Work/school zergswarms and game performance

[varmint]

I'm running a 1.3 patched game with the latest 1.3-compatible AM (and running crash-free, don't worry, this isn't gonna turn into another OMGCTD flail). I remember Pescado posting something about a 'brute force' solution to make sims go to work/school, and that seems to have been implemented with the latest awesome, because my sims are now dutifully attending both.

Or rather, trying to attend. The zergswarm at the school is so crazy that some of the kids never make it in, leading to a congested cluster of freaked-out teens and children in front of the school, and I've seen a couple reports on these boards of people having the same issue. Furthermore, at the times of day when the game is trying to squeeze everyone into their rabbitholes or poop them back out, my game performance takes a divebomb. From 8-9 am and then again in the afternoon from 2-5 pm, normal speed starts moving in 5 or 10 minute chunks and the sims take hours and hours to complete tasks that should take 30 minutes or less. So, while I was one of the people who wanted the work and school problems fixed, I now am having that "watch out what you wish for" feeling. I'm confident that the performance hit is caused by pushing everyone to their rabbitholes, because the same thing happened to me pre-patch when I tested twallan's modified AM from the 'inactive slacker sims' thread.

Changing graphics settings seems to have no impact on the issue. Setting dynamic avoidance to 0 didn't help either. Thinking that maybe my neighborhood was just too freaking crowded, I raptured half the town and this actually helped some, but the performance hit at rabbithole time still made things hair-pullingly slow. Is anyone else experiencing these issues? Is there any solution short of running a less populated neighborhood? I don't want to be forced to choose between the game being unplayable half the sim-day and having unemployed, failing sims, but still, could the 'force to work/school' feature be made configurable for large neighborhoods where having it on causes these problems?

[twallan]

How many sims do you have in your neighborhood?

My town has 33 households with 121 resident sims.  Of which 27 are school age children/teens.  I have the dynamic avoidance set at half its normal value.

When it comes time to go to school, the children appear to be quite apt at making it into the building, even though they all arrive at around the same time.

Good Day.

[varmint]

How many sims do you have in your neighborhood?

My town has 33 households with 121 resident sims.  Of which 27 are school age children/teens.

Pre-rapture I had around 36 households, 200 sims, with 35 or so school-aged. Post-rapture I'm running around 25 households, 100 sims with 19 or so school aged. I should add that everyone seems to be making it into the rabbithole post-rapture without clusterfucking, but the slowdowns still happen at the same times, which is mostly what I'm concerned about. If I could play through the day without the crazy lag and stuttering clock I wouldn't care if half the school-aged population stood in front of the school and passed out or starved. My computer is decent, I have 3GB of RAM and a top-end dual core processor with a good GPU, it really should be able to handle it. Maybe it has something to do with the 'loss of performance if you play too many active households' thing? I've actively screwed around in probably 15 or more of these households, and maybe I just need to limit that or get used to playing smaller neighborhoods.

[cassblonde]

I'm running a 1.3 patched game with the latest 1.3-compatible AM (and running crash-free, don't worry, this isn't gonna turn into another OMGCTD flail).

I wish I could help. Mostly I am posting to thank you for a clear, well written and non-flailly post. I have read too many posts today that make me logout and go bang my head on a wall at the level of stupid that exists in humanity.

I hope Pescado will be able to help you, you have clearly done everything in your power to help yourself.

[twallan]

Pre-rapture I had around 36 households, 200 sims, with 35 or so school-aged. Post-rapture I'm running around 25 households, 100 sims with 19 or so school aged. I should add that everyone seems to be making it into the rabbithole post-rapture without clusterfucking, but the slowdowns still happen at the same times, which is mostly what I'm concerned about. If I could play through the day without the crazy lag and stuttering clock I wouldn't care if half the school-aged population stood in front of the school and passed out or starved. My computer is decent, I have 3GB of RAM and a top-end dual core processor with a good GPU, it really should be able to handle it. Maybe it has something to do with the 'loss of performance if you play too many active households' thing? I've actively screwed around in probably 15 or more of these households, and maybe I just need to limit that or get used to playing smaller neighborhoods.

I actively control all my households, popping in whenever I think they need some guidance, so it's doubtful it has anything to do with how many homes are touched on a regular basis.

The stuttering clock issue was a major problem with my game, and I spent the last week hunting it down.  I eventually found it was a pile of junk car objects running in the background that was grinding my town to a halt.  After cleaning them out, the stuttering ended and my Speed 3 was actually fast.  However, I can't say whether this is the issue you are encountering.

