July 2018
July 2018
@StineStonSton Outdoor Living and Master Suite should be fine, as they're Stuff Packs. If you just install those, the files from your problematic packs would need to land in the folder for Master Suite. If I were you, I'd actually only install these two packs and then monitor your RAM use in the Activity Monitor while you play. That way, you can get a sense of how much room you might have to add other packs. Generations is pretty gentle, so you could add that later and only see a small uptick in RAM. Pets is the most demanding, followed by Seasons; Island Paradise and Into the Future are resource intensive as well. I wouldn't add any of those unless you were sure you could keep RAM use down, and then only one at a time. University Life is somewhere in the middle, so you might be okay running it. But again, RAM use is influenced by your style of play as well as a number of other factors.
Other things you can do: play completely offline, or at the very least don't login while playing. Turn off memories, as they're a resource hog. Turn off the hidden object game that shows up while your game loads. Keep an eye on RAM use in the Task Manager, and quit when you get close to 2 GB. If you're going to travel, make sure to do so right after you load your game, when RAM use is at its lowest. Keep your Edit Town and CAS sessions as short as possible, or better yet, build and create sims in a new game and then save your work to the bin. It's hard to stay under the RAM limit as your game progresses. Older saves and bigger families both take more resources, and at some point, a world may become unplayable. If a world is too overloaded to play anymore, you can always save a family to the bin and drop the sims into a fresh save.
This is why so many of us Bootcamp Windows onto our macs. It's a pain managing two systems, but TS3 runs much better in that environment. Unfortunately, not all macs have enough storage for a partitioned hard drive, or the hardware to make it worth the effort.
July 2018
July 2018
@StineStonSton I do think that Ambitions would run well on your computer. Late Night might be fine too, but it would be better not to play in Bridgeport (the town the comes with the pack) or to fix it up, as it has a few routing issues that can cause problems even on the strongest systems. The travel transitions in World Adventures can be difficult to manage, but otherwise, the pack is very gentle. (And you could buy the special items in buydebug if you didn't want to travel.) Keeping RAM use down can seem intimidating, but it's pretty easy to manage once you get used to it. And things like memories and the hidden object game just need to be turned off once.
Keep in mind that if and when you decide to install more packs, you'll still probably get more unknown error messages. But the fixes will be the same.
July 2018
July 2018
@StineStonSton The guide has instructions for earlier versions of mac OS as well, so just skip to the part that says "Mavericks or later." There are a bunch of numbers in the Activity Monitor, but really what you want to do is double-click the listing for TS3. You'll get a popup telling you how much RAM the game is using at that moment. If you want, you can free up a bit of RAM by using the "sudo purge" command in Terminal, but that's only going to get you around 20 MB extra RAM for every sim-day you've played. You can skip that step if you want. The most important thing is to save and then quit (save first, then quit without saving; never use "save and quit") when your RAM use goes over 1.9 GB. It will be lower after you reload the game.
I'm sure this is a lot, but I didn't know any of it until I got my new computer in December. It gets much easier once you've done it a few times.
July 2018
July 2018
@StineStonSton If you only had the base game and some unaffected packs installed, you wouldn't see the unknown error messages. Also, I don't know what OS you had on your old computer, but most of these mac-related issues have shown up in the last few years, as newer versions of OS X (like the current Sierra and High Sierra) have become increasingly incompatible with TS3. When I installed the game in 2010, I didn't have to do anything to make it work.This time around, I had the same problems you do.
The RAM issue, on the other hand, has always been a problem for macs, but it's possible that you avoided most of the trouble on your old computer. Or maybe your games were glitching out and you didn't know why, or maybe you only played with small families or moved on to new saves after a while. Everyone's play style is a bit different. I had major RAM issues because I like building big families and playing them for a few generations. But some people can run most of the expansion packs on their macs without too much trouble. That's why I suggested you monitor your RAM use—it's the only way to know for sure how your game is doing. If you're consistently seeing your RAM close to 2 GB, you'll know that adding more EPs isn't a good idea, unless you want to change how you play. But if you're only around 1.4-1.5 GB, you can safely add something else, and then watch the effects.
July 2018
July 2018
I think you're getting a little muddled even though @puzzlezaddict's advice is excellent. I don't blame you if you are, Sims 3 is a challenge on any Mac!
Please could you humour me and do the following, in this order. The reason I'm asking you to start at the beginning again is because you have 3 issues to contend with - certain packs not showing in the Launcher, fixing the Unknown Error message, and unsupported Intel graphics. We'll concentrate on the first two first:
Let me know how you get on with that and we'll proceed to the next steps