The fact that we play it anyway shows how great the base concepts of the game are (though it definitely needs mods/cc to be great).

It's sad though, because if they could have made it stable, not have the memory leak that's a major reason for Error 12, etc., it would be truly amazing to play. All the errors...well, it's an understatement to call them annoying.

Thankfully, I can't remember the last time I had an Error 12. After all this modding, and with all this computing power, I might actually have a TS3 that's running really well.

Welp, I was playing a new game today and the Grandmother of the family met herself at work. I was going to take a screenshot of the notification and make a joke about how "she finally found herself" but my computer didn't cooperate. Now she has herself as her only known co-worker in her relationship panel. I want her to call herself and have a chat lol. I'm on day two of this save game, I don't think it's going to go well....................

@mustang34 -It sounds like a social worker took a child away from an inactive family and the save started to corrupt like one of mine when a child was taken for failing school and that one exploded right away.
I've also lost older saves to Error Code 12 after turning the EA bugfest on for a "story progression" and it overloaded my memory because it was way too overactive.I had to start using NRaas Mods to solve that one and haven't seen EC12 ever since playing with the NRaas Mod version of story progression and I've got the entire Sims 3 collection installed with 106 NRaas Mod files and about 300 other Mods.I played earlier in my 100 baby challenge and the food replicators at one of my town's libraries were glitched and kept getting waiters assigned to them.I had to remove assignments in Register and disable new assignments to fix that glitch.

Just a quick note: I think things are better (avoiding E12, avoiding crashes, etc.) for people who weren't, in hindsight, as stupid as I was to buy through Origin.

If you can use 1.67, bypass the Launcher, not have Origin using up resources and seemingly occasionally causing crashes, etc., you are lucky. I wouldn't put it past EA to intentionally have made those of us it could, who bought through Origin, use it and just make the game a little more unstable, so we still get some enjoyment from the game (to whet our appetite) but have frustrations, that they hope we'll "upgrade" to TS4.

I have no intention of doing so. I haven't been ultra-thorough in researching TS4, but while it seems to have some improvements, the open neighborhood is gone, the demo of the sim creator seems as if it's much harder to get the look I want (To me, sliders are easier than "sculpting" with a mouse; I know some like "sculpting," but I had trouble when testing out their demo and they could have made both methods available).

I like some of what I know-- that custom traits are possible and not that hard to mod, that mood makes a bigger difference in available interactions, etc..

But in general, it seems like a bad tradeoff, another big factor being that I don't think there are mods for it as great as Twallan's TS3 suite, and I know Pescado has just started considering doing something like Awesome for it. Those "major" mods are really important.

And they didn't do the biggest thing they should have done, which would have been to make TS4 64 bit, or at least available in such a version. I think a lot of TS4's weaknesses, like no open neighborhood, are to save resources so as to fit it into a 32 bit environment. They could have kept what was best about TS3 (outside of Twallan's mods and Awesome being available) while adding more features, had they just gone 64 bit.

Plus, other things being close to equal, I hate to reward EA by buying more from them.

I'm in that sort of mood toward them as well, having just started my game up and having it quickly crash, when it had been running quite well.

No freaking joke.

My game only messes up when I'm playing very long sessions in very large worlds. I'd get some Error 12 when the game goes above 3,5 GB of memory usage and it'll eventually crash.
There are a couple of bugs such as the build/buy mode UI disappearing partially, but these bugs can be fixed by using keyboard shortcuts.
ONCE it happened that I loaded the game and everything but the UI was blue. But it only happened that one time.
I thank all the modding gods because I know that without their amazing contributions I will probably be playing a very buggy and laggy game.

Mine won't let me use TestingCheats for longer periods of time. It just starts to lag extremely, and then, when I turn off the cheat and turn it back on, it runs as well as when I started it. So, that's one problem.

The other problem is the BuyDebug when used via CAW- Edit In Game... yeah, it's just an endless loading screen to Edit Town, so from now on, I build my lots in actual game.

And the third problem... The CAST!
When I use it more than 20 times, the game starts lagging a bit in buy mode. Then, after few more uses, the loading cursor state is no longer default Sims 3 cursor, but the default windows loading cursor. At that point buy mode is unplayable because of lag. If I use it few more times, the game has tendencies to crash. The cast problem usually goes with the UI problems, making some parts of it invisible or inaccessible.

