Does it always take forever for 1.7 games to load?
witch:
I loaded a vanilla game, then patched and loaded WA, then patched again. It's at 2.2 now, I think. The only CC I have is the EA store stuff, the only mod is awesomemod. I haven't had any glitches to date, but did notice very slow loading times.
I don't keep unnecessary services running - see Elder Geek or Black Viper for turning off unnecessary shit permanently. I run WinXP with 2GB RAM, video card is Radeon HD 4870, 2.2 Ghz chip. I do turn off the antivirus before playing. Edit: I should add, I have a striped RAID array with 10,000rpm disks, which makes an improvement to many games in Read/Write speed. The machine's a good little performer and I would have expected the sims to be more responsive. Saves used to take an eternity, which quite put me off the game.
Textures do seem to be rendering more slowly, but I wasn't sure because I haven't played TS3 for several months. I've been playing Dragon Age which seems to render almost instantaneously.
Edit: Correct chip rating and other random shit.
aspinL:
I didn't really notice a difference in load time for the game or to a neighborhood, but what did slow/lag more was the rendering and such. When in a brand new town, on a blank lot with just one sim, I scroll the camera and notice a little jerk as it moves. Where as before it was always smooth, even on a 60x60 lot with a fully furnished house and family.
I do have a bunch of hairs in, as well as NRAAS computer, Awesome, one small hack and some other cc. It's not as much as I had before WA because I haven't added everything back in yet, but even so there was no lag or camera jerk with TS3.
As someone else said, I notice after I click on the .exe the screen goes black and the windows bar sits there and sometimes flickers, like it's about to disappear. The game just takes longer to actually launch and get going now.
I have more then plenty of RAM (6GB) with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX video card, 2.6GHz chip on Windows Vista. I turn off my wireless but not my anti-virus.
uknortherner:
The one thing I've noticed since the patch (I don't have WA) is as witch and death owner have pointed out - it seems to take an eternity for the game to render/retexture everything when you scroll around. It's almost as though the game immediately forgets anything that's off the screen and instead of reloading the textures from the HDD, it wastes CPU cycles regenerating them instead. The same can be said for CAS and CASt too - it constantly has to reload all the swatches every time I click on different tabs.
There's also a new folder in My Documents/Electronic Arts/Sims 3 called CurrentGame.sims3 which seems to duplicate the current active save when the game's running (the data is purged upon exiting) which could go some way to explaining the long load times.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: uknortherner on 2009 December 04, 12:19:06
The one thing I've noticed since the patch (I don't have WA) is as witch and death owner have pointed out - it seems to take an eternity for the game to render/retexture everything when you scroll around. It's almost as though the game immediately forgets anything that's off the screen and instead of reloading the textures from the HDD, it wastes CPU cycles regenerating them instead. The same can be said for CAS and CASt too - it constantly has to reload all the swatches every time I click on different tabs.
I think this functionality is done to try to keep the game from overrunning the 2 GB RAM usage limit for a 32bit program and then exploding horribly as a result: The game already eats up a lot of RAM and enough added content would easily push it over if it didn't dump them from RAM to clear space.
Quote from: uknortherner on 2009 December 04, 12:19:06
There's also a new folder in My Documents/Electronic Arts/Sims 3 called CurrentGame.sims3 which seems to duplicate the current active save when the game's running (the data is purged upon exiting) which could go some way to explaining the long load times.
There's a reason for this, actually: Since the game now is segmented into multiple different "zones", in order to switch zones, the zone information must be dumped out of RAM and stored someplace (otherwise save times would grow interminably long with having to load all 3 subhoods into RAM, not to mention risk blowing out aforementioned 2 GB limit). Since this information has to be stored somewhere, CurrentGame is basically a cache for this data, so as not to overwrite your save. In TS2, this sort of also existed, in that you were forced to save anytime you zoned. TS3 does not force you to save and will not damage your existing save you loaded from, so instead, it dumps everything in CurrentGame. An interesting potential exists for CurrentGame to be used as crash recovery if you crash shortly after zoning, but this has not been explored because crashing is bad.
uknortherner:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 December 04, 12:25:50
I think this functionality is done to try to keep the game from overrunning the 2 GB RAM usage limit for a 32bit program and then exploding horribly as a result: The game already eats up a lot of RAM and enough added content would easily push it over if it didn't dump them from RAM to clear space.
Ah, I see what you mean. I've just tried running TS3 in a window with process explorer running. Even with just the store stuff and AM installed, the program is already pushing 2GB in usage (evenly split between RAM and the page file). What puzzles me though is despite there being at least 2GB of RAM free before I start the game, it tops out at 1GB and shoves the rest in the page file. Why not use all available RAM instead?
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 December 04, 12:25:50
There's a reason for this, actually: Since the game now is segmented into multiple different "zones", in order to switch zones, the zone information must be dumped out of RAM and stored someplace (otherwise save times would grow interminably long with having to load all 3 subhoods into RAM, not to mention risk blowing out aforementioned 2 GB limit). Since this information has to be stored somewhere, CurrentGame is basically a cache for this data, so as not to overwrite your save. In TS2, this sort of also existed, in that you were forced to save anytime you zoned. TS3 does not force you to save and will not damage your existing save you loaded from, so instead, it dumps everything in CurrentGame. An interesting potential exists for CurrentGame to be used as crash recovery if you crash shortly after zoning, but this has not been explored because crashing is bad.
Right. So even in the base game, the patch is behaving as though I have WA installed and is running the game as such. Actually this makes a lot of sense!
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