Got this script error after letting the game roll for about 24 hours and just hanging out at home. Looks like more errors related to generating NPCs.
https://pastebin.com/gjMF2Afc

EDIT: I looked up the status of all 4 names in this script error and all of them were currently out of town. I tried calling one and inviting them over and it worked though. They came over right away and no errors generated.

The Arnett "household" to which these sims belong is always a service household so the game is classifying these sims as "out of town" since they are hiding off the map hibernating or something at the time. They aren't actually in a foreign world. And note their skills -- random Service Sims are not going to have such high levels in Mixology, Charisma, and Club Dancing, for example, so I take these are still remnants of the barmaid mod.

Personally I would probably try to Totally Annihilate them using MC, but if inviting them over so they finally instantiate (materialize, are simulated on-screen) or maybe giving them other assignments to keep they occupied by way of MC stops the errors then perhaps that's a good way forward as well.

Good to know. I assumed they were "out of town" or as I like to say "off the board" because the game threw the error and failed to generate them. I don't know what it means that I was able to summon one of them without issue though. I'll let it go a while longer and see if it keeps happening. Then back to travel testing I guess.

igazor post_id=85057 time=1633322012 user_id=6716 wrote: The Arnett "household" to which these sims belong is always a service household so the game is classifying these sims as "out of town" since they are hiding off the map hibernating or something at the time. They aren't actually in a foreign world. And note their skills -- random Service Sims are not going to have such high levels in Mixology, Charisma, and Club Dancing, for example, so I take these are still remnants of the barmaid mod.

Yeah, I'm still seeing these errors pop up every so often. Usually just one sim at a time, but I'm getting 1 or 2 notifications for these every few hours or so. Arnett household every time, and similar skills in Mixology, Charisma, and Club Dancing. Can't say for sure but since the notification for these just says "ErrorTrap" and the name of the sim I feel like I may have been getting these regularly and never paid much attention to it. Any recommendations on what to do at this point?
https://pastebin.com/TVhkTn1L

Progress! (at least I think so)

Made some more travel attempts and didn't have any luck (despite one successful travel mentioned several posts above). I followed the below recommendation by Chain_Reaction and this time, instead of the game crashing on the loading screen around 2% complete, the progress bar went all the way to 100% ...and then crashed. BUT! It did generate script errors, including an out of memory exception:

• https://pastebin.com/r0K3ReL4 - correction log file showing loaded assemblies (missing from the rest for some reason)
• https://pastebin.com/hKQdDVD2 - out of memory
• https://pastebin.com/1G9YbbHk

Chain_Reaction post_id=84318 time=1630478948 user_id=2 wrote: Is it the transition to China that is crashing now? Have you tried with only Traveler, Overwatch and ErrorTrap installed and nothing else from any source?

To recap, this is what I did:

• Removed ALL mods except for ErrorTrap, Overwatch, and Traveler
• Completely cleared family inventory
• Completely cleared sim inventory (items placed in a chest and left at home)
• Attempted travel to France with one sim only

I forgot to mention, the other thing I did was clear out all opportunities related to travel for all sims in my household (including the "deliver a painting" opportunities).

Further testing with the same scenario and starting from the same save file:

• Successful travel to Egypt with no errors during the travel attempt
• Successful travel to China. Got two script errors involving a bar object in my vacation house: https://pastebin.com/E4dSa1RT
• Successful travel to France with no errors during travel attempt

Notes:

• All of these attempts were from a fresh load of the game after deleting all cache files. Anytime I tried to just go back to the main menu and reload my last save, an error would pop up saying "A serious error has occurred while loading 'X'. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application."
• My PC should not be the cause of the out of memory error. I'm running a very decent gaming rig with i7 8600k/1080TI/64GB ram/NVME SSD storage. It's been a while since I set it up, but I remember setting the Sims 3 memory config setting to the 4GB max or whatever the recommendation was at the time.

EDIT: Double checking my config file and I realized everything has been set back to default. I must have done a reinstall at some point and forgotten to redo the config. I'm now wondering if all my crashing problems have been due to running the game with only 2GB memory. Doh!

