More Awesome Than You!

Ok, i am sick of my ridiculous loading times for lots and my game.
I am on a major culling project and am getting rid of useless stuff. Any idea what kind of downloads have most impact on loading times?
Will deleting all my stupid terrain paints, walls and tiles help? or deleting clothes/hair/ objects recolors?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

IMHO, "new mesh" stuff slows loading time, I noticed a big difference after removing a lot of custom hair.


After removing all of the custom hair I found I didn't care for - my game would load in less then 2 minutes and even though I have now added app. 1200 recolors for maxis stuff, my game is still loading in less then 2 minutes.

With all the custom hair - loading time was closer to 5 mins - drove me nuts, anything over 2 mins means I trim my downloads - and I had less custom hair then I now have in recolors of maxis stuff.

Start with the large files you don't use.
Skin files tend to be huge.

Yes, skin files are definitely huge and any that you don't use should go. I find that it helps to organize things according to size, check what they are, and remove if them if they aren't worth their gigantic file size. Custom beds are also a bit gigantic in size as well, I have a few that are larger than skintone files.

I've been trying to take a good chunk out of my downloads folder size as well, and have managed to take out about 500 MB of unused content so far. It takes awhile, but I've noticed the game speed improving a bit already.

The last time I weeded my download folders down, I just downloaded all the the sims I made/had to have and just kept those skin files. So I had a whopping total of 10 custom skintones (other than my defaults). That helped.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I have 30 custom skintones plus 4 default replacements, plus replacements for the alien, vampire and zombie *laughs*

they don't seem to make much of a difference in loading time for me.

Something easily overlooked: when you remove clothes/hair/furniture whatever, get rid of the mesh. I just went in game for my cull, dropped half of everything in CAS, and cut my load time in half. When I went through and actually removed the mesh files, I dropped another few minutes (my startup load time had actually reached a half hour before the cull *shudder*) Another big one: makeup. Honestly, how much makeup do you actually use? Rather than sort it all, I just deleted them all, then found and downloaded a few that I knew I liked.

I had already deleted my entire makeup folder and with the advise of folks here, changed it all to Dylan's makeup.
As for meshes, I found it hard to delete my orphaned meshes because i don't know which clothes goes with what but you mean they make such a big difference in loading times?

As for skins, I deleted most of them. It seems that there isn't much more to be deleted but I still have 11000 files in my folder  ??? >:(

Subfolders are really helpful.

And generally having less CC.

And becoming an avid SimPE CC editor makes you really cut down on your CC downloading if you know you're going to open it up, check the categories, the footstep sound, hairbinning, family, genetic value....

lmao I'm a hack junkie and a makeup junkie.

I have 68 eyeshadows by Helaene and I alpha edited every single one of them (hers allowed the eyeshadow to go to far down below the eyes, looked horrible on some skintones) plus some other eyeshadows and blush (some I made) lipstick and eyeliner/lashes totaling 178 files in 20 folders  :o

I keep telling myself to go through them...but all the eyeshadows are different and look different on different skintones, same with the blush but theres quite a few of those I never use and don't care for, so those i need to get rid of...soon... *laughs*

well i'm stargint to be bored too... but actually i've mesh and customed cloth everyware (npc, townies, dormies) so removing stuff will be a problem :\
btw, when i'll get pets i'll unistall all, i'll save my sims  and then i will play without customed objects :P

but for sure with some hacks ^^

Subfolder and organize.  It's always worth it in the end.
I started over completely blank when I installed OFB.  It's a lot better to just re-download the things you feel you need, than trying to organize a bundle of unsorted downloads.

Well, not really -- if you remove custom hair or clothing, the game just picks one of the built-in clothing styles or hair types to replace them.  I usually know when I've gotten rid of womans clothes that are in use when I go to a lot and the female sim is wearing that red shirt-white pants-red shoes combo. I never assign that one to any sim, and if any come with it or get it at age transition I make them change. :)

I tried that. Didn't last for more than a minute. I love my dresses and makeup too much. I do believe that my loading time is now 10 minutes or so, just to finish loading the starting splash screen.

Cars are also quite huge, especially the really detailed ones. But I'd rather have my sims walk around in the buff and bald than get rid of my cars!

Lol. We all have our little weaknesses.

