How do you decrease sims 3 saving time? -solved

[vvhitney]

(Sorry noticed I posted on wrong board)

My saving times have gone upto 30 mins and it's really starting to annoy me because before it only took a few minutes and its creeping up. I have tried taking out my unused mods. I have tried culling off 50 sims yet it hardly makes a difference. I also tested culling off all the NPC's sims through NRAAS master controller which was apparently 700 sims and that didn't make a difference either.

I saved the files and noticed the size of the saved sims game files did not decrease due to any sim culling but increased after each save. Save sizes started at 450mb, to 520mb (after sims cull) to 523mb (After 700 npc culled). Which brings me to the point, is there anyway to make my sims 3 save smaller? My saves are humongous now at 523mb.

I have turned off the memory function recently to try help it too. I have all the expansions up until pets, I don't have pets. I noticed that there are large files in the save folder related to WA, are there any files safe to delete in there? I don't mind deleting the vacation worlds.
I have a decent computer running 4gb ram with quad core processor at 3.6GHz.

Please let me know if theres anyway to change the saving time without getting a better computer, because its the large sims file making it long to save.

Thanks guys!

[Lakart]

You didn't use the search function at all, did you? Or even Google it? No? That's what I thought.

[vvhitney]

^ Sigh. Of course I tried searching before posting. Does it make you feel so important when posting that reply? oh your such a big boy! I wanted advice not some stupid no one to complain about my post.

Anyways I will share my solution which helped me a lot ^_^:
Currently my save game is.... 35mb (from 500mb)!!! With my WHOLE sims population! And it takes less than 2 mins to save.

I found using the NRAAs Porter to be of much use. http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Porter
This mod helps you to transport sims and numerous households at a time across to different worlds.
I moved my whole sim population at a third of a population at a time to my newly made world. The move included the sim's inventory, lifetime points/rewards, jobs and relationships between the sim's that have been grouped together when moving. I'm not quite sure about the family tree working properly on the move however.

The downside is that you have to use a completely new world, however you can easily just save a certain lot from you old world that you want to keep by saving the lot and placing it in the new world.
And since I moved the population in 1/3's at a time to the new world I lost the sim's relationship between the other sims that have not moved within the same 1/3 population at a time.
You also need to make sure you have enough lots for sims to move in or you will be stuck with a lot with 50 sims and you won't be able to move them out!
I have crashed a few times as well trying this method, mainly by trying to go back to main menu from playing a saved world.

Note: ALWAYS back up your saves in another folder before trying this out as it could stuff up your game.
Do this at your own risk! I am not responsible for you if you try this method.

And to keep the save size low, try not to play all the households in your sim world.

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Other stuff I tried:

*** Deleting Cache, it didn't do anything for me (I tried it but didn't mention it before because I didn't think it was too relevant ...I am now adding it just to clarify)
***Going into the save folder and deleting theTravelDB and other (China, Egypt, France)DB... this didn't make a difference to the saving time at all for me.
***Using TS3 Recompressor (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15129.0.html) the s3rc function helped get rid of about 30mb and the time on the save didn't make much difference, however if you have a smaller save file it will most likely be a significance to you.
+ I did not try the decrapify function as I was unsure of the risk it came with and it seemed a bit complicated fiddling with mods.

[jezzer]

The downside is that you have to use a completely new world, however you can easily just save a certain lot from you old world that you want to keep by saving the lot and placing it in the new world.

That's a pretty big "downside."  I don't think your "solution" is going to catch on.

[vvhitney]

Just a solution for people out there

If your game takes ages to save it might be worthwhile to do it. I've heard people's games that save for hours at a time and if it takes maybe one to two hours tops to save all the lots you want and move them to another world than its worth it to decrease the save time (mine decreased from 30 mins to less than 2).

If your game takes 5 minutes to save don't bother doing all this.

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Oh and this is still a trial... if I find any errors after moving I will post them

[Neowulf]

Again, if you had searched properly, you would have been able to figure this out easily. Also, you obviously didn't read Twallan's explanation of how to maintain worldwide relationships.

[vvhitney]

Again, if you had searched properly, you would have been able to figure this out easily. Also, you obviously didn't read Twallan's explanation of how to maintain worldwide relationships.

I couldn't find a way to maintain the worldwide relationship beside moving the whole town at once :/ Please explain how.

[Madame Mim]

Again, if you had searched properly, you would have been able to figure this out easily. Also, you obviously didn't read Twallan's explanation of how to maintain worldwide relationships.

I couldn't find a way to maintain the worldwide relationship beside moving the whole town at once :/ Please explain how.

Please read the instructions.

[Neowulf]

Ah, it seems that Twallan has yet to transfer the full information onto his wiki. Vodka puts me in a good enough mood to tell you, though. Porter has the automatic function of looking for duplicate sims (based on name and favourites), and allows you to replace them. This way, you can have many groups of people from one neighbourhood in different "packs" (with duplicates) moved one at a time. The safest method to retain all the information is probably to just pack one family and all of their relationships at a time. If Porter maintains the relationships with other sims not in a pack, it might even be simpler. Just unpack your whole town once and then a second time because it will (hopefully) recognize all the sims as being there, and connect them. But basically, Twallan's answer was redundancy.

Then again, vodka and late nights don't exactly make me think straight.

[vvhitney]

Ah, it seems that Twallan has yet to transfer the full information onto his wiki. Vodka puts me in a good enough mood to tell you, though. Porter has the automatic function of looking for duplicate sims (based on name and favourites), and allows you to replace them. This way, you can have many groups of people from one neighbourhood in different "packs" (with duplicates) moved one at a time. The safest method to retain all the information is probably to just pack one family and all of their relationships at a time. If Porter maintains the relationships with other sims not in a pack, it might even be simpler. Just unpack your whole town once and then a second time because it will (hopefully) recognize all the sims as being there, and connect them. But basically, Twallan's answer was redundancy.

Then again, vodka and late nights don't exactly make me think straight.

Thanks for your help, I appreciate it! Now my whole population maintains its full relationship between each other

After what you wrote I decided to try again and pack the whole neighbourhood at once. So I used NRAAS master controller to reset the whole world and then packed all the sims at once.
I then unpacked it into the world that I moved the population 1/3 at a time into (Also where 1/3 of the relationships of the town were lost between each other) and then all when all the unpacking finished all my relationships were kept and there were no duplicate sims!

But the first time I tried to unpack the whole sim population into a new town it crashed though, but I only tried once... might have been unlucky that time.
 
I also found this on the NRAAS site "What sort of issues should I be aware of ? 3.Do not attempt to export your entire town in a single family. The game will run out of memory attempting to create the file and either hang indefinitely or crash to the desktop." I think that's what he was referring to at the time (I wasn't sure I just assumed, but now I understand its not), so that's why after I decided to move the population of the town at 1/3s at a time.