More Awesome Than You!

Along with the many other problems I've been having lately there are random long pauses in the action. The sound continues and any other kind off animation like TV channels, the Zzz's from a sleeping sim, and the green diamond above the head continues. But the time and the sim freezes. They were bearable before but they're getting more frequent and longer and are beginning to make the game unplayable.

Possibly the Limozeen Bug? Try "towderelicts true".

I had this before, when I had too many harvestable trees on a lot.
The sprinklers were still going, but the world around them had stopped...

No dice.  :-[

I am having this same issue, just so you know.  I tried adjusting the graphics properties, thinking it was some sort of overload that was doing it, but no good. Just started this weekend, and I did mega-update this weekend. So, I don't know if it's the patch or what.  I'm calling it the Excorcist Bug myself, because the most common issue I have is that my sims will freeze, mid-action, all except their heads, which slowly look from side to side and their eyes roll around. Quite freaky, actually.  So, yeah, me too.

I have the same problem. It only occurs when my sims head to the carpool/school bus to leave the home. Their heads and upper bodies can move (they wave at others while frozen), but their legs are frozen. Then they move a couple steps and are frozen again. It's not my graphics settings or computer because when I take out Awesomemod it doesn't do this. I tried towderelicts and it didn't fix the problem.

I have the latest version of Awesomemod and I have my game patched to 1.4. I deleted cache files. I took out IndieStone and just used Awesome mod, both the AwesomeStory and the EA story fix and this still occured.

I even allowed one sim to stay home until all others left the lot, then I had her take the family car to school and she still froze for a few seconds every couple of steps on her way to the car.

The only thing is, on mine, the clock DOES move. I'd not have as big an issue if it didn't, but as it is, I can initiate an interaction, like tell a funny story, and it might take up to an hour to actually start. The minutes go by in chunks of 3-10, not slowly and rythmically as normal. It does seem to be a load issue- threw a party with 6 guests to test it out, and it looked like a zombie rave. Definitely gets worse with more people.

A lot of us reported this same issue under the "Work/school zergswarms and game performance" thread, listed further down from this one. In one family I have, 2 teens, 2 kids, and an adult all leave for work/school at the same time and it takes them hours to get out to the street. Usually it's between at least 9:30 to 10:30 before they all get out there, and by that time the bus has left and they then take the car or a bike to school. Over the weekend, one day my adult Sim, a level 10 scientist, didn't manage to leave for work until 11:30 (in spite of the fact that he started toward the door at the usual 7am time). He got paid about half his normal salary for the day. The screaming toddlers and babies are almost worse. They'll be in red status before the Sim, who stands holding the screaming infant for an hour or more, finally gets around to feeding it. It's very frustrating because something with game performance prevents your Sims from accomplishing what you tell them to in a timely manner, but the game is still punishing you for not doing it. Effin' stoopid game.  >:(

I started a new 'hood and nuked everyone to start off; there are only about half a dozen households at this point but so far I am not experiencing the awful game-nuking lag. I'm hoping that the same thing won't happen with this one, or else someone will find a way to fix it if it does.

I cannot reproduce this bug at all.

I have a slowdown every working week day between about 8am and 10am, it's not considerable but it is noticeable. I put it down to the sudden mass exodus because so many jobs start at 9am, I have the same slight slow down between 2pm and 3pm as they're all knocking off and then the Pro Sports and Culinary sims are all mass exodusing to their jobs between those hours. It's just another example of the stupidity of EA to have not staggered the work start times as I suppose they thought the average player would play for a few sim weeks then give up, start over, play something else. The more I play it the more I think this game was not designed to be played for any considerable length of time.

On the idea side what would be the likelihood of some majestic soul tweaking the work start times so they're staggered and there would be a constant flow rather than an 'all rush for the rabbit hole at the same freakin time'. If only I was an expert modder  ;D

It happens to me all the time, too.  In the morning, heading for the bus/carpool.  They take a few steps running, freeze, then take a few more, freeze.  It's maddening.  I want to get in the game and roll them out on a dolly.

It seems that the slowness that affects them isn't uniform.  Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's the impression I get.  In TS2, the timing of the game was always in sync from one sim to another.  In TS3, it seems as if sometimes time will run more slowly for one sim than another.  I suspect TS3 is spawning separate threads for each Sim in the household and the threads are not locked in sync with each other.  It would explain a lot of the weird graphical behavior, like the spinning heads when they stop moving.

My suggestion for a crappy fix, but one that would work wonders:  I think it would be good if there were an option to have all townies beam themselves to work, ala Star Trek, and thus keep them off the roads and away from swarming school entrances.  (Swarming the school entrances is another big pain in the ass.)  It might seem like a step backwards and not an ideal solution, but it would probably solve the problem so we could enjoy the rest of the game.

You can "beam" them, well "teleport" them. Turn testingCheats on and rightclick the ground to teleport there, you get graphics, sound and all with it!

The only time this has happened to me, is when my family moved to a new house (via the computer) and the kids and teens were at school, dad at work, so mum went to the house in her taxi. 10 Minutes later it was dad's turn to get home from work and instead of going to the new house, he went to the old one. I didn't notice until I realized he hadn't gotten home yet and once aligning the camera to him, he was standing at the old house in front of the door. I told him to go home, but he stomped and got the bubble with the footsteps on it. I tried everything, including the teleportation trick, but he stayed there. Meanwhile my kids were on the school bus, and yes on their way to the old house, so I made them stop and get out on the side of the rode for the risk of having them stuck at the house with dad. They could walk around and do whatever but when I told them to walk into their new house, they stomped their feet and didn't go either. I had to end up not saving and waiting until they all got home to move again.

Doc Doofus I think your impression is correct. I have the same problem and can't seem to identify a pattern either. I will say that the freeze issue is more prevalent in my largest (5) household. However the time/action issue is sporadic. Some actions are quite normal but others take forever.

I'm also starting to get the zombie townie syndrome. A lot of standing around doing dick. It's getting a little creepy.

I'm not convinced that it's AM related, since I swear I tried playing my 'hood again after taking AM out and I still experienced the excessive lag and freezing sims. It's possible I didn't clear caches, however, since I only do that on rare occasions, and it could have still been under AM influences. I'm going to delete caches and try again without AM to see what happens.

