More Awesome Than You!

Is anyone else irritated by the long pause Sims have before they enter the shower? They stand there for like fifteen to 20 Sim minutes staring at the shower wasting time when I want them to get ready for work/school whatever. Not to mention how long it takes for them to shit, shower and shave before they can go downstairs for breakfast. It does not take me 2 hours to get ready for the day! Are the EAxis guys just that slow and lazy? I have taken to getting them showered the night before so I can get them up in the morning, but just cooking breakfast can take an hour! Making waffles takes an hour? Have you no Eggos in this world? I find the time lengths for activities in the Sims3 are still just as annoying as they were in the last two versions. I do not grok the logic here.

I have searched the internet looking for a fix for this without luck. Aside from speeding up studying times, or lengthening the time it takes to eat a meal, temporal issues seems unaddressed. As an illiterate in coding, is this a difficult fix? Could I destroy my game quite nicely by trying to figure out how to do that, or is it something even I could manage without creating a BFBVFS?

Apparently the coders are all like my hubby who gets up an extra hour early so he can read the paper and dink on the interwebs before he goes off to work...

I have whoever is the primary 'chef' in the house prepare breakfast meals the previous day to cut down on food prep time in the morning. Showers and baths night before helps, too. In large households, I also try to get their pixelated tushies out of bed 3 hours before they must leave for work or school. Reason for this is the odd queue crap that happens while they head for the fridge - too many queued for the fridge and some will drop the action. So large households require an awful lot of micro-managing in the mornings.

I have similar 'stalling' in my game - while cooking, showering, etc. and have been told it's my game...as others don't seem to have this. I've tried a lot of things to get rid of it. I've been able to minimize it for the most part. I notice that it is at it's worst when the mail delivery person enters the lot. Again, it's probably just my borkenated game.

In some cases this could be accurate.  For example, I'm supposed to be to work in 40 minutes, which means I should be showering right now, but instead I'm sitting in front of the computer reading these posts.

What would be cool would be a "hooker-bath" addon, so a sim could achieve at least partial cleanliness right out of the sink if they're in the hurry.

My Sims pause constantly. While just walking through their house, they often freeze for a second or two (mid-walk), but I figured this was because of graphical lighting and shadows needing to be drawn. Same with any time they need to change clothing. I always though it was the game being retarded and having to cycle through all of my Sims clothing, and choosing which clothing they'll wear after they shower. They're always late to the carpool because they stand there for 45 minutes switching into career clothing. I've changed my settings around a lot and this one issue is one that I cannot resolve.

This is an issue with the game choosing to preserve real-time behavior over atomic behavior. If your sims have frozen during a uniform change, it is because their uniform has to be loaded into the game and, rather than preserving game-behavior atomicity, it chooses to keep the gameflow smooth, so instead of halting the game to perform the loading, the game just keeps running while one sim is stalled. To avoid this, pause the game when you notice it happening so that the game can finish loading without burning gametime.

I haven't had the pausing problem really, but my biggest time-waster is the fucking atrocious pathing in TS3.  My upstairs Sims get up, I queue them to go to the fridge and grab leftovers for breakfast, and each and every one of them goes downstairs, buttonhooks AROUND the stairs, and stands facing the wall behind the stairs for a few seconds like a creepy Sim-homage to "The Blair Witch Project" before going to the fridge.  It's like the end-space for going down the stairs is BEHIND the stairs, for some insane reason.

The worst pathing is reserved for toddlers.  No matter how much space I have in a toddler's room, if my Sim-sprog grabs a toy from the toy chest, he/she has to carry it into another room before sitting and playing with it.  If I queue an adult to put the kid in the crib, the toddler ambulates off to a faraway room to be picked up, adding a good hour of Sim-time to the tucking-in process.

Toddlers tend to get carried around to be fed as well. Clearly toddlers require some minimum space for their activities. A solution is to have a toddler bedroom be only sufficient for the crib, with a larger area adjacent for play, feeding etc.

I have never ever seen this pause-before-shwoer issue everyone seems to have. :|

And if the routing in your house is bad, change the house. Obviously the routing cannot be excused, but if your sims go stand in a space behind the stairs, get rid of that space? And try again.

I design small homes, and this is definitely an issue. Like you said, I've found the best solution to be having the nursery/kid room only hold sleeping furniture and usually a toddler potty, plus a one-tile-wide walking aisle. The next room has to have dedicated space for interactions like teaching to walk or talk, plus a toy. A 3x3 space will suffice, but you want the toy on an edge and not through the middle. Play tables are luxuries that are only given to sims who have larger lots (over 14x12) or a dedicated spawn-only floor.

The stair issue is odd. Are these stairs by chance of a stacked set? Did you make them L-shaped using cheats? I haven't done stacked ones, but I have done L-shaped a few times and they can be very challenging to set up in a way that sims will actually navigate because sometimes they ignore the lower set and walk around in nether space if you don't level off an adequate number of tiles in the middle.

EDIT: Oh, and if you are dealing with a small space and insist on having a toy box, open the toy box and remove all but one or two toys. Otherwise you'll end up with a play space that becomes completely unusable.

I hate toy boxes, so I tend to buy them to satisfy a wish and then delete the box. Each child in a family gets one toy and one teddy in its inventory at birth. Extra toys can make realistic playroom decor when placed on dressers or end tables.

No doubt that TS3 went right back to pre TS1-alpha for a routing engine. What gets me is the way they still walk into each other; only now they both stop and stand around looking stupid, long enough for even a DNA-challenged amoeba to evolve sentience, before either of them decides to move again. Is it really that difficult to code, even a semi-intelligent, routing engine?

