More Awesome Than You!

I'm finished now to assemble my special start hood. I got Aging Off so no one ages unless I use a birthday cake or the cheat "Trigger Birthday" No Story Mode so that no damn townie move into my empty houses. Problem is that the game is taking 18 minutes to save and this is 100% unacceptable once the game takes less than one minute to load in my computer.
Everytime I have to save the game I have time enough to go to the bathroom, prepare me a sandwich, eat it, burp 10 times and when I go back, the game is still on ....saving...
Anyone knows what can be the cause?
I have the awesome mod and about 10 small tuning mods that I checked also 10 times to be sure that they are not conflicting.

Another to point is that I had used the cheat "Max motives" and wanted to use the game cheat "Static Motives" so that I damn had time to adjust my Sims without having the crap moodlets interfering all the time. It showed that using the game cheat affect the awesome Max motives and make it further not useable (the game stops to recognize it).
For safety I renamed the awesome mod "zzzawesome" and it seemed to work.
The other way to make it work again is to quit the game, shut down the computer and start everything all over again. BUT to quit the game I have to SAVE it first - and this causes me to suckle my toes and stare at a screen for 18 hell boring minutes.

I think that's just how EA's crapulent code works, it's not mod-related AFAIK and there's nothing we can do about it.

I play with story mode off and Aging on, but TS2Aging enabled and I have the same problem. My condolences to you. Thankfully my game does not crash so I save only when I am done for today. Killing all NPCs did improve saving times somewhat (to about 12 mins from 20) and keeping sims' inventories (fridges, bookcases etc.) at minimum helps a bit too.

The moment I switch story mode on saving improves dramatically. One assumes that with story mode on only sacred households are actually saved and the rest are simply reset when with the story mode off everything is saved in detail. Am I right Mr.Pescado?

I've been living with save issues for a while now. Usually I get around 2 good saves before I start having issues with saving, and it's always one of three issues.

1. Endless save. Possibly the same as your 18 minute save, except I haven't waited around to see. I usually end-task, as it's quicker to redo the last day than wait for it.

2. Error Code 12/13. I haven't had 13 for a while, but 12 happens quite often, and at this point in time I have not found a working fix.

3. Save Crash. Simple CTD when saving.

What I have noticed in all these three scenarios is that the bad save files are usually much bigger than the usual saves. Also that they usually don't start showing up until later in the game, as the save sizes increase.

I've had these save issues before installing mods. Some have suggested it's 64bit Windows, but there is no evidence of that and my GF's PC is 32bit XP, yet she still gets them, just not as often (without awesomemod). I've reinstalled the game as recommended by EA, and it didn't fix it.

Originally I went through all kinds of system tests to make sure my RAM, CPU and HDD was in good health. So with all this, I can assume it's EA's fault and not anthing to do with AM or my own system.

No, that's just utter hogwash. And I've never seen this issue, either. How big are these unusual saves?

Doing a little more investigation on the saving issue. Seems that after a certain time my game starts experiencing little bugs, which are hard to notice unless looking in the right place at the right time. One of those is textures go missing or turn black on certain objects, the other is that animations start doing odd things (arms on backwards.) Most of which to me sounds like a nasty memory leak, which would also explain the corrupt saves after a certain point. However, I can't really say what could be causing it.

I can say that my GF was getting some graphical corruption when having too many patterns installed. The more she installed, the less time she could play before having issues (she doesnt use mods, only official addons and player made patterns.) This could mean that the base game has a issue that is made more obvious by installing more packages and mods. Or that the packages themselves are causing an issue. I'm going to try removing some .package patterns and see If i get more playtime from doing so. It has to be something pretty common, as a lot of people report these save issues, and my guess would be crappy coding from EA rather than an issue with the package files or patterns themselves.

Keep in mind that I run a legitimate copy of the game, without any NO-CD cracks or such. I have all the EA addons installed, Awesomemod, some xml tweaks and a lot of patterns. While I can play longer than she can, it could be due to having twice the hardware she has.

How often are you saving and how long are you running your game for? What is your RAMmage? I have story-mode and aging on typically, save every sim morning, and run my game for about 12 hours a day (eh, I'm unemployed at the moment and will tab in and out to the 'net to forum and job search for my three-application-a-day quota, plus play other dumb casual games). A save takes around a minute. I've had story mode off and aging off a few times while I was dicking around, and didn't notice any increase in save time.

When I played with Aging on and Story Mode on, the game was also saving in 1 or 2 minutes. The problem started when  I got both off. It seems that for every new household included in the game it represents an increase of about 3 minutes in game saving.
All in one, it seems that the game included two possibilities that are not possible at all.
The hood must have about some 100 empty lots, what means we are only allowed to build houses for some crap townies.
You know, on the end this is a Barbie game.
I cannot play the retards created. I cannot recognize them not to mention that no matter how my couples look like, their children are simply water drops.
Besides, the game is simply tiring. I got headache and I cannot remember last time I got headache, I was almost believing that I had no longer one.
I'm back playing TS2.

Are you people tabbing out when you save? Apparently, the save process is entirely suspended when you tab out and therefore doesn't finish.

No tabbing out, in my case.

My AwesomeMod neighborhood takes forever to save--or almost five minutes, anyway--and causes my computer to sound like it should be cleared for takeoff, what with all the fans kicking up to high speed.  The amount of time between saves seems to make no difference at all.  It takes forever to save even if I've JUST saved and haven't even done anything else.

My Indie Stone Mod neighborhood saves quickly, and the computer stays quiet about it.

Differences in the the two neighborhoods besides the mods:

The AwesomeMod neighborhood is older by about one generation of Sims.
In the AwesomeMod neighborhood I'm essentially playing the entire town, while with the Indie Mod Neighborhood only one household has been played thus far.
The AwesomeMod neighorhood has six or seven lots I've created in it (actually only four, but one--"cheap housing"--is plopped several times.)

I'll plop some of my custom lots into my Indie Mod neighborhood and see if that causes that one to take forever to save.

