Lum, this is going to sound very wrong, but I'm kind of happy that I'm not the only one with that kind of freezing problem But custom lots are not the problem here. My beach lot is all mine, it's just a boxy trailer built on default maxis beach lot, with only 3 sims in it. Also, the game was freezing up even when there was just a single sim living in it. It's not loaded with objects, nor landscaped, and there really isn't anything special about it. Also, on-lot freezing started like couple of weeks ago, before that it was happening only in neighbourhood view. I *do* have downloaded lot in this particular hood (one of the messie messlot houses from MTS2) but I never played it.

Where did you get that freezing lot of yours? Is there anything special about it? Thank you!

Snoot, yep, it's odd. But it's working! I played some more today and no freezing, yay! I could just turn the shaders back on if I suddenly feel the urge to snap a pretty pic. Thanks again!

Sorry, but changes made to my previous post just wouldn't stick, so here I am, double-posting 

"ETA - Just thought of something. If I sever the family ties of all the sims that are related to the screwed up sims, will that solve the problem? Or I'll just make a bigger mess? Or all is lost already?
Say, my playable kid's grandad is prepped for deletion. I sever the kid's family ties with InSim. Will that ruin kid's memories of 'Learned to...' and stuff? Will I be able to properly restore the kid's ties with mommy and daddy?"

Ok, I did this before, but this time I screwed up.

I prepped 9 sims (custom townies) for deletion. 3 of them have family ties that I stupidly forgot to sever. One of those 3 is father and grandfather to my playable sims. I haven't deleted SDCSs yet of those 3 yet, or reseted Sim Creation Index or deleted their character files. Now what should I do? Is it possible to restore those sims somehow? My last back-up is not very fresh, ofcourse. I suck.

Also, is it safe to delete SCOR instances (not for those 3 screwed up sims of mine, but in general)?

Oh no! Well it's quite new but it's not under warranty any more I have no idea what to look for, so I'm not going to touch it yet. Is there by any chance an easy, "software" way to find out if the card is fried or not?

Anyway, I applied BV patch #2 and I turned off the shaders.

The results:

I played for 6 sim days on said beach lot and no freezes, yay!!! Not very long, I know, but I'm quite optimistic about this. BUT the ocean goes all wonky:

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j246/___juju___/wrongsea.jpg

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j246/___juju___/wrongsea2.jpg

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j246/___juju___/wrongsea3.jpg

The ocean is normal in NH view, but some of the NH deco pine trees are black. Sigh.

Fly-over movies in all EAxis hoods went just fine, no freezes.

Game closes normaly. No errors or BSOD or anything.

Ocean goes back to normal when the shaders are turned back on.

So, I guess I'll just stick to the shaders solution. The sea is ugly but it's better than not being able to play the stupid game. Thank you for all your help! If there are more ideas about this, I'd be really happy to hear them Cheers!

Yay!


No. No blue screen. No hourglass. It just sticks to wherever it was. The cursor doesn't change. The sound keeps being normal for a few more seconds, than it goes DRRM DRRM DRRM. Mouse and keyboard don't respond.


Hmmmm. Well I'm doing the mounty thing with Deamon Tools v4.10 AND running from cracks. Not that I fully trust my memory, but I don't think I EVER started the game from original .exe. Other newish games I played are Black and White 2 and Stronghold 2, and boyfriend installed Football Manager 2008 recently, which is my prime suspect. Doesn't really matter anyway 'cause I cleaned it, wherever it came from, and the game still freezes.


Will do so. I do have antiredundancy but that Periodic Events Controler fix sounds interesting.


That's with the new driver that I uninstalled. I'll be perfectly happy with occasional UI mess-up that fixes itself, but no, the PC has to be restarted anyway. The driver part is where the help is most wanted. You see my current driver is quite old, and the new one causes such UI issues. Perhaps there's something in between that would solve the problem. I really don't know a thing about drivers
I had simmilar UI issues with my old driver in Castaway Stories. *headdesk* Add that to the list of games I had installed on my computer. But no freezing, restarting, just the mess-up.
Fresh reinstall - ouch! That will be the last resort. I'll try Snoot's shaders thing first, then do everything that could be done to my video card, because this really looks like hardware issue to me.

Thank you both for your help! I'll get back later to inform you of the shaders thing.

Hi all,

I hesitated to make a new thread here for so long, but my game got almost unplayable, so here I am Please bear with my unawesomeness, my silly english and my searching skills.

The problem:

I get random game freezes. Everything gets stuck, mouse and keyboard stops responding, the sound keeps playing, then it stucks too. The only way out of it is rebooting, thus losing all my progress. At first, it was happening only in neighbourhood view, very rarely, but it's getting more and more often, and it's happening in residential lots too. Well, to be honest, I mostly play one lot and it's a beach lot (default smallest one). I haven't tested other types of lots, 'cause I'm assuming it would happen there as well (actually, I played through one semester at the EAxis Sim State Frat House, and nothing happened, but I guess it might if I kept playing). When I say 'random game freezes', I mean really, really random. It freezes in a completely empty test hood, in EAxis hoods, in my custom hood (sparsely decorated, with only one household plus one unoccupied residential lot) and in my self-made merged EAxis hood, when the game is just idling and when I go mad with scrolling and rotating. On said beach lot it's also completely random, as in, not affected by sim actions, number of sims and visitors on lot, seasonal features or the number of objects on lot (the lot is quite empty). One thing though, it only happens when I'm moving or rotating the view, not when the screen stands still, and not when I'm zooming in/out. All of this started after installing BV, and, as already mentioned, it's getting worse.

