Scenario: You’re playing your game, which is performing quite smoothly considering your computer’s somewhat-outdated specs.
Situation: With very little to no warning, the game randomly decides to crash, often without any error message brought up by Windows.
Solution: After realizing you lost that hour’s worth of play-time, you save like a maniac after re-loading. The game manages to survive about twice as long as before, and only shut down upon you telling it to.
I don’t know what it is about The Sims games, but they tend to crash on my PC… a lot… often long after I last saved. I’m fairly certain that EA games in general would take any given opportunity to monopolize your system’s resources, because it occurs with games as old as SimCity 4 Deluxe and The Sims Complete Collection, which I know can be fairly demanding on today’s lower-end computers (even though mine doesn’t fit into that category… that is, at least not yet). Anyway, with the NRaas Saver mod, I don’t have to worry myself with lost progress because it frequently reminds me to save my game, but it seems to be affecting how the game runs long-term.
Skipping the technical shenanigans, saving your game more often reduces the load on your system RAM, which we all should know is the real victim to The Sims 3’s extravagant demands. Since the game would need to keep track of every change occurring since the last save point, it keeps all that information in what I assume is the RAM rather than the hard drive. When you save, all that junk is dumped onto the hard drive instead, freeing up some of the RAM. Please note that I haven’t done thorough research on that, but if that’s the case, it’s undoubtedly a contributor to this spontaneous-crashing phenomena, especially since the most common solution to that involves increasing the allocated RAM. (I’ve tried doing that, but it only resulted in much worse problems being had and even a blue-screen at one point.) If someone wants to contribute any information in regards to this, please do so because I certainly don’t have the time to prove it.
Regardless, do yourself a favor. Get a small timer to keep by your desk, set it for ten minutes, then save your game and restart the timer every time it goes off.
