More Awesome Than You!

I'd had lag problems with the loading after the patch (those being the least of my problems, with the blue lots being much more important), so I decided to take the advice of others to throw up my hands and start a new game.

But now it's still taking forever to load the startup town.

I'd had very slow saves, but only post-patch have I had very slow loads.  Is everyone having these or does it mean something is still wrong?

Edited to add:  I thought it would certainly load during the time it took me to write the message, but it didn't.  This is just default, beginning Sunset Valley.  Still wondering, is this normal?

Mine has been a lot slower since to load, even with all CC taken out. Another thing I've noticed since 1.7 is that when clicking the .exe for the game to load up, the windows bar kinda hangs there on the black screen until the EA logo appears, I'm on Vista, don't know if it makes any difference, apart from the fact Vista fails at everything. As long as my gameplay isn't effected though, I can live with it.

Since the patch, I find it now takes around ten minutes to get from clicking on the Sims 3 icon in Windoze to actually playing the game. I don't know what goes on for the eight minutes it takes for the actual save to load - it rarely accesses the hard drive in that time.

Nope.  Getting the same load times as before WA.  Mind you, I have almost no cc installed, and only awesomemod in the mods folder.

I get slow saves sometimes, but it does not seem to follow a consistent pattern.  I therefore blame something else on my system (antivirus?) and not the game itself.

I've noticed a huge difference in loading times for save files as well as loading times for details switching out of low resolution.  Before, it would take maybe a second or two for everything on the lot to pop up nice and clear.  Now it takes about 10 seconds for each section to appear, starting with the walls, then windows and doors, then furniture, sims, etc.  If I zoom out for a moment to see something from the neighborhood view, I have to endure it all over again once I zoom back in.  Same loading times and all.  I don't want to bother going anywhere as I spend more time waiting for crap to show up than I do interacting on the lot.  What's the point?

My first response was to clean out custom content.  I don't have a lot of .package files, but I've saved number of CASt textures to the library.  I deleted all of those, then removed the DCCache, DCBackup, and Download folders from the TS3 folder under Documents.  I then went back and reinstalled only the packs I wanted, mostly store sets.  I thought that the files in the DCCache had become bloated due to content I carelessly installed but never used, and this would give me a fresh start.  I can't tell a difference. 

One thing I did notice was that the installer was taking five minuets or so just to install one file - even something as simple as a texture.  I wonder if EA changed something about the way files are loaded and saved.

I always use task manager to close out crap I don't need running before I play.  I might need more RAMs; but that wouldn't explain the problem with the installer. With that in mind, it's hard not to think of this as a game issue rather than a computer spec one; or maybe it's a combination of both.

I loaded a vanilla game, then patched and loaded WA, then patched again. It's at 2.2 now, I think. The only CC I have is the EA store stuff, the only mod is awesomemod. I haven't had any glitches to date, but did notice very slow loading times.

I don't keep unnecessary services running - see Elder Geek or Black Viper for turning off unnecessary shit permanently. I run WinXP with 2GB RAM, video card is Radeon HD 4870, 2.2 Ghz chip. I do turn off the antivirus before playing. Edit: I should add, I have a striped RAID array with 10,000rpm disks, which makes an improvement to many games in Read/Write speed. The machine's a good little performer and I would have expected the sims to be more responsive. Saves used to take an eternity, which quite put me off the game.

Textures do seem to be rendering more slowly, but I wasn't sure because I haven't played TS3 for several months. I've been playing Dragon Age which seems to render almost instantaneously.

Edit: Correct chip rating and other random shit.

I didn't really notice a difference in load time for the game or to a neighborhood, but what did slow/lag more was the rendering and such. When in a brand new town, on a blank lot with just one sim, I scroll the camera and notice a little jerk as it moves. Where as before it was always smooth, even on a 60x60 lot with a fully furnished house and family.
I do have a bunch of hairs in, as well as NRAAS computer, Awesome, one small hack and some other cc. It's not as much as I had before WA because I haven't added everything back in yet, but even so there was no lag or camera jerk with TS3.

