Neighborhood Slowdown

[Li'l Brudder]

I have a queston, which will follow after the reason it is a question.

If I make new neighborhoods like most people do here, will it slow down my game?  I always consider if I really need a new neighborhood before making a new one.  Is my hesitency right?  Will a few more neighborhoods slow down the whole game?

[SaraMK]

Not that I've noticed. Of course each neighborhood will add a tiny bit of loading time to the game, but it is nowhere near what custom content adds.

You can avoid having too many neighborhoods by having more than one game set. Move the entire The Sims 2 folder out of My Documents and onto the Desktop. Run the game. It will generate the three Maxis neighborhoods in their unplayed form. Delete the three neighborhoods and create some custom neighborhoods. When you want to play your old neighborhoods, swap the The Sims 2 folder for the one you moved to the Desktop. When you want to play the new neighborhoods, swap them back.

I have about thirteen or fourteen game sets now. They all have their own custom dowloads. For example, my Alien neighborhood is in its own game set, and all the alien-like custom content is in there, so that it won't clutter up my non-alien neighborhoods or slow down their loading times. It would be really stupid to have an alien neighborhood and a Victorian neighborhood in one game set, and have to scroll past hundreds of ball gowns while looking for a metalic catsuit. Plus, I like to keep challenge (Legacy, etc) neighborhoods completely separate from all my other neighborhoods. That way I don't have to worry about moving out hacks before playing them, or anything like that.

[ZephyrZodiac]

If you want to save more time, you don't actually need to move either Sims2 folder, just rename the one with the hoods you don't want to play to something like Sims2Old, and the game will ignore that folder.

[Renatus]

Or, if you have an OS that supports mulitple user accounts, set up different ones for different sets of content. This makes sure you don't make any mistakes with renaming/moving (constantly doing that is a good way to introduce errors, and the data gets more fragmented when you're always moving it around), you just switch accounts and start up the game.

[Ancient Sim]

I've noticed that since restarting Pleasantview, the game is much quicker loading the neighbourhood screen.  It's coming out of the game that takes forever, and I mean forever.  However, if I remove my Downloads folder, I am instantly back on my desktop (in seconds).  I genuinely don't understand this, why would the game take so long saving all my downloads?

[BlueSoup]

I don't know, I have a lot of Downloads, but it takes awhile to load *and* shut down the game.  Shutting down the game is still far faster than loading though.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Have you tried deleting your groups.cache file and letting the game generate a new one?

[BlueSoup]

Me?  Yeah, I delete it all the time.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I just thought that maybe, if Ancient Sim didn't, the file had got really big and that might be why it's taking so long to close her game.

[Li'l Brudder]

Maybe I sould do that.  Quitting my game takes almost a fortnight.  Does it hurt the game?

(Yes, I still say fortnight!  Old english rocks!  Colours!  Neighbourhood!  Shoppe!  w00t!)

[BlueSoup]

It doesn't hurt a bit.

[Li'l Brudder]

*gulp*  Here goes...poof!

[trancejeremy]

I really don't think it matters how many neighborhoods you have; it only seems to load just the basic neighborhood info.  (Name and subneighborhoods).

The thing that seems to affect the game the most is the size of the neighborhood, once you pick it.  Bigger neighborhoods can take forever to load.

[ZephyrZodiac]

They would, obviously, since there's so much data to be loaded.  Getting rid of unnecessary character files helps, but takes time and you need to be very careful to do it right.  Also, having all the fixes like noA+spam, NoReunionMemory etc. really helps to keep the size of the Neighbourhood Memory for each sim down.  If you have a hood where you didn't install these fixes until after you started playing, you can get rid of a lot of these extra memories and that too will make the individual files a bit smaller.

[agcons]

I've noticed very little increase in load times with extra neighbourhoods, even those full of houses.  What has had a significant impact on reducing my load times is to have very few or no lots in my lots bin.  I created a neighbourhood specifically for placing those lots I wanted to keep, but did not want in the bin.  Doing this shortened my load time by almost half.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Why not simply package the lots you want to keep, save them elsewhere, leaving a few favourites for use?  Then if you know you are going to want a particular house, just reload it. 

But I have quite a lot of houses in my lots bin, and they don't seem to slow the load time very much, if at all. 

But if you have any OCCUPIED houses in your lots bin, that's a very different story!  It's the difference between a couple of megabytes per lot and over 100!  The same would apply if you have house with a large number of custom meshes rather than Maxis stuff and recolours, there is a trememdous difference in size.  A lot which is only a couple of MBs should really not slow load time any more than a two or three custom outfits or a custom hairmesh.

