Sims 3 - Sims/Lots won't load/textures disappear.
Alright I've been dealing with this bug for 2 years now. It is not the blue lot glitch because there is more to it when the bug happens, I always can start up my game just fine. The crippling bug happens anytime it wants to it seems. It can happen 2 minutes into gameplay to 30 minutes into gameplay to an hour or there's been times it doesn't show up for days. To then show up again ! I am getting beyond fed up. Yes I have CC and its been a pain to figure out what's causing it because the glitch comes at random. And in my opinion I am starting to think its more a graphical game engine failure then anything.
I just need help for sure knowing. When the glitch occurs time will still go by and the sims needs will deplete as time goes on. But the game itself is dead. Sims disappear or if they are still there they will just stand still. Interacting of any kind will not work.
Only highrises disappear and turn into blue lots. And sometimes the glitch happens during CAS and when it does the sim will lose texture and become white and red. I at first thought it was the custom world I was playing in then I moved my family through porter to another world. It didn't occur for 1 whole week and I thought I had fixed it, Until of course it showed up in the new town. I have done some experimenting when the glitch occurs as well. I have backed out of the game to the main menu without saving of course I never save when this happens, and I opened up a DIFFERENT household and tried to load into that which then will always say "A serious issue has occur please restart application etc" and the screen will turn white with awful graphical textures.
So basically when this bug happens it affects my entire game not just this specific household/save file. I have to always close out of sims 3 completely to fix this error to then get it again within however long it takes to come back. Someone please help with this.
I have done all the recommended stuff way back when I started playing the sims 3 on this computer 5 years ago like updating it to know my graphics card, frame rate limits. etc. This bug never happened until early last year. I have played the game with my CC in my launcher turned off for 30 minutes and it didn't show. I then turned it back on and instead took out my mods folder for 30 minutes and it never showed. Its by god impossible to figure out what is causing this issue because it appears at complete random.. Any help from people who know more about this is welcomed. I will try to grab more screenie's to show the CAS and trying to load up another town without closing the game glitch when I can.
@brookangel This happens because something in the game engine bounces and fails to load. While it's not technically caused by mods or custom content—it can happen in a vanilla game—mods and cc do make it somewhat more likely. It's like you're rolling the dice all the time, and adding mods and cc increases the chance of a bad roll. So that's why it can be so difficult to pin down the cause. Even if one mod or cc item is doing most of the harm, there's enough randomness that you might not be able to identify which one.
At any rate, one thing you can do is lower the High-detail Lots setting to 1 or 2, if you haven't already. Try enabling Object Hiding as well. They're both with the other graphics settings.
It is never a good idea to exit a save to the Main Menu and load another save before quitting to desktop. Doing so will allow the game to keep some data from the first save and perhaps superimpose it on the second save. And as you've seen, a glitch in the graphics engine can persist as well.
I don't really know what to tell you other than to try paring down your cc to only the items you really want to use. Mods tend not to do this unless they affect graphics directly or are especially demanding, so HQ or lighting mods or something like StoryProgression. A broken mod could of course qualify as well. If you want me to take a look at your mod list, just post a screenshot or two of the Packages folder, but I'm not going to be able to say much about custom content.
