Really Long Save Tiime

[edalbformat]

Sims are still electronic paper-dolls. I don't have any ccs in my game when you mean clothing, make-up, etc, but I have a lot of styles saved that I made self and helps me to save time when decorating sims or houses so that I know who is who at least. It is personal meaning even when you say I like to create distressing situations for my sims to live through. Particularly I don't see any fun in it once they cannot at all understand stressing situations. So far I see only that they start those negatives balloons just because the other sim doesn't have the same traits they have.
In TS2 they closed the ears with the fingers when a subject was not belonging to their traits. I never saw any real stress situation except child birth and fire that everybody reacts exactly the same way (run to and stay around screaming).

[alphagirl]

My save times have been very fast so far, not more than 30 seconds I believe. However I try to keep my CC to a minimum for now, because I don't want my TS3 to blow up like my TS2 did. I just went and deleted most of the custom hair again, most of it looks like crap anyways. So I just have a few basics (Awesomemod, ISM, NoIntro, NoMosaic, and way too much of the store stuff). Well, also, my notebook kicks ass.

[funkilla]

I have a save file that takes about 10 minutes to save a game. I don't use any custom content or mods except for AwesomeMod and it appears to only be that save file. I've got another save file that takes 10 seconds to save, but its still fresh.

[JamesNine]

I believe that if your neighborhoods get bloated with many, many sims then your load times are going to increase. I've noticed my load times getting slightly longer as new families are added but I'm still around 40 seconds with tons of CC. Just don't let your neighborhood go crazy!

[That Eighties Guy]

I have a save file that takes about 10 minutes to save a game. I don't use any custom content or mods except for AwesomeMod and it appears to only be that save file. I've got another save file that takes 10 seconds to save, but its still fresh.

A better computer;
Get one.

[funkilla]

I've got a great computer. 4 GB of RAM, 3.06 ghtz processor, Nvidia GeForce Go 7600. It's not my computer that's causing 10 minute load times. I'll go with the bloated neighborhoods as nearly all my houses are filled. Looks like its time to go all Ed Gein on some townies.

[tizerist]

Anyone else finding crashes during saves?
At times I have found myself crossing my fingers, breath held, hoping it pulls through...

[byronh]

I suppose it depends what you want.  If you want to dress up your sims like electronic paper dolls, then you might find this to be true.  On the other hand, I play with almost no cc and am more interested in creating distressing situations for my sims to live through.  You create your own interest.  If you play a cookie cutter game where your sim gets up, goes to work, fulfils his/her opportunities, builds skills, woohoos a couple of times to get spawn, eats, pees, and dies, it will get boring.  You need to be more creative.

Care to share any of these distressing situations? I too like doing malicious things to my Sims... except for the fact that there are so few things that you can do other than Fire, cheating on their spouse, giving them all the loser and unlucky trait, and making the children all hate each other. Please enlighten me! I'm running out of fun things to do in my game, and i've played just about every career and trait combination in the game.

[Sibylla]

It's not my computer that's causing 10 minute load times.

My setting, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6400+ ~3.2GHz, 3072MB RAM, directX10 (XP 3rd party) and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512, is decent for running the game. My save times are horrid too, after adding some stuff it went up to 15 minutes.

After clearing everything, except Awesome, the save time went down to, say, ten minutes. I've cleared the townies and NPC's down as much as I could and I only have 13 families in town, all other lots are empty.

Now, I'm not a computer wiz or anything, but I think it has something to do with the hard disks, their writing speeds? Mine are Samsung POS with 7200 rpms or something... I heard that RAID 0ing your hard drives might ease up playing Sims 3 (and 2 too), but I haven't had the guts to test it yet since it requires a full computer re-set.

[Buzzler]

Now, I'm not a computer wiz or anything, but I think it has something to do with the hard disks, their writing speeds? Mine are Samsung POS with 7200 rpms or something... I heard that RAID 0ing your hard drives might ease up playing Sims 3 (and 2 too), but I haven't had the guts to test it yet since it requires a full computer re-set.

Hard drive perfomance can't be the cause for these long save times, no matter how slow the drive is. Writing the save file to the drive is (mostly) sequential access, this doesn't take more than a couple of seconds, even for file sizes >100MB. The long save times must be caused by the game itself, for unknown reasons it needs so long to "build" the file. That is unless the save algorithm is a total brainfart, which wirtes and overwrites the data like a thousand times. The EA devs can't be that stupid.

Striping (RAID0 isn't really a RAID, since the R stands for "redundant") doesn't really improve IO-perfomance in most single-user applications/environments, where drive access is mostly random. Striping doubles the sequential read/write rates, but it doesn't do anything about the access times. Since TS3 streams lots of data, a solid state disk might noticeably improve the perfomance (won't affect the save times, though).

[Mootilda]

The EA devs can't be that stupid.

You're an optimist!

