Safeguards?

Do you use mods? Because even if you're normally averse to altering your game, nraas has a few cleanup mods that can prolong the life of a save far past its expected expiration date. Overwatch, Errortrap, and Debugenabler all help cull the accumulated bugs that can end up borking your game—they fix broken sims, delete unnecessary objects, reset lots, and probably a thousand other things that I have no idea about but are essential to the health of your save. They also allow you to perform these functions manually if you suspect something is off. There might be one or two other mods (Traveler?) that would help as well, without changing anything about how you actually play.

I clean out my DCBackUp leaving the ccmerged file as is. I also clean out the temp files from the DCCache file. I also clear out the CASPartCache, compositorCache, scriptcache, simsCompositorCache and the SocialCache every time I start up my game as well as getting getting of the FeaturedItems folder. I know there is a way to keep the featureitems folder from showing up in the TS3 folder but I haven't yet tried it.

@igazor might know more of what needs to be done besides what all I do in my folder... :)

And it's best to "Save as" when saving a game so that you have an earlier save to revert back to in case your current game crashes. I try to save when I'm done something such as decorate my lot or at the end of a Sims day or when a Sim had leveled up a skill or 2... :)

Thank you for responding! :)

@puzzlezaddict Yes, I am using quite a few nrass mods including the ones you've mentioned. I'm a bit of a mod addict normally so I didn't play for more than a few days before searching for them! :D

@lisasc360 I have been clearing the caches you referred to before I start the game each day. I found a tutorial to make it so that the featured items folder doesn't need cleaning out. It's really easy. I also have the saver mod set to save the game every 12 sim hours in 3 different save names. I'd do it more often than that but Sims 3 takes forever to save.

@Rainydayz179 - You can't play this way. Just pack it in, it can't be done. >:)

(I am, of course, not being serious yet) :p

I have 16 Traveler mod connected worlds in my six year old ongoing game, with several thousands of sims between them. I play five of these worlds where "my" sims live in rotation, and also leverage NRaas StoryProgression's caste features to rotate through anywhere from 2-10 households in each of those worlds. The other connected ones are the WA worlds, Uni, Oasis, custom vacation destinations where my sims might have friends and vacation homes, and a couple where no one I play really lives there anymore but there might be some friends of the elders or some very distant relatives still hanging around whom I don't want to lose completely just yet. To some, this game of mine seems extreme. But from chatting with colleagues at NRaas and on MTS, I can say that I'm not the only one who plays this way. Some have ongoing games started in 2009 when TS3 was first released that they still play, some who play more often or much faster than I do or who rotate less are on Generation 150 or something, etc.

With NRaas Traveler, there is no hard limit to the number of worlds one can connect. But I don't know of anyone who has, say, 50 or 100 of them within the same ongoing game. Seems like the TravelDB file that holds all of this together might corrupt and things would maybe begin falling apart somewhere along the line.

Things can of course go wrong, even with all of the mod protection in the world this game is delicate, and there are times when I have to revert to a prior save in the single timeline to replay around something awful happening. You can call me overly cautious, paranoid, all kinds of names, I call myself these names in fact so it's all good, but I have easily over 150 copies of this game from different points in time saved on internal and external drives. The notion of losing the entire thing at once is just not tolerable to me, the only ways that can happen would be if someone broke into my apartment and stole all my computer equipment, the entire building burned down (reminds me, I really need to send a few of these saves up to the Cloud one of these days), or if I get clonked on the head and don't even remember what a sim is. Plus it's fun to be able to open up one of those now ancient saves when looking for or trying to remember how something worked or what it looked like back then, whatever happened to that great painting so and so made, etc.

If you told me back then when I sat down, created my first sim, and placed him in Sunset Valley that I would still be playing TS3, and that same game save, six years later I would have said that you were crazy. This was only meant to be a let's check it out kind of thing, if I don't like it I'll easily find something else to play. That...didn't happen. And none of this was really planned out in advance, it all just sort of evolved over time.

As far as safeguards are concerned, it sounds like you are already well on your way to doing what you can for your ongoing game. But there's two issues to separate out a bit -- Prevention and Recovery. The system of backup saves however one arranges it are for Recovery should something catastrophic go wrong with the in-progress game or the computer on which it is being played. It's easy to say when one has successfully arranged that, just look at the number of saves you can resurrect at any given time. Prevention is, of course, trickier and some of it is more art than science. We have a page full of performance enhancing tips at NRaas in case you haven't seen it that covers most of the things we do to keep our ongoing games from imploding on us. Feel free to ask for assistance here or at NRaas if any of that requires further explanation. :)
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Tips+For+Better+Game+Performance

"lisasc360;c-16229785" wrote:
...as well as getting getting of the FeaturedItems folder. I know there is a way to keep the featureitems folder from showing up in the TS3 folder but I haven't yet tried it.

There are two effective ways to manage FeaturedItems.

1 - Set the folder to be Read Only for the current user and at the System level, then empty it out. This has always worked for me, for some reason it doesn't for everyone.

2 - Delete the folder entirely. Create and save a text document using Notepad, Word, whatever you like, called FeaturedItems, but with extensions showing remove the .txt or .rtf (whatever it has) extension so it's just a generic document. Put that document in your TS3 user game folder. The game can't create a new folder with the same name of an object that's already in the folder and it can't store its junk in what is really a document rather than a folder, so after a while it just gives up. We've seen by watching Process Monitor tools that it still tries for a while when the game starts up and shuts down, but those failed attempts are less stressful on the system than actually allowing it to keep repopulating with useless items.

