Long pauses

[wizard_merlin]

Last time I was getting frequent freeze-ups I decided to try rebooting my computer and it really helped.   Don't know why but it's worth trying maybe.

Weren't there reports, or suggestions, that TS3 had memory leaks?

If so, that would explain why rebooting the computer helps.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Hell, yes.  Jordi is right.  Game should not be taking up almost 2 Gigs of my 4, as is what's happening when these long pauses occur.

[wizard_merlin]

Hell, yes.  Jordi is right.  Game should not be taking up almost 2 Gigs of my 4, as is what's happening when these long pauses occur.

I have seen the game take up nearly 6GB of the 12GB I have and push 2-3 of the 8 cores to 95-100% of usage.  I have long felt that because of this, many people would experience fairly severe problems when the game tried to grab resources that weren't available, or simply pushed thei available resources to the max.

I hate to think how bad the EP is going to make things.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Wow, GTA4 doesn't tax my dual core as bad as that, and yes, TS3 is taking 99% of processes (Sweet Jeebus) around the time of the pause, but the bastard is still responding, of course (even though you can't do jack in the game).

[Sibylla]

I have seen the game take up nearly 6GB of the 12GB I have and push 2-3 of the 8 cores to 95-100% of usage

My guy knows a guy, who did a little tweaking and was able to cut Sims 2 from sending empty packages (don't know what that means, but I guess it has something to do either with the processor or the memory ). He was running the game for his girlfriend on some kind of a windows games emulator on linux on mac -thingy and got the game running smoothly. The only problem was the having a mac with linux on it -part; and he compiled the os himself. That would be a pretty hard thing for us non-techies to do.. I wonder if that could be done on Sims 3, with some genious programming skills.

[muse]

I was having this problem too, playing on my new MacBook.  It was most frustrating when my Rock Star sim was doing autograph sessions and it would take 45 game minutes to sign one autograph, making the session a failure.

However, I decided this must be an issue with memory or my graphics card, and started playing on my desktop PC, and then my Imac.  The problems have not recurred on either, with the same neighborhoods, mods, and custom content loaded.

[scandalicious]

I was having this problem too, playing on my new MacBook.  It was most frustrating when my Rock Star sim was doing autograph sessions and it would take 45 game minutes to sign one autograph, making the session a failure.

However, I decided this must be an issue with memory or my graphics card, and started playing on my desktop PC, and then my Imac.  The problems have not recurred on either, with the same neighborhoods, mods, and custom content loaded.

Apropos of little, but my Observant Rock Star has trouble with hers for a totally different reason.  She's too busy "OMG YAY/BOO!"-ing the fans' traits to actually move on to the next one.

[MrsSoares]

I am also having the same issue with the slow downs. It takes me half the morning to get my sims off to work/school, and the other half of the night to feed them before they starve to death becasue they didnt have time to eat in the morning. I am hard pressed to think its my puter as its a brand spaking new machine, Sims 3 being the first thing I installed on it 2 days after getting it. My maids stand around the outside of the house, dreaming of lost loves I suppose, my sims starve and piddle themselves because no one farking moves.

I origianlly started with AM and Indie, took out Indi, reconfigured AM.. still same issue. Deleted all saved games, started a fresh hood with the latest AM and still the same thing. In two test runs, the first with AM installed, nothing else, I allowed my only 2 sims to sleep untill they woke for work, qued up some actions (shower, tinkle and eat) In the run with AM the first sim had no time to eat and showered untill he was an hour late for work (because he stood outside the shower for so long contemplating something) and the second got to prepare her waffles after her shower, but not eat them, and was still late for work. In the run without AM I qued up the same actions, and the first had time to complete everything just as the carpool arrived and the second not only was able to eat, but then stood around the kitchen for 15 sims minutes with nothing to do.

This makes me a sad panda because I want to put my fist through the screen when I have to yell at my sims like I do my child to get something done. I have always played with MATY mods, but I am not sure my sanity can handle the oddness that has consumed my sims right now.

Has anyone got a theory as to what the problem might be, or how to address it without giving up on AM?

[wizard_merlin]

I am also having the same issue with the slow downs. It takes me half the morning to get my sims off to work/school, and the other half of the night to feed them before they starve to death becasue they didnt have time to eat in the morning. I am hard pressed to think its my puter as its a brand spaking new machine, Sims 3 being the first thing I installed on it 2 days after getting it. My maids stand around the outside of the house, dreaming of lost loves I suppose, my sims starve and piddle themselves because no one farking moves.

