Curiously enough, it was my male sim shooting blanks, but as soon as I updated AM to the most current test version, suddenly boom, he got the bullseye and she was running for the toilet to throw up. Weirdly, my stallion has done alright, particularly with this recent test build.

Happy to report that after two hours of play with this latest version of AM, and also running a metric assload of CC, as well as Overwatch from Twallan, I haven't had any crashes.

Pescado, what an amazing modder you are. Thanks so much for all the hard work you do.

Will continue to use the alpha version to check for any glitches.

Same, no crashes once AM is removed.

As far as the EA crashing issue, some of it is being caused by people trying to play Pets with shitty and unsupported video cards. Other people with high end video cards have fixed the crashing by enabling the Advanced Rendering option in the game's graphic settings. Updated drivers seem to help some folks. And turning down the graphics on video cards that are borderline has helped others. Also the mac client has been crashing since the Pets patch. Shoddy programming is shoddy, EA.

Umm at this point, if your game is that borked, I'd try uninstalling it completely and reinstalling everything except Town Life (and don't patch the 1.26 or install Pets, it is pretty FUBAR). Once you have everything installed fresh without Town Life, try using AM by itself and see if you can recreate the problems. I am pretty sure you won't be able to recreate these issues in a fresh TownLife-less and 1.26-less install with ONLY AM. The problems you are talking about are not due to AM (I am 95% certain of that, based on what you are saying).

Assuming AM is not the culprit, I would go ahead and install Town Life at this point, put AM in, and try to bork the game again, with only AM running. If you can't, then google up Twallan's Overwatch mod, which helps immensely in keeping neighborhoods clean and clutterless. EA's engine is pretty shitty and as ususal it's up to the modding community to fix their shit for them since they can't be bothered (witness, TSR has today released a mass-fix for borked CC from the Pets patch).

If you refuse to do a totally fresh re-install of the entire game (or you have already done so), I'd go get Twallan's Overwatch anyway and see if that cleans the neighborhood for you enough for AM and the engine to run properly.

That's kind of mean.

Your China lag has nothing to do with AM. It appears the last patch might have caused terrain issues in China and npc Sims (Sims you don't control) very easily get stuck. This happens a lot at Hot Springs, but it can happen in other lots around China as well. The only solution to this problem is to use the following command in the console: resetsim *

This will reset ALL sims currently in China, including yours and all npcs. I recommend you do this around 5 or 6am in-game, because it will reset all the market merchants as well.

This is not a permanent fix, as sims will get stuck again at some point. I have to reset my sims every few days.  Hopefully this is one of the bugs EA will fix in the next patch, along with photography, but who knows.

PS: I was getting this problem in China before I started testing AM. Also, lots of folks who don't use AM, like over at the EA forums, have this problem as well.