Is there anything I can do to keep my driver updates from #ucking up my game every time? I had a backup like I was told in one of the other thousand posts I've done over the last few weeks, but it didn't take or didn't work or I misunderstood and did it wrong. Whatever! I don't know. Heavy sigh...

Could someone please tell me again what steps to take so that I don't have to keep redoing everything each time my #&($*^# driver updates! What the heck is up with that anyway?! How effin stupid! I swear, no wonder so many people have given up on this game. I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth the headache! I mean I love the game, but seriously WTF ??!! I have never had to deal with so much BS from any game in all of the 20+ years I've been in front of a PC! I have a Error 12 Code nearly every time I play now and to pour salt in that wound I update my driver and I'm back to practically back to factory reset?!! I'm about to go back to playing Pong or Trails West!
But seriously, if it were not for you nice people and the amazing mods here I would have quit playing about two months after I bought the damn thing from Steam back in 2017!

Also, am I going to have to do all that stuff over again you guys had me work on in my "Dreaded Error 12" post? Geezus I hope not....

You already have the steps to preserve and restore a former Option.ini file, but the former file needs to be altered to account for the new driver version. I believe you already have that step as well, and it should only be one extra step. There is no way to prevent a driver update from resetting all of the EA defined Game Options. What you can do is not let Windows or any other force update your GPU quite so often. I mean, yes it should be updated if updates are available so as to stay "in sync" with Windows updates but not every day or anything like that.

Not clear on what any of this has to do with Error 12s, fps capping, or formal card recognition. None of those changes you made using the Nvidia Control Panel and Inspector should have become undone, but do check the frame rates in-game(still capped at 60?) and the DeviceConfig.log to make sure the card is still recognized (Found:1 Matched:1 and no 32 MB texture memory override), copy/paste the first 40 lines again if you want reassurance.

On the Error 12s, how is your game's RAM usage in GBs (not %s) measured by Task Manager doing when you first launch the game once the game clock starts moving forward smoothly, and again after let's say a half-hour or hour of solid play? Are you playing unreasonably long sessions without saving and without a save (as), total quit to the desktop, and reload?

Pong was indeed a pretty solid game. I liked the mods that allowed the paddles to become pregnant, but story progression caused lag on my system back then.

I'll try to explain in a different way. (Here's my 1st attempt for reference.)

The options.ini file has a driver identifier which identifies the existing graphics driver. It's the line in the options.ini file which begins 'lastdevice ='. If you use Notepad++ to open the file, that will be line 150. (Otherwise you'd use Microsoft's Notepad to open the file.) When the graphics driver is updated, the game detects that the identifier doesn't match the existing driver and then it will reset the entire options.ini file with the new driver identifier. The strategy is to copy this new identifier from the newly reset options.ini file to and older version you have saved somewhere else and then use that file instead of the newly reset one.

First, you have to make a copy of the entire options.ini file somewhere on your computer outside the Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 folder before the driver is updated. This is what you use that to effectively preserve your settings. Once the new driver is installed you'll need to run the game to reset the options.ini file; I think you only need to go to the save game chooser, I don't think you need to actually load a save game but I could be wrong - it's been a while since I've done this. You'll need to shut down the game to proceed.

Once the options.ini file in your TS3 folder has been reset with the new identifier, open the file in Notepad or Notepad++ and use Windows standard copy/paste functions to copy the entire lastdevice= line. Then open up your saved copy of the options.ini file, select the lastdevice= line and paste. If you done this correctly then your older saved copy of the options.ini file will now be updated with the new driver identifier. Next, delete the options.ini file in your Sims 3 folder (recall this one was reset and we used it to get the new driver identifier and no longer need it). Copy over your updated version of the options.ini file to the TS3 folder. This file has all your customized settings. Since the driver identifier has been updated the game should accept the entire file with all your customized settings instead of resetting the entire thing.

