Okay, so I'm all on board with this entire "Gemlins in the game" thing for how often Sims 3 crashes and to fix it you can literally just sacrifice some happy, cute, orphan kittens in front of your machine and it will fix it..but this is a bit ridiculous.
I have the latest patches for the original game, as well as WA 1.7.9. I was playing the game just fine from Friday on to late Sunday (off and on, of course
). At some point while exploring a tomb in Egypt, the screen suddenly flickered and then went black. I could still hear the music and everything, but the computer itself was locked up completely. I waited a full minute before restarting by soft-reset. I then proceeded to try and play the game again, but within 10-minutes, the same thing happened. I restarted, tried a third time, and this time the game crashes just like that but at bootup! I went through the basic de-gremlin process (removed the *cache files, etc), and even went as far as to remove all CC entirely--thinking AM and the new Twallan mods were conflicting. No go, unfortunately; the black screen still displays immediately upon reboot.
Now, I have a BFG GTX OC 1GB GPU; I know it is beyond enough to support this game. I searched around and found that some people are having trouble with the 191.xx drivers from nVidia--which I've had installed for about a month with no problem. Now it turns out this black screen thing is happening to a lot of people. I upgraded to the latest WHQL drivers from nVidia (195.62) and this didn't even fix it. I have completely uninstalled Sims 3, WA, and
everything nVidia now. I've cleaned the registry and insured that no trace of the previous installations of any three of those components was left on the machine. Then I proceeded to reinstall 190.1--the last stable release claimed by many in the Sims 3 community to run fine. I reinstalled Sims 3 and WA, patched up, CC'd, and loaded fine (my saves can't run without the CC...otherwise I would have skipped CC first, then added it in later). I started playing, joyous at the fact that I can finally get back to my quests and wealth. Lo-and-behold, 10-minutes later, BAM! Black Screen...
After spending 3-hours on this the last time, I wasn't going to do it again. As much of an upgrade as Sims 3 installer is from Sims 2 installers (installing all of
those XP's was a
nightmare ...) I still don't want do it
. I got the idea of opening up the options.ini file inside of the settings folder. I'll admit I've seen more complicated INI's, so this one was fairly impressive in simplicity. I looked through it to see if there was a corruption or something from my restarting so much out of frustration. No corruption, but I did get the idea of turning off Full-screen (logic: If it freezes outside of full-screen, I can end the task. If it is full-screen, the computer locks up because it is the only front process...). Boot it, and it
loaded! UGH!
So it seems to run just fine in Window mode, but I can't stand window mode since you can't Edge Scroll at all...which is how I get around in the game. So, I'm coming to the one place where I know I can get a fairly quick (if not snarky) response. What have I forgotten to check? I've checked the GPU's fan speed--which is fine and cooling--so it isn't the GPU. Drivers, mods, etc...all seem to check out fine. I've also tried to get the game running in window mode, and manually switching out to Full-Screen; crashes. It seems like whenever there's some random, fairly annoying glitch that I keep hearing about, someone around here knows about it and knows how to fix it. I'm fairly certain this is way beyond AM, but as a general request to anyone that may know something--I'm asking here.
Thanks...
Author