Long pauses
Tangie:
I tried lowering the settings on several options - graphics and I don't know what all, I'll have to look again to tell you which ones. It didn't seem to make any difference for me on my craptastic machine, unfortunately. :P
tjstreak:
This really does explain a lot. Perhaps all of the "buggy" stuff in EA's code simply reflects their goal of having the game run on as many computers as possible. If you want a different story progression and different features, you have to upgrade to a better and faster system.
Personally, I have a hard time justifying upgrading a computer to run a single game, let alone a single mod of a single game. I have an older machine (it was a second hand machine which had been used by a community college). It runs just about everything I want it to run, smoothlly, except for TS3 with Awesomemod. My primary reason for getting this machine was to run various business software -- mostly specialized database software. (I have run a couple of businesses.) So it meets 99% of my needs.
Unfortunately, this means that I run the game without Awesome mod most of the time. The NRSaa supercomputer and story progression offer comparable features without the same performance hit. Of course, I have implemented serious population control, limiting the game to about 75 sims. Honestly, this seems to be more than enough. The game really becomes really goofy by the time there are 200 plus sims, even without performance slowdowns. In fact, 75 sims may be far more than what is needed.
Of course, I find all the homes being uploaded to be rather irritating because there is no way that the game can accomodate a lot of homes homes. With 75 sims, 30 households appear to be the norm. If I need more baby bombs, an appropriate number of sims can be pollinated until the need passes.
Spineraker:
Okay, I've been digging into this for the last two days. I'm on a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), and I needed to re-install Sims 3--obviously. I brought over my save from my original play in Vista (I've been using the same Simie since day 1 release of Sims 3). So here's the breakdown of what I went through:
My sim lot on Monday, when I first re-installed the game and all addons, was updated to the latest patch and latest AM revision. I was glad to hear about the new feature to re-award the sims their earned plaques for skills as I long ago forgot to take nearly all of mine off the wall of the house I moved from (and for some reason couldn't steal them back with my Klepto... :P). Anyway, I played for about an hour and suddenly locked up in game. This was no ordinary freeze either: I was on speed setting 3, so I could see all animations very well such as the bushes, the plumb bob, trees, etc. My mouse would move just fine, but the picture was locked and so was the rest of the game world; I force quit. Coming back this evening, I come to find out that it is still happening. I re-installed AM thinking I got another bad DL (its happened to me before...latest Firefox seems to be causing some major grief with my internets -_-...). The problem persisted, and now is happening every 5 to 25 minutes. So, with some idea from previous pages here, I went into the game and analyzed everything I could with the NRS Supercomputer's features--a very handy debug tool, imho, as close to the "Yellow Box" debugger I always hid on my lot in Sims 2.
Here are the results (I'm placing it all here):
What I changed:
11 Stereos running; turned them off. (Coincidentally, this also returned music capabilities to my live household. I was not aware I was missing it until I suddenly heard the "job done" music score for the first time in a long time.)1 Missing sim returned to reality. Not sure where she went, but she's back now...6 voices inherited from their parents. Again, not quite sure of this one but I did it anyway.
Neighborhood Stats:
38 Households88 Residents85 Service NPCs23 Townies93 Total Lots64 Residential29 Commercial34 Residential lots occupied30 Residential lots unoccupied20 Residential lots completely empty
Total Town Wealth: 5,373,087[/list]
After this I suddenly noticed the second portion of this strange lockup thread: The jittery pathing. Thinking that I was boned, I looked at each of the characters and realized that all but one of the three members of the household were running off Supreme Commander scripts. I canceled all of them and suddenly my game returns to normal. I am now almost an hour into play with no locks yet. I'm wondering if SC and the latest patch are having some problems, or if the stereos are far more resource intensive than I had previously thought...
Zhivan:
I'm another with the sudden stops when the sims head out for work and/or school. The babysitters also freeze at the door, quite permanently until the parents come home. I have AM and Indie installed but use only Indie wittingly. I will have to check out what Spineraker posted above and see if anyone in the house has the Supreme Commander stamp.
I've had very few issues prior this, but can tell you that the above posters reporting it taking more than an hour to get their sims down a flight of stairs into the waiting carpool or bus are not exaggerating.
Edit/Update: Okay, familiarized myself a bit more with the Awesomemod and found the Configuration Tool. I disabled the Supreme Commander features and it seemed to help a little, making me think that it's not the primary part of the last patch that's bumping heads codewise. I tested in a family of four over a period of five sim days and I did check in the game to be sure none of the family members were following a Supreme Commander script.
J.M. is leagues above me in coding and solving game systems difficulties, I'm sure. I'll continue watching this thread to see if anyone else who's having this problem comes up with a fix, I'm just tossing my info out there hopefully to spark some sort of solution. If I do come up with anything (entirely by accident, I'm sure) I'll be sure to update once again.
J. M. Pescado:
I have never been able to reproduce these "total freezes" or pauses, so I have no idea what you are doing to cause it.
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