I run a Dual Core AMD 3.0Ghz on Vista with 4GB of RAM, with a GTX 280 graphics card.  I also run with the graphic levels turned to the lowest to minimize memory leakage, as once the game reaches 1.5GB in memory usage it becomes badly unstable on my machine (Error Code 12 save failures and such).

Good Day.

[pet_peeve]

Some building designs seem to put sims into roach motel mode. On the main lot I've been playing a while (3rd generation of a legacy thingie), the house has a raised porch at the front door (by extending the foundation 3 squares and putting stairs at the end), and if more than 4 or so sims visit for a party, they spend most of the time "no-after-you"ing each other until they have to pee, and leave.

I think it has something to do with that little pause they do before going through a door or at both ends of stairways - their "wait for this idiot to go by" time is huge, and they deadlock at the drop of a hat.

Someone with some good knowledge in queuing theory needs to visit that code with a large axe, and possibly explosives.

[twallan]

Someone with some good knowledge in queuing theory needs to visit that code with a large axe, and possibly explosives.

I concur.  My partner located an issue with my personal mod...  While I was debugging the issue, I played her town for awhile.

She has IndieStone active, so has considerably more children in her town than I do.  The count came out to 51 children/teens swarming the school each morning.

We watched the sight and they did indeed all pile up in front of the door, and attempt to get in.  Eventually all but one bounced and decided to go home without attending school that day.

I changed the DynamicAvoidance to zero again (the recent patch reset the darn numbers).  After doing so, the children all made it into school.

Obviously having them all bounce attempting to enter the school is a serious EAxis issue.  Amazing it was missed.  Though with the old issue regarding not going to school at all, they probably never encountered the problem in testing.

Good Day.

[BeakerMcSqueaker]

Someone with some good knowledge in queuing theory needs to visit that code with a large axe, and possibly explosives.

I concur.  My partner located an issue with my personal mod...  While I was debugging the issue, I played her town for awhile.

She has IndieStone active, so has considerably more children in her town than I do.  The count came out to 51 children/teens swarming the school each morning.

We watched the sight and they did indeed all pile up in front of the door, and attempt to get in.  Eventually all but one bounced and decided to go home without attending school that day.

I changed the DynamicAvoidance to zero again (the recent patch reset the darn numbers).  After doing so, the children all made it into school.

Obviously having them all bounce attempting to enter the school is a serious EAxis issue.  Amazing it was missed.  Though with the old issue regarding not going to school at all, they probably never encountered the problem in testing.

Good Day.

This is driving me insane and has made my game all but unplayable.

I've been playing a family with 4 teens and they can't even get out of the house to catch the school bus (I have to go into buy mode and drag them into the front yard), then they stand out the front of the school until it's time to go home.  Did EAxis really believe the players would NEED to see each individual child walk into the building? I think they need to drop the animation altogether and as soon as they hit the sidewalk in front of the school they should be transported into the building. A bit like the lack of animation for actually getting into a vehicle.

OK, so that's my rant out of the way.  Now can anyone tell me how to change the DynamicAvoidance?

EDIT: NVM, I found the thread that gave directions.

[moondance]

Changing the DynamicAvoidance seemed to make a big difference in my game. Interestingly, however, changing it to 0 caused my game to randomly CTD during gameplay--which it had never done before.  Changing it to something more than zero, but less than the original value works fine, with no CTD after extensive play. More voodoo, probably.

[BeakerMcSqueaker]

Changing the DynamicAvoidance has helped with the swarming but I really can't live with all the waiting. There seems to be a 10 minute wait between every action they perform. Pause before going down the stairs, pause after getting down the stairs. Pause before going through the door, pause after getting through the door. It doesn't take 2 hours to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen and cook waffles. I won't be playing the game until there's a fix for this.

[Chukertuc]

I´m having the same problem. My teenagers are crashing into each other in front of the school door; and the game clock jumps from 5 to 15 minutes making a simple "washing hands action" last for about 1 and half hour!

[Zazazu]

How many residents do you have? I have a feeling our population cake was a lie. I had about 225 when I actually counted, plus 72 NPCs and 20-some homeless. So, a little over 320 sims. I was having the same time-skipping. I did a cleansing and now only have 60 residents. Time runs smoothly again.

My computer is not a POS, either.