*sigh!*
I wish it was a small weakness...a quarter of my Downloads folder is comprised of cars! And I'm being VERY picky, so this means only the mostly detailed (read: with a poly count through the roof!) and fully functional get in.

Deleting a ton of walls seems to help speed up loading times. At least my computer didn't sound as if it is going to get a heart attack loading my game after i rid my game of about 200 walls and terrain paints.

And using jfade's WTF editor makes it really easy to clean up those files outside of the game: http://www.djssims.com/index.php?category=21

Thanks! Joe! I wish someone told me of that editor earlier. I was just randomly deleting the walls and deleting all my terrains paints. I bloody hate those but they come with the community lots all the time.  >:(

Clean Installer. You need Clean Installer. I never let terrains come with a lot since they patched the problem with the lot going all blinky when you delete a terrain in use.

Walls and floors I generally delete from within the game.  But I definitely need to delete meshes, it's a pain since I can rarely tell what they are.  And then there are the idiot creators who don't label period or include the picture for Clean Installer to show me.  ::) I know I have a ton of meshes I can dump.

I've also gotten rid of all my eyes and custom hair. I hate how the game passes on their genetics, and it's creepy to see Sims sleeping with their eyes open.  (and honestly I think those realistic looking eyes are WAY creepy, anyway! LOL) I really need to sort through my makeup too, since I always use the same ones over and over.

Not that my loading times are terrible. I LOVE my 10,000 RPM hard drive!  :D

I decided it was time to have a clear out after reading this topic,but I've come upon a problem with make-up and eyes so far.
The problem is that the maxis items appear in the middle of the cc items and when I try and delete any cc that follow on from the maxis stuff I am unable to highlight them or delete them.
 I thought  the maxis stuff in hair,make-up always came after the custom files but I rarely looked at these things so I could be totally wrong.
Has anyone else come across this or is it a maxis feature  I have not been aware of.

Feel free to poke or should get ready to walk the plank for asking a stupid question

Thanks
iain

I've never seen CC appear after maxis content.

Can you figure out what files they are and delete the files from outside the game?  Apart from that, I think you may have bigger problems to deal with.  I hope someone can help you.

Hi Ness,{are you royality and should I bow} I did not think it was a good sign but it does not seem to affecting the playing of the game, well so far anyway.

I had the sense to follow the teachings of someone else-I think it was Jade-here and I should be able to track them down,although that
assumes  the files are named and not just numbers,I  have all the orginal rars so nothing will be lost, well hopefully that will be the case
or I maybe deluding myself yet again when it comes to this game

Hopefully someone will have an easy fix for this problem or tell me how to avoid it the future.

iain

Royalty???  Where does that come from?

I'm another compulsive zip and rar keeper...  problem is, stuff that gets deleted from the game because it's crap doesn't get the corresponding zip or rar deleted.  If my downloads folder ever went splodey I'd have a really nasty time trying to sort through what needs to go back in and what should stay out.

Usually when problems crop up with the thumbnails, the solution is to simply delete the tumbnail files and let the game rebuild them. You'll find them in ...\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails.  It also doesn't hurt to delete the 'groups.cache' file in the directory above that (the 'main' sims directory).

Thanks for the info about the thumbnails I'll go and do that now and let you know if it works.I delete the groups cache after every game.

The royality comes from your royal highness [hi ness] ;Di 

 
thanks iain

We desperately need a tool that can identify meshes with no textures and vice versa so we can get rid of them easily...

Desperately.  *nods*

Here's a question for the mod gods...we know it's possible to hide Maxis textures we don't like, but is there any way to stop the game from loading the meshes?

Well I'm no mod god, but the initial answer would seem to be "no".
Unless you delete the mesh from the game resource file (which would be a very bad thing).

Why would you want to do this anyway? Many Maxis game meshes are used by multiple outfits, even NPC outfits.

To save load time and resources.  And some of the meshes themselves are butt-ugly and incapable of being textured in any way that is not butt-ugly, IMO.  It was just an idle thought though.

Amen! I'd just about kill for a tool like that (HINT HINT)

Actually, that's one play on Ness that I haven't encountered before, well done!   :)

But no, not royalty.

Jysudo, Dylan who?  And where?  :)

Dylan of laverwinkle...  http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php

absolutely gorgeous makeup!

