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

[rsdworker]

Finaly - i got all understand - its now installed - now i need is test it 

[Tacuitacitum]

Sims 3 is making my graphics card suffer something horrific. I've been monitoring temps since a spontaneous reboot;

I also have a HD38xx (3850, to be exact) and while neighborhood and live views run about 60-80% load on my graphics card, and ~70 degrees, menus and CAS run at 99% load and put my card into the 85+ before I shut the thing down myself before my card can explode.

I've turned all the options to minimum (which looks eyebleachingly horrible) and I've just upgraded the ATI drivers from 9.2 to 9.5 with no difference. (latest DirectX, 3GB RAM and a Quad Core CPU, if that's any effect on things)


This is silly. I'd expect it in neighborhood view where there's actually a substantial amount of things to render. CAS consists of one sim and reflection, and the menus aren't even 3D!

What comes to mind is that the menus and CAS menus are super anti aliased or otherwise filtered in order to make them look so super smooth and slick... which is murdering my card!

Neither my Playstation2 emulator and Assassins Creed manage that, and they're super intensive - the later surely must need more power than Sims 2. I can only reach the conclusion that Sims 2 coding is made of inefficient fail.
That, or it's all OpenGL, which ATI has a reputation for neglecting. Such a reputation that you should have thought of that, EA.

edit: menu's aren't even 2D? Muppet. Corrected now.

[Rockermonkey]

Damn, TS3 must really hate ATI's 3800 series. But I did however do alittle bit of research, the Nvidia GeForce 9600GT and the highest in the 38xx series(3870) are both comparable. ATI beat it in almost all cases, except where anti aliasing comes into play. Which absolutely made the highest card tank, while Nvidia still poofed up some pretty good numbers. This leads me to the conclusion that ATI just skipped out on optimizing for AA on these cards. Also, the OpenGL thing could be an issue...Maybe try turning down the smoothness all the way. Those temps are no good for a compy, and could completely fry your video card .

[DaBuschckah]

Not sure if you're still looking for people with NVIDIA cards having problems, but...

I have a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT card, and the game kept crashing. So I got the newest driver and the game continues to crash (the moment I get into the neighborhood view).

[Khaleesi]

Alright so I got the rar'd iso, and mounted the iso, but in the /Crack folder there's no keygen. Just rld-sims3.exe and Sims3.exe. Do I need to download a separate keygen or is one of those one of them? I honestly have no clue what I'm doing, sorry.

[Caz]

rld-sims3 IS the keygen

[Khaleesi]

Thank you. Like I said, I've never so much as looked at an iso before, so I appreciate your help.

[Solowren]

I was thinking of upgrading my video card, but now I don't think I will after reading all of these ATI video card issues. I have an ATI x800 with no issues. And it runs the game great on all highest settings.

Older cards FTW!

[araneldon]

I was thinking of upgrading my video card, but now I don't think I will after reading all of these ATI video card issues. I have an ATI x800 with no issues. And it runs the game great on all highest settings.

Older cards FTW!

Good for you, I got a grand spanking new 4770 which runs Oblivion beautifully, but TS3 plays like crap.
If antialiasing is enabled all transparencies (hair, trees, etc) get fux0red. And the constant shifting of detail
levels, I just hate that. And textures look worse than in TS2, although I may be imagining that.

Ah well, no matter. What with the apparent restrictions on 3rd party content, there's hardly any reason to
switch from TS2 for now.

[Chain_Reaction]

Well my game was fine till I tried to build a house. I built the outside and got paranoid about crashing (perhaps that was a bad idea...) and exited to the edit town mode to save (which is a silly way to design it). It saved fine and then I went back in and did another hours worth of work, exited to edit town and hit save. All was fine for about 5 seconds when the game just folded on it's self and threw me back to desktop. I checked my save and it's only 5MB which basically means if it didn't create it's own backup file, my entire town would be gone right now.

[BeautyWitch]

Could someone please help me? I know nothing about computers and I'm not sure what info you will need to advise me so I'll post everything.

I need to know if my computer is good enough to run this game at the best settings. And if not, what will I need to upgrade.

http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w319/htsmama/1.jpg
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w319/htsmama/2.jpg
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w319/htsmama/3.jpg
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w319/htsmama/4-1.jpg

Other info: It's a year and couple months old and running on Vista. I have no problem playing Sims 2 with all EPs, SPs and 2.33 GB of downloads on all high settings. Well, except for the 10 minutes loading time to fire up the game. Other than that; no lagging and community lots load in 30 secs or less.

