Should I keep the Errortrap Disable Dereferencing tuning file installed permanently? When I take it out, my game is very laggy and the sims freeze even though there is motion in the background, the trees move, the water moves etc. Whe it freezes I can't use the mouse to control anything. If I don't use Task Manager to stop the game, then I wait it out hoping the game will unfreeze, but the memory usage rises to 3200MB, then the game just crashes to desktop. With the disable dereferencing installed, this doesn't happen, the game runs smooth and fast. I'm using the 1.67 version of Errortrap, v100.

Are you certain that you don't still have boat routing disabled in the beta testing version of GoHere while sims in town are somehow allowed to ice or roller skate? I had a puzzle kind of like this recently in Bridgeport and thought it was all kinds of other things until I finally realized that sims were trying to skate on a pond that I never even noticed before. Or something like that.

And my apologies to Chain for inserting mentions of this issue into so many responses to players all of a sudden. We know it's tricky, to say the least, and that you're working on it.

Anyway, I made the mistake of having and keeping that tuning file in place myself a long while ago. All I really wanted to do was suppress the deref error logs, but Chain correctly informed us at the time that with deref tuned out, ErrorTrap isn't actually doing the trash data collection that it needs to do on a routine basis, these things accumulate, and can lead to game save corruption and all kinds of issues. And I did have to admit that things ran better once I removed the tuning file (and hung my head in shame for a short while). Thanks for bringing all those happy memories back for me.

Of course if your game is unplayable without the tuning file in place then I suppose you pretty much have to have it. But it would probably be much healthier for an ongoing, long-running game if we could figure out why this is happening. Or why the lag-freeze is happening more than once if it's the case that ET is doing a massive cleanup at the time and then the game manages to recover somehow.

Does all of this happen without the tuning file in place on a newly started test game as well or just on well-aged and progressed specific ones?

The 'Allow Boat Routing' option is set at disabled. Should I enable it? Although the game is unplayable for now, I don't want to make it worst keeping the tuning file in if it can get better without it. So does that mean the lag and freeze is just ET doing its job on a long(ish) game?

If Allow Boat Routing is set to False for v44, then we need to make sure that the sims cannot try to skate so as to avoid the resulting freeze-up and crash. If Allow Boat Routing is set to True, then the skating is reportedly not an issue but we end up with sims in water taxis and other boats in places where it doesn't make any sense to be. Depends on the world.

If, on the other hand, the lag and freeze is due to ET derefs, then yes I would say that it should subside after one or two runs. But your game has to be able to survive the experience or this just becomes theoretical. Hopefully Chain weighs in on this part.

Okay, so I need to do more testing, and watch for impending skating (I have one skating rink in a bowling arcade place) Does this also include ice skating, the skating that sims always want to do on ponds in Winter? I'll let you know how things go.

Yes on the different kinds of skating, or at least it has for me.

When I monitored the skating rink in my bowling lot, an inactive sim was about to skate. The game lagged a bit. I directed my active sim to join and the game froze, then crashed. So I tested the game without the skating rink. The game played without freezing and crashing this time, still with some stuttering, but not as much as before. I'll keep the ET tuning file out and let ET do its work

So except for not being able to skate of course, all is well then?

It's a really odd bug and hid itself very cleverly from me in the recent batch of freezes/crashing that I mentioned. While the game was frozen, I watched its RAM usage in Task Manager. Was running reasonably well and stable at 2.1 GB prior, then at and during the freeze the RAM usage inched up ever so slowly, bit by bit, until it reached some impossible level above 3.5 GB and finally crashed. I was able to reproduce it several times, but kept looking at totally unrelated things until I realized what was causing it; for example, sudden and quick repositions of the game camera seemed to trigger it as did heavy snow and sims entering subway stations, but those were all coincidences (the subway thing is routing so guess that could have been related to GoHere somehow but could never prove or disprove that for myself). I believe that I finally disallowed autonomous skating in Retuner to get through it, which was the big "AHA!" and "PHEW, that was all it was?" moment for this one. Serves me right for not watching more closely by way of Tagger what sims around the edges of my world map were really getting up to.

Yep, all is well now. The game is steadily getting back to a smooth play - without the dereferencing file.
Oh yes, thats exactly what happened to my game, the game froze and I watched the TS3W.exe in Task manager and it rose to about 3.2GB before it crashed on me. I had no idea what it was until I read about the skating, so I watched the sims at the skating rink. It was very popular lol! Each time I tested it with inactive sims about to skate and my active sim directed to skate, it happened. I just took the skating rink out rather than use Retuner, but I guess when sim-Winter comes, I'll need to use it to disable ice skating on all ponds and the ocean

Well I got my first ErrorTrap script errors! I don't think I need to upload them because they're all correction logs and dereferencing logs - all 35000+ of them apparently! I'm quite excited about them because I'm hoping they came from a big clean up after months (years?) of neglect from me keeping the dereferencing disabled