Sims2 Sims 2 UC has started randomly crashing

I think I have sorted the pink flashing (sort of… it does happen occasionally on one sims outfit or one piece of furniture) however I now have a new problem - after playing the game for around 10-15 minutes, I get the usual “The application has crashed and will now terminate” message.
Sometimes I will be lucky enough to get around 1 hours gameplay but never any more and sometimes not even 10 seconds - the average is around 10-15 minutes before the error appears.

Again, I have gone through ALL of my custom content adding them back in one-by-one, I have compressed all of my CC and also renamed each file so there aren’t any special characters.

My thinking is that I have “too much” CC - I have 16.8GB of CC and only 16GB or RAM. Could this be the problem? I’ve read on some forums that there is a limit to how much CC a computer can handle which differs from PC to PC.
Although I’m also unsure if that’s true as some people have 30GB+ of CC.

I’d really appreciate if anyone can help because my game is becoming unplayable and it’s very upsetting and frustrating because I purchased my gaming PC especially for the Sims 2 (and it was very very pricey!!!)

Thank you so much in advance for any help anyone can provide.

The total amount of RAM you have, is of no importance for the CC you load. The game cannot access more than 4 GB of RAM anyway. So every time a new piece of CC is needed, another piece that hasn't been used for a while, is thrown out of memory. But if there is too much CC in use at the same time, this can overwhelm the game, making it crash. If your sims are ALL wearing the most elaborate outfits AND hairdos (all different) with thousands of polygons and huge file sizes, at some point, only very few sims can be in the lot you're playing, because all those outfits and hairs must fit inside the limit of 4 GB, or perhaps the limit of your texture memory. When the limit is reached and a new sim walks by in yet another super-outfit, the game will just say "Screw you, I can't do this anymore. So do it yourself!" And then it crashes. And since you cannot predict when somesim is going to walk by, it appears random.
The point here is, you can have a lot of CC, and you can have a bundle of high-res CC. But you can NOT have 50 sims ALL in huge high-res outfits on screen all at the same time without the game giving up at some point. It's a balancing act and you need to exercise some restraint, some modicum of common sense, use the big stuff in moderation...

Also, some CC does not repond well to being compressed. There are so many things to consider in this game, I don't expect I'll ever be able to wrap my head around it all.

Thanks again for the response.

It's so strange, I seem to be able to play without issues for random periods of time at the moment - from a few hours to a couple of days by changing GRM each time - so no pink flashing and no crashing, and then without warning crashing and pink flashing occurs again! So then I change GRM again until no issues happen but then when they occur again I go back to GRM and change the settings again...

I've removed my highest poly CC from my game using DDO and have cleared through everything else one by one, so I'm reluctant to remove anything else from my game however, I'm presuming that's the only way to resolve my issue and make my game playable again? :'(

It's just frustrating because I have seen/read about so many people with over 30GB of CC and I purposely paid an obscene amount of money for a gaming PC specifically to play the Sims 2 with a vast amount of CC (although I honestly didn't think 15/16GB of CC was that much!)

Yes, I understand how frustrating it is to read about people having 30 GB of CC, when you yourself cannot seem to get just the half of that working properly. But as I said, not every 30 GB is the same. If you have millions of tiny little files adding up to 30 GB, the game can load and handle a great many of them at the same time. But if you have 30 files of 1 GB each -- the same total amount -- the game cannot hold more than 4 or 5 at the same time.
And before there was the UC, people used methods to distribute their CC over different packages so it would NEVER all be loaded at the same time. There was a program the name of which escapes me right now...

I myself have only 2 GB of CC, and that's more than enough for me. In fact, most of it has hardly ever been used, if at all. And you can imagine that my game never ever crashes, because I don't have all these insanely elaborate outfits and hairs... So, although I think that everyone is free to make their own choices, personally, I do not understand why people need so much CC anyway. As I said, it's a balancing act...

But I agree that it is weird how just changing some settings in the GRM back and forth seems to keep you afloat for a while, and then suddenly the game randomly crashes all the time on you again... I'm sorry. I don't know what to make of that.

Hi all, I think the issue has now been resolved (sort of!).

I removed the d3d9.dll & dxgi.dll files from the TSBin and it SEEMS to have stopped the pink flashing & random crashing! I know for sure that those files were causing me problems because I've tried to put them back in again (to resolve a new issue) and the crashes started again.

The only problem now (and the issue mentioned above) is that live mode seems to be extremely laggy... The Neighbourhood screen is fine, CAS is fine, even when I have my sims on a lot which is paused it seems fine (moving & rotating the camera etc), the issue with lag happens as soon as I click 'play'. The in-game clock goes very slow, rotating the camera is very laggy, sims movements are very laggy and the game speed doesn't seem to make any difference, ie. speed 1, 2 and 3 all seem to play the same (if that makes any sense?!).

I've tried to lower all of the in-game settings however none have made a difference
I've also deleted my Thumbnails and repaired the game via Origin (before re-applying the 4GB patch and updating GRM back to the settings I had previously).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can resolve this?

Thanks again as always!