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jeen1726's avatar
jeen1726
6 years ago
Solved

Sims 3: Assertion Failed at Address 0x000b:0xa7c1ffde Error Message

I have started playing Sims 3 again after a 7-year hiatus. I used to play the disk game on an old Toshiba, but now I have it downloaded through Origin on a 2017 Macbook. I am aware of the issues with...
mac
technical issues
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    6 years ago

    @jeen1726  I think that it probably does have something, or maybe everything, to do with the number of sims and other data the game is forced to handle.  The exception raised issues are more often seen when trying to launch the game, so I'm not as familiar with what the error means in the course of live play.  But a party with a number of sims present and all sorts of activities happening is definitely a good place to run out of memory, or else to just get a glitch from which the game engine can't recover.

    In your position, I'd quit to desktop and relaunch immediately before my sim calls to start the party, and quit immediately after it was over, just to keep resource use down.  RAM is the resource most likely to be exhausted, but it's not the only one, and the game engine itself can only handle so much excitement before it can't keep up anymore.  (Sims 3 is great, but it doesn't have the most stable of engines.)  This is even a problem in Windows, where Sims 3 is better optimized even independently of the higher RAM limit.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago

@jeen1726  What did you do to try to make the game use 8 GB RAM?  That's actually not possible: Sims 3 is a 32-bit app and can only use 4 GB memory (more like 3.7 GB due to overhead) before crashing.  The Mac version isn't even large address aware, meaning 2 GB is the limit.

The error you listed isn't specific to Sims 3, it's a Cider error that looks like it's appeared in other games that were made to work in macOS via Cider.  It's not typical in Sims 3 though, so I wonder if it has to do with the changes you made to try to make the game use more memory.

    • puzzlezaddict's avatar
      puzzlezaddict
      Hero+
      6 years ago

      @jeen1726  That post is inaccurate.  The limit referenced is actually for the script heap, and if you look closely, you'll notice the initial limit is 20 GB, not 2.  It doesn't affect how much memory the game can use.

      I don't know how Sims 3 could possibly be using more than 4 GB memory even in Windows.  It's a 32-bit app, and it can only address 2^32 (4 billion and change) values at any given time.  I guess it's possible that macOS pages the game to virtual memory better than Windows does, but a 32-bit app is still going to be limited by its nature no matter what you do to it.  The memory addresses are literally not long enough to accommodate more data.

      • jeen1726's avatar
        jeen1726
        6 years ago

        So I haven't gotten the "Assertion Failed" error message since yesterday, but now I'm getting the more common "Exception raised. Unhandled page fault on write access to 0x00000000 at address 0x7c470f73" during my house party. Is this just due to the amount of activity going on in the game (sims, mixologists, stereos, etc.)?

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