The Neverending Pause

[Claeric]

People suspect their VAGUE, UNPLACEABLE ISSUE is a memory issue. I suggest they try a solution related to allowing the game to access more memory.

I really, really don't understand how this is a problem.

[J. M. Pescado]

I am unconvinced at the credibility of this solution because TS3 seems to intentionally limit its memory usage by releasing memory. Additionally, I have not performed this move and have no problems.

[eevilcat]

I've experienced this a few times running Twinbrook. The game renders the current scene ok including any looping animations so hasn't crashed, more likely it's stuck in an endless loop somewhere. If the pathing code/logic is the likely cause, is this not something that Pescado could look at fixing?

Pescado probably could fix it, if he could see it.  The problem is the freezes we are talking about are not predictable and cannot be recreated, and Pescado doesn't get them in his game.  Sending him a save doesn't work, because it doesn't freeze when you restart.  All of this makes it impossible for Pescado to even try to fix, or properly identify the problem.  He needs to be able to reliably reproduce the freeze to track the cause.

If the design or implementation of a particular piece of code itself is flawed then Pescado doesn't need a save game to look at it other than for pinpointing where to look. The suggestion has been that the routing is causing the problems so it's probably worth giving any related code a once over as glaring bugs can often be spotted without running the code. If routing is failing and the piece of code calling it doesn't handle that within a loop then you would end up with what appears to be an endless pause.

[witch]

I plan on upgrading my main HDD and my games HDD to the WD Velociraptor which spin at 10,000rpm, this update won't happen until after I get back from my holiday, so I won't be able to confirm whether the faster HDD makes a difference for a while.

I wonder if you're on to something here. I don't get those pauses - well, not since my sims tried dig sites on SC in WA - I haven't had any pauses at all otherwise. (Touch wood). Although I only have 2GB RAM, I have two 10,000rpm Raptor drives set as RAID 0.

[wizard_merlin]

Those of you on 64 bit systems could try the CFF explorer trick, to tell the exe to allow over 2GB of ram usage (Supposedly it's unecessary, but ticking the box still does something or other, I don't know the specifics of it. Just that it lets the game access more memory if it can't for whatever reason.)

Like before, it's always worth at least trying. CFF explorer fixed a few peoples memory issues with the base game.

Already did that, a long time ago when it was first suggested, and did it with AMB as soon as it was installed.

[GnatGoSplat]

The CFF Explorer trick in Windows x64 does indeed work as a permanent cure to the E12/E13 errors, but it doesn't help the neverending pause nor the long, but eventually ending pauses.

[Sanati]

The suggestion has been that the routing is causing the problems so it's probably worth giving any related code a once over as glaring bugs can often be spotted without running the code. If routing is failing and the piece of code calling it doesn't handle that within a loop then you would end up with what appears to be an endless pause.

If it was a routing problem then everyone would be having the issue. I've never once had the game freeze like is mentioned here in my hundreds of hours of play. I don't see how one sim getting stuck would cause the whole game to freeze either. The amount of processing the game devotes to a single sim's pathfinding is ridiculously minor (it's often moving hundreds of sims around at once). If one sim got stuck on a ledge or something it's much more likely that sim would simply stand there in it's own loop while the game moved on without them until the system reset them or they died. I mean I've seen this happen before when a sim tries to route to something inaccessible, eventually their motives change and they pick something else to route to, I don't see there being a difference in the process when the obstacle is terrain instead of a fence or wall.

To debunk a few other possible causes of the issue, I play off a normal SATA 7200rpm HDD (500gb with less then 2gb free), I play on both EA and custom worlds, I have both EPs and the SP and all store content (except the soccer jerseys because they spammed the hell out of my clothing section), and my PC isn't that great (Vista, AMD Athlon 7750 2x 2.71ghz, 4gb RAM, GeForce 9500 GT 1gb).

Hope that helps you narrow down possible causes. Only thing I can think of (other than bad custom content) would be compatibility issues, maybe an ATI problem, or an issue with specific drivers.

