Sims 3 64 bit keeps crashing
For the first two weeks or so of playing the sims 3 64 bit version, I had no problems with the game lagging or crashing. However, lately it has been crashing more and more, with today seeing a total ...
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@CatCrackerz The issue might in fact be the pets, although it's difficult to be sure. Plenty of players with hardware similar to yours have been unable to use the Pets EP without crashing, but that's not a universal experience.
Since you could originally play fine with pets, the animals themselves may not be the issue, but perhaps something else going on in the world, for example a pack of wild horses spawning somewhere inconvenient or a baby animal getting stuck. Inactive households will adopt pets too, and those can cause problems even if your own sims' pets are fine.
If you're willing to use mods, I can recommend some to try, although I can't promise they'll help without knowing the exact cause of the crashes. If you don't want to use them, try disabling all the pet-related options you can find within the game settings.
It's also a good idea to delete the five cache files in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3 every time you get a crash. (The files should be deleted regularly anyway.) For reference, they are:
- CASPartCache.package
- compositorCache.package
- scriptCache.package
- simCompositorCache.package
- socialCache.package
If there are any files in the CurrentGame folder, delete those as well. That folder should always be empty unless you actually have a save loaded.
I'm open to using mods in my game, although from what I've seen the process is a bit more involved than the sims 4.
@CatCrackerz It's more involved, but still fairly straightforward. Here's a guide, if you're curious:
https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:TS3_System_Requirements
In your position, I'd start with NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, MasterController, and Register. The first two do their own cleanup without any need for user input; MC does nothing unless you use it to issue a command; Register controls the role sim population, which includes stray animals. Overwatch also has the option to shut down the neighborhood pet adoption feature, where an inactive household is selected to host randomly generated puppies or kittens. This feature can easily break, so I'd recommend disabling it.
With Register, you can disable strays and wild animals, which I'd try doing too, at least for now. If it stops the crashing, great, that's a solution that doesn't affect your sims' ability to have pets.
I installed those mods and turned off strays and wild animals. My game would lag whenever one of the mods caught an error, but it didn't crash until I started turning my camera after I turned it into full screen mode (only 10 minutes after I opened the world). is there any known problem with using fullscreen instead of windowed?
For reference, I originally thought that there was no correlation between the crashing and if it had it fullscreen or windowed. for the first few weeks of playing the game, I played it in fullscreen with the 4:3 aspect ratio, and recently got it to a 16:10 aspect ratio. Could that also be part of the problem?
@CatCrackerz When you're playing in fullscreen mode, using an aspect ratio supported by your screen, either its native resolution or a supported scaled res, should give slightly better performance than other options. However, if you were using the default 1024x768 res, that involves many fewer pixels than whatever higher res you're using now. Fewer pixels means less work for the graphics card, which can mean less crashing if the graphics rendering is the underlying issue.
Windowed resolution can improve performance, or at least decrease the rate of crashing, although it doesn't always. Two of the reasons it can help are the lower resolution it often involves and the fact that an unsupported resolution doesn't matter anymore: playing at a 4:3 aspect ratio wouldn't matter because the system doesn't need to resize the game window.
If you'd like to test, try using one of the reduced 16:10 resolutions and see how it goes. Without knowing your exact model Mac, I can't check that they're all supported, but at least most of them should be.
