Using Aging Off/Story Mode Off - game takes 18 minutes to save

[moondance]

I play like a dozen famblys, so that isn't it. I think it's purely dependent on whether or not you have a dangling pile of garbage somewhere. Error 12 seems to resolve itself if you just wait for it and keep playing a bit, and try to save later. If not, you can see how big your save files are getting. Try using "purgereactions" or somesuch.

I don't have a slow-saving neighborhood currently, because I got aggravated and deleted them, but if someone were to give you a copy of a neighborhood that takes forever to save, would you be able to look into it and tell if there was something fixable that's causing it, or if it's an EA thing that we're just going to have to learn to live with?

[Writin_Reg]

I am curious if the hoods that take longer to save are derrived from EA hoods or are they from the empty hoods?

The reason I asked this is I have 6 Hoods basically. The two Maxis, two cleaned hoods I got off here, and two hoods I got off modthesims which were cleaned also but just had the community lots in tact. Having played the Maxis hoods longer I would have supposed they would be the slow savers - but are in fact still saving almost as fast as when they were brand new. I noticed the slowdown started happening in all the "cleaned" hoods. As I got the modthesims hoods before the two here, I first thought it may have been because the "cleaning" left something behind that was causing a hang during saves - which is why I came here to snoop around and find out if others had tried these hoods and were having slow saving. That's when I discovered 2 hoods here, and assumed the cleaning job would have been more thorough, so I downloaded them. I did introduce 30 or so Sim families to each of these 4 hoods, and there are no duplicate Sims or families.

Also my slow save is no where as drastic as others have reported - at least not yet anyway. At most maybe three minutes, as I barely have enough time to make a cup of coffee in the time it takes - but it's really annoying to see the cluttered Maxis fuglies hood is so instantaineous still.


I have the awesomemod, delphies default skins and eyes, Peggys default hair and a lot of recolors, new patterns, and all of the store stuff for everything. I check for updates on all the modded stuff daily and update if there is one.

I do have a really good new pc - AMD 64 bit Phenom Quad core Black Edition with a Geforce 9400 gt with 1 gig onboard and it's  either 6 or 8 gigs of Corsair DDr3 for ram. I don't seem to have any other issues - and would be quite pissed if I ever take 18 minutes to save like one person here reported after getting this beast built, but I keep wondering if it is just a coincidence happening on cleaned hoods and not the EA hoods - or is the EA hoods eventually developing this problem too? It may help us to know  if people could mention their hoods in general that are having the slower save time.

[uaintjak]

I'm also having long saves (a couple of minutes or so sounds about right) using the Riverview hood.  It's very crowded (I moved all of the Sunset Valley sims into Riverview, along with a few others...altogether I have about 60 famblies) and I can't figure out if it's due to the large number of famblies, or if it's due to something else that I don't know about.  I'm only using AwesomeMod, the penis mod, the buyable lifefruits/fish, and the one that equalizes all of the beds' energy gains.

My saves in a regular Riverview hood prior to my mass combination were only a few seconds.  Gonna test out a few things and get back with you.

ETA: Took out all the mods except AM, saves are still long (actually about 5 minutes long, since I timed it using the "smoke a cigarette" method...very scientific).  I'm gonna assume it's because of the large number of famblies in the 'hood.

[moondance]

I had one hood that I used destroyallhumans on, and added about 20 families of varying sizes.  I didn't play it long because it started saving slow on the very first night.  Otherwise, all my hoods have been Sunset Valley with the normal EA sims plus one or two CAS sims that I made to play myself.  I have Riverview, but have only used it for testing and have never saved it.

[JBoat]

One thing from AwesomeMod that might be increasing bloat exponentially, is all the non-cleared inventories and needs/wants for each sim in each household you guys play.  Not only that, but in a normal game you don't get to control furniture in more than one home at a time, but I believe Awesome lets you do that as well (correct me if I'm mistaken, I personally don't ever play more than 1 house at a time).