@Doc: I agree, it's not synchronized between sims. Sim A will be running for the front door with Sim B right behind them; Sim A suddenly freezes mid-stride, so Sim B, who does not become frozen in place and is proceeding normally (relatively speaking) toward the door, stops behind the frozen Sim A, who is blocking their path. This is causing even longer delays, of course, because we all know how long they stand around after route failures.

ETA: OK, I take it back. I took AM out and played one sim morning. Things were a little slow and choppy, but it didn't seem quite as bad as it was previously. Put AM back in and confirmed; there was a noticable increase in the lag/freeze problem. I was also getting a lot of AM story mode notices, if that's relevant.

BTW, after putting newest version of AM back in, I experienced 3 CTD's, which I really haven't experienced more than a few times before. Voodoo du jour was to close out the launcher, which was running in the system tray due to installing new store content. And now I have to stop typing because my 11 week old kitten is trying to eat my arm.

Glad to know it's not just me. I also noticed a much more insignificant lag when my sims spin around to change outfits. They stand there for about 5 seconds.. it gets really bad when they all head out at the same time and all need to change at the same time. I have no idea what causes this, but I took out AM and it works much much better. There's still a small lag, but nothing like what I was experiencing.

It seems like all you guys are having differnet problems than I am. My pauses have no pattern and don't occur at any specific time. It affects the entire game except for animations like the diamond or the Zzz's from a sleeping sim.

This sounds like my 1AM freeze with EAStory. I recall reading that AwesomeStory tries to spread out the story actions to avoid the 1AM freeze - could your game be locking up while AwesomeStory does its thing?

This is normal. When your sim tries to change its outfits, the game must now load that outfit. Rather than stopping your entire game, it will stop your sim and he will stand there until his outfit loads. If you pause the game when this happens, the loading process can occur without running down the game clock and your sim will no longer stand there uselessly while it happens. Same story with sims going into showers.

It's the latest patch doing this. I'm having all the freezing and route problems, too, since the patch. When I was running my game after the patch without any core mods, I noticed some of these bugs, but they weren't too bad that the game was too hard to play, after I put in awesome mod (last two versions) with the indie mod, everything became even worse and to the point where it's very hard to play. I think the patch is bad and anything else added to the game will just add to the problems.

That's what I was thinking, as it didn't start until this weekend, when I patched.

I think I have a similar problem. My sims occasionally stop on the way to work or places I send them and half the time they just drop what it was they were going to do after standing around for a while blocking the path for other sims on the lot. I didn't think it was a freezing issue since it doesn't look like they actually lag, but more like some sort of pathing issue. What's worse is that it seems to happen to lots I'm not currently playing as well, but I'm not there to get them back on track and very few of the sims are actually making it into work/school. Almost every sim in the neighbourhood is well into the negative side of the performance meter and a few have lost their jobs already.

If this is too far off the issue in this thread, or has been mentioned elsewhere, I apologise.

I can not reproduce the freezing issues in my game, but I will second the path issues.  All of a sudden, everyone is swarming the same path, dropping their queues, missing work and school, and standing around for hours.  I have to manually reset them or they would still be there.  Mind you, I have multiple doors to every room, multiple exits for houses, and multiple stairs for every level. 

This was yesterday's build.  I will update again, today, before I play.

The thing is, I only play one sim, unless I later marry them off and I've only been playing one sim since last evening and had the freezes happening. The music from the stereo will keep playing, his plumbob spinning and his eyes seem to be moving and sometimes I see a little movement in the upper body but his legs are frozen and time stands still. If I wait a few minutes, he will start moving again. The pathing problems I have, I had with a couple I was testing for the inseminator mod w/awesome/indie, who I had a hard time with getting to the bed to woohoo. And then when I played the later game with the one sim, I would send him to town and the townspeople would sometimes be lively and talking but then other times when one of the town sims or my sim would move somewhere, it would seem to cause a big pathing problem and then everyone would just stop doing anything and just stand around silently. No one is getting to where they are going without me having to cancel my sim's actions/movements so that things will go back to normal.

And to add, this is happening with new games I'm starting and they shouldn't be having lots of homeless sims, extra cars or any other stuff that would be causing a big lag in the game.

I wasn't suggesting teleporting MY sims to work.  I was suggesting that the game teleport all the TOWNIES to work.  I'm quite happy with my sims taking the carpool or bus to work.  I just wonder if it wouldn't be less laggy if the townies took a shortcut.  I rarely follow townies from home to work, so it wouldn't be no big loss and it would keep them off the roads in the morning.

If only that could happen in real life.

You mean like if they were, oh, say, in your carpool?

Oh please implement that.  Having 4 carpools for 4 employees in the same career is not the point of a carpool :P  It would be really nice if when the car comes to pick up your sim, the others in the same career teleport into that car. 

Pretty much my entire game freezes. I can't move the camera...nothing. The only thing I can do is move the mouse...

This bug happens to me, too. My game doesn't freeze at all, the clock moves and the music plays. It's only my sims that freeze up. Especially when they're going through doors/gates. It makes them late for work every day.

They get stuck sometimes entering/exiting their work buildings that causes a traffic jam of every sim in my town standing outside buildings.

Maybe I wasn't clear with the teleport reference.  I was thinking, just have them VANISH off the street or out of their homes at 8am or whenever, and then walk out of the office front door at 5pm.  No car pool, no routing to a taxi, no bicycle, no running.

I experience really long pauses when installing the awsome mod. It makes the game unplayeble. Always happens at twelve o'clock at night... very strange

I had this bad and a couple of things made this problem non-existant in my game.  I can't be too helpful because I don't have the time to provide links but, the toilet that is in the Pudding factory, set it to run every night to delete the excess limos.  There is a link somewhere that has a short tut that makes the Sims walk through each other.  I am a retard with computers and I did it quickly.  My Simmettes couldn't all get into school and after doing that, they are all in at 10:00AM.  Doing this along with the chanes that JM has already added to the Awesome Mod should do the trick.

I have been having this stutter-freeze, but all the time, much worse at parties and in CAS, and also changing live/buy.
I took all CC out except mods, and it was playable. I put it back, except for most of the packages I extracted myself, I put that back with the launcher.
It is running, not smoothly, but, hey, it was unplayable. Maybe it is a bad synergy AM/CC.

