What in the world is it about the game that makes it so badly optimized?

[Claeric]

I have recently been playing the demo for "Just Cause 2".





There aren't as many objects in an immediate area to load as there are in The Sims 3, but this game is abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous, and it runs flawlessly on my computer, streaming fantastically in real time as I drive at high speeds, jump from cliffs, outrun 3 helicopters shooting missiles and just barely avoiding smashing into 4 sets of armored cars, and explode gas stations in the process.

So what in the hell is it about The Sims 3 that makes it have to load things for a few seconds when you look at them? That makes the game lag just from watching a car drive from A to B? That prevents Patterns from being saved in cache and loading immediately when opening CAST? That makes extremely low LOD lots in the distance a necessity instead of an option (since I can't honestly imagine the game would explode if the crappy lots were pre-loaded and streamed properly)?

I wasn't really that frustrated with it before since I figured I just wasn't the owner of as good a computer as I thought I was, but playing this game (And a few others) makes me really damn confused, because I don't understand why The Sims 3 can't stream a world a thousandth the size of the one in Just Cause 2.

[Jonni]

I've been thinking the exact same thing. My system runs Crysis on a steady framerate, all settings on high, beautiful textures, lighting etc. The Sims 3 is nothing in comparison yet I still experience the annoying lag or slow loading pattern at every hurdle. All I can do is wonder because i'm not really a techy person but I, of course, blame EAXIS!

[Anach]

Actually I was thinking that the game is remarkably well optimised to run at the framerate it does, with all the objects that we cram onto our lots, all of which are close proximity and appear in high detail. However,  A bad mod, too many mod files or a memory leak can half your framerate. I usually have to reboot once a day when playing Sims to keep the FPS constant.

Want to see a poorly optimised game, look at GTA4.

[J. M. Pescado]

There are several reasons for this.
1. Unlike Sims, things in shooters are pretty much entirely static. Every single texture and object has already been pre-rendered before the game shipped. Because the world is mostly static, lighting and other fancy things can be precomputed during level creation. The user is not empowered to arbitrarily level and reconstruct entire buildings or replace every single piece of visible scenery. Static things get to undergo a lot of precompiled optimization.
2. Unlike in the Sims, the camera of a shooter tends to move very slowly. Your camera, generally "you", can only move at the speed of a running man. Some rare games let you even move at the speed of a car! In any event, however this motion is fairly predictable and constrained. In the Sims, you can move faster than the speed of light, or at least, try to, given that the camera can instantaneously teleport to an arbitrary location at will, making it impossible for the computer to predict where you might go next. If you lock yourself on a sim and move ONLY at sim-speed, performance wouldn't be so bad, either.
3. Unlike the Sims, the number of objects the camera can see in a shooter is typically fairly small. Your field of view is typically maybe about a 90-degree cone centered around the player character's head. This is rather unbig, really.
4. Unlike the Sims, shooter engines are highly optimized, written as masturbatory exercises in speed by developers showing off their e-peens. The Sims lacks this masturbatory e-Peen element, so there is not much of an incentive to try too hard. Shooter engines are then reused repeatedly in games, whereas the Sims engine will basically only find use in Sims.

[Mosquito]

Motion to put the term "masturbatory e-peen" in everyday usage/MATY terminology.

Who`s in favor?

[IAmTheRad]

Do you need the high-speed perfectly seamless gameplay for Sims 3? My PC cannot even run Just Cause 2, and I can play Sims 3 just fine. Sure, I may not be on maximum settings and I'm not running at 60fps, but it's playable. Sims isn't really twitch gaming.

I wouldn't really worry about it if I were you. I haven't seen an PC game developed by EA that's properly optimized.

[Claeric]

I don't NEED to have super optimized gameplay, but I would really love it if my beautiful town was constantly beautiful, and not only once I have been in an area for more than 3 seconds, as long as I don't turn the camera to look in another direction (making me wait 3 seconds again for everything to pop into a high LOD).

[J. M. Pescado]

Claeric: Do what I did: Get 36 GBs of RAMs, but since Win32 can only use 2 of it, turn the rest into a ginormous RAMdisk. Install your game there, put your saves there, and put your swap file there. The computer now never touches HD. WHOOSH! Drawback? You have to replace the install every startup, and if you don't dump out your saves before your computer goes down, poof! The fact that the game has to load crap from HD a lot is one of the main performance bottlenecks. RAMs are like 500x faster just by default, and benefit even more from immersion in liquid nitrogen, while HDs, with mechanical moving parts, would die.

