Graphics error? Or... something else?

[Anne]

Was playing BV tonight with a family I hadn't played with since installing. All was going quite nicely, my sim had her baby, and everyone was happy - until the game just kind of... froze.
 
By froze, I mean that my sim who was eating just kept repeating the same motion, even after I hit pause. It was almost as if the graphics weren't keeping up with my inputs. I was able to get to the controls (save, etc.) and after a few minutes, all was fine again. I payed for another minute or two, and the problem resurfaced, at which point I gave up and quit. So, while my computer is busy making backups of all my neighborhoods and downloads, I thought I'd come here and ask some questions.

1. The game had been running for nearly seven hours by the time this happened (not all of it continuously playing, but it was up and running) so could this be related to the memory leak problem I've read about on other threads?

2. Or is it an actual graphics problem? I do have an Nvidia 5500 card (I know, I know) but I have been playing with no problems whatsoever since I got the game, even with graphics turned all the way up, and I've been figuring "If it ain't broke..."

 I have 1 gig of ram on a 2.4 processor and the aforementioned Nvidia card. Any other info needed please let me know.

[ZiggyDoodle]

No idea what's causing the problem.  I had similar stop-and-go moments during my initial play of BV, but they've stopped since I added the antiprank hack.

Have you tried lowering your graphics settings?

[Anne]

Have you tried lowering your graphics settings?

No, not yet, I was hoping to avoid that...

But I'm leaning towards the "it was running too long" theory, because after restarting (both the computer and the game) I was able to get back into that family with no problems. I went through about another sim day with them, and everything was fine. I've played another family also, and everything checked out ok.

So I'm baffled, too. We'll see if it happens again.

[jolrei]

Reducing shadows to medium has minimal obvious impact on display, but does improve slowness and lag issues (personal experience), making gameplay smoother.

I have had minor difficulties with stalled/stuck sims - usually forcing error on the sim and choosing reset jumps them out of it.  Of course, your problem might be more general than that I suppose.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Someone in another thread mentioned turning off UI Transparency as it is some kind of resource hog, so I thought I'd try it.  Worked well for me, my neighbouring houses now have recognisable windows and doors, not just a blurry rectangle, and my game is playing better.  Might be worth trying that before you lower your graphics settings.  (If your video card couldn't handle them, the game would disable them when you installed - at least, it does when I play on my laptop.)

[lemonfresh]

1. The game had been running for nearly seven hours by the time this happened (not all of it continuously playing, but it was up and running) so could this be related to the memory leak problem I've read about on other threads?

I have similar problems when I leave my game running for too long. Have you tried leaving the task manager running in the background and periodically alt-tabbing over to see how much memory your game is sucking up at various points during a game session? Mine starts at around ~300,000k or so and the longer I play, the higher that number jumps. Tonight I hit ~600,000k before I quit the game. As much of a pain as it is to quit and restart the game, you're better off doing so after a while so your game doesn't totally lock up and force you to do a hard reboot. I'm currently rebuilding a 'hood that got corrupted for that very reason.

[ZephyrZodiac]

It's just one of the annoyances, isn't it?  I could leave the base game running for hours, even a couple of days on standby, with far less RAM than I have now.  It's worth making your paging file as large as possible, and even making it non-dynamic so Windows isn't forever altering it and using up valuable RAM in the process, but since Seasons it doesn't seem to help much.  But my game actually starts to overheat my PC long before the available RAM (I have 2GB) is used up, so I have this funny feeling that although it says in the game specs in the log file that it knows I have 2 GB, in actual gameplay it doesn't recognise it, maybe because it's one 1GB stick and 2 512Kb sticks.  So, once my lots get to be more than starter homes, and have more than one or two sims in them, I tend to have to close after playing one lot before I move on to the next family to be played.

[lemonfresh]

This wasn't an issue at all prior to Seasons. BV is hosed in more ways than just coming with the much-undesired SecuRom "feature". I can't imagine what they've done to screw this EP up so badly. Taken their skills in the kludge department to astonishing new levels. Seasons only lagged on me if I did something stupid, like plant a forest on my lot just before Fall. 

I've been tempted to dig out my Sims 1 CD's and load them up, just to see how fast the game zooms on this pc. It's about 5 steps up from the one I had when the game first came out. Supposedly, not adding RAM in matched pairs is a bad idea. Don't know how true that is today, given how far things have come. Could your fan be giving out? Or maybe you need one for the ram itself?

I've been wondering if having everything lumped onto a 240Gb partition might be somewhat unhelpful. My HD is 250Gb and 10 of that is partitioned off for system backup type stuff.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I've been using my second hard drive as my My Documents folder, which was fine until I had to reinstall Windows on the smaller main drive (why oh why did the friend who built it do it that way round?) and since then I know there is an issue with the whole documents folder, but I don't have enough space on may main drive to move the documents folder back, so I'm stuck with it until I get around to backing everything up. 

I already have two fans, but I think I probably need to start thinking about replacing my hard drives themselves, they are getting a bit ancient and I rather think there are bad sectors lurking.  I did a complete reformat and reinstall of Windows, and I think the bad sector which I knew was there did get cleared up, but I think there are some on the second HD too.  Just that at the moment I can't even think about it, I just don't have the cash.

Funny you should say that about Sims 1 - I've been thinking about installing it on my old PC, which really isn't up to Sims2 +, and the base game alone is so boring....I also never really reached boredom limit with MM, Sims2 came out so soon afterwards, so I might actually enjoy playing again.  I recently downloaded SimCity2000, and I quite enjoy playing that - in fact, it can be totally addictive, even now!  I still have all my original cities on diskettes, so I might copy some of those in too!

[Anne]

  I recently downloaded SimCity2000, and I quite enjoy playing that - in fact, it can be totally addictive, even now!  I still have all my original cities on diskettes, so I might copy some of those in too!

I remember SimCity 2000! Loved that game. I wonder if I still have that anywhere... 

 The problem hasn't repeated itself since I posted the first time, so I am going with the "game was running too long" theory. Before BV I used to leave it running for hours on end, mostly because it takes nearly fifteen minutes to load completely. I'd start it up, go do other things, come back and play for a while, and repeat. I guess I won't be doing that anymore.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Oh, I still have the original SimCity 2000 plus the set which has futuristic buildings, but i could never get it to work - it would install fine, but then wouldn't load properly, or crash on loading etc., so I went to Classic Gaming and bought it there for 5 quid, and it works fine, although it was missing my favourite starter city that came with the original game (Volcano) but it was easy enough to copy those in.

You must have a lot of cc in your game for it to take that long to load.   My present Seasons game loads in about 3-4 minutes with just over 1Gig of cc - but I theme my games now so somewhere I can find homes for all my downloads without overloading my game.