I'm having the same thing.. sim freezes in mid-motion usually when going to carpool or her own car, or the kid going to the bus.

Don't want to confuse the issue, but - at the same time as I noticed this, the maids have also started acting weirdly. They will just stand around outside the front door, ALL FREAKING DAY. Even if I move stinky dishes right next to them, they will generally do nothing except complain about the stench. Eventually, the pop-up will come up that they're done for the day, and the puddles on floor / dirty dishes will vanish (but beds not made). But it's not consistent. Some days they work normally, and others they just stand around. It's almost like a route failure.

You don't need both and this will actually confuse the game. AwesomeMod will already perform this function, and if you need to trigger it now rather than waiting, try "towderelicts".

I think it's carpool-related.  It doesn't just happen at 9am, but seems to happen even for the 3pm and 4pm jobs as well.  As soon as the car arrives outside and honks, the sims go into some time warp where it takes them an hour to get to the porch.  Pausing the game to help it catch up rendering doesn't help.

I'm still using AM+ISM, so it might be an ISM problem.

I'll have to do that because the toilet stopped deleting items and the game is slow as blue blazes(whatever that means-my Mom always says that?).

I'm pretty sure i have the same problems sometimes. The Game freezes, you can move the mouse, the radio still plays, the Sims ZZZZ's still move while they're sleeping. The only thing i can do it is hit cntrl+alt+del and end the game. i It's completly random and has no pattern. I use 3boot and it dont seem to do it as often but it still does it.

Ever since I removed all my CC Hair, Removed a few useless mods.
I haven't had the trouble anymore. I also cleared out a lot of the Sims3pack DCcache and so forth, Reinstalled.
Everything has been good since... except that Riverview Borked on me.

I'm having extreme lag/freeze issues with my game as well. I have the next-to-last patch and the Aug. 18 version of AM, and I delete cache files almost every time I start the game.

It takes over a minute for the game to go to Build/Buy mode after I click the button. It takes the game from 15 seconds to several minutes to react to just about every command I make, actually. The game only finishes saving to file when I put the computer in standby and restart it; otherwise, the save screen literally stays indefinitely. The speed is normal and stays that way for several minutes upon loading, and it briefly rebounds from the extreme lag when I restore after minimizing. I've also experienced the persistence of sounds, voices, and animations of such things as "z"s and spinning plumbbobs despite the Sims themselves being frozen in place. This seems to occur even when the game is paused.

Is everyone having this problem using Indie Stone? I wonder if that's the issue...

I've got problems similar to many described here.

Back when my sims were adults interacting with a toddler, it took ages for them to get anything done. The adult would be commanded to, say, put the toddler in a crib. The adult would pause, then approach the toddler. The toddler would pause, then move a few feet (to get into position to be picked up?). The adult would pause, then pick up the toddler, then pause, then approach the crib, then pause, and then put the toddler into the crib.

The problems are less extreme but definitely still noticeable when it's one sim acting alone. For example, a teen needs to get to the bus. He'll step out of the house and onto the porch, often pausing mid-stride immediately before, in, or after the doorway. He'll reach the top of the mini-staircase leading to the ground, then pause, then descend the staircase, then pause, and then sprint to the bus.

Each pause lasts a couple of sim-minutes, so performing tasks can take sim-hours. It doesn't just affect active-household sims, either. When the paperboy comes through in the morning, he'll pause before he sets down the paper and then again before leaving. When the mailman comes through, he'll pause in front of the mailbox before and after inserting the mail. When I was robbed by a burglar and the alarm went off, it took all night for the police to arrest the guy and survey the house.

I'm playing 1.4.6.2 Mac, using AwesomeMod, a bunch of store-content from the pudding factory, and a handful of minor mods (better body sculptor, no intro movie, teen autonomy woohoo.) No IndieStone.

Yeah it seems you're the only one who's having the same problem as me.

I've seen that! It looks freaky.  Especially when it's one of the SV babysitters watching my poor vulnerable chil'rens!  But... for the record, I don't have awesomemod, any mod, cc, nor any patches, on my current install. <_<  (I'm getting there.  It took me about a year to consider Auctioneer, and even more for Carbonite.)  Though I wouldn't call it a vanilla copy.

Anyway, I normally go on a process killing spree when that happens.  Mixed results, and a few repeat offenders.  However, all of these alternate remedies and circumstances have me wondering, well, a few things actually.  Poorly summed up as: wtf do they all have in common, aside from running the sims 3?  Is it just that the system is on its knees at the moment, for various reasons?  Or is everyone just waving chicken bones to "fix" it?

Well, I was hoping all the cc hair I use to have was causing it, seems not. The only thing I can say is everyday I play sims 3 it does it after five or ten minutes in. I honestly don't know whats causing it, but it is discouraging me into playing sims 3 for a while. I can't get anything done without five or so minutes in the game freezes, for me that is a few sim days. I recently cleared out my patterns to see if it was that, no go. I've cleaned out a lot of my mods as well, still no go. Rather it's EAxis relate or AM, I hope it gets fixed at some point.

Is it possible your problem is caused by overheating? Issues that occur at random points in play, but only after time has passed, may be heat-based.

My computer has never had heating troubles before, back when the game came out I never had these issues.

I've only just started having this issue, after installing the latest edition of Awesomemod. I have all the patches installed except the last one.

Last night I tried playing a small household (one Sim) on a smallish lot with a bare-bones house, just starting out with the standard $16K nest egg. She got hungry. Stood in front of the fridge for about 5 seconds, then took out some food. Went to the counter, put the food down, stood there for another 5 seconds, then started chopping. Periodically paused for another few seconds during the procedure. Took the pan to the stove, stood there holding it for (again) about 5 seconds, then started cooking, with more intermittent pauses. Took the finished plate and stood there for -- wait for it -- about 5 seconds. Took the plate to the table, put it down, stood there for (guess how many) seconds, then sat down and ate.

 ???