My current game is a medium sized 20x30 with 1 sim on it (move-in g/f soon), and not a lot of stuff in storage.  Personal sim inventory is getting up there with fruits/veggies and fish, and there is a sizeable garden outside, but nothing glorious.  That, combined with the fact my computer is highly tuned and fairly fast, is probably what is keeping my saves really quick (latest was 15 seconds).

I have no doubt if I started to play every sim in 6 households, have each one with a custom inventory, and manage all their houses simultaneously, that my save would bloat tremendously.  I guess that may just be the price you pay for playing God.   

[Writin_Reg]

JBoat,

You guessed right. After I placed all these families in the empty hoods, I have been playing one family a night to build up relationships, jobs, skills, etc, etc. In my case I also have Story progression and aging off - assuming i could establish each household on it's own path until all households have a place  on the landscape with me being the carving God of that direction. Then i planned on turning story progression and aging back on with the last family in each hood which are my key choice family that I figured I would control in the end.

I am doing this in all 4 of the "empty hoods", where the EA hoods I had played fairly normal with aging on and story progression on. I was not liking the fact that EA screwed up the way I thought it was supposed to play - with all aging pretty much on key with each other - when instead the houses I was not playing seemed to have excellerated aging on. My own Sims were still not yet adults (they were YA) and I was playing the 190 day option of aging, yet their supposedly same age former schoolmates were turning elder already and I had not done  anything to keep my sims younger. So this totally annoyed me almost as much as the cloned neighborhood babies and the vanishings of the few Sims I had put in the game as chosen Sims for my Sims. It was as if the game mechanics purposely chose to eliminate any Sims not of the selected household including former selected household sibblings that had been moved out. This was my chief interest is being rid of all EA sims at the get go - which meant I needed to give each family I put in the game a history.

Like I said it isn't as though a few minutes is long - especially compared with Sims 2- it's just the fact the EA Hoods save in seconds while the cleared ones are now taking minutes and I have only played about 5 or 6 of the families in each of these new hoods so far. I wonder what happens by the time I get to family #30 which is my own main family in each hood. It is like the cleaning process actually bloats the hood when it should be emptying it or if you compare the number of sims with a history in these new hoods to the sims EA had in their hoods.

[Lissa]

My neighborhood that takes a long time to save is the original Sunset, not cleaned.  TS2 aging on, and I am playing all the families.  I play each family one sim week at a time with frequent switching to check on what other families are doing.

[tizerist]

I've had three crashes while saving today. Had to go back to the .backup every time.
My save times are not particularly bad, about two minutes.

Aging off. Story off. Save is 62.1 mb.

[Writin_Reg]

As I am not the least bit awesome, I didn't dare and just used those cleaned by others. There is cleaned variants - 3each hood - one modthesims and some precleaned hoods on this site. There is a way on here to also clean your own hood but being me I was not about to mess with it - as I screwed up several Sims 2 games some years ago trying that kind of thing and never again deleted anything. But if you search around you can find out how it's done by reading several threads, and perhaps you'll have been  luck than I ever do.

I am so unawesome once I make a mistake I try never to do it again. hehehe Go to the Sims 3 section under Facts and Strategy. Answers there.

[Anach]

I've had three crashes while saving today. Had to go back to the .backup every time.
My save times are not particularly bad, about two minutes.

Aging off. Story off. Save is 62.1 mb.

Good idea to create a series of saves, such as "save 1", "save 2", "save 3", and use them over and over. That way you should never need to use the .backup, as you are never overwriting the current save. I do this in every game I play. One save file is asking for trouble.

[witch]

I just do a savegame backup after every session.

[Roxxy]

I got fed up with the time it took for my Sunset Valley to save, despite changing things around such as taking mods in and out of game etc.   I decided to start a different game using Riverview with about 10 families in total.  My saves are now fairly normal and have not experienced any crashes as yet.  Having said that, I doubt the problem is gone, just delayed.

[Entgleichen]

One thing from AwesomeMod that might be increasing bloat exponentially, is all the non-cleared inventories and needs/wants for each sim in each household you guys play.  Not only that, but in a normal game you don't get to control furniture in more than one home at a time, but I believe Awesome lets you do that as well (correct me if I'm mistaken, I personally don't ever play more than 1 house at a time).

