Random Crash to Desktop

[Tangie]

If you set the AM config file to allow inactive skill gains, then Supreme Commander will give inactives commands to work on skills without you manually doing it yourself.

In another custom world I was playing a few weeks ago, I only had about a half a dozen sims in it so it was a lot easier to find the problem sim. The game was freezing - running - freezing so I was able to press the pause button like you mentioned in another thread and eventually the game would unfreeze and pause, which allowed me to go to edit town to locate the problem sim. This freezing happened several times; one time it seems that a sim was stuck at a WA register even though SC was instructing the sim to skill painting. On another occasion she was just stuck in her house because she had no easel, and for whatever reason she was not going to the high school to skill painting like the sims do in the original neighborhoods. (She had a path blocked symbol above her head.)

The freezing problems I've been having lately are not off and on freezing. No amount of time will result in the game resuming, so shutting it down via task manager is the only option. But as I mentioned previously, I used the reset world command the third time I restarted, before the freezing occured, and have not had any freezing issues since. I was controlling a 3-sim house, one of whom was a toddler and another was at work, so it wasn't any of the sims under my control who had the problem. It would have taken hours to track down the problem sim when you have a full neighborhood with sims spread out all over the place.

[Menaceman]

With my freezing though it never happens at the same point twice. Once the game freezes and I restart from the last save point, the game runs as normal past the previous freeze until it hits a new freeze point.

[Silent Dreamer]

With my freezing though it never happens at the same point twice. Once the game freezes and I restart from the last save point, the game runs as normal past the previous freeze until it hits a new freeze point.

I can second this. It so far has happened to me when a menu is about to pop up. For example, I wanted to get a career for my sim and the game froze just before the options appeared. Next, it froze when I went to the store right before the options appeared. However, if I restart the save, I can get past that same point with no issue whatsoever... until I get to the next one.

[StormchaserOne]

Pescado there is only one way to solve this crash problem.  Can you create a program to make Windows 7 compatible to SIMS 3?

[wizard_merlin]

Pescado there is only one way to solve this crash problem.  Can you create a program to make Windows 7 compatible to SIMS 3?

What makes you think it isn't compatible?  Running Windows 7 64-bit, and apart from the odd freeze occasionally, there isn't any compatibility issue.  I can go hours a day for several weeks without getting a freeze, then get a couple in a short space of time, then go weeks again without any.  Doesn't sound like a compatibility issue with Windows 7 to me.  I suspect it is more likely a game issue.

[The_Goddess]

Pescado there is only one way to solve this crash problem.  Can you create a program to make Windows 7 compatible to SIMS 3?

What makes you think it isn't compatible?  Running Windows 7 64-bit, and apart from the odd freeze occasionally, there isn't any compatibility issue.  I can go hours a day for several weeks without getting a freeze, then get a couple in a short space of time, then go weeks again without any.  Doesn't sound like a compatibility issue with Windows 7 to me.  I suspect it is more likely a game issue.

I also run Windows 7 64-bit and have had no freezes that last longer than an annoying few seconds.  I'm leaning towards driver issues as my guess for the culprit.  Nvidia cards seem to be causing quite a bit of frustration of late.   I stand by my earlier suggestion of "Go shopping".  Shopping solves so many problems.  Treat yourself to a Radeon.

[lordrichter]

I run Win 7 x64 and NVIDIA with no problems. The only freezing I see is related to items I have previously discussed.

[wizard_merlin]

Pescado there is only one way to solve this crash problem.  Can you create a program to make Windows 7 compatible to SIMS 3?

What makes you think it isn't compatible?  Running Windows 7 64-bit, and apart from the odd freeze occasionally, there isn't any compatibility issue.  I can go hours a day for several weeks without getting a freeze, then get a couple in a short space of time, then go weeks again without any.  Doesn't sound like a compatibility issue with Windows 7 to me.  I suspect it is more likely a game issue.

I also run Windows 7 64-bit and have had no freezes that last longer than an annoying few seconds.  I'm leaning towards driver issues as my guess for the culprit.  Nvidia cards seem to be causing quite a bit of frustration of late.   I stand by my earlier suggestion of "Go shopping".  Shopping solves so many problems.  Treat yourself to a Radeon.

I tried a HD4890 card once, ripped it out and went back to Nvidia.  I couldn't install the Catalyst center for running the displays, it kept saying some windows component was missing, and after 3 weeks of emails back and form with AMD, and forum searching to try and solve the problem I gave up.  With 2 monitors I needed the catalyst to be able to set up both properly.

[dedust]

I've been having this issue too, from the annoying semi freezes where animations and sounds can be seen and heard, but nothing is clickable and so on. This usually doesn't last long and the game resumes by itself. This is sort of a sign of the absolute freeze coming on later.

Then there's the absolute freeze, where I have to force quit the game and hope that my last save wasn't too long ago. Usually happens exactly as I'm using a pop up menu, sometimes in CAS (plan outfit usually), changing game speeds, or sometimes just generally when the time is ripe for a freeze. Which happens to be around 2 hrs of gameplay. So basically if I look at the clock when I start, I'm able to save my game before it'll freeze. What could possibly go wrong in 2 hours that causes the crash? Also I've noticed significant lag in Sim actions, they could be staring the fridge for (sim) hours, before they start cooking.

