Sims 3 won't close

[darkmage0707077]

Yeah, got your attention, right? It won't *close* instead of *open* for once.

Using the Alderlake patch since I have a modern system, and everything seems to work fine until I try to close the game. There, it hangs on the black screen for an excessive amount of time, often over a minute or more, long after the Sims 3 theme has stopped playing.

The time it takes seems to be random, as well, and isn't tied to gameplay at all - even quitting directly after startup from the main menu sees this delay. Sometimes, it even closes after only a few seconds, as well. Game is running version 1.69 Origin.

Is there a way to force it to close quickly on hitting exit? Even a crash to desktop would be better then this.

[puzzlezaddict]

@darkmage0707077  Sims 3 does hang on closing sometimes, and from what I've seen and read, it mainly has to do with the game trying to write to the FeaturedItems folder.  I actually had the game hang indefinitely when I blocked write access to that folder, so I stopped using that workaround.  Instead, I created a text file called featureditems, with the .txt removed, which blocks Sims 3 from creating a folder with the same name.  Now I get some quick shutdowns and some that take about a minute.

For what it's worth, I think the minute-long delays happen when I have NOT loaded CAS or Build/Buy, whatever would show me the items whose thumbnails would get downloaded to FeaturedItems if I hadn't also disabled Shop Mode.  So it happens if I quit right away or if I was just playing and never left live mode.

If the problem persists, or you don't want to use the above workaround, the fastest workaround is to bring up the Task Manager and kill the process.  But you'll need to empty out CurrentGame, inside the same Sims 3 user folder, afterwards—this folder holds the data for your current save as you're playing it, and it doesn't get flushed until the game quits properly.  The folder should always be empty if you're not actually playing; leaving the old files in there can interfere with the game loading the next time around.

If you can't see the Task Manager when you try to bring it up, put the game in windowed mode before quitting.

[darkmage0707077]

Thanks for the tip on the FeaturedItems folder! Having the permissions set to deny was a pain for back-ups, but your solution gets around that!

Unfortunately, this has been going on since I applied any mods other then the Intel and GPU patches, including messing with that folder, so the above didn't fix the close issue for me at all.

The workaround for killing Sims 3 and clearing the currentsession folder is appreciated, though somewhat cumbersome since I have to re-enable fullscreen mode every time I start the game back up.

I don't suppose you know of a way to re-enable full-screen automatically before the game launches?

[puzzlezaddict]

@darkmage0707077  The keyboard shortcut alt-enter works for Sims 3, once the game is running.  It also edits the setting in options.ini, but it doesn't change the in-game resolution.  The quickest way to switch to fullscreen before you launch it is to edit options.ini to set fullscreen to 1.

For the original issue, I'd be curious as to whether this still happens if you take your computer offline before launching Sims 3.  If so, you could block the connection within Windows's Firewall settings and see whether it helps.

[darkmage0707077]

Thank you so much! I'm going to get my batch script setup to change the flag in the ini file on game startup (I use it to clear the infamous cache files for me).

After that, I'll test your theory by disabling internet on my PC to see if that helps anything. Will report back when I can, hopefully some time later this week.