[eevilcat]

Code runs sequentially so if the update gets stuck in a loop then the game will appear paused. The rendering is probably handled in a separate thread so that's why the game graphics are redrawn, including simple animation updates. If this is the cause it's probably a particular sequence of attempted actions on the part of one sim in a particular location that then results in the game getting stuck. This makes it almost impossible to replicate unless you are lucky enough to have saved immediately before, however it is perfectly reasonable to spot bugs in code logic if you have an idea where to look. It's entirely possible that EA encountered this in the test process but it probably didn't make it through triage as, despite being a showstopper, it isn't reproducable and occurs relatively rarely.

[moondance]

I've had both types of freezes. The freeze that eventually ends on its own has always been fixed by resetting the world and has probably been caused by stuck sims.

I also, rarely, get the freeze that never ends which requires me to end task to get out of it. When I get those freezes there is always a tool tip stuck on screen; I've either changed speeds or been about to, or I've hovered over something, such as a sim, that causes a tool tip to appear, and then it freezes.

[Tangie]

Same here with me, moondance.

But I have to say that so far I have not experienced a lot of pauses or freezes since installing AMB. I have probably only played Twinbrook maybe 6 sim weeks, though. I have started 3 different games in order to test out the new careers since I had difficulty changing households. Is it possible that the longer the game goes the more pauses you have? I don't know how long any of you who are having freezing issues have been playing your current game so I was just curious.

I also thought I'd mention that amjoie at Custom Sims 3 reported that while removing, replacing, and repositioning a lot that spawners were multiplying each time. Some of the spawners were actually buried below ground. They were left behind when the building was bulldozed, they were placed on the lot again when she replaced the lot, then more were generated again when she repositioned the lot. I just thought I'd mention this as a possibility because I would think that having so many spawners on a lot might also mess up a game pretty quickly.

[wizard_merlin]

Same here with me, moondance.

But I have to say that so far I have not experienced a lot of pauses or freezes since installing AMB. I have probably only played Twinbrook maybe 6 sim weeks, though. I have started 3 different games in order to test out the new careers since I had difficulty changing households. Is it possible that the longer the game goes the more pauses you have? I don't know how long any of you who are having freezing issues have been playing your current game so I was just curious.

I am playing a relatively new game.  I always restart y game from scratch when EAxis release a new patch, and I often do it after major work is done to AM.  In this case, I started a new game when AMB was installed, and again when AM was first updated to the patch, and again when AM was updated to AMB.

Whether it is a new game, or a game that has survived few generations, doesn't appear to affect the frequency of freezing.  It is just totally random, unpredictable, and not reproduceable at will, and restarting a new save made just before a freeze just plays straight past where it froze last time.

I find the freezes more of an irritation when they do occur, especially if I haven't saved for a while.  I don't see them often enough for them to be overly bothersome or annoying.

[kuronue]

I had one earlier. Been playing this new game three RL days, ambitions, originally vanilla; the pause happened after I added awesomemod, though it still took a while, and I only had the one. My game seems to be running slower in general, though, I ought to tweak how much background shit I've got turned on in my config.

[mildlydisguised]

My save that I had been experiencing the Neverending Pause with, decided to refuse to load and CTD. After starting a new game, having freed up a lot of space on my C drive and not using the third speed, I have not experienced any Neverendings, so far.

[GnatGoSplat]

Over the weekend, my wife's computer experienced the exact same 2PM (clock stops at 1:59PM) weekend never-ending pause that mine did with my simbot.  However, switching to a different fambly before the clock strikes 1:59PM didn't work for her.  One fambly happened to have a simbot, so she tried deleting the simbot.  That didn't work either.  However, she extracted the house to the bin, then deleted the house, and put it back in from the bin, simbot and all.  Now the clock was able to advance past 2PM and all was well.

Strange.  Only thing we could come up with, is something becomes borked in the relationships with or involving simbots and when some code (story progression maybe?) that's scheduled for 2PM on Sat/Sun sim time occurs, some thread in the game goes into an infinite loop.  Neither one of us ever had the infinite never-ending pause until introducing a simbot into the game.  Could be coincidence though.

