Technical problems with THE HORROR: downloading, installing, and running it

[rsdworker]

Hey there again - i don't know why the game keeps calling home - i unconnected the internet and the popup always pops up through my play so how i can get rid it? - i followed the steps. 

[Tazon]

After 50 mins I was up to %56 with 129 people trying to connect and my service shut down. Now I'm freaked out and too scared to try again . I'm such a noob. Any tips on helping me how to be more awesome?

Does your connection run through a router? Sometimes that much traffic will make it quit after a while; you just need to reboot the router to get going again.

[Miellerie]

Just a heads up, I've had problems with X1950s overheating before (and erm... melting. Ahahaha. My 3850 is actually its warranty replacement since the store wasn't selling the X1950 some time later.)

People with ATI and their catalyst control centre, or RivaTuner or anything else that can monitor temps, I'd recommend doing so, especially if you have any of the cards that other people are having problems with or random crashes (In CCC, it's in the overdrive tab. Not all cards support it and my X1950 didn't, or I'd have spotted the problem long before it died.)

Hell no am I buying a new card to play Sims 3. My card should be sufficient and I'm not upgrading something that cost me £80 to play one game when all my other high spec games and even my 3D animation packages run just dandy on it. If I'd actually bought the game, I'd be demanding my money back because running my graphics card into the ground is probably damaging it. (That said, when I next update I'm not touching ATI with a barge pole unless they've fixed their OpenGL issues, even their professional animating rig cards have issues at the moment, and for £400+ that's just not acceptable.)

Miellerie, check that your drivers have installed correctly and are showing as 9.5 - a bad uninstall of the previous drivers can cause problems with new ones.

Thanks for that! By monitoring temperature, do you mean just go into the CCC and checking the temperature right after a crash?

I reinstalled the game and the display driver today and the message about updating didn't pop up And I managed to get 4+ hours of play before it froze on a splitting family processing scene (sister marries other guy and moves out). I am thinking of getting a new card and cpu because my computer's quite old now and hopefully I'll have no more problems after that 

[BeautyWitch]

After 50 mins I was up to %56 with 129 people trying to connect and my service shut down. Now I'm freaked out and too scared to try again . I'm such a noob. Any tips on helping me how to be more awesome?

Does your connection run through a router? Sometimes that much traffic will make it quit after a while; you just need to reboot the router to get going again.

Yes it does. I finally "woman- up" and got it done. lol.

OK so do I open all the files or just the ones that say WinRAR Archive; there are 31 named "rld-sims3?  There are files with R40, R31 and so on; what do I do with those.

[Tingeling]

I am trying to install the downloaded game from seedgames.org but I seem to have enountered a problem. I have mounted the ISO-file as one usually does, but instead of starting the install a window pops up telling me that there are files missing and that some of them may be copyrighted. After scouring this thread I also saw that some of the downloaded iso's had a file which you had to open through winrar. Well, I tried to open them but it was a no go. So, if anyone who has downloaded the seedgames.org version of the game could give me a helping hand I would much appreciate it.

[iHateyou]

Just a thanks...  This is my first time ever using a torrent, and I managed to do it despite being sure I was way too stupid to figure it out. I had to read about six million posts here before I could manage it so I really appreciate all the posts with questions and the great answers they received because it kept me from having to whine about it when I had problems.

Anyway BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAh.

[Elruwen]

Thank god for the backup files in the Saves folder! My saved game disappeared but I was able to restore it using the backup.

[Ryslin]

winrar is your solution to opening those r01-r32 files. If you open any of them ..it will open the whole thing. Or you can right click the files and extract to Here .. and it will take what is in it out.

You will then have a thesims3.iso
IF you use winrar to open that file (which it CAN do) it will whine and complain about copywrite.
Thus.. use demontools or other tools mentioned to "mount" the ISO into a nice handy virtual cdrom. Or even burn the iso with your favorite burning software. (I haven't looked at the size of the iso it might not be easily burnable)

If for some reason you have turned off auto load for cd/dvd's  then you will have to go manually to explorer and find the new drive added virtually/ open your dvd/cdrom yourself and install from there.

Winrar may whine at you if you do not have a registered copy. Just click it to be quiet on that pop up and it will go about it's normal business of being awesome.

[Tingeling]

Thanks for the help Ryslin. Although my issue is a bit different. I have been arring for along time so I know the procedure of mounting iso's and so on. The problem is that when I mount the iso the game setup installation doesn't start for some reason. It complains and a popup says: "Invalid directory entry has been encountered. Some content may be lost or inaccessible." It apparently is Roxio DLA Drive that is complaining. I've done the googlefu dance and it appears to be a problem with the dvd burner... Securom perhaps? But is it possible to contract securom without even having started the install process? I r confuse... especially since it is Damemon Tools that mounts the image. That was why I was wondering if someone who downloaded the same iso had issues and thus it would be a corrupt download which could easily be remedied.