[Claeric]

I would settle for just walls, terrain, and roofs being high LOD at all times. That alone would enhance hte experience so much.

Walls look horrible as geometric impostors and the terrain on lots looks ridiculous, too (not sure why it can't be the same as the terrain AROUND the lots, but until you actually load a lot, the terrain looks smudgy and it clearly shows the shape of the lot on the ground).

[Lum]

Do what I did and crawl back to Sims 2. You know you want to.

[raptureswild]

Motion to put the term "masturbatory e-peen" in everyday usage/MATY terminology.

Who`s in favor?

I second the motion.

To quote JMP (OK, paraphrase), "There is always something else to do in The Sims 2."  I'm contemplating.

ETA: What about putting games on a SSD?  Would that improve performance over a regular HDD?

[Buzzler]

1. Unlike Sims, things in shooters are pretty much entirely static. Every single texture and object has already been pre-rendered before the game shipped. Because the world is mostly static, lighting and other fancy things can be precomputed during level creation.

No, shooters are just as realtime-rendered as TS3. For modern shooters dynamic lights and shadows are on an entirely different level in comparison to TS3.

A big difference is that objects get recycled to a great extent. There are only so much trees, so much shrubs etc. and placing one object a dozen times is less demanding than placing a dozen objects once.

3. Unlike the Sims, the number of objects the camera can see in a shooter is typically fairly small. Your field of view is typically maybe about a 90-degree cone centered around the player character's head. This is rather unbig, really.

In shooters the reach of vision is greater and the LOD boundaries a farther apart. There's no big difference in the end. At least not in favor of TS3.

ETA: What about putting games on a SSD?  Would that improve performance over a regular HDD?

Probably.

[Claeric]

EA read this topic and added stuff to the patch at the last minute, because Ambitions fixes half of these issues. I can zoom around town at 3X speed without any lag- I dont think the game tries to load lots unless you are for sure on them now.

[snowbawl]

Would you kindly shut the fuck up, crackbaby?  For two days now you have posted your rampant, unabetted drivel all over this board.  Your play-by-play commentary citing your expansion pack experience is tedious at best.

[jezzer]

Would you kindly shut the fuck up, crackbaby?  For two days now you have posted your rampant, unabetted drivel all over this board.  Your play-by-play commentary citing your expansion pack experience is tedious at best.

Yes, as opposed to everyfuckingbody else who is commenting on their Ambitions experience non-stop.  God forbid anyone discuss a Sims game in the Sims section of a Sims mod site.

[Claeric]

Not to mention my topic about my experience with how well the game runs getting a response from me about how my experience has changed and it runs much better now is...pretty relevant!

[snowbawl]

Would you kindly shut the fuck up, crackbaby?  For two days now you have posted your rampant, unabetted drivel all over this board.  Your play-by-play commentary citing your expansion pack experience is tedious at best.

Yes, as opposed to everyfuckingbody else who is commenting on their Ambitions experience non-stop.  God forbid anyone discuss a Sims game in the Sims section of a Sims mod site.

I have not noticed this "everyfuckingbody else" person repeatedly posting over and over and over, again and again.  I will be on the look out, though.

Yes, yes, Claeric, YOUR stupid shit, we get it.

[Buzzler]

EA read this topic and added stuff to the patch at the last minute, because Ambitions fixes half of these issues. I can zoom around town at 3X speed without any lag- I dont think the game tries to load lots unless you are for sure on them now.

I've noticed no difference. Maybe the game is more resilient regarding bad CC now and one of your packages is corrupt.

[sewinglady]

Motion to put the term "masturbatory e-peen" in everyday usage/MATY terminology.

Who`s in favor?

I second the motion.

To quote JMP (OK, paraphrase), "There is always something else to do in The Sims 2."  I'm contemplating.

ETA: What about putting games on a SSD?  Would that improve performance over a regular HDD?

I vote in favor of the motion.

As for the Sims2 - there is NO going backwards, at least as far as I'm concerned.

[raptureswild]

Now that I think about it, that quote is in reference to leaving Spore.  I could be wrong.