Game crashing help :( Ok, so i have been all over FAQS on 5 different sims site, and posted my problem 3 times on the sims2 site technical help section, no one so far has been able to help me, and i cant find my problem anywhere in any FAQ. I have spent 2 months trying to figure this out, but it still baffels me. i have all expansions up to seasons, and all stuff packs except family fun. i have a lot of CC and always am careful about what i download because it has caused problems before. i had not played my game for about a month, and had not downloaded and new CC for 2 or 3 months. my game ran perfectly fine with all the CC before this. one day i go to play my game and it crashed while loading. i imediatly thought oh poo, CC killed me again. so i go on the hunt for the problem file(s) i am not able to locate any one file causing problems, so i remove the whole folder, and uninstal/reinstall. the game runs fine. i go online and redownload about 1/4th of the cc i had before, some new files, some of the same files. go to run game, doesnt work again. i finally descovered that no matter WHAT files are in my download folder, after a certain NUMBER of files is in there, it will crash. WHY? its never done this before. i got the game to run, and noticed something else. some of the maxis objects that come with the original game are missing textures, and some thumbnails dont show. now, the less CC i have in the folder the better it runs. the more i have, the earlier it crashes. i.e if i have all my CC in there, it crashes on start up, if i have 1/3 of the CC is crashes when loading a lot, so on and so fourth. does anyone have any idea whats going on??
Could you post up detailed specs of your computer? Also, when it crashes, does it generate any sort of error message? Error logs? Crash report?
it shouldnt be a problem with any of my computers capabilities, because its ran fine for months. but here they are anyway i have: 2.66 GH 1 G ram Intel(R) 82845G Graphics controler DirectX 9.0c the only thing that has ever affected my game, is the graphics card is a little small and doesnt show the fish in seasons, but nothing else is affected. the only message i get is "the application has crashed, it will now terminate." and thats only if i GET a message. when i have all my CC in there, the computer completely freezes and wont even shut down, and i have to unplug it. twice i got the BSOD and it said the application ialmrt5.dll (which is my driver) failed to initialize. but i dont know what to do about it :/ is there anything else you need to know?
ok, so it is a problem with my driver not initalizing properly, but why? i tried again, after updating my driver. and i get "idfxtray failed to initialize properly" which is the process name for my driver. its never had problems with the sims before, i have no recent CC, and no new expansions. why would my driver be having these issues now? and how can i fix it? if i need to get a newer driver, how do i go about that?
Try upgrading your graphics. Let's see if that helps. http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=865&lang=eng
Also ... after the next crash can you look inside the folder: Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Logs\ Look for the file named: [computer_name]-config-log (where [computer_name] is the Windows name of your computer) Please then attach that file to your next reply. If you use the post reply button there is a file attachment section that is pretty self explanatory. Don't worry, the file doesn't contain any important personal information, but it does contain a lot of technical info that might help shine a light on what is causing the problem.
Well. I'm am sorry that I can't see an obvious system deficiency in that log file. I re-read your original posy and I wonder what you mean by custom content .... I mean quantity. How much are we talking about? What size are the lots and families you play? The game uses up system memory with gay abandon if you give it a free rein. In this context a free rein is a large house with lots of (different) custom content and lots of sims (all wearing different custom clothing, and sporting high definition -- and different -- custom hair styles). It might just be that you are pushing your system too hard. Your onboard Intel graphics will use up every scrap of allocated resources just to deal with a failry simple game situation. If you add stress with large familes, large houses, lots of decorations, lots of ... well ... anything out of the build/buy catalogs, then, crashes are apt to occur. I'm not saying this is the cause of your problem ... but it's a possibility.
i have a lot of CC files, but not in that sense. i usually have fairly small lots, and small families. usually no more than 3 people per household. every now and then i have a large lot, but that lot usually only has 1 or 2 sims. my system ran fine before with all of it, and i hadnt added anything new in a long time. say i had 1000 CC files, and my game ran perfectly with those 1000 files. i stopped playing for about a month, and hadnt added any new CC in 3 months. so for 2 months, it ran perfectly with no problems with 1000CC files. a month later, i went to play again, and the game wouldnt even load. it would crash after about 45 minuet on the loading screen. i dont see how it could cause that to happen, if it ran perfectly before. with no changes in the files. now, it wont run unless i take out 80% of all my CC. and even then, its sketchy. this is after i removed all lots, all sims, and all neighborhoods. i have one lot, with nothing built on it, no sims in it, and the game wont load it if i have more than 20% of my original CC amount. i dont see how something THAT drastic, could be caused by the actual CC itself, when for years it ran fine with all that CC and more, because at one point i deleted it all and started over (when i got university) i think it has to do with my computer... but i dont know *what* exactally it is. :/
Remember that expansion packs also fall under the "content" description. How many expansion packs were added during the time of having 1000 custom content files?
absolutly none. the last expansion i got was seasons, and it was in there long before i had the said *1000* files. nothing about my game changed in a 3 month period of time. lets say for a timeline example: January i downloaded some CC, and added seasons. i played the game with no problems Febuary, March, and April. and in that time, added no new CC, or expansions. i stopped playing for a month in May, and in August i decided i wanted to play again. Nothing new had been added to the game since January, but something went wrong, and it crashed (and has been ever since) confusing eh?
Good question, Josh. I'm still interested in the quantity of CC. The ""1000"" files things is confusing and misleading and totally unhlepful. What is the size in bytes of your downloads folder. If we marry that information up with disc space we might see a few clues. TS2 happily fills up RAM and still needs more, more, more. I have 2GB and the games easily uses 1GB (and I have separate video mem as well) and yet the game still needs to pause to load up catalogue items, or clothing, hair styles etc. when changing appearance, or remodelling, redecorating, or refurnishing a house. There is so much file-swappng going on that fragmentation needs to be attended to if the game isn't to grind to a halt. The less free space you have the less 'elbow' Windows has to manage its virtual RAM space.
my computer has a 74 gig hard drive, the actaul amount of files i had in my downloads folder originally when the game began to crash was 10,248. taking up 3.42 gigs. i have 34.9 gigs of space left on my hard drive. i check this often. obviously, its not because im running out of space. i also have 1 gig of ram (windows XP home edition), and it has always been more than enough to run sims. i have never had stalling or long loading periods when playing. i used to have 256 mb ram, and i had stalling and long loading on that. but i got 1 gig for my B-day when i started using photoshop, because even with that as the only program running my virtual memory would get too low. so i needed the gig so that i could run my large photoshop files.
Hm, well I am banjaxed. Go to http://www.simwardrobe.com/ and in the Section The Sims 2 >> Programs You'll find a utility called "The Sims 2 Hack Conflict Detection Utility" Donwload it and run it to see if you have a hack which is messing with your game.