My current game is a medium sized 20x30 with 1 sim on it (move-in g/f soon), and not a lot of stuff in storage.  Personal sim inventory is getting up there with fruits/veggies and fish, and there is a sizeable garden outside, but nothing glorious.  That, combined with the fact my computer is highly tuned and fairly fast, is probably what is keeping my saves really quick (latest was 15 seconds).

I have no doubt if I started to play every sim in 6 households, have each one with a custom inventory, and manage all their houses simultaneously, that my save would bloat tremendously.  I guess that may just be the price you pay for playing God.   

Tested with NoInventoryDestruction disabled (the wishes aren't disableable), and it still takes 10 minutes to save. And my NB is the default one, no empty download.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have no doubt if I started to play every sim in 6 households, have each one with a custom inventory, and manage all their houses simultaneously, that my save would bloat tremendously.  I guess that may just be the price you pay for playing God.   

That isn't it. The game already saves all houses anyway, so the number of houses you manipulate has no effect on anything other than how white your screen gets. Inventories aren't really it, either, nor wants (TS2 retained all wants for all sims at all times in the entire neighborhood, without any problems at all). The cause of the save file bloatage is simply a mystery.

[JBoat]

I have no doubt if I started to play every sim in 6 households, have each one with a custom inventory, and manage all their houses simultaneously, that my save would bloat tremendously.  I guess that may just be the price you pay for playing God.   

That isn't it. The game already saves all houses anyway, so the number of houses you manipulate has no effect on anything other than how white your screen gets. Inventories aren't really it, either, nor wants (TS2 retained all wants for all sims at all times in the entire neighborhood, without any problems at all). The cause of the save file bloatage is simply a mystery.

Well the next thing I'd be curious about then, is the relation between save file size, and time to save that file.  Combine that with the number of sims/households controlled in-game, and we might find out something.  It might also show any differences in disk subsystem speed.

My game for example, is one household only, with 1 sim in it.  Fairly active inventory (fruits/veggies/fish), marginal furniture load, medium garden outside.  Not a social sim, so less than 10 total relationships with other sims.  My save game file is 26mb, and takes exactly 16 seconds to save.  My rig is a Q6600 (quad core) with 3 drives in a RAID stripe (64kb cluster size), pagefile on separate drive.  Needless to say, read/write speed on the primary drive (which is both the game drive and savegame/cache drive for TS3) is quite high.

I will mention that I find it interesting that a game like Sims 3 that doesn't save world state information (like Oblivion would) creates savegames of such huge sizes.  I'd think they should be much smaller, especially when only controlling 1 household.

[moondance]

Well the next thing I'd be curious about then, is the relation between save file size, and time to save that file.  Combine that with the number of sims/households controlled in-game, and we might find out something. 

My current neighorhood is 55 megabytes and takes less than 30 seconds to save.  The last slow-saving neighborhood that I deleted was around 60 megabytes and took around 5 minutes to save.  Today I've spent time with a household with eight sims, and a household with only one sim.  There was no noticeable difference in save times--less than 30 seconds, either way

[Writin_Reg]

Jboat -

Logically Jboat that makes sense, but since when has EA adhered to logic in their programming? A key example how that factor seems skewed take for instance my original first hood - Sunset Valley which was as vanilla as they come because I wanted to actually learn to play the game using EA's own chosen families. So my first family was the Goths, and because Cornelia was the sister of Mrs. Crumplebottom I naturally choose her house next (as well as the fact I could learn about playable ghosts).

Using your own argument these two families are at the extreme opposite of your single, one Sims household. I totally remade both homes and grounds,  using CAS a good deal. Heavily built on their town relationships, skills, bought partnerships in all businesses, and increased the families. The Goths became 5. The Crumplebottoms became 8, with 2 of these ghost babies - 4 were normal Simmy babies. I went throught the long, drawn out process to take Eric Darling from ghost to playable ghost to eventually a reinstated humanoid "living" Sim, including his two ghostly counterpart babies; and all the while working on his physical plumpness to a slim, trim muscular Sim at the top of his career. The Goths chugged along steadily and acquired all there was to acquire. The Crumplebottom/Darlings did it in a whirlwind. If any households should have had bloated files it was these two household - yet they both saved in less than a half minute.


