Sims 3 black screen on load- windows 11

[Theminebos]

I downloaded the sims 3 off of Steam and Origin, but I've been running into the same issue that I have been trying to trouble shoot for the past 5 days. All the "solutions" I've found don't work. To bee more specific, the launcher works, and it brings me to the welcome page, but every time I click the blue play button my screen goes black with an inverted white L. None of the generic fixes I've found seem to work for me, so I was looking for someone who is more techsavie than me help walk me through or be vocal enough about this for EA to fix it.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Theminebos  Just because it's easy and helps in this situation some of the time, try forcing the game to launch in windowed mode.  Go into Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3, open options.ini, search for fullscreen , and set it to = 0 .

If that doesn't help, please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

And if you've added any mods or custom content, please test without it.  The game often crashes due to an incompatible mod at exactly this point.

[Theminebos]

Thank you for your response I had someone at my school take a look at it. I didn't understand everything that they did, but that sounds somewhat familiar.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Theminebos  Do you still need help?  If so, please upload a dxdiag here so I can take a look.

[DiDiHaha]

Thanks so much! I haven't been able to play sims 3 on my pc in months. Your solution helped me.

[Pikafi27]

I’m wondering why it does this? It works fine when I make it windowed mode, but I like fullscreen so after i start the game i change it to full. sometimes i forget to change it back though and next time i open the game i have to force restart my computer as it doesn’t let me do anything when black screen is on.

is there a way to fix it or is this just my life?

[puzzlezaddict]

@Pikafi27  Does this still happen if you set the game to fullscreen mode AND use the same in-game resolution as the resolution of your monitor?  That helps in many cases.

If you still get a black screen, you can use Windowed Borderless Gaming, which is a free third-party tool, instead.  It's worked well with Sims 3 for many years.

Whenever you get a black screen, you can hit crtl-alt-delete and try to bring up the Task Manager.  If you can't see the Task Manager, choose Sign Out instead, and you'll be booted to the Windows sign-in screen, with all running applications closed down.

[MushyBeans21]

What did they do that worked for you?? I tried the solution here and launching without cc (I still left the cc in the folder just checked the box off) idk what cc is broken just though. I don’t want to uninstall and reinstall cause I have a save I really like on here but it’s getting so frustrating to not know how to fix this.

[puzzlezaddict]

@MushyBeans21  Did you specifically try setting fullscreen to 0 (zero) within options.ini?  It looks from your photo that the game is still trying to launch in fullscreen mode, so if you did edit options.ini, you may have found a second copy of the file, not the one the game is using.

Alternately, if you use GeForce Experience to optimize your game settings, or another app that does the same thing, it could be reverting Sims 3 to fullscreen on its own.

I'd also like to see a dxdiag on this computer.

https://help.ea.com/en/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

[Pikafi27]

@puzzlezaddict still happens at same resolution, i guess i’ll try that tool.

in other news thanks for the other tip. i’ve been force restarting the computer each time i accidentally leave it at fullscreen. lol