What would you sacrifice for a faster game?

dw4518 · November 2016

I'm getting too much lag and decided to remove something from my game. My choices are:

- remove custom content except key mods
- uninstall seasons
- uninstall pets
- uninstall stuff packs
- play with a smaller world (using storybrook county at the moment)

So what would you guys do? I'm having a tough time deciding!

becomingjenn · November 2016

Smaller world or Pets. Also have you tried doing all the things the Nraas site recommends? @igazor has links somewhere. I know for my own game, it helps to use some mods to limit things, such as register to limit wild Pets (and a few other things). You can also turn off pets in the options panel of the game.

Goulsquash · November 2016

It really depends on why you're having lag. If your graphics card is the issue, pets or seasons will be the culprits most likely.

CravenLestat · November 2016

Honestly the least enjoyable for me is pets expansion.Am an animal lover in real life but caring for a huge house of sims and feeding cats and dogs and kids and all those minor pets can take away from enjoying the game in my opinion.So would suggest to cut that out.I use no CC or mods anyway but even if I did would choose Pets to go over mods or CC.Pets has only a few things I miss like plastic surgery at the hostpital and minor pets like squirrels and birds and like one female outfit the shorts overalls one, missing 3 things does not kill me.Do like me play without it a while see if you really notice anything missing.I didnt and have more time to enjoy the life of my sim and the kids I have in game without worrying about dead birds rotting in my house or ghost horses I neglected running around.Would rather take my kids to the park and have family picnics then sit home all day cleaning parrot poo and brushing a cat

But suggestion: Save any townies you really like to your libraby you can still use them without the expansion installed they will just get generic outfits but everything will be the same except unless they were a cat person trait etc I have all my AP faves in all my games

IreneSwift · November 2016

I would go for the smaller world. Next would be Pets, except some of the clothing and decor items from Pets are among my favorites, so what I've done instead is to use mods to disable all animals, except the minor pets. With NRaas Story Progression, you can disallow any of the residents from adopting pets, and limit the number of each kind of animals. Unfortunately, setting those limits to 0 actually means unlimited, but if you have the household limit for the entire town set at 0, it actually means 0, so there will be no pets. Strays and wild animals can be mostly eliminated by NRaas Register, but setting each one to 0. I also set NRaas Overwatch to block pet adoptions, and there's another option in NRaas Story Progression to set "use pet pool" to false. I use all of the settings there are, to make sure.

Like @CravenLestat I find pets to be far too demanding for my liking, so I don't usually have them. One of these days though, I'm going to play a family with a pet. Maybe I'll learn how to deal with a pet without the game making it necessary for the pet to be the main focus of my active sims' lives. My singles with pets never had time to make friends, let alone find their Mr. Right. When they were home, life was all about the pets.

Seasons can also be made less demanding by disabling weather and removing seasonal lots. I use NRaas Tempest to control weather in my games, because before I started using it, my sims didn't usually have enough sunny days to ever do anything outside. Sometimes I play with only summer enabled. With Tempest, I can still have all of the holidays.

JoAnne65 · November 2016

I'd start by removing CC first myself over removing things that belong to the actual game, but I never really cared for CC that much so I may be biased there

As for pets, I highly recommend turning them into roommates via Mastercontroller when you don't like them to be an active member of your household. I love it myself. All I have to do is fill their feeder, for the rest they take care of themselves. When I feel like it I interact with them (you can even praise or punish them like the active pets and train them that way). For me it resembles having pets in real life, I never liked to control them to be honest.

nickibitsward · November 2016

I've never had to make that choice but I understand Pets and Seasons are the most demanding EPs.

coco · November 2016

I would remove Pets and lower some of the graphic settings. If that doesn't work, play in a smaller world.

LaBlue0314 · November 2016

Actually what I do to help with the lag is this. I have all the expansion packs and stuff packs. I completely disable the weather, and use the NRaas Mods to completely stop all animals. If I want to play with an animal, I will still have the family I'm playing have them. And I will also play with a smaller player created world.

TadOlson · November 2016

I use NRaas Mods including a heavily tuned NRaas version of story progression with my own settings and I do most of the story progression in the worlds manually.I have a 100 baby challenge in Storybrook County lite and found that empty worlds that were less developed work better and it can grow slowly over time.I also turn automatic memories off and don't throw a large population into a world all at once before starting to play.I just move a founding family in and play them for a while before eventually moving more in slowly as the town starts building up gradually.I actually play Sims 2 rotational style and start building my towns up gradually over time like in Sims 2.

GaiaHypothesis · November 2016

I do a variety of thing to keep my game playable. One of them is playing in smaller worlds, decreasing the amount of children the population has, taking away erroneous pets, reducing seasons, setting down some graphics (high detail lots, shadows etc. Never sim detail or edge smoothing). Then I would pare down on CC.

I have the base-game on my laptop, and I run it with a small world and MINIMAL CC. Like nraas basics, default skin and eyes, and a very select number of hairs and almost no CC clothing (a few pairs of jeans for the men because... yeuch... basgame pants) and it is still entertaining and runs super smooth (its definitely NOT a gaming laptop).

MemoriiValentine · November 2016

Does removing the pets expansion help a lot ?i cut down on half my cc and only get new hairs or houses as I need them from now on. I love playing in mayfield springs but the animals kinda lag it too much

CravenLestat · November 2016

I only removed pets because I do not use it and it depresses me to see strays

when you really break it down the amount of non pet related stuff is not that great.A few western looking decor some chairs a few decent outfits.I really do not miss it at all.Not saying Pets is bad I bought it

but am not into the unicorn thing all the time some games I play realistically.My game runs fine with everything installed Pets is the only thing I got rid of and Lunar Lakes because it really adds nothing to the game hardly has anything and I do not like the world.But did save all the hottie townies from LL first

A stuff pack offers way more than Pets does to me as far as content I use.