Yet  a  new sim I downloaded (someones avatar that was on the exchange)to a nearly empty of Sims neighborhood takes over a minute to save after I drop him on a 20x30 empty lot so I can build him his own house I simply placed one wall a toilet and shower on the empty landscape and moved him in. It was the minute I saved again after I put him in a nearly bare structure of one bedroom with a combined living room and kitchen and the bathroom - added a small pond for fishing and only used the bare necessities in furnishings - the cheapest in the catalogue that the bloat was painfully obvious as the save took more than triple the time and the only thing my sims had accomplished was reading a cookbook, taking a cooking class and getting a job at the restaurant. He had talked to just 2 other Sims. Which totally surprised me as he was the only Sim I had at that time put in an empty hood. Even with aging and story progression off (after it was supposedly fixed) the game eagerly pushes Sims into existence where none exist. But the point is the save time and this household certainly should not have taken  over a minute and a half to save at this point. It was also strange that increasing the lot population to three, adding a second floor and 3 more bedrooms, nevermind the fact of skilling, job advancements and acquiring much more expensive stuff seemed to increase the save time that drastically after the first boom in save time. As the additions only added about 20 seconds to the save time, so the house still took under 2 minutes to save. But this was painfully 4 times as long as the EA families highly bloated household. This is what makes no sense.

[tizerist]

I've had three crashes while saving today. Had to go back to the .backup every time.
My save times are not particularly bad, about two minutes.

Aging off. Story off. Save is 62.1 mb.

Good idea to create a series of saves, such as "save 1", "save 2", "save 3", and use them over and over. That way you should never need to use the .backup, as you are never overwriting the current save. I do this in every game I play. One save file is asking for trouble.

I have a slightly different foldering method, which involves weekly and daily folders, so I'll never lose more than a day whatever happens.
Found a savegame from May yesterday! Loaded it up, how naive I was....not even rotating driveways onto roads. Tch tch.

[Dagoth]

I've started experiencing long save times and increased save file size after using destroyallnpcs and destroyalltownies repeatedly. The file size suddenly went up from approximately 30 MB to over 60 MB. I tried clearing inventories and wishes, but it didn't help.
Tired of waiting ten minutes for each save, I saved all households to the bin and inserted them into a new, identical neighbourhood, after using therapture so I wouldn't have any duplicate sims (I had some of the townies and npcs married to my sims). In 5 sim days, I've played each family a bit, and the save file size is a reasonable 31 MB and takes 15-20 seconds to save. All this without changing my mod configuration.
Also, I've noticed that when playing the borked neighbourhood, the game doesn't run nearly as smooth as when playing the new one, especially on the higher speeds (ultra speed is actually slower than double speed). Additionally, if use dresser or plan outfit more than once before quitting and restarting the game, I get error code 12 for sure every time I try to save. This doesn't happen in the new neighbourhood, though.

[Imbrii]

I've also been experiencing long saves. In fact, saves are starting to trigger low memory messages from my computer, which they never did before. I could have browser, chat and misc things open with no problem, now it prompts to shut the Sims down every time it saves due to low memory with only a handful of tabs open. Luckily the saves have still happened so far, but I'm confused why it seems to be draining much more resources. I checked homeless, 40something NPCs and 3 small families. Purgereactions didn't work, I assumed because it's a SupCom command, or I didn't do it right. I'm still new to this.

I've played almost every household at least once and almost every lot is full, but now stick to one household, which is getting a bit full on produce but otherwise fine. Storymode, despite being on, seems to be not functioning at all, as it's been 2-3 sim weeks since I've seen a single popup, read anything that wasn't junk from the newspaper, or heard a gossip that wasn't rich/promotion-related. I've tried toggling settings, that seems to do nothing. I thought it might be I had too many sacred sims, removed it from all but one family, still nothing happening when 1am rolls around. I'm not sure if it's related or not. Aging is on and set to epic.