As someone else said, I notice after I click on the .exe the screen goes black and the windows bar sits there and sometimes flickers, like it's about to disappear. The game just takes longer to actually launch and get going now.

I have more then plenty of RAM (6GB) with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX video card, 2.6GHz chip on Windows Vista. I turn off my wireless but not my anti-virus.

The one thing I've noticed since the patch (I don't have WA) is as witch and death owner have pointed out - it seems to take an eternity for the game to render/retexture everything when you scroll around. It's almost as though the game immediately forgets anything that's off the screen and instead of reloading the textures from the HDD, it wastes CPU cycles regenerating them instead. The same can be said for CAS and CASt too - it constantly has to reload all the swatches every time I click on different tabs.

There's also a new folder in My Documents/Electronic Arts/Sims 3 called CurrentGame.sims3 which seems to duplicate the current active save when the game's running (the data is purged upon exiting) which could go some way to explaining the long load times.

I think this functionality is done to try to keep the game from overrunning the 2 GB RAM usage limit for a 32bit program and then exploding horribly as a result: The game already eats up a lot of RAM and enough added content would easily push it over if it didn't dump them from RAM to clear space.

There's a reason for this, actually: Since the game now is segmented into multiple different "zones", in order to switch zones, the zone information must be dumped out of RAM and stored someplace (otherwise save times would grow interminably long with having to load all 3 subhoods into RAM, not to mention risk blowing out aforementioned 2 GB limit). Since this information has to be stored somewhere, CurrentGame is basically a cache for this data, so as not to overwrite your save. In TS2, this sort of also existed, in that you were forced to save anytime you zoned. TS3 does not force you to save and will not damage your existing save you loaded from, so instead, it dumps everything in CurrentGame. An interesting potential exists for CurrentGame to be used as crash recovery if you crash shortly after zoning, but this has not been explored because crashing is bad.

Ah, I see what you mean. I've just tried running TS3 in a window with process explorer running. Even with just the store stuff and AM installed, the program is already pushing 2GB in usage (evenly split between RAM and the page file). What puzzles me though is despite there being at least 2GB of RAM free before I start the game, it tops out at 1GB and shoves the rest in the page file. Why not use all available RAM instead?


Right. So even in the base game, the patch is behaving as though I have WA installed and is running the game as such. Actually this makes a lot of sense!

I have a very outdated machine with only 2 GB of RAM, and suffered from unbearably long loading time ever since I installed the newest patch. Even toggling map view was a pain. I didn't have much CC to begin with, only some of the store contents. I don't have much love left for the store contents due to their poor quality, so decided to uninstall them all and see if it makes any difference. It didn't seem to make any difference at first glance - but when I checked my /Mods/Packages folder, all the junk files which were generated when I installed the store contents were still there. When I manually deleted them all, the game got so much faster even with all the graphic options maxed out.

I don't view that as a solution, though, as the game isn't (to me) worth playing with no CC.

So, since the game only allows itself 2GB, if I understand that correctly, then can there be a way for people with more RAM to allow the game to use more? Wouldn't that make a difference in rendering times and lagging?

Actually, I think there is.  I'm trying to find if the patch reset mine, but somewhere I picked up that one can use something called "CFF Explorer" to change the limits on the program.  I don't remember where the parameter is set, but I do remember changing it from 2 GB to something higher.

I'm looking with CFF Explorer to find the right key right now, but regardless, I did it before the patch and my game didn't blow up or anything, so I don't think it's that risky at the worst.

Edited to add:  Found it, and my setting had been overridden by the patch.  The thread is here:  http://www.modthesims.info/archive/index.php/t-375907.html (http://www.modthesims.info/archive/index.php/t-375907.html).  It could turn out to be a placebo, but again, at the worst it didn't seem to hurt anything.

