My current save takes 12 minutes to load. I've been playing in it for 21 sim weeks in the home world, and my sim also spent quite a bit of time in other worlds before she got married. Every so often, I take the nhd file into s3pe and delete all the SNAP files, so the file is only 63,349 KB, but the TravelDB file is 122,681 KB. When I reset everything, except my active lot, MC reports that 21,400+ items have been reset.
The game still plays well, and I don't get errors or bad saves, or even much lag, though it does sometimes freeze for half a minute or more, soon after I start playing, after it has started running up to speed. But it always unfreezes eventually, with no negative effect on the game afterward.
Between the refrigerator, bookcase, toy boxes, alchemy cabinet, nectar cabinets, and storage chests, my household has thousands of items in storage, including produce, nectar, elixirs, books, gnomes, collectibles of all kinds, inventions, etc. They also have a lot of things that are not in storage, including over 200 photos hanging on the walls that my sim took, as well as some items in the household inventory that they aren't using right now, but will be using later. This includes swift grow stations (it's winter right now), baby and toddler equipment, a clothesline, holo discs, and a few other items. I'm planning on getting rid of the collectibles once my sim has finished with the alchemy skill, and other items when they no longer need them. Will this help shorten loading time?
What else could I do to shorten loading time?
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The thousands of excess items are probably not that great either, since it's often recommended that your inventories be kept light as possible. My advice on the alchemy ingredients for now would be to look up what the highest level ones you can make between your current rank and max level and only keep the ingredients you'll need to finish up.
For the hanging it might be a good idea to make sure your graphics card can handle the game: I plan to upgrade mine later in the year because I realized for the amount of stuff I'm cramming in my game my card is actually too weak for it.
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:TS3_System_Requirements
I also found that a lot of my problems were eliminated once I started using a batch file to clean up my sims 3 folder every time before I played. If you want I can upload it for you, though someone here posted a guide on how to make your own.
Edit: I misread the OP and got the loading time backwards, reading it as 21 minutes. A loading time of 12 minutes for a progressed world with that much stuff on the lot is not unreasonable unless you are running the game on an SSD which should be cutting that down to a fraction of the time.
I can't prove this exactly, but it's always been my sense that hundreds of items in storage containers like chests do not have the same impact as hundreds of items hanging out loose in inventories or on the lot so that may be worth pursuing if they aren't already stowed away like that. The 200 photos on the walls of the actively played residential lot are possibly having a huge impact though.
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Do you have a link to the program.
For me my loading times varies, some days its super fast other days its quick.I try to clean out my game's cache prior to each session, and I clean out the world cache folders as well.Not sure if that helps, but I just do it.I also disabled and deleted sim memories and turned off online features.
https://graceymanorsims3.tumblr.com/
I don't clear caches every game session. I notice it takes longer to fully load lots if I do, particularly with textures. I find it better to leave them be (particularly simCompositorCache and compositorCache) unless I'm trying to solve some other issue or adding/removing CC.
I've had one game which would quickly grow to 20+ min load times. The only thing that worked to reduce that was to use MC to reset the whole town (including the active lot) once a sim-week. I have no idea why an MC reset was so helpful and have only had that help in one particular game. The loading time after resetting went back to a more reasonable 7-10 min, IIRC.
Good luck.
Do you know where I can find the file and/or instructions you're referring to, for cleaning up the save file? Since I'm already keeping my nhd file small, I'm not sure it would help, but I'd like to check it out just the same.
@igazor and @TreyNutz, the populated starter save I made for this custom town takes 3 1/2 minutes to load. I tried making a test copy of the latest save of my game, then using MC to move all the photos into the household inventory. That save only took 8 minutes to load, so it shaved 4 minutes from the loading time.
This household has a lot of stuff in their house and on their lot. My main sim has a lot of goals, so she has a lot of skill equipment she's currently using and objects waiting to be upgraded, most of which will be sold once she's finished with them. She also has all of the furniture and décor objects she collected from rubble piles in the dystopian future sitting in the basement room under the garage, waiting for when they return to the future and buy a bigger house. I don't like to keep too much in the household inventory, because whenever my sims consign anything, everything there shows up in the consignment panel, making it difficult to find the items they're supposed to consign. But I think she's pretty much done with consigning things, so I could put several items in the household inventory now.
