Corrupted files
Hi, Last night my Sims 3 game never fully loaded. There is no panel showing in order to access the Sims Inventory, etc. Also, there are no character icons showing to control them. In EA Help, the ...
Forum Discussion
@jeanmarie618 It's not too hard, just a bit time-consuming, to place all your households and buildings in a new save. Since you could start the new save in the same world as the old one, you'd know that everything fit where it needed to go and wouldn't need to plan the town's layout. I'd skip the "updated" versions of the worlds, at least for now, unless you're playing in Isla Paradiso or maybe Bridgeport. The other EA-made worlds run well enough that it's not really worth the trouble to switch out the worlds.
However, it would be even easier to "rescue" this save with mods, if it's possible. Mods are really not that complicated to install; you just download and unzip some files and drop them in the appropriate folder. Here's a good guide:
https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Installing_Sims_3_Package_Files/Setup_and_Files
The mods I'd recommend to try to fix your game are ErrorTrap, Overwatch, and MasterController. I'd consider adding Register and Traffic as well, and Traveler if you plan on having your sims travel, but you can start with the first three and see what happens. You can find links to all of the above here:
ET and OW do their jobs on their own; MC doesn't do anything unless you use it to issue a command. In your situation, I'd add those, load the save (the backup copy, since it's less corrupted), let the game clock run for a few sim-minutes, and then use MC to reset the town. You can do this by clicking on City Hall and selecting:
NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything
The reset may take a few minutes to run, depending on how many issues it needs to repair and how fast your computer is. So don't worry if the save looks like it's locked up, or at least don't worry for the first 10-15 minutes or so.
Once the MC reset is finished, let the game clock run for a few minutes more, then use "save as" to rename the save yet again, so you know which one was MC reset, quit, delete the cache files, reload, and see how the save runs. The reset may fix a number of other issues, and for those that it doesn't, we can try to figure them out afterwards.
If you have any questions about mods, or really anything I described above, please feel free to ask.
I'd also like to know which packs you have installed, and which world (Sunset Valley, Twinbrook, etc.) you're currently playing in.
Thanks for all that info. I am going to try the mods. Do they help older PC's handle the game better? My PC handles it fine, but I worry about the hard drive... or whatever stresses a PC. The CPU maybe?🙂 I reboot my PC when I see things starting to get wonky. Assuming I'm running low on memory when that happens.
This is my PC:
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6400 CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.71 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
The broken save is Sunset Valley. I run everything except Pets and World Adventures. I have both, but I read you should limit have many packs you run and I'm over the limit. I'll check which ones I run. For sure I run Seasons, University Life, Nightlife (not sure of the name)... I'll go look.
All the towns run fine, including Bridgeport. But I never bought the island one, after reading it had problems.
@jeanmarie618 Your computer can actually handle running all Sims 3 packs together on ultra graphics settings, although water and high-detail lots should be turned down to lower the stress on the game engine. (I play with those on "mirrors only" and 2, respectively.) Your processor wouldn't be under any undue stress unless it's overheating while you play, and your hard drive should be completely fine too. You also have enough RAM to support Sims 3, which can only use 4 GB, although it's a good idea to not run too much else while you're playing. The warning about not running with all packs is a bit overboard and totally generic—everyone playing through Origin sees it—and doesn't apply to your system.
The only component in danger, so to speak, is the graphics card, and that would be from running Sims 3 at excessively high framerates. It's not that the card can't handle the load of the game, it's that generating extremely high fps isn't good for GPUs in general. And turning down the graphics settings or disabling certain expansions will actually raise framerates: since the game becomes easier to render, the graphics card is now capable of rendering more frames per second than it could before. This is why it's critical to manually cap fps; if you haven't done so and want help with the process, please ask, and let me know whether you ever play in windowed mode.
By the way, World Adventures is one of the lowest-impact expansions, so adding it wouldn't have much of an effect on how your or almost any system handles the game. Pets is the most demanding EP, but like I said, you should be able to run it.
I'm not sure whether you've done this, but don't ever disable an expansion and then load a save that has been played with that pack active. That will definitely corrupt your save even if you do everything else right.
NRaas mods help Sims 3 run better, but most of their impact has to do with keeping saves from getting corrupted. The effects can include lowering the amount of RAM a save uses in that errors get handled before the game engine falls all over itself trying to resolve the problem, but the mods don't do a whole lot to help borderline systems. However, since your system is far from borderline, the issues you're seeing are almost certainly about your saves and not your hardware.
Glad to hear my PC has enough stuff for Sims 3🙂
>>>>>This is why it's critical to manually cap fps; if you haven't done so and want help with the process, please ask, and let me know whether you ever play in windowed mode.
I don't know how to manually cap fps. I'd like to try.I only play in full screen. In other games over the years I used full screen because I liked it so much more, but now that I'm getting older (63) my eyesight isn't great.
>>>>>By the way, World Adventures is one of the lowest-impact expansions...
Good to know.
>>>>>....don't ever disable an expansion and then load a save that has been played with that pack active.
Not sure if I've ever done that. If so, it was an accident.
A couple weeks ago I got a message saying items were missing. It wasn't from a missing expansion pack. They were the store bought items. I was tired and not thinking and hit save. What a mess. The game substituted stuff everywhere. I knew to always check which expansions are checked off to load, but didn't look to see that store bought items were showing. Now I don't know what caused that, but I always wait until I see the store bought items in the downloads window. They don't appear immediately like they used to.>>>>>NRaas mods help Sims 3 run better, but most of their impact has to do with keeping saves from getting corrupted.
I'll read up at your mod links tomorrow & get back with you about that.. Grandkids woke me up early today & were here all day.
Thanks much for your patience. Very kind of you🙂@jeanmarie618 Capping fps is easy enough. Right-click on your desktop, select the Nvidia Control Panel, choose Manage 3D Settings > Program settings, and pick TS3.exe from the list. (You want TS3.exe, which is for Origin installs, as opposed to TS3W.exe, which is for disc or Steam installs.) Scroll down to "Vertical sync" and set it to Adaptive. Enable triple buffering too, just above vertical sync. These settings only apply in fullscreen mode.
In case you ever want to play in windowed mode, in the same list of options there's a Max Frame Rate setting, which you can set to 60. This works in fullscreen and windowed modes, but it's best to use vertical sync and triple buffering in fullscreen mode because they also help prevent graphical issues like screen tearing.
As for the store items, they simply don't load sometimes for no apparent reason. If you see it happen again and accidentally save, you can always load the backup save instead. It's also a good idea to get into the habit of saving first, then quitting without saving as a separate step. In addition to making easier to avoid clicking "save and quit" when you don't intend to, the advantage is if the save process fails, you see it happen and can do something about it rather than the game going straight to "quit."