Category: The Sims 4

Sims 4 audio crackling or system freezing on Macs with M1 chip

Published on by BluebellFloraLeave a comment

The shiny and beautiful Mac with the M1 chip can run the Sims 4 beautifully even though the game isn’t native and requires Rosetta to run. There are two small niggles though which I’ve been a bit tardy about reporting here – sorry!

Freezing resulting in Mac restarting
I posted about this last November but just reiterating again. If you are experiencing freezing whilst playing, usually in CAS, just enable vsync in the game options at the main menu or open the Options.ini file in your Sims 4 folder using TextEdit, find the line for verticalsync and change the value to 1.

In-game audio crackle
Update – This issue has now been fixed in a game patch. Make sure your game is up to date in Origin.

This is pretty irritating and there doesn’t seem to be a fix apart from muting the sound. There is a thread here at Answers HQ so it’s worth subscribing to it if you want to see any updates.

Red and white sims, missing content, llamas, incomplete data

Published on by BluebellFlora5 Comments

There’s always something so satisfying about finally experiencing an issue that is a recurring problem for others.

This was after updating the game installation on my iMac to the December patch:

I tried all of the following to fix this:

  • Repair base game
  • Super repair by trashing The Sims 4 executable file in Sims 4.app/Contents/Mac OS then repairing before loading
  • Trashed the ClientFullBuild0.package file from each DLC Pack to force a re-download
  • Trashed the entire Sims 4 Packs folder so all packs were re-downloaded
  • Trashed the Delta folder in Sims 4.app/Contents
  • Trashed the Data folder in Sims 4.app/Contents
  • Uninstalled the game and reinstalled completely. Did this twice both to the internal drive and changed location to external

But none of that worked, even a new game installation didn’t work. I then did the following:

  • Uninstalled the game
  • Ran the Origin reset tool
  • Deleted the residual files that the reset tool doesn’t delete
  • Trashed the Origin app
  • Emptied the trash
  • Restarted the Mac
  • Downloaded and installed Origin
  • Downloaded and installed the game plus all packs

And that fixed it. Looks like Origin, yet again, is to blame for another catastrophic game failure. I managed to put my Sims 4 folder containing my saves, mods and other content back into the game with no problems.

This problem seems to be down to corrupted downloads and seems more prevalent after an update, as reported by others at Answers HQ. If you’re experiencing this, make sure you back up your Sims 4 folder and be prepared to completely uninstall the game AND Origin in order to fix it 😡

Sims 3 and Sims 4 – testing in Big Sur and on an M1 Mac

Published on by BluebellFlora22 Comments

My entry level MacBook Air has finally arrived so I can start playing around with Sims 3 and Sims 4. This is my Mac:

2020 13″ MacBook Air
Apple M1 chip with 8‑core CPU, 7‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine
8GB unified memory
256GB SSD storage

I have all packs up to and including Snowy Escape installed. Settings are maxed out in each game.

Origin

No problems downloading Origin from https://www.origin.com/gbr/en-us/store/download. I am aware that there were reports of Origin not downloading in Big Sur. This appears to have affected those using Chrome. If you’re still having an issue use Safari or Firefox and you will be able to download it.

When you launch Origin you will get a pop-up asking you to install Rosetta, go ahead and install it. Rosetta is the software developed by Apple to translate Intel x86 apps into a language the M1 ARM chips can understand:

Origin should now run and you can start downloading your games (at the time of writing there is a bug in the Origin beta/technical preview which prevents packs from being downloaded. Opt out of the beta in the Application Settings then restart Origin and you should be good to go).

The Sims 3

After installing all the packs the game was still showing as Finalising in Origin. I launched the game by double clicking the app in my Applications folder instead and the Launcher immediately came up (repairing will also fix this). After clicking play in the Launcher a couple of times the game finally started to load. Managed to load a household fine and get into the game and play. One thing I did notice is awful pink lines around some of the screen and sim icon edges. It doesn’t affect gameplay but doesn’t look great.

Overall performance was ok and stable. Having the 64-bit version now is fantastic but it’s no doubt still pretty buggy overall.

The Sims 4

With all the packs downloaded I could press play and start a brand new game. CAS loaded fine and I managed to move a sim into their Lot. There are a lot of reports of users having crashing issues in CAS or when leaving CAS to move their household into a lot. If this is happening you need to enable Vertical Sync in the in-game options (I have no idea why). As well as testing a brand new folder I also copied over my existing Sims 4 folder from my MacBook Pro. This folder is around 5GB in total with a ton of high poly CC. Still loaded and ran beautifully. Really smooth gameplay.

If you’re having issues please leave me a comment or report over in the Mac forum at Answers HQ: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/bd-p/The-Sims-Mac