More Awesome Than You!

Hi,

I'm running :
Windows XP Pro 64 bit
Intel R Pentium R D 3 Ghz 3 Ghz CPU (XE 925)
Micro-Star P4M890M3-V Mainboard
GeForce GT 440 1024MB DDR3 graphics card
450 W of power supply
3G of RAM DDR2-SDRAM

My game takes about 1.5 hours onwards to save.
Could this be memory related? I'm planning on having 4G of memory max, would this help?

I admire your patience levels to let a program sit for an hour and a half unresponsive, I would have axed it after 5 minutes. This is not memory related, it's likely your town is just burnt toast. How about doing something logical like trying a fresh town and see if it still occurs? And for heaven's sake, find your End Process button.

I used to get long save times, until I reinstalled the game. *shrugs*

Try nuking memories with awesomemod. clearmemories I think is the command.

Also this. (http://moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15129.msg485447.html#msg485447)

It's an old neighbourhood, about 950 Mb in size but still, 1.5 hours?
New neighbourhood takes just minutes.
I tried re-compressing, is this also known as decrapifying but every time it takes only about 5 Mb out of my save file. I'll give it another try.

Two different things.

The only way I've found to fix this is to use Twallan's Porter to port out the sims I wanted to keep and re-import into a fresh new hood.
I'm not sure what causes this kind of save game bloat, but it seems related to how many households have been made active.

Sheesh. *950* MBs?!? Something is WRONG with that neighborhood.

Could it be my processor dying to process the game? Yup, about 940 Mb now, it fluctuates around 930s to 960s. The save file has been there since 2009 I think when I first started to play.
I'll try re-compressing it.

No, I think the problem is that your save is 950 MBs, and since the game attempts to compress save files to save disk space, this results in enormously long save times, as if you attempted to use s3rc on the entire Fullbuild packages, a problem made significantly worse by the fact that the game tries to do the entire thing in a single thread, so the game gets zero performance benefit whatsover out of modern computars.

Out of curiosity, how long does it take for your game to load, if it takes 1.5 hours just to save?
And when you said "950 Mb in size", did you mean the whole save folder (including vacation 'hoods), or just .nhd file for the main 'hood?

The save file bloat and increasingly longer loading time is the one reason that I don't play TS3 as much as I used to play TS2. It's hard to develop any attachment to the game when you know that the eventual save file bloat will make the game almost unplayable.

I'm actually somewhat unclear as to what is *IN* these save files that causes them to bloat like that, since I have never seen a save file bloat to such mammoth proportions.

I'm sorry if I used the wrong term, I meant the whole folder is 950 Mb. The .nhd (Sunset valley)  file is about 289 Mb.
It takes about 20-30 mins to load.

Should I re-compress the .nhd (Sunset Valley) file?

No, that won't really help. First, it helps to identify what the largest and most bloated file is. Take a look inside the save directory and try to determine which file appears to be of unreasonable size.

Okay.
These are the files :
1a5tf1l3.dat : 26 b                                               
China_0x0859db4c.nhd : 57.8 Mb
China_0x0859db4cExportDB.package : 4.99 Mb
Egypt_0x0859db48.nhd : 175 Mb
Egypt_0x0859db48ExportDB.package : 4.66 Mb
France_0x0859db50.nhd : 48.5 Mb
France_0x0859db50ExportDB.package : 6.66 Mb
Meta.data : 297 b
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3c.nhd : 289 Mb
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3cExportDB.package : 130 Mb
TravelDB.package : 232 Mb

I'm not so sure how to see which files are abnormally large.
Maybe the Egyptian and Sunset Valley files are a little big.

All of that looks awfully huge. Are you taking way too many junk photos or something? I am presently investigating travelDB bloat.

Okay.
I used to take photos last time, but hardly nowadays. Also I used to travel a lot but not much nowadays. I have a graveyard since the first days where it hosts ghosts of sims since I first played.
The bloat has nothing to do with the age of the neighbourhood?

I have a certain amount of difficulty imagining 250+ MBs worth of ghosts, although I suppose it could be possible. If I were you, I'd pull open the NHD file in IngePE and see what the most commonly seen things in the file are.

Have you switched houses very often?  Every time I switched to a house I hadn't played before added around 5MB of additional bloat to my neighborhood .nhd.

Okay.
I've downloaded sim3pe.
Here is what I found                                         
China_0x0859db4c.nhd : Lots of files with the tag UNKN.
China_0x0859db4cExportDB.package : Lots of files with the tag TXTF and TXTC.
Egypt_0x0859db48.nhd : Lots of files with the tag UNKN.
Egypt_0x0859db48ExportDB.package : Lots of files with the tag TXTF and TXTC.
France_0x0859db50.nhd : Lots of files with the tag UNKN.
France_0x0859db50ExportDB.package : Lots of files with the tag TXTF and TXTC.
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3c.nhd : Lots of files with the tag SNAP, UNKN and some INV.
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3cExportDB.package : Lots of files with the tag TXTF and TXTC.
TravelDB.package : Between the files with the tag SIME and UNKN and some IMG.