I have considered moving my household and the residents of the town to a new copy of the same town, through the library, using NRaas Porter. It would clear the town's history and remove even the hidden memory of any sims they'll never see again, as I don't plan on having them travel any more, except to the future, and to China for martial arts tournament competition, so I thought it might help speed up loading time. But I'm actually planning on moving them and the town's residents to another unpopulated custom world once she's finished with all of the large skill equipment she's currently using, and can get rid of all the stored collectibles and other items they won't be needing anymore, including all but a few of her photos, which I want to keep for décor in their new home. It will take a while yet to get to that point.
So do you guys think that moving them now, to a new copy of the same world, would make very much of a difference, even though they will still have almost everything they do now? Or, since there aren't any other problems with this save, should I just do whatever else I can to speed up loading times and wait for the move to the other world?
Are there other things I could do to help speed up loading time.
PS @TreyNutz I do a once a week reset everything too, excluding my active lot, mainly to help prevent corruption, which used to make it impossible to play longer than about 12 to 14 weeks in one town. Thanks to NRaas mods, that is no longer a problem. Other than the loading times and the occasional long freeze, this game has been quite trouble-free, except for the usual minor issues.
I might try buying an empty residential lot, put in a basement or other simple structure, and move all the unused objects there - if you have a lot of them. I do this when I play Isla Paradiso and my sims live in a houseboat where there isn't much room. I've never tried offloading objects onto an additional own home solely in order to improve loading times, but it seems like it might help. My thinking is that maybe if a ton of extra objects aren't on the lot the game initially loads, then loading time might be shorter.
I see that you are excluding the actively being played lot from the MC Reset Everythings. Have you ever MC reset it? That would be worth a try also. And are you running on an SSD or an HDD? If the latter, there's only so far you will be able to go with load/save time saving tricks before they won't really be effective any further.
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My main drive is an SSD, but "My Documents" and virtual memory are on a much larger secondary hard drive.
I'm sure you are going to say that your experiences differ, but the only "bad" thing that happens to my active sims when they get MC reset along with their residential lot is that their Dream Managers also get reset so that they start getting beginning of the game types of wishes drawn again until things settle down. But for me it never disturbs their currently promised wishes, their behavior, or their appearance unless something was already wrong with the sims and their wardrobe/CAS assignments. I hate doing this too as it's disruptive to gameplay unless I am about to switch active households in a rotation anyway and put it off as long as I can, but still do so every few sim weeks in the middle of the sim night when it seems feasible.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
Okay actually I'm totally and completely nuts LOL
@ScottDemon I'll ask my son about that. He's the one who built and maintains my computer for me. But I have to stick with what I have for now anyway, as I don't have the money for new hardware. By the time I do, maybe SSD's will be more affordable than they are now.
I hate that too. For me, resetting right before I send the household to bed works out to be a pretty good time for most of my sims. Their motives are set to be fairly high except energy (deep yellow) and fun (at 50%). Sometimes I may tweak motives with TCE but usually I just use TCE to teleport them close to their beds and send them immediately to sleep.
My favorite one is where they have left a night venue before closing time and are made to go stand outside the venue while everyone else is shoved outside. They have made it home already or nearly so, and thought they were done for the night, but no that's not good enough. They have to go back to the venue and stand outside of it again. Resetsim from TCE just never feels like it does enough of a reset to be worthwhile.
Whoa, I got this one right (or close enough)? The week just started here, maybe I had better quit while I'm ahead. But glad that helped, not resetting the current lot for such a long time was just calling out to me as a potential source of trouble.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
Yes due to the flash caching and Adaptive Memory Tech they have it allows the HDD portion of the drive to run unhindered and do things 3 times faster than a standard HDD. But there are some programs and games like Skyrim SE for example where you won't see any improvement at all come to think of it even with an SSD that game won't show any improvement as it's unable to utilize the technology.
Okay actually I'm totally and completely nuts LOL
PM'd you!