Work/school zergswarms and game performance

[Chukertuc]

I`ve used the toilet and now the game works great! 

[ramseyazad]

Congratulations?

[twallan]

I`ve used the toilet and now the game works great! 

Oh yes, that could be taken so very wrong.

Glad to hear that a future edition of AwesomeMod will implement car monitoring.  One to rule them all!

Good Day.

[JBoat]

Just a note that the work I've been doing regarding sim routing/pathing has taken a turn (not a u-turn).    I'll be sending Pes all my findings so far, since he's doing work on his own to resolve sim pathing issues and rabbit holes.  Essentially I won't be producing a separate mod with XML tweaks unless I believe that the AM values can benefit from new ones.

[DuchessOfKvetch]

One does wonder why these problems only happen to a fraction of the user base; it seems to be more mucking-up of existing games/towns, though. I went ahead and started up an entirely new game post-patch, with the new Indie Stone and core Awesome mod - and no issues - YET.

I wonder how much actual testing EA does with saved towns with an actual "history". Are these slowdown/clusterfuck conditions also happening mainly to those who've accumulated a number of "active" households over time, and/or with multiple sacred households? Or are the non-modded Sims players getting farked games too?

[Silverdrake]

I have three households that I actively play, although I blessed about 10 before the rapture, and unblessed seven of those post-Rapture. It's going to be a problem when my sim has grandchildren, because I micromanage my favorite sims. The game has been much, much better since I cleaned up the EAxis households. I love Rapture, but I wish we had a guillotine in the park - it'd be more fun!

It's possible that my main family has accumulated so much stuff, books, points, skills, etc., that it could make a difference in game performance.

[Process Denied]

I took a screenshot at 1:11 pm and I had 23 students still at the door.  Needless to say, they didn't all get in.  I take control of the child that is causing the traffic jam and tell them to move,but it takes 3 hours their time for the child to move.  They are stuck.  There are days that are better than others.  Last knight, my Simmette didn't get out of school till 7:30pm.  So it also goes both ways.

[Buzzler]

It's possible that my main family has accumulated so much stuff, books, points, skills, etc., that it could make a difference in game performance.

Is that an assumption or did you find any clues that stuff, points, skills, etc. have an impact on game perfomance? I'm curious on what is affecting game perfomance for real and (stuck limos out of the picture thanks to twallan) right now it seems to me that game perfomance just degrades in time for no particular reason. Even if I save my families and all the "dummy"-families I just created to prevent the gerartric extinction of my hood and place them in a new hood (without killing off the default families!) there's no noticeable perfomance difference to an unaltered default hood.

Only one thing's for sure: The overall perfomance is badly affecting the pathfinding. I don't know the code but it seems obvious to me that the pathfinding is somehow turn-based and the lower the game perfomance the longer these turns are getting...

[pbox]

When you say "game perfomance just degrades in time", what exactly do you mean by "time" -- time that has passed in-game, or real time?

I noticed yesterday that my sims were abnormally slow when "taking their turns", and since the game had been running for rather a long time (several hours realtime, some of it paused) I tried simply restarting -- and that seemed to actually help; upon restart, in the same household, same situation, they suddenly started to move on.

I'm still on 1.2.7, with an old Awesome, so YMMV. Pathfinding has always been painful in my game (both 1.2.7. and pre-patch), not so much because of the slowness alone but because of the sheer idiocy of it .. a sim standing right next to the fridge will wait half an hour for another sim to hike all across the lot just because that sim is "first in line" to use the fridge. This isn't affected by restarting of course, but the time it takes to actually make the decision to walk to the fridge was noticeably shorter after restarting.

[Buzzler]

When you say "game perfomance just degrades in time", what exactly do you mean by "time" -- time that has passed in-game, or real time?

I meant in-game time. I encountered slow downs after hours of real time (and switching out of the game and back numerous times) which didn't show up again after saving and restarting but this is not happening consistently.

Actually pathfinding is working out acceptable for me most of the times, but I lowered DynamicAvoidance and installed Pescados XML-hack (both seem to improve the situation at least a little) and my CPU is pretty fast...

[Silverdrake]

It's possible that my main family has accumulated so much stuff, books, points, skills, etc., that it could make a difference in game performance.

Is that an assumption or did you find any clues that stuff, points, skills, etc. have an impact on game perfomance? I'm curious on what is affecting game perfomance for real

I'm afraid it's just a guess. Post-patch, I had the terrible slow-downs and zergswarms. However, after flushing the carlimos, adjusting dynamic avoidance, deleting half the families, and the latest awesomemod, I no longer have the school swarms, and my sims are managing to get to work. They still do this very odd freeze before stairs, the door, etc, which they were not doing pre-patch.