Oh my, that is some sexy makeup. I also (somewhat sheepily) agree that an "orphaned mesh" detector is sorely needed!

If you run the game in debug mode, go to Create a Family and look at the clothing, you should see the filename when you click on the clothing item I think. Is that where your cc appears after the Maxis stuff? I just wondered because other people were talking about makeup and clothing, thought that might be one way you could identify it.

Remember to enable CAS debugging as well: do a boolprop testingcheatsenabled 1 and then press shift+n. It should report the filename for everything, as well as other information (if defined).

Thinking in binary Jordi?  ;D

boolprop testingcheatsenabled true  ;)

1 also works :p

It's a boolean property, so 0=false, 1=true.

Shit...never tried that...heh, one never ceases to learn!

true never ceases to learn! :p

"Ok, i am sick of my ridiculous loading times for lots and my game." [Jysudo]

I just bought a new computer, with 1066 MHz processor, and the loading time "runs speedy wild"...:).

Size of Downloads folder:  2 Giga.

My past two weeks were spent cleaning out the downloads folder. ::)

After the cleanup, I left about 2400 packages using 715Mb of disk space.
The game now loads into the neighborhood chooser in less than a minute :)

I didn't target a particular type of package, I just deleted the objects, clothing, hairs, walls and floors that weren't being used.

Incidently, this made me work on the orphan mesh scanner again, and it was able to root out over a hundred mesh packages that were not in use [/shameless plug] ;)

However, the neighborhood's loading time remains essentially the same, maybe due to the sheer amount of garbage it contains. For instance, my Pleasantview main package is now over 12Mb in file size!

Thanks for the link to the WTF scanner. The page also has a gimmick that scans for duplicate skins and makeup and such and allows for renaming and deleting and such. Which would help immensely for those who download sims as the stupid installer likes to rename helaene's nice labeled makeup to 012debakuyaw2316. I have an entire folder of stuff from custom sims that I can't identify.

On that same note, the newest version of Clean Installer seems to lost it's ability to identify from makeup, eyecolors and such. For when I scan my "made sims content folder" everything is labelled: "Parts."

Thanks, I know it's a PART of a SIM, but it's nice to know if it is MAKEUP or EYECOLOR.

What? Orphan mesh scanner? Where, where?!?!?!? :o

Linky (http://theos.chewbakkas.net/ts2/meshscanner.html)

This was previously mentioned (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5042.msg141539.html#msg141539) in the Culling Hair thread, but at that time the results were less than encouraging :P

And it still helps if the downloads are organized into subfolders. For instance, I used it to scan a folder that only had the clothing recolors and meshes (of course I had to know that those were clothing meshes).

I never heard of that project, Theo, though I did ask Jfade about a clothes scanner at one point.  He said he thought Paladin was working on one.

I'd love some more tools to do cool stuff outside the game though, and if someone *anyone* would work on fixing SimPE the Pescado way, we won't have to worry about our beloved hacks after the EP-that-shall-not-be-named comes out.

Ahhh! Thank you! I love you! OMG!!!!!111  :-*

Say...any plans for an orphaned recolours scanner? Cuz I know I've got a whole lot of those.

That's the "Recolor-Basemesh Scanner", already included in SimPe. :)

I have two separate folders for archiving zips and rars.

When I install new content, the zip/rar goes into the Installed Downloads folder.

When I rip it out, the zip/rar gets transferred to the Removed Downloads folder.

When I rue its absence and put it in again...well, you get the picture.

So, if I understand how it works correctly, anything marked 'Unknown' in that scanner is safe to delete (other than the CEP file, of course)?

Edit:  nevermind, I figured out what this one does.  So I take it your experimental orphan mesh scanner is still worth trying, too?

Is that what that is? Huh. Never knew that. :P

The Recolor-Basemesh scanner adds the "Found Base" column to the package list. The value "yes" means that there is a mesh for that recolor, and the value "no" means that the scanner couldn't find a mesh for it.

Yea, I saw that.  But it seems that it was also finding recolors of Maxis objects, and saying it couldn't find a mesh for them.  That's kinda odd...

Doesnt do it for mine  ??? The objects probably work in the game, so it might be the scanner that has the problem.

It's because the Recolor-Basemesh scanner uses the FileTable to search for the Maxis meshes.

If you uncheck the base Objects.package(s) from the FileTable, then it may not find the meshes for your custom recolors.

