Game crashes a few minutes in
I recently installed Sims 3 on a new computer and applied the Alder Lake patch. First time I started the game I was able to play for a few game-days before it crashed; on subsequent attempts the game always crashes a minute or two after loading into a household.
I backed up my Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder elsewhere and emptied it entirely, so I'm starting a fresh new save with no mods installed.
I tried limiting the frame rate by setting Max Frame Rate to 60FPS and turning on vsync in Program Settings for TS3W.exe in the Nvidia Control Panel; and also setting screen refresh rate to 60hz in the ingame options. Using 'fps on' console command shows that FPS isn't going higher than 60.
The crash occurs in both windowed and fullscreen mode.
Another odd potentially related issue is that the intro animation is super slow, like slideshow slow, multiple seconds between frames. Tabbing out seems to speed it up, and once it gets to the loading screen the speed is normal again. I don't think this happened the first time I loaded up the game, but every time since it's been like this, before and after I changed the framerate settings.
Any ideas what I could try to troubleshoot this?
@sims_e_c All of the crashes your dxdiag lists are of a component of the Windows sound software, with the faulting module being a component of DTS Sound. So the problem may be that your sound setup doesn't get along with Sims 3, or that a driver is corrupt or needs to be updated, although the drivers are from October and should be fine in theory.
Anyway, please unplug your headphones and your DAC, or just the DAC if everything else runs through it, restart your computer, and test the game again. If you get another crash, or the intro is running slowly, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor. Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day. Today is on the right.
Look for an error that happened at exactly the time of the crash, or anything during the play session if it ran slowly. If you find one, double-click it to see more details, then copy that info and paste it into a reply here. If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.
Just for good measure, please also check whether Documents is directed to OneDrive. Search in Windows for Command Prompt, open it, and enter this command:
reg query "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders" /v "Personal"
This returns the location of the Documents directory. If you see OneDrive in the path, that means OneDrive is involved and should probably be dealt with. If the path is Users > your username > Documents, OneDrive is not a problem.