ETA: I plopped all my custom lots, and moved to another household, following the oldest child of the original household.  The game still saves quickly and without computer fuss.
 

I've had the save issues regardless of Awesomemod. They seem more related to the amount of data being saved. The further I progress in the game, the more likely I am to experience save issue. Early on in the game my saves were fine. Starting a new game and my saves are fine (with AM.) The problems show up once my main house gets to larger sizes, and I start manipulating more NPCs or adding other houses, and thus the save gets bigger. We arent alone in these save issues. If you do some googling like I have, you will find there are plenty of people with the issues I listed above. Everyone has a different "idea" as to why it happens. I've heard everything from cheats, cracks, 64bit, patching, piracy and mods to cause it, but I can dismiss most of those as I have several installed versions of the game running here, one has no Awesomemod, no cheating, no cracks, is 32bit and is legitimate, yet still gets the issue.

From all I've experienced with bugs around the time it starts having save issues, it seems to be more to do with a memory leak issue than anything else, and that problem seems to get worse as you progress through the game and obtain more items and more sims.  Take a look at your save game sizes. The bigger they are, the more data is being saved and the longer it will take to save. Mine are currently around 40Mb, and the GFs are around 35Mb, though they have been known to jump up to around 60Mb from time to time for both of us (remember she doesnt use any mods, just patterns.)

As for the act of saving. I never alt-tab when saving. The first couple saves usually work fine, and take about 20 seconds. After I've played a couple hours, I start getting issues with saving, such as crashing or error codes during trying to save.

I've recently tested my theory of mods possibly causing memory leaks and it doesnt seem to be related as nothing changed in terms of my save ability. I would guess that it's and EA problem and only crops up for players after they have progressed in the game and accumulated a lot of stuff. That seems to be when I start having issues and when the GF starts having issues. Which seems to be the case in your example above too. In one game you have no issues, but it's a fairly early game, where as the AM version has been played a lot longer.

No tabbing out.

The size of the save file is about 63 Mb. I tried to load "no story mode" save and switch the story mode back on, aging on. I played for two sim days on fast forward without switching households and saved under different name. The save took the same 15 minutes as before.

It seems that once you play for a while with story mode off your game is irreversibly borked.

My legacy game, with story mode on, is in 5th generation now, save file 35 Mb, saving time 4 mins.

A new game with all humans but my chosen 12 dead, six new houses built (all the rest are still present as on startup, except empty now) but never unpaused saved in 2 seconds.

Edit:
It seems to me not the stuff so much as sims with all their traits and relationships that cause the game to bloat. Especially homeless and NPCs. I'll try to play a post apocalypse scenario (in empty hood and story mode off, no jobs, no maids) and report later.

One thing I started to suspect that can be the main cause for such delay, is a personal habit I got in TS3. When I am decorating or painting houses I use to save a special color combination that I need to use many times to get a special effect, like for example the darned Wall Painting. For example I wanted to paint a swimming pool to be completely merged to a lake for a special childish house that my partner is building. We both include special effects and we both save special pattern combinations to be retouched once the combinations available are either too dark, too yellow, too green, well, too much of something. You never find the combination you really want. Same for some clothing once I found out that the ugliest dress available in game can look fantastic with some right combinations. I can stop doing this but then I can blame EA for one more impossible possibility.

I'd guess the problem is simply the amount of data bloat involved. Try typing "therapture" into the console and seeing if the problem persists.

Pescado, that was ebil!  ;D
I just managed to kill my entire neighborhood, trying that! I do have story mode on, unlike the OP, but I have the 20 minutes save problem too after installing some custom content -- which also fails to show in the game anyway. Meh.

My father was a Pentecostal preacher, so I grew up in church listening to sermons about the end of the world.  I was reading this thread and read Pescado's post and started picturing a ragged street preacher shouting "The end is here!" when I reached the command "therapture".   Then I proceeded to the next post and realized that was exactly what happened when you use that command, minus the street preacher of course.

Thank you for the much needed laughter!

I have story mode on. What sort of custom content are you installing?

My GF was having issues after installing lots of .package patterns. It would reach a point where she couldnt save and was getting graphical corruption after installing a certain amount of patterns.

Forget  about it. I found out the reason for the saving delay and it has nothing to do with the suppositions.
The bug is that I downloaded an empty neighborhood somewhere (maybe at MTS2) that was supposed to have only empty lots, no families, anything. I was very happy to start my own hood from zero - Mistake!
I used the awesome "ListAllHomeless" and got a huge list of all the start personage from Sunset Valley - all of them - as homeless, just occupying space, whole families without a visible home.

Exported all my created families with houses and started a new hood, this time with all the original personage. Placed back one by one all the 20 families that I created in the supposed "Empty" hood. Entered the lots and everything was alright, all the characters in the correct family links, all the rewards, skill points, everything in order. Houses reset, pristina clean, the only thing, everybody had no wishes (I give a damn to wishes).

Saved every lot, saved the whole hood, saved more than excessive and every save took 30 seconds.

Problem solved.

Actually ive just done something similar. Using the listallhomeless command I found I had 59 unnamed NPC and about 6 named. I went and made each household sacred and then did the command JM suggested "therapture", which then purged everything but about 10 nameless NPC (unsure why they remain.) If that doesnt work right, then I'll try the export method.

I have about ten custom patterns, most of which don't show in the game. The REAL issues didn't begin until this morning when I attempted to add sims3pack files using Delphy's installer (not the monkey, the other one that -is- for sim3packs). Now my game takes 18-30 minutes to save, and graphical updates are chugging like my videocard was about to asplode. It takes the naked meshes almost two minutes to load into colour when I open a lot or visit a rabbithole. The packs I tried to add (did I mention most of them don't show in game either?) were EA shop stuff and some innocent looking clothes from Parsimonious and MTS. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me next that the EA stuff had an extra security check somewhere that is killing me, but I doubt that the two other sources would have that sort of thing.

Damn you, EA. I can afford to buy the game. I just don't -want- to. Damn you and your Securom.


ETA:

^O^     <--- screaming street preacher.