I've seen a lot of this and just sort of resigned myself to it. Yesterday it took half the morning to get two of my Sim kids to the school bus. They moved like they were going, just slowly with lots of pausing and waiting for the other sim kid to go through doors. I followed them to the school where they did go in. But by the time they got there it was after eleven. In another household, the kid took so long just to get out the door that the bus left without him and he rode his bicycle instead. Nothing freezes and nothing acts like it's locked up. They just pause.

The other thing that really gets to me that seems to be a common complaint is that they don't do anything unless you tell them to.  In one household they congregate in the basement by the back door and just stand there. In another it's a hallway. Again, I've resigned myself to it.

The long pauses have indeed increased after the very latest build of AM, as I had just started my computer up to play S3 and it had not had any time to heat up...  I too noticed my sims just standing around not "doing" anything whereas before this build, they would go about their business as I always play w/free will maxed.  My kids going to school go in lock-step formation and I should have taken a piccy of my teen and kid both poised on the top step of the front porch each w/a leg extended to take the next step, just frozen for a sim second... funny to see not so funny to play...   ;)

So, is this being looked into for the next release of Awesomemod? I would hate to have to uninstall this hack but this pausing/freezing issue is unendurable. It's either it goes or the game goes. I can't play with this major bug.  :(

I cannot reproduce this behavior. If you have a saved game where this always occurs, I can take a look, but I see nothing like this in my game.

I think there is different versions of the pause, one that last forever and one that is just temporary. I have yet to see it repeat it's self with a save though in the same spot.

As a note, I was having the random hangs in a Sunset Valley hood. I roundaboutly discovered my Riverview was corrupt, pitched and reinstalled it, then did a full reinstall of all my "store" items and am no longer having any hang issues in Sunset Valley.

Perhaps corrupted files or are causing these pause issues?

My game is running smooth as butter (beyond the normal freeze to load objects in a new area) with the most recent build (no library - recipe options enabled).

I will try this, as taking out Awesomemod hasn't fixed the issue anyway.

I have this issue on my current computer (particularly when working out, they freeze with sweat dripping off them and it's freaking weird), but not on my boyfriend's computer. Both have same versions of AM. Is it possible it could be related to hardware, since he has an amazing computer and I am using my flatmate's spare which just about meets the minimum requirements while mine gets fixed? Or could be a coincidence, I suppose.

I have the same problem.  I take Awesome Mod out and it goes away.

I like many of AM's features, but this bug makes it unusable.

Fortunately, the NRass supercomputer has many of the same features without the lag problem.

                                  I also have this problem, my game is pretty much unplayable. My Sim kids don't get home from school until 5 p.m.
My Sims also do the "freeze walk" as well and they crowd stair cases and doorways for hours on end. Also doing something as simple as preparing a meal or feeding a baby takes forever. They just stand there for what seems an eternity before they do anything in their commands.  :-\  If I take AM out it doesn't do this, I kinda think it has something to do with the latest patch because I had no problems until I updated.

To be clearer, I believe there are two types of freezes that people are talking about. One freeze is a complete freeze of the game, where the plumbob spins but the controls are no longer responsive. The other kind of freeze is more like a stop-motion freeze where movements jerkily stop and go (except their heads still move) and actions take FOREVER to complete. I've had just one hard game freeze that I recall, but have had 3 saved games which all became unplayable due to the extreme lag and stop motion movements, as well as autonomy and motive failures. They were large families in large neighborhoods (around 100 residents). I just started a very small hood -completely empty with just a handful of couples, and do not (yet) have the problem, allthough sometimes their movements don't seem very smooth to me. A little on the  jerky side, but no major lag or motion freezes at all. Yet.

You're not the first I've heard blame it on the latest patch, and you might be right, who knows. Maybe someday someone will figure out a way to improve the situation; in the meantime I'm saving up cash to replace my sub-par computer, which if not the cause, is sure not helping the situation. Although some people with very adequate hardware have also complained about the problem. Oh, and when I took out AwesomeMod, it made no difference, I still had the problem. <shrugs>

I can confirm that it appears to be an EA issue.  As the hood population got larger the problem got worse and worse until I just deleted the hood and started over.  
I have a computer way over recommended specs.    The hood population was nearing 100, not counting NPCs.  Killing the townies would help for a few sim days till they re-spawned.

Starting a new empty hood with 1 sim family, all same mods and CC the game is again playable.

So, the solution appears to be to delete all those nifty homes we have been adding to the neighborhood?

I have not tried that yet.  I did remove a lot of the custom hairs and a number of items I never really used.

But, with more homes, that means more sims to gum up the works.

A number of programs, including awesome mod and the NRass supercomputer allow us to nuke the homeless.  So the problem is that we are putting too many homes in our neighborhoods?  Time to call out the bulldozers!

Well, it's not just the number of homes that factors into the population growth. If you are using AM Story Mode, then sims get created through jobs. I started a new 'hood with 4 couples and left all the houses in place, and have been playing it for several sim weeks. None of my 4 couples have jobs, and no sims have been created in my nieghborhood (but I am up to 40 NPC's, for some inexplicable reason).

FWIW, I was having these problems, and then my husband upgraded my video card.  I had an NVidia GeForce 7950 GT and now have a 9800 GTX.  I thought I had a decent card before, but the difference is amazing.  The game is running very smoothly now, and it had become almost unplayable before.

Interesting. I'm definitely saving up for a kickass gaming computer.

Were you having individual Sims freezing or the whole game freezing or both?

My whole game's started freezing now, almost every time I play for longer than fifteen minutes or so. It's pretty irritating, I really hope my computer gets fixed soon. :(

hullo,

i have been having this long pause in my game too. it appears to be random, and i cannot pinpoint it to any activity. i have one family in each neighborhood, and it's happening in both.  all of a sudden the screen freezes, and i just wait, and wait, and then... all's well again.


 ???

I think it's a graphics card problem.  I can't remember what I have but it was good 5 years ago.  I had this pausing, jerking, and finally progressing to sudden CTDs.  I took out AM and it made no difference.   So I rebooted my computer and it was completely ok again.   Added back AM and still ok.