Also, the game deffinitely has problems with routing. Even if the worlds are perfectly routable, NPCs and townies will find a way to get stuck after a couple hours of playing. I keep resetting the sims, to solve this problem.

I have not had Error 12 for more than a year now. Maybe because I got rid of the Supernatural and Pets population in my towns, as well as Memories. Ironically, Memories are memory eater. And, even when I opted out pets... minor pets in the world dissapeared, but horses did not? Wut? And then they get stuck, and my game starts to lag! I deffinitely need to find a mod to disable those wild ransackers.

It also seems that I stumbled upon a new way of crash... The game ends up in infinite loading screen to the actual saved game. It's happened twice already, and right now, as I'm typing this, it's the tird time it's happening. Off to the task mannager!

While my TS3 game actually worked, I had various troubles.

- Crash to desktop (not often, but it happened a few times)
- Seemingly eternal loading, even with very little CC
- Sims and pets would very often sink into the ground, and either get stuck or wander through the lot with their feet halfway buried.
- Random invisibility (sims would just disappear, the only sign of them being the plumbbob)
- Various other glitches and errors, varying from merely annoying to making the game unplayable
- Houses/saves getting borked after 4-6 times, even if I saved as a new file.
- CDs not working, and CDs borking the game (the "Into the future" disc didn't work, and after I tried installing, the game stopped working. I also tried another disc, but that had the same problem - I've had the same problem with the TS4 discs).

Haven't played it in a while. Thought I'd try via Origin when I next feel like playing, since that's the only thing that works for TS4.

As far as memories, I'd encourage everyone to disable them. In TS2, they were valuable because they actually came up in thought bubbles and seemed to affect Sims' behavior. In TS3 they're pretty useless, more to let us look back on our sims' lives or something, but not worth the memory they take up.

I won't disable expansion packs as a way to stop Error 12. I'd end up with the dreaded dialog upon loading, "Some objects could not be found and were replaced" or something. I have heard Pets and Supernatural are bad for memory usage...but Supernatural sims are too important to my game now to let go. I'd live without pets, themselves, if it meant I'd never have to worry about Error 12 again, but I'd also find I lost a lot of other content in my game that the pack brought with it.

And like your experiences, the game would just find other ways to crash.

Adding in edit: Speaking of which, my game has found a new one, that used to happen very rarely, and now has happened like the last 3 times I've played it, which is that if I switch out of the TS3 window, I come back to "...failed to function properly...Windows is searching for a solution...." Not every time, but enough that now I'm going to be afraid to switch windows. And that's really bad, as I'd learned how to check how much memory the program was using to see when I was in danger of Error 12.

I don't believe pets are that bad in terms of memory usage, but the problem is that they tend to get stuck (especially horses). I would recommend that you get some mod to get rid of game-generated pets, as well as removing the pets from unused households if you want (or keeping them to a bare minimum... horses more than anything else). The pets that YOU'RE playing should not cause any performance issue perse. They're just like Sims in that sense.

I'm having this happen too. It's been fun spending hours on a house and adjusting Sims with Master Controller, all the tediousness for nothing!

My game has forgotten how to load & save. Edit town? Eternal loading screen. Save the game? Eternal loading screen. It's just too bad that I have to quit TS3 for good.

I can't blame you. But I'm trying this last ditch effort:

1. I unistallled Origin(downloaded all my games through there),

2. downloaded the super patcher . It said I already had 1.67 installed but I installed anyway.

3. Cleared cache files, cleaned up DCBackup (except for ccmerge of course), and deleted CASThumbnails, and ObjectThumbnails out of the thumbnails folder

4. I have 3booter to bypass the launcher. And the game runs without the accursed launcher(1.69 had rendered 3booter useless). I fidgeted around in Build/buy and was able to save and quit normally. Had my usual suite of mods installed except for NRAAS(got to get the ones suitable for my patch level).


Again I'm not an expert (just really really stubborn about keeping my CC and mods) nor have I extensively tested this but it seems to be working, so try at your own risk if you have nothing to lose.

My game will crap itself after a few times playing. i have a small town, only a few sims in it, i have mods that clean up cars, etc. but honestly it still crashes all the time. it sucks.

Buydebug.
It crashes my game almost everytime which means no fishies in new lots which really bugs me...