My apologies for this being long; I’m trying to record everything again, since they saw fit to delete the other thread in its entirety (rather than just the troll posts….)
System info for crinrict:
iMac
Mac OS: 10.6.6
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo
Graphics card: ATI Radeon X1600
I have the whole lot: Sims 3, WA, LN, Ambitions, Fast Lane Stuff, High-end Loft Stuff, Outdoor Stuff. Game is fully patched and up to date.
I’ve never had any mods or cc from third parties. I have some items from the Store but nothing from the Exchange.
I don't have any other problems (no crashing, no save errors).
Timing:
I’ve only had the game since January of this year so these glitches developed quite quickly for me. I can’t remember how many sim weeks this represents but my game reached four generations of a family before becoming unplayable.
Problems I have experienced (roughly in order of occurrence):
1. Pausing and freezing. While the sims are frozen the plumbobs keep spinning, if they are asleep the zzzz keep rising, music or ambient sounds also continue (e.g. bird tweets). The pauses last a few minutes, becoming more frequent and longer. It gets to the point where it is frozen more often than playable and I have to give up on the game.
2. Sims stuck in furniture or floating half-in half-out their beds. This happened most often while sims are in bed – they float in a rigid horizontal position, part way through the bed. Resetsim works a few times but then stops working, sometimes the “reset” sim remains in the horizontal position but moves away from the bed so that they are floating in mid-air. The problem is not confined to beds - sims also get stuck in other furniture – chairs, bookcases etc. They cannot be controlled while stuck.
3. Merged sims and sims stacked up around town (e.g. a bunch of kids stuck in a seated position outside the school, as though on an invisible bus). One or more sims occupying the same space and uncontrollable. Similar to sims being stuck in the furniture except they are stuck to each other! Reset sim works for a while but then starts to fail.
4. Sims resetting themselves. Sims will pause for a moment and then suddenly jump to a reset position. This happened quite a lot while my teen sims were sitting down doing homework – they would suddenly leap up and be standing next to the table, but it also happened for the adults.
5. Invisible sims. The final symptom – sims just disappear. You can sometimes tell where they are because their thought bubbles still appear. Sometimes you can continue to direct their actions. It resembles the sims get into their cars – you know how they disappear from the pavement and suddenly reappear inside the vehicle – except that when my sims turn invisible they are not travelling anywhere.
(6. I used to have toddlers stuck at the top of the stairs. This would happen to me when the toddler was really sleepy and I would send an adult to pick up the toddler and pop them in the crib. Toddler would sit at the top of the stairs, adult would walk up and down stairs, achieving nothing. I solved this by instructing the adult to walk to near the crib and the toddler to crawl to the same place. Then they could interact without any stair-related shenanigans.)
Things I’ve already tried:
1. I tried turning down some of the settings in the Options panel (e.g. turn off mirror reflections, reduce quality of graphics) but this didn’t help.
2. Completely uninstalling and reinstalling. I tried this a few times but it had no effect.
3. After a very long email exchange with Customer Support, they had me try all of the following: clearing cache (no effect), turning off background tasks (I didn’t have any running that I could turn off), playing in a different account on the iMac (no use), resetting SMC, verifying and repairing disk permission, repairing Mac hard drive (none of these three worked because the hardware is not at fault!), provided system info to EA (system is OK).
4. Eventually, my final email from customer support stated that they were forwarding my correspondence to the team that develops Sims 3 patches. I thought this represented progress, but since the necessary information was in the deleted thread, I wonder what that team will now see (presumably they can still access it at their end). I might email them back and give them a link to this new thread, so they can't use their deletion as an excuse not to act.
5. What I am doing currently is playing a new game, as Andree suggested in the deleted thread, and keeping a log of how long I can play (in sim days), then which glitches occur and when.