[BeautyWitch]

I have no idea how I did it, but I've finally managed to install. Now a new problem; a message pops up saying the game needs to connect to the internet to verify my copy. How do I bypass this?

[Rockermonkey]

When you mounted the game did you take the exe and launcher from the crack folder? If not then you will need to and then place them in (computer/(HardDriveName usually c)/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/installdir\Game\Bin)
^ Think thats right, if not. Then keep close to the directions and find the similar folders. Rename the old launcher and exe, or delete it. then paste the two new ones in. DO NOT start the game with the launcher do it with the exe but not the launcher.

[BeautyWitch]

There is no exe file in the crack folder. Only the launcher and the app to generate the key. There is however, a TS3.exe file in the 'bin' folder. Is this the one you were referring to?

[Exiled]

So I've been torrenting more, and getting more crashes.  Each crash takes about 2-4 minutes after it freezes up before giving me the BSOD (hence why I didn't get them before, when trying to get TS3 Reloaded, since I always just manually reset) and about 5 minutes to create a dump file before restarting.

My computer only crashes when I try to get massive torrents (5.6GB, 4 GB, 9 GB).  For the last one, I tried to avoid the crash by by torrenting one TS2 stuff pack at a time, but it crashed was I was torrenting my third stuff pack (Glamour Life).

Here's the data.  Can anyone tell me what the computer's trying to tell me?  If a dump file is better, where can I find those?  I'm running Vista SP1.

KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR
0x0000007A (0XC0415878, 0XC000000E, 0X0B2E6860, 0X82B0F7ED)
Ntfs.sys - Address 82B0F7ED base at 82A3D000, DateStamp 47918a96

[morriganrant]

I feel as if I should come back and defend my card. My ATI 3800 series card is sitting at 60c. All through game play. I have allowed the game to remain on overnight (although tabbed) with no ill effects. The only crashing experienced is on one lot and since I had trouble installing the files, I assume that it is because of that. The seemingly random crash to desktop that I experienced before has not occurred again. I have had the game running and actualy up for at least 10 hours each day since I've installed it, I have no life. Anti-aliasing is maxed with no ill effect to sim hair or the trees. It was on when I first started the game and everything but the trees looked fine. We started fooling with settings, discovered that the pixelated tree issue was solved by fooling with the resolution, but by that point we had mutilated the sim hair. We played with the settings, got the sim hair back. The floating sim heads that appear for choosing actions still have no hair however(they were fine before I started all this). I am currently playing with every setting that I can, in game and out, trying to fix the problem. I have no idea what all we changed before.
The only other problem I seem to be having is with the benches in the cemetery. The card can not seem to find the texture overlay that they are supposed to have and instead gives them a nice pixely rainbow as a texture. The same benches on the Goth lot that I am playing are just fine. No other object seems to have this issue.
Once more I am going to state that I do not have the newest drivers for my card. Someone with my card and the newest drivers may have a different experience.

There is no exe file in the crack folder. Only the launcher and the app to generate the key. There is however, a TS3.exe file in the 'bin' folder. Is this the one you were referring to?

The file that is TS3.exe in the crack folder, that is the crack, what do you mean launcher? What is the file extension on that? The TS3.exe file in the BIN folder is the original. You want to replace the original .exe with the one from the crack folder. If your crack folder does not have one for some reason, there is a link in my signature. That link has the crack and keygen that came with my game rared up and uploaded.

Edit: the Adaptive anti-aliasing was causing the floating sim head-hair issue. My benches also have messed up distance textures, they're half-way complete up close, any further and the textures are garbage. Anyone know where the textures are stored and if it has to do with the CRC error I had while installing? This is not a GFX card problem, it is a file problem.

[Ryslin]

You know I had horrible graphics problems with the original release of spore , and had a 38xx version ATI at the time. The only solution I ever found for the dreaded black line corruption was deletion/uninstall of the game and reinstall.
To be honest I never use adaptive Anti aliasing. ATI's catalyst ai is also a bit buggy. Manually set your anti aliasing, turn off the adaptive, turn off catalyst ai and see if you stabilize morriganrant

..............
SecuROM comes from more than just the Sims series, have other games installed Tingeling?

.......
Kernal crashes are something entirely different Exiled. That is the OS having a fit. Check your settings on your torrent downloader. I am sorry that I don't know that exact kernal error, my gut says you are running out of memory during task. Then again your memory could be faulty. Could be a bad sector on harddrive , could be that it is placing part of the download in a system area and pissing off VISTA.

