Travelling game-breaking bugs
Posted: September 6th, 2018, 1:44 pm
Hello again. Looking for any help I might get for this, since I'm running out of ideas on what to do about it. This might run long but I'm trying to be clear and thorough.
Starting with the game-breaking I branded this as: might not be the most suitable nomenclature, I'll give you that, but it's gotten to a point where it crashes my game immediately to desktop, aside from not allowing me to save, and I still have little to no idea why.
So, the exposé: I've had one household of two for quite a while. Having all expansions except for Into the Future, and being the kind of person who likes dabbling in everything and a completionist on top of that, I send them on holiday regularly to do all the adventures and get all the relics and finish all tombs, etc.
I stopped playing a few months back because I couldn't save after returning home (from France) - I got the dreaded Error 12. Otherwise, everything seemed fine. Since I couldn't save, I had to exit and lose that progress and didn't feel like doing it all over again. Skip forward a couple of months, I'm back, resorted to another save, did all those things I'd done before, got them home, and saving resumed without a problem. Played it for a sim week in their homeworld (the one from Island Paradise), did some stuff, no hitches, no major bugs, just the regular game becoming steadily slower and lagging its bum with everything the more hours I've had it open. Usually fixed by saving, quitting the game, reopening it. No biggie.
I wanted to have them go on holiday again and continue their adventures. They had several opportunities in Egypt between the two of them so I sent them there first.
First problem: One of them had an opportunity in China, the one from the Dragon Cave quest. When I got to Egypt, the pop up told me I'd destroyed the keystone and cancelled that Opp. I'm mentioning this more because that questline seems to be rather broken for a lot of people. I hadn't brought it with me because I wouldn't need it but, in my worry, I closed the game without saving and went back to just before they had travelled (I save before they set the travel, not when Traveller -I think- asks me to just before they leave). Keystone and Opp both present in-game, so I decided maybe it would be better to go to China first and get that done with. I had another two tombs I needed to clear out for relic collections anyway, it was fine. Except it wasn't.
Second problem: I get to China, the Opp is cancelled again. The pop up is different this time though and he still had the key in his inventory, so I gave him the same Opp again. It told me to return to China, didn't acknowledge I was already there, so after poking around with DebugEnabler, I found the right stage for the quest and set it. I went to save, and here starts the error 12, so I couldn't. At all.
Third problem: Crashing to desktop. Now, a few things caused my game to crash to desktop several times on my tries, each with an increased level of frustration tied to it, and none of them are in order.
Once I tried to have one take a photo with their phone, instant crash just as the game was about to switch camera view.
When, after putting up with the worrying inability to save for one sim day and just getting the game to progress the Opp accordingly, then making them return home early, it almost loaded all the way before kicking me out again.
Once was because, after googling for help with the Opp, I read you can switch between worlds with Traveller automatically without going home and waiting two sim days and tried following the suggestion to travel to France first, then China. Crashed before getting to France.
And at least twice it was because of using Steam's overlay to use the browser, and I have no clue if it was because of the specific website I tried to open both times or something else - either way, I got an error message independent from Sims3 saying something stopped working (I'm gonna say it mentioned 'runtime' but I can't be positive, it was a regular windows error pop up message in any case).
To summarise, the latest save I have seems to be perfectly functional, in their homeworld. I can travel to Egypt and China, but not France. Once I get there, I can no longer save. And I can't have them return home because it crashes before they do.
Also another thing that worries me is that Error Trap tells me it recorded a bunch of errors as soon as the travel world loads every time I tried, so there's something definitely wrong with them.
My game takes a bit to load up, even more if I'm waiting on the holiday world to load after sending them travelling, and after somewhere between 5 to 10 tries where I had to boot it up again, I'm bound to be short on patience. It still amazes me the lengths this game can go to just to make itself not pleasurable to play.
EDIT: While writing this, I googled some more and found this How to Overcome Error Code 12 post in the Steam Community forums. Sounds about right from what I'm experiencing and, at the risk of making a somewhat useless post asking for help if I've just stumbled upon the solution, I'm going to try it anyway.
If anyone has any ideas on what's happening or suggestions on what I can do to fix it, please do post them. If nothing else, it will at least be a compilation of possible solutions and workarounds.