Has anyone got a theory as to what the problem might be, or how to address it without giving up on AM?

Hard to say.  Just because your computer is brand new doesn't always mean it is spec'ed to handle what you want it to.  If I had a dollar for every time someone has said their computer was brand new and not the problem, only to discover that CPU speed was too slow, RAM size too small, or Graphics card under spec'ed, etc, I wouldn't have to worry about working ever again.  However, in your case, given the information you mentioned, the computer looks less likely to be the case (but could still be, without knowing the specs of your system) as your game runs fine without AM installed, suggesting the system can handle the game.  But whether the system specs can handle what AM does to the game, that's probably debatable also, as I wouldn't expect it to add that much.  All I know is the game grabs an awful lot of resources on my system when I play.

Do you have any other mods, that may be interacting poorly with AM, resulting in the slowdown?

I would also suggest trying AM without the config file, just use the default AM settings, maybe it is one of the options your enabling or disabling in the config file that is causing the slowdown, especially if it is drawing more resources from the system.

A couple of options to consider, if you haven't already.

[MrsSoares]

I hadnt thought of trying to run without the config file, but I will do that right now. Thanks.

ETA: Removing the config file may have fixed it, so next test will be with a new config file (when I have time) RL so interupts my game time.

[lordrichter]

I am also having the same issue with the slow downs.

I would also suggest uninstalling the game, cleaning up all traces left behind, and reinstalling the game.   I don't think that just starting a new game necessarily resets the playing field.

[ElviraGoth]

As I was watching sims leave for work/school at that dreaded 8-9 am timeframe, I thought it looked like they were taking turns moving.  One sim would move, stop in midair while another one on screen moved, etc.

I started pausing when I knew a sim was just waiting for their clothes to load, and that helped some.

Then I tried switching to map view during the "get out the door, now!" hustle, and they all seem to move faster.  All the kids get on their bikes (except the current household's kids, who ride the bus), and all the workers get out to their carpools much faster than when I stay at the lot view.

I may be wrong, but I think it's the way the game handles all the movements onscreen.  It doesn't have to work as hard at refreshing the graphics in map view.

[Tangie]

I have a game from August, a family of 9, which became unplayable due to the severe lagging, jams at the school, and stinky, hungry sims flopping over sleeping everywhere (they eventually even lose all free will and will just stand around until given orders, then take 2-4 sim hours performing whatever tasks you give them). I have since been playing much smaller neighborhoods of no more than 30-some sims (at least that's what they're up to so far) and have not had these issues.

I just went back to play this saved game the other evening, and nothing had improved. Log jams at the school, no free will, stop and go movement, and sims moving so slowly that it takes hours to accomplish anything. So after seeing MrsSoares post yesterday, I decided to try it without AM. Took AM out, cleared caches, and played the game again last evening. I was surprised that it DOES play much better, and sims have free will again, and there were no issues with sims getting in or out of the school. Lots of green stinky clouds coming from sim bodies still, but that could be due to not enough time passing since I took AM out. Not perfectly smooth and seamless game play by any means, but a definite improvement over how poorly it functions with AM installed.

So, I have to conclude that unless you have a super powerful PC that can handle the additional processing demands, AM can make game play every bit as bad as the vanilla game is all by itself. Sad, but true. Which is why I am currently saving up to purchase a gaming PC.

In the meantime, I am sticking with playing my smaller 'hoods and working to keep my population down so I can avoid the meltdown as long as possible, and will just keep starting over if it happens again. Which is why I have been working on my ideal neighborhood - once I get it the way I want it, I can use it as a template to start over without having to recreate the 'hood. Unless or until I get tired of this, in which case I guess I'll go back to playing Sims 2 for awhile.

[wizard_merlin]

So, I have to conclude that unless you have a super powerful PC that can handle the additional processing demands, AM can make game play every bit as bad as the vanilla game is all by itself. Sad, but true. Which is why I am currently saving up to purchase a gaming PC.

In the meantime, I am sticking with playing my smaller 'hoods and working to keep my population down so I can avoid the meltdown as long as possible, and will just keep starting over if it happens again. Which is why I have been working on my ideal neighborhood - once I get it the way I want it, I can use it as a template to start over without having to recreate the 'hood. Unless or until I get tired of this, in which case I guess I'll go back to playing Sims 2 for awhile.

