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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 17th Dec 2020 at 3:47 AM
Default The Sims 3 - My New Experience
Well, the time has finally come.

I have finally been able to make it safely to my own home, and thanks to my dear, dear friend, I got a placeholder graphics card to place inside my new gaming machine. As of now, I'm still setting up some things, and I'm still downloading a lot of games from my game libraries, but the games that have currently been downloaded, AAA, Indie, Casual, Well Optimized and Unoptimized, all run beautifully. The buttery smoothness has almost drove me to tears multiple times today.

(Don't judge me.)

I also edit videos, and let me tell you I actually enjoy it now with this new hardware. I can ask my computer to do something and it will do it and do it snappily. It's been such, such a relief.

But moving on, I've opened up the Sims 4 and started a save. It's not a legacy or anything, just a save. It'll be the save I go back to to see if the smoothness and quality changes after [REDACTED] the rest of the packs and the latest patch.

I have not opened the Sims 3 yet. Currently, I'm still downloading packs, but I'm excited to see how this goes after taking the proper precautions and making the right optimizations. Will it go excellently? Horribly? Meh? I'm still interested either ways.

So, what's the purpose of this thread, eh? Well, it's nothing much, it's basically a public notebook featuring my thoughts on using TS3 on this new machine. You're all welcome to give your thoughts, as well. I admire chill conversation.

Oh c'mon. There better be a point to all this stress I'm under.
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Lab Assistant
#2 Old 17th Dec 2020 at 6:55 AM
I’m equal parts jealous and excited for you lol. Here’s to the future smoothness of your Sims 3 experience!
Mad Poster
#3 Old 17th Dec 2020 at 2:10 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Wojtek
Please do not update to 1,69. It'll screw your game entirely.

If the OP is planning to run an Origin controlled game on Windows with the game and its packs actually supplied by Origin. and not a retail disc or Steam install nor one of the Mac versions, then they aren't going to have a choice there. At least, not within the realm of legitimate installation methods.
Forum Resident
#4 Old 17th Dec 2020 at 4:51 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Wojtek
It sucks because we should have a choice to either update or not. I'm at 1,63 and not going to update any further.

What's worse to think about is that if by some chance EA ever actually decided to put in the work to make the PC version 64 bit as well, they'd 100% tie it to Origin.

It's what this game so desperately needs, but with all of the headaches even just 1.69 gives, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I honestly don't think it'd be worth it if that was the price. I'll take my chances with what we have now over whatever EA does nowadays to break the game further.

You have been chosen. They will come soon.
Forum Resident
#5 Old 18th Dec 2020 at 12:40 AM
https://www.nraas.net/community/Patch-1-69

In short, it's a case of "does it completely destroy the game because it's so bad?" And the answer is no, but it does a lot more than just chaining the game to Origin. The EP&SP manager in particular adds nothing but extra headaches, since as the page mentions, it has a tendency to forget your selections from one session to the next.

Thank goodness for physical media and manual patching, for this game at least.

You have been chosen. They will come soon.
Senior Moderator
staff: senior moderator
#6 Old 19th Dec 2020 at 10:38 AM
I don't think it destroys the game. It's a nuisance yes, but if you have no choice but to update to 1.69 then there isn't anything to really worry about.
The biggest issue is the launcher randomly unselecting packs or forgetting they are unistalled, and it's a real pain to have to reload and relesect them, but it's just meant that I've got into the habit of quickly checking they are selected before playing. It's annoying when they're not, but for me at least that only happens very rarely  

And I don't think that would ever wreck your saves - you'd know that your packs have been uninstalled when you get the base game loading screen, and probably even a warning notification that items are missing if you load a save. As far as I know, quitting without saving and reselecting the packs shouldn't cause any issues? 

One thing I've found that's probably been the most annoying for me, is tools like S3OC not being able to read the data from expansions properly. Some packs don't have any objects in the list, and other packs only have some objects that show up. But that's more of a modding problem than anything game breaking or game ruining. 

