I recently reinstalled the Sims 3 base game and am working on the expansions and stuff packs. I go to the game tab to check mark all the EP's and SP's I want to play with but when I load the game, only the base game loads. When I check the launcher, all EP's and SP's are unchecked. I've never had this issue before when I reinstalled the game a while back. If someone could help, it would be greatly appreciated.
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Exit the game, relaunch the launcer go in, and UNCHECK all the games.Close the launcher.
Then find IE on your computer clear the cache.
Relaunch the launcher and CHECK all the game packs again.
And then try launching.
This fixed it for me, hopefully it works.
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Well, this issue is fixed but now I am having an issue where it takes a very long time for the main screen to load to the save selection or town selection screen. When I finally get to choose a save file, the save file takes almost an hour even if the save is a brand new one. I'm not sure what is causing all these issues when I never had this trouble before.
Regardless of whether you have such content trying to load, you might try the following steps if you haven't already.
1 - Clear (delete) the five cache files on the top level of the TS3 user game folder in Documents and empty out the FeaturedItems folder. They will regenerate on the next attempted startup.
2 - Pull the entire TS3 user game folder out of Documents to the Desktop for safekeeping (or rename it), thus causing a new no-content added game folder to spawn in its place on the next startup. Does the game startup in either phase work out better on the new game folder?
3 - Use what we might call best practices, especially when troubleshooting such issues:
-- Play offline, meaning not logged in at the Launcher or in-game levels, for the time being thus forgoing any online features of the game (such as they are)
-- Disable the in-game TS Store shopping experience through Game Options
-- Disable the interactive find an object game that runs during the startup sequence, again through Game Options
-- Lock down the FeaturedItems folder so it stops filling up with nonsense during startup (can explain how if this becomes necessary)
4 - We could have a discussion about the hardware you are playing on, system specs and ask to see a dxdiag. But so far this doesn't necessarily sound like a hardware issue.
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-- Delete the entire FeaturedItems folder and its contents
-- Create a new text document called FeaturedItems, the extension can be .txt, .rtf. .docx, it really doesn't matter.
-- With Windows set to display file extension, rename the file to lop off the extension entirely so that the full name of the document is just FeaturedItems and place this document into the TS3 user game folder in Documents.
The game cannot create a new folder with exactly the same name (although it will try briefly) and cannot store things we don't want in what is now really a document and not a folder.
I guess the next question is, what has changed in the past few weeks. Windows update? Updated graphics drivers, something else? If we could, please open the file called DeviceConfig.log (or it may show as just "DeviceConfig") in your user game folder and paste the first 40 lines or so into a response here. Or, if you prefer, send it to me by PM. Not the long lists of game options, the parts that come before that. This will give us at least a preview of your hardware and what the game is using (or thinks it is using, not always the same thing) upon startup. Also please mention how many EPs we are talking about, and which ones if not all 11 of them.
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@igazor Well, I did have a Windows update a few weeks ago but not sure if that did anything or not. My computer runs Windows 7 so I won't be getting updates much longer. As for the EP's, right now I have them all installed but left the SP's uninstalled for now. I've tried to deselect them all and load just the base game and it still does it. I'll PM you the first 40 lines in a few minutes.
Its processor is on the weak side running at a max of 2.1 GHz. That's not fatal until we get to the heavier hitting EPs, meaning Pets, Seasons, IP, ITF, possibly some of the in between ones that were released after Late Night.
It only has 3 GB of RAM total. Upon starting the game, other processes are using much of that, so the game only has less than 1 GB to work with (976 MB for the session on which that log was generated). That's not nearly enough and explains why it takes an hour or more to even get things started as the resources the game needs are just not there to work with. On Win 7 and higher, more RAM than that is needed. We usually recommend 6 GB minimum, but 8 GB would be better, provided you have the 64-bit version of Windows.
Its graphics are integrated and the Intel GMA chip is far too weak to carry anything other than the base game. Many players on that hardware set cannot get the game to startup at all, others will have different experiences but performance will tend to degrade over time. That you can actually startup the game (eventually) and run it in any stable manner is actually quite remarkable. As saved games progress and move forward, they require yet more resources so the prospects for a properly running base game only where one shouldn't need to keep starting over with new games far too soon or have game sessions that last for more than a real time hour or so are very low.
You could probably add more RAM to this computer, how much so will depend on its configuration and again whether your operating system is 64-bit. But given its likely age, there probably isn't much else you can do to improve performance on it. Hopefully you might have or can soon have a stronger system on which to play TS3 (or TS4)? This one would likely be much better suited for TS2, if it holds up mechanically.
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You will also want to make sure you have enough hard drive space free. Nothing can help a system running Windows that has no or too little free space on the drive other than making more space available for it (and the game) to work with. At least 35 GB free should be insisted upon.
But if the processor and other components are not aging gracefully, these may only be temporary solutions until a stronger system can be obtained.
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I cleaned up my computer some and shut off some programs running in the background and I am glad to say that I can at least play the base game with no issues now. I'm not going to add EP's or SP's right now because I think they could cause the issue to happen again.