[Emma]

I have 50+ lots in my lots bin (none of them the maxis ones) all furnished and it doesn't slow down the loading time of the n'hood, only the loading time of the bin. It takes a few seconds to open though, thats all.
My actual neighbourhood seems to have a slow-down bug, it takes forever to scroll across, unless I am zoomed right in. It is just this one hood though, all my others are fine. I can't seem to work out what is causing it!

[ZephyrZodiac]

I honestly can't see a good reason why lots in the bin would slow loading time for the game or the hood.  Nearly everything in the game tends to load when you need it, which is why it takes such an age to scroll through custom bedding!

But as I said, inhabited lots are a different matter.  Not only do sims living in them wander around your hood as unlinked sims, meeting other sims and adding wierd memories, but all the sims they have ever met are included as unlinked sims in the house!  And if a neighbourhood takes forever to load, this could be the reason.  It's the character files that slow loading time, not the number of houses.  Just as small houses with only an average amount of furniture etc. and only 1-4 sims living in it play much faster than large, over-furnished lots with a full complement of sims.

[Emma]

I have no occupied lots in my bin

[ZephyrZodiac]

Nor me!  But some people do!  They believe Maxis!  And if a "feature" is provided, they use it!

I did do it a couple of times way back when, in the hood I'm currently reviving (but this is an earlyish backup before the hood was fubared) but I had to remove an unknown number of relationships before I got this hood running properly again!  It's got about 30 occupied lots, and I've been back to almost every one of them and sorted everything out, but it's also got a lot of empty lots which I'll probably get rid of soon and replace with copies of my own houses instead of downloaded ones which just don't work until you change them a lot, and are probably full of terrain paints!

[Emma]

Thats why I tend not to download lots unless I absolutely trust the person who made them-I currently only have mine, Reg's and witch's lots on my n'hood atm. I never download occupied lots either-but I used to when I first got the game-no wonder it kept on exploding

[agcons]

I timed the game load from the start of the splash screen; I had no inhabited lots in the bin, and between timing tests I added no custom content, nor did I make any other changes.  I finished timing when the main neighbourhood screen loaded, and instead of 8 minutes the game loaded in 4.  I also timed the load several times before and after, and the load times were pretty consistent. 

I can't see a good reason for this, either. I did it before installing NL, so perhaps now leaving houses in the bin would make no difference. 

As for saving the lots elsewhere, I guess it depends on what we find easier.  I have loads of lots, and over time I tend to forget what they look like.  By dumping them in an unused neighbourhood I can see them, whereas if they're in Win Explorer I just have a not always descriptive file name.

I learned the hard way about downloading inhabited lots, quite early on.     I never download them now, either.

[Swiftgold]

I timed the game load from the start of the splash screen; I had no inhabited lots in the bin, and between timing tests I added no custom content, nor did I make any other changes.  I finished timing when the main neighbourhood screen loaded, and instead of 8 minutes the game loaded in 4.  I also timed the load several times before and after, and the load times were pretty consistent. 

I can't see a good reason for this, either. I did it before installing NL, so perhaps now leaving houses in the bin would make no difference. 

I noticed after NL that the Maxis lots were back in the lot bin, too. I don't have too many downloaded lots, and I used up the ones Maxis provided with the game pre-NL, and so my lot bin was empty. Much to my surprise after loading NL, not only were there new Maxis houses with driveways in the bin, but also all the old ones that my Sims had been living in since March! Not sure if I want to duplicate some of them... maybe I'll use them as a base for remodeling, since I get quite annoyed with building new houses. My Sims live in very extended family groups because I don't like having to redecorate new houses for offshoots and those silly young newlywed couples

[ZephyrZodiac]

As for saving the lots elsewhere, I guess it depends on what we find easier.  I have loads of lots, and over time I tend to forget what they look like.  By dumping them in an unused neighbourhood I can see them, whereas if they're in Win Explorer I just have a not always descriptive file name.

If you package the lot to a file, then move it to a Saved Houses folder, and create a folder for the package e.g. "The Blue House", then you can install it to a vanilla hood with clean installer, just to check it doesn't have any baggage, enter the hood and put the house into the game.  Then enter the house and take as many shots of it as you want.  Later, you can retrieve all these photos and put them with the sims2pack in the "The Blue House" folder.  That way, you get a much better idea of what the house looks like in game than you get from the maxis pics, especially those messy looking NL ones!