This is a whining post, not a story post. Feel free to wait for the actual story post!
Assuming there ever is one!
I've been trying to get the Wonders uploaded, but I decided to take a break from that today and play the Hodgins. There's a lag in that game, for no good reason, and it took me almost 3 hours to play through one Sim day. One! I just wanted to get through two days so that I could post about Yeti's and Snow's birthdays!
I finally made it to Yeti's birthday. You may recall that I was trying to get there last time I played, too, but the game crashed on me. So I finally made it! She had cake! She aged to teen! I gave her a make over! I came out of CAS and...
*crash*
Before I could even save the game. I had saved not long before, but it was definitely before her birthday. So I have to play her birthday over again.
I am seriously never going to make it past her birthday. It's been weeks that I've been trying to get through this one day!
And I'll never know what Snow looks like as a child since I have a whole other Sim day to get through before that even happens.
So, what do you think? Pack up the family and nuke the town? I could actually probably finish out Ariel's LTW quickly and not lose any progress there. Blu's LTW is fubared anyway.
Hmmm...
Oh for heaven's sake. (Actually, I had to rewrite my curse about three times. Somehow, I'm more comfortable being profane on Facebook.)
ReplyDeleteI spent a bunch of time chasing down lag on my games a while back. It seems like every victory is just one battle in an ongoing war. I have the Wonderlands down to the minimum of mods and cc I'm willing to play with, and right now they're still not so fast. Having MAXED OUT THE HOUSEHOLD SIZE might have something to do with that, but I digress.
OK, so some suggestions --
1. Reset Everything -- I'm starting to think my games will be better if I just give up and run that once a sim-week.
2. CC Magic. http://sims3.the-prof.net/forums/index.php/topic,1725.0.html (This appears to be the primary forum for the tool, though the downloads are hosted at MtS. I wanted to be sure I had the most current version.)
I installed this with some trepidation a few months ago, and I wish I'd done it a year ago. As a warning, once you go CC Magic, it completely reorganizes all your CC, and it's hard to go back. That why it's hard to go back. But my trepidation was wholly unfounded. It's hard to go back because managing content in Sims 3 sucks, and this fixes it.
To properly convert your content, you should take all the stuff out of your Mod/Packages folder (though leave the folder there empty, and don't touch your Resource.cfg file) and dump everything in Downloads. Also, uninstall any Sims3Pack content from the launcher -- AFTER being sure you have the Sims3Pack files themselves -- and dump those files in Downloads. Then install CC Magic and run.
Oh, and before you do ANY of that, I'd make a backup copy of your who The Sims 3 folder, because I'm like that.
What CC Magic does is twofold. One, it just processes all your CC, regardless of whether it's Sims3Pack or package, into the most efficient form to be read by the game. That's if you just install and run and do nothing. If you put more effort into it, you can create a bunch of Sets, then assign those sets to different game configurations, so that the Hodgins game and the Wonder game and whatnot can run with different CC. Third, (did I say it did two things?) it allows you to activate and deactivate individual items by checking a checkbox.
That last part revolutionizes your ability to troubleshoot lag.
3. This is probably my weirdest suggestion, but I am doing this with the Samples, and I think it helps.
Twallan's Relativity.
Now I don't actually WANT to lengthen my sim days, and I refused to touch this mod because it seemed like a huge stack of additional resource consumption I didn't need in my game. However, I stumbled upon a thread on NRaas chatterbox (because I am a geek who hangs out there) by a guy who claimed that just installing that mod smoothed out a lot of choppiness.
If you set the sim-second to be just a LITTLE bit longer than the default sim-second, it seems to give the game a bit more breathing room to execute and recover from its own animations. So you get a game with a very similar day-length that is snappier than before.
I'm currently running the Samples at tick-time of 28 (see docco), which is 3/4 of the default setting of 37. Smaller tick-time is a longer second, and I swear that relationship made sense when I was reading the docco, but I have now forgotten it, so when I repeat to you it sounds magical.
It is making me crazy! So, thanks for all of the suggestions... maybe I'll run through them this weekend. The hubster tried to play his own Sims game a few days ago and said "maybe I need to get you a faster computer for the Sims"!
DeleteI might take your suggestions on board Susan. My game is also really laggy at the moment. I also keep getting the problem where none of my store content shows up in game ... I can barely play the Stratford file at the moment :(
DeleteI'm wondering if my pc is somehow eating my files as my Minecraft game is playing up as well! I want to update my processor or even buy a new pc but I really don't have the funds. Especially not considering that I'm trying to save up for a house so I can FINALLY move out.
I failed to subscribe to this thread, so I didn't realize anyone said anything to my suggestions. Go me :-p.
DeleteHere's another thing that might help, Save Cleaner: http://www.den.simlogical.com/denforum/index.php/topic,1532.0.html
This primarily helps with load time, and not always for very long (the game is excited to recreate the junk that was in the save file). However, Sims made the questionable decision to load EVERYTHING into memory rather than building any kind of database-like structure that would allow it to store lesser-used information on disk and access it quickly. Therefore, if you're loading less crap into memory, you should get more resources to use elsewhere.
This reminds me to run this on my own save files. And while I've never had a problem, he's right that it's always good to make a copy of your save file before messing with it.
Jo: If your store content isn't showing up in game, that looks like a more serious problem than lag to me. Have you backed up your save files and just done a complete uninstall and reinstall? That is a horrendous pain in the butt, especially with reinstalling store content, but it can fix all manner of evil.
You always have the best suggestions, Susan!
DeleteOf course, I discovered today that I might be starting from scratch anyway. Stupid computer!
I've had the content problem before and I found a temporary fix for it on Sims VIP. I did the same thing again but it didn't help. I think it's an EA bug but no less irritating. Last time a complete reinstall did nothing for the content problem but I find reinstalls help with the lag problem.
DeletePlease define,"Start from scratch." Because I am reading that as you lost your Hodgins save, and that would makes me cry.
DeleteJo: Now I remember talking to you about that problem the last time. I've never seen it, and I have no idea what would cause that. Ugh.
"Start from scratch" means downloading Ariel from the exchange and starting her generation all over. It's still up in the air as to whether we can get the data off of the old box since the hubs has been spending all night getting the base game and expansions on the new laptop he went out and bought. New toy is more tempting that fighting to get my families off of the old computer, you know.
DeleteBut I keep whining about getting my families out of the dead-ish place, though, so he's going to have to get to that soon. The suspense is killing me!
Apparently Blogger ate my response, but it was generalized panic that is hard to reproduce. I do hope that the system boots long enough to pull a save file off.
DeleteOh no... It's this time of the year again, isn't it?! Crashes and glitches everywhere. That sucks :(
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's all of the pollen in the air around here? Messes up the processing-whats-it or something?
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