Lunar Lakes has 20 new things period!!! counting build/buy and clothing all combined, I was not impressed,If you can live without the tree of prosperity you can get rid of that too.The tree is cheaty anyway

dw4518 · November 2016

thanks for everyone's tips! I should really uninstall pets but I like the idea of animals roaming around my world. Seasons I do not care for that much but I do like a lot of the objects. so really I can't bare to get rid of anything, hard decision

Charlottesmom · November 2016

I agree with everyone who said pets, I adore animals in RL but in general Pets in Sims drive me batty! I would never personally get rid of Seasons, I adore the snow, but hear it does slow down games to a crawl.

becomingjenn · November 2016

dw4518 wrote: »

thanks for everyone's tips! I should really uninstall pets but I like the idea of animals roaming around my world. Seasons I do not care for that much but I do like a lot of the objects. so really I can't bare to get rid of anything, hard decision

Do you have Register? (a Nraas mod). I really do suggest it. The default for many of the pets is something like 6 (these are stays and wild animals that spawn and the spawning can mess things up if the spawn in the wrong place). I turn all cats and dogs to zero and keep one of the deer and racoon. The horses and unicorns, well, it depends on the game I'm playing. This has helped a lot (and I tweak around with other Nraas mods, but this seems to help the most).

As for seasons, play with the length (I don't like too much of winter, so I keep them short and sweet), but make the summer and spring super long. I also turn off hail and if my sim is at uni, I turn off all weather. You can play around with these in the options panel on your game, no mods required.

Good luck.

MemoriiValentine · November 2016

Charlottesmom wrote: »

I agree with everyone who said pets, I adore animals in RL but in general Pets in Sims drive me batty! I would never personally get rid of Seasons, I adore the snow, but hear it does slow down games to a crawl.

I love the pets in the games but I get scared something might happen to one . Like if somewhere in my sims game a cat might be attsckign a bird and I can't stand to think about it

TheDarkRose · November 2016

I play without stuff packs so I'd say get rid of them.

IreneSwift · November 2016

Stuff packs don't cause lag.

LaBlue0314 · November 2016

I completely agree, and so have many others, stuff packs are just items you have in CAS, buy mode, and build mode. Keep your stuff packs.

phoebebebe13 · November 2016

dw4518 wrote: »

I'm getting too much lag and decided to remove something from my game. My choices are:

- remove custom content except key mods
- uninstall seasons
- uninstall pets
- uninstall stuff packs
- play with a smaller world (using storybrook county at the moment)

So what would you guys do? I'm having a tough time deciding!

Do you have your computer specs posted somewhere? If not can you post them so I can get a better idea of what is going on.

Windows Key + R Key will open your run box in the lower left hand corner of your computer. In the run box type DxDiag. Hit ok , let it load than use the save option to save the DxDiag text file to desktop. You can copy and paste the DxDiag text file in several sections in several posts. The report is long and will not fit in one post. You can also upload the DxDiag text file to pastebin http://pastebin.com/ and then post a link from pastebin here Thank you

dorcsyful · November 2016

You don't have to give up on those EPs forever. Both my current and old laptop weren't good enough to run all my EPs. So I started with a single sim and activated WA and Ambitions. He/She lived and when he/she died, I disabled both and turned on ITF (only that, as it's one of the most demanding) then LN an Generations, then Pets etc. (I actually have a complete chart)
I know you probably have a better computer than I do so it won't be one or two EPs at a time but if I were you I'd say every second generation should have pets.
For seasons I'd say if you only like the objects turn off everything in the options menu and only leave summer. I think someone mentined once that snow is the one that's making it so demanding.

Odonata68 · November 2016

I sacrificed some $$$ to buy a gaming comp!

(not really a sacrifice because I can update it) Although, I don't have everything installed yet, I hope I won't have to give up anything to play.

dw4518 · November 2016

phoebebebe13 wrote: »

Do you have your computer specs posted somewhere? If not can you post them so I can get a better idea of what is going on.

Windows Key + R Key will open your run box in the lower left hand corner of your computer. In the run box type DxDiag. Hit ok , let it load than use the save option to save the DxDiag text file to desktop. You can copy and paste the DxDiag text file in several sections in several posts. The report is long and will not fit in one post. You can also upload the DxDiag text file to pastebin http://pastebin.com/ and then post a link from pastebin here Thank you

I don't think I can afford to upgrade my laptop right now but here's the basic specs:

System Information

Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 14393) (14393.rs1_release_inmarket.161102-0100)
System Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
System Model: UX303UA
BIOS: UX303UA.202
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
Memory: 12288MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 12188MB RAM
Page File: 3889MB used, 10154MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
User DPI Setting: Using System DPI
System DPI Setting: 144 DPI (150 percent)
DWM DPI Scaling: UnKnown
Miracast: Available, with HDCP
Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Not Supported
DxDiag Version: 10.00.14393.0000 64bit Unicode

I have now run some homeless sims out of town using Nraas mod and used Register to limit animal adoptions and pregnancies. I also took out some townies too. It runs a bit better now but story progression will probably blow up the save file again soon haha

Astro · November 2016

Odonata68 wrote: »

I sacrificed some $$$ to buy a gaming comp! (not really a sacrifice because I can update it) Although, I don't have everything installed yet, I hope I won't have to give up anything to play.

my thoughts exactly.

igazor · November 2016

@dw4518 - You're playing TS3 on a Zenbook? Cool, those are powerful little puppies. Unfortunately your model only has an integrated graphics chip and that would not be upgradable. No matter how spiffy the rest of its specs are, It's not just not going to be able to handle the heaviest EPs (Pets and Seasons) very well.

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What would you sacrifice for a faster game?

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