Do a search on google with your kernal dump number and the OS and see what you get.

[morriganrant]

You know I had horrible graphics problems with the original release of spore , and had a 38xx version ATI at the time. The only solution I ever found for the dreaded black line corruption was deletion/uninstall of the game and reinstall.
To be honest I never use adaptive Anti aliasing. ATI's catalyst ai is also a bit buggy. Manually set your anti aliasing, turn off the adaptive, turn off catalyst ai and see if you stabilize morriganrant

Spore I had no problem with once I found a decent set of drivers. It was the newest drivers that gave me issue with Spore. Artifacing and such. I was also thinking that I would need to uninstall and reinstall. I was just debating on that anyway. Part of my issue installing seems to be that it thinks that the neighborhoods cache file is not the same size as the one found in the .cab files. If it gives this error again, I may just live with it for now instead of finding a new torrent, or else try to get someone to upload the original for me. My household is all paranoid with the lawsuits against the torrent sites and COX is known to send warnings to pirates. Until I get a new version of that file I can't know for sure what the crashing on that one lot is caused by. I have already turned off Adaptive Ati-aliasing(once I figured out that it was my problem) and have maxed anti-aliasing. Catalyst AI has been off since the beginning as it didn't appear to be doing anything for Sims3, and even on games I have where it does, it doesn't seem to do enough for me to bother.

[BigFatLady]

There is no exe file in the crack folder. Only the launcher and the app to generate the key. There is however, a TS3.exe file in the 'bin' folder. Is this the one you were referring to?

There should be the keygen file and a TS3.exe in the crack folder - that TS3.exe is the one that you need (look at the properties and the cracked one was modified 21.05.09 - if you have one from April, that is EA one and will be the one asking for registration)

[TashaYarrr]

For those who think there may be an ATI problem -- and I'm not saying there is -- I'd be interested to know what happens if you do the following:

1) Completely uninstall current ATI drivers and Catalyst Control Center. Restart when you are asked to (important).

2) Install the latest "Display Driver Only" for your config from ATI (this should exclude the Catalyst Control Center).

This is just curiosity on my part.

Exiled, if you're getting BSODs while torrenting (if I'm understanding you correctly), you may have some kind of serious issue with your computer. I'd shut down all extraneous software (including your torrent software) and anything else living in your system tray. Then run a full virus and spyware scan. Beyond that, you may have to run Windows Repair or something (from original discs). Also try googling "0x0000007A" for more possibilities.

Oh, I also wanted to mention that after exhorting everyone to get new drivers, I was encountering some occasional PC-killing freezes (not crash to desktop or BSOD, just a slowdown and gradual death of video output). Usually when panning across town or loading create-a-style or something. I checked my drivers and they were about three versions old. Installed the latest NVIDIA WHQLs, no freezes yet (knock on wood).

[BeautyWitch]

There is no exe file in the crack folder. Only the launcher and the app to generate the key. There is however, a TS3.exe file in the 'bin' folder. Is this the one you were referring to?

The file that is TS3.exe in the crack folder, that is the crack, what do you mean launcher? What is the file extension on that? The TS3.exe file in the BIN folder is the original. You want to replace the original .exe with the one from the crack folder. If your crack folder does not have one for some reason, there is a link in my signature. That link has the crack and keygen that came with my game rared up and uploaded.

Edit: the Adaptive anti-aliasing was causing the floating sim head-hair issue. My benches also have messed up distance textures, they're half-way complete up close, any further and the textures are garbage. Anyone know where the textures are stored and if it has to do with the CRC error I had while installing? This is not a GFX card problem, it is a file problem.

Ahh, thanks a bunch, because my crack folder didn't have that file. It's up and running now

[Exiled]

Exiled, if you're getting BSODs while torrenting (if I'm understanding you correctly), you may have some kind of serious issue with your computer. I'd shut down all extraneous software (including your torrent software) and anything else living in your system tray. Then run a full virus and spyware scan. Beyond that, you may have to run Windows Repair or something (from original discs). Also try googling "0x0000007A" for more possibilities.

Yeah, BSODs while torrenting.  Confirmed three crashes.

I've done a bit of Googling and the techno level is overwhelming me.  The 0x7a error is caused by "virtual memory paging file, disk controller error, virus infection, or memory hardware problems."

A site recommends running Autochk, but when I try, it says it cannot run in Win32 mode...wtf?  So I can only run it when I reboot the computer and before it launches Vista?  I've set Task Scheduler to run Autochk when the computer boots up, but I wish I had a more guaranteed way that I knew that the problem was over with.