The graphic card is really an important item, but to upgrade to the latest available doesn't make much of a difference in terms of processing a lot of sims in a hood. In fact I noticed that Service NPCs don't weight much on the balance. To kill them all is waste time once they are respawned soon after to about 40 units. It seems that the game makes a spare for burglars, social workers, firefighters etc, even if you never use them. I also didn't understand the reason for this spare, once as soon as a service NPC is required, a new one is created and it is not among the spares that apparently clog the hood (they don't because very seldom one or another pop up in the park, but disappear before you can contact them). It is one more of the inutilities from EA.
The saving problem is dramatic. As soon as the hood reaches around 100 inhabitants, saving time can go up to 5 minutes. This is unsuportable because when you are sitting in front of a screen, one second is eternity. I have a pretty good computer, almost no ccs, except for some replacement skins, I made my own xml mods and check one by one against AM and one another and my hoods are unplayable as soon as they pass 32MB (equivalent to have about 120 sims in a hood). I don't have any complicated houses because I myself live on a place where almost everybody have exact the same kind of house and looks paradise. So, I recreated sort of the place I live. I'm not a bird, so I never play bird view. Instead I place the cursor in the middle of a sim street and "walk" on the hood, observing the houses and buildings around. Besides, I found out that rabbit holes work better when combined (spa with Gym), working places with restaurants, so I created a very lively downtown where sims after go skilling, make a stop at the restaurant, or after watching a football game, go to spa, or fitness. I got the idea when I visited Simlogical and Inge had placed a combination Kitchen and Pub. I could not download so I got the idea and started to combine rabbit holes. Full success.
I sincerely don't know if buying a super-duper computer will change that much once I believe that is pure EA's incompetence. TS2 Base Game was also kind of unplayable. I damn know that the first EPs will be also a bag of poo. The game is destined to be just good right before TS4. As always TS is not any investment. As soon as finished, is not more worth a dime.

I have this wild theory that save times may drastically improve if you were to, say, allocate about 100 MBs for a RAMdisk and use a RAMdisk to save to, since then it will not be thrashing to disk.

I have the rabid slowing down problem as well. It happens most severely when my sims are off to work/school, and when they're returning home. Happens at a greater rate in higher population houses. Didn't used to happen. I don't think it's an overheating problem, as the time is consistent (however, a lot of other times my game slows down, it might be an overheating problem. My computer has known heating issues, having gone so far as needing a fan replacement). I'm wondering if it's like the others have said, it has something to do with the whole town moving off? (Game also slows down if I try to visit the park and there are a lot of sims, or I send a lot of them.) I'm consequently wondering if there's no hope for it, and it's just my lack of power (or rather, Vista cruelly sapping the not-actually-that-shabby power I do have).

Since you are way "More Awesome Than All  of Us", could you please tell us how to accomplish this? 100 MB is nothing and it would sure improve things!

It's a wild theory. I haven't pursued any practical implementations or how one would go about arranging such a thing.

I've been having the occasional random freezes.  They tend to show up when I play for 2-3 hours without saving. I also tend to use streaming audio so I can listen to my talk radio station while I play.  I don't know if it's related but yesterday when my internet became unavailable for a few seconds, my game slowed way down to almost a dead stop, then went back to normal when the internet reconnected.  I shall talk to my Personal Computer Geek about the issue. 

Since the Geek and I have been debating the merits of a new video card for my computer (the Geek--it's fine; Me--need a new one), I shall show him this thread.

This might be pure coincidence... But usually my game just stops (things move, but time is stopped, the sims don't move, plumbob spins, etc.) fairly often. Like say once every few hours (or more). I've been playing for hours today, and I've only had it happen once, early this morning. At the time I'd been playing the household for like a sim week. Since then (pure coincidentally), I've only been playing households for like three or four days, tops. I'm wondering if maybe switching houses more helps with this problem...

Last time I was getting frequent freeze-ups I decided to try rebooting my computer and it really helped.   Don't know why but it's worth trying maybe.

Weren't there reports, or suggestions, that TS3 had memory leaks?

If so, that would explain why rebooting the computer helps.

Hell, yes.  Jordi is right.  Game should not be taking up almost 2 Gigs of my 4, as is what's happening when these long pauses occur.

I have seen the game take up nearly 6GB of the 12GB I have and push 2-3 of the 8 cores to 95-100% of usage.  I have long felt that because of this, many people would experience fairly severe problems when the game tried to grab resources that weren't available, or simply pushed thei available resources to the max.

I hate to think how bad the EP is going to make things.

Wow, GTA4 doesn't tax my dual core as bad as that, and yes, TS3 is taking 99% of processes (Sweet Jeebus) around the time of the pause, but the bastard is still responding, of course (even though you can't do jack in the game).

My guy knows a guy, who did a little tweaking and was able to cut Sims 2 from sending empty packages (don't know what that means, but I guess it has something to do either with the processor or the memory ;) ). He was running the game for his girlfriend on some kind of a windows games emulator on linux on mac -thingy and got the game running smoothly. The only problem was the having a mac with linux on it -part; and he compiled the os himself. That would be a pretty hard thing for us non-techies to do.. I wonder if that could be done on Sims 3, with some genious programming skills.

I was having this problem too, playing on my new MacBook.  It was most frustrating when my Rock Star sim was doing autograph sessions and it would take 45 game minutes to sign one autograph, making the session a failure.

However, I decided this must be an issue with memory or my graphics card, and started playing on my desktop PC, and then my Imac.  The problems have not recurred on either, with the same neighborhoods, mods, and custom content loaded.

Apropos of little, but my Observant Rock Star has trouble with hers for a totally different reason.  She's too busy "OMG YAY/BOO!"-ing the fans' traits to actually move on to the next one. :P

I am also having the same issue with the slow downs. It takes me half the morning to get my sims off to work/school, and the other half of the night to feed them before they starve to death becasue they didnt have time to eat in the morning. I am hard pressed to think its my puter as its a brand spaking new machine, Sims 3 being the first thing I installed on it 2 days after getting it. My maids stand around the outside of the house, dreaming of lost loves I suppose, my sims starve and piddle themselves because no one farking moves.

