My Game Freezes At Random Times (MAC)

CrystalMiner2364 · July 2016

This is a recurring problem I've been having with two households now. I move them from a small house into a large one, and every once in a while the game pauses, but I didn't press "P" so it isn't manually paused. (If you didn't get that, it freezes basically). It's quite annoying. I had to stop playing my favorite household because it froze every 2 minutes practically!
I am on an iMac and my EP's are Pets, High End Loft Stuff, and Late Night. I only have 7 CC hair. (I only got them so I can make certain characters look nice) I don't know if this is required either, but the world is Appaloosa Plains.
What's going on, and how do I fix this? Do I have to download Master Controller or is it something I can do without it?
Thank you!
P.S. this glitch isn't because of any of the EP's, I was playing the other household with NO CC or EP's running, by the way.

igazor · July 2016

Hi there. We've had some of this conversation before but it was long ago, so perhaps a refresher and some more details are in order.

The NRaas mods that will help the most in making laggy worlds playable are Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Register, and Traffic. MasterController doesn't actually do anything to or for your game except add large sets of commands to sims, objects, lots, and City Hall, then it sits back and waits for you to select one of them. The place where MasterController does help is that it provides a way to run a Reset Everything (from City Hall) that is much deeper than a testingcheats resetsim and can at least temporarily provide relief from in-world glitches and routing failures if you run one every few sim weeks or so. On the other extreme, NRaas StoryProgression if you are running that will add more overhead to your game and could very well make it run worse if you are already having issues.

See this page for a large number of tips to improve the game's performance, some but not all involving mods:
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Tips+For+Better+Game+Performance

But there is something else in play here that needs to be addressed. TS3 for Mac is not a proper port of the game into OS X; it's the only one in the series that EA did this to. As a result of the way it was done, the game can only utilize 2 GB of RAM no matter how much you have installed or how powerful your Mac is. That's around half of what the Windows version can use, and it brings a lot of limitations to the table as to how far you can push the game.

For me, Seasons and Pets killed the ability to play large households, those on large lots, and in heavily populated worlds, and my multi-generational long running ongoing game faltered with so much lag and freeze that it became unplayable, while brand new games still played just fine (as long as I didn't stay in CAS or Edit Town too long). The first posts on this thread provide a guide to things you can do to make gameplay smoother on the Mac version. Constantly purging (resetting) RAM is probably the most important to take note of.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/658546/latest-mac-help-threads-guides-please-start-here-before-posting-a-problem-updated-27-07-14/p1

https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay

Even with all of the mods, tips, and tricks in play, I lost patience with the Mac version of the game years ago (as did many others), BootCamped Windows onto my Mac, and play the Windows version instead. Now with all EPs in play, that ongoing multi-generational game I mentioned is still humming along just fine, or at least as fine as can be expected with TS3. I understand not everyone wants Windows on their Macs, but it's really either that or at some point having dial back one's style of play to fit within the limits that the Mac version provides.

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My Game Freezes At Random Times (MAC)

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