After installing Seasons, I was able to play it for two times just fine, but the 3rd time it started freezing right after loading a household. First I thought it was the HQ mod which I enabled before loading the game for the 3rd time, but it’s not it, the game freezes with or without it. I’ve tried basically everything - deleting caches, excluding CC, deleting all saves and reinstalling Seasons. This is what happens:

Everything is frozen, sims and camera don’t move
The cursor is working, but unable to click on anything
Trees and blumbobs are still animating
The background sound of the game is working

The game works fine when I uninstall seasons and load the game without it, but once I put the EP back - the bug returns. I've tried the latest SuperPatch, but it didn't work either. My PC is more than capable to handle Sims, I've build this game rig myself, so it's not a performance issue.
The freezing is permanent once loaded a household or house, right after the ask about placing new lots in the town. Then, the music that comes with a message about the weather stone plays and the game just stops.
Anyone has any ideas how to fix this?

I had this exact problem, and tried all of these solutions with no results.

The ONLY thing that solved the problem was lowering my graphics settings (I think I lowered tree detail, smooth edges, lighting and shadows, and visual effects). They had all previously been set to high, and I moved them down to medium. My computer is pretty high spec and ran all the previous games on high detail with no problems.

Well, I tried the lowest settings possible and it didn't help. The fact that I was able to play first time with high settings just fine sort of eliminates this possibility.
Thanks for the suggestion though.

I'm getting a very similar issue. Same symptoms; everything's frozen but the cursor, sound, and animations still work, but I'm still able to play the game. About every 30 minutes of play though, it freezes up exactly like that. Sometimes the freezing lasts 30 seconds, sometimes 5 minutes. I've found "resetsim *" in the cheat console immediately stops the freeze, but 50% of the time it comes back after just a few seconds and I have to keep repeating the command until the freezing stops for good--only to come back 30 minutes later. Nraas Overwatch also seems to help, since I installed that I haven't been freezing quite as often, but the issue still occurs.

This never happened before seasons. I have a friend with the exact same periodic freezing as me, and seeing your post makes me think this isn't such an isolated problem. Hopefully it can be fixed in a patch or something, because I've tried everything to no avail. Are you using SLI by chance? Just trying to think of something uncommon we might all have in common that would cause this. Will keep an eye on this thread, while I can still play the game the constant freezing every 30 mins is absolutely infuriating.

I've been having the exact same problems since Seasons. I recently bought more memory (i now have 3gb) and it's seemed to have stopped now. I also lowered the graphics settings even though it used to run fine. I know people have more memory and it still happens. I still have the problem of the game crashing to desktop though for no reason since Seasons. I can't stand to play it anymore till a patch comes out

Had that too.. it's gone now.
So just try to wait for a whole, I'm sure it'll dissapear.

Same periodic freezing here since installing Seasons. I suspected it to be a routing problem, so I used the resetsim * cheat many times almost on every sim-day, but it's only a short term solution, the freezing is coming back. My next tip is that while freezing, the game is generating the new season-related objects, like for example, the wild flowers, or aliens or who knows what.

In which neighborhood do you play and experience this periodic freezing? I'm in Bridgeport and haven't tested another neighborhood yet.

Hi !

I have the same problem. My game crashes after 5-30 seconds. I try everything, but nothing solve the problem. Maybe the problem is, the game use more than 2 GB during the game...because of that we have crash. There is a tool, I use it Yesterday, but after 30 minutes, my game crashed again.

http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

I have win7, 64 bit, 4 GB Ram.

I have this same problem and the rounting maybe be one of the causes, since the Error Trap keeps constantly giving messages about an animal or a sim being unroutable or unmovable or a townie's aging being stuck. Otherwise the game works fine. I have 8 gb of RAM. I'm getting more next month but I know that's not the cause. This started right after Seasons/1.42 patch. I play in Moonlight Falls.

By the way, I read once that you shouldn't use resetSim command too much because it ends up weakening the integrity of the game files. I wish I could remember from where I read it...

varpunen, that sounds like the kind of superstitious nonsense people dream up when dealing with an inherently unstable game like TS3. Please don't go around repeating such things without a strong reference -- especially when resetting sims is a part of well known mods such as twallan's Overwatch and ErrorTrap; if twallan and Pescado aren't leary of resetting sims, it isn't an issue.

I try it now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w2JZYPnXEo

I hope, it will be help.

Actually I found the forum I read it from. A member there wrote that it was said by Pescado himself in one of the conversations here in MTS2. I have no reason to doubt her. There is a lot of conversations here, so it will take time to track down that particular one. Also I believe that resetSim commands in mods are more stable than the game's one, at least when it comes to MC.


