More Awesome Than You!

A bizarre bug has struck my Sims game, and there seems to be no single thing that triggers it.

Everyone in the game freezes. They simply stop moving, and I am unable to click anything in the game. Normally, when it freezes, the entire game stops. With this? It's like someone off screen just yelled at them to stop what they were doing - because everything else keeps going. Music keeps playing, birds keep flying, time keeps passing, the trees are blowing in the breeze - my sims have just come to a complete standstill.

I'm running the latest version of AM, as well as WA. I've not had this problem crop up before, so I'm kind of baffled. Has anyone else had this happen, or know a way to fix it? Because I have to completely kill the program and play from the previous save, it's annoying. It's happened in two separate games now, so I have no clue what is going on.

This started happening to me too, either last patch, or last AM update. It only happens very very occasionally. So I just try to save often to get around it.

Yes, others have seen it happen.  Pay closer attention.  The clock stops when it happens, it is just a bit of lag and nothing to get too worried over.  Many things can be the cause of the lag.  Deleting your cache might help.

If it's just lag, will the game finally catch up after a while? I waited a half hour the other day before closing it out.

The game does not need to catch up, as the clock does stop.  A half hour does sound a bit excessive.  This has never happened in my game.  My longest lag was not even a full minute, and usually occurs when I start a brand new game.

Try turning off unnecessary background tasks on your computer. 

I think I know the bug you're talking about, and no, the clock does not stop.  I've seen that bug, too. This is a different one. What other mods do you have installed? When I had the problem, it was a weird conflict between two seemingly unrelated things that left me scratching my head when I finally found it.

I've had this happen ever since I first got the base game, before I had ever even heard of AM.  From discussions I've searched for on the Intarwebs, the closest thing that people can find to this is when a sim (or several) are attempting to route to a particular location that does not have any routing available.  In other words, the creator of the 'hood left several broken links from point A to B and the sim got stuck half way.  Unless you pick the 'hood apart in CAW, this is going to continue happening at random.

Personally, I've configured AM to autosave every 30 minutes.  Like I said, this has happened a lot to me and I'm not ready to dive into CAW just yet to fix the broken links.

I had a similar issue with Springville, or so I thought. My game runs much smoother after decrapifying and converting sims3packs to dbcs and getting rid of the package files. Another thing that helped was to get rid of some of my old saves, as I too tend to save frequently and thus had around 40 saves clogging up my files. However, I noticed last night that my game still freezes up. I paused the game and let it sit in the background for a few seconds while I perused the internet for answers. Ten seconds later the game was ok. Towards the end of the session the lags were more frequent. I can only assume that it has to do with my graphics card overheating or my power supply not beeing able to handle the load since it seems to be a build up over hours. I do not know if my game lag is the same as yours, but you could try one of my solutions and see if it helps.

Supreme Commander can become obsessed with locations that sims cannot get to.  Islands in France, a certain bathroom in China, and a few places in China where rocks are placed that are difficult or impossible to route to. 

When this happens to me, if it is a brief repeating lag where sims freeze and unfreeze several times in "quick"(1-2 seconds) succession, I usually look for a controllable sim that is stuck in a loop because of Supreme Commander.  If I can kill that action, things get better right away.

If an uncontrolled sim gets stuck in a loop, things can get really bad, with lags of several seconds.  However, pausing the game will return responsiveness and it can be possible, but time consuming, to find the sim that is in trouble.  If the sim can be found, resetsim will fix them.  I would think that "maxmotives" would fix sims driven by low motives, but I have not found a case where that worked.  For me, resetting the world has always fixed it, but this is usually a diagnostic measure to confirm that a sim is in trouble somewhere.  I always reload a safe save game after resetting the world.

My true freezes (complete nonresponsiveness) only happen every couple of real days, and then usually in the beginning minutes of play.

Even if "maxmotives" were to work, it would just happen later. You need to remove what is triggering the route fail, or clear a good path while restricting them from straying. I had a lot of this in my first creation, Dragon Cay. I have only had one sim oddly have this type of route failures in Asherton, and I believe it was something unique to her as no other sims had routing issues where she did. Killing her off two generations ago has eliminated those types of slowdowns.

To find the problem sim, enter "radar all" and pinpoint all sims that are not in their homes or in a workplace. Find sim, change household to their household. Teleport them out of the problem area. Then deal with whatever is causing the routing issue if you can find it. Enter "radar all off" to clear your map.

As you can see Zoni, there are several things that can cause a lag in the game.  Without more information you are going to get several answers to fix the problem.  What world are you playing?  (Sunset Valley, Riverview, other?)  What are the stats of your computer and can it handle the game?  Are your drivers up to date?  Are you using Supreme Commander?  Does this happen in your hood, or only while on vacation?  Custom content that is not made properly has caused many glitches in the game that seem completely unrelated.  Removing CC and experimenting to see if it still happens with all CC and/or mods removed might help to pinpoint the cause. 

