Re: Phone Calls Are Stopping The Game

@MCA_der_Negus  Are you willing to try another mod?  If so, it would be interesting to see what NRaas Overwatch makes of your save in Starlight Shores.  Among other things, a huge drag on performance can be the career limos building up in the inventories of inactive sims.  Overwatch has been known to remove tens of thousands of these during its nightly cleanup run.  (There's another NRaas mod, Traffic, that prevents the limos from spawning entirely, but then you wouldn't know if the limos were an issue in the first place.)

Let me know how many Overwatch finds, and then you can try installing Traffic if you want; hopefully it will help.

As always, whenever you install or remove a mod, delete your cache files before launching the game.

There are other cleanup mods too (NRaas ErrorTrap for sure, and others depending on what you're trying to accomplish and which packs you have installed).  I'd be happy to give you a list if you're interested.

If the vehicles aren't the problem, I'd still like to see a dxdiag on your computer.  Your hardware may be over the top for TS3, but there might be a driver issue, or not enough storage, or something else that I can't think of right now.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

And don't worry about the delay in responding.  People post when they have time, and I respond when I know what to say.

@MCA_der_Negus  Could you please provide the entire dxdiag, not just the first page?  Once it's done running, you can save the whole thing as a text document and then attach it directly to a post.  The other important details like driver info and free storage are further down, and the Windows errors are all the way at the bottom.

Here it is

@MCA_der_Negus  Thanks for the full text.  There's nothing that jumps out at me right away, other than the fact that Sims 3 has been throwing a lot of errors (no surprise there).  Of course, you're two Windows 10 builds behind, but you probably knew that already.  There's also a newer version of your graphics card driver, although this doesn't look like a GPU issue to me.  (Don't take my word for it though.)

I see a whole bunch of files associated with the TS3 errors as well, but in all honesty, I'd need some help to interpret them, or even to know which ones to focus on.  I can ask for that help, and get back to you on that (which files to upload, then what they're suggesting), although it might take a little while.

In the meantime, I'm still wondering what would happen with a new save in a clean game folder, with no mods, and no other files from your existing folder.  I know you tried it once in Bridgeport, but could you try again in Sunset Valley?  You could pick the Roomies or Working Friends household and just run it at speed 3; I think those sims know enough people to get calls sooner or later.  At the very least, it would demonstrate definitively whether this was a system issue or something with your game folder.

@MCA_der_Negus  The most common source of lag in Starlight Shores is the performance limos that spawn for high-level performers in Showtime careers.  Overwatch will clean these up every night, but even one day's worth of extraneous limos can number in the tens of thousands, and that will drag down performance right away.  That's why I asked how many vehicles OW was removing—if you were seeing 20-30k each time, their presence during the day could easily account for the lag.

The solution would be to install NRaas Traffic, which prevents the spawning of these limos by default.

Another common issue is definitely an overstuffed world, either with sims or with objects, as in, residential lots with thousands of objects that the game has trouble rendering.  I'm not sure what constitutes too many sims in Starlight Shores—each town has a different number over which performance can start to drop—but you can check the number of residents with NRaas MasterController.  I doubt that anything close to 300 residents (not NPCs or Role sims, but sims who actually have homes there) would work well.  The command would be (click on City Hall) NRaas > MC > Demographics > Population.

Another thing you could do with MasterController is reset the entire town.  This would reset all sims and all lots, including any potential stuck or broken objects.  This is a helpful thing to do even in the absence of game issues; many players run one every six sim-weeks or so just for the health of their saves.  At the very least, it's worth trying to see if your existing save runs better after the cleanup.  The command is (City Hall) NRaas > MC > Town Options > Reset Everything, and it can take a few minutes to finish, depending on the speed of your hard drive and how many objects need to be reset.

Unlike many mods, MC doesn't change anything about how the game runs.  It just loads and waits for you to run a command, and the rest of the time, you wouldn't even know it was there other than when you saw the NRaas entries on object menus.

