More Awesome Than You!

I've searched "frozen sim" "stuck sim" "not moving" etc but found no results, so I'm guessing this hasn't been mentioned before.

My sims keep getting stuck, and not moving until they reach near death. For example, I instructed one sim to have a shower, and she stood next to it, not moving for FOURTEEN sim hours, then walked off when she reached hunger desperation. I've tried to cancel these frozen interactions but nothing happens. It happens more at the gym, before school or work or when I tell a sim to shower.

Any idea why this happens? I've just installed the AwesomeMod but it's not related to that because it was happening before installation.

Do you have a slow computer? Mine haven't gotten stuck, but sometimes they stand for a bit too long waiting to change clothes. My computer is ancient, so I attribute it to texture loading.

This happens to me fairly often after a sim has aged up or acquired a different outfit--the sim can stand there for a good few hours until they spin into the new clothes (or new body in the case of bathing after having aged up). My video card is on the elderly side and I 'only' have 2 GB of RAM.

Try checking your background tasks, and possibly going fullscreen/low resolution. My computer doesn't have too many problems with running the game for extended periods of time, despite being a humble 3-year-old laptop with only 1 Gig of ram and a 1.66 Ghz processor. I have the graphics on Crap™, but the game's running rather well.

In any case, you've finally found a way to reliably kill off the puddings. Congratulations.

Hmmm, my computer is an iMac, barely 2 years old. Could be a bit slow by sims standards though.

Indeed! I usually have 1 sim hour or less to get them to food before they keel over and die. Makes starvation much easier actually. Every cloud, every cloud.

This is weirdly occurring in my game right now, but not to a sim I'm playing.  My sim went to visit the juice bar in town after work one night and found Tom Shallow standing at a fusball table, zombie-like, staring straight ahead, with his arms diagonally out from his sides.  She tried to interact with him but he didn't respond, so she eventually turned to one of the other folks in the bar who were milling about or dancing.  Later on, since she'd tried to interact with him evidently, she knew him enough to have him in her phone book.  I left her cooking, and zoomed across town to the juice bar and found him inside still in the same place with his arms raised.  I remotely had my sim call him to chat, but when he "answered" he told her he was just going somewhere and to call him later.

Every once in a while after that I would go monitor him while I had her give him a call but he always had some excuse to not have a conversation, saying it was too late, or he was at work, or he was just leaving, while really he was standing there all zombified.  From time to time as well, as I'd be scrolling over the town, I'd notice his thumbnail image at his house as listing him inside, but every time I'd check the juice bar, there he was, frozen.  With so little contact he's eventually disappeared from my sim's phone book, so I haven't  been able to call him for a while, but he never moves, doesn't blink when I set all the lights in the juice bar to hellscape-red, and eternally has his arms slightly raised, as if silently defining his personal safety circle.  Maybe someday I'll try resetting him.

Wow...that's fucked up  :-\

It's happened mainly to the sims I'm playing but I've had the same zombie-like situation in the gym. Often three or four sims stand in a line around the exercise stuff, staring at it blankly. It's annoying. The gym is hardly ever accessible for me now.

Could your problems be due to something like changing clothes? I know my game lags a few sim minutes when they have to change clothes.

Possibly. But it's not the entire game that lags. Everything else continues, and just my sim stands there, occasionally tapping their foot or something.

I think this is how the game is designed to not lag: Rather than stopping the entire game to load textures like in TS2, the game just continues to load the textures in the background while everything else continues: However, the sim that NEEDED those textures gets frozen instead, resulting in that sim becoming "Stuck" in texture load while everyone else moves on. This is why sims ordered to take showers and whatnot will occasionally just hang in place for several seconds unmoving for no apparently obvious reason.

Yes, actually, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the fact that the entire game doesn't stop to load a single thing. It'd slow to a crawl if it did. It seems like they actually did get something right here.

Not really because it reaches the point where my sim is actually dying by the time it's loaded...

No way. My iMac is also 2 years old. And its' the basic 20" one and the game runs perfectly. It has to be some sort of bug. Just use the "resetsim [sim name]" cheat. Its' the only way. My sim also just stands there in front of the shower or dresser (not for 14 hours though). I just use the resetsim cheat and everything is peachy... for the time being.

Sometimes I find that the performance can change arbitrarily. Despite my best empirical efforts, I've yet to isolate the cause, but sometimes it happens after having just had a virus scan, from all I can tell. Sometimes I can barely run the game on fullscreen, other times, I can have Firefox running YouTube and be talking on my chat program at the same time. Try restarting your computer and brutally murdering background tasks until the pants are dead - that could help.

I had a sim get frozen twice without anything texture-related, and my computer didn't seem to be straining at all.

Both times she had just finished teaching a toddler to talk and got stuck cross-legged on the ground, needs dropping and life continuing around her as normal.  Didn't move at all.  The toddlers struggled a bit but were unable to escape the interaction/gorgon stare until I used resetsim on their mother.  After that everything was fine.

I haven't had any other sims get the same problem with toddlers, just her.  But she is an evil daredevil, so I figured she hated her kids and was trying to have a who-starves-to-death-first staring contest.

Oh my god, I just sat here and almost peed myself laughing, as this post just struck me so hilarious!

Agreed.  I can't get this terrible image of a red-headed, skinny mother-sim clutching her flailing child with a maniacal, crazed look in her eyes... muttering "Stare into my eyes, little one, enter the light..." or something of the sort.  -coughs-  Anyway.

I've had a few stuck sims who I choose to ignore and haven't experimented with in the least.  The best was a larva who left a clone of herself when she was left on the floor in front of the only bathroom.  Good times, good times.  ::)

If you're having issues with the game freezing your sim to load textures, just pause the game for a bit to give the game time to chew, so it can load without burning gametime.

I have a similar set up as yours (old laptop with 1.5 GB's and a 1.66 processor) and the longest I've had a Sim wait to change clothes via getting in the shower, leaving for work...etc is about 2 Sim minutes. 14 Sim hours seems like there might be some other problem. But then again, I never have other programs running while I Sim; occasionally Firefox but that's it. Could it be old Cache's that haven't been cleared?

Mine only do that when I play a fambly for the first time. I wrote it off to them not knowing yet how to get themselves to work or something, and once they 'figured it out' they were fine ever after.  :D
Good to know it's outfits being loaded though, I'll just pause my game now instead of fast-speeding through it and letting my sims examine the shower critically for a few hours before they decide it's fine to get in.

Well I've got an elderly Don Lothario and his wife standing on a corner in game frozen and stinking the place up (literally!). They've been there for many sim days and although I get the option to greet them, it just stays in queue and never actually happens so I have to cancel my sim from greeting them.

Reset sim did nothing. I tried putting move objects on and deleting them but I couldn't grab them to select. I moved out of the damned house and the lot is vacant but they are still there. I guess I can bulldoze it ugh but I'd rather not.

Why redheaded? Sounds to me like you're insulting Wiccans!

I've had this happen to one of my sims before but this sim was pregnant and went into the hospital got stuck in there for about a day and a half and came out with the baby five hours after that! She hadn't eaten before she went to the hospital and was about to die from lack of starvation and it reset the -80 hunger moodlet then my game froze and it crashed back to my desktop.