I origianlly started with AM and Indie, took out Indi, reconfigured AM.. still same issue. Deleted all saved games, started a fresh hood with the latest AM and still the same thing. In two test runs, the first with AM installed, nothing else, I allowed my only 2 sims to sleep untill they woke for work, qued up some actions (shower, tinkle and eat) In the run with AM the first sim had no time to eat and showered untill he was an hour late for work (because he stood outside the shower for so long contemplating something) and the second got to prepare her waffles after her shower, but not eat them, and was still late for work. In the run without AM I qued up the same actions, and the first had time to complete everything just as the carpool arrived and the second not only was able to eat, but then stood around the kitchen for 15 sims minutes with nothing to do.

This makes me a sad panda because I want to put my fist through the screen when I have to yell at my sims like I do my child to get something done. I have always played with MATY mods, but I am not sure my sanity can handle the oddness that has consumed my sims right now.

Has anyone got a theory as to what the problem might be, or how to address it without giving up on AM?

Hard to say.  Just because your computer is brand new doesn't always mean it is spec'ed to handle what you want it to.  If I had a dollar for every time someone has said their computer was brand new and not the problem, only to discover that CPU speed was too slow, RAM size too small, or Graphics card under spec'ed, etc, I wouldn't have to worry about working ever again.  However, in your case, given the information you mentioned, the computer looks less likely to be the case (but could still be, without knowing the specs of your system) as your game runs fine without AM installed, suggesting the system can handle the game.  But whether the system specs can handle what AM does to the game, that's probably debatable also, as I wouldn't expect it to add that much.  All I know is the game grabs an awful lot of resources on my system when I play.

Do you have any other mods, that may be interacting poorly with AM, resulting in the slowdown?

I would also suggest trying AM without the config file, just use the default AM settings, maybe it is one of the options your enabling or disabling in the config file that is causing the slowdown, especially if it is drawing more resources from the system.

A couple of options to consider, if you haven't already.

I hadnt thought of trying to run without the config file, but I will do that right now. Thanks.

ETA: Removing the config file may have fixed it, so next test will be with a new config file (when I have time) RL so interupts my game time.

I would also suggest uninstalling the game, cleaning up all traces left behind, and reinstalling the game.   I don't think that just starting a new game necessarily resets the playing field.

As I was watching sims leave for work/school at that dreaded 8-9 am timeframe, I thought it looked like they were taking turns moving.  One sim would move, stop in midair while another one on screen moved, etc.

I started pausing when I knew a sim was just waiting for their clothes to load, and that helped some.

Then I tried switching to map view during the "get out the door, now!" hustle, and they all seem to move faster.  All the kids get on their bikes (except the current household's kids, who ride the bus), and all the workers get out to their carpools much faster than when I stay at the lot view.

I may be wrong, but I think it's the way the game handles all the movements onscreen.  It doesn't have to work as hard at refreshing the graphics in map view.

I have a game from August, a family of 9, which became unplayable due to the severe lagging, jams at the school, and stinky, hungry sims flopping over sleeping everywhere (they eventually even lose all free will and will just stand around until given orders, then take 2-4 sim hours performing whatever tasks you give them). I have since been playing much smaller neighborhoods of no more than 30-some sims (at least that's what they're up to so far) and have not had these issues.

I just went back to play this saved game the other evening, and nothing had improved. Log jams at the school, no free will, stop and go movement, and sims moving so slowly that it takes hours to accomplish anything. So after seeing MrsSoares post yesterday, I decided to try it without AM. Took AM out, cleared caches, and played the game again last evening. I was surprised that it DOES play much better, and sims have free will again, and there were no issues with sims getting in or out of the school. Lots of green stinky clouds coming from sim bodies still, but that could be due to not enough time passing since I took AM out. Not perfectly smooth and seamless game play by any means, but a definite improvement over how poorly it functions with AM installed.

So, I have to conclude that unless you have a super powerful PC that can handle the additional processing demands, AM can make game play every bit as bad as the vanilla game is all by itself. Sad, but true. Which is why I am currently saving up to purchase a gaming PC.

In the meantime, I am sticking with playing my smaller 'hoods and working to keep my population down so I can avoid the meltdown as long as possible, and will just keep starting over if it happens again. Which is why I have been working on my ideal neighborhood - once I get it the way I want it, I can use it as a template to start over without having to recreate the 'hood. Unless or until I get tired of this, in which case I guess I'll go back to playing Sims 2 for awhile.

When you upgrade to a new PC, if you can, try to avoid the off the shelf variety as they usually fall down in one area or other for high end gaming.  If you can (sometimes costs more) have someone custom build a system for you, and make sure your CPU, RAM and Graphics card is as far over the stated minimum specs as you can afford.

I have a system resource monitor running on my second monitor which I can keep an eye on when TS3 is running, and the game really does grab alot more resources than the minimum system spec's say is required.


That sounds reasonable, and I have held a similar view for a long time about this game.  Once I saw How much of the resources the game was grabbing within my system, it seems reasonable that a borderline system will be adversely affected.  I guess the big question is, is it the Graphics card, CPU, RAM, or a combination that's the problem?

I know the TS3 supported Graphics Card list actually shows some older, lower end cards, which may be the biggest issue.  One of the "Supposedly" supported lower end cards (that was listed, haven't checked to see if it still is) gave me problems with TS2, yet EAxis says it supports TS3.  If it was problematic with TS2, I really don't believe it would handle TS3 any better, probably worse.

I upgraded my graphics card and RAM last spring, long before TS3 came out.  And my system is 4 years old, but it was designed for gaming at the time, and I have no problems running other games that are graphics intensive. 

I still run XP, though.  Maybe it's the OS that's slowing things down.  I'm sure switching from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system would have a significant effect, especially for things that the GPU doesn't handle.

I need to get a look at Windows 7.  Didn't like the look of Vista and it had too many problems.  I had Windows ME at one time, so I didn't want to have to use another glitchy system.

Not to state the obvious, but I see at least two variables there.  More depending on what the timeline actually was, and what preparations were made.  When testing, you want to minimize those as much as you can.  I'm not suggesting you set up a sterile lab environment, but there were some steps you could have taken that would have helped immensely.  Now, I don't know if you did take extra measures, and neglected to mention them.  Judging only on what I see, however, even if your conclusion is correct, I would call the data you used unreliable.

Question: Did you have a look at what your system thought it was doing around the times that your sims went stupid on you?  If so, was there anything of note?


