I've had a series of issues recently with this game and I haven't played for a while. At my last attempt, the launcher would fail to initialize the game sequence and would drop back to the Origins interface. After going throughmany troubleshooting steps(provided at request), EA suggested that I manually uninstall the base game only and reinstall. Yesterday I finally attempted this and the game launched, my safety play family loaded but I was warned that content was missing. I looked in the buy folder and everything from the store was missing. Without playing, I exited and saw that in the launcher the items appear, along with other cc, but they look like they need to be installed. When I try to install them I get an error that says "Installation failed. Update software and try again." or something along those lines. I thought I might need to login to get it to work and the launcher will not allow me to log in. The password box just goes blank when I hit "ok."

I contacted EA after looking online for a solution and talked to 3 people. I have deleted my "Temp" folder, I was asked to reinstall Origin but I just did that 2 days ago, I reset IE, then uninstalled/reinstalled base game and other digital downloads. The last person I talked to suggested that the issue is due to reinstalling from the digital copy, not the dvd. He said to reinstall using the dvd but I cant get it to read.

All of my games are dvd, but I have base, uni, IP, and ItF as digital copies as well since my dvd player is on the fritz.

I have all games, and most stuff packs.
Win 7, 64 bit


Any and all suggestions are welcome. I'm tearing my hair out.

I will offer some advice, and hopefully someone else will jump in if these suggestions don't work.

If you now have a digital install, after a DVD install, you will need to be on patch level 1.69. Check the patch level, and update if necessary.

You do not need to sign in or even be online if your content to be installed is already in the downloads folder. It will appear in the launcher.
I think the launcher works best if you turn off the internet when installing items.

The launcher doesn't like to install too much content at a time, so limit it to one world or six sets or twenty objects at one time, then install the next batch.

Good luck.

Attuned- Thanks for responding I am patched to 1.69 something. It's completely updated. Does it matter that I went from dvd to digital format when I reinstalled? Does that somehow change the registry and how the game reads things? When I went through everything a few months ago I cleared out Origin cache and appdata and Im wondering if something got messed up that way...

Sounds like the first thing to try would be pulling your TS3 user game folder out of Documents to your Desktop for safekeeping, thus generating a clean game folder on the next attempted launch. You will have not installed content at all on the clean folder, but this is to test to make sure your install is stable and can it accept added content from there if so.

The missing step though might have been that the Registry needs to be cleaned in between a disc uninstall and an Origin digital re-install. Elements will otherwise get stuck and left behind, changing from disc to Origin installs especially. Painful though it sounds, a complete uninstall of everything, Registry clean with CCleaner, and reinstall through Origin might be required.
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Don't worry about patch levels, once you install the base game or any EP/SP through Origin you will be on Patch 1.69, no choices given.

I thought that I had cleaned out the registry when I did the manual uninstall, though I didn't do ccleaner... I followed the instructions from the ea website but looked at the sims wiki and Carls Sims as well. Just to verify my understanding, you think I should uninstall all sims games and start from scratch...? Is there any possible way to avoid that, my dvd drive is on the fritz and most of my games were used and not registered on Origin.

Ah, I see. Well, clearly an external optical disc drive or a repurchase of the used EPs so they can be registered properly under Origin would be required to do a reinstall.

Have you tried the clean game folder test first?

I just turned my computer on and had the base dvd in the drive. For some reason it's reading it today :/ I only uninstalled the base so I'm hoping it will work this time. I'll update one it's completed. I might have to try the clean folder method and my friend is going to let me borrow her external if this continues to be an issue... I appreciate your help.

So I was able to install from the dvd and the game started with no problem. After I exited the game, without play testing, I was able to login on the launcher. However, I started to move things back into the download folder (I had done a clean folder method as suggested) and was again not able to login. I still don't have access to my store content. My other files are loading into the game and mods (only no into tested) were fine. Is there somewhere in the registry that maybe got left behind or damaged when I was uninstalling/reinstalling the base game? I thought it would be ok since I reinstalled from the dvd...

Sometimes I think that my game just wants me to go through hell for no reason. I turned on the launcher today and was able to login, went to the store and re-downloaded all of my items and now I'm re-installing everything. It seems fine now. :/ I'll play test later, and I have no clue what happened. Thank you for your help.

So the game has been running *ok* ... I had one crash with an error I've never seen -exception trying to divide by zero... Something like that. It seemed pretty serious to me but the game started up again. I am running a fresh game. I didn't want to corrupt any saves. The biggest issue is that my adopted cat seems to be wonky. Error Trap goes crazy and before I can alter her path, Error Trap says it's recorded like 27 errors. Nothing is in the Sims 3 folder though... I don't know what's causing it. I've reset her a few times. I don't know if it's just the sim or the game itself.

Error trap doesnt seem to e working properly... I'm continuing to have this issue with the constant resetting and now it has gone on to the adopted dog and the human sim. My cat was glitched out of the world then the game crashed. Error trap is saying its writing errors but nothing shows up. I have normal script error logs that say null exception error. Any ideas? Should this be in a new post?