When you close the game, even without saving, it goes to a black screen and the cursor circle thing is rotating, and it can take a minute before the game really closes. What is the game doing? Is it writing to the cache or something?

When things are working as they should, the game has quite a few things to do before it can call it quits (gracefully, not by crashing). The game runs mostly by having been loaded into RAM so those memory registers need to be cleared out. The parts of the game save used for reference are really a copy in the CurrentGame folder, and that needs to be emptied out. If you were playing with any online "features," such as they are for TS3, those connections need to be terminated. And some stuff that no one really cares about, probably including things such as the dreaded FeaturedItems Folder being updated or such being attempted, and logs written to.

And a full report of everything you have done with your computer since the game session began is sent to some mostly harmless guy in the mod community who likes to stay up all night reading them. It's how he gets his fun these days. But shhh, let's not tell anyone about that part.

I've noticed that the game always quits really quickly, as in, under five seconds, if I haven't blocked its ability to dump a bunch files in FeaturedItems. (I usually do block it, but sometimes I have a test folder for one reason or another.) It sometimes quits similarly quickly even when I do block this lovely feature, and it seems that the game is much more likely to hang for a while quitting if I've only been playing for a few minutes and/or I haven't gone into Buy mode in that play session.

It kind of makes me wonder if the game starts out waiting to dump those items on me, and if it never gets the chance and can't put them in FeaturedItems either, it doesn't know what to do with itself and takes forever to quit.

I don't care enough to test; I'm just saying those are my informal observations.

Thanks for the interesting replies.

I have set the game to be offline. Does it still use the internet? How do I block that?

Sometimes I need to quit the game to add some CC or poses, and staring at the black screen steals minutes from my important life.

Knight wrote: ↑

June 8th, 2022, 7:02 am

Cororon post_id=89436 time=1654684369 user_id=5627 wrote: How do I block that?

I blocked connections by creating rules (inbound and outbound) in the windows firewall, as in this article.

Also, don't forget to delete the FeaturedItems folder if you previously denied access to it, so that the game will create a new empty folder (if you disabled Internet access correctly) with default permissions.

Thanks! Is it the TS3.exe or the S3Launcher.exe (or both?) I should put in the rules? And I'll use the ones from the base game folder, right?

Thanks again. I have blocked them now. And deleted the Featureditems folder.

Cororon wrote: ↑

June 8th, 2022, 7:28 am

And deleted the Featureditems folder

Deleting the folder won't be enough, it will spawn again. See this procedure
https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/12/t ... tures.html