I have had this game installed on three different PC's and I have never had it crash not once. The closest thing I have had to being a crash was when my electricity went out during a storm. Because the game wasn't properly shut down when I went back, I was greeted with the 'fatal error' screen. Compared to what is/has happened to others on this thread, I am beginning to feel like I am very lucky.
@Onverser
Since I made this discussion I've actually completely solved my crashing 'issues' (I basically found out why the game would crash, which was rare but it did sometimes). For some reason if you tab out of the game or minimize it or switch to a different window, anything that requires TS3 to not be on the screen will cause the ram usage to shoot up, saving the game also makes the ram usage spike as well - those two things were causing my game to almost always crash while saving.
Not related to crashing but I also had this issue where sims weren't rendering correctly when I would pan the camera back towards them, they'd be really low quality and it would take a few seconds for them to load in. Found out the reason for that was because I had set the SimCompositorCache size to 4k and the game can't handle that, so I put it back to 2k and everything works perfectly now!
If you need help troubleshooting your game to get it to work correctly feel free to ask!
I'd have to say once in build mode, and then later yesterday scrolling around China... Found the save was.... S3 Thyme just started her second term apparently... Blast it.... lol
And both crashes were yesterday, so yeah.. Havent played in a while before yesterday.
I have never crashed. When I looked at what a crash is and how to fix a crash, then I realized I have never crashed as I never had to do those things to fix my Sims game. In all the years been playing. Sure, hope I never do, sounds terrible.
My game hardly ever crashes - it freezes sometimes when I´m playing an old save or a full household when everyone is running around doing stuff, but it nearly always recovers from that. In case that happens, I reset the town with Nraas, I´m sure their mods do a lot to keep my game stable. I also regularly clear the caches and do all the other little thing you can do.
I do treat the game like a raw egg - I have a "gaming pc" (not actually a real gaming pc, just a solid desktop pc but it runs all of the Sims games well) with nothing else but said games on it, I play in fullscreen mode and never try to tab out of it (because the game does NOT like that), and there´s no internet connection when I play.
The game and the pc always get shut down when I´m done.
The last time my game crashed, was when I tried to cheat an werewolf into CAS, but as I learned, that´s a known issue.
Was highly tempted to chose "Can't remember the last time it crashed", but that would be slightly disingenuous.
For the first time in over 3½ years, my game finally crashed sometime last week. It caused by some broken incompatible custom content I had installed and I suspect that me constantly tabbing out of the game to listen Youtube videos in the background didn't help matters LOL. There was very intense graphical glitching before TS3 ended up crashing to desktop. I would have loved to have taken screenshots of it, but I didn't think about it about it then.
Every other instance of TS3 crashing on me in the past was do to hard-drive failure, lack of storage, having Island Paradise installed on my cruddy old computer, or extremely bloated save files. Most of those things could arguably be considered my fault, so I still give TS3 a pass in those regards.
Very infrequently. However: I never play more than 2 or 3 hours without saving, closing, and restarting. I also use all of the stability related NRaas mods. And even though I use custom worlds and homes, I stay away from the ones that have large file sizes. If I have a large world, then I won't add really large, complex lots. When I do, I never add more than one. All of that is just to try to avoid the memory issues that you sometimes have.
I've got sporadic random crashing. Crash Log Analyzer states that it's some CC, but the crashing is so infrequent that it would be impossible for me to test to see what CC it is that is causing the crashing. I don't usually lose much when it happens as I've learned to save frequently with Sims 3.
Probably depends on how heavy is my save, how many EPs I play at the same time (usually not more than 3-4), and from which computer I play.
Sometimes I play without/with minimal CC to avoid this crashes and still play.
My game started to really bog down with the massive collection of mods I had. I also had a large save file regardless of running it through save cleaner often. Sadly this game has limits. I believe that was eating up a lot of the games memory.
Eventually I got a second monitor so I could avoid lowering the game so much. That nasty UI glitch though.... oof. Luckily F5 to save before quitting did the trick for me but still annoying.
So I didn't crash too often but my bogged down mods folder, save file, and lowering the game were triggers.
I've decided to nuke my mods folder only leaving NRaas and defaults in a new game folder. I'll be playing a rotational save in SV with the smooth patch. It's been a while since I've played S3 admittedly but I have very much missed this game. I want to get my game back to a playable state before I return to my old bloated game folder.
