More Awesome Than You!

Awesomeware => AwesomeMod! => Topic started by: vvhitney on 2010 June 28, 07:08:12



Title: Sims starving to death
Post by: vvhitney on 2010 June 28, 07:08:12
I'm sorry I'm not sure if this may or may not be related to the AM mod, but would I like some help to fix this please.

I have had a problem of having stupid sims who don't eat and starve themselves to death.
I have had one sim die during my whole playing time of a few months and after the new sim's patch (im now on 1.12.70.006002) and downloading the new AM mod I have had already about 8 deaths of sims who are not elderly.
I find that they mainly die on community lots, with or without an active playing family there.
When looking at other sims at the community lots some just stand around doing nothing too (don't know if that is normal).

I only have AM mod installed at the moment with no other mods and running sims 3 with no expansions.
I used to have the NRaas_WorkPusher.package mod on but after the new sims update, it no longer works.
I have also tried turning on "NoCommunityStalkerSwarm" and it does not help.
I have high autonomy on too.

Please help.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 June 28, 07:28:05
I keep hearing this problem, but I have not witnessed any unusual starvation deaths in my game. If you notice any strange sims standing there starving, try RadarTagging them and seeing what their stats are like. The present belief is that starvation deaths are caused by the game being starved for CPU, so it skips processing things, causing them to stand there and starve.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: wizard_merlin on 2010 June 28, 11:13:51
Like Pescado, I keep reading about this issue, but have yet to see it happen.  System specs could be a problem, or maybe bad, corrupt or incompatible CC/mods are the problem.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Anach on 2010 June 28, 11:28:06
The only starvation deaths I have experienced are from sims being stuck at the endless award ceremony due to me switching families before my last active sim had completed the ceremony. This caused most the town to remain in the ceremony until death. Only way I could fix it was to revert to an earlier save. The other starvation was from a sim stuck in terrain after getting off a park bench in my newly upgraded park. I reloaded reset the sim and fixed the terrain around the bench.

No other starving sims to report.



Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vvhitney on 2010 June 28, 11:34:48
Thanks for your replies guys.
I just find it weird after this happening downloading the new sims update.
From the deaths I find my sims die from just standing there and not being trapped :(

I'll try using radar tagging and see what I can find.
Hopefull i'll find a fix, i'll keep you guys posted.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vvhitney on 2010 June 28, 13:44:06
Ok I accidentally saved while someone was about to expire (die) so I have a starting point. I just resurrected a person from being a ghost that previously died and this guy(that is about to die) is in the same family. This guy that is gonna die is in the library and his moodlet says he has stir crazy (but his not at home!).

I have played sooo many diff sceanerios to try save him and finally I found out a way which didn't end up glitching or him dying randomly after. What I did with the person that was about to expire was to split him from the household and moved him into my active household and he now works perfectly fine.


Here are some examples of ways i tried to save him which failed:

1.I tried giving him a death flower while he was about to die, he is saved however the game glitches.

2.I tried placing the guy on sacred mode and radar tracking and he is saved, However when i go to his family and play him it glitches

3.I put guy on sacred mode he is saved, and i talk to him and invite him to my active sims house however randomly dies afterwards. (it says he has 0 social)  Pic: (http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/8198/ts32010062823035268.jpg)

4.I put the guy on sacred mode and his saved and I type maxmotives and he dies while on sacred mode.

What happens when it glitches:
-I only see his face on the (bottom middle) profile shot every time I click another person(even when switched household)
-His actions appear when clicked on other people and not theirs.
-The need bar is stuffed up as well as the moodlet bar.


So...theres something glitchy going on in my sims game >_<

Edit: Another sim has just died again.. within one day of saving this sim


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: TheCatMeow on 2010 June 28, 16:14:17
I've had a sim die while on vaca in China. My computer specs are so beyond sims 3 high playability, I know it's not the problem with my game. I've even tried a completely new game and a sim would randomly die from starvation. At the time, I only had Am installed, so it seems like an EA bug.

After searching around on the Sims 3 forum, a lot of people have reported that sims and objects can randomly become stuck. The sims would just stand around and not do anything or would fall through the floor/ground and become stuck. I wonder if this is what is happening to the non-active sims. However, most of those issues did sound like processing problems . . .


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Hallie on 2010 June 28, 17:40:03
Just so you know I found this was just a problem with the new game. It was something I encountered alot in Twinbrook before the awesome mod was being updated. So I think that this was a general EA problem not an awesome problem.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: zanzertem on 2010 June 29, 15:48:54
I have also seen this. While running around China doing missions the camera was instantly ported to the location with all of the Kung Fu equipment.....and was showing someone dying! He wasn't an elder. In fact, I had aging and storymode off. Thought it was strange but didn't think too much of it at the time. If I see it again I'll send a save.

Sorry for the lack of information, just confirming the issue.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: dedust on 2010 June 29, 20:32:20
I've been having this same issue with Sunset Valley, Riverview has been working fine so far. Sims seem to just stand around at their yards, inside their houses or on community lots in swarms, doing nothing. They usually fail work and school, have the Stir Crazy moodlet (which happens even when they're not home), and all critical motives at -100. Then they expire and die. Which results in mass mourning, and other sims dropping all queued actions.

They can be saved from death with resetsim, though this results in other sims mourning like crazy whenever they see the 'saved' sim. Which is sort of annoying, as they have a habit of dying outside job related rabbitholes, which then leads to working sims dropping queues before, during and after work. So they have to be constantly watched over.

I believe it means the neighbourhood has become somehow corrupted, and Sims stand around for hours before taking any action.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: radiophonic on 2010 June 29, 22:00:25
I've only seen starvation with sims addicted to activities such as the Sim Fu dummy. Had three or four in a row die in China but no biggie really, they get replaced. It does however, seem like the more populated the hood, the more likely you'll have unemployment/death issues. My previous neighbourhood got way too big for itself and mass unemployment ensued. It seems likely that the mortality rate would/should increase in the case of a packed city but the consequences make fun factor of the game drop sharply. Nobody wants to have to babysit 5+ playable homes to make sure sims are going to work and not starving while staring at their gardens.

On the other hand, my legacy lot is on generation four and I'm wishing the population of old, crusty sims would die. I have maids from the first generation still hobbling around town and presumably still living in the NPC "house". Pretty annoying really. I'd love to kill them off by hand but would rather not increase the likelihood of my legacy game going BOOM.

TLDR right? Anyway, from what I can tell from playing a few different worlds so far is that the more packed it is with playable homes, the more likely it is for something to go wrong such as mass starvation.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 June 30, 06:23:25
Sim death issues are caused by essentially overloading your game with more people than it can support, resulting in greater and greater lags between when they are processed. After a certain point, sims can go so long between action cycles that they can no longer do enough to keep themselves alive.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: The_Goddess on 2010 June 30, 14:40:10
Sim death issues are caused by essentially overloading your game with more people than it can support, resulting in greater and greater lags between when they are processed. After a certain point, sims can go so long between action cycles that they can no longer do enough to keep themselves alive.

Do you have a recommended population amount or is it more subjective to the type of computer you are running the game on? 


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: dedust on 2010 June 30, 15:03:11
So, would the problem go away if the population shrinks? I noticed I had about 20 families of my own in the problem neighbourhood, and some townie families and npcs on top of that.  ::)


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: inktomi on 2010 June 30, 15:53:58
I've been running into this problem with NPC sims both in China and Egypt, sometimes in the middle of reporting to them for an adventure. I've been playing with a brand new Twinbrook, and only had one sim on vacation at the time, so if it's a matter of overpopulation, the cap is set exceedingly low.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 June 30, 16:36:06
Do you have a recommended population amount or is it more subjective to the type of computer you are running the game on? 
Depends on your computer. My computer is Awesome, so I never see this.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: KingSaverio on 2010 June 30, 16:56:09
I have read the posts in this section, and I didnt notice this weird problem till i checked on one of my households and the wife was starving to death as well as other sims in the neighborhood, :/


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Motoki on 2010 June 30, 18:07:34
So then it looks this is an issue caused by Awesome Story Mode. The Twallan Story Mode (and I think EAxis?) have provisions to remove sims from town either by emigration or death should the neighborhood become too full to the point where it taxes the system too much.

I know the idea with population control in Awesome Story is that you do a bunch of manual fiddling and go in and delete a bunch of cribs from houses so they don't reproduce, but that still takes a long time to bring the population down. In the meantime, apparently, sims will starve under such conditions forcing a more immediate decrease in population. :P


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: GnatGoSplat on 2010 June 30, 18:14:07
I had this problem in Riverview pre Ambitions, exactly as dedust described, with AM at the time.  It's very likely my Riverview was grossly overpopulated considering my save folder was >500MB.

However, after installing Ambitions and playing an un-awesome Twinbrook, as soon as the game is loaded with AM installed, at least 8-sims instantly dropped dead of starvation at the perpetual celebration party in front of Town Hall.  I pulled AM and reloaded the exact same save - not a single one of them croaked.  I don't know if my computer's un-awesomeness would cause such different behavior with and without AM installed.
This also occurred with Awesome Story disabled, so I don't think Awesome Story itself is the reason.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Motoki on 2010 June 30, 18:18:44
Well I think the starvation from the cult-like mass swarm at City Hall and the starvation of random seems around the town are two different issues though.

For some reason, they get transfixed on that damned awards ceremony to the point where they won't do anything else, even eat or go to the bathroom.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: GnatGoSplat on 2010 June 30, 18:48:33
That's true, the situations are probably different.  However, it seems like AM might remove some kind of artificial protection from death that an un-awesome game seems to have.  With an un-awesome game, the mass swarm at City Hall seems completely immune to death when they should have died of starvation long ago.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: The_Goddess on 2010 June 30, 19:02:33
Do you have a recommended population amount or is it more subjective to the type of computer you are running the game on? 
Depends on your computer. My computer is Awesome, so I never see this.

This is good news, I've added 3 neighborhoods to my world and was worried after hearing all the complaints.  I will allow my little Sims to continue to spawn like mad and fill my town.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 July 01, 04:25:13
So then it looks this is an issue caused by Awesome Story Mode. The Twallan Story Mode (and I think EAxis?) have provisions to remove sims from town either by emigration or death should the neighborhood become too full to the point where it taxes the system too much.

I know the idea with population control in Awesome Story is that you do a bunch of manual fiddling and go in and delete a bunch of cribs from houses so they don't reproduce, but that still takes a long time to bring the population down. In the meantime, apparently, sims will starve under such conditions forcing a more immediate decrease in population. :P
See? We have a system, too. Only you SEE it happen, as opposed to having sims that seem perfectly alive to me suddenly die.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vorpal on 2010 July 01, 09:00:45
I don't think that overpopulation is the ONLY reason for Sims starving to death because in several past games (patch level 1.8 or 1.10, can't remember, and onwards) I had this happen already in week one, both in Riverview and in Sunset Valley, and neither China nor Egypt are overpopulated and these are the two vacation spots where I saw this most often. In China it was always at the Academy and caused by the training dummy and in Egypt at the Market and possibly related to the snake charming basket.
I tend to believe, however, that this issue is somehow triggered by using game altering mods. In all of the games that I mentioned twoftmama's autonomous teen woohoo mod was installed and after I had taken that out the death rate decreased rapidly. Since then I've had it only happen once. I still do have that increasing decay of motive sustenance the farther I advance in my game. I am currently on week 9 in Twinbrook and almost every Sim has to be pushed to go to work by AM, many of the children miss school and when I go downtown they stand around complaining about some motive need but doing naught against it. One of my neighbours is also constantly passing out because of tiredness (I can hear her hitting the floor). She, btw, is one of those constant romancers. When I switch to one of those Sims that has to be pushed to work twice or thrice I can see that its needs are in the deep reds - tired, hungry and unwashed. The current population is 77 residents with only 4 new pollinations and I had entered the neighbourhood with only one sim, not a whole family.
So, to cut a long story short, could it be that the reason for this are major changes in the autonomy system that causes weaker systems than the awesome ones to just buckle?


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 July 01, 10:12:30
Possibly. I am looking into this, but in some neighborhoods on the computers of the less awesome, I've noticed that sometimes sim-autonomy hasn't fired for hours.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: saraswati on 2010 July 01, 20:14:58
I've absolutely had the unexplained deaths of non-elders, but the only place that's happened in my game is at the Academy in front of the training dummy. It's happened a few times and it's incredibly irritating.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vvhitney on 2010 July 03, 04:12:38
Hmmm I have also found out that when changing around the active families there is usually one person who is starving or close.
I looks as though in most families that there is one person in the family that gets ignored by the computer.

Maybe they are falling to death because the work pusher mod has been removed?




Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Jackathyn on 2010 July 05, 19:54:06
Seconding the issue of people starving to death in the Martial Arts Academy. I only sent one sim to China and saw it happen when he went to train. Played chess for his life and saved him. I've only seen this occur once in my game.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Trubble on 2010 July 06, 10:01:45
Jackathyn, put a fridge on the Academy lot. Stopped it happening for me.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: BlueSoup on 2010 July 06, 10:09:10
I did that but it didn't stop anything for me.  Next time I visited, two Sims died one after the other of starvation.  They had a grill and a fridge.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: Trubble on 2010 July 06, 10:38:29
I had two kick it so I added a fridge. My sim was on that lot for a fair few sim days on multiple trips and no more deaths occurred. I figured it had worked and remembered reading about other people having success with it? It was useful for the "death on vacation" photos at least.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: BlueSoup on 2010 July 09, 10:00:08
The second my Sim arrived at the Academy, two Sims that were perfectly happy and playing on the Sim Fu training dummies suddenly stopped and died.  I had already been focused on the lot waiting for her to get there and nothing seemed out of the ordinary until she arrived, and then it all happened all at once.  Like Trubble, I took the opportunity to get a few photos that I was missing.

(http://bluesoupistan.com/bluesoup/files/Misc/academy_deaths.png)


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 July 09, 10:32:41
I have a few suspects of what causes this, and I suspect it is resolution granularity. Type "aistats" into the console and see if you see particularly high resolution times.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: BlueSoup on 2010 July 09, 10:36:29
(http://bluesoupistan.com/bluesoup/files/Misc/aistats.png)


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 July 09, 12:02:39
Yeah, your neighborhood is definitely showing some severe lag. My mskew is only about 2 hours, with an average resolution of about 20 minutes. With your neighborhood, the game isn't processing some people for nearly 15 hours! Obviously, by then, they may have starved to death. Maybe if your computer wasn't expending so much power on rendering your ENORMOUSLY FAT HEAD...


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vorpal on 2010 July 10, 09:19:10
So, I guess that this not only causes those sudden deaths by starvation but also that my nhood is currently completely out of sync as if every household lived within their own time bubble? Examples for this are
a) most sims miss work. Although game time says it's time for work, when I switch to a family that is due for work and click on the go-to-work-button I get the message that I should try again in five hours as it is not their time yet.
b) SuperComputer tells me that a child is about to age up in 1 day. When I switch to that child its life meter says that there are still 2 days until age up. Using the SC on that child, however, still states 1 day.
c) children miss school and get bad grades but I cannot send them manually and the message says "no school atm".

