Crash on save

[kmonica]

Hi all,
Sorry if this post is redundant; I have searched the forum but could not seem to find a solution. I am experiencing crash on save almost every time I save the game. It became really unplayable; about 80% of the time it crashes to desktop while saving. I have no custom content other than Awesomemod and all latest patches. I used to get error 12 and 13 at first, now it just crashes to desktop. If anyone has solution or any workaround it'd be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Tever]

Did you try reinstalling yet? Maybe one of the patches got corrupted on install.

[ProfPlumbob]

are you using the autosave feature in the AM config?  Ever since I started using it, crashing would typically happen around the third autosave.  It has never crashed when I manually save, only when autosave kicks in. 

[J. M. Pescado]

I have not observed this phenomenon and see no reason why it would be the case, but the game has always had issues with saving, and frequent autosaving can exacerbate problems that already exist in saving.

[Process Denied]

If your game has gotten very large and your computer specs aren't the greatest, you might try lowering your graphic options.

[kmonica]

Hi all,

Thanks for posting!

@ Tever:  reinstalling now, let's see what'll happen

@ ProfPlumbob: I tried the autosave feature but in my case it seems to make no difference; it crashes randomly (very often!) whether I save manually or thru Awesomemod.

@ ProcessDenied: My world is very small, currently only 35MB. I am running 3.20GHz  i7 extreme edition CPU (overclocked to 3.8Ghz), 2 GeForce 9800 GX2 cards in SLI mode, 8GB Ram, 3 western digital drives in RAID. All with the latest drivers.  I tried disabling SLI (and just about anything else I could think of!) but it seems to make no difference. My system kicks a major butt with all other games with no stability or other issues, only Sims seems to be borked for me :-(

I am putting clean install of Sims now, and will try again with my current saved world, although I have a feeling it probably won't change much...
Thanks.

[ProfPlumbob]

an interesting observation; autosave doesn't crash my game when it's running in window mode, but only in fullscreen.  The last two nights I tested this leaving the game on, one night with full screen, the other in window.  No crashing with window mode, full screen crashed by its third save. 

weird!

[Process Denied]

I didn't mean the computer graphics, I meant in the game under options, the game had all of them on high, so I lowered them to medium instead and my game stopped crashing.  As your game gets bigger, your computer graphic options may have to be lowered to compensate.

[byronh]

It seems games randomly get corrupted regardless of what mods or CC (or lack thereof) you have installed.

The only advice I can give is save often. I made that mistake again today while trying to make my own neighbourhood. I assumed an error code 13 or crash was unlikely because none of the residents would have even begun story progression, but I was wrong after about 3 hours of work.

The error codes/crashes seem to ONLY occur after you don't save for a long time. When I play with autosave every 15 minutes, I haven't had a single crash or error code.

[wizard_merlin]

The error codes/crashes seem to ONLY occur after you don't save for a long time. When I play with autosave every 15 minutes, I haven't had a single crash or error code.

I don't agree, I often run the game over several hours (real time) without saving, and it saves fine when i do.  the longest i have gone without saving was about 8 hours playing.  When I finally saved to go to bed, it saved fine.  So I don't think the time between saving has anything to do with it.

I have only had 1 problem with saving, which threw an error 12.  I deleted the saved game, restored the back up, and haven't had any errors since.

I have only had one crash on saving, and that was after selecting quit, then telling the game to save before quitting, it crashed during the save.  Since then, I always save on it's own, then quit without saving, no problems since.

[gelfling]

The error codes/crashes seem to ONLY occur after you don't save for a long time. When I play with autosave every 15 minutes, I haven't had a single crash or error code.

I also disagree. There are times when I can play for hours on end without an issue and yet on other occasions I see one or other of these save errors after no more than thirty minutes of play. There's something wrong with the game client somewhere but if there is a link between the amount of time played and a save error then it has to be triggered by some item, Sim or other random thing that may be encountered during play. Perhaps it's triggered by a random act carried by an NPC Sim such as switching on the radio and tuning it into the children's station.

[kmonica]

Hey all! Thanks for all the great ideas. It seems that I have finally fixed my crashes. For GOOD! What did the trick for me is setting the "High Detail Lots" to 4. Here is a useful post http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/79541.page  Go figure why this worked, but it just took away ALL my crashes including error 12 and 13. Just played for 15 sim days continously and not even ONE crash!!! YAY!!!! 

[lmind]

Hey all! Thanks for all the great ideas. It seems that I have finally fixed my crashes. For GOOD! What did the trick for me is setting the "High Detail Lots" to 4. Here is a useful post http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/79541.page  Go figure why this worked, but it just took away ALL my crashes including error 12 and 13. Just played for 15 sim days continously and not even ONE crash!!! YAY!!!! 

