Crashing as soon as staring gameplay

peanutbutternjellyfish

So I have an iMac, but I'm honestly not sure which one (it's a couple years old but in perfect condition and is a really nice computer so it should be able to run the game just fine it always used to.) I was playing the game with no problem then all of a sudden it just started crashing, which I understand is just something that will happen but I can't even play the game. Sometimes it even crashes before the launcher will open! Today I played loaded it and immediately went into CAS. I spent about an hour creating a sim and never had a problem. The SECOND I went into gameplay however the game crashes. It just says soemthing about it being an unexpected error. I deleted my game caches and deleted my mods, also tried playing without wifi like someone suggested to me. None of this worked so please help me I miss playing...

puzzlezaddict

First off, you can get your computer's specs by clicking on the apple icon in the upper-left corner of your screen and selecting "About this Mac," which is the first option. In addition to the specs, it could help if you listed which OS you're running (Sierra, High Sierra, El Capitan, etc.). Also, if you downloaded anything new into your game recently, or even updated your computer, that would be useful to know. Oh, and which packs you have could affect performance as well.

One quick test to run is to pull your entire TS3 folder out of Documents (not just mods, or saves, but the whole thing) and then launch again. The game will generate a new, fresh folder with no content. If this folder lets you play without crashes, then you can start to add back saves and downloaded content, a little bit at a time, and see if you can find the source of the crashing. Sometimes the folder itself can become corrupted, and forcing the game to spawn a new one is the best course of action.

There are plenty of troubleshooting steps you can take, but clean folder test is a good place to start, and it will help you and other posters try to pinpoint what's going wrong with your game.

peanutbutternjellyfish

I have a Mac 27 inch from mid 2011. It runs on OS X El Capitan. (ver 10.11.3) It hasn't been updated in awhile, so I am going to try that as my next step.

I took out the folder like you said, and the game ran fine from what I played of it. I slowly put the items in my folder into the new one, and it immediately stopped working. I took out all of my mods and downloads yet it still didn't work. I suppose I could just delete it and play with the newly generated folder, but I would really hate to lose all of my content. It will run for a few minutes without crashing now, but sadly the problem still exists.

puzzlezaddict

Before you update to High Sierra, there are some other steps to try. (Also, every OS from the past few years, including El Capitan, is incompatible to a degree with TS3, but High Sierra seems to be particularly uncooperative, so an update might create a problem rather than solving it.) First of all, you didn't list your specs, but I think you have only 4 GB RAM? This isn't a problem in and of itself, as TS3 for mac can only use 2 GB at a time, but if you have any other apps running in the background while you're playing, you could hit the RAM limit even sooner. Restarting your computer before you play is the easiest way to control for this.

Also, if you have a lot of EPs installed, particularly Seasons and Pets, it's almost impossible to play without hitting the RAM limit very quickly no matter what the specs of your mac. That's why it matters which packs you're trying to run.

When you did the clean folder test, what content did you add back in that caused the crashing to recur? There are plenty of possible solutions, depending on the source of your issue. And just checking, but do you delete the five cache files in Documents frequently? If you didn't do so before adding back your mods (or before removing them again), that could have caused the problem. But regardless, the only way to fix this is to identify which specific files are corrupt and remove them. No update, either to your OS or to TS3, is going to do that for you.

peanutbutternjellyfish

I updated it before I saw your responce actually...

I have 8 GB actually, so would that still be a problem?

I have every EP except IP and WA, so that must be a big part of the problem then. (I only have Town Life stuff and High End Loft stuff in SPs though.)

I do delete those files, so I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. Every single item I would put back in the folder caused it not to work (I tried them all individually.) I even deleted my games and restarted them, which made it run longer, so I think maybe it's just an issue of RAM like you said and once I get to a certain amount of time played in each game it makes them work less and less.

peanutbutternjellyfish

I tried running it now and had the exact same problem, so I don't think the update did anything good or bad.

puzzlezaddict

If you have 8 GB RAM, that's probably not the issue, unless you have a bunch of browser windows open at the same time or you never restart your computer. The limiting factor will be Cider, which is unavoidable on macs and can never use more than 2 GB for TS3 at a time. And you're right that a long-running save will need more resources to play than a new one.

To give you an example, I have only the base game and Ambitions installed on my macbook (as well as some SPs, which don't really add to overhead). When I start a brand new game in SV while offline, the RAM load is about 1.50 GB initially and rises very slowly, meaning I can play for hours, especially with a single sim. When I start up my most recent game, which I've been playing for 4 sim weeks with a family that's grown to 14 sims, the RAM load is 1.71ish on startup and gets to 1.9 in just over an hour. At this point it's time to quit to desktop and reload.

As many simmers can tell you, the EPs Seasons and Pets, followed by IP and ITF, are particularly resource-heavy and will push you over your RAM limit pretty much no matter what you do. Snow is especially demanding, as are various issues related to stray animals. The real tech experts will tell you that even trying to run these EPs on a mac is probably a lost cause. I'm actually about to Bootcamp my new computer (with Windows 10, unfortunately, although you might have to use an earlier OS), as this is the only practical way for me to add more packs and still play TS3 the way I want to. If this is something you're interested in, igazor plays on a Bootcamped imac that's about as old as yours and is pretty happy with the experience. Tag him if you'd like to ask about it.

I'm sorry that you can't play TS3 on your mac the way you want. It's so frustrating when something that used to work just starts acting up with little explanation. I hope you can find a way to still enjoy the game, but with a 2 GB hard limit on a mac, you're never going to have a lot of room to maneuver.

Edit to add: TS3 has some issues with RAM leakage, as in, it doesn't always release all of the RAM it's no longer using. You can address this by purging RAM periodically using Terminal. I've found that this only helps a little bit, maybe enough to compensate for the memory spike when I try to save but not much more than that. If I launch the game with wifi on (even if I don't sign in), the command will purge something like 20-30 MB right away—probably the leftover stuff from EA's in-game shopping experience that gets loaded even if you have it turned off. (Check your FeaturedItems folder in Documents for the unwanted content, and you can delete anything you find there.) But if I'm not online, purging will only free about 10 MB for every sim-day played. Still, it might be helpful around the edges.

peanutbutternjellyfish

Thanks for all the help! I did everything you suggested, plus I found that playing without CC, to my dismay, made the game run a lot longer. I think I may uninstall Seasons considering I don't really use anything from it in the first place, in fact it always gets on my nerves and I turn off all of the weather settings anyway lol
Thanks again!

Tremayne4260

Also, try this. Clean your RAM before starting up the game at all. (I use an app called Memory Clean as I can then monitor how much free memory I have. I've never used the Terminal method.) Then try starting it up and I find I can play for hours like I used to. And yes, I run High Sierra. I also have the 1.69 version of all my Mods from NRAAS. Granted the Mac version is 1.67, but it runs fine.

igazor

Just to clarify if I may, the only NRaas mod that needs and has a 1.69 version is ErrorTrap because it's a Core Mod. That makes it special and we have 1.67 and 1.69 releases for it that are otherwise equivalent. The most recent versions of all of the others are meant for both patch levels.

Tremayne4260

Thanks!