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Maav209's avatar
10 months ago

Sims Biography/sentiment panel is broken. (No Mods)

Hello!

My Sims biography and sentiment panel is broken and I am unsure what to do anymore. Before the game broke I was playing with some trait mods and memory buffs mod. I was adding Buffs for storytelling purposes and it broke immediately after that. When I click on the panel the first time, it looks like the picture I have attached. When I try to click it again after closing it, it does not pop up anymore. When I click on the townies panel, it does the same thing. The game keeps playing and you can hear the sims music in the background as if the panel was open. My game broke about two months ago and I have been unable to fix it. I feel like I've tried everything. I do play with a lot of mods, my folder is about 6 gigabytes. I removed my entire mods folder and launched the game again and it still didn't work. I tried a new save file and that also did not work. I uninstalled and reinstalled the sims and the EA app multiple times and It did not work. I tried repairing the game through the ea app option and again, it didn't work. I tried reinstalling the sims again after downloading a program where It searches and scans my entire PC and deletes any file to do with EA and The Sims and still nothing. I even went as far as resetting my entire PC just to be sure and I'm sure you can guess by now that it also didn't work. I also installed it in my secondary hard drive and that also did not do anything. I thought maybe it was an update that broke it but a couple of updates have come out since then and I still have the same outcome.

Edit: I downloaded the EA app on my sisters PC and logged into to my account and downloaded the The sims (shes never had it installed before) and the problem happened for her as well. Could the issue be with my EA app Account?

Im not really sure what to do anymore at this point. Ive been playing with mods for over 10 years and I feel like I'm pretty good at identifying broken mods and updating them but I'm not sure what to do now since it is a new install on a secondary hard drive, with no mods and a new save file to test it. Please help lol 

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  • @Maav209  This is odd, and you've been very thorough.  I do have a couple of suggestions though.  First, please unplug your second and third monitors, and set your first monitor to run at 60 Hz.  I realize this isn't what you want (or what you paid for with the monitor and the other hardware), but please try it as a test.  Restart your computer, open Sims 4, and let me know what you see.  If the problem is still present, switch the game to windowed mode, at a 1920x1080 resolution, quit, restart your computer, and check again.

    If this doesn't help, would it be possible to get a dxdiag from your sister's computer so I can compare it to yours?  It's usually easier to find the problem with multiple examples.

    Another troubleshooting step you can try is a clean boot:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

    The one service to leave enabled is the EABackgroundService, which the EA App needs in order to run.  Disable the rest as described.

    When you reboot your computer, go through the Task Manager's background processes list shutting down any service that doesn't absolutely need to be running, for example anything from MSI Afterburner to RGB software might still be enabled.  If you accidentally kill a critical process and it doesn't restart on its own, just reboot your computer again.

    Don't open anything other than Sims 4 and the EA App while testing, not even a browser window.

    Finally, if you've overclocked your PC in any way, please remove those settings, including the GeForce Experience auto-overclocking feature if you're using it.

    To answer your question, this is unlikely to be an EA account issue.  EA servers only host one version of Sims 4, and either you can run it or you can't.  The App's few features can interfere, but they don't change from one account to another aside from online restrictions for underage users.

  • Maav209's avatar
    Maav209
    10 months ago

    Hello @puzzlezaddict ! 

    I have tried everything you have suggested, and unfortunately, it did not work. I'm unable to retrieve my sister's DXdiag at the moment. However, my brother just got a new laptop, and I decided to install the Sims on his computer to see if the problem persisted, and it did ☹️ I have attached his DXdiag. It makes sense that it's probably not my EA account, but I don't understand how this problem happens on three different computers. Im installing the game the same way I always have. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out! 🙂

    I should also add that the game does not pause in the background when I open my Sims sentiment panel but it does pause on the townies panel (doesnt work all the time though). When I click on the townies panel, the game pauses and I can see all the information. When I exit and click my sims panel then that issue that I described earlier happens. Once I click out of my sims panel and click on a townies panel, it no longer works.

  • @Maav209  Your brother's dxdiag doesn't clarify anything, unfortunately, but he might want to know that a component of McAfee is crashing.  I'd suggest uninstalling and reinstalling it the official way:

    https://www.mcafee.com/support/s/article/000001616?language=en_US

    There's also something going on that's draining his battery when the screen is off, probably the CPU or some other component or driver not being in the proper idle state.  The dxdiag can't tell me more than that, and I have no idea whether he would care enough to investigate, but the errors are clear.

    For your issue, it sounds like you've installed the base game through the EA App, but what about your packs?  Are they installed through the App too, or did you get them from Epic or somewhere else?  What language did you install the game in on each device?  If you have time, could you install in a different language and see whether the problem is still present?

  • Maav209's avatar
    Maav209
    10 months ago

    @puzzlezaddict I will let him know!

    My game and all of my packs were purchased from Origin before it became the EA App. I installed the game in English on all three. I uninstalled and reinstalled the game and the packs in Spanish and the issue still persists. 

  • @crinrict 

    Yeah, the issue in that post is exactly what is happening to me. And yes that's what I meant when discussing the sentiments/biography panel. I guess there isn't a fix if people have been having issues with it for the past couple of years. I can click on the sim profile on the pie menu and not have any issues, however, I don't see that option to click it when I select my own sim. Thank you for linking that thread, I felt like I've looked everywhere and hadn't been able to find anyone else with this issue. 

  • crinrict's avatar
    crinrict
    Hero+
    10 months ago
    @Maav209 Could you add your voice over there ? Would be good to bump it to show it's still an error. As this thread is a bit technical with troubleshooting, I don't think it should be merged.