im not talking about a whole open world im talking about lots that you can see and click on or walk by as fully loaded and unfrozen just those 3 lots around you im not talking about a fully open world like the sims 3 which i will miss forever we all can see that everything is fake around our sims except households or real lots
about the sims 3 i did everything on this site to help me the game doesnt crash like when i start it or after a minute or two i can play for an hour if its a heavy hood or something
i can play more if its a a very simple and small one actually i did once and the game i thought would never freeze crash or anything also the fps was very high it wasnt slowing down at all and there was only 5 houses and 5 lots so that the game wont slow down or crash and i have all those over watch and error trap they did clean my game and i do clear the cache but god cant i play without all this mess and at least without my game crashing after long hours of gameplay for no reason
also i used a method where i limit the fps with the fps limiter and it did work for sometimes but it didnt fix the crappy game forever i think its just broken i really loved the sims 3 more than any game but as much as i loved it i hated how much it became unusable with every patch EA release they fix something and they make something else worst
the most place my game crash in is CAS i tried playing without CC and it did crash after i was making the fifth sim so it isnt really any bad CC i already cleaned most of my stuff there the CAS in the sims 3 always prerender the thumbnails i dont know why it has something wrong with the thumbnails the sims 2 and 4 when a new thing is added in the clothes section it takes time to load only the first time the sims 3 takes forever every time and yet no body found a way to fix that
also for people saying they need the game to be 64bit to use more ram i just read that if you have a 64 bit operating system you do not need to allow your system to access more RAM it already does Any 64bit system that runs a 64bit OS has a 32bit address translator that allows the 32bit program to load in 3-4GB range of address left over by the OS so the sims 3 have a very stupid Engine which i like to call in the DEMO STAGE ! 64bit or not the game is broken (lazy EA )
and the sims 4 i think maybe i cant judge from now but the crashes and lags i saw until now didnt happen with everyone people who have powerful PCs didnt face any problems at least not yet only the disappearing sims and they can be fixed by aging only active households and disabling the auto age as it might the problem i didn't face it at all and i have large families and i play long hours and switch from family to another nothing weird happened just one the last sim im controlling whatever he\she is doing they go back standing in the street if they were a sleep they are wearing pajamas if not they just stand there

I know what you mean, John, about Sims 3 being broken, and I've had to use every work around posted on the internet to keep mine from crashing. It's a buggy game and with every patch, as you said, EA fixed something and broke something else. This is why I won't buy their new shiny full of all new bugginess, and from what I've seen, some old ones that were already in older Sims games. I've been watching let's plays and reading from people who've played Sims 4, and I have a now stable working Sims 3 on my computers with the workarounds, so I don't need another one installed. I even have Sims 2 on one of my computers but will have to uninstall new graphic card drivers and reinstall older ones if I want everything to work fine with it, as the latest update caused a terrible graphic error where most Sims have a large black rectangle under them everywhere they go, it's their shadow. That was disappointing, as I was recently playing Sims 2 and enjoying it. There are still things I haven't experienced in both Sims 2 and 3, and I find myself surprised by them when playing, so I don't need a new game anyway. Actually, I could likely use Sims 2 on my laptop without the weird shadow; I shall have to give that a go some time.

Something that really irked me a while back is, after EA fixed the large address aware thing with Sims 3, they broke it again, and my game started crashing again until I went through every .exe file in the game AGAIN and reset it to be large address aware so it will use more than 2 gigs of RAM. I don't even want EA's latest patch for the game, as now I have finally fixed most of the stupidity they did to it and will just have to live with what they left broken and keep the mods in that fix other things they left broken.

I understand also the frustration of the thumbnails always having to reload every time they are loaded in Sims 3. It makes no sense why they did it that way, but on both my computers, they load really fast, so it doesn't bother me much. I was able to upgrade my desktop computer with a good card and RAM that I got for super good deals on Amazon. I could not otherwise have afforded it. My Sims 3 game is beautiful because of this, and I just can hardly stand to look at how plastic and ugly everything in Sims 4 is, like someone posted on here earlier today, it all looks like clay or something. I have custom content skin tones and hair for my Sims 3 Sims, so they don't look so puddingy as they do in just a vanilla game, and I can make Sims that look very different from one another and have made a bunch of Sims 3 Sims off real people that look like those people, so I don't have much of an issue with the way the Sims look, compared to Sims 4 ones.

It is as you said, lazy EA. So many things were broken in Sims 3, but they decided, since they're too lazy or not technically inclined enough, to just leave it all out of Sims 4 and give us a stripped down game, and I'm not at all okay with that.

I fixed that by setting the shadow settings to medium. Maybe you can try that before fiddling with the drivers?

Yes, I reinstalled Sims2 recently and it does get a little flustered with all those newfangled GPUs.

OK, so I made some observations recently:

• Sims are not cached when you travel between lots, so you will end up experiencing longer loading times since the game has to reload almost entirely every time you travel (I read the code in the game to come to this conclusion, so it's not speculative). As the save file gets more bloated, loading times suffer more.
• This happens even if you change an outfit or edit the household.
• Content in the game is also not cached.
• Autosave happens only when you're travelling.

If you ask me, that sounds like they'd end up using more than 4 GB of RAM to do these things (caching, autosave during the game's runtime, etc.). 64-bit support for machines that are using it would allow them to take advantage of extra addressing space to accomplish these things. Currently, the game is using 2.7 GB of RAM on my system.

Another thing, though: Using 2.7 GB is quite high for a game that doesn't have to load such a large amount of textures and doesn't have extremely large datasets to cache. Perhaps trimming down memory usage could allow them to add these features without having to add 64-bit support.

I'm surprised to read your high memory footprint is that high, as GnatGoSplat reported his memory usage was never greater than 2 GB. It's interesting to me how little effort EA consistently puts into memory management, as the same problem with an expanding footprint eventually creating instability was one of the real shortfalls of TS3. You would think they learned their lesson.

Your findings suggest that EA failed to take advantage of the closed world, loading screen between lot system they settled on for the very reason of improving performance and stability. So much was sacrificed, without concomitant gain. That's too bad.

Awesome. Thanks. I shall have to try that. I found the problem solution on Wiki and all it talked about was to downgrade the drivers. At least that's what I remember reading. So ya.