Another question: Would I need to uninstall all the Sims 2 games to get it running smoothly? TIA

[Solowren]

It looks fine to me. You don't need to uninstall TS2; you have plenty of free space.

[DaBuschckah]

Good for you, I got a grand spanking new 4770 which runs Oblivion beautifully, but TS3 plays like crap.

Yeah, it sucks. I got a super-awesome computer because I do tons of digital art and animation, and its always been able to run games fine as well. But this game refuses to work past loading...

[Viviane]

I played 5 hours straight without any crash or freeze. Only problem was my 8800GT 512Mo going from 42°C (idle) to 78/80° (loading + CAS). The temp drop to 65°C after increasing fan speed significantly. I am considering to cancel my preorder I don't want to play near 4 fans at max speed (too noisy) nor risk my card.

[TapThatBooty]

I can get the game up and running, but after a few minutes of playing, either in family mode(live/buy/build mode) or CAS, the game closes itself. It doesn't give me an error message, just closes. My drivers have been updated, so I'm a bit confused.

[BeautyWitch]

It looks fine to me. You don't need to uninstall TS2; you have plenty of free space.

Ok, thanks. Now I need to do a lot of reading before I attempt to Arr anything. I'm just not that awesome I'm afraid.

[Miellerie]

My game just closes itself after a while as well but usually after 20-30 mins, though it was over an hour once. It runs fine otherwise on highest settings and 1680x1050 fullscreen. I have to remember to save each day which I'm not used to  

I have updated my graphics drivers, but every time the game starts I still get a popup reminder to update my graphics drivers. If it helps this is what I'm running:

Vista 32bit
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB
Intel E2140 1.6GHz.. I've been meaning to overclock it for years  

I might try reinstalling the game later on today to see if that helps.

[BeautyWitch]

Has anyone used MagicISO Tool before? http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm

Can this one be used instead of Daemon? This site (http://www.petri.co.il/mount_iso_files_in_windows_vista.htm) claims that Daemon has spy-ware and I would rather not take any chances.

[malianx]

I used magicISO on my windows 7 install, worked fine.

[jolrei]

I was thinking of upgrading my video card, but now I don't think I will after reading all of these ATI video card issues. I have an ATI x800 with no issues. And it runs the game great on all highest settings.

Older cards FTW!

I either need to upgrade my old video card (X300) or build a new rig.  P4 (3Ghz) with X300 card and 2GB of RAM is causing lag.  I have to reduce screen res and lower settings just to play at any decent speed.

[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?

[Tacuitacitum]

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.

[Ryslin]

ATI's 38xx series had some bugs on the core chip.
We also run into the fact that the game company is told "oh yeah it can handle it" then crash crash crash ..because the actual code used did not match the directx / nor the driver code.

Torrents can and are corrupted ..all it takes is grabbing the hash (ie the torrent) changing the file it is reading and uploading. It isn't terribly difficult.. and at this point I imagine there are some folks trying to get this release off the network.

Demon works just fine "IF" you use an older version and upgrade SPDT (file from microsoft or use google)

NOTE there are many programs out there that will interfere with most iso/cd image loading software just on principle. Ever played a DVD in your drive?
The custom little applet it installs to watch will do as much damage as securom.

Overly aggressive antispyware/antivirus/firewall will crash your game. If the game pings the internet port randomly for any reason, your firewall hopefully blocks it. If it does this by warning you it is blocking it ..said pop up can lock the game if there isn't enough memory to task switch. (has to go back to desktop to allow you to acknowledge the attempt at internet)


So in closing .. my rant is about the fact that this is probably not the game that is crashing.
I have left it playing now for 2 days.
Xp64
ATI -4850 512ram
4 gig system ram
4 core AMD processor (phenom 2 2.
plenty of hdrive space

Installed with dtoolslite 4.30.1 sptd 1.56

[brownlustgirl]

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?

What are you scared of? The file is on the computer, when you start your internet up again, the medium you are using to dl the torrent will start back up at your last point. Shoot 56% in under a hour is a WIN! Took me 6 hours.

[Ryslin]

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?

If you are using the program defaults (utorrent so on)you are likely pushing your internet connection to the max. There are settings to change upload/download speeds.
Standard dsl/cable 500 down , 12 up is perfectly fine. If you still crash out try reducing the amount of connections (also a setting). I think it defaults to 80, dropping to 50 might help.