Hrm...  I'm not sure I can agree. I bought my current computer sometime late last year.  It was cheap and initially couldn't even load Northrend.  More memory fixed that, but I still get happyfuntiemlag in Dalaran during WG.  ("Blah blah WoWcrack. Blah blah system on knees. Blah, mostly fix't!" to the unaddicted.)  This isn't a lean mean gaming machine.

That said, I haven't seen any performance issues from AM that weren't already there in the vanilla (unpatched) game.  In fact, I haven't run into the previous performance issues (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,16350.msg482560.html#msg482560) yet, but won't assume they're gone until I get much more playtime under my belt.  Not that I haven't run into problems, but the issues I've pinned down so far have been unrelated.

If it is a system spec issue, I'd suspect it's more complex than AM requiring a "super powerful PC". Wizard_merlin gets into this here:

To expand on that a bit, computers are not monolithic slabs of hardware, but interconnected modular bits of hardware.  Now I admit, I haven't recently been windowshopping, but my cynical experience is that on a typical premade computer, these bits are not of equal quality, and the salespeople are only too happy to wave the shiny bits in front of you while kicking the subpar components into the back room where THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO FRATERNIZE WITH THE CUSTOMERS OR ELSE THEY WILL GET THE HOSE AGAIN.  Assuming they even know which is which, natch.  I doubt this has changed.

Guh, I'm oversimplifying things a lot, and think I'm running the risk of either talking in circles or rambling uselessly.  I'll just end here.

I agree with you; at one time, either this game or another, I took AM out and still had an unplayable game. I admit that I did not test extensively in either case. ETA: the saved game I played last Sunday is also a bit older but I am not experiencing any of the issues mentioned above, except for the fact that the babysitters and maid would do nothing but stand on the porch the entire time they were there. Grrrr.

It's also true that my computer is an off-the-shelf piece of crap, and my graphics card is not even supported by EA. Worse yet, I cannot upgrade my memory at all, although I don't know that it matters since it's my understanding that there's only so much memory Vista can utilize anyway. And I purchased this craptastic machine less than a year ago. The price was right at the time, though.

When I get the cash, hopefully in the next 3-6 months, I intend to upgrade. I am not awesome enough to build my own machine, and neither is anyone I know IRL, so I'll have to find someone at some computer shop who'll build it for me. Or else buy an overpriced Alienware monster, which is tempting me due to all the bling.  :)

That applies to 32-bit systems.  64-bit systems can support much higher levels of RAM, but also require a supported CPU.


Don't let the bling fool you.  The extra you pay for the overpriced Alienware bling may enable someone else to get you more RAM, a slightly better CPU or even a better graphics card for the same money.  If you did know someone who could build a system for you, you would have done better as you probably wouldn't be paying for labour charges to assemble the machine and install the OS, etc to get it up and running for you.  But on the flip side, a good computer shop will charge reasonable prices, and if they use OEM products, they are cheaper than full retail, it may offset some of the labour charges.

When your ready to upgrade, make sure you do some good research first to make sure your going to get the best bang for your buck.

Also, sadly, Alienware is now part of the evil Dell empire now :( ; independent no longer.

I was messing around with the game on my MacBook, and was able to alleviate this problem somewhat by lowering the resolution of the game.  Response lags that had previously been twenty or thirty gametime minutes went down to three or four, making the game moderately playable.  Perhaps give that a shot?

I tried lowering the settings on several options - graphics and I don't know what all, I'll have to look again to tell you which ones. It didn't seem to make any difference for me on my craptastic machine, unfortunately.  :P

This really does explain a lot.  Perhaps all of the "buggy" stuff in EA's code simply reflects their goal of having the game run on as many computers as possible.  If you want a different story progression and different features, you have to upgrade to a better and faster system.

Personally, I have a hard time justifying upgrading a computer to run a single game, let alone a single mod of a single game.  I have an older machine (it was a second hand machine which had been used by a community college).  It runs just about everything I want it to run, smoothlly, except for TS3 with Awesomemod.  My primary reason for getting this machine was to run various business software -- mostly specialized database software.  (I have run a couple of businesses.)  So it meets 99% of my needs.

Unfortunately, this means that I run the game without Awesome mod most of the time.  The NRSaa supercomputer and story progression offer comparable features without the same performance hit.  Of course, I have implemented serious population control, limiting the game to about 75 sims.  Honestly, this seems to be more than enough.  The game really becomes really goofy by the time there are 200 plus sims, even without performance slowdowns.  In fact, 75 sims may be far more than what is needed.

Of course, I find all the homes being uploaded to be rather irritating because there is no way that the game can accomodate a lot of homes homes.  With 75 sims, 30 households appear to be the norm.  If I need more baby bombs, an appropriate number of sims can be pollinated until the need passes.

Okay, I've been digging into this for the last two days. I'm on a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), and I needed to re-install Sims 3--obviously. I brought over my save from my original play in Vista (I've been using the same Simie since day 1 release of Sims 3). So here's the breakdown of what I went through:

My sim lot on Monday, when I first re-installed the game and all addons, was updated to the latest patch and latest AM revision. I was glad to hear about the new feature to re-award the sims their earned plaques for skills as I long ago forgot to take nearly all of mine off the wall of the house I moved from (and for some reason couldn't steal them back with my Klepto... :P). Anyway, I played for about an hour and suddenly locked up in game. This was no ordinary freeze either: I was on speed setting 3, so I could see all animations very well such as the bushes, the plumb bob, trees, etc. My mouse would move just fine, but the picture was locked and so was the rest of the game world; I force quit. Coming back this evening, I come to find out that it is

still happening. I re-installed AM thinking I got another bad DL (its happened to me before...latest Firefox seems to be causing some major grief with my internets -_-...). The problem persisted, and now is happening every 5 to 25 minutes. So, with some idea from previous pages here, I went into the game and analyzed everything I could with the NRS Supercomputer's features--a very handy debug tool, imho, as close to the "Yellow Box" debugger I always hid on my lot in Sims 2.

Here are the results (I'm placing it all here):

What I changed:

• 11 Stereos running; turned them off. (Coincidentally, this also returned music capabilities to my live household. I was not aware I was missing it until I suddenly heard the "job done" music score for the first time in a long time.)
• 1 Missing sim returned to reality. Not sure where she went, but she's back now...
• 6 voices inherited from their parents. Again, not quite sure of this one but I did it anyway.

