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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#51 Old 21st Oct 2014 at 9:56 PM
Resurrecting this thread because we got an answer from EA, with help from the info gathered from all of you and from glitzGERO on the EA forums who provided a crash log.

Here's the explanation from SimGuruModSquad for anyone without full access to the EA forums. It resolves all my questions and gives me a way to work around this problem, AND provides a way to test on all systems:

Hey guys,

Thanks for the callstack, with that information I have been able to reproduce this crash.

The problem is with the skinning code. Basically the code is computing how many matrices it needs to store by looking at the number of unique bone indices that are being referenced and that computation for the affected assets is coming out incorrect and resulting in a bad memory write. The working version of the asset has a reference to bone index 2, and that is ensuring there is enough space and avoids this memory corruption.

I suspect this is a legitimate bug in our code and not necessary a problem with the assets other than it happens to trigger a latent bug in the code. So we are investigating on our end, I will keep you posted.

As for why it only happens on certain machines: It only happens when software skinning is enabled, which only is enabled on Intel cards. You cannot switch to software skinning via the options. But for tool makers wanting to reproduce the crash you can go to the file GraphicsRules.sgr (next to the EXE) and set this line (~line 86):

setProp $ConfigGroup EnableSoftwareSkinning false

to

setProp $ConfigGroup EnableSoftwareSkinning true

Of course you will want to undo this change once done reproducing the crash. Note that you can always "Repair Game" in Origin if to get any modified files in the install directory back to their correct state. You should only make this change to debug this issue, otherwise you will experience reduced performance.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
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Pettifogging Legalist!
retired moderator
#52 Old 21st Oct 2014 at 10:04 PM
That is great to hear. =D Really cool that you kept at it until you had a solution!

Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.

In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
Field Researcher
#53 Old 26th Oct 2014 at 3:19 PM Last edited by Astraea Nevermore : 26th Oct 2014 at 3:40 PM.
Hey guys, looks like I'm still having problems with hair meshes crashing on Intel video cards D: I thought about opening a new thread, then I figured that it'd probably be better to have everything about these crashing issues in the same place, hope you don't mind! This is the page where I uploaded some alpha hair meshes converted from The Sims 3. They work fine on my computer (Windows 7, Intel Core i7-3770k @3.5 GHz, Radeon HD 7700 video card, Origin version of TS4) and I've seen pictures of the hair working fine on other computers as well (some had troubles with the transparencies in hair not showing up in notebook mode, but that's a common issue which happens with all alpha hairs on notebook mode, I read). Intel video cards, however, still cause trouble

Here's what I did to make the hair:
-Used S3PE to export the GEOMS from the original Sims 3 hair, imported in in Milkshape, removed old bone assignments and remade the UV map so that it would fit TS4 hair. I didn't touch any vertex and didn't even move the hair meshes, since their placement was already good.
-Used the updated version of Cmar's mesh tools to clone a base game hair: I used the Medium Long male hair as base. I exported the lod 0_2 as a sims 3 geom out of the base game hair, imported it in Milkshape, copied the comments. Closed it, opened the TS3 mesh I wanted to convert and pasted the comments there. Re-exported as Sims 3 geom.
-Used Cmar's mesh tools again to convert the Sims 3 mesh to a Sims 4 format. For the format conversion, I used as reference the same base game hair as before. Imported the meshes in my package with the mesh tools.
-Used s4pe to change the shader on the hair meshes: selected the new imported GEOMs, went on "Grid" and changed the shader from "simskin" to "simglass". I didn't touch the Geoms that still used a base game mesh.
-Used Sims 4 Studio to import the textures.

Here is my attempt to fix one of the meshes (Chain Reaction, female version), which I tested doing the GraphicsRules trick suggested on the official forums: it seemed to work the first time I tried it, but then, when I tried closing and re-opening the game again, it crashed as soon as I selected the mesh :/
I tried using s4pe to export/import the Sims 4 geoms instead of the CAS Tools, but nothing, it still crashes on Intel settings. I'll admit I'm quite desperate do you know what could it be?
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#54 Old 26th Oct 2014 at 6:39 PM
If it's the empty bone assignments problem we saw with the hat, I'm finishing up an added function for CAS Tools that should fix it. I still need to figure out one part and test it with hats, hairs, accessories, etc. Hopefully it'll be ready for release in a couple of days. Thanks for the link - I can use some test cases of hairs.

It might be possible to fix manually by adding more bones to the mesh, even if they're not used, and changing a couple of the zero weight bone assignments to point to unused bones - but it would be pretty fiddley and I don't think I'd want to try it.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Field Researcher
#55 Old 26th Oct 2014 at 8:17 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
If it's the empty bone assignments problem we saw with the hat, I'm finishing up an added function for CAS Tools that should fix it. I still need to figure out one part and test it with hats, hairs, accessories, etc. Hopefully it'll be ready for release in a couple of days. Thanks for the link - I can use some test cases of hairs.

It might be possible to fix manually by adding more bones to the mesh, even if they're not used, and changing a couple of the zero weight bone assignments to point to unused bones - but it would be pretty fiddley and I don't think I'd want to try it.


Yay, thank you so much for the answer! Yes, I guess it's something with bone assignments, since the problem appears to be the same as with the other Intel card crashes I heard of up until now (game crashing as soon as the hair is selected and/or when changing the colors). I'm gonna wait for the CAS Tools fix, then! I wouldn't feel confident enough to make manual bone assignments either, lol Thanks for your hard work on all these issues, really :lovestruc
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