Long pauses

[Zhivan]

I have never been able to reproduce these "total freezes" or pauses, so I have no idea what you are doing to cause it.

Sorry, didn't mean to summon you - I had read earlier in the thread where you were not able to recreate this problem in your own game environment. I've read through the thread and tried everything that even made remote sense to me, and have gotten the pauses to an acceptable level. Of course there are other issues now, but what would this game be without the strategic addition of having to work around the random, reoccurring glitch?

[Spineraker]

Of course there are other issues now, but what would this game be without the strategic addition of having to work around the random, reoccurring glitch?

Not an EA game, that's what.  Note that AM is not the only culprit for making glitches--Pescado does what he can do do a fantastic (even, if I dare say, AWESOME) job of making the mod as good as it is. Problem is, there are inherent issues in the core of Sims 3 that, like all EA games, we have to work around anyway...I'm starting to think that this reoccurring glitch--of which mine has returned recently and my fix isn't fixing now--is actually mostly on EA's side; AM just simply exacerbates the glitch to the point of experiencing it.

The fact that Pescado can't reproduce the issue is what is really bugging me. That means there's something that we're doing that he is not...and we don't know to tell him.

[Tangie]

This past week I purchased a new laptop. I installed TS3 along with all of my saved content (including AM) and games. One of my saved games had become unplayable on my old machine (hadn't tried to actually even play it for weeks) due to severe lagging, stop motion action, loss of autonomy, and taking hours of sim time just to get them all out for the car pool or bus - not to mention NPCs walking around with green stink clouds who were also dropping like flies to sleep on the sidewalks because their motives were all in the red. I had a cheap HP with an underpowered AMD processor and 3 GB of DDR2 RAM.

When I played this same game on my new PC, which has an i7-720QM processor and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, I had very, very few problems. I couple of times I did see sims who were running to the door freeze in mid-stride but it only lasted a second or two instead of 20 or 30 sim minutes. They (3 teens and 2 kids) all made it to the bus well within a reasonable period of time, when before they were so slow the bus regularly took off without them. There were no crowds of stinky kids dropping to the ground to sleep in front of the school, preventing all of the kids from even getting inside. I did see a couple of sims still walking around town with green stink clouds but when I switched to one of them her hygiene level was fine so I chalk it up to another EA glitch (one that has been discussed in another thread). One of the most interesting things I noticed playing on this new PC are all of the autonomous actions, many more than they exibited on my previous PC. Sim families were walking around talking to each other practically all the time (previously I saw very little of this and had to order them to socialize with each other) and the sim parents even spontaneously go hug their children several times a day. They even walk faster, meaning on my old PC it might have taken them 20 sim minutes to walk from point A to point B, it now takes them half that time.

There has been some speculation that these problems could be caused by having underpowered equipment, and based on my experience that has been confirmed for me. I don't think it would be too much of a guess to say that Pescado most likely has system specs that are much higher than your average person, which is why he does not see these problems in his game. So I really doubt if it's anything you are doing, I just think this game requires a LOT more processing power than the minimum reqs would have you believe. Even with this new PC, I am not at all convinced that it will run all the content and expansion packs that are sure to be created for this game.

Edited to remove extraneous words and other typing fail.

ETA2: As long as I kept my neighborhoods small, I could get by playing on my old PC. As soon as the population reached about 70-75 (the 'hood above had about 100 sims), I would begin experiencing issues such as the lagging and pauses.

[witch]

There is a command to clear various stuck emitters. One of the early problems with awesomemod had the green stinky clouds permanently attached to sims. If you find the command to clean up the stuck emitters your stink clouds should disappear.

[Sabrewulf]

This has happened to me too, but not in every neighborhood.

In Sunset Valley I have error 13
In Riverview I have these long pauses.

Lovely 

[coltraz]

My game has gone laggy and pause-ridden. It didn't used to be.

If I recall correctly, Pescado plays without anti aliasing. That's probably a part of his good fortune.

[Tangie]

There is a command to clear various stuck emitters. One of the early problems with awesomemod had the green stinky clouds permanently attached to sims. If you find the command to clean up the stuck emitters your stink clouds should disappear.

I found it! Or at least I think I found it; I'll give it a try later and find out. Unless it's been changed, the command is "purgereactions".

[J. M. Pescado]

If I recall correctly, Pescado plays without anti aliasing. That's probably a part of his good fortune.

I don't need anti-aliasing to make things look blurry. That's what vodka is for!

[Augustv]

Thanks for getting back to us on this El Presidente.  I should have known it was going to take a while.  I just left my old neighborhood alone and started a new one.  The only problem I'm having now is the game is crashing to the desktop during build mode, which it didn't do before I installed the expansion pack.  It has nothing to do with Awesomemod though so I'll see what I can do to figure this out.

I miss awesomemod   /cry

[Zhivan]

If I recall correctly, Pescado plays without anti aliasing. That's probably a part of his good fortune.

I don't need anti-aliasing to make things look blurry. That's what vodka is for!

Yay, vodka!