EA/Maxis has found the Nvidia problem!
Simsample:
I had this issue over a year ago with my old NVidia, I think it was when NL or Pets came out. The way I solved it was to put more RAM in the computer, and that was a PC which was purely for gaming- no internet connection, no AV, no background services or screensavers or nice windows themes. The PC was well above minimum specs at the time, too.
IcemanSimmer:
EAxis is so full of shit it ain't even funny >:(
My first reaction when I saw MaxoidShannon's posting earlier in the week was "jeez, these guys are really clutching at straws". Here's my take on the whole situation from a post I made here at MATY last October:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8993.msg277139.html#msg277139
To quote myself:
"The logical conclusion is that the EAxis development team screwed up some of the DirectX code in BV. How can the game, which was working fine in Seasons + 162.18, suddenly get broken with the release of BV just 2 months later???"
I use Norton AV and have it on at all times even while gaming and it has never caused any issues. The bottom line is that the Sims 2 game code is fubar (Nvidia has told Eaxis that also). On a side note, ATI card owners are now experiencing gfx issues coming out of FT (not as severe as us Nvidia owners, but problems nonetheless).
The only way this issue will be resolved is if EAxis stands up and admits their game is borked instead of passing the buck to someone else (first they blamed Nvidia, now Symantec). I've resigned myself to the fact that a fix for this long running problem will probably never happen. The only saving grace is "boolprop useShaders false" (which is in my UserStartup.cheat file). This stops the BSOD for me at the cost of degraded gfx quality.
Quote from: Carrigon on 2008 March 13, 05:29:03
I've had this crash with Castaway. I do not have Norton and I turn off my antivirus when I play. I still get the same crash. I barely run any processes unless absolutely necessary. I don't think that's quite where the problem is coming from.
My daughter was experiencing severe BSOD's on her Castaway. From the readme file:
PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.
Since her comp uses Core 2 Duo, I told her to use Task Manager and set the affinty of the game to 1 single core instead of using both. This solved the issue and Castaway is running quite stable for her. If you are using a multi-core cpu, give this a shot, may help.
Count Four:
I do not have boucoup amounts of RAM. I have NVidia. And most pathetically, I am a dial up user. Because of that, I never try to play this game while online.
When I had the base game, and even when I had an EP or two, I left security programs running. Blue Screen of Death, like clockwork. Once I installed Seasons, I knew that wasn't going to work at all on my crappy machine. Now I shut down Avast AV, ZoneAlarm, and just about everything else, up to and including Explorer.exe. I haven't seen blue screen of death in ages, because I basically give Sims free run of my RAM.
So I agree with EA, it's a memory issue. Whether it originates with anti-virus or Sims 2 itself is up to the tech-type people to figure out, but I know when Sims 2 is running alone, I get no BSoD.
(And it says in the game booklets to shut down anti-virus and crash guard programs before running Sims. I just looked.)
quasim:
I'm running TS2 with all EP installed on a notebook wich is 5 years old (Dell Inspiron 8200, 64MB ATI, 1GB RAM, 1600x1200 TFT). Before FT I rarely had a crash, but now with FT I started using Moniques "Save Reminder" to alert me every 24 Sim Hours to save.
To get TS2 running smoothly on this machine, I used a special WinXP Gaming edition, which comes with no bulk at all. Since that PC is not on the net with that configuration, no AV etc installed. Of course I'm dual booting with a "Real XP".
These crashes are IMHO sloppy coding, and any connection to specific hardware is purely coincidental.
jsalemi:
Quote from: IcemanSimmer on 2008 March 13, 08:17:27
My daughter was experiencing severe BSOD's on her Castaway. From the readme file:
PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.
Since her comp uses Core 2 Duo, I told her to use Task Manager and set the affinty of the game to 1 single core instead of using both. This solved the issue and Castaway is running quite stable for her. If you are using a multi-core cpu, give this a shot, may help.
That readme note has been around forever in the regular game, too -- at least as far back as OFB. And yea, it is relatively useless these days, when all but the cheapest entry-level systems have at least a low-end Core 2 Duo in them. You can't really turn off one core. :P There have been many discussions about poor Sims performance on dual and quad core processors here for over a year, including a recent one in the 'you broke it!' forum about game lag.
The Task Manager method works, but unfortunately TM gets amnesia, and doesn't remember the setting from one play session to the next, so you have to load the sims game, then go out to the TM every time to set the affinity. There's an easier way to force the game to use only one processor all the time-- use a handy little free utility called ForceCore (attached here). It's pretty simple to use -- just put it someplace the system can find it (I have it in c:\windows\system32), and then put 'forcecore.exe <x>' in front of the rest of the target info in the icon that launches the sims game (right-click, then choose properties on the icon). The <x> is replaced by the core number (1 or 2 on a duo), or you can use a -1 and it'll pick either one at runtime.
And yea, the whole Norton thing is bullshit -- their 'solution' only really applies if you're running the game with their minimum specs (in which case, you have more problems than just nVidia issues). On a dual or quad machine with at least 2gb RAM, the anti-virus software would barely make a blip in the amount of processing power and memory it uses, even with bloatware like Norton or McAfee. Better yet, of course, is to dump Norton/McAfee, and go with a good freeware antivirus (I use avast! and never had a problem with it).
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page