@puzzlezaddict I'm back, I had to take a break from the game but I was also trying to fix it as always. When the cars are reset it's about 10 - 20 or even less. I disabled the limos and even the ambient taxis with NRaas Traffic and I reset the town and even that didn't work. It seems like the town/phone is cursed. I tried to look for how many Sims I have in the town. While looking through population I couldn't find any total numbers. I chose homeworld and lot and family, are these the correct one? 

@MCA_der_Negus  To see the overall population, click on City Hall and select NRaac > MC > Demographics > Population, then X out the filter.  This will give you a list of every sim in the world, broken down into a few different categories.

@puzzlezaddict Is this the one? Is it normal that service is over 5000?

@MCA_der_Negus  That's the one, and no, it's entirely abnormal to have that many service sims.  You can find out what they are with NRaas > MC > Demographics > Jobs by Career > Type of Service, and check the same path but choose Type of Role while you're at it.

@puzzlezaddict Ok here are the lists but It doesn't seem to be that many...

@MCA_der_Negus  You're right, the list of service sims is hardly overwhelming.  What about filtering by Type of Role, rather than Type of Service?  You should see listings like Proprietor (for clubs), or Stylist and Tattoo Artist if you have Ambitions.  And check (same path) > Type of Pet Pool as well; maybe your town is overrun with strays.

@puzzlezaddict I checked that but it also doesn't seem to be a lot. I wonder where these 5000+ services are coming from.

@puzzlezaddict IT WORKED!!! It finally worked, I had this problem for months! The deletion progress took longer than I thought and after the process the game starts even a bit faster. The phones are now ringing immediately. I had one call that stopped the game for about 1 second but that's ok. I want to thank you for your patience and your help 🙂

I now have 77 service sims and after two sims days they were 78. I have story progression off but is there a way to stop them from growing? Is 70+ too much? Is there something like a max number? Thank you again.

@MCA_der_Negus  I'm so glad to hear that getting rid of all those service sims helped.  78 is a much more reasonable number, and unlikely to affect how your game runs, although it still seems a bit higher than normal.  Some of them will of course be the usual service sims that need to show up when called, either by you or the game, e.g. maids, firefighters, babysitters, newspaper and pizza deliverers.  But it's entirely possible your save is still generating too many of them to fulfill some other function, and that without intervention, you'll wind up in the same place you started.

If you want to find out where they're coming from, you can get info on any particular sim via MC.  There are probably several paths to do this, but one is (City Hall) NRaas > MC > Sim > Status > Career > Town Family > Service.  Once you select a sim or sims, you'll get a report on each one listing their assignment type.  If you see that one type has too many sims, or that a bunch of sims don't have any type listed, you'll know they're the problem.  (A couple of sims without an assignment is probably fine; a new game I just started had two.  They're probably just waiting to be assigned as coworkers or drive carpools or something.)

One potential source of service sims that I didn't mention before is the set of homeless street performers (acrobat, magician, singer) spawned when Showtime is in play.  The issue is not that the performers exist, but that the game keeps assigning new ones, and possibly bumping the old ones out of their assignments, meaning they wouldn't be listed when you searched using MC > Demographics > Type of Service.  There's no real way to stop this the game from generating these sims; even mods can't shut it down entirely.  So the only useful approach is keeping an eye on the numbers and getting rid of the extra sims when necessary.

On that note, NRaas Overwatch has a setting to remove homeless sims that aren't currently assigned to a particular role.  Sometimes it's a bit too invasive, as in, it might remove sims who exist for a reason that OW can't currently find (for example, the workers staffing the seasonal festival booths don't have anything to do the rest of the year).  But it's an easy setting to test, and it wouldn't require you to manually sort or delete any sims.  The path is (City Hall) NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Clean up all Homeless > True.

@puzzlezaddict I cleaned up the homeless and it seems that it doesn't grow anymore. Thank you again for your huge help. I never thought the game could be fixed without a complete reinstallment.