Any ideas on what would be causing the increase in save time and memory hogging would be most helpful.

[edalbformat]

I kept self for 2 days trying different combinations to see what could be the cause for such delays. My conclusion is that it deals on something that probably EA has implemented self to guarantee that players would do exactly what they want them to do. Sort of punishment for not following the rules.
Explaining: I installed the Awesome Mod in one computer and my partner is running Indie Stone on the other. First we both continued the same game play (everything off) and we had the same delay in both computers.
Then I changed the game play and created a new hood. This time I chose one Sim to play (Agnes Crumplebottom) and switch everything on (Story Mode and Aging, but used the longest aging process). Suddenly everything was smooth and game saving takes only 10 seconds, no matter how many times I save.
I changed Agnes with the midlife crisis many times to make her different and tried to relate her to many sims (the maid Elf Grading or something, the neighbor male from Roomies). Unvariably to every romantic movement it seems that the males scape just before whoohoo for the most incredible reasons. The neighbor scaped with a message "Sim X has to be somewhere else right away", the maid just denied woohoo rudely. I played Agnes for time that would be equivalent to kill her in a normal aging progress and she is still virgin.
The supposed dead husband that is buried in her garden wasn't even introduced to her - they simply didn't know each other.
So the initial hood is already programmed internally and has the meaning to just disappear in the normal course of the socalled "Story Mode". Any atempt to stop the process causes the game to lag.
No matter if Awesome or Indie, stopping the story mod cause issues like Sims get stuck without interactions possibility (I got almost the whole neighborhood stuck in swimming-pools or in front of a work building), visited families that don't move at all.

It seems that this "big Life Stories Game" (in my mind this is not TS at all but LS continuance), is planned so that you play ONLY ONE SIM and watch the others.

Attempts to create an empty hood and play it "blank" is just visual.
Everytime a new townie is created it takes exactly the form and shape of the original characters. It simply places them back.
This seems to be the reason that I recreated the Goths and the game had a lot of problem to recreate the thumbnails (everytime I loaded them, the thumbnails were exactly like the original destroyed family). They are programmed internally to be exactly the way they were.

There are many discussion going on about how Indie or how Awesome does this or that and how it should continue. Has anyone any idea on HOW EA is going to continue? This is only the base game and from previous experience we all know that they DO NOT know at all How they themselves are going to continue. They change format and rules at EVERY EP.
Sounds like Political Parties!

[Anach]

Today I did some further testing and fixed a lot of existing issues.

1. Fixed crashing and other anomalies during save.
2. Fixed lack of story messages (Awesomemod feature) at 1am.
3. Fixed stuck teddy bear in child inventory.
4. Fixed issue with reward points being out of sync within the UI.
5. Fixed issue with "first kiss" buffs not showing up.
6. Fixed missing audio notifications and music.

Ok so it sounds great, but what did I do?

Well it started with some testing I did by starting a new game in Riverview. While playing my Riverview game I noticed that a lot of the problems I'd been having with the last game (listed above) were no longer present. So what I did was export my household+house and also some of the other new families I'd created around town, then placed them into a fresh game of Sunset Valley, and re-merged the households of the exported Sims. The drawback of doing so has been that I lost all my custom paintings, as well as friends and story progression of my previous Sunset Valley. However, the benefits (at least for me) outweigh any losses I have experienced.

While I had to edit a couple relationships to restore sibling status to a few of the exported sims when merging them back into households, I did try to limit myself when using debug commands. One of the main tools I avoided using was the "Select Sim" command, and instead went into edit town, then changed household the proper way. The reason for this is that I noticed after using "Select Sim", my save times increased, and also any furniture edits i made to those other households when using "select sim" could be seen permanently through the windows of the house, unlike standard furniture, which could mean they arent being saved in the correct place when trying to save.