I went ahead and made everyone in my neighborhood sacred, then raptured the rest. The game removed 149 sims, but saves still take about 6 minutes for me. Not as bad as 20, of course, but still annoying. So the homeless might not be the cause.

Dont know what could be causing your issues, but just in case, here's a few tips.

Even with a non-legit game, you can still use the ea launcher to install stuff. The recommendation is usually to disable the network connection first, though not sure if it really matters. Then to save diskspace, just delete the files from the downloads folder after. That's if you think you are having issues with Delphy's installer. I usually always clear cache files when installing new stuff, i just find it's more reliable.

As for extra protection. I doubt they are protected, as every person who downloads from the EA store gets the exact same links to files. Though always run those official sim3packs through the compressorizer, as most the time they wont work otherwise.

I tried the therapture command without sacred and it removed 189 npcs. Then reloaded and used it after setting households to sacred in edit town mode. Again it said 189, but I doubt that it actually removed that many, that is probably just listing what it expected to remove if it wasnt for the sacred option. However, It did remove about 55 from the listhomeless. The problem is, i still had 10 NPC homeless afterwards, and then after returning to the game that number went up to 33 NPC.

Where do all these homeless "NPC" come from I wonder, and how can I be rid of them; do i need to be rid of them?

Ah. Well, I know I had 70-ish NPCs and two homeless families. After The Rapture there were no homeless families, still 7 NPCs. I switched to different houses twice, pressed play for 5 seconds, then paused again, and had 9 NPCs and a homeless family. This was 4 am game time, so the family wasn't triggered by Story Progression. Where are these sims coming from?

They're coming from your sims' careers. Since there is a minimum coworker/boss requirement, every time the game wishes to generate some coworkers or bosses, it will spawn a fambly and select someone from it.

But no one new got a job in the 5 second interval. Is the game changing bosses/co-workers behind the scenes?

So it can be expected that number will fluctuate. At least I got rid of the named homeless duplicates that I had. Oddly most of them seem to be copies of new Single Sims i had moved into town. Yet those particular sims are still in town, but their duplicates are no longer listed.

However, from the looks of it, I can pretty much eliminate this as the cause of my save issues.

There's a command to wipe out clones of your sims, too, if they somehow snuck in from the library before you could install them.

Oh that might be handy. What command would that be. I didn't see anything like that under help.

Just a thank you to Anach for good ideas. I ended up just doing a fresh install and patch though, and for some reason this solved everything. Something, somewhere must have gone corrupted on me, but I have no idea what. :/

Should be "nukeimpostors". Will wipe out any fambly containing an impostor of any sm in the current fambly.

Cool thanks. Ill try it out tonight after the movie.

It was a worthy idea, but unless the executable was compiled to run with 64-bit addressing, it won't take advantage of extra memory.  The exe will only address up to 2gb without that being done.  There are certain utilities on the web that reportedly allow "patching" of the exe so that it can address more, though I would be skeptical about their success with a game that was intended to be run on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.  Perhaps later I'll backup my exe and find out, though I'm crunched right now working on a new Sims 3 mod.

I'd be curious to know if you looked in the task manager while that ini tweak was active, and saw any increase in the memory use for TS3.exe, or if it was still around 2gb or less.

I am running x64 Windows 7, with 8gig RAM. I have heard rumour of this problem being more prevalent on X64 versions of windows, but not limited to x64. If it's caused by memory leaks, then there is probably nothing we can do about it. Increasing the memory may extend the play time, but not much else. I've yet to see Sims3 use more than about 1.6gig of RAM.

I did notice that the time I can play and successfully save for is reduced if using the plan outfit or change appearance options. It seems loading those interfaces can not only be prone to crashes themselves, but often when returning to game I will experience missing textures and other anomalies, whcih again seems to look like a ferocious memory leak problem.


Im interested in whether your game has a large number of controlled sims? Most the issues with saving seem to be from people who have progressed in the game quite some way. Myself I have about 7 sims in my household. Surprisingly my GF hasnt had a save issue for some time now, and she has edited a lot more objects than me. Her house is bigger, her town has more custom buildings, but she only has 3 sims compared to my 7. However, she is also using 32bit XP with 4gig RAM.

We here are comparing two different computers running XP 32bits. I am in an Intel 2.4 Ghz processor with 2GB RAM, File Page Code 4096MB, NVidia 8600GT with 512MB RAM.
My friend has an AMD 3.8 with 4GB RAM, File Page Code 4096MB, NVidia 7800GT with 256MB RAM.
I get better game performance than her, besides that I managed to make my graphic card to accept Very High Sim Detail, hers doesn't even start if done so.
I'm noticing that at every save the time increases of some seconds. I count how many times the saving wheel spins at every save. It increases of 3 spins at every save. So, it is really a problem that is only temporary solved and will sure repeat again.

While XP itself can address up to 3gb with the proper configuration, 32-bit applications cannot without being edited first, and/or recompiled.  Even after being enabled for it, they have to physically *want* to address larger space (like with the ini setting).  So unless all three are happening, it's just a placebo / voodoo effect.  :)  I have had it make a difference in other games in the past on XP, but have moved past that to the wonderful world which is 64-bit now.

Perhaps after SLAM is complete, I'll visit it and see if it makes any performance difference on Vista 64, since applications here have a native shell within which to acquire more memory after being edited.  I don't personally have any performance issues though - even my saves only take 10 seconds or so.  RAID too is a wonderful thing.

Keep toying with the idea however - there is a slim chance it could pay off and work.

Ive been doing some testing this past couple days, and this is what i've found so far.

1. If I save twice per sim day, I can usually only make 2 saves before it fails with either error or CTD at the end of saving (bad save.)
2. If I wait longer before saving (2 days) I have higher chance of getting error code 12 the first time I try to save.
3. After the second successful save, I often end up with graphical glitches, such as missing textures (black bodies, or black UI objects.)
4. If I reload a game after getting the missing textures from saving, I still have black objects. I need to clear the cache files to fix the missing texture issues.
5. Error code 12 can usually be bypassed by removing all saves from my save directory and attempting to save again.