When you upgrade to a new PC, if you can, try to avoid the off the shelf variety as they usually fall down in one area or other for high end gaming.  If you can (sometimes costs more) have someone custom build a system for you, and make sure your CPU, RAM and Graphics card is as far over the stated minimum specs as you can afford.

I have a system resource monitor running on my second monitor which I can keep an eye on when TS3 is running, and the game really does grab alot more resources than the minimum system spec's say is required.

Then I tried switching to map view during the "get out the door, now!" hustle, and they all seem to move faster.  All the kids get on their bikes (except the current household's kids, who ride the bus), and all the workers get out to their carpools much faster than when I stay at the lot view.

I may be wrong, but I think it's the way the game handles all the movements onscreen.  It doesn't have to work as hard at refreshing the graphics in map view.

That sounds reasonable, and I have held a similar view for a long time about this game.  Once I saw How much of the resources the game was grabbing within my system, it seems reasonable that a borderline system will be adversely affected.  I guess the big question is, is it the Graphics card, CPU, RAM, or a combination that's the problem?

I know the TS3 supported Graphics Card list actually shows some older, lower end cards, which may be the biggest issue.  One of the "Supposedly" supported lower end cards (that was listed, haven't checked to see if it still is) gave me problems with TS2, yet EAxis says it supports TS3.  If it was problematic with TS2, I really don't believe it would handle TS3 any better, probably worse.

[ElviraGoth]

I upgraded my graphics card and RAM last spring, long before TS3 came out.  And my system is 4 years old, but it was designed for gaming at the time, and I have no problems running other games that are graphics intensive. 

I still run XP, though.  Maybe it's the OS that's slowing things down.  I'm sure switching from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system would have a significant effect, especially for things that the GPU doesn't handle.

I need to get a look at Windows 7.  Didn't like the look of Vista and it had too many problems.  I had Windows ME at one time, so I didn't want to have to use another glitchy system.

[scandalicious]

I just went back to play this saved game the other evening, and nothing had improved. Log jams at the school, no free will, stop and go movement, and sims moving so slowly that it takes hours to accomplish anything. So after seeing MrsSoares post yesterday, I decided to try it without AM. Took AM out, cleared caches, and played the game again last evening. I was surprised that it DOES play much better, and sims have free will again, and there were no issues with sims getting in or out of the school.

Not to state the obvious, but I see at least two variables there.  More depending on what the timeline actually was, and what preparations were made.  When testing, you want to minimize those as much as you can.  I'm not suggesting you set up a sterile lab environment, but there were some steps you could have taken that would have helped immensely.  Now, I don't know if you did take extra measures, and neglected to mention them.  Judging only on what I see, however, even if your conclusion is correct, I would call the data you used unreliable.

Question: Did you have a look at what your system thought it was doing around the times that your sims went stupid on you?  If so, was there anything of note?

So, I have to conclude that unless you have a super powerful PC that can handle the additional processing demands, AM can make game play every bit as bad as the vanilla game is all by itself. Sad, but true. Which is why I am currently saving up to purchase a gaming PC.

Hrm...  I'm not sure I can agree. I bought my current computer sometime late last year.  It was cheap and initially couldn't even load Northrend.  More memory fixed that, but I still get happyfuntiemlag in Dalaran during WG.  ("Blah blah WoWcrack. Blah blah system on knees. Blah, mostly fix't!" to the unaddicted.)  This isn't a lean mean gaming machine.

That said, I haven't seen any performance issues from AM that weren't already there in the vanilla (unpatched) game.  In fact, I haven't run into the previous performance issues yet, but won't assume they're gone until I get much more playtime under my belt.  Not that I haven't run into problems, but the issues I've pinned down so far have been unrelated.

If it is a system spec issue, I'd suspect it's more complex than AM requiring a "super powerful PC". Wizard_merlin gets into this here:

Just because your computer is brand new doesn't always mean it is spec'ed to handle what you want it to.  If I had a dollar for every time someone has said their computer was brand new and not the problem, only to discover that CPU speed was too slow, RAM size too small, or Graphics card under spec'ed, etc, I wouldn't have to worry about working ever again.