I have an older pc - planning to upgrade everything this year. I've been playing this town for a long time, although I'm now using a copy I made after fiddling with Neighborhood Workshop a few days ago.

[Swiftgold]

I've definitely noticed performance degrading if I play for a long time. In the worst case I've had Indiemod completely quit in the middle of my playing and revert to EAxis storymode, which one time I only noticed when I realized one of my playable families had suddenly moved out of town despite that being turned off both in Indie and Awesomemod. Now I make sure to save a lot and when I see the storymode notifications reverting from the Indie verbose notifications (and when I see teens getting jobs and elders retiring, neither of which happen with Indie in my game), I make sure to restart without saving

[chaos]

TS3 suffers from a wicked memory leak. I have a high-end gaming computer, and after 3-4 hours of play, I begin to notice short bursts of random lagging. After 5-6 hours of play, the game gets annoyingly slow at odd times, for no apparent reason (not the usual 1 AM storymode lag). This is despite having trained myself to automatically save the game each sim-day at around 2 AM. I have storymode notifications enabled, and use them as a reminder to save. The mind boggles as to why EA didn't fix the memory leak with the latest patch, but I've given up trying to fathom why they do, or don't do, certain things that are obvious and would seem to make sense.

[Tangie]

I installed the new patch and newest AM on Monday, and the update went fine (all that worrying for nothing!). However, I am also experiencing the terrible lag now. I first played my newest saved game with just one male sim and I noticed some slowness and choppiness, but it really got ridiculous when I played another older saved game with a bigger family. I, too, have found the lag to get worse the longer the game is played; it is so bad that it makes the game nearly unplayable. It takes hours and hours for a sim to feed and change a toddler although the motives are not subject to the slowness, so the kids continue to cry and starve while the idiotic sim parent just stands there holding the crying kid until s/he decides to do something about it. Like others have said, the clock will also skip many minutes at a time. My sims and kids keep missing work/school because it takes about 4 sim hours for them to pee, shower, eat cereal, and walk/run-FREEZE-walk/run-FREEZE-walk/run-FREEZE to the bus/carpool in the mornings. Gah!

Needless to say, this is not enjoyable.

I wasn't sure when/if AM was cleaning out car/limos since I wasn't noticing any improvement in performance while playing, so I downloaded the standalone but it listed no derelict cars so I assume AM did it's job, it just didn't improve performance much for me. I play on what is basically a low-end laptop and this was a fambly of 6, two adults, two kids, two toddlers. I realize these are two big issues and are part of the problem, but the bottom line is that the slowness wasn't much of an issue until I updated to the newest patch and AM, soooo...Coincidence? If anyone has any other ideas to share on what I can try to fix the gawdawful time warp I would appreciate it. I guess I could try nuking half my town and see if that makes any improvements, but I am wondering if all the pushing to get all the sims in the neighborhood to actually DO things is what's making my system slow to a crawl? Or is this just a common problem with older 'hoods?

[varmint]

Tangie, have you tried the 'towderelicts' console command in the newest builds of AM? I find it hard to believe that you had no cars to clean up in an old neighborhood, the experience of others in that situation was a huge pileup of vehicle objects. And cleaning them up is the main thing that improved my performance. If you're still getting clock stutters and the vehicles really are cleaned up, then I would guess that yes, it's just the size of your neighborhood and your computer can't handle all of it.

On another note, does anyone know what it is that controls whether the 'hour til carpool' alarm goes off? Because I've noticed that in the case of the school bus, this alarm matters a lot. Basically, if I see it go off in the household I'm playing, all the school-aged kids in my neighborhood will end up getting pushed to school. Often, however, it doesn't fire. The bus still arrives and the kids I'm actively playing get to school, but when I check the neighborhood, none of the other kids have bothered to go that day. And whether the hour warning goes off or not seems completely random. I've saved a game at 4 in the sim-morning and run it over and over and over to check the alarms, and half the time it goes off, half the time it doesn't, even if I perform the same sequence of actions on the same clock speed. Weird.

I guess I might just have to make the leap to SC so I can get my control freak on with these damn kids since it's probably better than obsessing over whether or not the warning alarm has fired and whether I want to bother to hop around and force some kids to school if it hasn't.

[Buzzler]

What are you experiences regarding the token-based get-sims-sqeezed-into-rabid-hole-thing? For me there's only a little time improvement at the school (apart from the fact there's no shoving anymore). Everywhere else (the Bistro especially) iit's actually gotten worse...

I installed the new patch and newest AM on Monday, and the update went fine (all that worrying for nothing!). However, I am also experiencing the terrible lag now.

Try updating AM again, there's already a new version. I only noticed a little difference (could be voodoo though) but people with slower rigs told me the perfomance has improved noticeably.

