Category: Apple

Updates on OS X El Capitan and The Sims 3 and Sims 4

Published on by BluebellFlora2 Comments

Two main issues have come up for those who have updated to OS X El Capitan:

The Sims 3 – Those playing the disc version are experiencing the disc authorization error. This can be fixed by uninstalling your most recent EP/SP and downloading and installing the digital version through Origin. Instructions here.

The Sims 4 – Those who have Macs with a NVIDIA GeForce GT/GTX 6xxM 512 MB graphics card don’t seem to be able to properly play. The game is glitching, crashing and freezing. This only affects the GPUs with 512 MB VRAM.

There are threads on the officials and AHQ related to this. The Sims 4 El Capitan thread has been stickied and SimGuruJanitor has posted in it. As usual no other acknowledgement has been made so all we can do is hope that EA are still paying attention to it.

TS3 Work TS4 Work

The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 on OS X El Capitan

Published on by BluebellFlora4 Comments

I love El Capitan. My Macs are lovely and fast thanks to Apple’s little tweaks to speed everything up and of course Metal, which my MacBook Pro can take advantage of. Amazing.

But do The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 love El Capitan? Yes and no.

TS3 Work

As soon as I clicked on Into The Future to launch Sims 3 the debug error popped up:

TS3ElCapitanDebug

Tried it a few more times, no joy. So I tried bypassing the Launcher, same thing happened. Purged RAM, re-patched 1.67 and restarted. Nothing. Then I decided to follow my own advice and move out the Sims 3 folder and let the game regenerate a new one – it worked! The lovely Tremayne4260 pointed out that the same thing happened to her when she upgraded to Yosemite last year and she had to reinstall all her Store content. So I copied over my Store content from the old Downloads folder into the newly created one, opened the Launcher, selected everything then hit install. It worked, everything installed, all 3.5 Gb of it. I then moved over my Saves and everything is hunky dory again. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any improvement in gameplay though but at least I can play.

TS4 Work

I clicked on the Sims 4 icon to open it, Origin opened and immediately my Mac asked me if I was sure I wanted to open it as it hadn’t been opened before. Yeah, whatever. I clicked yes then had to enter my password for the Origin Helper Tool (why does that always pop up??) then Origin crashed. So I opened Origin on it’s own. After several attempts at logging in and more crashing later I finally managed to open it. I then quit it and launched Sims 4 from the icon in my Dock. Everything opened happily, super quickly in fact. I then started to play my Sim and wow, everything is smoother, quicker and lag free. The game has really ramped up a level on my trusty 2012 15″ MacBook Pro.

We have a thread  for each game on the official forums for feedback and any possible issues that may arise. It already looks like there may be an issue with late 2012 21″ iMacs with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512 MB graphics. Please post if you are experiencing difficulties, EA are aware of them –

The Sims 3: http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/856422/el-capitan-and-the-sims-3

The Sims 4: http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/856370/os-x-10-11-el-capitan-official-release-thread

Origin does not work properly on OS X El Capitan beta

Published on by BluebellFloraLeave a comment

Edit  – Origin is now working since the release of El Capitan Public Beta 5.

… And you know why? Because as of today, the 3rd August 2015, El Capitan is still in beta. This means that you are participating in the beta program at your own risk as the operating system is not fully stable yet. That’s why it’s called beta. No 3rd party apps are officially supported in El Capitan because the final release is not available yet. So if you encounter a bug in any Apps that are not Apple’s, tough. However if you do encounter a bug in the operating system and Apple’s Apps, be a dear and report them via the Feedback Assistant.

So if you only have one Mac, and you are not particularly clued up on how beta programs work, I have one question for you – why the fuck on earth did you enrol in the beta program in the first place? Because you wanted to be one of the first to have El Capitan on your Mac? Well more fool you.

Lunder89 over on the official Sims forum has posted this super video showing detailed and easy to follow instructions on how to get Origin to work properly in El Capitan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euq795mtkYU

It involves Terminal, installing Xcode and downloading and installing Homebrew. Good luck.