Seasons & lot corruption

[Morague]

Hi

I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing this problem. I've never had lot corruption problems in the past, but in the last week I've had 3 lots go bad.

These lots started crawiling along - all sims asleep & it took over 5 minutes of real time to "speed" through the night - ultra speed was slower than regular slow. Slow speed produces really choppy actions.  I turned all of the graphics stuff down to minimum, turned off bump mapping & shaders. I used the debugger & forced erors on everything on the lot. I tried everything I could think of. I even removed the downloads folder & tested - this didn't make any difference.

The lots ran fine through spring & summer - this weirdness started with the fall season. I had added a few birch trees as well as the orchard trees & garden plots in the spring, otherwise no other plants. I use a lot of mods mostly from here but very little in the way of custom content for hair, clothing, etc. The houses are not overly large although they are on 5x5 lots. Moved one family out, rebuilt their home on a new lot & it's now running fine - so, the problem must be with the actual lot. Other lots run fine (good speed)

The only things I can think of that could be causing this slowness are the orchard & garden plants or the falling leaves from the birch trees. I deleted the birch trees but not the orchard & gardens. I have cancelled out water ballooons & catch several times but I would imagine that if those items did not delete properly they'd just be like the stuck kicky bags & not cause the slowness problem.

I played with debug on & didn't get any errors. I haven't done anything stupid - this was a new custom neighborhood, no additional sims introduced, no other houses, no deleted characters - I haven't even had anyone die yet, so no ghosts. I just have the base neighborhood & SimState attached. There are a total of 24 sims in my neighborhood - 6 residential lots & 1 community lot & just the standard SimState. I have 723,000 MB available to play the game (from the log file) which should be more than enough. My video card is only a GeForceFX 5200 with 256 ram, but this isn't the problem as some lots run just fine even if i have the graphics turned up.

Maybe I just planted too many trees & plants? I have 9 orchard trees & 12 garden plants. I don't know - anyone have any ideas or experiencing anything like this?

[marvine]

I did notice a serious slowing down at the moment the leaves started falling on a 3x2 lot with 7 regular trees and almost no custom content, 2 sims and a cat - noticeable and sudden enough that I thought "oh, that's the falling leaves"; on the other side, no issue at all on a 5x5 lot chock full of CC with 4 sims and a servo, and 2 orchard trees... I mean it doesn't seem to lag more than usual.

[amjoie]

The size of the tree didn't seem to matter in my game. The tiniest crab tree was putting out leaves as fast as the largest birch. And the leaves fall all through the season, never getting to be bare trees until winter starts. You can literally rake night and day, all season long, and never totally catch up -- if you have more than just a few trees. I had that happen with less than a dozen trees. I had to get a robot to do the raking, because the family of two had no time to sleep or eat if they tried to do the raking as needed.

The more leaf piles you have, the more the game has to "remember."

I would guess that your card is already taxed, just playing a regular game. So the extra burden of generating leaves might have been enough to choke the game.

It is easy enough to test, if you still have the lots in question. Just remove the trees and see if it solves the problem. If it does, add trees one at a time, to see what your card can handle.

Probably time to save some pennies for a new card, especially if you want any more expansions ....

[KellyQ]

I have the same card and my game slows to a crawl whenever it's raining or snowing. I am starting to think of making it perpetual summertime in my game, which sucks.

[Lorelei]

Upping my RAM solved a lot of slowdown/hang issues. A tool I use that helps is WinCleaner Memory Optimizer. It's similar to Cacheman. When it starts up, I stop clicking and moving around until it beefs up my available RAM. You may need to adjust the recovery point so it doesn't bottom out your mem while restoring, but once you hit the sweet spot, it helps.

[Mirelly]

Slight aside. I've been using RAM Booster for years (the original J.Pajula version, not the commercial rip-off). It's perfomance is faultless but it always bothers me that it needs a whole 2MB of memory to run ... not a big chunck out of 1024 but ... well. How much does WinCleaner use? (Yeah, I'm too idle to download it and try for myself )

[sara_dippity]

If you are seriously computer savy, don't get offended. Have you cleaned up your startup programs and processes? I know cleaning up the startup programs is reccomended a lot, but processes is often not mentioned. Using the run dialog box (on your start menu) enter msconfig. On the startup tab, choose to hide all Microsoft programs. Then uncheck everything. Your video card does require one startup program, but when you reboot the drivers will put the right file back in this list for you. I know, I had that card. Now look at the processes list. I can't pull it up here (public computer) so I don't remember if that has one to hide Microsoft processes...
Now. Manually read each entry and compare it to one on this list or this list. Find the entry and bring up the definition and necessity of the process and decide if you need it or not. Then clean them all up by hand.
Just kidding. There are tools to help. Try this one.

[Lorelei]

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memory-Tweak/WinCleaner-Memory-Optimizer.shtml

It doesn't use much, but I can't find the relevant info. Will keep hunting. The advertised non-hogginess of resources prompted me to try it.
http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?itemid=2781836


Re: startup items. See also bleepingcomputer.com if a mystery entry appears. They ID most items for you via a search feature.

[KatEnigma]

I'm having problems with Parties and a HUGE memory leak.  The game will increasingly use more RAM as it goes along anyway, but I tried having a party twice yesterday. Once in I think fall. I'd paused it for awhile while I went off to do something, and when I came back, it was down to 200MB free RAM and it crawled. So as soon as everyone left, I restarted the game.  I blamed it on leaving it paused for a couple hours. THEN later, I had a birthday party in winter- at night. OMG! No pausing, and it hadn't been running that long, but again, down to 200MB free (out of 2 gig- 1.5 free with game not running) and it didn't release the memory after everyone went home. Then I shut down and went to bed, instead of restarting. DH was talking about finding me a memory manager, since I obviously need one unless EA fixes the memory leak.

