Hello everyone,

I installed the Sims 3 on my Macbook Air a couple of days ago, but ever since i did, i couldn't get past CAS.
Every time i want to give my sim a tattoo, the game freezes or just completely flips out.
When it flips out, it always freezes after 10 minutes or i can't see the menu where you can change your household name, because it's all broken.
I have no idea why my game does this, because i have the Sims 4 installed, and that works perfectly.
PS. I do have some CC installed.
This is what it looks like:





Does anyone know the source of this problem?
If so, please help me! Thanks in advance!!

Yeah. Unlike all of the other iterations of this game, TS3 for Mac is utter garbage a mess. I know that sounds really harsh and it pains me to say this because I love TS3 and I love Macs. But let's see here -- from About This Mac on the Apple Menu, which exact MacBook Air do you have (year released, processor, RAM, graphics)?

I have a Macbook Air 13-inch from 2015.
The processor is 1,6 GHz Intel Core i5.
The RAM is 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3.
The graphics are Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB.

Thanks for helping out!

Okay, that MBA is stronger than some of its predecessors. Which means at least you can get the game started whereas the older ones often cannot. But at 1.6 GHz its processor is weak and it really doesn't have enough RAM although being a Mac allows some leeway here because of the way OS X manages things. An MBA is really made for lightweight tasks and file organization, email, streaming videos, web surfing, things like that, but not graphics intensive games.

Compounding things is that the game was never designed to run on that graphics chip as it didn't exist back when the game was in development. That it's functioning at all is fortunate, but Intel graphics put more stress on RAM and processor usage so in reality it's just making things worse once the game loads up and gets going.

The more complete story demands an explanation of my initial garbage/mess comment. TS3 for Mac is not a proper port into OS X like all of other Mac versions of Sims games are, including TS4. EA did this one by wrapping Cider around it so it runs in a partial emulation of Windows XP under the hood. As a result of this being a botched job that they never went back to fix, the Mac version of the game can only utilize 2 GB of RAM no matter how much the player may have to spare. If it tries to reach beyond that, there will be graphics glitches as you have shown, crashes, and Error12s making the game impossible to save (out of usable resources).

You could try Purging RAM constantly throughout play to stay under the 2 GB limit and keeping ALL graphics settings at their bare ugly minimum in Game Options. But honestly, the experience you would be chasing down is not going to be a good one and if you force too many TS3 EPs and content on this MBA, you run the risk of overheating and damaging it permanently.
https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay

On Macs with stronger components, such as the one on which I am typing this to you now (a 5+ year old iMac with a dedicated AMD graphics card), Bootcamping Windows and running the game from the Windows side is really the way to go so as to bypass the RAM restriction. On an MBA though, there is likely not enough drive space to support Bootcamping properly and you would still be faced with only 4 GB total to work with and the same weaker processor and graphics chip. TS4 for Mac doesn't have all this goofy overhead associated with it as it's a proper OS X application, but I expect you would have problems there as well if you add in all of the EPs and GPs released thus far because of your hardware limitations. Certainly City Living is known to be very heavy.

Sorry I couldn't bring you better news than that.

Thank you for figuring all this out for me!
I think that I just have to accept my laptop is not good enough for the Sims 3 .
But I am thinking of getting a Macbook Pro with better RAM and graphic cards and such.
So it might run better on that computer!