To expand on that a bit, computers are not monolithic slabs of hardware, but interconnected modular bits of hardware.  Now I admit, I haven't recently been windowshopping, but my cynical experience is that on a typical premade computer, these bits are not of equal quality, and the salespeople are only too happy to wave the shiny bits in front of you while kicking the subpar components into the back room where THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO FRATERNIZE WITH THE CUSTOMERS OR ELSE THEY WILL GET THE HOSE AGAIN.  Assuming they even know which is which, natch.  I doubt this has changed.

Guh, I'm oversimplifying things a lot, and think I'm running the risk of either talking in circles or rambling uselessly.  I'll just end here.

[Tangie]

I agree with you; at one time, either this game or another, I took AM out and still had an unplayable game. I admit that I did not test extensively in either case. ETA: the saved game I played last Sunday is also a bit older but I am not experiencing any of the issues mentioned above, except for the fact that the babysitters and maid would do nothing but stand on the porch the entire time they were there. Grrrr.

It's also true that my computer is an off-the-shelf piece of crap, and my graphics card is not even supported by EA. Worse yet, I cannot upgrade my memory at all, although I don't know that it matters since it's my understanding that there's only so much memory Vista can utilize anyway. And I purchased this craptastic machine less than a year ago. The price was right at the time, though.

When I get the cash, hopefully in the next 3-6 months, I intend to upgrade. I am not awesome enough to build my own machine, and neither is anyone I know IRL, so I'll have to find someone at some computer shop who'll build it for me. Or else buy an overpriced Alienware monster, which is tempting me due to all the bling.  

[wizard_merlin]

It's also true that my computer is an off-the-shelf piece of crap, and my graphics card is not even supported by EA. Worse yet, I cannot upgrade my memory at all, although I don't know that it matters since it's my understanding that there's only so much memory Vista can utilize anyway. And I purchased this craptastic machine less than a year ago. The price was right at the time, though.

That applies to 32-bit systems.  64-bit systems can support much higher levels of RAM, but also require a supported CPU.

When I get the cash, hopefully in the next 3-6 months, I intend to upgrade. I am not awesome enough to build my own machine, and neither is anyone I know IRL, so I'll have to find someone at some computer shop who'll build it for me. Or else buy an overpriced Alienware monster, which is tempting me due to all the bling.  

Don't let the bling fool you.  The extra you pay for the overpriced Alienware bling may enable someone else to get you more RAM, a slightly better CPU or even a better graphics card for the same money.  If you did know someone who could build a system for you, you would have done better as you probably wouldn't be paying for labour charges to assemble the machine and install the OS, etc to get it up and running for you.  But on the flip side, a good computer shop will charge reasonable prices, and if they use OEM products, they are cheaper than full retail, it may offset some of the labour charges.

When your ready to upgrade, make sure you do some good research first to make sure your going to get the best bang for your buck.

[BattyCoda]

When I get the cash, hopefully in the next 3-6 months, I intend to upgrade. I am not awesome enough to build my own machine, and neither is anyone I know IRL, so I'll have to find someone at some computer shop who'll build it for me. Or else buy an overpriced Alienware monster, which is tempting me due to all the bling.  

Don't let the bling fool you.  The extra you pay for the overpriced Alienware bling may enable someone else to get you more RAM, a slightly better CPU or even a better graphics card for the same money.  If you did know someone who could build a system for you, you would have done better as you probably wouldn't be paying for labour charges to assemble the machine and install the OS, etc to get it up and running for you.  But on the flip side, a good computer shop will charge reasonable prices, and if they use OEM products, they are cheaper than full retail, it may offset some of the labour charges.

When your ready to upgrade, make sure you do some good research first to make sure your going to get the best bang for your buck.

Also, sadly, Alienware is now part of the evil Dell empire now ; independent no longer.

[muse]

I was messing around with the game on my MacBook, and was able to alleviate this problem somewhat by lowering the resolution of the game.  Response lags that had previously been twenty or thirty gametime minutes went down to three or four, making the game moderately playable.  Perhaps give that a shot?

[Tangie]

I tried lowering the settings on several options - graphics and I don't know what all, I'll have to look again to tell you which ones. It didn't seem to make any difference for me on my craptastic machine, unfortunately. 

[tjstreak]

This really does explain a lot.  Perhaps all of the "buggy" stuff in EA's code simply reflects their goal of having the game run on as many computers as possible.  If you want a different story progression and different features, you have to upgrade to a better and faster system.