Neighborhood Stats:

• 38 Households
• 88 Residents
• 85 Service NPCs
• 23 Townies
• 93 Total Lots
• 64 Residential
• 29 Commercial
• 34 Residential lots occupied
• 30 Residential lots unoccupied
• 20 Residential lots completely empty

• Total Town Wealth: 5,373,087

[/list]

After this I suddenly noticed the second portion of this strange lockup thread: The jittery pathing. Thinking that I was boned, I looked at each of the characters and realized that all but one of the three members of the household were running off Supreme Commander scripts. I canceled all of them and suddenly my game returns to normal. I am now almost an hour into play with no locks yet. I'm wondering if SC and the latest patch are having some problems, or if the stereos are far more resource intensive than I had previously thought...

I'm another with the sudden stops when the sims head out for work and/or school. The babysitters also freeze at the door, quite permanently until the parents come home. I have AM and Indie installed but use only Indie wittingly. I will have to check out what Spineraker posted above and see if anyone in the house has the Supreme Commander stamp.

I've had very few issues prior this, but can tell you that the above posters reporting it taking more than an hour to get their sims down a flight of stairs into the waiting carpool or bus are not exaggerating.

Edit/Update: Okay, familiarized myself a bit more with the Awesomemod and found the Configuration Tool. I disabled the Supreme Commander features and it seemed to help a little, making me think that it's not the primary part of the last patch that's bumping heads codewise. I tested in a family of four over a period of five sim days and I did check in the game to be sure none of the family members were following a Supreme Commander script.

J.M. is leagues above me in coding and solving game systems difficulties, I'm sure. I'll continue watching this thread to see if anyone else who's having this problem comes up with a fix, I'm just tossing my info out there hopefully to spark some sort of solution. If I do come up with anything (entirely by accident, I'm sure) I'll be sure to update once again.

I have never been able to reproduce these "total freezes" or pauses, so I have no idea what you are doing to cause it.

Sorry, didn't mean to summon you - I had read earlier in the thread where you were not able to recreate this problem in your own game environment. I've read through the thread and tried everything that even made remote sense to me, and have gotten the pauses to an acceptable level. Of course there are other issues now, but what would this game be without the strategic addition of having to work around the random, reoccurring glitch?

Not an EA game, that's what.  ::) Note that AM is not the only culprit for making glitches--Pescado does what he can do do a fantastic (even, if I dare say, AWESOME) job of making the mod as good as it is. Problem is, there are inherent issues in the core of Sims 3 that, like all EA games, we have to work around anyway...I'm starting to think that this reoccurring glitch--of which mine has returned recently and my fix isn't fixing now--is actually mostly on EA's side; AM just simply exacerbates the glitch to the point of experiencing it.

The fact that Pescado can't reproduce the issue is what is really bugging me. That means there's something that we're doing that he is not...and we don't know to tell him.

This past week I purchased a new laptop. I installed TS3 along with all of my saved content (including AM) and games. One of my saved games had become unplayable on my old machine (hadn't tried to actually even play it for weeks) due to severe lagging, stop motion action, loss of autonomy, and taking hours of sim time just to get them all out for the car pool or bus - not to mention NPCs walking around with green stink clouds who were also dropping like flies to sleep on the sidewalks because their motives were all in the red. I had a cheap HP with an underpowered AMD processor and 3 GB of DDR2 RAM.

When I played this same game on my new PC, which has an i7-720QM processor and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, I had very, very few problems. I couple of times I did see sims who were running to the door freeze in mid-stride but it only lasted a second or two instead of 20 or 30 sim minutes. They (3 teens and 2 kids) all made it to the bus well within a reasonable period of time, when before they were so slow the bus regularly took off without them. There were no crowds of stinky kids dropping to the ground to sleep in front of the school, preventing all of the kids from even getting inside. I did see a couple of sims still walking around town with green stink clouds but when I switched to one of them her hygiene level was fine so I chalk it up to another EA glitch (one that has been discussed in another thread). One of the most interesting things I noticed playing on this new PC are all of the autonomous actions, many more than they exibited on my previous PC. Sim families were walking around talking to each other practically all the time (previously I saw very little of this and had to order them to socialize with each other) and the sim parents even spontaneously go hug their children several times a day. They even walk faster, meaning on my old PC it might have taken them 20 sim minutes to walk from point A to point B, it now takes them half that time.

There has been some speculation that these problems could be caused by having underpowered equipment, and based on my experience that has been confirmed for me. I don't think it would be too much of a guess to say that Pescado most likely has system specs that are much higher than your average person, which is why he does not see these problems in his game. So I really doubt if it's anything you are doing, I just think this game requires a LOT more processing power than the minimum reqs would have you believe. Even with this new PC, I am not at all convinced that it will run all the content and expansion packs that are sure to be created for this game.

Edited to remove extraneous words and other typing fail.

ETA2: As long as I kept my neighborhoods small, I could get by playing on my old PC. As soon as the population reached about 70-75 (the 'hood above had about 100 sims), I would begin experiencing issues such as the lagging and pauses.

There is a command to clear various stuck emitters. One of the early problems with awesomemod had the green stinky clouds permanently attached to sims. If you find the command to clean up the stuck emitters your stink clouds should disappear.

This has happened to me too, but not in every neighborhood.

In Sunset Valley I have error 13
In Riverview I have these long pauses.

Lovely  ::)

My game has gone laggy and pause-ridden. It didn't used to be.

If I recall correctly, Pescado plays without anti aliasing. That's probably a part of his good fortune.

I found it! Or at least I think I found it; I'll give it a try later and find out. Unless it's been changed, the command is "purgereactions".

I don't need anti-aliasing to make things look blurry. That's what vodka is for!

Thanks for getting back to us on this El Presidente.  I should have known it was going to take a while.  I just left my old neighborhood alone and started a new one.  The only problem I'm having now is the game is crashing to the desktop during build mode, which it didn't do before I installed the expansion pack.  It has nothing to do with Awesomemod though so I'll see what I can do to figure this out.

I miss awesomemod :(  /cry

Yay, vodka! :D