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Patch Notes Addressed Culling Issue
Ceres_Meiriona
Posts: 5,006 Member
So I found this part of the patch notes to be really refreshing. I've often complained about the lack of communication regarding culling, and so this detailed response was extremely appreciated by me. How about you guys? Does this change how you feel at all?
Source: forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/863471/december-4-2015-patch-notes#latest
If you don't want to read it from the notes, here it is.
Source: forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/863471/december-4-2015-patch-notes#latest
If you don't want to read it from the notes, here it is.
Hey folks,
I wanted to take a moment to speak directly to one of our most important issues.
We have listened to your feedback on culling and performance. And we have been, and will continue to address these issues, and have a group dedicated to them.
Some of the work they have been doing recently has been focused on optimizing load times, reducing memory usage, and increasing performance… but what about culling? Well, it turns out culling happens because of the need of those three items: load times, memory usage, and performance.
Outdoor Retreat was over using our compatibility region filters (when a Sim is requested for a “thing” we use a filter to determine who). Such that when the filter failed to find someone that fit the requirements exactly (male, bartending skill 5, young adult), it created a new Sim to fit the role rather than allowing for some flexibility (bartending 4 or 6 is probably just as well).
Along the same lines, we took the above fix and made it general – rather than always creating exactly what was requested by the game, we allow flexibility. Reducing the number of new Sims being created, that more often than not, would just come and go without the player realizing.
Get to Work added aliens, and one of the requests of the spawning system was to create disguised aliens. Turns out we were creating A LOT of disguised aliens. Not on purpose, but there was a cool down assigned to the spawned Sim that would then prevent them from spawning again in a given period of time. Sadly, the system was requesting ‘in disguise’ aliens more frequently than the cooldown’s timer… and thus creating brand new Sims on each request. We adjusted the tuning, and saw an increase in performance.
We have spent some time optimizing lighting draw calls, to assist with framerate issues while in Build Mode.
We removed some data duplication between the game side code and Create A Sim code, saving around 50kb per Sim data (also known as SimInfos).
The smaller the size of a SimInfo, the faster it is to load a given Sims information.
We discovered a large memory and performance spike as a result of inventories. Turns out that NPCs, who don’t need to know exactly what is in their inventory when they are an NPC, were carrying around large amounts of data and in some cases could have many hundreds of inventory objects, resulting in slow load times, and memory/performance spikes when the NPC was created.
Now NPCs do not instantiate most of the objects in their inventories until needed. This provides a much needed relief in the runtime performance spikes in our test environment.
These are some of the specific issues we have addressed recently, all with the goal of making the game stable, performant, and enjoyable. Please know that we are always looking at performance, culling, memory, and load time optimization issues among our highest priority issues. And while we can’t always speak to them, we are always appreciative of your feedback.
Thank you,
SimGuruGnome
24
Comments
Yes, this.
Thank you.
Infinite Diversity, Infinite Combinations
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Thanks SimGuruBChick! I appreciate the confirmation greatly. ::hugs::
Oh I missed that on twitter, thanks for sharing @PHOEBESMOM601
That definitely reaffirms what I was thinking. The transparency is nice, though, and I do appreciate them sharing the efforts they're making to remedy the situation.
@Moodbeamy If the game is over generating sims, and you were to adjust the rate to stop doing that, maybe we wouldn't need a cap increase? I'm not sure, but I will definitely be watching my family trees so that I can provide some feedback as to how effective these adjustments are during game play.
@JasonAnthonySterling You're totally right about that. There is no concrete IT'S FIXED statement, and I think that was omitted on purpose, because they really aren't sure what is going to happen after 16 generations of game play. I think that's where we as the player are supposed to step in and lets them know if this is a good "fix" for legacy gameplay. It was nice to read that they have a team dedicated to this issue, though. It's nice to know they view it important enough for a dedicated team, because it sure is important to me!
Thanks SimGuruBChick. Appreciate your confirmation. I noticed that there were some tweaks to disguised aliens, which makes me a bit nervous. I really hope this isn't turned down too much. Alien abductions were turned down too, to where they hardly ever happen. I definitely appreciate all of the efforts you guys put in to give us a great gaming experience. Hopefully, we will still see disguised aliens.
When will the culling mechanic gets triggered by the game?
I do plan to do a lot of legacy playing to see if I can get culling to trigger, though, so I'll keep everyone posted on how that goes. Hopefully others are doing the same!
Edit: As much as I adore TS4, culling is a primary joy killer for me, so I'm probably a bit overly excited about this. Forgive me! lol
culling is a game killer indeed.
If the game is not generating unnecessary sims anymore (which is something good) does not mean culling will not start because we players are making many sims as townies or playable. Not raising the minimum cap to a much bigger number or stopping culling all together would mean the problem will continue to haunt us again and again.
Infinite Diversity, Infinite Combinations
Thanks to 06bon06 for my lovely new signature pic
Thanks! Do you know the new limit?
Can you tell us how high the cap limit has been expanded from the old one?
Some of my creations in the gallery use CC so remember to enable them in the gallery's options to see them all.
Could you let us know the new limit? It's not 181 is it?
Infinite Diversity, Infinite Combinations
Thanks to 06bon06 for my lovely new signature pic
Thank you (and everybody there) so much! Really happy to not have to worry about this on Tuesday
Also, thank you for all the culling notes! We really needed the reassurance and details!
Some of my creations in the gallery use CC so remember to enable them in the gallery's options to see them all.
i second this! such good stuff and notes on culling very informative of how complex the issue is
The Essence
How To Lose Your Ugliness in Ten Generations
Check @SimGuruBChick's comments later on p. 1, though.