Tag: The Sims 3

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

Fix for incompatible graphics finally here

Published on by BluebellFlora5 Comments

So after many months we’ve finally worked out the fix needed for all the incompatible graphics cards in Macs that EA have never bothered to support in The Sims 3. You have tmethei, the11thmoon and wendyp7 to thank for their time and effort spent on editing their own game files. Head over to their pages and give them a hug.

If your game does not launch past the blue screen with green plumbob and you’re on a 2013 or later model Mac then this fix is for you. It’s most likely that you have one of the following graphics cards in your Mac:

  • Intel Iris 5100
  • Intel Iris Pro 5200
  • Intel Iris 6100
  • Intel HD 6000
  • AMD Radeon R9 M370X

Go to this guide and follow the instructions, paying particular attention to obtaining the specific details for your Mac – Fix for incompatible graphics.

Good luck and please pass it on to any Mac users you know who have been struggling to get their games working 🙂

TS3 Work

 

Intel Iris graphics, Mac and The Sims 3

Published on by BluebellFloraLeave a comment

Only applicable to the 32-bit version of the Sims 3

Just written a brief page on the Intel Iris problems on Macs with The Sims 3. Sadly EA will never fix it but there is a possible workaround. Head over to the page if you need to know more 🙂

Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro graphics and The Sims 3