[ramseyazad]

For what it's worth, I tried ISM's 'wolfrun' concept, left the neighborhood running for about a day, and came back to all these same problems, lobotomized sims taking forever to go take a pee or whatever SupCom told them to do, unable to get to school or work or anything.  At times, fps looked like about 3.   I tried removing everything but awesome, tried lowering the graphics settings, tried a single sim fambly, tried gassing their asses, tried gassing more of their asses, and there was no change in the performance of that neighborhood.

 I started a brand new neighborhood and this was not the case, everyone in the same household, with the same mods (awesome, indie, couple various xml tunings), went about their business fairly efficiently.  Haven't played it long enough to tell if it will reproduce the problem, so, very well could be voodoo.

[twallan]

For what it's worth, I tried ISM's 'wolfrun' concept, left the neighborhood running for about a day, and came back to all these same problems, lobotomized sims taking forever to go take a pee or whatever SupCom told them to do, unable to get to school or work or anything.  At times, fps looked like about 3.   I tried removing everything but awesome, tried lowering the graphics settings, tried a single sim fambly, tried gassing their asses, tried gassing more of their asses, and there was no change in the performance of that neighborhood.

This sounds like the lag issue I was encountering.  If you still have the town, perhaps you could use my "NRaas Standalone CarLimo Cleaner" object to see whether there is a large number of global objects piling up in the background.

I would love to know whether your lag issue is the same one that I found in my game.

You'll find the object over in the Pudding Factory, if you are interested in taking a look.

Good Day.

[Motoki]

For what it's worth, I tried ISM's 'wolfrun' concept, left the neighborhood running for about a day, and came back to all these same problems, lobotomized sims taking forever to go take a pee or whatever SupCom told them to do, unable to get to school or work or anything.  At times, fps looked like about 3.   I tried removing everything but awesome, tried lowering the graphics settings, tried a single sim fambly, tried gassing their asses, tried gassing more of their asses, and there was no change in the performance of that neighborhood.

 I started a brand new neighborhood and this was not the case, everyone in the same household, with the same mods (awesome, indie, couple various xml tunings), went about their business fairly efficiently.  Haven't played it long enough to tell if it will reproduce the problem, so, very well could be voodoo.

I have had this experience as well but I noticed similar things when my old neighborhood got large even before Indie. I just think Indie on a wolfrun running fast speed just speeds up the process of create of LOT of sims in a short time.

Honestly, in my experience with this game there's a threshold of the number of sims in your neighborhood and I don't know what it is exactly, it may vary for some people, but once you get beyond that threshold it's just BFVFS territory with terrible lag that turning graphics settings down does not help and lobotomized townies who can't even take their asses to the toilet.

I think Indie just facilities speeding this process up by a great deal, but imo it can happen to all neighborhoods sooner or later if there aren't some means of population control in place.

[JBoat]

I've been working with the routing algorithm and rabbit hole issues for the last 3-4 days, and may have found a solution (when combined with the latest force-to-work/school code).  The problem comes with the constant pushing and avoidance code that tries to stuff X sims into 1 rabbit hole at a time.

The last test I did (*without* the force code) had a 95% success rate in getting 13 sims into 1 hole over 20 tests, when all were delivered to the lot within the same ten sim-minutes (ten RL seconds).  I plan on doing some tests with the new force code (after I read up on it to see precisely what it does), and hopefully it will allow us to get a 100% success rate without the CPU-bashing, and within an acceptable time limit.

[Buzzler]

This sounds like the lag issue I was encountering.  If you still have the town, perhaps you could use my "NRaas Standalone CarLimo Cleaner" object to see whether there is a large number of global objects piling up in the background.

I just used it to check the town I had to scrap lately because it ran so awfully laggy (No difference between speeds 1 and 3 on a C2Q @3.8GHz!) and you're right on the spot: 1052 stuck limos. Flushing them did the trick, runs like a charm again. Additionally there are 148 Objects.Vehicles.CarBusSchool (at 4 a.m.), should be safe to delete them as well, right?

Thank you very much, this is a big relief cause the town I'm playing now has begun to slow down as well... so while you can just keep your shoes on, because I find just the imagination of kissing your feet repulsive, I am willing to bow down before you.

[twallan]

I just used it to check the town I had to scrap lately because it ran so awfully laggy (No difference between speeds 1 and 3 on a C2Q @3.8GHz!) and you're right on the spot: 1052 stuck limos. Flushing them did the trick, runs like a charm again. Additionally there are 148 Objects.Vehicles.CarBusSchool (at 4 a.m.), should be safe to delete them as well, right?

Thank you very much, this is a big relief cause the town I'm playing now has begun to slow down as well... so while you can just keep your shoes on, because I find just the imagination of kissing your feet repulsive, I am willing to bow down before you.