I have a hunch that there's a something like a hard junction between playable and non-playable perfomance. If your're above that you're well and it really doesn't make that much of a difference how fast your rig is but below that the gaming experience is just plain horrible no matter how resistant to low frame rates you might be.

I realize these are two big issues and are part of the problem, but the bottom line is that the slowness wasn't much of an issue until I updated to the newest patch and AM, soooo...Coincidence?

Just for testing take the AM out and see what happens. For me perfomance degraded with the patch and degraded further with the AM for the patched game. Yet I still have no idea what's causing this long term perfomance degradation and I wouldn't even bet that Pescado could tell what he did or even if he did anything to affect perfomance...

If anyone has any other ideas to share on what I can try to fix the gawdawful time warp I would appreciate it. I guess I could try nuking half my town and see if that makes any improvements, but I am wondering if all the pushing to get all the sims in the neighborhood to actually DO things is what's making my system slow to a crawl? Or is this just a common problem with older 'hoods?

I'm pretty much certain that older 'hoods are just slowing down. As for now I'm unaware of any possible ideas known to share. There's no harm in testing whether your game perfomance improves if you show your townfolks your bad side (just save your game to a different slot bevore that - should be obvious but you never know). Please post your findings. As I said population size has no perfomance impact for me but that could be due to the fact my CPU is pretty fast.

Tangie, have you tried the 'towderelicts' console command in the newest builds of AM? I find it hard to believe that you had no cars to clean up in an old neighborhood{...}

The new AM does a good job in nuking stuck limos. I already had ~200 stuck limos in my 'hood again and was just waiting for a good moment to flush them, then the update came and beat me to it.

On another note, does anyone know what it is that controls whether the 'hour til carpool' alarm goes off? {...} I've saved a game at 4 in the sim-morning and run it over and over and over to check the alarms, and half the time it goes off, half the time it doesn't, even if I perform the same sequence of actions on the same clock speed. Weird.

I had that feeling the alarm wasn't going off every time but I thought it was just me clicking away the notifications and forgetting about it a second later...  I'll have to check but I'm almost positive that it's far from "half of the time" for me though.

[Tangie]

Thanks for all the feedback. I did try towderelects but I got an unknown command. AM had been running awhile before I DL the stand-alone toilet, so maybe the car/limos had already been purged by that time?

I have never actually looked at the school to see if they're getting stuck. If you don't actually look, you don't have problems. The game was not designed to have an entire neigborhood of kids get in the school building in a short time frame. It will all happen "off camera" as long as you don't peek! (This reminds me of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indy saying "Don't look, Marian!" when the Germans opened the Ark). If I did look, I have no doubt it would be just as excruciating as the way they are (NOT) moving around the house.
 
Just to update the speed thing further, last night I DL the newest AM but didn't install. Took the old out (without replacing, played w/o AM at all) and opened the same game and played for awhile after work today, and it was slightly better speed-wise but still very slow. So I got out of that game and started playing the McDermotts' (the "farmer" family) in Riverview to see how a new game would play. It still was a little slow. I sent Maximus (the teen) to pee at 7:30am on game day two and by the time he was actually out in front of the house running to the bus it was 9:30am. Two hours just to pee, OMG. Then at exactly 3PM game time, I had a hard freeze (nothing responded AT ALL) and had to close down via task manager. This was without AM at all, mind you. Then I added the newest AM back in but I'll have to wait until after work tomorow to play around some more to see what happens with it in, and how that compares. I also haven't tried reducing the size of my original 'hood yet to see how that affects game play. I'll post more after I try some additional stuff, including going back to the original game and trying the towderelects command again with the newest AM installed.

[Kyna]

Thanks for all the feedback. I did try towderelects but I got an unknown command. AM had been running awhile before I DL the stand-alone toilet, so maybe the car/limos had already been purged by that time?

Well, you would if you typed towderelects.  Try spelling it correctly, towderelicts works in my game.

[neder]

I have never actually looked at the school to see if they're getting stuck. If you don't actually look, you don't have problems. The game was not designed to have an entire neigborhood of kids get in the school building in a short time frame. It will all happen "off camera" as long as you don't peek!

I have to disagree on this point.
I am experiencing school zergswarm clusterfucking and intentionally avoid viewing the school while it's happening.
When I click the portraits of my school-age sims, the dropdown progress bar advances normally once 9AM hits.
Their actual performance bar(in the "job" tab) doesn't actually start moving until around noon, when it finally shows them as "Learning!" instead of "going to school." (They take no school performance hits as long as they make it onto the bus and into the crowd at the gates).
Even though the game should just teleport them into the building if you're not looking - hell, even if you are, I mean, what an arbitrary place to suddenly demand realism- I think it still insists on stuffing them in there one by one.