My game has hardly ever crashed - after necessary patches, because it crashed a lot when it first came out - even when I played via Origin. I know it was because we bought a high end computer back in 2008 specifically so it could properly run the awesomeness of the new Sims iteration. . But when it *would* crash, it was 95% due to cc. Cause I'm a cc junkie! So I had to painfully filter the culprit out and all was well again until I went cc hunting again and would run into the same problem. (This was before I learned how to properly test and organize all my cc...)
I will say this though: everyone raves about how great/necessary it is to have NRass Error Trap in your game, but I swear to goodness when I added it to my game it made my game crash after every attempt to play with it in. No clue why it would when most others don't seem to have that issue... But that's what kept happening so I've kept it out of my game ever since and... apparently I don't need it cause it runs fine. (I play on disks now if anyone is wondering... and all my cc has been tested and deemed safe).
It could be that back when I had Error Trap in it was conflicting with cc that maybe I've long gotten rid of. (I also think I was playing in a custom world at the time and that also could've been the problem.) So I'll have to add it back into my game sometime and see what happens. But for now, my game is fine and runs beautifully.
My game crashes for the same reason as OPs game after I used the windows tab and want to get back into the game afterwards. As a modder, this can be very tedious, as I have to go back an forth a lot. I didn't happen prior to the pre HSY patch though, so I hope it will get fixed..
Now now EA, don't be stinking up our lovely lavender bath with your shopping fart. - My TS4 mods - Gallery ID: 83bienchen
I don't even play The Sims 3, I might download it someday it's a good game a great game even, I just don't play it. I only play The Sims 4.
Be yourself; life is not about pleasing others, it's about pleasing yourself. Don't try to please others if it makes you uncomfortable. If others judge you for who you are, ignore them. If what you do makes you happy, continue.
Usually my crashes are because of conflicts in the game, usually because of a mod or trying to makes lots that shouldn't exist, like when I tried placing dive lots in a certain area it would let me but when I tried to save the game it crashed it. Other than that I don't have any issues, I recently upgraded to 32gb of ram so that really helped alot.
so. i have the most basic graphics card and a 3 in 1 laptop. it handles everything extremely well and i think the only problem with that is instead of crashing, It freezes. But its quite odd since I havent experienced that many problems with S3 which is meant to be the most laggy game.
I have had a few crash scares due to the lag in this game; the worst I ever experienced was when the game became unresponsive and I had to do a hard shut down by pressing ctrl+alt delete to terminate the application in my task manager. That was when I could only move my cursor, but, pressing a button didn't do anything. There were times when I would save more frequently just in case if the game were to crash unexpectedly; I once played for an hour or two without saving and the game became unresponsive and I had to do a hard shut down on it and launching it back up; there was only the base game enabled.
I stopped playing the sims 4 a few months ago when I officially got bored with it, but it would crash almost every time I played. But the sims 3 I fined will only crash every once and a while. And I find it's only when I will switch to a different tab and even then not every time. so I have gotten into the habit of saving every time before I pause and switch tabs. and just generally saving when I am like "hmmm I've been playing for a while and nothing has happened the last 3 times I switched tabs."
9 times out of 10 any game crashes I experience is mod/cc related and the other 1 out of 10 times is not keeping up with save maintenance such as too many books or fruits/vegetables in the inventory, etc. Otherwise, TS3 plays beautifully for being a 32-Bit game and I can play for hours or all day if I want without crashing, error code 12 or any other error. I can fast forward for literally Sim months that's how good TS3 is and how I've become aware that I don't agree when others say TS3 is poorly optimized. It's not perfect that's for sure, but poorly optimized? Not at all.
I'm impressed by the calculations of the real-time simulation in fast forward speed and for such long periods of time with absolutely no hiccups and all Sims continue to take care of themselves and each other, so the younger ones are always fine.
