Exit Stage Left, Please.

[Marq]

The freezing described earlier (tree animations still looping, sims freezing, can't move the camera around, can't click anything, ect) happened to me twice today and has been a regular occurrence since the patches for HELS came out.

I'm using the base game, WA, AM, and FPS limiter.  I do have a fair amount of store items and .package items.  No other mods though.  The freezing happens while on vacation, in the main hood, on community lots, and on the home lot.  Pretty much anywhere.  -_-  The timing seems to be random as well.  I've had it happen at all times of the day, without warning, and I'm failing to notice a pattern.

I'm playing on my laptop, which handles every game I've thrown at it on high settings perfectly fine, except for TS3.  No stuttering in Oblivion, Dragon Age Origins, Battlefield (various), Fallout 3, etc, etc.  This is the only title that freezes and CTDs. 

The only "work around" I've found is the auto-save feature in AM.  I have it set at 30 minutes, but I'm moving it down to 15 because I'm a fast player.  Has anyone else found a real solution to this?  Should we try closing the game every 30 minutes and clearing the cache files?  I'll try this tomorrow and see how it goes.

[lordrichter]

Marq, workarounds for this have already been discussed in this thread.

[J. M. Pescado]

I haven't seen this, but I will keep an eye out for it.

[Marq]

Marq, workarounds for this have already been discussed in this thread.

The solutions discussed would never work, or don't work, for my type of freezing.  I can't move the camera around or click anything when it freezes so I can't see if there's a sim routing fail.  I only play 2-4 sim sized families, so it's not a matter of too many sims.  The only mod I'm running is AM and the few .package files I have are updated and non-conflicting.  (I thought this was a culprit, it wasn't)  I have been decrapifying since the prgram was released for general use.  And, I don't have unneeded programs running in the background, I've manually disabled all the stupid windows crap that's not needed from booting.  

So, none of the solutions work.  =/   This is why I posted my description because the game doesn't lag and catch up, it just stops.  I let it run for an hour once and I got nothing.

ETA:  Thanks for keeping an eye out for it. 

I've been doing more digging and it's not a common issue.  I also haven't found any solutions except saving often and manually closing the game.  One of the patches does note that extended play stability and playing on speeds 3/4 was increased.  This leads me to believe that my style of playing (long binge session on speed 3 mostly), causes the game to become unstable.  *shrug*  I haven't had time to try playing for an extended session at slower speeds though.

[Tangie]

Just wanted to mention that I was experiencing the same type of freezing today (also before today) while starting a new game in a new world. I just posted about it in AwesomeMod's Bugs thread. In my case it seems to be caused by Supreme Commander's Auto Paint feature. Sims are getting stuck between peeing and painting and can't do either, and it's causing freezing and lagging in my game.

[J. M. Pescado]

If you have a save, paused, right before it happens, I can take a look at it. Otherwise, I haven't been able to reproduce this yet.

[Marq]

If you have a save, paused, right before it happens, I can take a look at it. Otherwise, I haven't been able to reproduce this yet.

That's a negative on having a save before it happened.  I've resorted to doing a clean re-install so we'll see if that fixes the problem.  =/  If it doesn't, I'll start saving more often and see if I can catch a lucky save right before it happens.