[Motoki]

I have never actually looked at the school to see if they're getting stuck. If you don't actually look, you don't have problems. The game was not designed to have an entire neigborhood of kids get in the school building in a short time frame. It will all happen "off camera" as long as you don't peek!

I have to disagree on this point.
I am experiencing school zergswarm clusterfucking and intentionally avoid viewing the school while it's happening.
When I click the portraits of my school-age sims, the dropdown progress bar advances normally once 9AM hits.
Their actual performance bar(in the "job" tab) doesn't actually start moving until around noon, when it finally shows them as "Learning!" instead of "going to school." (They take no school performance hits as long as they make it onto the bus and into the crowd at the gates).
Even though the game should just teleport them into the building if you're not looking - hell, even if you are, I mean, what an arbitrary place to suddenly demand realism- I think it still insists on stuffing them in there one by one.

Is this AM forcing the issue for the sake of realism though or default game behavior? I've never noticed such things on the default EAxis story mode, they just sort of go and I never see them actually walk in.

[Swiftgold]

Though the bar moves while they're waiting outside, any opportunities that are supposed to finish upon going to school don't until they're actually in the building, as I learned last night. I turned off the clipping avoidance hoping it would get all the kids in the building, but there's still a huge pileup of them until 12:00 at least. There's some sort of precedence thing because they will all stand and wait for one particular kid to get his ass in gear and move through the door before proceeding, no matter if there's a huge bunch of empty space and no one in the way for someone else to go. I don't care so much because at least they're going to school now, but, still. In my Riverview Indie wolfing run, before these latest couple of updates, I'd have kids go to school and end up playing on the playground all day when they got tired of waiting outside. That neighborhood is full of neurotic, insane, evil, inappropriate, etc. Sims now because they all failed school so very hard.

Also, there's a door at the back of the school building but it's apparently only a facade... I wonder if it's possible to make that an entrance too, somehow, though teleporting in is definitely no worse than the teleporting cars and bikes.

[pbox]

I have never actually looked at the school to see if they're getting stuck. If you don't actually look, you don't have problems.

I have to disagree on this point.
I am experiencing school zergswarm clusterfucking and intentionally avoid viewing the school while it's happening.
When I click the portraits of my school-age sims, the dropdown progress bar advances normally once 9AM hits.
Their actual performance bar(in the "job" tab) doesn't actually start moving until around noon, when it finally shows them as "Learning!" instead of "going to school."

I believe having them selected amounts to the same thing as looking in that case -- they're being run on high detail simulation. In my game it's the same with sims who still have stuff in their queue when unselected -- as long as they do what is queued up, they're on high res.


I have a question re. the CarLimo .. what car exactly is that? On what occasions is it being generated? Asking because I seem to have *no* CarLimos (when checking with the flushy toilet). Not one. Could this be because I have none of the rabbitholes? Or is it perhaps a sign of upcoming trouble (cars being blackholed somehow, or something)? I'm on 1.2.7 with an old Awesome that doesn't yet have this feature, so they can't have been auto-flushed by AM.

[twallan]

I have a question re. the CarLimo .. what car exactly is that? On what occasions is it being generated? Asking because I seem to have *no* CarLimos (when checking with the flushy toilet). Not one. Could this be because I have none of the rabbitholes? Or is it perhaps a sign of upcoming trouble (cars being blackholed somehow, or something)? I'm on 1.2.7 with an old Awesome that doesn't yet have this feature, so they can't have been auto-flushed by AM.

As far as I can tell the "CarLimo" issue is generated by an improper cleanup after using a Limo for carpooling.

If none of your sims use a Limo as their carpool vehicle, then you will probably not encounter the issue.

Good Day.

[neder]

Is this AM forcing the issue for the sake of realism though or default game behavior? I've never noticed such things on the default EAxis story mode, they just sort of go and I never see them actually walk in.

I never noticed it before AM, but back then my hood only had the premade townies and one or two playables- possibly not enough to cause the issue.

I believe having them selected amounts to the same thing as looking in that case -- they're being run on high detail simulation. In my game it's the same with sims who still have stuff in their queue when unselected -- as long as they do what is queued up, they're on high res.

Sure, but now we're talking about Schroedinger's students. If I'm not watching them, are they in school or not? When I click on them, anytime before noonish anyway, it shows that they're definitely not. Perhaps if I just ignored them from 9AM until 2-3PM their progress bars would fill just fine. If that's the case, then Heisenberg provides a more appropriate metaphor, because the very act of seeing if they're in school must boot them out. But in order to be booted out, they must have been in school to begin with and the progress bar shows they clearly are not. However, that's exactly what you would expect and I know that, so the poison must definitely be in the glass in front of me!

I guess I'm off to make more observations (and perhaps get involved in a land war in Asia).

[cheriem]

BTW, just have to poke my nose in and giggle at the Princess Bride references in the post above....