But I have no idea what they are. Only can guess that txt are text files, img are image files and maybe unkn are unknowns?

@ GnatGoSplat, yes I do switch houses quite often, I play a household for a few days and then I normally will switch.

All the travel and export DBs can be burninated with no apparent effects, I've found. You may also try using IngePE to destroy all of the SNAPs, but that part is untested.

Okay.
Does this mean I can delete the travel and export dbs? Will they regenerate?

Yes. If you strike them down, they'll just come back, and pick up all their stuff.

I've deleted the travel and export dbs. They haven't regenarated so far. It still takes about 30 mins to load and 1.5 hours to save.

Try a test: Destroyallhumans, then see how long it takes to save with the neighborhood totally empty of all life.

I can't use that test. I don't have awesome mod installed.
Maybe I'll try decrapifying or recompressing again.

Why DON'T you have awesomemod installed? It fixes a ton of EAxian errors, and has a bunch of extra uses to boot.

Also, I don't think compressing will help you at all with time, since it'll just require more time to decompress later.

I am beginning to see where the problem might be coming from.

You do realise that some people might use twallan-ware or even play vanilla? Not everyone uses AM.

I am hoping Pescado has stomped out this behaviour in AM, EA are uniquely able to bork their games in new and interesting ways.

Yes, but these people are clearly sick and need to see a doctor.

I use both twallan-ware and awesome, and don't see why others would be unwilling to add awesome. I suppose there are some that would WANT to play vanilla, but it's not entirely practical. Most of the extra features of awesome are configurable, and basic gameplay is essentially the same with or without awesome.

I don't normally install mods in my games, just CC. I like to go vanilla. But I might give it a try to test the destroyallhumans cheat.

You might also like to try "clearmemories" to help a little with the bloat.

I normally see things that way, too, but there are several key differences here: Vanilla is broken and sucks. Just read the list of "fixed bugs" and you will see what I mean.

AwesomeMod, however, can be configured to run pretty close to vanilla, except for mostly fairly inobtrusive fixes, stuff people thought was always there, until they take it out.

I've been doing it for a while without any problem. The game just generates Sims' thumbnails the next time you click on the relationship panel.

I'm curious about IMGs in the save files. They look suspiciously like some kind of img caches to me, like the ones found in the cache files.

I believe they're an image cache also, but I recall when I attempted mass extermination on them, the result was that the game did not rebuild them fast enough and defaulted to the base-world's image caches, which worked really badly if you had altered those lots.

Okay.
I've run the test destroyallhumans twice. About 100 to 200 plus sims were killed. Unfortunately the vacant houses were immediately filled by sims from nowhere. It still took 1.5 hours to save. The safe file size decreased to about 276 Mb.
I also ran the clearmemories before I killed everyone but somehow when I looked back at my sims scrapbook, the memories were still there.

Your own memories aren't cleared. If you want to clear EVERYTHING, do "clearmemories all". And something is deeply, deeply wrong with your game if, after emptying the entire neighborhood, there's still 200+ MBs of cruft in there.

Okay. What should I do next? I haven't go rid of the ghosts yet

Have you tried a fresh game to see when the bloat occurs?  If it is occurring with the first save of a fresh game, I would suggest a serious issue within your game or CC, you could also start a fresh game with no CC and see what happens when you save.

Twallan's Porter is probably your only hope, assuming you want to save most of the residents and their relationships.
It fixed my 2009-era bloated save.

Okay. How about the relationship of my sims with their dead ones? Will they lose the relationship if I transport the cemetry and the sims to a new Sunset Valley?

I'd assume if you "Manage the Dead" on the Mausoleum, and add the dead sims to the inventories of their family members, you can bring them with you. I don't know if the Porter will keep the graveyard as it is. I've never really tried using it like that before.

Are you sure it's the save time, and not the quit time? I've had no problem saving, but quitting takes forever, if I don't shut it down myself manually first.

The game loves to inexplicably take interminably long to quit, yes. I have long since given up on relying on it to actually end on its own, and just use my CRTL-ALT-F4 YOU DIE NAO shortcut.

This is new though. It's never taken quite this long, we're talking over 10 minutes (I just force it after that).

Yes, I think it's the save time, I've save as before and it's taken that long.

Edit :
Okay, I managed to export my families to a new Sunset Valley neighbourhood with the graves in their inventories. Saved a couple of times without much play in the daily lives of my sims. Was revamping the neighbourhood. Took about a 2.5 mins to load,  about a min to save & quit. And 30 secs + to save in the middle of the game.

The files as they stand now are roughly
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3c.nhd  22.8 Mb
Sunset Valley_0x0859db3cExportDB.package  131 Kb
TravelDB.package  2.85 Mb

I haven't travelled so far. Are the sizes okay?

P.S : I also tried to upgrade my ram to 4g but my comp refused to recognize it, so I guess I'll be stuck on 3g.