More Awesome Than You!

I have one lot that keeps freezing. It's happened three times now. No error message, no crash notice, it just stops. It's a 5x5 lot, with barely anything on it. I can't think of anything that could be causing it.

Any advice on random freezes? ???

Fix the central heating?

 ;D

Seriously though, have you got something on that lot you don't have anywhere else? I've found that pesky bits of custom content will freeze a lot for no apparent reason. What does activating the Lot Debugger do?

A lot debugger is present on the lot, but I can't click anything once it's frozen. The only things on this lot that are different are the weeds the treasure holes.

I now blame it on Numenor's coal stove. The freezing has spread.

Does it completely freeze? Have you tested for a long time (within reason) I say this cause in my custom hood I had a load of things ported from the base hoods for some reason the first load of the lot the game locks but after a few minutes it recovers. But after exiting the lot and trying again everything worked fine. I've noticed small occurances of this happening with other lots in my other hoods however I've not tried a huge lot yet.

I was certainly patient with the game. These lock ups weren't on the first load up, either. They seem to be occuring at random times without rhyme or reason.

I have had the coal stove for some time and it hasn't caused problems like that in my game. I hope that helps the debugging proccess a bit.

This has been happening to several of my lots for a while now. I have yet to figure out the reason why either since there aren't any error logs or messages.

(Not a very helpful post, I know.)

I have removed the stove from all of my lots, and the freezes have stopped. Not sure why it's affecting me and not you.  :-\

Well, I tell ya'.  There are a lot of reasons for lots freezing/crashing with custom content in them.  I find the larger the lot, the more frequently this occurs.  I've also been fighting with EA forever about a problem with the game either writing illegal/incorrect instructions to graphics cards with DirectX, or mishandling older custom content.  EA won't verify either, they blame nVidia who says there is a memory leak and BV asks for the driver-version in the wrong way, but it took too much energy to fight them when this problem got out-of-hand with Pets. I had to threaten them with negative publicity, so nVidia helped EA out and created Beta 162.18 during Seasons.  When BV came out, this problem was alive and well all over again  >:(, and now ATI-users have problems but less often than nVidia-users.  I have to use boolprop useshaders off to play without all lots crashing within 5 minutes, and that takes away seeing lots of details in the game.  Some of my lots don't crash at all, but the commonality with the ones that do is that they are large, and have a fair amount of custom content.  I know it's not my CC, because I know what I've added since Seasons, and 100% worked perfectly fine after the 162.18 nVidia patch. Since I practically got the crap beaten out of me by EA, and ended up shunned by the Sr. Developer, I'll not tackle them alone again. So, if only 1 lot is doing this, most likely it is a CC object (or hack that isn't working correctly). My guess is the all-famous graphics problem caused by this game which affects previously-working CC, and nobody knows what it really is!  :(