[Morague]

Hi

Thanks for the feedback. I'm what I'd conside computer savy (no offense taken) - I've replaced motherboards & other components, know my way around in DOS from the old days & do regular maintenance. I empty the Trash bin evey day, defrag weekly. I've set up a static page file. I have ove 80 gigs free on my hard disk, my processor is 2.2, i have Direct x 9c with that video card & yes, i know I could use a more robust card but it does have 256k on it & does show bump maps if I enable it in the Graphics Rules.sgr file. I disconnect from the Internet to play & disable everything except Explorer. The lots play fine & with high detail settings except in the fall season. So I really don't think it's my system - if it was then I should have problems on all lots. I'm only having problems on the lots where I had placed birch trees (for the garden club inspection)

The problem does not go away if I simply delete the trees :/ I only had 2 birch tress, althought I had 9 orchard tress & 12 garden plants - no other ornamentals. I play pretty conservatively - I generally make smallish houses because I like to have 6 to 8 sims. I use a standard house for all my sims because it works for the way I play & I like the layout. 2 stories - main floor has 2 4x4 bedrooms, 2 2x3 baths, 1 4x4 ktchen, combined living room 4x10 with a 2x2 hall down the middle. Upstairs in just 2 4x4 bedrooms, 1 2x2 bath & a large room for the pool table & stereo. I always use exactly the same furniture in every lot - yeah - I am that boring!

Moving them off the lot into an identical house fixes the speed problem so it's not the sims. I'm wondering if the fallen leaves are not getting deleted properly. I don't have any problem with the 9 orchard trees & 12 garden plants all through Spriing & Summer. It's just in the fall once the leaves start falling that the lot starts to crawl so I'm pretty sure that's what it is. But deleting them does not solve the problem - in fact deleteing all of the orchard plants & tress didn't help either & I deleted the groups.cache too. It seems that once the slowness is in existance the lot is no longer operative :/ I haven't made it to a winter season yet so I don;t know if that fixes it - but - I doubt it will.

[jsalemi]

I'm having problems with Parties and a HUGE memory leak.  The game will increasingly use more RAM as it goes along anyway, but I tried having a party twice yesterday.

Huh -- that may explain my recent crash.  I had a toga party going on a greek lot with 7 or 8 sims participating, and it was going pretty well.  Then it started snowing, and seconds later  I got the stuttering sound, tiny blue screen, and a complete crash to reboot. The greek house was fine when I went back in (fortunately I had saved not long before the party) and played out the rest of the day without the party ok.  But a memory leak would explain the crash.

[kryptmoon]

This may seem crazy but I had the same problem with a lot that never gave me problems before. I  had only 3 orchard trees and about 12 garden plants. I could'nt understand why my lot was dragging during the day and I could barely move across the lot at night when they were asleep.(fast mode) It was summer, no snow, no rain nothing out of the usual. I thought maybe I had a build up of invisible characters on the lot as I just tried for garden club membership which brought a host of members to inspect.(maybe they did'nt leave properly, I thought). I tried lowering my graphics options etc. and could'nt figure it out. It was'nt until the fall season was almost over and I had already harvested my garden plants I started to remove the LADYBUGS from the lot and put it into my inventory.(after all I did'nt need any more until I replanted in the spring again. Altogether I had 15 on the lot.3 for each orchard and the rest in the garden.I did'nt get pests at all during the spring and summer season)
       
It seriously stopped lagging after I removed 6 of them(from the garden)I guess with all the bugs flying busily around put more strain on the cpu. 15+ was overkill. I have a very high end computer and handle huge lots no problem with all options, so as you can imagine I was very worried why all of a sudden the huge lag on an ordinary lot.

You never said you had any ladybug houses so this may not even be it for you, but you did mention that the only thing that had changed was that you had added some orchard trees etc. Sometimes it's the stupid little things and not your comp. so I just thought I'd mention that I had this problem and it was solved by removing some.

[sewinglady]

After installing seasons, I had my whole neighborhood go 'bad' on me.

Could not get any lots to open - if I clicked on them, the game crashed to the desktop.

This was a custom neighborhood that I had been working on for well over a year.  I also had a lot of custom content...around 10,000 files.

My solution was to delete it all and start over. Neighborhood is gone, the custom content is gone and so far, so good...

Obviously, whatever was corrupting the lots was something that was on every single lot... and the only two things I can say for certain that I put on every single lot are Merola's Multi Painting and TwoJeff's College Adjuster.  Since I can't play without them, I reinstalled both and neither have caused any problems on lots in my new neighborhoods...so it wasn't them...and I have an idea about what it might have been and where I got it from - not a hack either - possibly was a cloned plant or tree object.

[Liss]

Thanks for the link to that memory optimizer thing, definitely going to try it.  Since installing Seasons I've had a lot of spontaneous reboots and it's only while playing the game so I know that's the problem.  Didn't I hear someplace that Windows XP reboots when it's had too much, as opposed to the Blue Screen of Death of old?

[aussieone]

I've noticed that my game zooms along at triple speed just fine, UNTIL bugs start buzzing aroung the plants in the greenhouse, then it slows to a crawl.

As soon as I send a sim out to 'spray' or 'spray many' and the bugs are gone, then triple speed zooms along ata fast pace again.

Very strange!