Just wanted to say, because I avoided updating for ages but then had no choice when I got a new laptop, and even though I was worried it was going to ruin something, apart the occasional pain of reselecting the packs there aren't any serious issues, at least not that I've experienced :P
Scholar
#7 Old 20th Dec 2020 at 6:34 AM Last edited by lucy kemnitzer : 20th Dec 2020 at 7:14 AM.
This is my experience too. I avoided 1.69 as long as I could-which wasn't long-and there were only 2 consequences: 1)it's not always possible to stay offline all the time, and 2. I have to watch my expansions. Every so often Origin sticks its oar in and demands to update even if I'm ostensibly p[laying offline. Then Origin has the gall to flash a panel at me claiming that I can play while the updating is going on, which is a darntoheck lie. I don't know how they have the brass to claim that when the game is completely unavailable until Origin is finished updating. As for #2, I am sorry to say that just two days ago it afflicted me. I checked my expansions, but the process of scrolling through Seasons got unchecked though it was checked before. As soon as the world loaded I got the dread "Some objects could not be loaded" and I quit without saving, and looking at the Nraas script error I saw "Trick or Treat Unavailable," which I thought was an odd error during loading until I realized what it meant. So when I went to try again I knew what to look for, and I found the unchecked box for Seasons.

Oh, another thing I blame on 1.69, though I am not sure I am correct to do so: there's a trick I used to use to keep the "featured items" folder from filling up with unwanted store thumbnails everytime I played the game, and that trick doesn't work anymore.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#8 Old 21st Dec 2020 at 2:02 AM
Update #1 - The First 3 Play Sessions
I'm just going to put it out there, simply because I think there's no shame in it. The first time I opened up the game and got to the world view, I cried. I didn't bawl my eyes out, but there were about five tears that made their way down my cheeks.

The game is so, so amazingly smooth, and this is with all settings maxed out; yes, even the High Detail Lots are set to eight.

I decided that for the first save I create on this new machine that I would play without mods and cc to get the authentic Sims 3 experience, and that I would play in Appaloosa Plains, as it has been my favorite EA world to play in ever since I started playing the Sims 3 years and years ago. It took about a little under a minute to load the world, it was so fast I was temporarily in shock, in fact. The family I created was the Sephora family, with one YA female and one Adult female cat, since I can't seem to stop myself from making a sim family that doesn't contain at least one animal. Playing with Base Game + All Expansions apparently cannot slow down CAS on this machine. Everything was so quick and till' this day I'm still delighted at that fact. I also kind of knew that it wasn't hard to make sims look good without cc, but now I'm sure, because Cianna Sephora, as I've named her, looks just like how I want her to in CAS and In-Game with no such thing as harsh lighting to speak of. I'll post pictures of this family sometime in another reply to this thread.

The first, second, and third play sessions were...chaotic, for lack of a better word. But trust and believe they were fun and funny as all get out. To make something inexplicable very short, my sim is now on a scale of disliked to enemies with the townsfolk because she was attracted to Honey Darnell, her boss, and decided to fall in love with her. This made her a decent level celebrity. She then became attracted to another woman, Gracie Loveland, and fell in love with her. Since this was all in public the entire town caught whiff of it and deemed her a dirty cheat and a slut. All of this happened without my input and was completely autonomous, which honestly left me slack-jawed at the sheer mess that my sim found herself in. Confused but unable to stop fucking laughing, I right-click on the cat, Chime, to see what she was up to since I was doing a mini-challenge to not control her. Turns out she was halfway across the town, which was shocking to me, trying her hardest to play with Mozart Miller. I got to watch as Mozart slowly became as what I can only call "annoyed" as Chime kept trying to do friendly interactions and he kept rejecting them. Slowly but surely, he started doing mean interactions, which eventually ended up with the two of them fighting. Chime won the fight though, so it's a win in my opinion.

So yeah, Sim Drama, amirite?!

Oh c'mon. There better be a point to all this stress I'm under.
Alchemist
#9 Old 21st Dec 2020 at 12:46 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Wojtek
It sucks because we should have a choice to either update or not. I'm at 1,63 and not going to update any further.


Why 1.63 and not 1.67?

what does his name even mean?
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#10 Old 22nd Dec 2020 at 2:46 AM
Hm, patch 1.69 hasn't effected my game negatively so far.

Oh c'mon. There better be a point to all this stress I'm under.
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