having an issue with WW animations getting stuck

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

So I'll start an animation and everything will be fine, but then after a time the animation progress pie will freeze about a quarter of the way through and the same animation will play on repeat, not only that but the sims will no longer become selectable, and bringing up the menu to save or quit the game will not cause the animations to pause, they will continue to play in the background, also clicking on most random items stops bringing up a pie menu, and I can not exit the animation that is in play at the time. I can quit out of the game, but not back to the main menu, quitting to the main menu has only produced an infinte load screen. One sim is a human and the other is an alien.

 

This is interesting to me because I was not haveing this issue before. I thought it might have something to do with a custom skin tone mod I made for aliens, but removing that file seemed to make no difference, the only other thing I have done since then is install a default replacemnt for alien eyes, something called whisper eyes, but I'm not sure how that could be tied to animations freezing. I'm also not getting any error logs for this. It's as if the game just overloads the memory on my computer and it causes a partial freeze during the animation sequence.

[SilentAegis]

This sounds vaguely similar to an issue I had a couple of years ago. Sims started freezing for no reason and would eventually become completely unresponsive during normal gameplay. Fix was updating the game, but to this day, I don't know why that fixed it since freezing versions should be entirely fine. Nor do I know the cause. It's especially telling that it seems this started happening all of a sudden, just as my issue did. So with that, a couple of questions so that you'll hopefully be able to avoid doing the same: 

Is this strictly only during WW animations? Does the game behave fine until you start up a sequence? 

In Task Manager, when this happens, is RAM usage sitting at an unusually high number? 95-100% or so? 

Is the simulation clock still advancing? 

Does this happen in another save? 

Does this happen on completely different Sims?

Edited Monday at 03:58 AM by SilentAegis

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

It only seemed to be happening during sex animations, otherwise the game was fine. It turned out that it was the eye file that I had installed, removing that fixed the issue, though I have been noticing another issue and that is that after changing the eyes of an alien sim they always revert to an eye texture from another mod I have installed, so I'm guessing that whatever is causing that might be the real issue. I have a mod installed that overhauls aliens, so I'm wondering if that might be causing the issue somehow. Unfortunately I'm not sure which eye texture mod I have installed that the game keeps reverting to, so I can't approach things from that angle either, and at the moment I'm at work, so I can't poke around my files or send screenshots to help identify the mod I'm talking about.

[SilentAegis]

Great, at least you found the culprit for the initial problem. 

For the eye texture, you might be able to identify it by saving a Sim the game switches the eye texture to to your library, then opening them with Tray Importer, if you have it. I'm wondering is it really switching textures or outright switching eye CC to some other one.

Edited yesterday at 03:44 AM by SilentAegis

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

48 minutes ago, SilentAegis said:

Great, at least you found the culprit for the initial problem. 

For the eye texture, you might be able to identify it by saving a Sim the game switches the eye texture to to your library, then opening them with Tray Importer, if you have it. I'm wondering is it really switching textures or outright switching eye CC to some other one.

 

I think it's switching CC. This is one of the eye textures that keeps showing up.

[SilentAegis]

I recognize that eye texture. Do you have anything called "Whisper Eyes" in your CC folder? If it's a default replacer, that might be it. Assuming the eyes featured here are CC.

EDIT: I might be wrong since your eyes look more matte than the eyes I'm thinking of. Could just be the picture, though. 

EDIT 2: They may be from these. The swatch on the bottom right of the second picture look like these eyes. 

Edited yesterday at 04:51 AM by SilentAegis

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

6 hours ago, SilentAegis said:

I recognize that eye texture. Do you have anything called "Whisper Eyes" in your CC folder? If it's a default replacer, that might be it. Assuming the eyes featured here are CC.

EDIT: I might be wrong since your eyes look more matte than the eyes I'm thinking of. Could just be the picture, though. 

EDIT 2: They may be from these. The swatch on the bottom right of the second picture look like these eyes. 

 

Yeah, I think it's those. I had the whisper eyes default in my mods folder before but I removed it because it was apparently causing a conflict that was making WW animations get stuck. Do you know if outdated files will cause issues like this? I mean the textures work, though I have noticed other issues in CAS when customizing other Sims (non-alien Sims), what will happen there is I might pick an eye texture then change the hair or something, and the eye texture will switch to something else.

 

I know the file you linked was last updated in 2019, or something like that.

[SilentAegis]

6 hours ago, Z0mBieP00Nani said:

 

Yeah, I think it's those. I had the whisper eyes default in my mods folder before but I removed it because it was apparently causing a conflict that was making WW animations get stuck. Do you know if outdated files will cause issues like this? I mean the textures work, though I have noticed other issues in CAS when customizing other Sims (non-alien Sims), what will happen there is I might pick an eye texture then change the hair or something, and the eye texture will switch to something else.

 

I know the file you linked was last updated in 2019, or something like that.

I have never heard of this nor come across it. Though I don't use default replacers since I do recall they can be problematic, but never to this degree. 

And yet, upon searching, and to my surprise, apparently default replacers for eyes can cause freezing. See here.

Luthienrising also explains here that a lot of older default eye replacers have become incompatible with newer versions of the game and she shared this three years ago. 

So my theory is during a WW sequence, WW has to update the appearance of your Sims during sex because of sweating, you're using Undressables, one of Nisa's traits, or a piece of clothing is removed mid-sequence. When it refreshes the Sim's appearance, it encounters the broken alien-eye override, and the simulation gets all screwy. No idea if I'm right, but that's all I've got off the top of my head. 

So your non-alien Sims may be switching to other old default replacers you have. 

Edited yesterday at 05:36 PM by SilentAegis

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

3 hours ago, SilentAegis said:

So your non-alien Sims may be switching to other old default replacers you have. 

 

I believe so, it's something I noticed in the past. It makes me wonder if I should just uninstall all of the old textures then, which sucks becuase I have a lot of eye textures done by Paraline, not just the alien eye textures... I'm not sure if anyone has ever updated those eye textures or not.

 

I figured the freezes must've been happening because of the sweat mechanic in WW encountering a conflict as well, though my understanding of how that was happening was not as in-depth as yours seems to be.

 

EDIT: It looks like Paraline updated their eye textures sometime in 2025, so that's fortunate. I'm going to download those and see what happens.

Edited yesterday at 08:32 PM by Z0mBieP00Nani

[SilentAegis]

6 hours ago, Z0mBieP00Nani said:

It makes me wonder if I should just uninstall all of the old textures then, which sucks becuase I have a lot of eye textures done by Paraline, not just the alien eye textures... I'm not sure if anyone has ever updated those eye textures or not.

If they are default replacers. If not, I see no reason to fix what ain't broke, and it'd spare you unnecessary work. I have CC from several years ago in my game still not causing problems, including eyes. And none are default replacers. 
 

6 hours ago, Z0mBieP00Nani said:

It looks like Paraline updated their eye textures sometime in 2025, so that's fortunate. I'm going to download those and see what happens.

I look forward to the results. 

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

58 minutes ago, SilentAegis said:

If they are default replacers. If not, I see no reason to fix what ain't broke, and it'd spare you unnecessary work. I have CC from several years ago in my game still not causing problems, including eyes. And none are default replacers. 
 

I look forward to the results. 

 

Swapping out the old textures for the new ones fixed the issue.

[SilentAegis]

1 hour ago, Z0mBieP00Nani said:

 

Swapping out the old textures for the new ones fixed the issue.

Awesome, a clean troubleshooting win.