Help! My game's screwed up

[ShortyBoo]

I think my game's fucked up and I'm not sure how it happened or why. I just went to start up my game and it looked like this:



I thought it was strange, but just figured the thumbnails didn't load or something and tried to load the game. Then I got this message:



I tried restarting the game like it said, but the same thing happened again. Is my neighborhood completely lost now? I really don't want to lose the two families I had.

The last time I played, I was moving the camera around to take a pic of one of my sims when the graphics suddenly looked really bad and the game froze. I couldn't minimize the game or anything, so I did a manual restart. I had been getting random CTDs, so I tried disabling Data Execution Prevention by following the instructions posted on MTS. The first time I tried the game, I was able to play six hours with no crashing. The time after that, it froze and I had to manually restart, then I tried again, and after several hours, the same thing happened. The CTDs I was getting at first all had the same Exception info. The first time it froze, there was no xcpt file, but the second time, there was, only it was showing a way different exception. I don't understand what all it means, but it might be helpful.

This is what it normally says when I get the CTDs:

[Exception info]
date: 2009-12-07
time: 18.01.10
type: ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x00000014
address: 0x005c98a1 "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 World Adventures\Game\Bin\TS3EP01.exe":0x0001:0x001c88a1

And this is what showed when the game froze, the last time I played before getting the current error:

[Exception info]
date: 2009-12-09
time: 14.25.02
type: INT_DIVIDE_BY_ZERO
address: 0x007da1d4 "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 World Adventures\Game\Bin\TS3EP01.exe":0x0001:0x003d91d4

[J. M. Pescado]

I think you have experienced a save corruption error. Try rolling back to the .backup version of your .sims3 save.

[ShortyBoo]

I copied all the files from the folder Sunset Valley.sims3.backup into Sunset Valley.sims3 in the Saves folder in My Docs and tried loading the game. The same thing happened. Is there anything else I can try, or is my game lost?

[dolldrms]

I copied all the files from the folder Sunset Valley.sims3.backup into Sunset Valley.sims3 in the Saves folder in My Docs and tried loading the game. The same thing happened. Is there anything else I can try, or is my game lost?

You don't copy the files to the .sims3.  Delete the bad save and rename the backup to .sims3 by deleting .backup from the file name.

[ShortyBoo]

I copied all the files from the folder Sunset Valley.sims3.backup into Sunset Valley.sims3 in the Saves folder in My Docs and tried loading the game. The same thing happened. Is there anything else I can try, or is my game lost?

You don't copy the files to the .sims3.  Delete the bad save and rename the backup to .sims3 by deleting .backup from the file name.

I'll try that, but won't it have the same effect? What's the third folder for, the one that has .bad on the end of it?

[Tangie]

The one that has the "bad" file extention name is your corrupted save file. I recently experienced my first error 12 and got a "bad" file. I just deleted it, and for safe keeping I copied the backup file and placed it elsewhere on my hard drive. Then I renamed the backup file to the name my game was supposed to be named. The next time I opened the game it paused when I selected the game I wanted to open but after a few seconds (I actually think I pressed ctrl-alt-del) then the game loaded normally and I haven't experienced any problems since. At least not yet.

[ShortyBoo]

Well, I tried using the backup, but it didn't work. So I decided to download 3booter and FPS Limiter, thinking maybe that would help at least with my crashing issue, but it didn't. I started up my game, made a new file, and after just a few minutes in build mode, the game CTD and I got his exception:

[Exception info]
date: 2009-12-15
time: 22.35.22
type: ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x44a7ed06
address: 0x00944135 "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 World Adventures\Game\Bin\TS3EP01.exe":0x0001:0x00543135

I don't get why my game keeps crashing. I didn't have this problem at all before WA. And now it seems like the crashes are getting more and more frequent. I just want it to stop so I can play the game. What does that exception mean anyway? I keep getting those ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address ones, just with different numbers at the end.

[sewinglady]

Oh my...I got that once...it's pretty much the BFBVFS for your neighborhood as far as I know.

I uninstalled the game and reinstalled clean - did not even attempt to save any neighborhoods as I decided to go 'minimal' with my reinstallation of custom content.

The one piece of advice I can offer here is that from the point I reinstalled, I have never used the town names as the game file names. I've been using a totally different naming system and always 'save as' so I can always go back in time to a previous point in the neighborhood when things were fine if need be.

[ShortyBoo]

I swear I have the worst luck with Sims games. When I first got TS2, I had a GeForce 6600 GT. For a long time, after an hour or so of playing, I'd get a BSOD and have to manually restart my computer. I tried everything, and in the end, the only thing that stopped it was switching to a Radeon x1900. So for TS3, I wasn't going to switch back to an Nvidia card simply because of my TS2 experience with it not working, so I bought a Radeon HD 4850 in February, just before they announced the release date was to be moved from February to June. Once the game leaked, I installed it and found that when I went into CAS, after just seconds, the music would stutter and the game would go to a black screen or I'd lose the video signal to my monitor, forcing me to manually restart my computer. I tried everything, and I mean everything that was suggested to me. The first thing I did was eliminate overheating as the cause. It never got above 57 C. So I reinstalled Windows, I replaced my power supply, I swapped the stock cooling on the card for a VGA cooler, I swapped out my old case for one with more fans, nothing worked. As a last ditch effort, I decided to try the game with my brother's GeForce 8800, and it worked. He hates ATI cards, so he wouldn't trade me even though my card was a year newer, so I tried going back to my old x1900. It worked, but the graphics sucked.

But now I can't even play on my crappy old video card and I was just thinking recently that maybe the FPS issue might have caused at least part of the problem, but after using it, my game crashed even quicker. Unless I did something wrong and FPS Limiter didn't work. I put it in the Sims 3 root directory with 3Booter. I was hoping maybe the FPS thing was what was wrong with my Radeon HD 4850 and I could go back to using it. But now it's looking like I just might have to buy a new card, but after wasting almost $300 on the 4850 less than a year ago, I'd hate to get a card and have it also not work. I'm almost thinking of buying my brother a newer GeForce card and taking his old one. He plays more games than I do anyway.