“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone
What doesn't kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter”
TS3 rarely crashes for me. If it does crash and I get an error, it is usually my own actions that caused it. I was using the testingcheatsenabled to edit a sim in CAH and continued playing which could corrupt the sim. I forgot to pause the game before the edit of the sim, then save and quit/reopen the game, as the sim is usually safe that way. Or I used cheats to age a sim down to teen or younger and that often corrupts a save and causes a crash. Also, I might have placed an object onto a festival lot and it overlapped with another object and that can corrupt the lot and cause a crash. I then have to reopen the save and delete the lot that I corrupted and place a new festival lot from the bin. Also, when I first began playing the sims 3 two years ago, the game would crash often every few minutes and I had a lot of graphical issues. I discovered that since I was using a DVD to install the game my computer's operating system was not compatible with the sims 3 and that caused it to crash. I had to open up properties for the exe files and had my computer read the game as a Windows XP(pack 3) game instead of a Windows 7 game which it attempted to read the game as by default. Then my game ran fine after I changed that setting. That was only an issue with the DVD version of the game though. I also play the patched 1.69 version with the EA app and don't have the same crashing issue even though it doesn't read the game as a Windows XP.
Comments
Since I made this discussion I've actually completely solved my crashing 'issues' (I basically found out why the game would crash, which was rare but it did sometimes). For some reason if you tab out of the game or minimize it or switch to a different window, anything that requires TS3 to not be on the screen will cause the ram usage to shoot up, saving the game also makes the ram usage spike as well - those two things were causing my game to almost always crash while saving.
Not related to crashing but I also had this issue where sims weren't rendering correctly when I would pan the camera back towards them, they'd be really low quality and it would take a few seconds for them to load in. Found out the reason for that was because I had set the SimCompositorCache size to 4k and the game can't handle that, so I put it back to 2k and everything works perfectly now!
If you need help troubleshooting your game to get it to work correctly feel free to ask!
And both crashes were yesterday, so yeah.. Havent played in a while before yesterday.
I do treat the game like a raw egg - I have a "gaming pc" (not actually a real gaming pc, just a solid desktop pc but it runs all of the Sims games well) with nothing else but said games on it, I play in fullscreen mode and never try to tab out of it (because the game does NOT like that), and there´s no internet connection when I play.
The game and the pc always get shut down when I´m done.
The last time my game crashed, was when I tried to cheat an werewolf into CAS, but as I learned, that´s a known issue.
My studio: http://www.thesims3.com/mypage/WatrDragon/mystudio
Just assume that every edit I make is because of typos.
Was highly tempted to chose "Can't remember the last time it crashed", but that would be slightly disingenuous.
For the first time in over 3½ years, my game finally crashed sometime last week. It caused by some broken incompatible custom content I had installed and I suspect that me constantly tabbing out of the game to listen Youtube videos in the background didn't help matters LOL. There was very intense graphical glitching before TS3 ended up crashing to desktop. I would have loved to have taken screenshots of it, but I didn't think about it about it then.
Every other instance of TS3 crashing on me in the past was do to hard-drive failure, lack of storage, having Island Paradise installed on my cruddy old computer, or extremely bloated save files. Most of those things could arguably be considered my fault, so I still give TS3 a pass in those regards.
Sometimes I play without/with minimal CC to avoid this crashes and still play.
Eventually I got a second monitor so I could avoid lowering the game so much. That nasty UI glitch though.... oof. Luckily F5 to save before quitting did the trick for me but still annoying.
So I didn't crash too often but my bogged down mods folder, save file, and lowering the game were triggers.
I've decided to nuke my mods folder only leaving NRaas and defaults in a new game folder. I'll be playing a rotational save in SV with the smooth patch. It's been a while since I've played S3 admittedly but I have very much missed this game. I want to get my game back to a playable state before I return to my old bloated game folder.
S3 simblr: http://simplysimming.tumblr.com/
S4 simblr: http://simlogic.tumblr.com/
I will say this though: everyone raves about how great/necessary it is to have NRass Error Trap in your game, but I swear to goodness when I added it to my game it made my game crash after every attempt to play with it in. No clue why it would when most others don't seem to have that issue...
It could be that back when I had Error Trap in it was conflicting with cc that maybe I've long gotten rid of. (I also think I was playing in a custom world at the time and that also could've been the problem.) So I'll have to add it back into my game sometime and see what happens. But for now, my game is fine and runs beautifully.
I'm impressed by the calculations of the real-time simulation in fast forward speed and for such long periods of time with absolutely no hiccups and all Sims continue to take care of themselves and each other, so the younger ones are always fine.
Stand a little taller
Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone
What doesn't kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter”