Hello everyone,

I need help trying to figure out what is wrong with my game.

I was playing a male fairy, who was a ghost hunter. At one point I had a challenge at the city hall, I completed the challenge (By putting it on the Fourth speed I think that is the reason why it messed up), and thats where the bug hit. The sound of "congratulations you completed the challenge!" sound kept playing in a loop. It would not end. Then every 15 or so in game sim minutes the game would freeze for a few seconds, (Read everyone stopped moving but animations kept playing) and would then resume. It makes for a very unpleasant play time. I tried putting everything on low but it didnt help.

I have tried installing master controller and using the "reset everything" It could be my imagination but it actually helped at first. The freezing stayed away for a while. It reset about 12000 objects? Im playing on the world with the mermaids. But the freezing came back. Then I tried with the AwesomeMod which had a "Fixall" feature. It fixed about 228 problems. GREAT I thought! It FIXED things! surely my game must work great now right? but nahhh the freezing continued. Its dissapointing sims 3 doesnt have a log like minecraft does, where you can see where the problem lies.

I tried monitoring my RAM and CPU usage.

My CPU usage is about 40ish % and peaks out at 60% once the game freezes but only for a split second, then goes down to about 40% My RAM is consistent at about 3.22 GB of usage.

I tried with a sore heart to start a new game. This game was unaffected, no freezing and smooth gameplay. So obviously the bug I experienced earlier has probably messed something up. I would really rather not abandon my current play world.

I dont feel like this is affected by my PC specs but ill include it just in case...

I use windows 7 home premium.

My processor: Intel core, i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20Ghz
System type: 64 bit.
RAM : 8.00 GB

My graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

AFAIK my graphics card drivers is up to date. But again, it only started freezing after this weird bug.

If I cant salvage my world, any idea of how to avoid this particular bug? I dread the day where I spend weeks in a world and this bug will hit me again.


Edit : After giving up and making this thread, I decided to look around for one last time. And found a thread where someone recommended, "Overwatch, errortrap and register" and behold! It has fixed it somewhat. Occasionally it still freezes but it seems to fix itself now. I can play like half an hour without any sort of weird lag! altho its not a "solution" its definetly good enough to enjoy the game again. (Y) Ill leave this thread up in case someone else some day some where will have the same weird issue as me. :B

If anyone else has any input feel free to add. Still looking for a reason/solution to this.

Unfortunately I do not think there is a solution; there seems to be certain combinations of actions which cause the game to get into a processing loop, and you just have to wait. I've read of numerous instances of this, in each case the action(s) triggering the glitch were different but the results were the same - all sims literally freezing in mid-stride while other animations and music continue. About the only hope I can offer is that these "time freezes" get shorter in duration as you continue playing.

In my case my inventor sim detonated a neighbor's car, when she bent over to pick up one of the scrap piles I thought the game had locked up - every sim in sight was frozen in mid-action ...but the snow was still falling and music was still playing. After several minutes I killed the process in task manager and restarted.(my save was just before detonating that car), detonated the car again, with the same results. I decided to wait it out this time ...approximately eight minutes later the sims came back to life; not having the patience to endure that again I didn't bother picking up any more scrap and just sent my sim home ...where there was a five minute freeze when I dragged that scrap pile into the workbench. That was about a month ago, ever since when I click on that workbench there is a freeze, with only music and environmental animations running, before the sims become active again; though the duration has dropped from 6-8 minutes to 2-3 minutes. (And I've had Overwatch, errortrap and register running for ages.)

I've already replied to the OP who posted the same on the EA Tech Issues forum. I believe the key, beyond the ghost hunter glitch which was a separate issue, is that they are playing in Isla Paradiso ("the world with the mermaids") and have not taken the usual steps required to fix that world. And "Overwatch, ErrorTrap and Register" ... if I didn't know any better, that was quite possibly me saying that as well but there are a few other steps that must be taken with the flawed out of the box lots to complete the job for most of us.