Yes I delete the CarBusSchool objects as well...  I believe they are suffering from the exact same error as the CarLimo.

Make certain however that none are currently in use.  Preferably flush them at night.  I have code in place to stop inhabited vehicles from being crushed, but one can never be too safe with our children.

You can delete them both at the same time by flushing "CarLimo,CarBusSchool" (no quotes).  The operation takes comma delimited lists.

Good Day.

[varmint]

So, yeah. Turns out that having a metric assload of ghost vehicle objects littering your town can make your game performance suffer. I just flushed over 1000 of the things and the difference is amazing. Thanks, twallan.

I do still think that there are some issues to be ironed out with squeezing sims into and out of their rabbitholes - I think it's related to the vehicle issue since those are the times of day when all the car objects are firing up, but the solution is probably a separate one. Thanks to JBoat for looking at that.

Stopping now before I get a reputation for asskissery.

[cassblonde]

I suppose if I need more detailed directions on how to flush I am too un-awesome to use it?

I do like to keep a tidy game ...

[JBoat]

I do still think that there are some issues to be ironed out with squeezing sims into and out of their rabbitholes - I think it's related to the vehicle issue since those are the times of day when all the car objects are firing up, but the solution is probably a separate one. Thanks to JBoat for looking at that.

But of course, it annoys me to see such idotic AI in this day and age when computers are so close to mimicking human intelligence.  To have such poorly planned routing algorithms is just a sin.

I believe I have the tweaks in place, the only thing stopping the code from being circulated is an infrequent and minor issue, but one that hurts in a big way when it happens.  Occasionally (once in 10-20 rabbit hole tests), I'll see a sim step onto the rabbit hole "pad" to enter, and then spontaneously forget where they were going.  They essentially lose their train of thought, and stand there clueless for however long they want, blocking other sims from getting in.  That's why I was keenly interested in this forcing code, though I think it is part of Supreme Commander and therefore won't work for sims not being controlled by it.

I think placing a sim in a Low Resolution mode while they are on their way to work/school can accomplish the same goal, since I've seen them waltz right into the school when I was in town map mode, and they had no trouble pathing past each other.  Not sure if that's something that will break animations and suspend belief or not, though I suspect it may.

As an interesting sidenote: the tweaks I've made to the routing behavior move much faster than the standard push-n-shove code that EA gave us.  During my routing tests at the School, that 13 students make it in around 9:45 or 10:00 with vanilla routing, but usually make it in between 9:00 and 9:15 with the new changes.  There is none of the typical shoving and pushing, and milling about like you'd normally see.

Provided I can fix the seeming "alzheimers" problem with some sims on their way into the rabbit hole, I'll gladly distribute what I've come up with.

[ramseyazad]

This sounds like the lag issue I was encountering.  If you still have the town, perhaps you could use my "NRaas Standalone CarLimo Cleaner" object to see whether there is a large number of global objects piling up in the background.

I used your terlet and it reduced the lag considerably, 599 carlimos and couple hundred carbuses.  It did not fix it completely, which means (to me) that story mode is slowly borking the game in some other way as well.  We need that batman box thing that worked so well for fixing crappy issues in TS2.

[J. M. Pescado]

Next version of AwesomeMod wil incorporate better monitoring for the invisible derelict vehicles.

[twoftmama]

The Batman box was awesome!

[Silverdrake]

I'm also having the swarming/routing issues with the patch. My sims moved around fairly well pre-patch, except for at-home parties, at which they all got stuck in front of the door for hours. Of course, pre-patch, almost every family except the active household slacked off at work and school. Now that they are all actually attending work and school, it takes a sim 2 hours to get out of the house for work, and the kids stand in front of the school until late at night. The upside is that they never have to do their homework, as it remains at 100% in their inventories.

I killed all the homeless, removed 414 carlimo objects, and adjusted the Dynamic Avoidance, and it helped a little. It still takes ineffably long to start an interaction and to get out of the house. Getting into the school is a bit faster, because they don't spend time saying, "After you!" "No, after YOU!"

I would attribute it to my older pc, except that I didn't have these headaches pre-patch.

My next step is to kill off most of the households, and to keep doing this as new ones move in. I did have IS with Immigration turned off, but it caused me so many other issues that I took it out.

Update: killed off half the EA-created families, and with that and maybe the latest Awesomemod (don't know if it tweaked anything to do with my issues), it's playable again! The sims still take longer than they used to getting out of the house, but the swarms are gone.