Razor1911 release vs. Reloaded release

[Dizzymental]

I downloaded and installed the Reloaded version, and then for shits and grins the Razor version. Right off the bat with the Razor version I noticed less crashing, though it still happens, and a very slight speed up in the fast forward options. However, it could be because of the fresh install rather than any real changes in the code.

We had the RLd version and had the game crashing every couple of hours of play. But with the Razor crack running the RLD version, no crashing at all and most of the graphics settings are on high or medium. Anyone else who has crashing every couple of hours, you might want to try it. Get the Crackfix version of the crack by Razor  (it's about 11mb I think) and just replace the RLD crack (the 29 mb one) if you installed the RLD version of the game already. As I said, worked a treat for us.

[Sparks]

The crashing. Is that directly correlated to graphics card?

I'm playing on a "granny computer" laptop; I don't even have a graphics card ( well, it's integrated and such) and I haven't had a single crash. I CAN say that when I first started the game, all settings were lowest. I've put them all at about middle ground and everything is running smoothly.

The only reason I'm posting this is because I was planning on getting a new laptop in about a month, was curious about the best graphic card selection. But if I can run TS2 with all EP's and TS3, AND people who have way more superior setups than i do are experiencing crashes, should I even bother?

[I.Am.She]

I haven't had ANY crashes with the RLD and the RZR release, but after reading all these, i suspected it was just luck. Installed the game for my neice and she has a POOR internal graphics card, still no crashing from her side and she can run the settings, some on medium, some on low.

I'd love to know why some people are crashing and some arent.

I've also never experienced any of these bugs everyone posts pictures of... I was quite looking forward to stretchy toddlers

[Roflganger]

I've also never experienced any of these bugs everyone posts pictures of... I was quite looking forward to stretchy toddlers

I'm still running the RLD version (because unlike you lucky bastards overseas, I have to deal with bandwidth capping).  The only graphical glitch I've experienced is someone having a newspaper stuck in his crotch for a few seconds.  I've had Sims go through the entire aging process, and no stretchy necks or gaping mouths or any of the amusingly horrifying things I've seen. 

I also haven't had any problems with performance or crashing, on my AMD 3800, Nvidia 7600, 3Gig system.  I was worried I'd have to settle for low end graphics, but I've got everything maxed except for the building detail. I can even run in windowed mode without issue.

[bowrain]

I uninstalled the RLD version, installed the Razor one, put in the crackfix and when I double click on it, a black cmd box flashes for a split second and the disappears. What gives? Putting the reloaded cracked exe in works. I haven't got the patch yet.

Nevermind, I got a fake one, it seems. I downloaded from another site and it works like a charm. (The bad one was from pirate bay, fyi. And it didn't come in .001 extension )

[TashaYarrr]

Crashing: on the system specs below, which has a pretty fresh OS install with very damn little else installed on it and excellent cooling, I would get 'system freezes' requiring a hard reboot about every 1-3 hours of gameplay. These were usually when I was doing something in the game (rather than just watching), such as panning across the neighborhood at close zoom, grabbing an object in buy mode, or attempting to load Create a Style. The game would suddenly grind to a halt. If I left it alone, it would start to flash, and eventually I'd lose the video signal input. No combo of drivers, in-game settings, or NVIDIA control panel settings would forestall these. Since uninstalling Reloaded and installing Razor1911 (rather than patching one to the other), and applying 2 of the patches that were found, I have not experienced these system freezes.

Also, I've noticed that the game seems to run best if you actually let it use the settings it picks for you when it auto-detects your card.