How many of you guys compress your .package files?

I've only done it a few times since installing TS3, so yesterday I ran the compressorizer through everything in my packages folder to catch up. I hoped the space it cleared up would be enough for my game to run smoothly again. Instead, it did the opposite. It must have taken close to an hour for the game to load. Then it was exactly 20 minutes to save. The run-time lag made it unplayable; even buy mode was sluggish. I left the game and deleted everything in the packages folder.

I just finished restoring most of the content I had, uncompressed. The loading times are back to what they were before I installed WA, and the rendering doesn't seem to be as slow either. I didn't play long enough to test everything out, so I'm not 100% certain the problem is gone. One thing I'm sure about is that compressing made everything much, much worse.

Could it be a coincidence?

That's interesting, at the very least.  Perhaps someone more awesome than I am can figure out why the end result was a less laggy game (after going through a very laggy period), because right now it's really, really sucking as it is.

I'm assuming I must have gotten lucky because I have noticed my game is now faster than it was before WA, in terms of rerendering. Initial loading times are a bit longer (by about a minute), especially the first one when the files haven't been converted to the new format. I saw that if it's not in your view, it is deleted... that just started with WA. But my game is definitely faster at grabbing models and retexturing everything vs how it was before, almost instant. Base game I was waiting 20 seconds or more for everything to reinitialize. I have very little CC though.

Anonym, have you used the compressorizer on custom content?  If so, it might be worth it to delete your cc and re-download, without compressing this time around.  It worked for me.   :P 

Anyways, to update, I noticed rendering times are still a little slow, but in a different way.  Everything shows up as gray, then there's about a 10 second wait before it all instantaneously pops in.  Sort of like the game tries to get everything on the active lot loaded before allowing the textures to show.   Before, it seemed like they showed up whenever the object finished loading; the rendering times were less noticeable with the object showing as gray for only a few seconds. 

Despite this, the lag is gone, so it isn't nearly as bad.  I hope it remains this way for me.  I was just about ready uninstall WA all together.  It wasn't worth playing like that.

I never used the compressorizer on CC (thank God, because finding where I downloaded everything from would be a horror; most was from MTS, but some key stuff is from sites I found from a link here or a link on MTS or a link on Crazy Town, etc.)

The only time I used the compressorizer was when Pescado recommended a couple of months ago that those of us with huge save files try using it on our save files.  I tried that, with the same result others got:  The file got significantly smaller, but the first save after was back to being just as huge as before.

Since then (way before 1.7.9), I haven't used the compressorizer.  I never had even thought of using it on CC.

How did that .exe work for you?

This thread was very useful to me!
I replaced all of my compressorized cc with the original sized one: my game loads ten times faster and animations are no longer corrupted!
Well, I never had trouble using the compressorizer before the latest patch.. it's weird. But it works!

Things are closer to normal now.  I even can play the town I had been playing before (I think and hope I got rid of all the blue-lot producing CC).  It still loads very slowly, and the way it loads lots is strange; but the game play itself is working its way back to normal (unfortunately, just as before, normal includes Error 12/13, but at least I'm only having the problems I used to have....)

I gave this a try, but the game seems to be hard-coded not to push for more than 2GB memory usage and as a result, still insists on using 1GB of RAM and 1GB of virtual memory.

As for the compressed files thing, I'll need to find a way to decompress not only my CC, but also the core package files (FullBuild0, FullBuild1, FullBuild2) too as I recall running these through the compressorizer a long time ago.

EDIT 1: I'm going to try replacing the FullBuild packages with the originals from the DVD and see if that makes a difference.

EDIT 2: Doing the above shaved around ten seconds off the loading time. Not much, but it does seem to suggest that compressing package files could actually be detrimental to game performance. The only way I can tell for sure though is to go through my CC and either replace them with with uncompressed files, or get dirty with DOS and uncompress them myself and see what happens.

