Hi there,

when browsing through my Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/ folder, I came across the following files and I have no clue what so ever what they're for.

xcpt PC-<my name> 09-06-26 08.42.10.txt
xcpt PC-<my name> 09-06-26 08.42.10.mdmp

I've got a couple of these, all dated on june the 26th, at different times though. I'm just curious and trying to get to know the ins and outs of my new game, that's all.

Many thanks for helping,
Maltha

I never seen these before,*.mdmp looks like a crash report and I wonder if the *.txt document is a reader friendly of the crash report.

mdmp stands for mini-dump, and contains machine-readable information about a crash. The txt file contains user-friendly information about the crash. You can open the minidump in an appropriate debugger to allow you to debug the game.

EA could use these files to try to figure problems with the game. Otherwise, these files are completely useless and can be deleted; they are just wasting space on your hard drive.

Thanks for responding

It makes sense to me now. The 26th is the day I installed the patch. Luckily my game never crashes, but that day it did because of a conflicting mod. Since the crashing no longer occurs, I'm off to delete the files. Thanks!

Maltha

I just had an idea these text files just might help us as with everyone else here, if anyone has a crash and don't know why this just might be the ticket.

I think if people are reporting a crash to have them upload the text document if it’s not too big, I would like to poke around in one and find out why computers are crashing.

Windows writes minidumps if your computer does a BSOD crash. EA is now writing minidump for game crahes? That's new.. :\ Windows stores them in C:\Windows\Minidump

Not new... EA wrote minidumps for TS2 and now for TS3; I'm not sure about TS1. Unfortunately, without the source code, the minidumps can be pretty useless... they often only tell us that EA doesn't write very robust code.

CrazyAce, are you interested in specific crashes, or all crashes?

Any; it would be nice to see why people are having crashes with TS3 instead of guessing, researching and testing all the time, this way problems can be narrowed down to a plausible crash.