My attempts of solving the problem:

1. This is not related to my downloads because it's happening in a completely clean game too. But anyway, my downloads folder is only about 360MB in size, I have a bunch of hacks, HCDU doesn't show any conflicts except for the ones it should show (I'm guilty of using the Kitten Killer and the inteenimated hacks). I also have hacks that could be outdated, namely:
Squinge's Increased Bills
Jordan M.G's noinheritseasons
Avadon's real-Sickness
godknowswho's Slower Skills
I couldn't find any information about their up-to-date-ness, or I was just plain lazy. So shoot me. Or don't, because I don't see how they could become outdated, and I don't see how it can be related to the freezing problem.
I'm using GunMod's Camera Mod, but I've been using it forever without problems. It didn't suddenly became outdated, right? I'm also using HystericalParoxysm's Seasons Atmospheric Tweak.

2. Since all of this started post BV, SecuRom seems like an obvious reason. I always play from cracked .exe but I followed the cleaning procedure from the stickied SecuRom thread just in case. And, behold, I had the suckers. I have no idea how I got it, guess I did use the damn launcher at some point. Anyway, I cleaned it properly (regedit doesn't show it, and there's no SecuRom folder in my Application Data, is that it?). But no, my game still freezes.

3. Finally, the graphics card. Hardware is where I'm most unawesome at. So updating the drivers was my last resort. I think I've done it properly - I uninstaled my old drivers and cleaned the mess with Driver Cleaner, then I installed the new drivers. The results are unsatisfying.

Best case scenario - Instead of complete lock up I get messed up graphics, mixed up textures, whatever. Example pics below are unedited i.e. huge, so click only if you're really interested

Example Pic 1 - The Hood

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j246/___juju___/untitled.jpg

Occupied lot gone white. Also notice swan-like things where road turnings are supposed to be.

Example Pic 2 - The Lot

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j246/___juju___/untitled2.jpg

UI gone wrong. No description needed really. This happened while bying a bed, picking the covers to be precise.

This problem sort of fixes itself after a little while and that's all fine and dandy. But no, after I exit the game, my desktop resolution goes from 1024x768 to like 40x30 and I get nVidia error and have to restart OR I get BSOD and have to restart.

Worst case scenario - I start Pleasantview. The flying-over movie thing starts, then it freezes a bit, then the textures go wrong, the game struggles for about a minute, then I get BSOD.

Epilogue - I rolled back the drivers.

My specs (from DxDiag):

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.070227-2254)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E6750  @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Page File: 258MB used, 3680MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Display Devices
---------------
        Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
     Manufacturer: NVIDIA
        Chip type: GeForce 8600 GT
         DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
       Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0402&SUBSYS_22861682&REV_A1
   Display Memory: 512.0 MB
     Current Mode: 1024 x 768 (32 bit) (75Hz)
          Monitor: SyncMaster 703(M)s/ 753(M)s/750(M)s/753(M)v, MagicSyncMaster CM173A(M)
  Monitor Max Res: 1280,1024
      Driver Name: nv4_disp.dll
   Driver Version: 6.14.0011.5819 (English)
      DDI Version: 9 (or higher)
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
 Driver Date/Size: 4/12/2007 17:44:00, 5433216 bytes                   

(That's the driver I rolled back to. The new driver setup file I downloaded is called "175.16_geforce_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe". Is there anything else relevant?)

TS2 is installed in default location. Drive C has Total Space 39.0 GB, Free Space 15,7 GB

I have all EPs and SPs up to Kitchen and Bath. My entire game is ARRRed, and I hadn't experienced any problems before this (except for the flying skunk and weird penguin walking but that's really no biggie). I haven't applied BV patch 2 (don't know why I would do that now, FT installation didn't ask for it), and I never applied the sucky FT patch 1. I'm waiting for the cracked .exe to be released to apply FT patch 2. Also, I'm using Numenor's AnyGameStarter. The freezage occurs in 'Full Game' as well as in 'AnyGame' so I'm guessing it's unrelated.

Whew. Thanks for reading through all of this. I tried to include every possibly relevant piece of information. I have no idea what to do now, so, awesome people, I will greatly appreciate any kind of help! *kisses buts*

Extra Question - How do I found out if HyperThreading technology is enabled on my PC?

*starts to madly refresh this page*

Me again  Double posting so this post doesn't go unnoticed. I've updated descriptions for FT. There are few changes, and seeing that the patch is up on the german site, this will probably get outdated very soon, but here you go anyway.

Nice to know I've been helpful 
frankie, I'm not installing FT anytime soon, so, no, I'm not going to update this. I'm guessing that new and updated hacks are in "Firing Range" so you'll only need those descriptions added.

Hi all,
yes, I'm aware that I'm guilty of necromancy and yes, this is my first post here. Do point and laugh and poke with pointy stuff. However, I have compiled all the FFS hacks descriptions in a single pretty document, so I thought I'd share.
So, wanna see OCD in action? Get this neatly bulleted, formatted, and colour-coded document containing all the descriptions of hacks in BV directory, plus Director's Cut exclusives (plus the fruitbowl ).

Dark red descriptions are for hacks not included in DC.
Indigo descriptions are for DC exclusives or hacks that lack the original manual for other reasons (these brief descriptions are mostly copied from various forums around).