Sims starving to death

[saraswati]

I've absolutely had the unexplained deaths of non-elders, but the only place that's happened in my game is at the Academy in front of the training dummy. It's happened a few times and it's incredibly irritating.

[vvhitney]

Hmmm I have also found out that when changing around the active families there is usually one person who is starving or close.
I looks as though in most families that there is one person in the family that gets ignored by the computer.

Maybe they are falling to death because the work pusher mod has been removed?

[Jackathyn]

Seconding the issue of people starving to death in the Martial Arts Academy. I only sent one sim to China and saw it happen when he went to train. Played chess for his life and saved him. I've only seen this occur once in my game.

[Trubble]

Jackathyn, put a fridge on the Academy lot. Stopped it happening for me.

[BlueSoup]

I did that but it didn't stop anything for me.  Next time I visited, two Sims died one after the other of starvation.  They had a grill and a fridge.

[Trubble]

I had two kick it so I added a fridge. My sim was on that lot for a fair few sim days on multiple trips and no more deaths occurred. I figured it had worked and remembered reading about other people having success with it? It was useful for the "death on vacation" photos at least.

[BlueSoup]

The second my Sim arrived at the Academy, two Sims that were perfectly happy and playing on the Sim Fu training dummies suddenly stopped and died.  I had already been focused on the lot waiting for her to get there and nothing seemed out of the ordinary until she arrived, and then it all happened all at once.  Like Trubble, I took the opportunity to get a few photos that I was missing.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have a few suspects of what causes this, and I suspect it is resolution granularity. Type "aistats" into the console and see if you see particularly high resolution times.

[BlueSoup]

[J. M. Pescado]

Yeah, your neighborhood is definitely showing some severe lag. My mskew is only about 2 hours, with an average resolution of about 20 minutes. With your neighborhood, the game isn't processing some people for nearly 15 hours! Obviously, by then, they may have starved to death. Maybe if your computer wasn't expending so much power on rendering your ENORMOUSLY FAT HEAD...

[vorpal]

So, I guess that this not only causes those sudden deaths by starvation but also that my nhood is currently completely out of sync as if every household lived within their own time bubble? Examples for this are
a) most sims miss work. Although game time says it's time for work, when I switch to a family that is due for work and click on the go-to-work-button I get the message that I should try again in five hours as it is not their time yet.
b) SuperComputer tells me that a child is about to age up in 1 day. When I switch to that child its life meter says that there are still 2 days until age up. Using the SC on that child, however, still states 1 day.
c) children miss school and get bad grades but I cannot send them manually and the message says "no school atm".

I have to say though that I had these problems right from the start with that hood (Twinbrook) and there are times when suddenly it all goes well for several game days until it falls back into that state of out-of-syncness.
Before Ambitions I had a similar case in Riverview when I had to push every non-played school kid manually to go to school, but at least in that game they obeyed and went and did not prompt that message that there was no school atm. Moving my main family into a new Riverview fixed that, however, which makes me wonder whether this problem is something that can infect a town right from the start.

my maximum skew is currently 1090.667 and the average is 60.281 with a nhood of 124 days. Population number is currently 79 residents and I capped it at 80 using aweconfig. I guess this makes my head considerably fatter.

I have to admit that my computer is not the "best" (Macbook Pro with 2.8 GHz CPU and a mobile Geforce 9600 - I don't know how much you should subtract from that configuration's processing power due to the additional task of handling the Cider environment) but in the past I could play larger populations just fine (slow, but fine).

[dedust]

I have probably the exact same Mac as vorpal above, and most likely the same problems as well. I always thought that this was a quite nice laptop for playing, but with the maximum of 4GB RAM and the dreaded cider environment, all this just isn't enough. With a PC of the same specs TS3 should be running smoothly, at least it seemed to do just that even with my old PC rig, at 2GB RAM, a FX-60 2.6GHz cpu and dual GF 7800GTX's.

I created a new neighbourhood, imported my families from Sunset Valley, and looks like I have the same idling-till-death issues like before. So far I've had only a few pre-created townies drop dead, but it's only a matter of time when I have to start saving my own Sims from the Grim. Sometimes they seem to be able to do some things themselves, but it takes a while still. This problem wasn't around with Riverview, where I had only about 5 or 6 families to play. There were a few families I didn't touch and a bunch of townies too.

If only EA would port its games as native, instead of this wine based piece of crap that eats all ram in seconds.
POO.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have added some prototype features to attempt to reduce this, but obviously, can't test it. Let me know how the latest version does for you.

[wizard_merlin]

I have to admit that my computer is not the "best" (Macbook Pro with 2.8 GHz CPU and a mobile Geforce 9600 - I don't know how much you should subtract from that configuration's processing power due to the additional task of handling the Cider environment) but in the past I could play larger populations just fine (slow, but fine).

Don't forget that every EP will add to the system, and impact its performance.  This also happened with TS2, the next EP EAxis release will probably slow your system down even more and annoy the shit out of you even faster.

[vorpal]

Although I have not played TS2, I remember this very well from TS1, too. I just hoped that it would not happen so soon, because the performance hit I am having now is drastic compared to what I had without AMB. I still have a save of a hood started back in August last year. It's a family of 8 on a 60x60 lot in Sunset Valley with some 125 residents and it remained playable even after installing WA. Now it's 3 Sims on a 20x30 lot in a Twinbrook of 80 residents and they are all too inert to even die. And I am sure as soon as they'll include weather in a future EP that will be the particle movement frontier I will not be able to cross.
I'll see what the new version of AM will do as soon as the RL temperatures have gone down a bit. Currently it's too hot and the laptop cooler I bought has just left the building wrapped in a very black body bag with "crap" written all over it in its own blood.

[phnxflyng]

Yeah, your neighborhood is definitely showing some severe lag. My mskew is only about 2 hours, with an average resolution of about 20 minutes. With your neighborhood, the game isn't processing some people for nearly 15 hours! Obviously, by then, they may have starved to death. Maybe if your computer wasn't expending so much power on rendering your ENORMOUSLY FAT HEAD...

Is this a problem that upgrading RAM or something will fix? I would really appreciate if someone who knows how this works would advise me. I'm happy to upgrade my pc in the service of good simming.