So far I've been able to regain my ability to save continuously without issue. Only time will tell whether or not my save issues get worse as the story progresses, as right now my saves are around 27Mb, rather than the 40-50Mb of my previous game. A lot of the problems could be from my last game being a pre-awesomemod game and having so many different mods installed and removed, so hopefully I will have less issues now my active mod list has stabilised somewhat.

[J. M. Pescado]

Just FYI - I use purgereactions every night in my game (sim nights), and almost every night it purges a few danglers.  Seems to keep some proverbial ghosts at bay, which is good, but I have no idea where they come from to begin with.

If the number is low, these are actually "benign" emitters that are not really dangling, but it is nearly impossible to detect this condition accurately in code and no real harm is committed by purging them, so we wipe them all out. Affected emitters include real stink emitters, ghost emitters, and Criminal Mastermind emitters, so you don't want to casually wave this around for no reason.

[twallan]

Back on the original topic, if I may...

My town has been plagued with the long save times for quite a while now.  They tend between 10 and 20 minutes depending on what sort of stupidity I've been up to in game.  They do tend to get progressively longer though, with the next time I save taking longer to perform than the previous.

However, entirely accidentally I found that removing my mods seemed to alleviate the issue entirely.

Steps:
1) Removed all mods (I was having a crash problem, so I removed them all to determine where the issue was)
2) Loaded my game
3) Saved the game in record time (it took under one minute to save, which I have not bested in many weeks)
4) Closed the game
5) Re-added my mods
6) Successive saves have so far been on par with the "under one minute" initial save

Now, I suspect when I start getting back into the game and playing my houses, the save time will start creeping back up.  But now I at least have an approach to "restart" the clock.

Some interesting tidbits:

Prior to the fast save, my save game file was 122,596 KB in size.  The fast save produced a file of 104,965 KB in size.

Somewhere in those missing 17,000 KB of data is the culprit of my extremely long saves.

I checked on the households after re-adding of the mods, and found the following:

1) All the promises are missing
- I was not expecting those to vanish, as I thought they were only reset when the family was set unselectable.  However they are all missing, except for the active household

2) All the personal inventory is still there
- I WAS expecting this to vanish.  I was pleasantly surprised to find it still available on all my inactive sims

I simply can't believe the saving process would bog down that badly on only the Promises data.  But until I locate what other data might be missing, that is my only theory.

----

A word of warning:

If you attempt this, ensure that you do not have any homes marked as Sacred, or the Supreme Commander running on any sim.  The initial time I saved, the system outright deleted my Sacred household.  Though it did so, very quickly.

Now I'm unsure as to whether this is because they were marked, or because they were running SC (as both were applicable)...  But consider yourself apprised.

----

On an aside...  Removing AwesomeMod also removed all my tracking markers, obviously.  A future "nice-to-have" would be the ability to turn on Tracking on ALL households with a single menu operation.

Good Day.

[edalbformat]

I'm playing my new created hood and my chosen SIm (Agnes Crumplebottom) for 2 test days and had related Agnes to 5 different men that I move in her house, make babies with her and move the man out with the babies. The game is saving normally (30 to 35 seconds) without any change. So, I still suppose that the saving delay is the Aging OFF/Story Mode OFF (I have both on now full time).
Two new problems are visible and has nothing to do with mods: I'm playing the longest aging and something is not matching at all. The families that are not being played are aging in a completely unlogical way. Sims are aged at random and many families that should have about 250 days left, suddenly show up as elders.
The other problem is that I move Agnes' men out and chose them temporarily to stablish them in a new home and start a story slightly. I take only some hours to do this and at this short period, Agnes move out from her house. It is a pain in the neck. I put her back to her old house again and go to adjust the others moved. She immediately move out again and I find her in very poor houses though she has more than 200,000 cash in her account. Worst, she move out and leave high expensive cars behind, causing the lots to be extremely expensive.
She moved 3 times just because I left her on her own for some hours. I suppose that if I didn't have the awesome mod, she would become homeless with a fortune in cash in the inventory.
No, no boy. The game story is 100% dismatching.