Ah.  I don't think I did uncheck that, but I'll look to be sure next time I try it.

Thanks!

Meh, that thing is always giving me false positives for things I that *know* are there and work.  I don't trust it.

I tried it, and it's telling me that I have the meshes for things that I know I don't (accidentally got deleted in the great Custom Hair clean-up and I don't feel like paying TSR blood money right now) and it says all my meshes have recolors, which I also know to be false.  ::) Not a single "no" on the page, despite all my meshes having been moved into my clothes folder (including ones for objects that no doubt are in their folders) I guess I'll start taking them out, and see what breaks.  :-\

Maybe that's why I never knew what it did...b/c it doesn't work. I did fiddle around w/ it a while, and I never could figure out if it scanned for recolours, orphaned meshes, or both...like you guys said, a lot of false positives, and negatives.

But the Basemesh scanner should only work for Buy/Build mode objects.

Most objects of this kind are packaged with the mesh and the base recolor in a single file, and additional recolors can be installed in separate files.
When you delete an object from the game catalog, only the "main" file (mesh and base recolor) is deleted, while the additional recolors remain installed.
Since the OFB expansion, you're no longer allowed to delete individual recolors.
These stray files can should be identified using the aforementioned scanner.

On the other hand, most clothing and hairs are packaged with the recolors, and possibly a new mesh in separate files.
Using either BodyShop or the game catalog to delete clothes or hairs, only deletes the recolor files; If they're recolors of a Maxis mesh, then the story ends here.
But if they're recolors af a custom mesh, the mesh file (if any) will be left without any use, but will continue to be loaded by the game.
For this kind of packages the Orphan mesh scanner can (should ::)) tell which files contain meshes and if they're still being used.


If you enable both scanners you can check both recolor "types", but I think it's better to check just one kind of recolor at a time.

For instance, if I want to check for orphaned meshes, I would choose to scan only in the \Downloads\Clothing folder with the orphan mesh scanner active.
And when I delete buy mode objects, then I would scan the \Downloads\Buy Mode folder, with the recolor-basemesh scanner active.


But enough of nice theories! :D
What I can tell is that the orphan mesh scanner sometimes can't find a recolor of a mesh, even though the recolor packages are present and included in the scanning scope.
This happened with a hair mesh package, and I still don't know what caused this :P

Maybe if someone would give me an example of the packages that were erroneously identified...

...pretty please?  ;D

Here are some screenshots of the folder scanning, with both scanners active.

First, the recursive scanning of the \Downloads\Build Mode folder:
(the package icons were disabled, because I want more for less ;D)
(http://theos.chewbakkas.net/maty/scanfolders_objects.png)
The orphan mesh scanner made consistent results, but only by coincidence, because it wasn't designed to scan all build mode object types.
Here, you're looking for stray recolor packages, that would have the "Found Base" value as "no"


Next, the scanning of the \Downloads\Clothing and \Downloads\Hair (recursive scanning because I keep the meshes in a subfolder):
(http://theos.chewbakkas.net/maty/scanfolders_bodyshop.png)
In this case, the "Found Base" values are irrelevant, and you should focus only on the "Contains Mesh" and "Mesh References" columns.

Apparently, I was just slow today and didn't get what I was looking at.  :D

The Orphaned Mesh Scanner did indeed find 3 Orphaned meshes for me. And at least helped me identify that the other ones I wondered about were all interrelated, and have since been deleted.

The Basemesh scanner found an absolutely obscene amount of recolors without a mesh.  :o 325!!!!

I have used the basemesh-recolour scanner in SimPe for some time and as far as I can tell it only finds meshes that are in the same folder as the recolors. When the mesh was in another folder the recolors showed as being without mesh even if both folders were scanned, when moved to the same folder it found the basemesh.

That kinda sucks, b/c I tend to have everything in subfolders, and it sort of defeats the purpose of subfoldering in the first place if I'm going to have to dump them all in one folder to scan.

Ok, so let's see if I'm understanding this now.  If it says yes in 'contains mesh', but the 'mesh references' column is blank, that means it's an orphaned mesh?

Yes, that's the idea :)

Gotcha -- thanks!  Now if only there were a way to delete them directly, instead of having to print out a list and delete them from the directory by hand... :)

Er...possibly I'm misunderstanding as I'm up obscenely early by my reckoning, but how do you figure?  I've got OFB, and I just made a random barbecue recolor to test this, and deleted it within the game no problems.  File all gone buh-bye.  ??

