That stupid "game freezes but effects and sounds keep going" problem, again.

[Claeric]

I'm sure there's a thread on this already but I couldn't find it (I thought it was "The pause that annoys", but that's not it.)

Anyway, the issue: Game pauses, but there are effects still going (water, trees) and sounds still playing (birds, water, wind, music).

But the game is frozen. Can't click, move the camera, anything. USUALLY it stops after a second or two. It has started happening almost CONSTANTLY in my Sunset Valley and I dont know what to do about it. I have tried Fixall and using Fixall regularly. Nothing. I have cleared caches repeatedly. Nothing. I have removed all CC. Nothing.

I don't know what to do. D:

I DO have a save where it is happening consistently. It starts at 4:30. The sim is gardening and will continue. At 7:46/47, he has bladder failure, and the game will freeze for a second or two. Would that help? Should I upload it?

[lordrichter]

You know, it is not unusual for the game to pause for a length of time while it takes care of stuff in the background.  My impression is that the script portion of the game is pretty lame in the concurrent tasks department, so if something is happening to a Sim that occupies a locked block of time, Sim action will freeze until it is done.

Your freeze is pretty short, so I have little hope that this will work, but if you can PAUSE the game (press zero or P to pause) and interrupt the freeze (unpausie resumes the freeze), then you can confirm whether a script running against the gardening Sim is what is doing this.  You have to use the keyboard to pause, do not trust mouse clicks.  There will be a delay between the key press and the response. Once you have control of the game while paused, simply reset the Sim.

If the pause comes after the freeze, it is not as easy.  If the pause is ignored, your problem lies elsewhere.

Fixall will not touch this.  Resetworld will fix it if it is due to a Sim action, but to me that is diagnostic, not corrective.  You need to find the Sim causing the problem and see what they are trying to do.  That is easier said than done if it is not a household Sim.

That is my comment on this matter.


Edit: This was discussed in the well-named "Exit Stage Left, Please" thread: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,18227.0.html

[Claeric]

It is absolutely not the game pausing to load something, as it only happens ocasionally. That is to say that it does not happen in every game file on a regular basis, but sometimes, the file will start doing it CONSTANTLY and meanwhile never do it ever beforehand. So it's not a regular, common, everyday game action. And you cannot change the speed or pause, no. It's a total freeze.

I will try resetworld. This save has shown me that it is happening at 7:47 consistently regardless of what the sim is doing, so it should show whether it worked or not. (it also is happening cross-household.)

Edit: It did not freeze when I did resetworld and has not freezed in 24 game hours. (Before it was doing it every couple hours or so, if not more).

:|

[lordrichter]

I expect that your game freeze is too short for the Pause trick to work.  I have good luck with that when the freeze is much longer.  It usually takes a few seconds for the pause to happen after pressing P.  When the freeze is long enough, it actually does pause during the freeze.

This just makes your problem harder.  If you can catch it while IN the freeze, you can examine the state of the game that caused it, to a certain extent.  After the freeze, it is too late and before the freeze, it has not happened yet.

Resetworld before the freeze will likely prevent it, but will not show you where the problem is.  You could save just before the freeze (7:40 or something) and systematically reset each sim you can find, one at a time, one Sim per game load, and wait to see if that prevents the freeze.  If you have 100 Sims, that is 100 reloads, 100 resetsim commands, and guaranteed madness.  I have never been that dedicated. 

If you can find the Sim you can find out what they are doing.  If you know what they are doing, you might be able to identify what the problem is.  If it is caused by a Sim action blocking, that is.

[Claeric]

Well, I have a sim I suspect may cause it (after I used resetworld, it told me a sim from a previously played household had an error and his "work and school crap" supreme commander interaction needed to be re-queued. Re-queueing it didn't make it freeze again, but that may have been it.

As long as it isn't a constant issue (like I said, it starts out of nowhere) and I can stop it (by resetting everybody), I guess it's fine if I can't find the EXACT cause. At least now I know it's because one sim was doing something stupid.

Edit: Nah, it wasnt that sim. But resetworld did fix it anyway.

[cassblonde]

I've had the game lock up on me as well and actually searched and found the "exit stage left" thread - next time it happens I will try to see if a quick pause and resetworld will help. Otherwise I just set Awesome Mod to autosave for me so I don't lose a lot of game play. Next time it freezes I will give it a bit more time as I thought that the program hung and I was SOL.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, I have a sim I suspect may cause it (after I used resetworld, it told me a sim from a previously played household had an error and his "work and school crap" supreme commander interaction needed to be re-queued. Re-queueing it didn't make it freeze again, but that may have been it.

That's just the message you get anytime the game detects that the command got aborted due to a world reset, and gives you a little popup so you can click it to requeue it. It's not the cause. It's useful for when a heavily commandered neighborhood gets reset as a result of a patch.

[lordrichter]

Uh.  If you have Sims running Supreme Commander in the background, I think they are running in high resolution mode.

It seems to me that could contribute to a lag or freeze problem.

[cannedsarcasm]

I've experienced this some time in the past, but I've also experienced this recently in my own game - a freshly started game in Sunset Valley after 2 months of not playing.

On two occasions it's frozen on me, once upon arriving at the Graveyard (one sim household) and once before a toddler's birthday. It is a permanent freeze, the game does not pick up again. The trees still rustle, the water and fish still animate, but the sims, puck and all controls are dead.
It's in a neighbourhood that has not yet had Supreme Commander applied, or even a switch to a new active household, so lordrichter: I don't think there's a correlation there at all. I suspect the sim herself is corrupted somehow.

I've also had a similar kind of permanent freeze occur in that family midway through teaching a toddler how to talk. The parent and toddler become completely frozen, though the surrounding world is still active and alive. I cannot recall whether it affected all members of the household, I don't believe that it did. This freeze has occurred at least twice previously in other families on different save files. I quit without saving, so no suggested fix from me. I did try switching to a different household and evicting the frozen ones. They were then moved back into that lot. The mother sim and the frozen toddler were both there, but the toddler's twin had vanished from the family. Still on the family tree, but otherwise gone. Really fracking annoying, since it was a ghost toddler and I wanted to keep it. I've had other sims drop from families before (again, in other files), so I don't think it's by virtue of being a ghost or otherwise related to one.

[lordrichter]

The only correlation between the freeze and Supreme Commander is that SC is often a victim of this same bug.  SC does not cause this.  Finding a Sim using SC that is blocked or looping is merely a means to check for an easily identified condition that can be easily corrected.   Unless the underlying situation that caused the problem is identified and fixed, something that is not always easy to do, it will likely happen again.  A freeze not caused because SC is looping is merely harder to find.

I also want to be clear that SC looping does not seem to cause a freeze unless the attempted action is one that will cause an actual long delay in the game.  If SC is blocked because a Gnome has moved to block Sim access to the refrigerator, the game does not freeze.  Instead, the symptom is jerky Sims animation that is best described as "on and off" action by the Sims, who behave in a move, stop, move, stop manner.

Because blocked routes can cause game lags, it is not unreasonable to theorize that routing calculations that get out of hand can cause more serious performance issues, like freezes.

Not all freezes need to be caused by the same thing.  A freeze of any noticeable length is merely a symptom of something going wrong, namely some part of the game going off to do some work and never returning, or taking an extreme amount of time to return.  There is no rule of programming that says that this can only happen in one place or for one reason.