------------------
System Information
------------------
Time of this report: 5/28/2009, 07:34:31
       Machine name: INANNA
   Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
       System Model: System Product Name
               BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
          Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+,  MMX,  3DNow (2 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
             Memory: 3582MB RAM
          Page File: 466MB used, 4992MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.5512 32bit Unicode

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
        Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
     Manufacturer: NVIDIA
        Chip type: GeForce 8800 GTS
         DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
       Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0193&SUBSYS_040F19F1&REV_A2
   Display Memory: 320.0 MB
     Current Mode: 1920 x 1200 (32 bit) (60Hz)
          Monitor: Plug and Play Monitor
  Monitor Max Res: 1600,1200
      Driver Name: nv4_disp.dll
   Driver Version: 6.14.0011.8585 (English)
      DDI Version: 9 (or higher)
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
 Driver Date/Size: 4/30/2009 22:02:00, 5896320 bytes

[kennyinbmore]

And by the way, I LOVE THIS GAME!  I see a lot of complaints - am I the only who thinks, outside of the glitchiness, it's freakin' awesome?!

I made a comment on another thread I'm not regretting leaving TS2 behind at all. I'm totally digging this game. Now if they can just give me some weather and pets I'll be set

[GnatGoSplat]

I'm almost sure most peoples' crashing problem is due to overheating.  The game itself seems quite stable, but it'll find ANY weakness in your PC's cooling system.
I had 2 different PC's that would overheat and cause a BSOD with 0x00000124 as the error code, one running AMD processor w/Vista x64, the other running Intel w/x86.  I replaced the CPU heatsink/fan on the AMD X2 PC and now it never crashes.  I don't have a better CPU heatsink/fan for my Intel C2D PC, so I just ran a health monitor program and set an alarm at the CPU's maximum allowable temperature of 61C (Google says it's 61.4C for my C2D).  The alarm goes off about 5-minutes into the game!  It doesn't BSOD immediately at critical temp, so I just shut off the alarm and save often.   It managed to go 4+ hours last night without crashing, though I don't even want to know what the CPU temps were like.

Overheating is probably going to be more likely in home-built PCs because I think OEMs are more likely to put their machines through vigorous testing.  Not to mention home PC builders tend to do fun stuff like overclocking.  My Intel box is overclocked to 3.0GHz from 1.8GHz, that's probably the reason mine overheats so easily under load.

[kennyinbmore]

The game has yet to crash on me. (knock on wood)

[TapThatBooty]

Since uninstalling Reloaded and installing Razor1911 (rather than patching one to the other), and applying 2 of the patches that were found, I have not experienced these system freezes.

The issues you have said are the exact same as mine, I know there are patches somewhere in this thread but I cannot for the life of me find them again, would you happen to have a link to the ones you used please?

[tizerist]

The issues you have said are the exact same as mine, I know there are patches somewhere in this thread but I cannot for the life of me find them again, would you happen to have a link to the ones you used please?

...and if so, could we perhaps keep updated links in the first post? Rather than trawling these 8+ pages?
As an example I couldn't find the pulled patch high or low.

[Dizzymental]

Nah it's not an overheating problem. We're running it on a new, fast puter. Anyway, haven't had any weird stretchy toddlers either. Apart from the crashing with the other crack no other bugs or problems. Whole game feels like playing TS2 all over again before the exp packs, though.
Loving the global aging (or ageing, for us Brits and the Grammar Police)  

I'm still running the RLD version (because unlike you lucky bastards overseas, I have to deal with bandwidth capping).   

I bet you're on VirginMedia. The tight bastards.

[Angelo]

I've solved my crashing problems by disabling smooth edges. My crashes were of the sort that after about 15 minutes of play, the system would freeze and my monitor would stop getting a signal, remedied only by a hard reset. Of course it's very weird, since I run more graphically intensive games with antialiasing without any problems.

[Lum]

Tried to patch the 'Reloaded to Razor' thing I have in my game through the patch someone left on rapidfire, but it told me I had the wrong region. How else can I patch it? Can I change the region? Or should I just shrug and be on my way? Can't say Sims 3 is a priority for me.