It seems to me that the saving issues arent a game problem, but more of the save manager itself. It does seem that saving the game somehow causes cache corruption and often has an issue with the overwriting of existing saves. It is also possible that saving expedites the issue of the memory leak. So most likely there is nothing we can do to fix it and have to wait for another patch.

Strangely, my Indie Mod neighborhood still saves quickly.  Maybe when they killed EA's version of story progression they also inadvertently killed whatever caused saves to take forever on older neighborhoods.

Just an update on this idea for game speed, lag, and save times...

I went and backed up my TS3.exe, patched it with the generally accepted 4gb patcher on the web, went and edited all relevant ini settings to be a full factor larger (not just 2x, but 10x), and haven't seen it use any more memory than usual in the task manager (1.4-1.6gb).  Going to keep toying with the idea, though I don't think it'll pay off without future 64-bit support from EA.

Moondance, my game with Awesome mod installed, takes 25 minutes to save.  So I would like to try Indie mod--do you uninstall Awesome when you want to play the Indie neighborhood?  If so, can I do that when I have Supreme Commander enabled?  I've checked out the Indie mod, and though it looks good, would rather use Awesome, but if Indie will reduce my save times I may soon have no choice.

Mine takes ten seconds (timed it once).  Perhaps there's something amiss with your computer to have it run this slow.  Defragged and cleaned-out hard disks?  Sufficient and static Windows paging file set correctly?  Enough RAM?  Not running anti-virus while you play?  Not running a hundred other programs while you play?

Thanks, I'll check out these things--should have enough RAM though--both my husband and a computer expert friend say that I have humongous amounts of RAM.

edit:  I can figure out how to check everything but the "sufficient and static windows paging file set correctly"  How do I do this and what should the correct values be?

Depends on what OS you are running, but it is basically in the same area.  Here's (http://www.computertooslow.com/move-windows-page-file.asp) a quick and dirty page that gives you an idea where to look.  I normally set it to 2x RAM, but never more than 6gb.

What I think is happening to you Lissa, is that your hard disk subsystem is slower than the rest of the computer (CPU/GPU/Memory).  This is a common problem in off-the-shelf style computers like you'd buy from Dell, in that most people don't pay attention to the speed of their hard disk, just it's capacity.  One thing I found very important with Sims 3 - it stores savegames and cache files in your My Documents folder, which means if you haven't defragged that it will chug and chew on the disk like a rabid dog.

My particular setup is going to be faster than most, due to having 3 fast drives in a RAID stripe array, and a Quad core CPU.  But you should never have to wait more than 1-2 minutes for a save regardless, if your system is tuned well.

Thank you, JBoat, I'll defrag tomorrow morning and quiz my husband and friend about the hard disk subsystem.

I stumbled into this problem lately, when I got my first Error 12 messages. Along with that, saving, be it successful or not, was taking more and more time. Searching for what's causing this I did a few tests:

Two Neighborhoods, number one: week 1, day 4.
Number Two: week 31, day 7.

Took every mod out except Awesome, and then took even that out. I let those Neighborhoods run just a few seconds, then saved. This took normally about 40 seconds, except the constellation I'm usually playing with, the week 31, day 7 one, with Awesome in. This one took 13 minutes to save. And as the game progresses, this time will even grow further as it did until now. So I can choose between several unacceptable choices: not to save much often by risking an error 12 rendering hours of playing useless, or, saving often and not having any game flow at all, or, taking Awesome completely out and having an unacceptlable gameplay this way. None of these choices is appealing to me. Never heard of the Indie mod, though, maybe I should look into that.

Well, you have to uninstall Awesomemod to use Indie, so yes, though to "uninstall" one mod to temporarily use the other, what I actually do is rename it by changing the filename extension.  I also do that with my neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods themselves are named after whichever mod they are associated with.  So when I load up Indie, the only neighborhood(s) that show up as available to play are Indie neighborhoods, and ditto for Awesome. 

It may not matter though. This hasn't happened to me yet, but I've seen a few reports now of people using Indie also complaining about their games taking a while to save, so mine will probably become slow soon too, since my Indie 'hood is beginning the 4th generation. 

What gets me about it though is that, at least in my game, the long save times occur suddenly, rather than getting progressively longer as the neighborhood gets older and larger. I played one neighborhood for at least two weeks--long enough for my original family to be on its 6th generation, all saves were quick, and then all of a sudden, it happened. I saved once and it was quick and painless, saved again maybe fifteen minutes later and it took around five minutes. And after that, that neighborhood always took a long time to save, so I gave up and deleted it.  I've started new neighborhoods that became slow to save on the 2nd save, and others that took two or three days to become slow savers. It's just weird.

Voodoo, then.  Do you suppose long saves relates at all to how many families in the neighborhood you play?  I play every family in game, and add more of my own.  I had thought that once Pescado had story mode whipped I would switch to playing 5 or 6 families and turn off TS2 style aging, but saves are increasing so rapidly I fear for the state of the game itself, and think I might have to go back to TS2.  It took forever to load but that was after years of play, installing all but one of the expansion packs, and tons of custom content.

Oh well, off to defrag.

I play like a dozen famblys, so that isn't it. I think it's purely dependent on whether or not you have a dangling pile of garbage somewhere. Error 12 seems to resolve itself if you just wait for it and keep playing a bit, and try to save later. If not, you can see how big your save files are getting. Try using "purgereactions" or somesuch.

I'll do that.  At present I have completed disk cleanup and started defrag at 8 am--it is 10 am here now, and is 30% done.  I'm glad to hear it may be possible to play many families--I'm obsessive about my games.

Just FYI - I use purgereactions every night in my game (sim nights), and almost every night it purges a few danglers.  Seems to keep some proverbial ghosts at bay, which is good, but I have no idea where they come from to begin with.

Additionally, I have noticed a lot of famblys moving around in my game, though people like the Landgraabs have yet to which is good.