[Sarafina]

I used to get these all the time playing a user made world (Fargo) but they were the type that would go away after a few minutes.  I chalked it up to that world and stopped playing it.  Since then I have been playing multiple worlds, including Twinbrook for quite some time.  I never had another one until I just must awesome mod back in and restarted Sunset Valley and had a bunch right away.  They were the ones that I had to kill from the task manager.  So I think it's something related to awesome mod as I've never had any problems without it but a bunch when it's in.  I don't think it's a stuck sim because I started using fixall and towderelicts every sim day and there was really nothing ever needing clearing.  I don't have any simbots and it shouldn't be routing because it happened in an EA world.

[Tangie]

I wanted to report that I started having serious lag issues shortly after my earlier reply - Murphy's Law, right?  

I played without AwesomeMod for a few days and still had lag. My PC actually had a blue screen event last night, to top it off. Today I finally spent some time combining some CC package files since I hadn't done that since last winter, which served to identify and eliminate some bad CC files. At least I think that's what SP3 does when it crosses out some of those numerical files. Through examination with S3PE I also discovered that I had some files that modified the same skill even though it was not identified as a conflict using Delphy's Dashboard application. So I edited one of the package files to eliminate the duplication so I could keep the file I liked. I also discovered that in the last two days I stoopidly had added a file I KNOW conflicted with another file, which was probably a large part of my lag problem. Duh.

Anyway, the result is that this game is suddenly fun to play again. Loading a saved game only takes a few minutes instead of the 10 minutes it's been taking. So if you haven't combed through your mods lately to look for conflicts and/or merged them to create fewer package files, I can personally recommend it. It sure helped my game, anyway!

[Caylie]

I've been getting this same never ending pause ever since installing Ambitions. I can start a new game and edit the town as much as I want. I can create sims in CAS with no problem. The issue shows up when I go to actually play the game. As soon as I either move in a new family or choose a family to play, the lot loads and that's it. The game clock never moves off of 8am and I can't select anything on the UI or in the game world. It happens every time, doesn't matter which hood I choose the game is simply unplayable.

My system is five years old but still above minimum with a recently upgraded video card, and the game played fine with WA and HELS:

Pentium D 3.00Ghz dual-core
3GB RAM
GeForce GTS 250 with 1024MB RAM Driver version 6.14.12.5721
Over 100GB free HDD space
WinXP SP3
No CC installed All caches cleared

Edit: Uninstalling and reinstalling Ambitions did not work, but messing with my settings in game seems to have done the trick. I set all the graphic options to their minimums, then while exiting and restarting the game a few times brought them all back up to where I had them. The game is now running just fine, no sign of the pause.

[Bain]

I don't know if others found a solution, but for me I was having the never ending pause constantly. It was driving me up the wall. I did a clean install over again, and the game still did it. I followed the instructions from http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,17746.0.html regarding merging package files. I went from around 1500 package files to a little over 200 package files. I extracted all the store stuff into combined package files, which greatly reduced my numbers. It has been over a week now, and I haven't had any never ending pauses in the game. I don't know if this will help the rest of you, but it made the difference for me. I hope this helps you guys too.

[Jonni]

Well today I spotted and fixed my damn pausing issue!

My pauses were inconsistent and lasted for 1-20 seconds every 15 seconds or so (while the trees continued to sway). Turns out it was nothing to do with memory, as far as I could tell. It was the simulation itself freezing whenever a Sim on one particular lot tried to leave that lot though an action such as 'Go to work' or 'Go to the Gym'.

This paticular lot was downloaded from MTS, and I placed it by firstly creating new empty lots using Edit World. It appears any Sim living here could not leave the lot at all. There were no obstructions, however the lot was slightly raised up from the sidewalk. I noticed the occupant of the lot being rather idle so I decided to visit the lot with my active Sim and then click on the 'Go Home' button on his portait icon. The game immediately froze for 1 second and then resumed when that Sim displayed the 'I'm stuck' thought bubble. I repeated this and at every time the game froze.

Deleting this lot completely fixed the issue. I do hope this can shed some light on the problem. The only way I can think of pin pointing this in your world would be to visit every lot and then click 'Go Home'

Good luck!