I read that thread and tried this yesterday.  Just came back to report that it did not work for us.  We still get CTD, error 12, and error 13's when saving.  It happens randomly, whether we play for 5 minutes or for 50.  Seems more likely to happen if the camera is on a community lot, as opposed to having the camera on the active family's home lot. (but happens randomly on both) Our savegame is up to ~63megs after 4 generations on normal lifespan, and I think the game simply eats itself after a while.  Eventually, no matter what you do, saving becomes a game of Russian roullette, and that's just the way it is.

[kmonica]

Hi lmind,

Don't give up; I am sure you'll find solution soon! I can tell you it took me weeks to find a solution to my crash problem; very frustrating and it seems a lot of folks out there have that problem. I hope and trust that EA will fix it with the next patch.

[lmind]

Here to report back (again).

Tried playing in windowed mode, worked for about 25 minutes, then crashed with error code 12, and then 13.  At this point, we can only play 15-20 minutes (sometimes 30, as I said before) before crashing while saving.  We still keep autosave turned on and it saves every 5 minutes, so that if (read: when) it crashes, we only lose 5 minutes of human time.  I can't even begin to tell you how frustrating it is to play the same freaking story over, and over, and over, and over.  We really need a solution to this, and are open to trying anything.

So far, we have tried:
~removing custom content
~removed all cache files, regenerated without awesomemod, removed script.cache, then ran with awesomemod
~Save in Edit Town
~Save As in Edit Town (this actually sometimes works, but we have to close the game anyway because it will crash the very next autosave)
~Manual Saving (of course)
~turning down the number of High Detail lots to 4
~playing in window mode
~saving while zoomed in on the ground of the lot (so that not a lot of objects were onscreen)


OH, and we're not willing to play without awesomemod; we are on generation 5 in a Legacy Challenge and are not willing to start over!

As I said, all we get is a good 20 minutes of playing time before we have to reload the game. It is complete BS.   Anyway, if anyone has another solution, please post!

Thanks!

[wizard_merlin]

Have you tried a game without AM, just to make sure it isn't something EA related?

I would recommend taking your saves folder and moving it somewhere safe, so you can later return to your current game if you want to.

What I would do, and suggest, is a complete uninstall and then re-install and patch, then play for a while with a clean vanilla game.  You may not want to play without AM, but for testing and troubleshooting purposes, you need to.

If you still get crashes, it is an EA thing and your dependent on EA to maybe fix it.

If the game doesn't crash after a few hours, I would either run the Installer helper (recommended, but if running Vista, turn off UAC before running the installer), or manually install the framework, and then play the game again, still with no mods to make sure you haven't damaged any files, or screwed anything up, while installing the framework.

If the game still runs fine, then add AM (re-downloaded just before installing) and run the game on the default settings for a while.  If it still works then add the config file (made fresh) and run the game.

If after all this you are not crashing, I would suspect your previously saved games have a corrupt file/s which is causing the issue.  But if you want to check, you could move the saved game into the new saves folder and try playing it.  If it crashes, I would conclude a corrupt game file/s and recommend scrapping it and starting a fresh game.

[lmind]

Definitely have played numerous games with and without AM, no crashes whatsoever.  It is only the Legacy neighborhood, and only when it reaches a certain size.   We seem to have started having problems when the savegame file reached 45MB, and haven't stopped having problems since.  I would be interested to know if anyone hasn't had a problem with a Legacy-type neighborhood that is greater than 45MB.  At any rate, I'm sure we could start a new game and play for hours without a problem, because we did that already.  This is our second Legacy game, and the only one that has reached a large file size.  This is the only thing we can think of.  The game simply cannot handle such a large, complicated neighborhood.  We do not play with overstuffed houses, there is no custom content --- it doesn't matter.  Maybe something on the lot is corrupted, but I think the savegame would never happen if that was the case.  We can save.... sometimes.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for all the suggestions.  Think this is EA's problem to fix.  (We had this problem with theSims 2)

[kmonica]

Lmind:

One more suggestion: have you tried running the game in administrator's mode? This was my first attempted fix and while it did not completely eliminate the problem it reduced the errors by about 80%. Also it seems that the larger the game gets the more of errors it gets, at least from my experience.  I know how annoying and frustrating this is and I am very surprised how silent EA is about this. I hope they will release a patch soon! Keep us posted if you find the solution!

[Patoloszek]

I had a very similar problem, my game crashed like every 5 minutes, i couldnt save it because it crashed while saving too.
Only one solution I googled actually solved the problem. Try getting rid of norton antivirus or avg if you use this software. If not, then disable or uninstall current antivirus and try running the game. Good luck!