Scanning my hard drive with NAV 2009 and will be running Spybot S&D when NAV finishes up.

[Lorelei]

No BSODs yet, but prolonged play on a laptop with an NVidia card may cause jittering (audio) or flickering video. Worst case scenario, laptop freezes. We're talking HOURS and HOURS of non-stop play (including building, buying, collecting, spawning, skillinating, redecorating) with Firefox and IRC and other stuff going on in the background, though.

Game jitters a lot less if I don't use ESC to skip the opening video advert for the game. (I have no idea if it would work better in fullscreen, but my default screen resolution would possibly make the text unreadable and images stretched, and alt-tab would likely cause issues as well. Who knows? Something to mess about with, later.)

Other culprits are "memory leak plugger" tools like WinMemOpt. If I forget to turn it off, it freezes the game temporarily and sometimes jitters occur after.

[Tacuitacitum]

I've just gone through CCC and turned catalyst AI off, and everything down to "performance" rather than balanced/quality. All my options in Sims 3 are down to minumum as well. Game still puts on 99% load and shoots me into the 70s-80s temps.

If I switch tasks, but still have Sims 3 in the background (eg, I bring CCC or speedfan to the front, but not actually obscuring the Sims 3 window so it's still rendering, just not the active program) my load goes down to about ~20%. This way I can watch the game (as it will still play, rather than pause) but I can't actually play it (since clicking anywhere in it makes it the active window, even if I have an always-on-top window open). I don't know if that's standard behaviour - it seems slightly bizarre.

I'll try reinstalling the drivers without CCC now, and then if there's no improvement, some different drivers.

Morriganrant, what version drivers are you currently using?

Edit: Uninstalled and reinstalled 9.5 without CCC, and using Rivatuner to monitor temps. Still 99% load and shooting temps. Not being a frequent user of Rivatuner, I'm not sure how to tweak anything with it, so I'll get ATI tray tools and see what I can tweak with that.

Thanks for that! By monitoring temperature, do you mean just go into the CCC and checking the temperature right after a crash?

I reinstalled the game and the display driver today and the message about updating didn't pop up And I managed to get 4+ hours of play before it froze on a splitting family processing scene (sister marries other guy and moves out). I am thinking of getting a new card and cpu because my computer's quite old now and hopefully I'll have no more problems after that  

The temparature usually falls somewhat rapidly for me when the game is closed, so I'd suggest running the game in windowed mode and having CCC in the background so you can watch the temps as you're playing.

Alternatively, get RivaTuner and open hardware monitoring. It'll create a graph so when you've closed the game, you can see what the loads were while it was running, rather than current load/temp only in CCC.

Edit 2: Just got ATI Tray Tools started: I do not need 680 fps, EA. That's why load goes down to ~20% when not active - the fps falls to 180. Still far to high. In game fps is about 260, which is completely unneccessary. In CAS, it's ~600 again. Result is 99% load and high temps, all for something I can't even notice.

FFS. I had this problem with Civ 4 but you can put an entry in the config files to limit framerate for that game. Any way to do this with Sims 3?

Edit 3: At fullscreen, it's reporting framerates at 60 but I'm still getting 99% load. Windowed mode has the framerate set to 'default' and I can't change it, resulting in apparently 600fps. I'd still like to experiment with limiting the framerate, but I can't find any settings in the .ini files to do so.

Also, is Sims 3 using OpenGL, or D3D?

[snabul]

Concerning the cracked .exe:

To avoid confusion, I always rename the cracked .exe to something like "crackedSims3.exe".
Then I put it in the proper folder without renaming or deleting the original game .exe.

I create a link to the cracked .exe on my desktop that launches the game.

By the way: My reloaded version works perfectly.

[timelycorruption]

I've got 3 GB of RAM. Saving torrent!TS3 requires 5.59 GB of RAM. Does it take 5 GB to run TS3? Would I need to get more RAM? If I wait until it's in stores, will I be able to play it?
I'm very confused, because there seem to be conflicting ideas about this; some people are playing it with 1 GB, yet it requires 5 GB to download. This is a paradox. I can has confusion. Feel free to poke me with sharp objects and cackle.

[HomeschooledByTards]

I've got 3 GB of RAM. Saving torrent!TS3 requires 5.59 GB of RAM. Does it take 5 GB to run TS3? Would I need to get more RAM? If I wait until it's in stores, will I be able to play it?
I'm very confused, because there seem to be conflicting ideas about this; some people are playing it with 1 GB, yet it requires 5 GB to download. This is a paradox. I can has confusion. Feel free to poke me with sharp objects and cackle.

HUR.

RAM =/= hard drive space.