I have experienced this crash on my game, where you select a save game or a new game, and it CTDs.

I have a Mac.

My crash has additional things, though:

When I have all my CC in except patterns, the game makes it to the choose a game crash. With patterns, it hangs on the black screen before the intro starts. I sorta think that may be a problem with too much CC, because I checked, and they are all patterns. I took one out that I noticed was something.beauty.package instead of just .package, but that didn't help any. It just seems odd that only ~500 patterns would kill my game.

Anyway, when I made it to the choose a save game screen, I tried to make a new neighborhood, but Riverview was unavailable. According to the launcher, it's installed, and I found its file in the SavedWorlds folder.

I reinstalled the game and repatched up to 1.3, and that has fixed exactly nothing.

Removing all CC fixed the CTD, but Riverview is still not showing up for me.
Removing awesomemod and keeping all other CC (except my patterns) fixed the CTD, but Riverview is still not showing up for me.
Removing all CC except awesomemod fixed the CTD, but Riverview is still not showing up for me.

So my Riverview problem is a vanilla issue, and my choose neighborhood screen CTD appears to be a CC conflict issue.

Are you using current awesomemod with the 1.2.7 game? Don't do that.

It probably has something to do with the way the ghosts are basically translucent sims. NPC sims drive to a random lot and vanish as well. TS3: it's really cool if you don't look too closely!

Peggy can die in a pit. Go with HP.

There seems to be a lot of things like this in TS3. My boyfriend refused to decorate things properly because he didn't know that the create-a-style allowed you to drag the entire template (not just the individual patterns) to other objects. (TBH, it took me several days to realize that one on my own.)

Later, I found out he also didn't know that clicking an object and waiting a second or two would bring up a number of recolour options. 

So, didja know you can click the little blue corner on a stack of objects and move the whole stack?

ahh... TS3, with the learning curve much steeper than expected...

A napping rug for toddlers.

Nursery furniture. I don't care if the sims use it or not, I just want a goddamn changing table in the room.

OGOD SHELVES.

Spiral staircases or ladders...

A smart car. Or a VW Beetle. I don't know what it is about those little cars, I just like them so much. :3

I really, really want pets. I had it for TS1, but not TS2. I want my loner sim to have four cats.

But I will be so, so sad if pets is only dogs, cats, birds, fish, whatever. I want sheeps! And rideable horses! Et cetera!

Modders did it! They even made flying horses and elephants. Why can't EA be as awesome as modders?

bulldoze, download, place, repeat

shift+ctrl+click "make fat" seems to have stuck. The maid came back a few days later, and she's still a pasty land whale.

I used a debug interaction on a maid (shift+ctrl+click) and made her fat instantly. I didn't check, but since it works this way for water level and weediness of the plants, I assume you would get the option to "make thin" a fat sim. Will it just revert when they are out of sight? I'll call up my maid later and see how she is.

In this instance, my sims started with less than 15 paintings, and ended up with 31, so she definitely painted 15 more. Seems to be an inconsistent bork. Something else may be affecting it.

My elder sim had a wish to paint 15 masterpieces, so I chained her to the easel for the sake of selling paintings after her death. A billion paintings later, I wondered why the wish hadn't been fulfilled. I checked, and she'd painted 31.

The wish to paint any number of masterpieces or brilliant paintings is broken, as far as I can tell.

Good rule: if it ends in .package, it goes in the Packages folder.

If you're on a mac, all you have to do is right click the file and choose a label. It looks like this:



I'm not sure you can do that with windows but it seems likely.

So far, all I've got is Awesomemod, minor hacks, default replacements, and patterns in my .packages, so... yeah.

Beyond that, I suppose subfolders would be useful for creator, or at LEAST source website.

Actually, I'm having the same thing happen. Just put in the testingcheatsenabled command.

I sent my sim to the graveyard to steal the grimmie statue for his garden, but he had to steal the two benches on either side before he would take the statue. My other sim REFUSED to take the swingset from the park.

I play in windowed mode, but the mouse-loss happens to me occasionally. I just click around inside and outside the window until it comes back. I've never had to restart the game to get it back.

I'm on a mac, but I traded my mac mouse for a random usb mouse I had lying around when I got the compy.

Mac OS X Leopard, waayyy over requirements for The Sims 3.

At first I deleted only mods that would obviously conflict with Awesomemod (Delphy's slider hack).

Installed framework (overwrote the files I already had because I'm dumb).
Installed Awesomemod + config file.
>>>crash
Inserted enablescripterror.
>>>crash
Removed ALL nonawesomemod custom content.
>>>crash
Tried organizing all the mod files in a billion ways.
>>>crash every time
Cleared all the caches.
>>>crash every time
Reinstalled framework and awesomemod.
>>>crash
Remove everything but what came with the game.
>>>crash

NOTHING I have done works. I've read this entire thread and not one thing works. D:

I don't know how to disable the launcher, so that's what's trying to load. Every crash is exactly the same. The game pretends it is going to load for about three seconds and then CTDs before even getting to the launcher with an "unknown error" and that's it.

Edit:

Also, I'm using the retail version, and just the store content I had so far. I also had some exchange stuff, but it was all patterns.
Anyway, reinstalled the game entirely, and it's loaded now.

Edit2:

All the CC in game which was in Sims3Pack form is already in the game now. Also my saved games are still there and a-okay. I don't know why that is. So stuff from the store, the exchange, and houses from MTS3 are all already installed.
Also! I learned what happens if you load a saved game with a missing CAS pattern. The texture is black. No other ill-effects.

Edit3:

Inserted Delphy's resaurce.cfg thinger. Added the Mods and Packages folders manually where they belong. Didn't touch the Framework thinger from here, so that one .dll that goes in Game/Bin isn't there. No config file. So the game starts, but just past the intro, it freezes up. The plumbob doesn't shine, the loadie bar doesn't fill, no music, etc. I have to force-quit.

Edit4:

Added Aweconf, same stall on loadie screen. Added enablescripterror, and got a CTD AFTER starting the game from the launcher. Slight improvement.

Added the .dll from the framework.zip in Game/Bin, deleted the aweconf. No CTD before the intro video. Now I'm letting the intro run through... and this time it worked! There's music and loading happening! More updates to come.

(Hopefully this may help anyone who had no luck with anything else... reinstall the game, everything will be okay.)

final edit:

So my voodoo fix was reinstalling the game and then finding the right combination of arbitrary file-shuffling until I unborked it.