Pathological loading times
GnatGoSplat:
I don't think slow game load times has anything to do with HDD access speed. All slow loading save games I've had actually exhibit very little HDD access. The LED just kind of flickers occasionally and remains dark for a great deal of the loading delay. Pes once mentioned a save game can be bloated with an excess amount of compressed crap which keeps your PC busy uncompressing aforementioned crap. You might try Twallan's Porter mod. Export your entire hood using porter, then create a fresh hood, destroyallhumans with AM, place your Portered save, and use Porter to extract. That should leave you with a new hood with your old sims that should load as quickly as a new, fresh hood.
Madame Mim:
Quote from: Soltis on 2010 December 07, 02:11:54
Quote from: Madame Mim on 2010 December 06, 00:37:14
Obviously it's due to the endU virus (also known as PEBKAC) - you used the word pathological not me.
If you want to bandy pretty semantics, the term also has a comp sci meaning referring to algorithmic behaviour which grows geometrically or exponentially; I could easily induce hour-long loading times with this little problem, if I just kept returning to the main menu and re-loading.
It bears mention that making foolish assumptions about situations one doesn't really understand is the actual basis of most ID 10 T and PEBKAC errors.
paid - I crawl back in my box.
Soltis:
Quote from: GnatGoSplat on 2010 December 07, 20:22:25
I don't think slow game load times has anything to do with HDD access speed. All slow loading save games I've had actually exhibit very little HDD access. The LED just kind of flickers occasionally and remains dark for a great deal of the loading delay. Pes once mentioned a save game can be bloated with an excess amount of compressed crap which keeps your PC busy uncompressing aforementioned crap. You might try Twallan's Porter mod. Export your entire hood using porter, then create a fresh hood, destroyallhumans with AM, place your Portered save, and use Porter to extract. That should leave you with a new hood with your old sims that should load as quickly as a new, fresh hood.
Yeah, the same bears out in my experience -- but a lot of people still insist on doing unnecessary diligence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it's not the actual cause (especially strange since HDD speeds haven't meaningfully changed in ages, SSD not withstanding...).
At any rate, another interesting observation: the game loaded just fine (well, fine-ish) when my sims were in SimLa (or whatever) for a few days; the loading times spiked the moment I came back home.
I have the funny suspicion it's the house I built, or something; I tend to build big, and the house I have is 7 storeys tall (including basements) and 60-ish squares long, with a massive garden and considerable decoration. Still not enough objects that it *should* slow down the game, but I think anyone familiar with EA programming knows that "should" and "is" are frequently very different.
I will try the house exporting trick, though, just to see if there are any extraneous factors I can weed out; thanks for the suggestion.
GnatGoSplat:
Quote from: Soltis on 2010 December 10, 08:08:26
At any rate, another interesting observation: the game loaded just fine (well, fine-ish) when my sims were in SimLa (or whatever) for a few days; the loading times spiked the moment I came back home.
Yeah, that's because each WA town has its own .nhd (neighborhood) file. The game won't load your bloated main hood until your sim comes home.
Quote from: Soltis on 2010 December 10, 08:08:26
I have the funny suspicion it's the house I built, or something; I tend to build big, and the house I have is 7 storeys tall (including basements) and 60-ish squares long, with a massive garden and considerable decoration. Still not enough objects that it *should* slow down the game, but I think anyone familiar with EA programming knows that "should" and "is" are frequently very different.
I will try the house exporting trick, though, just to see if there are any extraneous factors I can weed out; thanks for the suggestion.
It's possible. Come to think of it, my awful 460MB save folder that literally took 45-minutes to load was one where I had built several huge houses (main hood .nhd itself was 260MB). However, I'd saved the houses to the library and put them back into a fresh hood, used Porter to restore all the old sims into the fresh hood, and the new save folder ended up only 30MB and taking under a minute to load. Same hood, same houses, same sims, more buildings (added the Ambitions lots), but a lot smaller file size. It seemed like the houses themselves don't bloat the save, but perhaps the save gets more bloated with every modification to the lot. I haven't tried changing a lot and checking to see if the save file grows or not. I do know that the more famblies you've made active does result in a bloatier save file. About 5MB per fambly made active in my case.
Soltis:
Very useful information, all in all; when I finally get pissed enough at the loading time to bother with the export/import I'll let you know how it works out.
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