Lastly - through my sim's entire Science 10 career, he didn't have even 1 boss.  And he only ever had 2 co-workers (long lifespan was enabled).  I thought the second was to be expected, but the first was highly irregular in Sims 3 for me.  I've played 4-5 other sims in the science track before using AwesomeMod, and they all had bosses at some point.  It might have been "broken" before, but it certainly was more immersive when it was.  Not having a boss, ever, was really an immersion breaker.

I don't have a slow-saving neighborhood currently, because I got aggravated and deleted them, but if someone were to give you a copy of a neighborhood that takes forever to save, would you be able to look into it and tell if there was something fixable that's causing it, or if it's an EA thing that we're just going to have to learn to live with?

I am curious if the hoods that take longer to save are derrived from EA hoods or are they from the empty hoods?

The reason I asked this is I have 6 Hoods basically. The two Maxis, two cleaned hoods I got off here, and two hoods I got off modthesims which were cleaned also but just had the community lots in tact. Having played the Maxis hoods longer I would have supposed they would be the slow savers - but are in fact still saving almost as fast as when they were brand new. I noticed the slowdown started happening in all the "cleaned" hoods. As I got the modthesims hoods before the two here, I first thought it may have been because the "cleaning" left something behind that was causing a hang during saves - which is why I came here to snoop around and find out if others had tried these hoods and were having slow saving. That's when I discovered 2 hoods here, and assumed the cleaning job would have been more thorough, so I downloaded them. I did introduce 30 or so Sim families to each of these 4 hoods, and there are no duplicate Sims or families.

Also my slow save is no where as drastic as others have reported - at least not yet anyway. At most maybe three minutes, as I barely have enough time to make a cup of coffee in the time it takes - but it's really annoying to see the cluttered Maxis fuglies hood is so instantaineous still.


I have the awesomemod, delphies default skins and eyes, Peggys default hair and a lot of recolors, new patterns, and all of the store stuff for everything. I check for updates on all the modded stuff daily and update if there is one.

I do have a really good new pc - AMD 64 bit Phenom Quad core Black Edition with a Geforce 9400 gt with 1 gig onboard and it's  either 6 or 8 gigs of Corsair DDr3 for ram. I don't seem to have any other issues - and would be quite pissed if I ever take 18 minutes to save like one person here reported after getting this beast built, but I keep wondering if it is just a coincidence happening on cleaned hoods and not the EA hoods - or is the EA hoods eventually developing this problem too? It may help us to know  if people could mention their hoods in general that are having the slower save time.

I'm also having long saves (a couple of minutes or so sounds about right) using the Riverview hood.  It's very crowded (I moved all of the Sunset Valley sims into Riverview, along with a few others...altogether I have about 60 famblies) and I can't figure out if it's due to the large number of famblies, or if it's due to something else that I don't know about.  I'm only using AwesomeMod, the penis mod, the buyable lifefruits/fish, and the one that equalizes all of the beds' energy gains.

My saves in a regular Riverview hood prior to my mass combination were only a few seconds.  Gonna test out a few things and get back with you.

ETA: Took out all the mods except AM, saves are still long (actually about 5 minutes long, since I timed it using the "smoke a cigarette" method...very scientific).  I'm gonna assume it's because of the large number of famblies in the 'hood.

I had one hood that I used destroyallhumans on, and added about 20 families of varying sizes.  I didn't play it long because it started saving slow on the very first night.  Otherwise, all my hoods have been Sunset Valley with the normal EA sims plus one or two CAS sims that I made to play myself.  I have Riverview, but have only used it for testing and have never saved it.

One thing from AwesomeMod that might be increasing bloat exponentially, is all the non-cleared inventories and needs/wants for each sim in each household you guys play.  Not only that, but in a normal game you don't get to control furniture in more than one home at a time, but I believe Awesome lets you do that as well (correct me if I'm mistaken, I personally don't ever play more than 1 house at a time).

My current game is a medium sized 20x30 with 1 sim on it (move-in g/f soon), and not a lot of stuff in storage.  Personal sim inventory is getting up there with fruits/veggies and fish, and there is a sizeable garden outside, but nothing glorious.  That, combined with the fact my computer is highly tuned and fairly fast, is probably what is keeping my saves really quick (latest was 15 seconds).

I have no doubt if I started to play every sim in 6 households, have each one with a custom inventory, and manage all their houses simultaneously, that my save would bloat tremendously.  I guess that may just be the price you pay for playing God.   ;D

JBoat,

You guessed right. After I placed all these families in the empty hoods, I have been playing one family a night to build up relationships, jobs, skills, etc, etc. In my case I also have Story progression and aging off - assuming i could establish each household on it's own path until all households have a place  on the landscape with me being the carving God of that direction. Then i planned on turning story progression and aging back on with the last family in each hood which are my key choice family that I figured I would control in the end.

I am doing this in all 4 of the "empty hoods", where the EA hoods I had played fairly normal with aging on and story progression on. I was not liking the fact that EA screwed up the way I thought it was supposed to play - with all aging pretty much on key with each other - when instead the houses I was not playing seemed to have excellerated aging on. My own Sims were still not yet adults (they were YA) and I was playing the 190 day option of aging, yet their supposedly same age former schoolmates were turning elder already and I had not done  anything to keep my sims younger. So this totally annoyed me almost as much as the cloned neighborhood babies and the vanishings of the few Sims I had put in the game as chosen Sims for my Sims. It was as if the game mechanics purposely chose to eliminate any Sims not of the selected household including former selected household sibblings that had been moved out. This was my chief interest is being rid of all EA sims at the get go - which meant I needed to give each family I put in the game a history.

Like I said it isn't as though a few minutes is long - especially compared with Sims 2- it's just the fact the EA Hoods save in seconds while the cleared ones are now taking minutes and I have only played about 5 or 6 of the families in each of these new hoods so far. I wonder what happens by the time I get to family #30 which is my own main family in each hood. It is like the cleaning process actually bloats the hood when it should be emptying it or if you compare the number of sims with a history in these new hoods to the sims EA had in their hoods.

