Re: infinite loading screen when travelling

Hi, thank you for the fast reply! 

So i tried to send the Alto family to Paris and left my game to load overnight and it didn't work :/

@sweeyener  Do you have OneDrive enabled and set to automatically sync the contents of Documents with cloud storage?  If so, please either disable auto sync or disable OneDrive entirely, at least long enough to test.

If that doesn't help, move your entire Sims 3 folder out of Documents\Electronic Arts and onto your desktop.  Launch the game, start a new save, and try to travel with a random family.  Please do so right away, as in, within a few in-game minutes of starting the save.  And don't use Create a Sim or Build/Buy before going—the idea is to see whether the travel transition works when the game engine hasn't had much work yet.

By the way, you don't need to leave the game on overnight to see whether it loads.  In a new save, the travel transition should take less than 10 minutes even on the slowest hard drive.  In a long-played and overloaded save, it might take 30-40 minutes, but even that is unusual.

Thank you again for the quick answer! I unistalled OneDrive and moved my Sims 3 folder to my desktop before launching the game. I took a family from Appaloosa Plains and made them travelled to China and it worked!

@sweeyener  Okay, that's a great sign.  The next step is to copy the save folder you've been playing from the old folder to the new one.  Don't move it, copy and paste it (right-click to see the options), so you have the original as a backup if you need it.  The folder for each save unsurprisingly goes in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Saves, and they're all labeled with the names you've used for your existing saves.  (You can ignore the folders with the .backup extensions for now.)

Load your old save in the new folder, and see whether your sims can travel.  If you get a missing objects warning, just ignore it—that's from whatever store or custom content you haven't added to your new folder yet.  You can copy that over later, or reinstall it if you'd prefer, but for now the best test is to see whether your sims can travel in an otherwise empty game folder.

Again, be sure to delete the five cache files I listed before.  They should be deleted any time you add or remove content from your game folder, and also when you switch from one save to another.

Well, I tried to make them go to China and I arrived without them...like the thing with the needs and traits was still here but there wasn't my sim on it and the little squares with the sims in it were also gone...

@sweeyener  Okay, so the save itself is a bit overloaded, and the game engine is strained enough that the travel transition is failing.  Without mods, all you can do is relieve as much of the stress as possible and hope for the best:

• Empty your sims' inventories as much as possible.  A few items is fine; a hundred is not.
• Use "save as" to rename the save, then quit (without saving) immediately before you want to travel.
• Load the game just to the Main Menu.  Turn off memories, the in-game shopping experience, and the hidden object interactive loading screens.
• Lower all the graphics settings to the minimum.  (You can revert to your normal settings after the travel transition.)  Now quit the game again, without loading a save.
• Delete the five cache files in your game folder in Documents: CASPartCache, compositorCache, scriptCache, simCompositorCache, and socialCache.
• Empty out everything in FeaturedItems as well.
• If you play through Origin, sign in and then put Origin in offline mode.  Now disconnect your computer from the internet—turn off wifi and/or pull the ethernet cord.
• Now launch your game, load the save, and send your sims traveling right away, as soon as the game clock starts moving forward.

If this doesn't help, then adding a couple of mods is the only other suggestion I have.  There is one mod specifically meant to fix the broken travel transition, and two more that clean up errors and bad data in general.  Let me know if you're interested.

Thank you so so much for helping me! So, I did what you wanted me to do and at first it didn't work but I added the 3 mods you suggested (Traveler, ErrorTrap and Overwatch) and it worked!

@sweeyener  That's great to hear, and yes, those are exactly the mods you'd want.