Note: I did look at the sims3.com forum before coming here, but it's pretty much dead as the creator of Los Aniegos, Coasterboi, hasn't been on in a while.

I'm hoping someone may be able to help me out with this problem I'm having, or at least have the explanation as to why it is happening.

So I held out as long as I could before I realized there was no way I was going to be able to download the kind of world I wanted (South Cali/big city/beaches/lots of neighborhoods/nightlife) without World Adventures and Pets. Those were the EPs that I absolutely didn't want, but eh, I got them. My hands were tied. I had Generations, Ambitions, Late Night, Showtime, and Seasons before installing these two.

I installed WA first and checked everything to make sure my game was still running properly, and thankfully, it was. About a day later, I installed Los Aniegos, just because I wanted to see if I could run it without installing Pets - no-go. It crashed when I tried to load it. So I installed Pets, restarted my computer, ran TS3, and everything worked perfectly. Yayyyy

I was surprised because I'm playing on a laptop and I didn't think it would run so smoothly, but everything was working great. Though loading was slow at times, I didn't mind because there wasn't any noticeable lag.

I'm taking too long to get to the point, but basically, I was able to play fine. UNTIL, I adopted this stupid, adorable kitten. Ugh. No, I didn't want the Pets EP, but since I have it now, I was like "well, my sim is an animal lover, and this kitty is cute, so let's adopt it!"

This is when everything turned to crap. My Sim (and the kitten) started freezing at every other moment. I couldn't even get my sim to walk ten steps without it freezing. I promise you that kitten was a demon bug/glitch/nightmare in my game...I had it for a day (a Sim day) before I had to give it back up for adoption and just that alone took over an hour to do because my game would freeze for 3 to 5 minutes at a time. I had to go to task manager twice when game-play wouldn't resume. My mouse could still move (and it kept the Sims mouse design, it didn't switch to Windows) around but none of the controls would work.

Oh, and before I got rid of the kitten, I deleted the cache folders (CasPartCache.package, compositorCache.package, scriptCache.package, simCompositorCache.package) just to be sure.
I thought everything would go back to normal after doing all of this.....and...I was wrong. It started off running smoothly again, but then it started doing the same freezing for minutes at a time thing again. My Sim started taking 30 game minutes just to "register" an action (I don't know how else to put that)...basically, I would click for her to go home, and she would stand there for 30 game minutes until she started moving. Same goes for interacting with other sims/places.


Any ideas what I should do at this point? I'm not sure if it's the entire Pets EP that's doing this, or if it was just that cat adoption that went wrong. Should I delete Pets and Los Aniegos? Or just Los Aniegos? Or is there a fix??

I'm really don't want to delete L.A., only because I added some improvements to houses and storylines for the character there and I actually do like the world. But I'd rather play the EA worlds than to keep an extremely laggy, yet awesome, custom world.



Sorry for the long post! Any is greatly appreciated!

Pictures of the demon kitten possessing my sim and the entire Los Aniegos city below...

I have a Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop running intel Core i3 M370 @ 2.40 GHz with Windows 7 64-bit, and intel HD graphics. I have 3 GB memory and 109 of 283 GB of storage available.

I know one of the help guides and/or forums said 3.0 GHz is recommended, but I've never had an issue thus far..unless that could be what's causing this freezing after the evil kitten adoption?

If i'm not mistaken Los Aniegos is a non populated world, which might explain the freezing you have, game is trying to populate the world, there's nothing one can do about it that i know of, other then populate it one self, by placing households in the empty houses, to try reduce the need for game to populate it.

Los Aniegos is actually populated with...I want to say at least 50 Sims.
You may be thinking of Red County, since I don't think that world is populated and is also a Southern California type of world created by Coasterboi.

I forgot to mention that another reason I believe it was the cat that caused the glitching and freezing, is because when I went into CAP (with the testingcheatsenabled true, shift+click of course), I wanted to see if I could change the type of cat/coat color. Just to test it out, but I made no plans of actually doing it. Note: this was after my game already started freezing for minutes at a time.

The first thing I went to was type of cat...I tried to change him to a Scottish fold. Uuumm...that's when this kitten really turned into a demon. Maybe the CAP is only for adult cats and that's why it did this, and unfortunately, I was unable to take a screenshot in CAP (unless there's a keyboard shortcut for it?) but it scared me sooooo bad. The entire body had stretched it's eyes out of it's head, and he had no body, just little fragments with tall legs and a pointy exterior with giant pointed ears. And he was at least 5x his regular size.

But the coat color and type of fur worked without issue.

lol I cannot describe how terrifying it was to see a cute little kitten one moment, and then see..whatever it was that I saw appear right after it. So has that happened to anyone else who tried to change a kitten's breed/type? Or did the adopting the kitten really disrupt something in the game?

Not sure if this is a necessary info either, but the freezing for minutes at a time never happened while my Sim or kitten was in CAS or CAP, only in-world.

• Sims 3 - Freezes and Lags
  If you encounter any freezes or lags in gameplay, try the suggestions in Game Help:Intermittent Freezes^wiki.
  If issue persists, please provide the answers to the questionnaire when you post in the Help forum.
  
  

To rule out population problems, you might want to switch to twallan's StoryProgression instead of EA, and set it up not to generate any new sims. You should also be aware that it's inevitable that you'll get some crappy performance, as you're playing with a bunch of EPs and patches, in what sounds like a big and complex world, on a very weak computer. And, of course, the standard disclaimer applies - by playing TS3 on a computer which is not built to cope with it, you're damaging the computer and shortening its life. I know I sound like a broken record, but many people don't know this, and it's important that they're informed.

Try twallan's other mods too, such as Overwatch, as they can help improve things if the freezing is caused by buggy world routing. If the routing is buggy, though, then there will always be freezing, no matter what mods you install or what else you do.

I forget whether or not you can make puppies and kittens in CAP. If you can't, then you should avoid editing them in CAP. Doing that wouldn't cause freezes, though - just the distortion you saw.

Thanks! In the end, I just decided to delete the world. I'm playing on Riverview now, and there are none of those issues that were going on in Los Aniegos. I can't say for sure what the cause was, but I don't think it was just the world size since I was playing fine without lags and freezes before I adopted the cat. But oh well, no biggie. ^__^

Thanks for the help!