My neighborhood that takes a long time to save is the original Sunset, not cleaned.  TS2 aging on, and I am playing all the families.  I play each family one sim week at a time with frequent switching to check on what other families are doing.

I've had three crashes while saving today. Had to go back to the .backup every time.
My save times are not particularly bad, about two minutes.

Aging off. Story off. Save is 62.1 mb.

As I am not the least bit awesome, I didn't dare and just used those cleaned by others. There is cleaned variants - 3each hood - one modthesims and some precleaned hoods on this site. There is a way on here to also clean your own hood but being me I was not about to mess with it - as I screwed up several Sims 2 games some years ago trying that kind of thing and never again deleted anything. But if you search around you can find out how it's done by reading several threads, and perhaps you'll have been  luck than I ever do.

I am so unawesome once I make a mistake I try never to do it again. hehehe Go to the Sims 3 section under Facts and Strategy. Answers there.

Good idea to create a series of saves, such as "save 1", "save 2", "save 3", and use them over and over. That way you should never need to use the .backup, as you are never overwriting the current save. I do this in every game I play. One save file is asking for trouble.

I just do a savegame backup after every session.

I got fed up with the time it took for my Sunset Valley to save, despite changing things around such as taking mods in and out of game etc.   I decided to start a different game using Riverview with about 10 families in total.  My saves are now fairly normal and have not experienced any crashes as yet.  Having said that, I doubt the problem is gone, just delayed.

Tested with NoInventoryDestruction disabled (the wishes aren't disableable), and it still takes 10 minutes to save. And my NB is the default one, no empty download.

That isn't it. The game already saves all houses anyway, so the number of houses you manipulate has no effect on anything other than how white your screen gets. Inventories aren't really it, either, nor wants (TS2 retained all wants for all sims at all times in the entire neighborhood, without any problems at all). The cause of the save file bloatage is simply a mystery.

Well the next thing I'd be curious about then, is the relation between save file size, and time to save that file.  Combine that with the number of sims/households controlled in-game, and we might find out something.  It might also show any differences in disk subsystem speed.

My game for example, is one household only, with 1 sim in it.  Fairly active inventory (fruits/veggies/fish), marginal furniture load, medium garden outside.  Not a social sim, so less than 10 total relationships with other sims.  My save game file is 26mb, and takes exactly 16 seconds to save.  My rig is a Q6600 (quad core) with 3 drives in a RAID stripe (64kb cluster size), pagefile on separate drive.  Needless to say, read/write speed on the primary drive (which is both the game drive and savegame/cache drive for TS3) is quite high.

I will mention that I find it interesting that a game like Sims 3 that doesn't save world state information (like Oblivion would) creates savegames of such huge sizes.  I'd think they should be much smaller, especially when only controlling 1 household.

My current neighorhood is 55 megabytes and takes less than 30 seconds to save.  The last slow-saving neighborhood that I deleted was around 60 megabytes and took around 5 minutes to save.  Today I've spent time with a household with eight sims, and a household with only one sim.  There was no noticeable difference in save times--less than 30 seconds, either way

Jboat -

Logically Jboat that makes sense, but since when has EA adhered to logic in their programming? A key example how that factor seems skewed take for instance my original first hood - Sunset Valley which was as vanilla as they come because I wanted to actually learn to play the game using EA's own chosen families. So my first family was the Goths, and because Cornelia was the sister of Mrs. Crumplebottom I naturally choose her house next (as well as the fact I could learn about playable ghosts).

Using your own argument these two families are at the extreme opposite of your single, one Sims household. I totally remade both homes and grounds,  using CAS a good deal. Heavily built on their town relationships, skills, bought partnerships in all businesses, and increased the families. The Goths became 5. The Crumplebottoms became 8, with 2 of these ghost babies - 4 were normal Simmy babies. I went throught the long, drawn out process to take Eric Darling from ghost to playable ghost to eventually a reinstated humanoid "living" Sim, including his two ghostly counterpart babies; and all the while working on his physical plumpness to a slim, trim muscular Sim at the top of his career. The Goths chugged along steadily and acquired all there was to acquire. The Crumplebottom/Darlings did it in a whirlwind. If any households should have had bloated files it was these two household - yet they both saved in less than a half minute.


Yet  a  new sim I downloaded (someones avatar that was on the exchange)to a nearly empty of Sims neighborhood takes over a minute to save after I drop him on a 20x30 empty lot so I can build him his own house I simply placed one wall a toilet and shower on the empty landscape and moved him in. It was the minute I saved again after I put him in a nearly bare structure of one bedroom with a combined living room and kitchen and the bathroom - added a small pond for fishing and only used the bare necessities in furnishings - the cheapest in the catalogue that the bloat was painfully obvious as the save took more than triple the time and the only thing my sims had accomplished was reading a cookbook, taking a cooking class and getting a job at the restaurant. He had talked to just 2 other Sims. Which totally surprised me as he was the only Sim I had at that time put in an empty hood. Even with aging and story progression off (after it was supposedly fixed) the game eagerly pushes Sims into existence where none exist. But the point is the save time and this household certainly should not have taken  over a minute and a half to save at this point. It was also strange that increasing the lot population to three, adding a second floor and 3 more bedrooms, nevermind the fact of skilling, job advancements and acquiring much more expensive stuff seemed to increase the save time that drastically after the first boom in save time. As the additions only added about 20 seconds to the save time, so the house still took under 2 minutes to save. But this was painfully 4 times as long as the EA families highly bloated household. This is what makes no sense.

I have a slightly different foldering method, which involves weekly and daily folders, so I'll never lose more than a day whatever happens.
Found a savegame from May yesterday! Loaded it up, how naive I was....not even rotating driveways onto roads. Tch tch.