If you got all the way down here, thank you so much for taking the time to read it.
Starting with the game-breaking I branded this as: might not be the most suitable nomenclature, I'll give you that, but it's gotten to a point where it crashes my game immediately to desktop, aside from not allowing me to save, and I still have little to no idea why.
So, the exposé: I've had one household of two for quite a while. Having all expansions except for Into the Future, and being the kind of person who likes dabbling in everything and a completionist on top of that, I send them on holiday regularly to do all the adventures and get all the relics and finish all tombs, etc.
I stopped playing a few months back because I couldn't save after returning home (from France) - I got the dreaded Error 12. Otherwise, everything seemed fine. Since I couldn't save, I had to exit and lose that progress and didn't feel like doing it all over again. Skip forward a couple of months, I'm back, resorted to another save, did all those things I'd done before, got them home, and saving resumed without a problem. Played it for a sim week in their homeworld (the one from Island Paradise), did some stuff, no hitches, no major bugs, just the regular game becoming steadily slower and lagging its bum with everything the more hours I've had it open. Usually fixed by saving, quitting the game, reopening it. No biggie.
I wanted to have them go on holiday again and continue their adventures. They had several opportunities in Egypt between the two of them so I sent them there first.
First problem: One of them had an opportunity in China, the one from the Dragon Cave quest. When I got to Egypt, the pop up told me I'd destroyed the keystone and cancelled that Opp. I'm mentioning this more because that questline seems to be rather broken for a lot of people. I hadn't brought it with me because I wouldn't need it but, in my worry, I closed the game without saving and went back to just before they had travelled (I save before they set the travel, not when Traveller -I think- asks me to just before they leave). Keystone and Opp both present in-game, so I decided maybe it would be better to go to China first and get that done with. I had another two tombs I needed to clear out for relic collections anyway, it was fine. Except it wasn't.
Second problem: I get to China, the Opp is cancelled again. The pop up is different this time though and he still had the key in his inventory, so I gave him the same Opp again. It told me to return to China, didn't acknowledge I was already there, so after poking around with DebugEnabler, I found the right stage for the quest and set it. I went to save, and here starts the error 12, so I couldn't. At all.
Third problem: Crashing to desktop. Now, a few things caused my game to crash to desktop several times on my tries, each with an increased level of frustration tied to it, and none of them are in order.
Once I tried to have one take a photo with their phone, instant crash just as the game was about to switch camera view.
When, after putting up with the worrying inability to save for one sim day and just getting the game to progress the Opp accordingly, then making them return home early, it almost loaded all the way before kicking me out again.
Once was because, after googling for help with the Opp, I read you can switch between worlds with Traveller automatically without going home and waiting two sim days and tried following the suggestion to travel to France first, then China. Crashed before getting to France.
And at least twice it was because of using Steam's overlay to use the browser, and I have no clue if it was because of the specific website I tried to open both times or something else - either way, I got an error message independent from Sims3 saying something stopped working (I'm gonna say it mentioned 'runtime' but I can't be positive, it was a regular windows error pop up message in any case).
To summarise, the latest save I have seems to be perfectly functional, in their homeworld. I can travel to Egypt and China, but not France. Once I get there, I can no longer save. And I can't have them return home because it crashes before they do.
Also another thing that worries me is that Error Trap tells me it recorded a bunch of errors as soon as the travel world loads every time I tried, so there's something definitely wrong with them.
My game takes a bit to load up, even more if I'm waiting on the holiday world to load after sending them travelling, and after somewhere between 5 to 10 tries where I had to boot it up again, I'm bound to be short on patience. It still amazes me the lengths this game can go to just to make itself not pleasurable to play.
EDIT: While writing this, I googled some more and found this How to Overcome Error Code 12 post in the Steam Community forums. Sounds about right from what I'm experiencing and, at the risk of making a somewhat useless post asking for help if I've just stumbled upon the solution, I'm going to try it anyway.
If anyone has any ideas on what's happening or suggestions on what I can do to fix it, please do post them. If nothing else, it will at least be a compilation of possible solutions and workarounds.
If you got all the way down here, thank you so much for taking the time to read it.