A friend and I just started a save of The Sims 3 where we pass it between each other every few days for fun, and I'm encountering sudden, random freezing where Sims and the world seem to freeze for anywhere from a few seconds to ten or more. Plumbobs, fire, music, and water effects don't seem to be affected at all.

I started off the game as a brand new save, and everything went smoothly. I zipped it into a .rar and sent it over to my friend, and he played for four or five hours before this sudden freezing began seemingly out of nowhere. It now does the same thing on my PC as well. No mods are in use except for single hair mod.

I've tried running the Kuree Save Cleaner and some of the standard methods of cleaning up the game from the Sims wiki, but nothing seems to help. (Though moving them from a Bridgeport apartment to a house lot seems to have made the freeze last less time)
(This savegame is the only save on my system affected; even my own save of 6+ years works perfectly with no cleanup ever having been done to it.)

Both games are fully updated retail copies activated and launched through Origin, and I made sure we both have identical expansions and stuff packs installed (Everything except Supernatural and Generations, and only the 70s, 80s, 90s and High End Loft Stuff packs) and both of our systems are more than capable of running TS3. The only difference I can think of is that I'm on Windows 7 and my friend is on Windows 10.

I know this is probably a strange issue and method of playing the game, but any help or tips would be appreciated.

I'll need to stop you there, Nitromon, TS3 is perfectly capable of running for dozens of hours if you simply tab out to let it cool off overnight. When running in the background, the game will gradually unload parts of the simulation until it's just another background application taking up a few hundred megabytes of memory here and a few hundred there. With my day-to-day rhythm as of late I've had to keep my PC running at night and for the past couple of months it's been on for about a week each time. TS3 can handle that perfectly fine though you might risk an unexpected crash if you tab back into it after 3 days and expect everything to work as normal....

I would recommend adding NRAAS Overwatch to your mod mix, along with ErrorTrap and MC. Overwatch scans for lag/freeze-causing stuff -- like stuck vehicles/Sims, for instance -- and clears/resets them. Such stickiness is usually the cause of lag, especially when you allow it to accumulate over time during long play sessions. This is all assuming that you're each playing on a system than can handle the game + EPs/SPs you have installed, of course. In my estimation, running TS3 without these "fixing" mods, especially if you're using worlds, EA or otherwise, that have routing issues, is just kinda...Well, it just doesn't work well. (EDIT: Just read your OP again, and it seems you're playing in Bridgeport? From what I've read, that world has many issues with NPCs getting stuck in the high-rise shells or whatever they're called. That's definitely a world where you need the resetting and "unsticking" mods if you're going to play it for any length of time.)

As for long sessions...I'm by no means a TS3 expert (TS2 is my main game), but I've had the game since it came out, and when I play it it tends to be in long sessions. Or at least the game is loaded for long sessions; I'll stop playing for meals or to do some chores/errands or just do something else for a while and then go back to it without having to reload it. The system hibernates and I have no trouble playing the game after it "wakes up." I've left it loaded (but not necessarily active) for days in a row. That said, I do have the full complement of NRAAS's "fixing" mods, I run Save-Cleaner before each game load, I have a mod that prompts me to save the game every 20 minutes of real time, and I don't play huge, heavily-populated worlds. (I kinda build worlds as I play, TS2-style, and I don't allow anything but the most necessary NPC generation because I want my worlds to be full of my playables, which I play rotationally. Again, TS2- style. ) So, the situations probably aren't entirely the same, but...Yeah, I can leave the game running for a long time without any apparent problems.

Oh, wow. Didn't expect this kind of a response. Hah.

@Nitromon

I've owned the game since release- must have missed the part about my save of 6+ years. I've played this game for hours on end on that particular save, saving every so often of course, and never experienced anything close to this type of lag. The usual jitter here or there, but never a hang where the game completely locks up to ten seconds or longer. I've also never seen an error 12 in the length of time I've played.

... However, I've never played on Bridgeport.

@iCad

I'll definitely add those mods into my mix. I was hoping to keep things mostly vanilla for ease of transferring the save between players, but seems like some quality-of-life mods like you mentioned might be for the best. No worries on the system requirements, either. I'm playing on an i7-3770K with a GTX 1070 and 24GB RAM, game is installed on a SATA SSD.

I was pretty big on TS2 mods, but never did much other than some minor items and cosmetics in TS3. Probably would have grabbed those mods if I saw this kind of lag before, but this is the first time.

If I'm getting this right, it seems the main issue is Bridgeport, then? I can definitely say that none of my other saves were in Bridgeport, so it'd make sense from my end. I'll take the tips everybody mentioned into account and (hopefully) fix up the save to a working state.

One last thing; I'm guessing nobody sees any issues that might be caused by us bouncing the save back and forth? I was worried that might have been what caused this in the first place, but Bridgeport does seem a likely culprit from what's been said. I made sure that both games are fully updated and have the exact same expansions and stuff packs enabled- the only thing I can't control is the OS difference.

I would definitely recommend having a look at all the NRAAS mods. I'm kind of like you in that I mod the holy hell out of TS2, but don't really feel a need to do much to TS3 aside from fixing things that EA FUBARed. But IMO it does really need the fixes that the NRAAS mods offer because the game code is not well optimized (and my feeling is that it wasn't well tested, either) and all these little things add up to lag, even if you're playing on a good computer. I would deem many of the NRAAS mods essential if you're going to play any save long-term, much as I deem essential the mods that prevent neighborhood corruption for TS2. I can understand wanting to keep things simple since you're game-sharing, but if both of you have just have Master Controller, ErrorTrap, and Overwatch, you should be better off than you are now. And since you're sharing, you can export/import settings for those mods, too, so that would make setup on both machines easier.

I've never played Bridgeport myself, as I'm not really interested in a "city" environment, but yes, I have read that that world is very problematic. In fact, most if not all of the EA worlds have issues that eventually cause lag, as routing errors and such accumulate. But from what I've read, Bridgeport and Isla Paradiso are the worst of the lot in that regard.

As for game-sharing itself, I don't see a problem. What you're doing is essentially the same as what people do when they upload a save file to share when they have, for instance, updated Sunset Valley with stuff from all EPs. I assume you're exchanging back and forth via file-sharing, and those are pretty safe, so I don't see where there'd be an issue. I know my daughter years ago used to trade TS2 neighborhoods with her little girlfriends all the time. They'd pass flash drives around between them and play things round-robin, which is what you're doing, though probably not with flash drives. And they never had an issue. So if little giggly 8-year-old girls can do it without issues, I'm sure pretty much anyone can do it.

Great, thanks a bunch for the tips! I'll definitely install those mods to make things a bit easier on us.

The MTS community never fails.

On my really old save, I've got a few more mods enabled- fifteen or so. But they're all minor mods- outfits, hair, Buy Mode items and such. Nothing major by any means. And it wasn't perfect, of course, but nothing even close to what I experienced with this save. Since we are passing this one around, I disabled most of my mods except for one hair CC which I replicated on my friend's computer.

Anyways, I've got all three NRAAS mods installed and the game chugged along for the first few Sims hours- notifications showed a bunch of unroutable Sims and such, but after a bit longer, everything is running much better.

I'll probably go ahead and do what Nitromon mentioned before to fix up Bridgeport entirely, but it's definitely much better now!