I've started experiencing long save times and increased save file size after using destroyallnpcs and destroyalltownies repeatedly. The file size suddenly went up from approximately 30 MB to over 60 MB. I tried clearing inventories and wishes, but it didn't help.
Tired of waiting ten minutes for each save, I saved all households to the bin and inserted them into a new, identical neighbourhood, after using therapture so I wouldn't have any duplicate sims (I had some of the townies and npcs married to my sims). In 5 sim days, I've played each family a bit, and the save file size is a reasonable 31 MB and takes 15-20 seconds to save. All this without changing my mod configuration.
Also, I've noticed that when playing the borked neighbourhood, the game doesn't run nearly as smooth as when playing the new one, especially on the higher speeds (ultra speed is actually slower than double speed). Additionally, if use dresser or plan outfit more than once before quitting and restarting the game, I get error code 12 for sure every time I try to save. This doesn't happen in the new neighbourhood, though.

I've also been experiencing long saves. In fact, saves are starting to trigger low memory messages from my computer, which they never did before. I could have browser, chat and misc things open with no problem, now it prompts to shut the Sims down every time it saves due to low memory with only a handful of tabs open. Luckily the saves have still happened so far, but I'm confused why it seems to be draining much more resources. I checked homeless, 40something NPCs and 3 small families. Purgereactions didn't work, I assumed because it's a SupCom command, or I didn't do it right. I'm still new to this.

I've played almost every household at least once and almost every lot is full, but now stick to one household, which is getting a bit full on produce but otherwise fine. Storymode, despite being on, seems to be not functioning at all, as it's been 2-3 sim weeks since I've seen a single popup, read anything that wasn't junk from the newspaper, or heard a gossip that wasn't rich/promotion-related. I've tried toggling settings, that seems to do nothing. I thought it might be I had too many sacred sims, removed it from all but one family, still nothing happening when 1am rolls around. I'm not sure if it's related or not. Aging is on and set to epic.

Any ideas on what would be causing the increase in save time and memory hogging would be most helpful.

I kept self for 2 days trying different combinations to see what could be the cause for such delays. My conclusion is that it deals on something that probably EA has implemented self to guarantee that players would do exactly what they want them to do. Sort of punishment for not following the rules.
Explaining: I installed the Awesome Mod in one computer and my partner is running Indie Stone on the other. First we both continued the same game play (everything off) and we had the same delay in both computers.
Then I changed the game play and created a new hood. This time I chose one Sim to play (Agnes Crumplebottom) and switch everything on (Story Mode and Aging, but used the longest aging process). Suddenly everything was smooth and game saving takes only 10 seconds, no matter how many times I save.
I changed Agnes with the midlife crisis many times to make her different and tried to relate her to many sims (the maid Elf Grading or something, the neighbor male from Roomies). Unvariably to every romantic movement it seems that the males scape just before whoohoo for the most incredible reasons. The neighbor scaped with a message "Sim X has to be somewhere else right away", the maid just denied woohoo rudely. I played Agnes for time that would be equivalent to kill her in a normal aging progress and she is still virgin.
The supposed dead husband that is buried in her garden wasn't even introduced to her - they simply didn't know each other.
So the initial hood is already programmed internally and has the meaning to just disappear in the normal course of the socalled "Story Mode". Any atempt to stop the process causes the game to lag.
No matter if Awesome or Indie, stopping the story mod cause issues like Sims get stuck without interactions possibility (I got almost the whole neighborhood stuck in swimming-pools or in front of a work building), visited families that don't move at all.

It seems that this "big Life Stories Game" (in my mind this is not TS at all but LS continuance), is planned so that you play ONLY ONE SIM and watch the others.

Attempts to create an empty hood and play it "blank" is just visual.
Everytime a new townie is created it takes exactly the form and shape of the original characters. It simply places them back.
This seems to be the reason that I recreated the Goths and the game had a lot of problem to recreate the thumbnails (everytime I loaded them, the thumbnails were exactly like the original destroyed family). They are programmed internally to be exactly the way they were.

There are many discussion going on about how Indie or how Awesome does this or that and how it should continue. Has anyone any idea on HOW EA is going to continue? This is only the base game and from previous experience we all know that they DO NOT know at all How they themselves are going to continue. They change format and rules at EVERY EP.
Sounds like Political Parties!

Today I did some further testing and fixed a lot of existing issues.

1. Fixed crashing and other anomalies during save.
2. Fixed lack of story messages (Awesomemod feature) at 1am.
3. Fixed stuck teddy bear in child inventory.
4. Fixed issue with reward points being out of sync within the UI.
5. Fixed issue with "first kiss" buffs not showing up.
6. Fixed missing audio notifications and music.

Ok so it sounds great, but what did I do?

Well it started with some testing I did by starting a new game in Riverview. While playing my Riverview game I noticed that a lot of the problems I'd been having with the last game (listed above) were no longer present. So what I did was export my household+house and also some of the other new families I'd created around town, then placed them into a fresh game of Sunset Valley, and re-merged the households of the exported Sims. The drawback of doing so has been that I lost all my custom paintings, as well as friends and story progression of my previous Sunset Valley. However, the benefits (at least for me) outweigh any losses I have experienced.

While I had to edit a couple relationships to restore sibling status to a few of the exported sims when merging them back into households, I did try to limit myself when using debug commands. One of the main tools I avoided using was the "Select Sim" command, and instead went into edit town, then changed household the proper way. The reason for this is that I noticed after using "Select Sim", my save times increased, and also any furniture edits i made to those other households when using "select sim" could be seen permanently through the windows of the house, unlike standard furniture, which could mean they arent being saved in the correct place when trying to save.

So far I've been able to regain my ability to save continuously without issue. Only time will tell whether or not my save issues get worse as the story progresses, as right now my saves are around 27Mb, rather than the 40-50Mb of my previous game. A lot of the problems could be from my last game being a pre-awesomemod game and having so many different mods installed and removed, so hopefully I will have less issues now my active mod list has stabilised somewhat.

If the number is low, these are actually "benign" emitters that are not really dangling, but it is nearly impossible to detect this condition accurately in code and no real harm is committed by purging them, so we wipe them all out. Affected emitters include real stink emitters, ghost emitters, and Criminal Mastermind emitters, so you don't want to casually wave this around for no reason.

Back on the original topic, if I may...

My town has been plagued with the long save times for quite a while now.  They tend between 10 and 20 minutes depending on what sort of stupidity I've been up to in game.  They do tend to get progressively longer though, with the next time I save taking longer to perform than the previous.