I'm not even using Windows, I'm running this on OS X Snow Leopard. Which the game thinks to be XP apparently, since it's running trough cider, an emulator platform used by EA among others, so they don't have to do any new coding. And which of course eats a LOT of memory. Those lazy bastards. And my mac has Nvidia too.

[wizard_merlin]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was some kind of bottleneck within the game itself.  Basically EAxis craptastic shit.

[Menaceman]

I have absolutely NO idea what's changed in my game but two days after posting about the constant random crashing it hasn't happened since. I think the only thing I changed was that I turned aging back on for a few Sim days. It was off when I reported the issue. I've had storymode activated the whole time.

[Rainbow_Brite]

I have absolutely NO idea what's changed in my game but two days after posting about the constant random crashing it hasn't happened since. I think the only thing I changed was that I turned aging back on for a few Sim days. It was off when I reported the issue. I've had storymode activated the whole time.

I've never played my game with the aging off but my game continues to crash. I still can't seem to find anything that actually triggers it. I have done the DEP thing, and that helped for a long time. I didn't have any issues and then all of a sudden it started crashing again. I then went and downloaded the CFF explorer and tried that. Again, it seemed to work for awhile and now I am back to having my game crash. I just continually save it whenever I remember and keep reading forums to see if anyone else has found a solution.

[dedust]

I tried the CFF Explorer too, fixed the files in Windows and moved them back to my Mac. Still freezing and crashing, again after about 2 hours of playing. This seems to be the actual playing time, and times when paused don't count. Can't be exactly sure though.

Also there's still this strange Sim lag, that seems to be somehow connected to changing clothes. Going for a jog, to work or to a shower all require changing, and my sims seem to have some trouble with it. They just tend to stand there for hours until they change their clothes. Does anyone else have this, is it EAxian, AM or connected to the crashing?

[StormchaserOne]

Developers are currently working on a new patch.  This will solve DEP Problems.  One thing which is in common with crashes is inventory limit.  EA will be adding a limit to how much can be in inventory.  Also the DEP is crashing with Windows 32 and 64.

[vorpal]

Changing outfits does cause lags as has been mentioned several times in various threads and the only thing you can do in this case is to pause the game before changing to allow the game to load the outfits in the background.

As regards other lags, from what I could see by following twallan's threads at TSC, Story Progression is probably the main cause, as he has set up a testing routine to eliminate lags caused by his own SP mod (http://ts3.tscexchange.com/index.php?topic=1842.0). And this may also be the cause for many of those crashes in connection with some bad sim or routing failure. In one of my games I had a certain homeless Sim named Narcissa Vatos who was so sex-crazed that every time I got the message of her romancing someone the game crashed immediately afterwards (she must have been a bigger bang than even Zaphod Beeblebrox). After I annihilated her the crashes went away. So, your 2 hour problem may be due to something going on behind the scenes that is triggered every two hours and causes your CPUs to overload (which is, of course, an amateurish assumption as I am one of those stupid Mac users who is happy when he manages to find the socket for his keyboard).

What I am quite sure about, though, is that those freezes are EAxian, because I had these from the very beginning when I got the game last year in June. Patch 1.8 was probably the best in this respect as I had no problems then (this was also the patch that enabled Macs to finally use custom hairs again). With 1.11 the freezes are back, but actually less often than before and for some of these I can track the cause (like some routing problems in vacationlands or, as I said, SP events that sort of fail). And whenever this happens and I have to force quit, the Mac equivalent of Process Monitor showed me full bars on both levels. Ea seems to be superbly apt at creating apps that cause your machines to overreact, just look at Bioware's Dragon Age forum and the inability of a formerly quite capable developer team to address these issues.

[lordrichter]

Developers are currently working on a new patch.  This will solve DEP Problems.  One thing which is in common with crashes is inventory limit.  EA will be adding a limit to how much can be in inventory.  Also the DEP is crashing with Windows 32 and 64.

What makes you think this?

[wizard_merlin]

Developers are currently working on a new patch.  This will solve DEP Problems.  One thing which is in common with crashes is inventory limit.  EA will be adding a limit to how much can be in inventory.  Also the DEP is crashing with Windows 32 and 64.

What makes you think this?

Given that EAxis released a patch just before WA to update the base game with new features needed for WA, it is probably a fair call that EAxis will also release a patch prior to the next EP, updating the base game to support the new EP.

As to whether the patch will fix the crashing problem, I would ask the same thing of StormChaserOne.

[ItchyNScratchy]

Glad I found this thread. I'd put TS3 away a few months ago after I couldn't stand playing without AwesomeMod anymore. I've never been able to get AwesomeMod to work. I've read all the tutorials that I could find to see if I was doing something wrong, but I've never been able to figure out the problem. I place AwesomeMod in my game file (no other mods, or even ANY other CC, mind you), I start the game, and it crashes before it can even really begin loading. I tried troubleshooting this last year, but eventually gave up because I couldn't find an episode that anyone had that was similar to mine. When I take AwesomeMod out, the game runs fine. But it's hardly worth playing if I can't play every household without watching each one age to elder before I can even play 3 sim days. So Sims 3 has just set dormant in my machine for a long time.