Also mentioned by RoseCity in this thread, post 10:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=481657

......"by Pescado himself".... ! ? WOW! Very impressive!

i've been having the same issue. since seasons, my game has been unplayably laggy. i did some reading and a few places suggested that it's caused by the weatherstone, because the stone is causing a buttload of townies to spawn all the time. for some, overwatch was removing over 30,000 cars every night. for me, i kept getting popups about my location (seasonal lot) merchants every 6 seconds. i found a spot in my town where they keep spawning and they're all stuck. if you use twallan's mods, use the debug enabler to put the weatherstone in your family inventory so it's out of your town (so far that's the only way anyone knows how to remove it) and it won't respawn, and hopefully will fix your lag. i'm going to test it myself in a few minutes.

Excuse me? Even though I do not use any of his mods, I didn't realize that Pescado has become a laughing stock at some point. I just mentioned what he had once said. There's no reason to ridicule me.

Please calm down everyone, this is not a discussion about other modders and their competence!

Back to the topic.
I've noticed one main difference with the issue I'm having from what most of you have - my game freeze is immediate permanent. I've tried to wait for 2 hours, but nothing happened, my game doesn't even use a half of my PC's resources. The console command is impossible to use, since nothing is clickabe at all when the game is frozen.
It looks like most of the time freezing happens when the game tries to do something that's beyond capabilities of the PC, so usually mods and waiting help. My freezing seems to be different (and totally desperate, lol).

Also, I suspected the weather stone for the cause of this before, as the game freezes right when the music and popup about the weather stone appears. Some of you mentioned that there's a way to put the stone automatically in family's inventory, is there a link I can read more about this?

Agreed. There's no reason for personal attacks.

Anyway, do get any crash logs? Also I noticed that right after seasons there started to be similar symptoms that I had before I upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB. The lack of RAM made the loading of textures to take awhile and now after Seasons, I'm experiencing the similar situation again, though it doesn't take quite as long now. I do have permanent freezes but those happen only when I'm on Edit-Town mode building something. All I can do is to force quit the game and those cases doesn't create crash logs at all.

I don't get any crash logs, the game is showing as "Working" in the task manager, so I think the tool won't register any crashes since the game is technically still working. I have to close the game with task manager, since I can't click on anything when this happens.

I doubt it's the RAM, I was able to play 2 times after installing Seasons just fine with all the effects and weather on maximum settings with no slightest lag. The 3rd time I got the message about the weather stone and the gameplay was completely frozen. This is why I suspect the weather stone.

I don't think it's the RAM, either, even though the symptoms seems similar. And the permanent freezing is so frustrating because you lose a lot of work if you haven't saved every five minutes or so, which I do now. The message you get... it's from the game itself and not by Error Trap? I've never gotten any message about the stone, myself, even though the stone is there in the forest.

The conversation is at the Nraas site:
https://nraas.wikispaces.com/messag...305928#58356890

They say you need the Debug Enabler's "Move to family inventory" -option.

i read a little bit about it in this thread. it mentions that the weather stone is the problem, but i can't find where i read about deleting it with twallan's debug enabler. however, i did test it myself (using debug enabler to move the stone to your family's inventory) and it seems to have worked. since the stone wasn't deleted, the game won't try to respawn it. haven't noticed any issues with it in the inventory either.

Oh wow, thanks for the links.

My only concern now is how to find and remove the stone without loading a household. The game freezes once the household is loaded, so I'm not sure how exactly I should do this. Can it spawn while in Edit Town?

Can you get into Edit-Town mode without crashing? If you can, then it would be simple just to change active household and go get the stone. I quess the extreme option would be starting over again in the same neighborhood after the stone has been removed, if you have a resent copy of the family that is. Not the most pleasing option, I know. When it comes to spawning, I think if the stone spawns when the neighborhood is loaded, then it's already there when you get to Edit-Town mode.

Some said back at Nraas that the stone is probably in the neighborhood object menu in Edit-Town mode but I just checked and - at least for me - it was not there, not in any category.

Yes, I can go to Edit Town mode, but only when I load a new neighborhood and don't load a household first. After the household is loaded, I can't do anything at all because of the game freezing. I can go to build mode and CAS just fine until I load an actual household.
I doubt that the weather stone spawns in a new world that doesn't have an active household selected, but I'm not 100% sure. If it could spawn without loading a household first, it would be great.

Hmm, don't know about that. All I know is that if there's not a single community lot, then it wont spawn. But if no active household... haven't tested that one. I quess you just have to test and see.

Elexis, I don't know if it would help but have you tried decrapifying your world save?

ETA: Didn't mean to say "world". :p