There's a memory limit in Sims3.ini in C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin.  That might be the hard coding you mean, although I still have never seen in task manager the TS3 process use more than 2 GB of the 3 GB of RAM that I have.

As I wrote before, I'm not certain it helps, but it doesn't break anything and might help some.

A 32-bit program cannot use more than 2 GB. That's a physical limitation.

Yes, it can. The large address awareness flag must be set and the program must be coded to support the whole 32 bit of virtual address space every program gets, i.e. the MSB must not be used for other purposes. Still this is kind of pointless when running on a 32-bit Windows, because 32-bit Windows only provides 2GB altogether for all user applications. There are ways around it, but they're unsupported for very good reasons.

Isn't that what I just said?

A 32-bit program can use 4GB of RAM on a 64-bit Windows no problem. On a 32-bit Windows it can't because there's only 2GB address space which all user applications have to share (independent from the individual address space of each application). The latter is not a physical limitation but an historical convention which cannot be changed due to compability issues. Other 32-bit operating systems provide 3GB address space for user applications.

Well, I'm personally glad we cleared that up.  I was really wondering when Pescado would learn that stuff about 32 bit and 64 bit Windoze, 'cos, y'know, the rest of us just didn't really like to say anything. 

Sometimes a full an blatant blathering of the totally bleeding obvious is the best course of action, eh?

Depends on how it's written. If it treats addresses using the same signed convention that limits it to 2 GB, the limit imposed by signed int32, then your program will misbehave if addresses like that are used. If it never actually performs such a memory test, then it might not notice. You're risking death by doing it, though.

Yes/no. The size of a signed 32bit integer is a physical limitation imposed by the number of bits. Whether or not the values are treated as signed or unsigned, also cannot be changed after the program is made. Since a program compiled and intended to run on Win32 must adhere to the minimum compatible behavior, this limitation is thus applied to all Win32 programs: Given that a fiery explosion will result on a Win32 system, the one the program is meant to RUN on, should this limit be ignored, the program is thus so limited and cannot use more than 2 GBs of RAMs: If it tried, the game would run seemingly okay on some systems and explode horribly on others. So it can't do that anywhere.

Update:  With everything finally seeming to work, I sat down for a nice, long night of simming tonight.

The lag was awful.  The lag is made far worse by the fact that the game clock moves as if there were no lag, so you basically can't accomplish anything, as a simple social like "flatter" can take a sim-hour.  "Chat" could take four sim-hours or something.

If it were my computer's specs, it would have been that way before 1.7.9, and it wasn't.  Or, as is possible, the needed specs to run it decently went up quite a bit with the new patch.

Arrrgh!

I've noticed my game getting increasingly laggy over the last few days. I thought it may be a rogue mod but now I have the feeling it's crappy EA code. My PC is hardly high-specced, but it ran the game fine before the latest patch.

I wanted to try and decompress all my mods to see if that made an improvement as I have a feeling that the new EA fucktardery code isn't playing nice with compressed files, but there's no way of doing it as a batch process (and I'm sure as hell not manually typing out those stupid "548975378yd79f8gyw98gfys89hyg78s9.package" filenames over 200 times in DOS). Crappy store crap.

I have that feeling too.
As I said in my previous post, I never had trouble with compressed files before the patch.
Now that I have them decompressed (a good 252 MB of joy), my game loads very fast and runs smoothly without (!!) all the bugs I was so angry at.

Well, that's what the LAA-flag is for. Windows is able to provide 4GB of virtual address space to an application, but the application must explicitly declare that it's able to handle it.

Devs probably leave the low-level memory management to the compiler in most cases, so it's simply a question whether the compiler supports LAA. Lots of games at least won't explode if the LAA-flag is set, although admittedly there's usually no benefit from doing so either.

I pray to Pescado to make a batch uncompressor.

I didn't compressorize my CC, but I'm sure much of it came compressed.