Short of looking like the lone, dumb idiot, I just never posted my issue here. I don't have Windows 7, so I'm sure that it's not necessarily just a Windows 7 issue. I have Vista 32-bit machine.

I'd love to play Sims 3 again--with AwesomeMod--but I just don't know how to make it work.

[misscatfish]

I place AwesomeMod in my game file

To which "game file" are you referring? Do you have the necessary framework installed?

But it's hardly worth playing if I can't play every household without watching each one age to elder before I can even play 3 sim days.

You can play with aging turned off whether or not you have AM, but there are dozens of other good reasons to have it. You may find it worth your effort to lurk around a bit more for existing information.

[ItchyNScratchy]

I place AwesomeMod in my game file

To which "game file" are you referring? Do you have the necessary framework installed?

But it's hardly worth playing if I can't play every household without watching each one age to elder before I can even play 3 sim days.

You can play with aging turned off whether or not you have AM, but there are dozens of other good reasons to have it. You may find it worth your effort to lurk around a bit more for existing information.

I've got the framework, I've got the d3dx9_31.dll in both the game/bins of WA and the base game. I have the Resource.cfg file in WA and base game. I tried taking it out of the base game and loading, that didn't work. So I just put it back in the base game file. I've got awesome mod in the Hacks portion of WA, and I also tried putting it in the base game hacks section to see if that would help. Nope, nothing, zilch. Checked the Dashboard from MTS, no incompatibilities, no issues showing up there. I've got absolutely no other content in my game, not even EAxis store junk. I've read tutorials, I've tried suggestions from other threads that I thought might help, but I can't figure out what piece of the puzzle I'm missing!

And as for lurking more, I've lurked and lurked and lurked my share, on here, on the Sims 3 site (that doesn't do much good), and on other Sims 3 forums. Unfortunately, most of the time when I can manage to stumble on a situation that I think might be relevant to my situation, I end up finding that there are replies such as, "look around more. You clearly failed." or "Lurk moar, use search." or "READ THE FAQ". It's quite hard to find answers amidst all of the folks replying calling folks n00bs. It's no wonder people can't find answers--they're having to weed through all of the name-calling. That's why I gave up with AwesomeMod last year. I didn't want to deal with being told to read and lurk more. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

I'm not someone who does a lot of talking--as you can see, I've been a member here for quite some time and the only time I ever post here anymore is when I'm at the end of my rope, google hasn't come through for me, and can't find the answer on my own.

ETA: This is also something I've followed in the past. Just tried and it still doesn't work: http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Sims_3_Loading_Crashes
And now I can say that the game will now load about 1/3 of the way and doesn't progress. It also will not close without Ctrl/Alt/Del.

[misscatfish]

ItchyNScratchy: Fair enough. I couldn't tell from your post what you had already tried, and thought it might have been a case of search fail. Bits of this problem do sound familiar from my lurkings, but since I've been lucky in not having very many issues, anything beyond the very, very obvious is beyond my experience. Therefore, I leave you to the tender mercies of the More Awesome.

[myskaal]

Just my recommendation, insure that you have no corrupted files floating about: Completely uninstall. Delete everything. Run CCleaner.

Reinstall and patch.

Follow these instructions for installing the framework: http://sublimesims.net/smf/index.php?topic=1726.0

Drop awesome.package and aweconfig into C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Mods\Packages (unless you specified a different directory for game install, then follow the path as needed).

Come back and let us know if it crashes again.

[DMDye]

Also, remember to delete the My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 folder when uninstalling.

[Rainbow_Brite]

"I have the Resource.cfg file in WA and base game. I tried taking it out of the base game and loading, that didn't work. So I just put it back in the base game file. I've got awesome mod in the Hacks portion of WA"

This is pretty much the same as what myskaal wrote, I just put it all here so you can follow step by step.

First of all.. you should only have one Resource.cfg file. This could have been your issue all along. Secondly, you need to have the d3dx9_31.dll in both C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Game/Bin AND C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 World Adventures/Game/Bin. I know that you mentioned you did this, but check again. Now, you need to put your Resource.cfg file in C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 World Adventures. Then, you need to create a folder for your mods in C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 World Adventures -->(created folder: Mods/Packages). Your mods will go here (including AM). So overall, your mods will go in C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 World Adventures/Mods/Packages.

It's really not as difficult or as intimidating as people who come on this forum and complain about it to be. Like I said, follow that step-by-step and AM should run. If it doesn't, double check.. triple check. It could be something as simple as you thinking you put a file somewhere that it isn't. To check and see if AM is installed correctly, hit ctrl + shift + c and type showconfig in the box. Do this when your 'hood is loaded. If you get 3-4 blue pages popping up with settings, then AM is working correctly.

[StormchaserOne]

I got this DEP issue on priority list along with inventory.  I was on EA chat with Gavin and Microsoft for 3 hours.  I even threatened to hack SIMS 3 to make it compatible to Win 7 64 Bit.  You need to hack game to make it compatible.