I can confirm that a lag was caused by a sim in my playable family gettting stuck. I was going nuts because the game would pause every few seconds, for minutes at a time, during which time I could do nothing. Game time did not pass during those lags, although all other animations and sounds continued. I was playing a family on vacation in China so I thought it might be somehow related to the vacation, and decided to get all my sims to Base Camp and then send them home.

This particular Sim would not come home, and it turned out that she was stuck on a riverbank. She had been fishing at one of the spots closest to Base Camp, but could not find her way up the bank (she kept getting that "there's something in my way" thought bubble). I directed her to a part of the bank that she could climb. As soon as I managed to do this, all was fine and my game ran perfectly again. 

Just for the record, I have never used Supreme Commander.

So your screen can still move around, but time and sims stop?  Mine is different.  The whole thing stops (except animations of trees and and sounds, however cars do not move) and I can't scroll anywhere to find the problem.  The longest I've sat and waited for the hiccup to fix itself was about an hour.  I basically left it running and did housework hoping it would right itself.  During these times, I have to manually shut down the game with Windows.

The game is responsive for me, it takes a while for it to notice I am there.  I usually hit "0" (zero) to log a request for a pause.  Eventually, the game will notice and pause.  Once that happens, the camera moves without a problem and it is possible to switch between sims.

My computer is more than able to handle Sims 3, heh. I build and repair computers. All of my patches are up to date, and I've never used SupremeCommander. I do have some mods in, but I've tried taking all of them out and still had it happen. It's really quite annoying, since I can't pinpoint the cause.

Airilina - No, I can't scroll. That's what happens with my game, except I can't confirm cars because none have been close to my sims houses when it happens.

This happens to me occasionally as well, though never for more than a minute or two. It usually seems to be the computer thinking about how to do something and then it unfreezes again. If you are having it happen for an hour though, that sounds like you might have a more serious issue.

Mine did it yesterday, though it was only when I first booted up the game after patching and updating AM and deleting appropriate caches. It didn't last long (5 minutes as compared to an hour/half hour as reported by the OP), but I, too, couldn't scroll, but time did stop. Fountain still ran and the tree leaves blew and the music kept playing, but my sims and time were frozen.

Any of those who are having the total stops, do you also use FPS Limiter? I just started using it yesterday and have had no total stops since.

Yes, I've been using the FPS limiter and the booter along with AM.

It happened again today (I started a new neighborhood since my last one was borked).  After a wait, I shut down through task manager, restarted the game and it happened again after about twenty minutes.  However, this time I am only playing one sim and she was taking a bath.  My guess is another sim in the world was trying to go somewhere and just stopped the whole thing up.

I don't use the FPSlimiter (though I used to - I forgot to reinstall).

Today while playing in the first vacation world (this is my first time playing WA), halfway through a French tomb, it froze/stopped. I waited a bit, and it took ages for it to recognize a change - changing speeds, pause/unpause, etc. And then as soon as it changed, it would progress for a second and then freeze again. I found that minimizing and restoring made it snap to again, but like before, it was only for a second. Fed up, I just saved while it was paused (as I could actually click and scroll and view stats and all that without the freezing while on pause, but not on normal play).

I'm pulling this theory out of my ass, so if its completely illogical and have no background, its because I'm not a programmer and didn't test it - but I have the setting on AM to autosave while paused, and to leave it unpaused after saving. If the other people who are experiencing this have similar settings, then perhaps it is AM waiting for the game to go in pause to autosave at the same intervals of which it lags up (i.e. mine is set to autosave every 15 minutes). I don't know, but maybe I'm just seeing some correlation that isn't there.

Nope, I have AM set to autosave every 30 minutes instead of whenever I pause.  Sure, it lags the game play a bit but it's amazing how many times I have to work off of my autosaves because of this freezing problem.

I have this happen while on vacation, usually while in fast mode. Time and sims freeze, but tree animations and sounds still function. I don't use AM, so that can't be causing the problem. I personally think it's the tourists/other adventurerers causing the lag, at least in my case. After I change back to normal speed and a few seconds pass, everything is fine. Note that it doesn't always do this in fast mode; that's why I think it's the game 'computing' or something.

(Did I use the semi-colon correctly in that last sentence?)

Yeah, similar problems here. I haven't had pausing when SC is off, just when it's on - and when 8 sims are directed off around the countryside on vacation. The 'Dig' setting seems to cause problems for me. Usually if I change it to 'random' the pausing stops. I'll note any occurrences tonight.

I haven't noticed any problems with the auto game save, I have it set to 30 min intervals, when game is paused. I often get an error message when the game has paused itself for a shop or wardrobe menu and AM is trying to save, but it just tells me it can't save while other dialogue boxes are open and it doesn't seem to have any adverse effects on the menu interaction.

Now that I think about it, I did have one of my Sims set to to Dig/Excavate setting a few minutes before it lagged up to the extreme lagging. I'll reboot and try to fix him.

Same here. Vacation worlds have always been pretty buggy for me as a whole, even though my (fairly large) main worlds run fine. I've gotten into the habit of avoiding them due to this.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.