Work/school zergswarms and game performance
varmint:
I'm running a 1.3 patched game with the latest 1.3-compatible AM (and running crash-free, don't worry, this isn't gonna turn into another OMGCTD flail). I remember Pescado posting something about a 'brute force' solution to make sims go to work/school, and that seems to have been implemented with the latest awesome, because my sims are now dutifully attending both.
Or rather, trying to attend. The zergswarm at the school is so crazy that some of the kids never make it in, leading to a congested cluster of freaked-out teens and children in front of the school, and I've seen a couple reports on these boards of people having the same issue. Furthermore, at the times of day when the game is trying to squeeze everyone into their rabbitholes or poop them back out, my game performance takes a divebomb. From 8-9 am and then again in the afternoon from 2-5 pm, normal speed starts moving in 5 or 10 minute chunks and the sims take hours and hours to complete tasks that should take 30 minutes or less. So, while I was one of the people who wanted the work and school problems fixed, I now am having that "watch out what you wish for" feeling. I'm confident that the performance hit is caused by pushing everyone to their rabbitholes, because the same thing happened to me pre-patch when I tested twallan's modified AM from the 'inactive slacker sims' thread.
Changing graphics settings seems to have no impact on the issue. Setting dynamic avoidance to 0 didn't help either. Thinking that maybe my neighborhood was just too freaking crowded, I raptured half the town and this actually helped some, but the performance hit at rabbithole time still made things hair-pullingly slow. Is anyone else experiencing these issues? Is there any solution short of running a less populated neighborhood? I don't want to be forced to choose between the game being unplayable half the sim-day and having unemployed, failing sims, but still, could the 'force to work/school' feature be made configurable for large neighborhoods where having it on causes these problems?
twallan:
How many sims do you have in your neighborhood?
My town has 33 households with 121 resident sims. Of which 27 are school age children/teens. I have the dynamic avoidance set at half its normal value.
When it comes time to go to school, the children appear to be quite apt at making it into the building, even though they all arrive at around the same time.
Good Day. :)
varmint:
Quote from: twallan on 2009 August 01, 00:42:14
How many sims do you have in your neighborhood?
My town has 33 households with 121 resident sims. Of which 27 are school age children/teens.
Pre-rapture I had around 36 households, 200 sims, with 35 or so school-aged. Post-rapture I'm running around 25 households, 100 sims with 19 or so school aged. I should add that everyone seems to be making it into the rabbithole post-rapture without clusterfucking, but the slowdowns still happen at the same times, which is mostly what I'm concerned about. If I could play through the day without the crazy lag and stuttering clock I wouldn't care if half the school-aged population stood in front of the school and passed out or starved. My computer is decent, I have 3GB of RAM and a top-end dual core processor with a good GPU, it really should be able to handle it. Maybe it has something to do with the 'loss of performance if you play too many active households' thing? I've actively screwed around in probably 15 or more of these households, and maybe I just need to limit that or get used to playing smaller neighborhoods.
cassblonde:
Quote from: varmint on 2009 August 01, 00:13:20
I'm running a 1.3 patched game with the latest 1.3-compatible AM (and running crash-free, don't worry, this isn't gonna turn into another OMGCTD flail).
I wish I could help. Mostly I am posting to thank you for a clear, well written and non-flailly post. I have read too many posts today that make me logout and go bang my head on a wall at the level of stupid that exists in humanity.
I hope Pescado will be able to help you, you have clearly done everything in your power to help yourself.
twallan:
Quote from: varmint on 2009 August 01, 01:43:33
Pre-rapture I had around 36 households, 200 sims, with 35 or so school-aged. Post-rapture I'm running around 25 households, 100 sims with 19 or so school aged. I should add that everyone seems to be making it into the rabbithole post-rapture without clusterfucking, but the slowdowns still happen at the same times, which is mostly what I'm concerned about. If I could play through the day without the crazy lag and stuttering clock I wouldn't care if half the school-aged population stood in front of the school and passed out or starved. My computer is decent, I have 3GB of RAM and a top-end dual core processor with a good GPU, it really should be able to handle it. Maybe it has something to do with the 'loss of performance if you play too many active households' thing? I've actively screwed around in probably 15 or more of these households, and maybe I just need to limit that or get used to playing smaller neighborhoods.
I actively control all my households, popping in whenever I think they need some guidance, so it's doubtful it has anything to do with how many homes are touched on a regular basis.
The stuttering clock issue was a major problem with my game, and I spent the last week hunting it down. I eventually found it was a pile of junk car objects running in the background that was grinding my town to a halt. After cleaning them out, the stuttering ended and my Speed 3 was actually fast. However, I can't say whether this is the issue you are encountering.
I run a Dual Core AMD 3.0Ghz on Vista with 4GB of RAM, with a GTX 280 graphics card. I also run with the graphic levels turned to the lowest to minimize memory leakage, as once the game reaches 1.5GB in memory usage it becomes badly unstable on my machine (Error Code 12 save failures and such).
Good Day. :)
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