[Final Warrior]

EDIT: I fixed the problem. It was a stuck Sim. Fucking Mortimer somehow got stuck through the fence over at the Bachelors', I had to do some temporary remodeling.

So yeah, looks like the constant temporary freeze problem is due to stuck Sims.

---

Sorry for the necro, but I'd rather necro a topic with a relevant post than create a new thread (and get anally reamed with "FUCKING SEARCH" posts).

My pauses were inconsistent and lasted for 1-20 seconds every 15 seconds or so (while the trees continued to sway).

This is exactly the problem I am having and it started only just a few hours ago (I've been playing four about 8 hours straight for the past three or so days). First thing I tried when I had this problem was fixall; it fixed some phantom butts and a bad Sim, but not this problem.

Installed:

Sims 3
Sims 3 WA
Sims 3 HELS
Sims 3 Amb
Sims 3 FLS

(In that order.)

Have been playing with Awesomemod from the very beginning.

I've not installed any major CC (not that I know what the hell constitutes "major" CC, though) - just two Sims; the first of which did not have any problems (i.e., the game did not have this freezing problem immediately after the Sim was installed; in fact this problem didn't crop up until after about a day of play after this Sim was installed and dropped into my neighborhood) and the second of which I just installed about an hour ago (i.e., long after since this freezing problem has started; this Sim was only used for bodysnatch onto another Sim I made through CAS). No other custom CC, playing in Sunset Valley only.

Have only added two Sims to Sunset Valley; one made through CAS (later modified with bodysnatch and some minor tweaking with editsim) and the first CC Sim (mentioned above). I don't play the CC Sim at all.

I've placed only two lots - EAxian's Miramontes at 74 Landgraab Ave and Cabin Fever at 9 Sun Song Ave - before the freeze problem. Miramontes currently has no occupants, Cabin Fever has the CC Sim and I have verified that she can enter/leave the house without problem.

Just nuked the Miramontes lot from orbit. Has not fixed problem.

Started a new game in Twinbrooks. No freeze problem.

Have tried restarting the game multiple times to no effect. Haven't tried doing a system reboot, though.

Have been starting the game using the Awesome Updater's updater.bat (mostly to avoid using TS3's Launcher).

System specs:
Win 7 Pro x64
ASUS P56X58D Premium motherboard
Intel Core i7-930 (2.4GHz, 4 physical, 4 virtual cores)
6GB DDR3 RAM (G.SKILL PI Series, if that's relevant)
ATI Radeon HD 5850 GPU (specifically an XFI card, if that's relevant)
ASUS Xonar Essence ST soundcard
2x2TB@7200RPM Hitachi Deskstar HDDs (technically only one is in use, as it has my Windows partition; the other HDD is Ubuntu and not relevant to this, AFAICT) (1.39TB free on the partition that I've installed TS3 to [the same partition has My Documents]; 29.4GB free on the system partition)
1TB@5400RPM Western Digital My Book portable HDD (on which I'm currently storing the .iso of TS3 that I'm running the game from) (575GB free)
750w Corsair PSU

Just tried moving the .iso from my portadrive to my system drive, no change in performance (i.e., the problem still persists).

Just switched active households to a default (i.e., non-custom made) one; no freeze problem. What the eff is this bullshit.

:rage:

ETA: resetworld hasn't helped.

Since I'm running in windowed mode, I can watch how much TS3 is sucking up, system resources-wise. It holds steady ~15-18% CPU use and ~1,180,000K - ~1,300,000K memory use.

ETA2: I tell a lie. Normally TS3 uses up 05-08% CPU; when it does its freeze though, that number shoots up to 15-17% and stays there until it unfreezes (for all of twenty seconds). This is constant and consistent. So, at least for me, the problem doesn't seem to be memory use.

ETA3: The problem still exists and persists even after I removed all .package files (except for awesome.package and aweconf.package) from my Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Mods\Packages.

ETA4: I think I found the problem. Mortimer Goth is stuck partway through the fence of the Bachelor household. I am going to punch this kid in the dick so hard his mother will be retroactively sterilized. I don't even give a fuck that he's a kid. Anyone know how to nuke/move specific Sims?

