Random Crashing.

[madkitty]

My game has been behaving normally, until today. I tried playing, and I wanted to make a family, but I got the
"This Application Has Crashed. It will now Terminate."
Message.  I just keep getting it randomly while playing. Even during gameplay. I haven't downloaded anything that would crash my game, because my only major downloads were yesterday, and I played fine after that. I'm confuzzeled. I did delete the .cigen files and such, but that was a while ago.
Any help here would be appreciated, and if you need other information, just ask

[caffeinated.joy]

Download files can corrupt your game even after having them in there for awhile (appearing to be just fine). Just to eliminated your cc as a culprit, I would pull out your downloads and play your game without them. 

[madkitty]

I'm a little scared to do that, do you mean go into a house and actually play a family? Because my game is mainly CC, and I'm not sure what will happen to my pixel people if the CC is gone. Won't it mess them up or something? (Sorry for the failure of a description, it's been a long day..)

[Carlwashere]

Just do what I did, play a family you don't care too much about, and quit WITHOUT saving. They should be fine, and if not, oh well. 
Also, if you've recently starting running your game quality settings all on high, turning them down might help a bit.
I can't tell you how many times I crashed my game because I started asking too much from it. 

[ancienthighway]

You could even create a new neighborhood and play it without CC.  As long as the CC is back in before you play your real neighborhood everything will be fine.

What you are describing sounds like it could be a problem with meshes.  Meshes that don't work with your game could be in your downloads folder for years and never cause a problem because the game never tries to use them.  But as soon as it assigns that custom hair or the custom clothes to an NPC, the game will crash every time it tries to play that character.

[Theraven]

If it's not a CC problem, it could be a memory problem - especially if you (like me) insist on having a lot of downloads (I had around 14 when it started, now almost 20GB), and use Vista.

Vista has a random crash problem if a 32 bit program (like Sims 2) tries to use more than 2 GB of memory. Here's an explanation on how you can enable the game to use 3GB (if you have 4 GB RAM installed).
It helped me when I had random crashes, and now it doesn't crash at all (except sometimes when I use snow, and I get a graphic memory issue, where snow and high poly objects starts flashing purple)

[madkitty]

Thank you so much for the replies! I did try playing yesterday and no crashing. Huh.

@carl
I never thought of that! I'll try it before removing my DLs.

@ancienthighway
Meshes... I'm not sure about this one. I'll remove my DLs and see if that works.

@theraven
I don't currently have Vista installed, so that may not be the problem, but my computer is pretty low on memory.


I'll try your suggestions and let you know!

[Theraven]

Not sure if Win 7 has the same memory problem as Vista, but XP didn't.

Could still be a memory problem if you have a lot of downloads.
On my XP laptop I had a limit on around 8-9 GB before it started using 1-2 hours on loading (or quitting). Was extremely slow anyways, but I sort of got used to that (only times I managed to be patient about something).

Turning off reflections and shadows helps a lot if you've got a slow game (on my laptop I couldn't have them turned on at all, unless I really needed it). Try that before anything else.

[madkitty]

  8-9 GBs!   
My EA Games folder only has 4.14 GBs!
0.97 GBs of Downloads...
Anyway, I have XP on my computer. This problem is extremely unpredicatable, so it's hard to figure out the issue

[Nalia]

Most likely it's a custom content, since it started after putting fresh custom content in. It doesn't matter whether your game crashed immediately or two days later.
Test without any cc to be sure. Backup your "Neighborhoods" folder; cut/paste Downloads folder to your desktop; start the game. If you play fine for a couple of hours without problems then you know.

[madkitty]

I've neglected this thread a bit. Anyway, the problem seems to have stopped. I deleted a boatload of CC I didn't want, so it seems to be okay now.