Uncheck Enabled, then delete all the files with the .pacakgedisabled extention.

Yea, I know I can do that -- I'm lazy and want to save a step. :)

(Actually, I don't delete them right away, just in case the mesh really isn't orphaned and something I like is missing. :) )

But,... but I can't! :'(

I'll post a pic later, but the trashcan now only shows for the main object.

I remember there used to be a second trashcan that deleted the recolors, but it's gone since OFB (or maybe since OFB patch 1, don't really recall).

Try the design tool, the recolor trashcan's in there.

The OFB patch did mess things up slightly.

You can't delete individual recolours from the buy menu, but you can delete through the design mode tool.

I agree, it would have been nice to be able to delete them directly, or move them around from within SimPe.  I was going back and forth between SimPe and Clean Installer to reorganize things. (move out the recolors to my missing Sunair meshes  :'( ) It wasn't too bad to just disable and then go delete them all, but an all-in-one thing would have been convenient, I agree.

I did delete them all, though, because I'd already moved all my unidentifiable files into a folder on my desktop and gone into the game to see if anything had broken or disappeared.

I seriously think that creators who don't clearly label their works shouldn't be allowed to upload anything.  ;)  For instance, whenever I do feel like hunting down my missing meshes, I know exactly which ones I need because Sunair numbers everything STRINGOFNUMBERS_SAskT016_yellow. SA for Sunair, sk for skin, and then a number that corresponds to a mesh. Inside Clean Installer, it's labelled something like SkinTO16_yellow by Sunair.  But even if no one wants to be that organized, just naming it "red dress" or Mesh_reddress" is a heck of a lot more helpful than a string of numbers, and then no thumbnail! /rant LOL  :D

I'd never sort that one out  ::)

A million thanks to you! (http://www.yonkis.com/mediaflash/unmillon.htm) :-*

Oh and the only deleting recolors from the redesign tool was "how we intended it to work in the first place." Not that they broke it during the patch, but that they finally "fixed" it.

Heh, I'll drink to that *Raises Diet Coke!*  And I'll also add that creators should be required to label their stuff in whatever language is predominant at the site they're posting it on!

Apart from huge Downloads folders, do

- custom music for buy/build/radio stations located in the Music folder
- collection files
- SC4terrain files
- Sims templates stored in SavedSims
or
- the number of neighbourhoods

add to the starting time?

Yes, yes, no, no, yes. But all only very slightly, and hardly after they've been indexed/cached once.

I didn't know either, thought I was stuck with zillions of bright blue recolours. Well, not zillions, but a good few. Thanks from me also.

Good thing to know. No more changing the audio books then. ;)

Ok, maybe I am dense. But I have a lot of problems deleting in design mode.
You know how the texture for the objects are all linked together? E.g. car interior and exterior.
When I deleted an interior, i realise that an exterior will have a lot of html code (white background with black words...i was thinking it is html code) will appear. In which I can't delete because the bin option is no longer avaliable.End up having to delete the whole bloody thing.

how could i prevent such an issue? thanks for any help once again.

I was hoping that running the game in debug mode would make the catalog show the filenames of the recolors, but it only shows the model name, which doesn't help much :P

The same happened when I deleted some painting frames, that unfortunately were in the same packages of the painting recolors.

The recolors I deleted appeared in the catalog in a blue color, or with black text in white background.

But I think that effect is temporary; next time you start the game, the deleted recolors should no longer appear.

Which recolor are you talking about? you mean the texture I deleted ? (e.g the interior) or will both the interior (I deleted) and its related exterior (which I didn't delete) disappear the next time I load the game? I am seriously confused. I don't know why maxis want to make it so hard for us to delete stuff  ???

Not to mention that catalogues have a tendency to return to the beginning everytime something is deleted in CAS.

I seriously hate that!  >:(

Same here. Like Maxis couldn't have thought this part through. Did they really expect us to only have enough d/ls to fill up the first few pages?

Ditto!!

Ummm... three-to?  ???
Guess there's no chance that anyone could code such a change for the catalogue display?

From what I understand, that's not Maxis fault in the end, but the creators by putting both recolours in one file... that's right?

