game corruption, but it is infamous in the The Sims 2 community because of how disruptive and how 'infective' it tends to be. The bug becomes invisibly attached to any lots that a player with an 'infected' game opens, even if the player attempts to use game utilities like SimPE or Clean Installer to 'disinfect' their lots. This means that even if a player reinstalls The Sims 2, any lots that they accessed when the bug was active will still be infected and will transfer the infection back to the game installation. This infection can also spread via downloading custom lots, even if precautions are taken to clean the lot prior to installation. Content creators therefore are discouraged from sharing lots if they have encountered the bug within their installation, as they may unwittingly infect other players.
Several game modifications have been created that eliminate or control the negative behavior of the bug, the most widely-known and recommended being BO's No Sim Loaded mod.
Notes[edit | edit source]
- ↑ The Mod The Sims user and game modifier Dolphin26 states, in regards to the bug and its origin: "Any hack that modifies the menu that pops up when you click a sim can cause the problem if the author of the hack doesn't realize that they need to change the default GUID for the social object they clone. When you remove such a hack, it sees an invisible object stored on your lot that it can't find the definition for because you uninstalled the hack. So it resets the object to it's default GUID, which is the example object Maxis wrote for hack developers to copy: the infamous "super duper hug". Almost all hacks that modify the sim menu are clones of that example hack."