[PrinJess]

I found that using the Compressorizer or Pescado's compressor tool on CC with meshes included will make the game considerably slower, including save times. I noticed how slow it was becoming when I compressed these files. Packages that aren't meshes or aren't included in the package are safe to compress. Every time I would zoom in to a household, objects like chairs, couches and the like are gray and then turn back into their original state.

Save time with compressed meshes was 50 seconds or more.

Save time without compressed meshes was less than 20 seconds. A little more when loading a house. Times aren't much different with no CC installed.

I have 72 MB of CC in the game and load times are as described above. Then again I've recently reformatted my computer (but I know compressing CC meshes slows the game down for some reason).

Oh, and these are my computer specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz
3 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT

[tizerist]

I found that using the Compressorizer or Pescado's compressor tool on CC with meshes included will make the game considerably slower, including save times.

Can anyone else confirm this?

[RustyShackleford]

Nope if anything running the store stuff through the compressorizer made things faster.I am however running one of the pre-nuked hoods,the original ones were so junked up they would scarcely creep.

[PrinJess]

I'm not talking EA's stuff--- stuff you'd find at MTS or the others.

Then I guess it is a coincidence since my speed and performance for the game has accelerated tenfold since I removed the compressed meshes and also while also testing it on a reformatted computer. I may have to do another test.

[RustyShackleford]

I'm not talking EA's stuff--- stuff you'd find at MTS or the others.

Oh sorry,every time I hear compress I think of those bloated store packages.

[PrinJess]

That's quite all right. Mistakes can happen. =D

I can confirm this. Unfortunately there's no way I can prove it. I only used one CC. Now I'm not sure if this is related to the mesh itself, but shrinking it to an itty-bitty size causes sluggish performance. And that's with just one in the game. I had several compressed meshes in my game and it was so slow that I was practically ripping my hair out.

I used this CC/mesh for the test. It is a 2.5 MB file. Using the compressorizer I shrank it to 1 KB. I placed it in my game like normal. Startup went normally. Upon loading a house, however, loading took longer. I tested the speed of zoom in, zoom out, and of course, the elusive "gray mesh" I get. Both zoom in and zoom out were sluggish and froze. The gray mesh appeared but converted back to the object texture. It didn't last as long because only one compressed mesh was in the game. Like I said I remember I had plenty more and the meshes' textures took longer to regenerate.

Besides fucking up my game, the compressed mesh CC doesn't even show up in CAS. Having it compressed is totally senseless and pointless, to have your game run like a tortoise for an item that doesn't even appear.

EDIT: So far, cars I downloaded from MTS that have been converted don't slow the game down. I think it depends on the conversion and the mesh being converted.

[Sibylla]

Hard drive perfomance can't be the cause for these long save times, no matter how slow the drive is.

Oh. Of course I wouldn't have told that unless I heard it from someone who gets paid doing that. But he doesn't play Sims or isn't familiar with the.. ehem.. efforts EA makes with their products and he only suggested it. Well, knowing what you know saved me the ever painful reinstalling my wormbox.

[J. M. Pescado]

I REALLY doubt that compressed or uncompressed objects affect save times at ALL because objects are never written back out to disk in any way, so the game has no reason to care.

I think I know what causes horrible save times, though. It occurred to me that the .sims3 saves are actually DBPF files, same as all other packages, and what's more, the game COMPRESSES them. This is a fairly computationally intensive activity, compared to decompressing them, and when I ran a save file through s3rc, I noticed it was taking about as long to compress them as the game did to save them in the first place.

[jfade]

I REALLY doubt that compressed or uncompressed objects affect save times at ALL because objects are never written back out to disk in any way, so the game has no reason to care.

I think I know what causes horrible save times, though. It occurred to me that the .sims3 saves are actually DBPF files, same as all other packages, and what's more, the game COMPRESSES them. This is a fairly computationally intensive activity, compared to decompressing them, and when I ran a save file through s3rc, I noticed it was taking about as long to compress them as the game did to save them in the first place.

Mystery solved. Huttah. As Pescado has updated s3rc to fix this horror, the Compressorizer will be updated to make use of this feature tonight.

[cathybb]

I noticed that when I removed households from Supreme Commander Radar, it shorted my save time to less than 2 minutes.  Then again, it was max 5 minutes with several on radar.

[gesine]

I was appalled yesterday when my save time shot up to 20 minutes after I installed a half dozen houses and just as many new hairs. I had on autosave every 15 minutes and I was saving more than I was playing. I quit the game and took out all my CC (except for AwesomeMod and 37 lesser mods). My save time was then 9 seconds. I don't know what they were thinking, but I'm afraid I'm going to have a hard time getting into and loving a Sims game without custom content. 

[R. L. Yatch]

There is no "i" in "time"!

Oh... wait, that's "team", I meant. Sorry. Ne'ermind. I'll shut up, now.