Problems with Town Edit Mode

simgirl542

I have a large sim family. Their eldest sim just got home from college and brought a girl with him, though I have no clue as to how they're not dating or anything. When they returned home I realized that I had forgotten how small their family home was so I decided to move them out and move the rest of the family into a new home.
The problems started last night. Whenever I went to change between the families, I could only get the eldest son and the girl to cooperate fully. Whenever I went back to the main household I could only control the mom...at first. Then after doing the usual trial and error things of moving them to different homes it changed to where their pictures were no longer appearing. I even went to a different household altogether and back again and that different household's member's pictures appeared.
I moved them to a new town and the issues ceased, but I don't want them in a new town because that completely severed ties with their eldest son.

Today I decided to go back into that same household but a slightly older save, which was from his last day at college. When they returned home I ran into a new more irritating problem. Every single time I go into Town Edit Mode the game crashes before I could bulldoze a lot and put a new house on it.
I tried deleting the cache files, twice. No help. I even went into my Origin account and tried repairing the game. It couldn't hurt to try, but unfortunately it didn't help.
I really don't want to start all over again because that's all I seem to do with this game, recently...start over when the game crashes too often. It crashed on the map screen when I was in the base game town (I forgot the name of it) and I had no choice but to abandon that game and start fresh in a different town and now the same thing is happening in that town.
If the game is crashing in town edit mode then that means I can't even change households at all.
I don't understand as to why this is occurring now when I have been playing this household with just the usual issues for about two weeks.

I really want to continue this family. Their eldest son has a girlfriend who is still at college and I want them to be together but that can't happen unless this is fixed or resolved so I can move him into an new home.
I'm going to combine the households again and try saving them to the clipboard so I can move them to a new neighborhood but I doubt that he'll still have his girlfriend let alone know her.

Please help me.

pax1sw

Are you getting an error message before your game crashes, or does it just crash? When it crashes, does it crash to desktop or completely freeze?

simgirl542

I didn't see an error message. I go to bulldoze a lot so I can place a house for them and it crashes to the desktop. There's no time for an error message to appear.

My original plan was to try and get the girlfriend to move in with them at another house, save them to the clipboard/family bin, then move them to another neighborhood, but don't think I can do that because I don't think I have a save with the girlfriend anymore. I might have a game save where he knows her, but it crashes on that one too.
I think the neighborhood I was using might be the issue, as when I moved them to a new neighborhood the issues stopped.

I do have the family in the clipboard/family bin from before he went to college, but that was when he was still a teenager and it would be kind of like starting over because I would have to wait for him to age up to YA, send him to college again, and while waiting for him to get through the two terms hope he meets the same to female sims.
Now that I think about it, this one might be worth the effort if I move them to a new neighborhood first.

ciane

It sounds like the file has just gotten too large to work well. You can try to load a new world that is the same one you are playing and save that. Then, quit. Then, go into your old save folder and copy the .nhd file over to the new save.

Check for things you can easily delete from your save like memories and things in Sims inventories when you can load your save.

Also, you can delete the .tmp files in in your dccache folder and some of the cache files that grow really large in size (like the compositor ones) from your sims 3 folder.

You can also move out the screenshot folder to another location.

This will make your save, and your game, smaller and hopefully you can keep playing it long enough to save your family to the bin and put them in a new world.

simgirl542

Thank you @ciane. I'll try that if what I'm doing doesn't work out the way I want it to.
I went back to the save that I have where he's still a teenager and started that family. So far it's working out. I was able to move them to a bigger house, but I have to start over with just about everything else: Careers/jobs, skills, etc but cheating will help with the careers/jobs part. I'll have to wait out the age up and skills part. I'll have to do the college part over too and hope he meets the two female sims that he met before. This time, I'll send his brothers with him too though.