My Sims are pausing every once in a while and all NPCs seem to have been stuck somewhere?

Question

In Sims 3, me and my fiancee have settled with doing the change active household style of playing as discussed here Multiple users and households in Sims 3

Anyway, I have a feeling that some of the NPCs and the other Sim is getting stuck somewhere. Let me explain. Say i have Sim-A, and my fiancee uses Sim-B. I am currently playing my sim (Sim-A) and going about with my busy career etc. I do try to call on Sim-B to invite her over etc and she keeps saying sure, but 5 seconds later she says something came up. That seemed possible(even after 2 days of trying to call...my sim is lazy and busy so going to Sim-B's apartment is not really practical at the moment)

So, when I sometimes try to play for tips in front of the movie theater, I see a bunch of NPCs naturally go there and sometimes chat around, do whatever the want, etc. I do notice though that most(if not all) of them are complaining of lack of sleep etc. I noticed this too when playing Sim-A or Sim-B(when playing Sim-A, Sim-B keeps complaining of lack of sleep, and vice versa)

This also happens to most Sim-A's friends. They all complain and I had a suspicion that they're getting stuck somewhere. So the question is, is this a known bug, or is there a way to "debug" this problem without using tedious methods(like logging into every active household and checking them one by one)?

An added note: Sim-B invited Sim-A to stay the night over since they're both tired(and still complaining of lack of sleep). Sim-B proceeded to sleep on her bed, but Sim-A just stood there, waiting for something to happen(add to the fact that Sim-A was already RELAXING on the bed...he stood up to do nothing!). After an hour of just standing there, I finally got fed up and switched active household over to Sim-A. He certainly wasn't stuck and I had to manually ask him to sleep on the bed(which he did).

I am playing Late night btw and the only other major mod i don't have is fast lane(and i think that's even just a stuff expansion)

I hope someone can shed light into this. I have a feeling Im gonna have to reset all the sims in my town for this to work

Answer 1

The Sims 3 is notorious for high CPU and resource usage, especially when you get multiple households and things going. Try opening up the task manage (ctrl+shift+esc) while playing and take a look at the CPU and Memory percentages. If they are pegged at 100% or close to it, that may be the problem.

The game does try to "optimize" by instead of the entire game chugging, only certain processes of it do, like sim behavior and the background world simulation (which is why everyone is tired). Something to try is lower the various settings, or removing households you don't really care about so the background simulation doesn't have to work as hard(backup your save in case this doesn't work!).

Answer 2

Have you downloaded any new Custom Content lately? thats a likely culprit of sims frequently getting stuck, have you tried resetting the stuck sim through the console (Ctrl+ Shft+ C) resetsim (first_lastname) If they continue to get stuck after that, there are still many other reasons: outdated mods, misplaced furniture on the lot, something D/L'd from the Exchange your game doesnt like. So many untold factors still remain, like your machine, your OS.

Try resetting the sim first. Thats the easiest step and the one with 0 repercussions if you do it. But imo it sounds like a memory leak being caused by bad CC (custom content)

Answer 3

Make sure you haven't downloaded to much to the game, if you have go to the downloads section on that front screen and take of whatever you dont want!