mandatory mod, apparently

[slurpeefiend]

My game, neighborhoods, and houses have been loading much slower than usual lately, and for various reasons I didn't notice of it until the last day or two.  Today I began the long and frustrating process of trying to ferret out what mods or custom content files may be causing this, and have run into an unusual situation.  Apparently there's a mod somewhere in my downloads folder that is required for my houses to load, and without it they go into the never-ending load cycle.  It first happened when I removed my "global mods" subfolder, and then again when I completely emptied my downloads folder.  When I put everything back it loaded slowly, but it loaded.

Has anybody heard of this kind of thing happening before or know what might cause this problem?

[J. M. Pescado]

Work of the non-awesome, no doubt. Mods, however, are rarely the cause of game slowdowns due to their small size. The usual hog is CC crap like objects or clothes. Remember, you should not have more CC than half of the RAM in your computer, if you don't want your game to crawl.

[slurpeefiend]

Work of the non-awesome, no doubt. Mods, however, are rarely the cause of game slowdowns due to their small size. The usual hog is CC crap like objects or clothes. Remember, you should not have more CC than half of the RAM in your computer, if you don't want your game to crawl.

It's looking like the original slowdown is due to some kind of career I've added recently (it's always the careers that get me), but that's not the issue I'm most interested in.  The real "Oops! You Broke It!" here is trying to figure out why I can't load any of my lots when my downloads folder is totally empty.

[syberspunk]

The real "Oops! You Broke It!" here is trying to figure out why I can't load any of my lots when my downloads folder is totally empty.

Well... if your downloads included objects with new meshes... then maybe lots that had those objects are trying to render them... but since they don't exist anymore, they all have to default to whatever object they were cloned from?

That's just my shot in the dark. 

Ste

[J. M. Pescado]

Well... if your downloads included objects with new meshes... then maybe lots that had those objects are trying to render them... but since they don't exist anymore, they all have to default to whatever object they were cloned from?

If the "default back to whatever object they were cloned from" fallback routine fails to find the object, the object vanishes from existence and you have no trouble. If the object EXISTS, but your altered object doesn't resemble it at all anymore, and your creator didn't bother to zap the fallback field, you instead get an object in a potentially invalid state that can error-loop forever if debug mode isn't on, sending the lot into an endless load, or simply CTD outright.

[SaraMK]

When this sort of thing happens to me, turning on debug mode and hitting Delete on any errors usually solves it. I always assumed this happened because the game couldn't figure out what to do with missing objects... looks like I was at least mostly right.

[slurpeefiend]

Sounds reasonable... thanks dudes!