I don't have the Diesel Stuff Pack but I have patched my game to 1.36 and can confirm the presence of "featured" store collections. I would almost call it useful if it showed all of the store stuff that I own, however, EA have done a half-arsed job of it and thus it only shows their selection of the sets that I own.

Whatever has gone wrong with your game has nothing to do with the format of the custom content you have and everything to do with something an out-of-date mod or dodgy custom content. You will find it significantly easier to track down any issues and manage your content if you stick to the .package format.

I have merged the default skins that I use and all's well. I have also merged the slider mods that I use.

None of my Sims have that trait. I have also used Twallan's Super Computer to check for hidden traits but he has none other than the five I gave him: perceptive, genius, eccentric, charismatic and virtuoso. He will get on with any other task I set him but give him a case and he will immediately go daft. It seems the Investigator AI has been royally stuffed.

My Investigator has been a pain to play: if I want him to actually do something with the case he has received I have to watch him. If I take my camera away he will abandon what he was supposed to do for any other task. Conversely my Ghost Hunter, Stylist and Architect will get on with the task at hand.

Did you merge all of your packages into a single 2Gb file? If so it is no wonder that you noticed your game slow down. Try merging them in batches of no more than 200MB. If your game still seems to be slower than before you have probably got some bad CC that you will either need to fix with Delphy's tools or remove.

It worked as usual for me; you may have a borked installation or a conflicting mod.
My game has been remarkably well behaved and has only baulked at one piece - or set, of CC that causes my game to freeze if I click to view the relevant category in Buy Mode.

I have Ambitions running on my Windows 7 x64 PC without issue thus far. I applied the 4Gb patch at the outset and have never needed to bother about with DEP.

So do I but I wouldn't trust it to catch everything. I put any new CC into a separate folder then load my game and see if it plays nice. If my game lags stupidly, behaves in a way that it didn't before, or something turns black the CC is dumped. If it plays nice I merge it with my other content using this method: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,17746.0.html

You should take a look at your CC too. What has happened in your game will happen in my game if I have added a new piece of CC that is either incompatible with other CC already in my game or is dodgy.

If they were you would not have to look far to read the complaints therefore if you cannot find any there are none - or none worth commenting upon. As EA patches go, this one is inoffensive so the usual advice applies: check and update your mods and custom content to make sure they are compatible with the latest patch.

I use Windows 7 x64 and do not experience any random crashes to desktop. I applied the latest patch for TS3 on Thursday and since then it will almost always crash to desktop if I want to save my game. No .bad file is produced and no .backup file is made; it pretends to save for about 5 seconds before disappearing without a trace. I have TS3, WA and HELS, a few mods, numerous patterns and a few custom content objects. I have checked for updates for all of these and suspect that one of these will need to be removed at least until the culprit has been updated to be compatible with the latest patch.

Windows 7 x64 is stable for the most part even when it comes to running TS3.

The Launcher is no more stable following the 1.9 and 2.4 patch on Windows 7 x64 than it was before so if EA fixed anything at all, it is not apparent.

"Mods" is the catch-all term that covers anything that does not come with the game such as hair, objects, patterns and clothing. If one or more of these is malformed or has become corrupted then you will experience a noticeable decrease in both performance and loading times. If you don't see the option to import as dbc then you must have the wrong version or you have missed the important step of starting the process by clicking on File and New before beginning the process of importing. Did you follow Inge's link?

If you have followed the instructions to the letter then it is safe to say that one or more of the mods you are hoping to merge is dodgy. Eliminate the dodgy mods and you will find a marked increase in both the time it takes to load your game and with game performance.

The best version of s3pe to use is the one linked from here because that is the one that offers you the option to import 'as *.dbc' from the Resource drop-down menu.

Not exactly: 1.8 and 2.3 are the patches that will royally frell your Launcher. Anything up to 1.79 or 2.2 will not, however, if you want to use Awesome mod you will need to update your game to the latest patch. If you take the time to read through this forum and others you will learn that there are ways to install and use much of your custom content even with the latest update.

My game and my copy of Awesome mod are fully patched and up-to-date. I also have the following mods installed: Twallan's Supercomputer, the No Intro mod, Absimiliard's Realistic Aging Mod and No Mosaic. These are the only TS3 mods I have used and I have the latest available versions of each of these.

The riddler bug has so far struck two of my five worlds - one of which was started after I installed the latest patch. I did not see any riddler tiles before I installed the latest patch. I recently switched from Windows XP Pro SP3 to Windows 7 - 64 bit where I still have the problem as evidenced in my previous post.

I added two residential lots to one of my towns earlier today and noticed that one of these pesky tiles had appeared on the road! In case it matters, I don't have any customised road mods in my game.



I have used these lots in other saved TS3 games without incident for the past two weeks.

The Riddler has struck again: this time in a game in which I had only played Agnes Crumplebottom and her home is the only one that I had re-decorated. I had installed a few houses I had downloaded and some lots I have created but had not meddled with any other part of the town. I didn't notice any problems until I decorated Miss Crumplebottom's nursery and covered over the unpainted walls of the house. Agnes' home is fine, however, the Wolff and Goth homes were infested with those tiles as was the Art Gallery.

I've just changed from Windows XP SP3 to a clean install of Windows 7 64bit so will start a new game and replicate my steps to see if I can trigger this again.

I also disagree. There are times when I can play for hours on end without an issue and yet on other occasions I see one or other of these save errors after no more than thirty minutes of play. There's something wrong with the game client somewhere but if there is a link between the amount of time played and a save error then it has to be triggered by some item, Sim or other random thing that may be encountered during play. Perhaps it's triggered by a random act carried by an NPC Sim such as switching on the radio and tuning it into the children's station.

This has just happened to my game where it has affected the same lots as has already been reported here. Affected tiles appear as normal from a distance and change into lurid question marks upon zooming in. I cannot edit the tile but I can replace it with a wall or floor covering via build mode. Previous to this I had made some changes to two EA homes: 325 Oak Grove Road and 1 Sun Song Avenue in Sunset Valley. These homes had some furnishings (a shower - can't remember what else), walls, windows and floors that had apparently been styled or created using, as Writin_Reg put it, "voodoo".

I've purged my cache files but this had no effect on the issue. My game is up-to-date as are my graphics drives and my OS (WinXP Pro, SP3). I last updated my copy of Awesome mod and Twallan's Supercomputer yesterday. I have oodles of CC installed and I also have store items in my game. I don't know what caused this to happen but I suspect it was triggered by my attempt to edit the styles in those two homes I mentioned above.

Same here. I read this thread and double-checked my game to be sure. As far as the fish go, you need 10 to stock a pond so you could try stacking 10 of them together in the hope that it will allow you to at least remove it from your fambly inventory and [hopefully] to your fridge.

Legal: didn't have any problems installing the patch but did think something had gone wrong when I fired up the game having forgotten to remove the old copy of Awesome mod but it took .00001 seconds to realise and 2 seconds to fix.

Yes... I saw this because I forgot to remove the previous version of the Awesome mod (yes, I'm blonde) after patching to 1.3. Update your copy of Awesome mod to fix.

My Sims have the same issue since they completed the last of the charisma challenges. Those babysitters that have turned up to my Sim's home have looked after my toddler well enough but the belching, farting and flirting with the maid is just too icky to put up with.