More Awesome Than You!

      My computer is running on an Intel Core 2 Duo, and because of the way the game is coded, it never took advantage of that. Big homes ALWAYS crashed... That is... Until I installed AL! First I was expecting a half hour install, but 10 minutes and it was fully installed. So I thought "Thats odd, I hope it installed properly." As it turned out, it not only installed properly, but after it created the user files, all the loading screens ran faster than it took to get a book to read. I made a huge mansion, that ran perfectly, as in no disappearing furnishings, or floating dogs!
      So my question is did EA actually make AL dual core compatible? If so I may lose my phobia of the game due to large house glitches! I am extremely suprised at how well it's running. Get rid of the heaps of glitches, and I'll be all set, and I hope many other people will be too.

You loosened tight pants. I've suffered no Core 2 problems, the only program I've had to suffer such problems was Earth 2150. To which Forcecore works fine.

I didn't have major problems either (just couldn't make mansions,) but everyone says the game is incompatible with dual core, and to see the performance skyrocket gives me three possibilities:

1. They made it dual core compatible,

2. They fixed the memory leak, or

3. They did both.

My game's loading session has sped up too. It used to take about seven minutes. Now it takes three.

Just for the heck of it, I will add that I have all EPs and SPs.

No Core 2 problems here either, but AL is slower to load than FT (no pants are currently involved -- I figured last EP was a good time to nuke it all from space.)

My AL loaded pretty fast, but with no Petz nor FT... at first. It feels like she's returning to her grumpy old ways, though.

Mine still crawls like a snail. You're imagining things.

No change here. No dual core, either. Still takes me 6 minutes to load the game with 2.54 GB of custom content, all EP, K&B, H&M, and Ikea SPs. (mini-rant, & key is hard to find when you can't see your keyboard)

On the test account, it's about 1.5 minutes icon to household.

Mine seems about the same, which is lightning speed.  Takes 3 minutes max to get to the neighborhood screen.  8)

Mine loads the actual *game* very fast, but going into the neighbourhood and then into a house takes quite a bit of time.  Given how huge my neighbourhood seems to be, though, that's perhaps not surprising..

I'm experiencing the opposite.  My game seems much slower and going into a hotel for the first time took so long that I thought it was going to crash.  I usually run my game with 8 gigs of downloads and the Megahood that is almost as big--and if I run a new hood with no downloads, I usually don't have to wait but a few seconds.  It is really strange.

The game sure seems to be at least somewhat slower than before although it has been some time since I played. Just reinstalled the game and all the EPs (no Stuff Packs and only 81 MB of CC). Empty lots load fast but occupied lots take longer to load and traveling to community lots takes a long time to load too.

I have a fairly old computer but I noticed a change after installing AL, graphics are sharper and I can play larger lots than previously without lag.  I noticed the change the first time I loaded after I installed AL, as soon as I saw the huge lots in Belladonna Cove I thought I wouldn't be able to play them.  They play fine, no lag as of yet, although I haven't explored everything yet.  I wondered if they had updated the graphics card settings because there was a noticeable change in the sharpness too for me.  Maybe Nvidia and EA have finally got their acts together.

specs
AMD Athlon 2600+ 2.10GHz
2 gig ram
Nvidia Geforce 7300GT 512 Meg
XP Professional SP2

Mine's still slow; however I think that's because ye olde fans are on their way out. It locked up twice yesterday.

That's not good. Have you tried spraying them out with a can of compressed air?

If the people that noticed change have dual core, that supports my theory. If not, it's back to the drawing board.

Edit: What about ATI cards? I have an ATI Radeon X1600 video card. Do you guys have an ATI card, because possibly that is behind it!



Windows XP Home SP2
iMac Intel via Bootcamp
2.16GHz, 0.98 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X1600
All EP's
No SP's because their not worth it.

I run Sims + all eps and sps on a non-awesome dual core laptop and, other than tight pants and n00bness, have not had problems with any of the eps.  The game loads quickly; neighborhoods a little slower.  I haven't read anywhere that EAxis was going to make the game take advantage of dual coredness.  If your theory is correct, it is merely coincidental or accidental. 

I'm running a dual core laptop with all EPs (minus BV because I didn't like it) and an ATI Radeon X1400 video card. I was surprised at how quickly the game loaded after installing AL; however, I upped my RAM to 2g over the summer and it may simply have been a result of that.

I wonder if they sneakily deteled some old stuff like they've done before.  For example, some early-EP houses have been known to disappear from the lots and houses bin with the installation of a new EP.  Less content to load = faster load time, presumably.

I'm running a quad-core (and no I'm not bragging about it, I don't see that much difference) and there doesn't seem to be anything loading any faster than it was with FreeTime...yeah things sped up considerably when I moved the game to this computer from my previous one (it was limping along kinda like an in-game zombie)...but nothing's really made things any faster than it was when I first loaded it here.

And I'm sure Maxis didn't do anything right...except their track record is perfect - they broke the piano again.

That's weird. I remember reading a thread here about the game having a glitch that caused it not to run properly on Dual core machines? It was soem time ago and I am technically challanged so I may have not understood what people were talking about.

Though I remember the thread 'cause it explained how to fix it and everything with a file you had to download from the Windows site. :-\

The file is actually called 'Forcecore' and it's a small utility that's somewhere here and around on the net -- it forces the application to use just one core.  Up to FT at least, the game ran faster if you forced it to use only one core.  It had some glitches and ran slower if you let it use all cores.  It seems like AL may not necessarily run better on a multi-core machine, but it won't run bad, either.

So if I tried the Forcecore on AL it wouldn't make any diffference?

It doesn't appear to.  I ran AL for a couple of hours on my Core 2 Duo desktop last night, and it hummed along just fine -- even seemed faster than FT using one core w/Forcecore. I saw no lag, no graphic glitches, nor any other signs of it having an issue with a multi-core processor.

So it seems that AL at least plays nice with the multi-core processors, if it doesn't actually make good use of them.