Windows 10 (Fall update) plus new install of Origin UC (updated) = Unplayable?

FWIW, after 1703 rollback of Windows, I was able to play (with NO other changes made) for a couple of RL hours without any pink or crashes.

I suppose also worth mentioning that I was able to play for several hours last night on my laptop with 1709, but which has an 860m and which never received the Origin update from a few months ago. (I've mentioned this laptop before, but I made absolutely sure that it has 1709 and that it doesn't have the Origin patch (you can tell by the dates on the files in the TSBin folder, can give specifics on request, I think it's like 2009 dates vs 2015 dates, but don't have either one in front of me).

@gwynne I wrote my current experiences about these problems (crashes and flashing) to the Cat's thread, so I won't repeat them in this one. But I'd like to thank you for taking the time to do all the testing and documenting. I'm following this closely.

@gwynne - I have an ITS question for you. Is patch 1707 something I can put on Windows 10 Pro and if so, would I want to? I noticed the Win 10 Enterprise machine at work is patched to 1707 (not 1703, not 1709). Can you shed any light on this? I'm wildly hoping maybe 1707 has the security fixes but not the game/graphics driver breaking stuff. I asked our ITS department but they're probably buried in the Patch Avalanche of Jan '18.

Unrelated note, @BoilingOil did an interesting experiment with letting the driver manage its own memory. Turned that on, but did NOT fix the seti textureMemory line. Then later, tried again with the seti textureMemory line removed entirely. Did not get good results. So either the manager is lousy at managing or the game wants to see a textureMemory setting in graphics rules sgr for some reason before it allows self management and doesn't just query the driver for memory size. And you probably already read about that. I'm rather sleep deprived and don't know who all read what. I think BoilingOil reads everything all the time, not sure.

@Epi7 - *wave wave* You didn't happen to, in one of your experiments, do one where you commented out all the seti textureMemory lines and turned on driver memory self management?

I think I'm losing track of which thread(s) I'm posting in, sorry if this is all over the place!

@CatOfEvilGeniu - I did not try the said setup where I would have commented out the seti textureMemory. The reason for this is that logically thinking the Graphics Rules.sgr script file is not executing anything while going through the script. This would mean that the boolprop enableDriverMemoryManager has nothing to do with the textureMemory variable because they are used separately in the same script file. The enableDriverMemoryManager is most likely a variable that is used later on in the game code to determine how to manage the GPU memory (as the name suggests) in game (eg. how does it allocate memory and handle memory cleanup). I wouldn't want to speculate, but at this point I don't think anyone really knows what the variables are doing and what's happening in the game code when they are changed. We can't even be sure if the textureMemory variable is used for anything else than defining in the Graphics Rules.sgr what graphics settings the game will use (which would mean that the game itself doesn't get any information about how much memory it is able to use from the Graphics Rules.sgr).

I'm planning on doing some research with running Windows XP in a virtual box if the game is able to recognize:
1. Texture memory size - The game might try to poll some deprecated Windows APIs that are not anymore available in newer Windows.
2. Audio drivers - Since all my crash logs seem to point out to an audio function where the exception is happening. I'd like to try to rule out the sounds completely (btw @mortia you have exactly the same crash logs as me).
This testing might not mean anything but we need more data to try to get the game working properly for all of us.

(26-01-2018 09:19 PM)CatOfEvilGeniu Wrote:  I think BoilingOil reads everything all the time, not sure.

Well, the actual fact of the matter is, as a general moderator, it *is* one of my duties to see what's going on, and if members observe the rules as they are outlined by the site owner. After all, if rules are ignored, people may require some discipline. A serious scolding, or banning for a longer or shorter time may be indicated... Hehehehe...
But in truth, I just skim over most of the posts, and there are areas where I slack off a little (or a lot, depending on the area).
For example, I completely ignore that "Sims Community Finds" post, that @Ginnie writes every day, because it's as uninteresting to me as a phone directory (Sorry, Ginnie). But I'm sure that she doesn't ignore rules, because otherwise, @leefish herself would have disciplined her a long time ago. And since that doesn't happen, I trust Ginnie to be a responsible poster.
I also quickly skim over large posts that take up more than half my (1920x1200) screen. Those are way-too-long walls of drivel that I'm tired of looking at, even if I do NOT read them. I make sure that I've *seen* them, and that my name has been spelled correctly, if it is at all mentioned! Because I can't have people calling me inappropriate names like "Boiling Oil", hahahahaha...

But no, I do not habitually read EVERYTHING. I have more important things to do with my time... Wasting other people's time with uninteresting walls of drivel such as this, for example... (never gets old, does it?) And playing games such as TS2, FO4, KSP, SCS, TWoM, and more acronyms like that.

I find I keep asking folks the same questions about their system, the steps they’ve tried, and what’s going wrong. Maybe we could have a survey thread where people could check off what they did, what’s going wrong, and upload dxdiag, sgr, config log and crash log files. And have an ‘other’ option where they can add symptoms or fixes not listed. One big survey thread somewhere so we can collect data in one place? Optional, of course, but ask folks nicely to do it.

Lots of people say ‘I tried everything’ then don’t say what they did. Then someone suggests something and it turns out they didn’t try it yet.

@BoilingOil - I’m willing to help put a data collection thing together but don’t have expertise in the web side of it. Something that gives an Excel sheet of answers and allows batch download of files grouped by post maybe. Is that doable?

@CatOfEvilGeniu - I can see the logic of your suggestion, but there is one problem: I don't know the first thing of the system(s) used here on LeeFish.nl. The only one to have that knowledge, as far as I'm aware, is @leefish herself. So even if it can be done, I'm sure I am not going to be able to do it!

@BoilingOil - I didn't mean to task you with it, was more asking if it was doable and not even necessarily here. I think MTS has a survey feature regular members can use, or did, not sure. Leefish would be nice but I don't want to make lots of work for anybody. Maybe I can look into SurveyMonkey or something for gathering data. Right now, need sleep. zzzzzzzzz

@CatOfEvilGeniu I know, I know. I just wanted to make sure nobody was going to wait for me to do it. But my main point was, I cannot say whether it can be done. I suspect it can, but you cannot trust that assessment, because I have no thorough knowledge of this board's systems.

For my latest silly trick:

I took the harddrive out of the PC in post 1. I put it into another machine entirely, with somewhat similar specs (newer gaming mobo, i7, 32GB RAM), except that the new chassis had a GTX 970 instead of a GTX 1070.

Meaning, I literally just transplanted my entire Windows install, intact, with Sims 2 and everything. I didn't even reinstall the NVIDIA drivers.

I let Windows update to 1709. I'm playing around in the game now with highest gfx/shadows/reflections/etc, full CC, swapping houses and hoods, and no flashing pink (yet) and no crashes (yet).

In other words, the same install of Windows and the Sims UC that was flaking out with a GTX 1070 seems to be fine with a GTX 970.

It would have been better 'scientific method' to simply install the GTX 970 in the original chassis, but there were other reasons I needed to migrate my Windows drive to another machine, and I didn't have time to try intermediate steps.

Will report back if this changes.