Forum Discussion

Hero+

Re: (MAC)sims 3 stuck finalizing

@snnicorn The fact that your game is running is great; that eliminates most of the issues with TS3. The crashing in CAS or Edit Town may be due to the game hitting its memory limit, as both those modes use more RAM than live gameplay. Unlike TS3 in Windows, the mac version of the game can only use 2 GB RAM before crashing or throwing errors, and there's also a memory leak issue that causes the game to use more and more RAM as you go along.

You can monitor RAM use in the Activity Monitor while you play—hit cmd-enter to switch between fullscreen and windowed mode. (Since you only have 8 GB memory overall, it's also a good idea to not have much else running on your computer besides the game itself.) You can also periodically purge RAM via Terminal command. But if TS3 gets too close to the limit, the only thing you can do is save, quit to desktop (without saving, as a separate step), and reload.

https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay/

If you find that your game is crashing even when it's nowhere near the RAM limit, then there are a few more troubleshooting steps you can try. The first is one you should do anyway: delete the five cache files in your game folder (in Documents). These files can fill up with stale data and should be deleted regularly, even in the absence of issues. For reference, they are:

CASPartCache.package
compositorCache.package
scriptCache.package
simCompositorCache.package
socialCache.package

4 Replies

snnicorn
7 years ago
Thank you so much for your help!! That is a really weird issue that the Mac version has, I wonder why it's like that I hope they can update it and fix it at some point because that really blows.
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
7 years ago
@snnicorn Yeah, it's really annoying not to be able to play TS3 properly in mac OS. Unfortunately, the issue is probably never getting fixed. The Windows version was made Large Address Aware (the technical term for a 32-bit app being able to use 4 GB RAM instead of 2) back in 2010, but the mac version never received that patch due to the way the game was ported into mac OS. And since TS3 has been out of development for over five years now, we don't expect anything to change.

After fighting with the RAM limit for varying amounts of time, many of us mac users gave up and started playing in Windows instead, either on a different computer or via partitioning the hard drive and installing Windows (this is known as Bootcamping). I Bootcamped my mac last spring, and I'm thrilled at how much better the game runs. But this isn't a solution for everyone—for example, you'd need at least 300 GB free storage to devote to the Windows side of the partition, plus some breathing room on the mac side. And it's not the same as playing in mac OS, which is what we'd all prefer to be able to do.
Zarli1234321
5 years ago
@puzzlezaddict what if the files aren't there?
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
5 years ago
@Zarli1234321 This thread is a couple years old now, so I'll lock it here. Please instead create a new thread describing your own issue in more detail. Include the specs of your Mac: everything under About This Mac except for the serial number.