[cwykes]

Just wanted to say that the CFF explorer thing made a huge difference to my game when I first started playing TS3.  I got crashes without it and almost no crashes with it.  I didn't put the fix back after I installed loft stuff and ambitions, but I haven't got the crashes back.   I'd guess EA improved the memory handling since base game.  I am getting these freezes.  Sometimes the game unfreezes quickly, sometimes freezes last 10mins or so and sometimes I have to kill the game with task manager.  Can't help on why/when.

[ciane]

Here's my saved game with reproducible results:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/koaclandox7qdxr/SV%20AdamThomas.sims3.zip

I have the EPs, but no SPs. The freeze will occur at 2:43. The clock, sims, and any screen directions/movement will freeze. Plumbobs will turn and woohoo confetti will fall. The family is in Sunset [played less than two Sims weeks (or three if you count the six days in France)] and resides in the normally empty lot next to the Altos.

I use large address aware, cff_explorer, and fpslimiter and have a quad-core Vista system with 8 gigs of RAM.

I do have some mods, such as Twallan's master controller, overwatch, and debug enabler; Rainbow Brite's skill challenges XML tweaks; things like nointro, gymbufffixed, and ghost/simbot reaction remover; and, of course, AwesomeMod. I do really limit the things I add to my game (though my package folder does contain over 300 files).

I didn't try any fixes yet (other than clearing the four main caches) as I wanted only to provide a reproducible error for others to look it.

Also: It happens to be a Sunday (for the person who stated that this normally occurs on a weekend) and I had to alt-tab and end task through the task manager. Resetworld did not stop the 2:43 freeze when I tried it on a "saved as" file. The freeze happens right after the pop notice about the boy earning simoleans for the latest chapter of the book he's writing.

[tizerist]

Just solved a case of frequent long pausing in Champs Les Sims. No problems in the other vacation hoods or the base hood.

I had plonked a couple of families down into lots, and it started.
Evicted, and placed elsewhere the suspects, (whose house had an 'elaborate' path to the front door) and all was fine.

Short end: Delete families one-by-one, and keep checking if its gone.

[Beldara]

my pc specs are almost identical to wizard_merlin, he just has a little more ram than my 6gigs, but same gpu core etc etc. aka more than enough for the sims.

I too have experienced this random freeze up...on the rare occasion it rights itself after about 30 seconds, 99% of the time I'm forced to end the process via the task manager.

It's most prevalent when I've hit fast forward, or in a world that I've been playing for a while, and then after restarting the game it's not a repeatable crash and will happen again down the track at some other seemingly random time.

I was under the impression that it was a result of a bad sim, or bad pathing or something eventually going pear shaped in game and the game just hanging as it tries to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be doing, and it has nothing to do with my pc specs.

The game will never crash if I've left it in build mode, have 300 other programs running in the background or on my other monitor etc and disappeared away from the pc for hours and then come back, it's only when the game is live and the sims are doing their thing that it will randomly choke.

I've just accepted this is a part of ea's flaking programming, and saving reguarly and doing a fixall every now and then and me visually poking around the neighbourhood to reset any dodgy looking sims seems to limit it to a minimum.

[SendMeLies]

I suspect in my LN game the neverending pause is related to mixology. Something is borked on the skill gain and for some reason when a sim is about to gain the first skill point it pauses forever. I figured that out by chance after 3 different games. I have no idea who are the sims freezing the game on my first saves but on the last one if I make my sim read a mixology book or practice on a bar it pauses forever at the skill gain. I didn't notice this before because I usually send them to a class.

The problem is I cannot prevent NPCs from practicing or learning skills. I suspect some other new skills are broken - this was reported on the BBS. On my other save games I can avoid freezing by using ResetWorld a few times, but it is getting too frequent now so it is impossible to play. I have to investigate this though, my very first game playing Late Night never paused or crashed for over 6 sim weeks. I did few interaction with celebrities and didn't try most new features.

The only mods I have installed are AwesomeMod and Twallan Master Controller. Games played with store content but no other CC, cache deleted.