[MacJake]

I actually tried that *upgrade* as an experiment to see if it made any difference and couldn't get it to patch either. So I changed a registry value and got it to patch. I had the .00002 patch so I did HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Sims/The Sims 3/SKU/*change value to 2*, then I patched it and it took. I had to reapply the crack.exe afterwards but the game fired up fine afterwards. No crashes, nada. I only have minor graphic glitches but I think that's my more machine.

I haven't investigated much yet to see if any of that made a major difference from the original Reloaded version I installed, but my skuversion is now 1.0.632.00002. For what that's worth at this point.

[FourCats]

bad RAM causes bluescreens or hardlocks (or reboots if you haven't turned that option off)

total shutdowns are usually overheating but could also be a bad power supply

Sometimes in my house total shutdowns are caused by a hungry cat running over the powersupply button.

[TashaYarrr]

Sometimes in my house total shutdowns are caused by a hungry cat running over the powersupply button.

My husband just HAD to buy the enormous black guild-navigator-tank-from-Lynch's-Dune tower case with power and reset buttons on the top. The cat quickly demonstrated to him that they would need to be disconnected, stat.

Angelo, you make me realize that I'm not sure I ever turned edge smoothing back on post-RZR. I definitely had it on at various settings during my RLD crashes. Sigh. Back to the drawing board. RZR vs RLD will be academic soon, but still curious to see if edge smoothing = reproducible system freezes.

If someone wants to provide clearly-denoted links I'd be happy to update the top post.

[mikaa]

Updated to Razor with the overwrite patch, so far it works smoothly. Also razor version fixed the bug with dissapearing items from sim inventory after switching the active family (most annoying bug I had in reloaded), so far I didn't notice any other improvements.

[J. M. Pescado]

That is not a feature changed by the Razor version. The inventory will self-destruct at the next available opportunity, after you have stopped looking. There were basically no code changes between versions.

[Lorelei]

Was bored, so decided to try an experiment FOR SCIENCE.

Laptop stress test running RELOADED version results: 72+ hours and still going, albeit with some graphical flickers when I have Firefox running at the same time. Have swooshed all over the 'hood and gardened, skilled, etc. Graphics on high.

YMMV.

My conclusion is that any flickering / freezing I've dealt with = memory leaks due to other memory-hogging applications  (TS3 gobbles up a G+ if you let it) or too much heat.

[TashaYarrr]

Lorelai, would you mind mentioning whether you had any Edge Smoothing enabled?  I'm not sure if 'graphics on high' definitely implies that.

[missaaliyah]

I haven't had any problems running the Reloaded version although some bugs, and now I have the Razor one installed its running better, little or no bugs at all.  Game is faster in a way and loads quicker.

[barachanchan]

If anyone has the Razor, 1.0.631, or 1.0.632 version of the game, can they please confirm if they see this message while connected to the internet that their game is "non-final, unauthorized."

[blackjackii]

I basically proved that my crashing was caused by advanced rendering being on.  I turned it on yesterday as a test - my ponds and fountains look really stupid without it - and then after I shut down the game and started it up it crashed immediately when I tried to start it.  I turned adv rend off via the options.txt file, and was able to start it up.  Then I reset all my settings to default, which includes rendering on, turned that off, left everything else (a mix of high and medium), restarted, and played for a couple of hours and no crashing.  So, for me at least, it's the advanced rendering that causes the BSOD.

Heat problem was pretty well solved by the Razor version.  My CPU temp can hit 80+ after a long time of playing, my computer will shut down at 90.  I make myself minimize frequently which will instantly drop it a few degrees.  GPU and system temp are staying out of the danger zone altogether, whereas with Reloaded they were in it.

[Zazazu]

If anyone has the Razor, 1.0.631, or 1.0.632 version of the game, can they please confirm if they see this message while connected to the internet that their game is "non-final, unauthorized."

The general rule with pirated games is to block them from your firewall. Never let them connect. With Sims games since BV, never run from the launcher. I suspect that is why issues are being had...running from the launcher and letting your game connect is the only way it would know of the outside world, and that it may or may not be a registered version.