In my experience, it's really neighborhood size (in terms of number of sims) that determines how long it takes to load a neighborhood or lot. (Which is why I'm afraid to get Pets, which will have the potential to increase the number of "sims" by a heck of a lot)

I used to have around 1200 sims in my main neighborhood - took me about 3 minutes to load the it and about 2 minutes to load a lot.   Got that down to about 850 (using the deleter tool in the QA version of Simpe, which has some side effects), and the load time dropped to 2 minutes and lot about 1:30.

And brand new neighborhoods take almost no time to load (either the 'hood or the lot).

Has anyone tried the Orphan Mesh scanner after Pets came out?  I know I dare not open my neighborhood with the current SimPe but is opening Downloads okay?

I was thinking about creating folders for my CC, and was wondering what was and wasn't "safe" to put into folders, how the folders should be named, etc.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions. ^_^

As long as they're all under Downloads, you can pretty much name the folders anything you want, and organize them however you want.  One scheme that seems to be common is to have  a folder for every separate hack/mod author -- makes it easy to update particular mods and reduce the chance of duplicates sneaking in.  Plus, some mods depend on load order (particularly some from TwoJeffs and Pescado) and 'twojeffs' comes after 'pescado' in the directory (assuming you're using the NTFS file system).  It's also handy to make directories for types of objects, like 'clothes', 'hair', etc.

The only thing I've found that sort-of prefers to be in the main Downloads directory is the Insimenator. It sometimes gets a little quirky if it's in a sub-directory.  Otherwise, I haven't found a hack, mod, or custom object that cares what directory it's in.

Sweet. Thanks a lot! :D

I've found that (for me at least) the best way to manage my downloads folder is to organise it into a sensible set of sub-folders e.g. all the MATY downloads are in a MATY sub-folder under downloads. If I download a set then I save all the meshes/textures to its own sub-folder named after the set. If I then download recolours for that particular set it they'll go in the same 'set' subfolder. Default skins go in a default skins folder. Everything else I try to group in sub-folders that mimic the Maxis hierarchy e.g. comfort/sofas, comfort/beds etc simply for ease of keeping track of things. I always try to keep textures (recolours) with the associated mesh(es) in their own sub-folder, usually named after the creator/mesh. If you want rid of something then delete the sub-folder. Likewise if you download another recolour you know where to put it.
The flipside to this is you have to be quite brutal with your file management... if you download something, try it and don't like it, then get rid of it. There is absolutely no point in loading content that you aren't going to use. I keep the downloaded zip/rar files in a similar folder structure - that way if I do want to retry some content it's easy to locate. It's also very tempting to install every single recolour that someone has made, again just install what you will use in game. Finally, you have to constantly be housekeeping with your downloads folder, checking what's there and pruning out the dead wood. Mine is currently around the 750Mb/2,500 files mark and is due another tidy up as the loading times have got a little too long.
(Incidentally, it seems to me that lots with pets appear to take longer to load even if they are relatively small and have only a couple of sims resident.)

Piker. :)  My downloads folder is about 3.5Gb, and there are folks here with even more than that.

And yea, Pets in general seems to have slowed down the game again, after GLS made it faster.  But of course, that's because EA didn't use the latest engine when they made Pets...

So what would happen if GLS were loaded after Pets?

Not sure.  It may still just run the latest EP (Pets) regardless of the install order.

It does. The highest game version is run, which is currently Pets. It just enables or disables previous XP and SP content on the basis of them being installed or not.

So does this mean that Glamour, and even FFS, can be installed once you've got Pets, without fear that they'll screw with the core game and break stuff?

And how about the new Holiday pack?

Yup, that's what it means.

The new holiday pack, like the old holiday pack, is not an expansion or "stuff pack". It is a patch for objects.package and a few addon bins, so no possibility of a conflict. If Maxis did all their "stuff packs" this way they wouldn't be so annoying!

Great. So that means as long as the actual EPs are installed in order, the game engine should be as good as it gets. The other ripoff packs can be added or removed whenever.

The actual XPs can be installed out of order as well. If you now only have base+Pets, and install NL/Uni/OFB at some point in the future, you won't need to update your mods. You jsut get access to game features which were disabled before.

As long as the XP/SP you install is older (qua game version) than the XP/SP you run currently, you will not get into problems.