Hello. I've recently had time to play The Sims 3 on my new PC and I've been encountering my fair share of issues. The most recent one has me really stumped though. Every time the game gets cold and even frost appears on the ground, if I tab over to a community lot, the game will crash to desktop. I've troubleshooted by setting up a new save and going to a community lot in the summer with no issue. Then, in that same save, I cheated it to winter with low snow on the ground, and the game crashed to desktop almost immediately. I've also troubleshooted by entering the game with no CC save for the nointro mod, and the same thing happens, leading me to think that it's nothing to do with a mod and rather, something to do with graphics.

I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super in a Windows 11. I've updated my graphics rules and graphics cards in my game files to reflect this. I also use the Alder Lake patch and always Run As Administrator when launching the game. I recently updated my graphics driver, as well as updated C++ in case that was an issue. Nada. I'm curious if there's anything else I might need to do in order to let the game run properly when it snows.

While I did not get a ScriptError (yet), I did get this exception info:
[Exception info]
date: 2024-10-09
time: 22.53.15
type: ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x00000034
address: 0x7c2a4e65 "C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\dxilconv.dll":0x0001:0x00013e65

Edit: I'm actually noticing something right now. The exception is talking about the C drive and I've installed my Sims on my D drive since that has more space. Would that discrepancy affect anything? I was also thinking maybe it was Reshade shenanigans, but my main save file crashes even with Reshade off. Strangely enough, turning Reshade off was what fixed the problem in my test file so I don't know what in the world is going on now.

Hopefully that helps. I can try and play enough for the game to generate a Script Error as well though, if that's more useful.

Thank you.

Have you taken any steps to limit the frame rates for TS3 on that graphics card? TS3 has no functional built-in fps limiter, so we need to rely on Nvidia settings together with vertical sync (if playing in full-screen mode) or use a third party tool to make this happen especially on a card that strong.

To see the fps rates you are actually getting in-game, presumably when it's not winter yet as you don't want to see the game crashing on you again right away, hit ctrl+shift+C to bring up the cheats console and type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed fps should never exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. Most are 60 Hz, so that means 60 fps, some can run higher but only up to a point. To make the fps display go away, cheats console again and type fps off (enter).

Also probably worth asking, but does anything different happen in windowed vs. full-screen mode?

Hi igazor and thank you for the suggestions. I've limited the FPS to 60 via Nvidia Control Panel, as well as turned on Vertical Sync. I always play in windowed mode (for Reshade) but during the test, I played in full-screen mode as well and it was basically the same in terms of the FPS.

The FPS never exceeds the 60 I'd set it to when moving around the map and such. Out of curiosity I set it to winter (no snow; just the frost from the low temperature) and the FPS was at 20 when the game crashed while I was in the process of moving my camera to a community lot.

I remembered last night that I had to actually reinstall The Sims 3 on the computer because when I initially installed it on this PC, my save file started crashing to desktop in winter too and wouldn't open. The LazyDuchess Alder Lake patch erased a dll or something, forcing me to have to reinstall the whole thing. So a reinstall of The Sims 3 didn't fix whatever is going on.

Okay, something is out of kilter then (this is a highly technical term that doesn't actually mean anything, don't mind me) that we haven't yet identified.

I would suggest posting this issue, and you can link back here if that helps, on EA's Answers.HQ board for TS3. It's actually run by player/volunteers with EA oversight and they have a lot of experience with helping players to get TS3 up and running without all the crashing on modern hardware, so it would be so much more efficient if they could take a look and get the right info out of your system that they need to help you solve this.

Okay, thank you! :> If their suggestions work, I will report back here.

I ended up figuring it out with the help of dxdiag and my friend. It's kind of silly. But in my defense, I don't use PCs very often and have used laptops my whole life. It turns out that when I set up the monitor, I'd plugged it into the Intel card that came with the PC tower and not the Nvidia graphics card that I kept thinking it was using. LOL... Once I plugged it back in, it's working fine in winter again. For some reason, it looks really ugly but I can figure that out later. I'm just happy that I can experience winter in the game again.