TCL post_id=85065 time=1633338996 user_id=23336 wrote: I'm now wondering if all my crashing problems have been due to running the game with only 2GB memory. Doh!

Unless you are running an old Mac version of the game, no, that won't be the case. Any information on the net that tells you to modify the game files to use more memory are outdated. The patch that made the game use up to 4 GB (~3.7 GB in practice) is already quite old.

In my experience, not limiting the framerate is the most crash-inducing issue. This gets especially an issue in CAS, where framerates can get insanely high.

"Out of town" in game terms just means that the NPC isn't a resident but lives either in an NPC apartment, in case you provide those, and/or gets disabled when (s)he isn't needed, similar to how the game treats babies and toddlers of inactives.

Turjan post_id=85067 time=1633347274 user_id=20191 wrote: Unless you are running an old Mac version of the game, no, that won't be the case. Any information on the net that tells you to modify the game files to use more memory are outdated. The patch that made the game use up to 4 GB (~3.7 GB in practice) is already quite old.

I followed this guide to make changes to the config files for memory, CPU, and vram. Are you saying I don't need to do any of that?

Turjan post_id=85067 time=1633347274 user_id=20191 wrote: In my experience, not limiting the framerate is the most crash-inducing issue. This gets especially an issue in CAS, where framerates can get insanely high.

I've been running the game with framerate limited to 60 fps. Even after going in and making the above config file changes again, I just got another out of memory script error on the travel loading screen.

TCL wrote: ↑

October 4th, 2021, 7:51 am

I followed this guide to make changes to the config files for memory, CPU, and vram. Are you saying I don't need to do any of that?

Step 5 (supposedly making the game use more memory) is useless, because as Turjan said, Sims 3 in Windows has been able to use 4 GB RAM, minus some overhead, since 2010. Furthermore, the value listed is actually the maximum size of the script heap, and it's 20 GB, not 2; count the zeroes. It's best to return this setting to its original value.

Step 6, force-rating the CPU higher, is not essential and would only have an effect if your CPU was being rated lower than a 4. Since your 8600K's base frequency is 3600 MHz and it's multi-core, it will easily come in above the cutoff for uber.

The VRAM setting is helpful, but not changing it doesn't usually cause crashing, just some delay in rendering.

TCL wrote: ↑

October 4th, 2021, 5:16 am

All of these attempts were from a fresh load of the game after deleting all cache files. Anytime I tried to just go back to the main menu and reload my last save, an error would pop up saying "A serious error has occurred while loading 'X'. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application."

Going back to the Main Menu and loading a different save can cause all sorts of issues, including crashing. The game doesn't release all the RAM from the previous save and can superimpose data on the new one, which normally wouldn't be a problem if you were loading the same save. But since you're traveling, it might be. More importantly, the game not releasing all the RAM puts you closer to the ~3.7 GB limit once you load that second save.

Update:
I finally seem to have my game working again! Thanks to all of the helpful feedback in this thread, I was able to fix several issues I was having. With the crashes still happening however, it became clear to me that it had more to do with memory than game mods. After seeing all the out of memory script errors pop up, I installed Crash Log Analyzer and realized in the very log list of crash logs in my user folder, literally all of them were caused by the out of memory error. I read through the Tips For Better Game Performance page and cleaned up the files in my S3 user folder.

I then noticed my game save was 1.6GB and the TravelDB file alone was 1.2GB. I knew I had been playing with memories turned on and they were maxed out for my 2 main sims but I never thought much of it previously. I turned off memories in the game options and used Kuree Save Cleaner to clear memories and clean my save. This took the save down to 181MB and the TravelDB file down to 23MB.

After that I took the advice of a comment on a reddit post and installed the Razer Cortex game performance booster. This app has an automatic RAM cleaner that optimizes the game's memory while you play and so far it seems to be working great. My save now takes less time to load and the travel load time is much much shorter, even after reinstalling all of my mods.

I'll post an update here if anything changes, but so far the combination of using Traveler and Register along with cleaning my save file and running Razer Cortex seems to have fixed all of my travel crashing issues. Thanks again to everyone who provided feedback, I'm grateful for all your help.