Windowed Mode

SimGuruLyndsay

There are a number of you reporting that your game is going to a “black screen” and crashing or freezing. We are looking into this issue and trying to find patterns to figure out what might be happening here. We don’t have a good fix for you at this time but there have been some cases where players seem to avoid these “black screen” problems if they switch their game into Windowed mode. If you are experiencing any “black screen” problem, you could try these steps.

For PC Users
Open your game:
1. Enter the Options… Panel. (The “…” button)
2. Go to the “Graphics” Tab.
3. Uncheck the “Enable Fullscreen Mode” button.
4. Click the check mark to apply your changes.

When in Windowed mode you can still adjust your game resolution so you can make the window bigger or smaller as you choose. The resolution can be changed in the same Graphics Tab.

PC Users
If you can’t start up your game and only see a black screen here are other tips:
- Try pressing(Alt+Enter) as soon as the game starts. That should switch your game into windowed mode.
- If Alt+Enter doesn't seem to do anything, you can edit the options.ini file. You will find it in My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\. When you find the Options.ini file, open it with notepad or wordpad and change the line "fullscreen = 1" to "fullscreen = 0". Then save the file. This will force your game to start in windowed mode.

Mac Users
You can press Command-Return to toggle in and out of full-screen.

Again – This doesn’t “fix” the black screen problem but there is a chance it might help some of you so it’s worth a shot.

- Lyndsay

PS. I mistakenly labeled the above steps as PC and Mac. I updated with the appropriate information for Macs. Sorry for any confusion.