I have to say though that I had these problems right from the start with that hood (Twinbrook) and there are times when suddenly it all goes well for several game days until it falls back into that state of out-of-syncness.
Before Ambitions I had a similar case in Riverview when I had to push every non-played school kid manually to go to school, but at least in that game they obeyed and went and did not prompt that message that there was no school atm. Moving my main family into a new Riverview fixed that, however, which makes me wonder whether this problem is something that can infect a town right from the start.

my maximum skew is currently 1090.667 and the average is 60.281 with a nhood of 124 days. Population number is currently 79 residents and I capped it at 80 using aweconfig. I guess this makes my head considerably fatter.

I have to admit that my computer is not the "best" (Macbook Pro with 2.8 GHz CPU and a mobile Geforce 9600 - I don't know how much you should subtract from that configuration's processing power due to the additional task of handling the Cider environment) but in the past I could play larger populations just fine (slow, but fine).


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: dedust on 2010 July 12, 11:31:24
I have probably the exact same Mac as vorpal above, and most likely the same problems as well. I always thought that this was a quite nice laptop for playing, but with the maximum of 4GB RAM and the dreaded cider environment, all this just isn't enough. With a PC of the same specs TS3 should be running smoothly, at least it seemed to do just that even with my old PC rig, at 2GB RAM, a FX-60 2.6GHz cpu and dual GF 7800GTX's.

I created a new neighbourhood, imported my families from Sunset Valley, and looks like I have the same idling-till-death issues like before. So far I've had only a few pre-created townies drop dead, but it's only a matter of time when I have to start saving my own Sims from the Grim. Sometimes they seem to be able to do some things themselves, but it takes a while still. This problem wasn't around with Riverview, where I had only about 5 or 6 families to play. There were a few families I didn't touch and a bunch of townies too.

If only EA would port its games as native, instead of this wine based piece of crap that eats all ram in seconds.
POO.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: J. M. Pescado on 2010 July 12, 11:44:06
I have added some prototype features to attempt to reduce this, but obviously, can't test it. Let me know how the latest version does for you.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: wizard_merlin on 2010 July 12, 16:53:08
I have to admit that my computer is not the "best" (Macbook Pro with 2.8 GHz CPU and a mobile Geforce 9600 - I don't know how much you should subtract from that configuration's processing power due to the additional task of handling the Cider environment) but in the past I could play larger populations just fine (slow, but fine).

Don't forget that every EP will add to the system, and impact its performance.  This also happened with TS2, the next EP EAxis release will probably slow your system down even more and annoy the shit out of you even faster.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: vorpal on 2010 July 12, 18:16:13
Although I have not played TS2, I remember this very well from TS1, too. I just hoped that it would not happen so soon, because the performance hit I am having now is drastic compared to what I had without AMB. I still have a save of a hood started back in August last year. It's a family of 8 on a 60x60 lot in Sunset Valley with some 125 residents and it remained playable even after installing WA. Now it's 3 Sims on a 20x30 lot in a Twinbrook of 80 residents and they are all too inert to even die. And I am sure as soon as they'll include weather in a future EP that will be the particle movement frontier I will not be able to cross.
I'll see what the new version of AM will do as soon as the RL temperatures have gone down a bit. Currently it's too hot and the laptop cooler I bought has just left the building wrapped in a very black body bag with "crap" written all over it in its own blood.


Title: Re: Sims starving to death
Post by: phnxflyng on 2010 July 13, 04:54:09
Yeah, your neighborhood is definitely showing some severe lag. My mskew is only about 2 hours, with an average resolution of about 20 minutes. With your neighborhood, the game isn't processing some people for nearly 15 hours! Obviously, by then, they may have starved to death. Maybe if your computer wasn't expending so much power on rendering your ENORMOUSLY FAT HEAD...

Is this a problem that upgrading RAM or something will fix? I would really appreciate if someone who knows how this works would advise me. I'm happy to upgrade my pc in the service of good simming.