Although s3rc does allow you to decompress files, it's a daunting task trying to type in those gibberish package names one at a time (especially in my case where there's 200 of the things). It would be nice to tall s3rc to look at a folder (or directory in DOS-speak) and decompress the contents in one go.

Exactly.  I just decompressed a number of resources in s3pe, but no one could have the patience to do them all one by one (at least if, like me, they have tons of CC).

Exists already, do bash, s3rc *.package

Won't let me do that in DOS. It keeps throwing up a "Could not stat *.package" message.

Yes, basic DOS doesn't handle globbing, that's why you use bash.

There's a batch converter program called PowerRen 2000. I'm not sure if this program can convert the files in question but thought i'd mention it just in case it can. Google turns up a few links where you can download it free.

slightly off topic however lots with a lot of foliage will slow to a crawl on my machine.

That and ea download manager sucks badly, but people *should* know that by now I hope.

My sims 3 has never crashed nor slowed down significantly due to mass paranoia during installation.  Awesome Mod only made the game much more tolerable.

But foliage was one thing that made my machine load and slow to a molasses.

Ah, I never realised there was a bash client for Windows! Just downloaded one and have set it to decompress all my crappy store packages. Now to see if the uncompressed packages actually make a difference to the general sluggishness of the game...

Edit: And my findings are as follows:

The game now takes an extra minute to load - this is from double-clicking the icon through to the saved game loading and control being returned to the player.
Texture compositing now seems to be faster - almost at the same level pre-1.7, but not quite. Objects seem to load faster now.
There's still periods of lag. I'm putting this down to a rogue script mod though. I might just end up stripping out all the script mods and sticking with AM/NRaas mods as these are the only ones getting regular updates.

Also:

No, this would corrupt the files as it would use a completely different algorithm to s3rc.


I remember in the not-too-distant-past a patch put out by EA that basically halved the FPS on my PC. It seemed at the time this was happening due to the graphics engine drawing lots and lots of trees and making half of them invisible. Also, the tree slider didn't work at all. A follow-up patch fixed this problem, but I can't help but wonder if the current patch has introduced yet more invisible objects that are constantly being generated.

Well, I found something on MTS that helped to reduce the lag for me and, from what people on MTS post, will solve it for many with PC's.  Often a few bad pieces of CC are ruining it completely, as with the patch the game apparently keeps trying to open them.

1) Get "process monitor" for Windows here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx).

2) Unless you know Process Monitor well enough to make your own filter to just catch .package files from TS3, get Delphy's filter linked in post 283 of this thread:  http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=379085 (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=379085).

3) Run Process Monitor with the filter while you play a bit of your game, then close the game.

4) Use the "Tools" (as described in the thread) to see if a few packages are getting a ridiculous amount of events.  Remove those packages and see if that speeds up your game.

Wow.  I'm not sure what to say except it all runs perfectly now.  The problem files?  A series of Fresh Prince cars starting with the name "F-P2009Nissan370Z01..." and two other files I can't recognize called 5faa5c3b_gai and 5fe5e9e3_gai.  They had event counts in the hundreds of thousands while everything else was below 100.  Now I'm wondering what the hell was wrong with them and whether or not the files can be fixed. 

There a basically three reasons to update a scripting mod - 1. to implement new features, 2. to squish bugs and 3. to adapt the mod to a changed code base. If there are no feature or code base changes and nobody reported bugs to the modder and he didn't stumble on bugs himself, then there's no reason to update a mod, is there?

"Regular updates" isn't necessarily a good indicator for the quality of a mod or the effort of the creator.

Or... As in the case of two mods I got shot of, the creator last updated them in August and hasn't been heard from since. The mods were broken by the latest update - either completely, or damaged enough to cause lag, which means that there's no point keeping them in my game.

Well, in that case these mods are more like abandoned than lacking regular updates, right? And if "getting regulars updates" means the same to you as "supported", the part about being AM/NRaas being the only mods of that kind might be considered as kind of insulting.