Personally, I have a hard time justifying upgrading a computer to run a single game, let alone a single mod of a single game.  I have an older machine (it was a second hand machine which had been used by a community college).  It runs just about everything I want it to run, smoothlly, except for TS3 with Awesomemod.  My primary reason for getting this machine was to run various business software -- mostly specialized database software.  (I have run a couple of businesses.)  So it meets 99% of my needs.

Unfortunately, this means that I run the game without Awesome mod most of the time.  The NRSaa supercomputer and story progression offer comparable features without the same performance hit.  Of course, I have implemented serious population control, limiting the game to about 75 sims.  Honestly, this seems to be more than enough.  The game really becomes really goofy by the time there are 200 plus sims, even without performance slowdowns.  In fact, 75 sims may be far more than what is needed.

Of course, I find all the homes being uploaded to be rather irritating because there is no way that the game can accomodate a lot of homes homes.  With 75 sims, 30 households appear to be the norm.  If I need more baby bombs, an appropriate number of sims can be pollinated until the need passes.

[Spineraker]

Okay, I've been digging into this for the last two days. I'm on a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), and I needed to re-install Sims 3--obviously. I brought over my save from my original play in Vista (I've been using the same Simie since day 1 release of Sims 3). So here's the breakdown of what I went through:

My sim lot on Monday, when I first re-installed the game and all addons, was updated to the latest patch and latest AM revision. I was glad to hear about the new feature to re-award the sims their earned plaques for skills as I long ago forgot to take nearly all of mine off the wall of the house I moved from (and for some reason couldn't steal them back with my Klepto... ). Anyway, I played for about an hour and suddenly locked up in game. This was no ordinary freeze either: I was on speed setting 3, so I could see all animations very well such as the bushes, the plumb bob, trees, etc. My mouse would move just fine, but the picture was locked and so was the rest of the game world; I force quit. Coming back this evening, I come to find out that it is

still happening. I re-installed AM thinking I got another bad DL (its happened to me before...latest Firefox seems to be causing some major grief with my internets -_-...). The problem persisted, and now is happening every 5 to 25 minutes. So, with some idea from previous pages here, I went into the game and analyzed everything I could with the NRS Supercomputer's features--a very handy debug tool, imho, as close to the "Yellow Box" debugger I always hid on my lot in Sims 2.

Here are the results (I'm placing it all here):

What I changed:

• 11 Stereos running; turned them off. (Coincidentally, this also returned music capabilities to my live household. I was not aware I was missing it until I suddenly heard the "job done" music score for the first time in a long time.)
• 1 Missing sim returned to reality. Not sure where she went, but she's back now...
• 6 voices inherited from their parents. Again, not quite sure of this one but I did it anyway.

Neighborhood Stats:

• 38 Households
• 88 Residents
• 85 Service NPCs
• 23 Townies
• 93 Total Lots
• 64 Residential
• 29 Commercial
• 34 Residential lots occupied
• 30 Residential lots unoccupied
• 20 Residential lots completely empty

• Total Town Wealth: 5,373,087

[/list]

After this I suddenly noticed the second portion of this strange lockup thread: The jittery pathing. Thinking that I was boned, I looked at each of the characters and realized that all but one of the three members of the household were running off Supreme Commander scripts. I canceled all of them and suddenly my game returns to normal. I am now almost an hour into play with no locks yet. I'm wondering if SC and the latest patch are having some problems, or if the stereos are far more resource intensive than I had previously thought...

[Zhivan]

I'm another with the sudden stops when the sims head out for work and/or school. The babysitters also freeze at the door, quite permanently until the parents come home. I have AM and Indie installed but use only Indie wittingly. I will have to check out what Spineraker posted above and see if anyone in the house has the Supreme Commander stamp.

I've had very few issues prior this, but can tell you that the above posters reporting it taking more than an hour to get their sims down a flight of stairs into the waiting carpool or bus are not exaggerating.

Edit/Update: Okay, familiarized myself a bit more with the Awesomemod and found the Configuration Tool. I disabled the Supreme Commander features and it seemed to help a little, making me think that it's not the primary part of the last patch that's bumping heads codewise. I tested in a family of four over a period of five sim days and I did check in the game to be sure none of the family members were following a Supreme Commander script.

J.M. is leagues above me in coding and solving game systems difficulties, I'm sure. I'll continue watching this thread to see if anyone else who's having this problem comes up with a fix, I'm just tossing my info out there hopefully to spark some sort of solution. If I do come up with anything (entirely by accident, I'm sure) I'll be sure to update once again.

[J. M. Pescado]

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