This issue now seems to be fixed in the 1.68.154.1220 November 2020 patch.
Thanks all for confirming it now seems to be fixed. If you start experiencing issues again please post 🙂
I have the same problem now after updating to the latest patch - never had any similar problems before.
I only get 2-3 minutes of gameplay of trying to build on an empty lot with no family. Seems like the most common trigger for these glitches is rotating the camera, which will occasionally freeze the game for a few seconds, with the default MacOS cursor showing instead of the in-game one. Music will continue to play, but everything else is unresponsive.
The longer I play, the more frequent, longer and severe the glitches get. Once the glitches are triggered once, the subsequent ones will happen automatically. Eventually even exiting the game becomes almost impossible. Got a whole screen of bright red for 10 seconds once. Weird square artefacts in the graphics, which will be even displayed in the world map preview of the lot I was editing, after restarting.
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
macOS Catalina 10.15.4 (19E287)
Processor 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
Memory 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Graphics Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
Storage 1 TB
Expansion Packs City Living, Discover University, Get Famous, Get to Work, Get Together, Island Living, Seasons
Game Packs Dine Out, Parenthood, Spa Day
Stuff Packs Bowling Night, Cool Kitchen, Fitness, Laundry Day, Moschino, Perfect Patio, Romantic Garden, Vintage Glamour
I've played my save with CC and mods, but I've tried playing with them disabled and it's no different.
Not running f.lux or any other software that would modify my graphics or display.
Hmm, you all have last generation 2019 15" MacBook Pros with AMD Vega GPUs. iMac Pros with similar GPUs are experiencing complete system lockup after the September patch with similar GPUs - https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/CPU-max-usage-and-system-crashing-on-IMac-Pro/m-p/9468479#M37516 although they are getting complete system lockup which I don't think you guys are?
Could you see if disabling Origin in-game helps at all? https://bluebellflora.com/2017/12/23/disable-origin-in-game/
And if any of you get any lastCrash reports please can you attach them to a post here 🙂
@Bluebellflora wrote:Hmm, you all have last generation 2019 15" MacBook Pros with AMD Vega GPUs. iMac Pros with similar GPUs are experiencing complete system lockup after the September patch with similar GPUs - https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/CPU-max-usage-and-system-crashing-on-IMac-Pro/m-p/9468479#M37516 although they are getting complete system lockup which I don't think you guys are?
The mouse still moves normally during a freeze glitch for me, so I guess it's not a total system freeze. I occasionally get the beachball spinner as well. Never gotten any system alert like in their first screenshot, but the blocky artefacts from the second screenshot are exactly what I get when I let the spiral of glitches get bad enough.
@Bluebellflora wrote:And if any of you get any lastCrash reports please can you attach them to a post here 🙂
I haven't got any lastCrash reports, as the game doesn't technically crash - though maybe it might if I leave it for long enough?
@Bluebellflora wrote:Could you see if disabling Origin in-game helps at all? https://bluebellflora.com/2017/12/23/disable-origin-in-game/
I'll try that next, thanks!
It's definitely not a full system crash for me. The closest I got to that was the Origin glitch if it froze in windowed mode instead of fullscreen; the game would close itself and the client would claim that it was logged in on another computer (it was not). The only thing I could do to fix it was restart the computer, but there was no LastCrash file. It doesn't really seem to be a "crash." About half the time, I can actually mouse through the exit menu by watching the cursor change shape, and if I'm in build mode and click on a menu item, I can hear the sound effect for selecting an item, for example. The game is responding, according to macOS; but the graphics are wrong.
I did disable Origin in-game, especially because of that weird Origin glitch, and it didn't help the overall game freeze. So far, the only thing that seems to have made a serious improvement was disabling f.lux.
I tend to be able to move the mouse even when the screen goes completely frozen, and still with the ingame pointer rather than the system one.
Yesterday I managed to play for several hours on a new save. Regular gameplay, on one of the premade lots. Made some minor build changes to it and added new furniture with no issue. I then made a new save for building, created a tester family, exited to manage worlds and went into a lot to build. Within twenty minutes it started freezing again.
Tonight I tested the linked fixes. iCloud is disabled already, I disabled retina display ingame, toggled laptop mode, enabled vertical sync, and reset my NVRAM. No change. The build lot now starts acting up within less than five minutes of opening it, some times less than a minute.
Disabling Origin had no effect.
Given that the issue seems to be triggered by rotating the camera, I tried playing with the Sims 3 camera. I had very occasional rainbow wheels and framerate drops (on a fairly simple lot) when zooming and changing stories, but overall I was able to play normally for 46 minutes.
Around the 30 minute mark I switched to the TS4 camera, and 15 minutes later while dragging to resize a room, the cascade of freezes began and I had to save the lot and quit the game one painfully slow click at a time.
I don't know if the TS3 camera was significant, but anecdotally I was able to play for a lot longer than before until needing to shut it down.
@groenroos wrote:Disabling Origin had no effect.
Given that the issue seems to be triggered by rotating the camera, I tried playing with the Sims 3 camera. I had very occasional rainbow wheels and framerate drops (on a fairly simple lot) when zooming and changing stories, but overall I was able to play normally for 46 minutes.
Around the 30 minute mark I switched to the TS4 camera, and 15 minutes later while dragging to resize a room, the cascade of freezes began and I had to save the lot and quit the game one painfully slow click at a time.
I don't know if the TS3 camera was significant, but anecdotally I was able to play for a lot longer than before until needing to shut it down.
I play almost exclusively with the Sims 3 camera and tbh am not surprised the Sims 4 camera was worse. After trashing my Options file, the game defaulted me back to the Sims 4 camera and it was a catastrophe—almost instant freeze on loading a lot. I had to close and reopen my game before I could change the camera setting.
I now find that if I have all other apps on my computer closed, I can just barely manage to stream or record the game with OBS if I am gentle with my camera movements and don't try to place large/full rooms from my library onto a lot. For example, I placed a room full of harvestable plants on a lot while streaming and almost crashed my entire computer. I dropped 0.1% of my frames (I normally drop 0), my bitrate tanked, and of course I had to close the game to fix it.