However, entirely accidentally I found that removing my mods seemed to alleviate the issue entirely.

Steps:
1) Removed all mods (I was having a crash problem, so I removed them all to determine where the issue was)
2) Loaded my game
3) Saved the game in record time (it took under one minute to save, which I have not bested in many weeks)
4) Closed the game
5) Re-added my mods
6) Successive saves have so far been on par with the "under one minute" initial save

Now, I suspect when I start getting back into the game and playing my houses, the save time will start creeping back up.  But now I at least have an approach to "restart" the clock.

Some interesting tidbits:

Prior to the fast save, my save game file was 122,596 KB in size.  The fast save produced a file of 104,965 KB in size.

Somewhere in those missing 17,000 KB of data is the culprit of my extremely long saves.

I checked on the households after re-adding of the mods, and found the following:

1) All the promises are missing
- I was not expecting those to vanish, as I thought they were only reset when the family was set unselectable.  However they are all missing, except for the active household

2) All the personal inventory is still there
- I WAS expecting this to vanish.  I was pleasantly surprised to find it still available on all my inactive sims

I simply can't believe the saving process would bog down that badly on only the Promises data.  But until I locate what other data might be missing, that is my only theory.

----

A word of warning:

If you attempt this, ensure that you do not have any homes marked as Sacred, or the Supreme Commander running on any sim.  The initial time I saved, the system outright deleted my Sacred household.  Though it did so, very quickly. :)

Now I'm unsure as to whether this is because they were marked, or because they were running SC (as both were applicable)...  But consider yourself apprised.

----

On an aside...  Removing AwesomeMod also removed all my tracking markers, obviously.  A future "nice-to-have" would be the ability to turn on Tracking on ALL households with a single menu operation.

Good Day. :)

I'm playing my new created hood and my chosen SIm (Agnes Crumplebottom) for 2 test days and had related Agnes to 5 different men that I move in her house, make babies with her and move the man out with the babies. The game is saving normally (30 to 35 seconds) without any change. So, I still suppose that the saving delay is the Aging OFF/Story Mode OFF (I have both on now full time).
Two new problems are visible and has nothing to do with mods: I'm playing the longest aging and something is not matching at all. The families that are not being played are aging in a completely unlogical way. Sims are aged at random and many families that should have about 250 days left, suddenly show up as elders.
The other problem is that I move Agnes' men out and chose them temporarily to stablish them in a new home and start a story slightly. I take only some hours to do this and at this short period, Agnes move out from her house. It is a pain in the neck. I put her back to her old house again and go to adjust the others moved. She immediately move out again and I find her in very poor houses though she has more than 200,000 cash in her account. Worst, she move out and leave high expensive cars behind, causing the lots to be extremely expensive.
She moved 3 times just because I left her on her own for some hours. I suppose that if I didn't have the awesome mod, she would become homeless with a fortune in cash in the inventory.
No, no boy. The game story is 100% dismatching.

Removing all mods, starting the game, saving, and then re-adding the mods cut down my save times considerably as well.  Went from 6 minutes saves down to less than a minute.

Same here, thanks twallan, that was a great tip. I wonder what Pescado has to say about this "discovery."

Twallan's discovery worked for me, too.  Save files dropped from about 78k to about 55k, and the saving time dropped from 15 or so minutes to a a minute and a half or so.

I have no idea why it works like that, but it does.

I did it with sacred households intact (I don't use SC, though), figuring that if it deleted those households I'd just work from one of my other saves and that time remove sacred from everyone.  My Sacred households were fine and just lost Sacred status.  The only thing I lost-- besides wants, which is really trivial-- was that some custom clothing from MTS2 has to be returned to my sims' used wardrobes through the dresser command.

I'm sure times and file sizes will creep back up, but when they get really bad I know a way to get them back down.

I don't know if it will get rid of the Error Code 12 save error; but even if it doesn't, with the shorter save times saving every 15 real life minutes wouldn't be so bad, so if I hit the EC 12 I'll lose much less progress.

I'm also interested in Pescado's theories of why it might work as well as it does.

Thanks, Twallan!

The error code 12/13 were happening since the game was released, without any additional content, so i'd say the only way that will be fixed is through an official patch. If EA fix those error codes, it may fix all our save issues, as there is definitely something up with saving.

No idea. I have never encountered this in my game, perhaps because CERTAIN PEOPLE refuse to send me an afflicted file.

Currently uploading an error13 infected save to kludgemush. Should be there in about 10mins.

Upon trying to make the next save after this, I received error 13. However, the thing with error 12/13 and the "18 minute" saves, is that while they may happen after playing a while, restarting the game allows saves to return to normal. I can pretty much guarantee that Ill get a save issue after ive made changes in game, such as using CAS or editing colours of multiple items in build mode. Though it also shows up after extended play. This happens in the base game without mods and is inflicted upon people randomly (while some get it, others do not), so I doubt there is anything that can be done about it until EA fix their save routine.

New Theory:

Problem occurs because awsomemod does not allow the game to randomly remove NPCs.

What if problem was seen duing beta testing and the fix was to keep a fixed data size - to do that it flushed NPCs that are not active in the game.

Just an idea since this doesn't seem to be going anywhere good.

Interesting theory, except it happens without awesome mod or in fact any mod. I've still experienced the long duration saves and save erros on a completely clean game.

Thank you for "purgewantquest", this works for me!

Hopefully it works consistently. Time will tell. Hopefully that's two issues fixed. Which only leaves the error code 12/13 issues to resolve.

I've been reading all 4 pages since I have the same saving issue - it took Riverview about 18-20 minutes to save and quit.  I've noticed it takes Riverview too long to save.  I was wondering what Sacred household and Supreme Commander are?  I'm guessing both have something to do with the Awesome Mod? 

As this is an awesomemod thread, that is a safe assumption to make, yes.  Next time, look around the forum and do a search instead of asking questions you have reason to suspect are stupid.  You've posted here often enough to know that!