More Awesome Than You!

Has this ever happened to you... I sound like some cheesy commercial for dandruff or maybe adult diapers or something ..

Anyway a weird thing happened yesterday.  I got it in my head to call the adoption agency in order to get a pet.  I'll plead temporary insanity on that one..  Anyway, the game hiccups and the hard drive goes wild.  Ok so it's generating a animal control officer or some such thing.  Although I thought I had already done that with the tree, but whatever..

So it's grinding and grinding and not spitting up anything.  I check my task manager and I'm at 1.2 gb of memory used.  Hmmm.  Not good since I have only a 1GB.  (Note to self: get extra ram) Hard disk is still grinding, swapping furiously obviously.  Decide to step away from the computer for a bit.  Come back 5 minutes later and my memory usage has climbed to 2.5 gb.  Aarg.  that's not a memory leak that's a memory flood. That's an alien takeover.  I had to terminate the program. 

Weird.

The game floods over with generating stray pets for adoption, at least that is what happens to me.
Fifty or so character files later and the original phone call was only for a single pet. Heh.

I was afraid something like that was happening.  But I checked my game in SimPE after and there doesn't appear to be any new character files.  Maybe terminating the game stopped it.

But good point. No more pet adoption agency.  They are PETA's supporters anyway.  I shall boycott them.  I'm going to create my own Pet adoption agency. Some ornery old coot with a couple of mean dogs will run it.

This exact thing happened to me today, except I ended up with 206 empty package files in my Characters folder. Last time I ever call to adopt a pet.

This has to be a glitch of some kind. I had this exact thing happen.

Called the agency. There were no animal control officers yet in the 'hood, so the game hangs... and creates about 30 character files. I had the Characters folder open at the time (I often do that, to monitor how many sims are getting dumped into my 'hood), and watched this happen with my own eyes. I also had to terminate the game from the Task Manager because it had been something like 5-10 minutes and it didn't look like it was going to start responding any time soon. The extra character files vanished as soon the game was terminated. Also, the memory usage had climbed to about 2.5GB. I have 4GB, so this wasn't over what was available, but it was much higher than usual.

Only 5 or so of the character files generated vanished after I shut the game down from the task manager. The other 200+ empty ones were still in my Characters folder afterwards. I deleted the whole neighborhood, I don't even want to know what sort of trouble that would have caused.

This happened to me the first time I ever tried to call the pet adoption agency. Whole game froze up, I did that tap fingers, spin around in the chair several times, eventually walked away from the computer for 15 minutes only to come back and find it was still hung, shut down from task manager.
When I checked my character folder, any files that might have been ggenerated were gone (same initial count as before loading up the game that day).
I loaded the game back up, called the agency again and this time it only hung for probably less than a full minute before popping up with an extrememly limited adoption pool.

Yep.

Is this with Seasons in there or just Pets? I'm going to stay away from adopting Pets...doesn't sound like a fun thing to do. Have enough trouble with Seasons sucking the memory dry....don't need to adopt a pet and be totally out memory.

I have both Seasons and Pets.

I had the glitch with just Pets. Haven't tried adopting after installing Seasons.

Oh Joy! Won't click that buttoon then. ::)

I double-checked my character files and all of them (except the usual unknowns) are accounted for.  So whatever the glitch was, it didn't create any junk files, that I could see

I have all the EP's running, but not the pet patch.

Huh... so I'm not the only one who experienced this.  My game froze and I had to shut it down from the task manager.  When I attempted the call the second time it only took a few minutes, but there were a grand total of two animals in the adoption pool (one large dog and one cat). 

I didn't think to check the RAM usage.  My hard drive was grinding away, though, now that I think about it.

lol!  :D I felt that way about a problem I was having with the memory leak in Civ IV.  The videos in that game sucked my poor system dry.