I don't actually give them toys, because in MY day, we didn't have toys, they hadn't been invented yet! We had to play with jagged metal and broken glass, AND WE LIKED IT!

just to add my experience, my first sims are always "stuck" holding the door when trying walking out the bedroom when I told one of them to feed the fish that I had neatly arranged on both sides over 3 xtra long dining table and 1 small wooden dining table. maybe too much animation or too much movement in one view? I miss the big aquarium that I used a lot in the 1st sims game. shrinkable fish bowl, yeah, good idea, but I want to minimize animation to speed up the game.

This always happened to me everytime a sim changes his/her outfit for work. He/she wasted about 30 minutes? standing so stupid until changes the outfit. Ugh.

We've been over the outfit-change stuckness. To prevent it, pause the game while an outfit change is occurring so that the game can load without burning gametime.

So I need to watch every sims in the household. Anyway, is it possible to make a mod for this?

Blame EA and their sucky coding. On my new PC (an Intel Core i3), the outfit-changing is instantaneous, but on my old Athlon 64 3200+ PC (before it died), it would take several sim-minutes to do it. Really, all of this stuff should be pre-cached from the start, from the moment you leave CAS, or the moment the game generate townies even if it means an initial five-minute wait before playing, but EA wanted to give this illusion of speed, even on lower-end CPUs, and they've failed miserably in that regard.

Sounds like it is possible.

FWIW I discovered unchecking the the little option box that enables the store/shop while you play increased my performance by great measures. YMMV

It's POSSIBLE to stop it from doing that, but then your game will behave similarly to TS2: The entire world will hiccup every time someone, anywhere, changes uniform.

This is the thing I hate the most about Sims 3. What is the point of it? They do it even if there is a clearly identifiable route for them to take past each other without either having to stop. In the midst of several tiles worth of space they still choose to walk into each other and then stand around looking stupid for half a sim hour.

I simply hate the foot-tapping, it makes them look extra stupid.

I got really pissed off with the routing issues, so I messed around with the .ini file so that these morons simply walk through each other. I had my concerns the moment I saw some of the demo videos and developer walkthroughs where you saw loads of sims standing around, moaning about route failure and tapping their feet. Hell, EA even used that bloody animation to make it look like they were tapping in tune in one of their promo videos (the candy-stealing one)!

Hear, hear.

When they collide, they stop, tap their fucking foot, then takes another step forward; only to collide AGAIN in a mere second. Repeating this until they clip their puddingfaces through each other.

THIS! A long time ago I downloaded a mod that stops the foot-tapping from MTS because I couldn't STAND it, but naturally they still pause for an abnormally long time before they both turn in the same direction - and fucking run into each other AGAIN.

Agreed, I had the same hack, but to me it seemed to break about half a dozen patches ago.  His Awesomeness had made a crappy XML tweak (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,16077.0.html) (his words, not mine) to address the same issue, but it is rather old.  I can't remember if I've tried it, so I'll give it another try the next time I fire up my game.  I'll report back if it doesn't asplode my game.

Since the conversation has gone to mannerisms that annoy us, can I add mine?  The stupid nose-holding when they jump into a pool.  I mean, really.  At least let the 12-and-older Sims jump in without holding their nose.

Back on topic, pausing the game when a Sim hesitates to change outfits or strip for the shower does indeed seem to help -- if I can get to the pause button before they actually change.  It seems the worst to me when I start up the game after clearing caches.

Would you mind packaging this up and uploading it? The idea of sims walking around freely just walking through each other is really damn exciting. I do not give a crap if they're gonna walk through each other, just that they won't mind it is amazing.

Actually, it'll be better (and safer) for you to make changes to the file yourself. You'll need to navigate to /The Sims 3/Game/Bin/Sims3.ini and change the settings for [Config] to read:


It's actually an old tweak I'd seen on here before, except with DynamicAvoidance_FieldRadius set to 0.0. This forces those braindead sims to simply walk through each other without all the routefail crap that normally ensues. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to get this to work properly for stairs, where they'll still do that foot-tapping crap, but even these settings help to reduce the congestion that normally happens near stairs.

Changing ini files isnt encouraged, because it causes patches to fail and claim files are broken.

I dunno about the sims3.ini though...

For what it's worth, I gave this tweak a try, and I have no experience making mods whatsoever.  I just expanded my Sims' house, so it took a few hours of play time to notice, but lo and behold, finally I saw two toons walk right through each other.  One of them paused momentarily, but there was no foot-tapping or any such thing.  I should mention that I disabled JMP's "crappy XML tweak" first, since for all I know the two tweaks might have conflicted.

Claeric's point is well-taken -- I did save the original .ini file, and will switch the files back with each patch, just like I do with the .exe file that has the no-CD crack.  Actually, it might even be necessary to throw out the tweaked .ini file, put the old one back where it was, patch, then store a copy of the .ini file, and THEN make a new tweaked .ini file.

Either way, my game just got about 6.5% more enjoyable.  I think what I'm supposed to say here is BAAAAAH.  :)


*clicks "thanks" button*
I have now been edumacated.  ;D

Yeah, I forgot to add, keep a backup of the original Sims3.ini and drop it back in before applying any new patches. The patcher will kick up a stink otherwise.

@jwaas, I use this .ini tweak and Pescado's mod without issues.

ETA: Don't forget to click the "thanks" button for added lulz!

I think I have a mod which alters something else in the ini file, because it isn't working.

Should they ALWAYS just walk through, or only if there's no path around? I was hoping they'd always just walk through, so I could pretend it was "sliding by" but without an animation, but if there's another way around they run right around.

It only does it when there's no path around. There is a way to force them to walk through each other all the time regardless of space, and it involved changing one of the other [config] settings to 0 in addition to DynamicAvoidance_FieldRadius, but this had a knock-on effect of trapping sims in doorways where they wouldn't move at all. Eventually, you'd end up with a load of sims getting trapped in the same door.