If it doesn't work then you still have your older saved copy of the options.ini file and can try again. Occasionally I mix up the copy/paste and end up having to do it twice. It's easy to get confused with multiple windows open of essentially the same file.

EC12:

I didn't read your entire thread on this as I really didn't have much to contribute. In my experience once EC12 starts to hit a game it's impossible to 'fix'. Many of my games have been abandoned over the years because EC12 made them impossible to continue to play. Factors which seem to affect this in my experience: large resident population, large overstuffed households (>16), long played neighborhoods, TS3 use of RAM > 3.0 GB. In some games I'll actually monitor RAM usage and when it creeps up near 3.0 GB I'll save, quit to desktop, and reload the game. I'll also save, quit to desktop, and reload after long CAS sessions. While I can usually manage EC12 this way for a while, I typically end up moving the household via Traveler to a new neighborhood (which helps, especially if the population is small and the world is not large), or I abandon that save and begin a new game.

I don't know what you did to deal with EC12 before, but I wouldn't expect you'd to need to repeat it due to a graphics driver update.

How do I monitor Ram usage?

Since my new PC I haven't played for more than an hour or so, maybe 1.5 hours. I started saving every 30 min. I also don't' have all that much custom content. My sims lot is big, but there are only 7 sims living there. I also already deleted an entire floor of stuff plus the entire floor itself (it was a basement) And the town is capped at 125 sims and the resident population is currently 119. I've done clean ups of all sims inventory and only allow a small number of pets and animals in the game. I even got rid of all insects and other rodent spawners as they aren't necessary IMO and I don't have any sims that deal with them. Though I'm not sure how much info they use up, but I figure every bit helps.

JohnL83 post_id=64192 time=1551825188 user_id=18010 wrote: How do I monitor Ram usage?

I'm not talking about a formal monitoring procedure with graphs and charts as output here, although maybe TreyNutz did mean something more formal like that. Open the Task Manager and look at it occasionally. If the RAM usage for the TS3 executable is showing as a % in that column, right-click to see it as an absolute amount (MB or GB).

I always have the Task Manager open when I play even if my eyes are not exactly glued to it at all times. They might be during world travel transitions since they take a long time and there isn't much else to be looking at. I don't like surprises. And my most recent Error 12 a few weeks ago was certainly not a surprise, I was doing far too many things in Edit Town for one session and had seen the RAM usage go over 3.6 GB momentarily. I expected trouble and got it, but there wasn't much since the last save that I needed to do over again.

Ahhh yes, easy to do. I wasn't thinking there. Sorry. It's been a rough week in RL as well so I'm kinda at my wits end...however much "wit" I even have these days.
I can sort all this out in the next few days. I will be home for a while again soon thanks to yet another surgery. (nothing too serious, but still it's another 2-3 weeks at home recovering.) Yippee me! At least the weather is crappy and cold so I wont feel like I am missing out on much during recovery.
Funny, this time last year here in Missouri the tulips were already just sprouting, this year the snow is covering most stuff and the ground hasn't even begun to thaw out. I don't think we've been above freezing here for more than a few hours in the last 2 months. The week ahead looks a bit better, but it's hardly, "run outside and get the yard ready for spring" weather. Still, I will take just above freezing to this negative temp BS!

This would be about the time last year or maybe a couple of weeks later that I saw what must have been a just out of hibernation squirrel frolicking around the park, with snow still on the ground. I was so happy to see it that I started talking to it as a sim might. Luckily it was very early on a Sunday morning so there weren't many passersby to think I was totally off my rocker. But guess I was a bit, late winter weather is always depressing to me.

Hope you have a speedy recovery.

JohnL83 wrote: ↑

March 5th, 2019, 5:33 pm

How do I monitor Ram usage?

I meant just keeping the Task Manager window open and clicking on the Memory column to sort by RAM usage. Then shrink the window as small as possible and orient it out of the way so I can glance at it every once in a while. I play on a dual monitor set up and have the game in a window on one monitor, Task Manager open in a corner on the other.

Hope you feel better soon.