"Rainydayz179;c-16230673" wrote:
I must have messed something up last time I tried it though because my main family's wishes were gone when I switched back. I did it right the first time when I did it as a test. No clue.

There are at least six ways to switch active households. In order to preserve dreams and opportunities, the switch must be Dream Catching. Not all of them are, some of them require an option to be set by the player.

MasterController - Is Dream Catching if you set the option that way in MC > Settings. But then only for when an MC command is actually used to switch households.

StoryProgression - Is Dream Catching only if the household being left behind is set that way in Household (Town, Caste) Options. But then only for when an SP command is actually used to switch households. Thus you can set some households to always retain their dreams and opps while others not, but again only when an SP command is used to make the switch.

PortraitPanel - Is Dream Catching if you allow the switch active household option in PP and display inactive sims on the panel. This is probably the least used of all the methods.

Selector - Right-clicks to switch active households are always Dream Catching if that right-click to switch option is allowed for in Selector's settings.

Mover - If you are splitting a household and switching active play to a newly created one, the switch will be Dream Catching if it is allowed for in Mover's settings.

Edit Town - This is the EA way to switch actives and is not Dream Catching. Mover is supposed to provide the same protection here as it does on the moving by phone/computer screens, but it's not very reliable.

The Dreamer mod, although not required for any of the above, enhances dream management and makes things a bit more stable.

Having listed all of these out, I should mention that having Dream Managers running on inactive sims is very resource intensive. In most of my worlds I can't have DMs running on more than one or two inactive households, in some none at all, without seeing a huge performance hit. You can see how many DMs are running by way of a MC filter and can cancel them on all of the inactives (it's all or nothing) by way of an MC > Town command.

@Rainydayz179 - I totally agree with you on the Selector thing and I switched off the right-click feature ages ago after accidentally switching households far too many times when I really meant to be refocusing the game camera. On City Hall, NRaas >Selector > Switch Households on Right Click > False. The mod is very valuable though. When a scripted object or even a sim throws errors when being clicked upon, Selector can catch them and produce a script log that gives clues as to what's going wrong (we can help interpret these at NRaas if needed). It's like an ErrorTrap specifically for clickable objects that have menus.

Can't say my Sims 3 game is volatile, since I have been playing the same family for seven and a half years now (I'm in generation 21 at the moment). If anything I'd say on the contrary, Sims 3 enables me to still have every heir I ever played in my game (on the graveyard), which for me adds a lot of depth to the experience. And my world is filled with family members of my current heir.

Sims 3 can have its whims though, so it's a good idea to take some measures. I see you already got a lot of advice concerning mods and mods are great, but I must also add (after playing the game vanilla for years) it can actually be mods that make your game more sensitive/fragile. Ever since I use them I have occasional crashes, something that hardly happened before. This is not me being anti mods; the mods - and CC - I have now I wouldn't want to miss anymore, but it is a warning to be aware of that and not stuff your game with them. I often see mods presented as a solution, where I can't help wondering if they might in fact be part of the problem in some cases.

Though I hardly suffered from actual crashes when playing vanilla (I was not familiar with 'Sims 3 has stopped working', nor with the infamous error code 12), Sims 3 does come with save breaking bugs. Which is why I learned to 'save as' and number my files. That way, whenever things do go wrong, you can always return to an earlier save. Another thing I always do is saving my family on a regular basis (to MediaFire).

When you do use mods (and honestly, I can recommend them and in some worlds you'll have to because they have severe routing issues only NRaas mods will solve), you'll have to make sure to clean your cache files before playing (the ones @lisasc360 mentions). And whenever your game does crash, make sure to empty the currentgame folder before restarting the game.

Sims 3 is delicate, but also quite user friendly where it comes to saving the game, sims, families and houses. Which in my view makes it anything but a volatile game, as long as you take precautions.

@JoAnne65 That's so cool that you're so many generations into a family. The most I've gotten has been legacy families where I played to the 10th gen and then used that gen to start something new. Lately, I get bored really quick and have been changing households and challenges a lot.

You mentioned that you save households to mediafire. How do you do that? I'm used to the gallery in Sims 4 where I can save households or builds as a backup.

"Rainydayz179;c-16231004" wrote:
@JoAnne65 That's so cool that you're so many generations into a family. The most I've gotten has been legacy families where I played to the 10th gen and then used that gen to start something new. Lately, I get bored really quick and have been changing households and challenges a lot.

You mentioned that you save households to mediafire. How do you do that? I'm used to the gallery in Sims 4 where I can save households or builds as a backup.

Saving families happens in edit town. Just click on the family and a window will pop up. Choose the icon that says ‘share’.

https://www.thesimsresource.com/previews2027/2027728.jpg

The file will end up in your Exports folder and from there you can save it to MediaFire. I prefer this to Sims 3’s “gallery” (the Exchange) because EA deletes them from there from time to time. Plus you may not always want other simmers to be able to download your household.

As for getting bored with one family, funny thing in my case is that that’s what happened to me in the beginning (jumping from one to the other). At one point I just decided to stick to this one family and make every new generation a fresh and different one. Not using any cheats helped me not getting bored as well (before that I’d constantly cheat ;)). And maybe playing rotational will work for you?

Oh, p.s., another tip concerning saving: not only save as, but also make sure to save at a regular point (in my case at night, as soon as they go to bed I save my game (as) and it’s become such a habit that I never forget). Sims 3 doesn’t have autosaving and this is what secures that. I also save after an event I really don’t want to lose (at night I number my file, when I save during the day I add a, b, c to the number).