I read somewhere that if we have special characters in the CC file names, like "-", "_", etc , loading time will suffer. is it true?

I have heard that as well, although from what I heard "-" and "_" are okay but any other symbols like "[" or "~" are not. IIRC, the problem is supposed to come in when you have a lot of files with those special characters in the name. I have no empirical evidence to prove it or disprove it, but it's easy enough to rename a file and never have a problem.

iirc the accent marks on letters do the same too, and some letters with accent marks or in different scripts are unreadable by the game.

I've found that this thread at GOS has the best information on renaming files: http://digitalperversion.net/garden...p?topic=29930.0. Also, bundling files is the best thing in the world for speeding up the load times as long as you keep unbundled backups (this info is also in the thread).

Best rule of thumb is if bodyshop won't let you use it when naming the project, don't use it in a file name.

what tool do you need to bundle files?

You need SimPE to bundle files. Everything's on page seven of the thread I posted; reply #101. AlmightyHat gives a nicely detailed tutorial. I would suggest reading through the entire thread, though, as there are a lot of tips throughout.

And don't bundle mods!

I believe it was proven that bundling only helps for Sims 3, and has no effect or makes things worse for Sims 2.

I'm pretty sure that unless you have absolutely piles and piles of filenames with odd characters that it's not going to make that much difference. Having said that, of course, the use of underscores is popular. I use them myself. Perhaps in future I'll use CapitalsInMyNaming instead to separate out the different parts. One thing I don't like is when creators use brackets in names to make their CC appear at the head of the list when sorted in Explorer. What's the point, especially when so many people do it? I usually remove those.

I went through my download files with a batch renamer utility and removed all those characters including spaces. Everything but a dash and an underscore. It cut my loading time in half. More than half, actually. I remove every single character from every single file now before I install it. The thread on GoS is right - the difference is stunning.

I use bulk name renamer to remove special characters from my cc files and that includes gaps. _ and - are not special characters those are okay to use to separate words.

The other thing that slows down loading is the length of a file. If the folder is four deep the game must read every folder that comes before it as well and if the names on the folders become too long when taken together the game won't even read it. This can happen when you have a folder and say it has a long name such as 'Long creators name for lovely person as a secret Santa gift and I used X creators textures and X creators colours and this is what it is.' As much as it's nice to know three creators work went into a download, I remove all of that. I will try and shorten the file name and just keep the creators name who made the gift with the name of the site. So MTS, BPS, GOS. When you have a long folder name and then stick that in four sub folder deep that is when the length really comes into play.

This is so true. I used to subfolder things down and down, but not only did it not really help me find stuff, it definitely slows down the loading time. I'd like to bite the bullet and go with two deep. I try to abbreviate the names so I can find missing pieces if I ever need to. It really does help.

Just in case you need someone else to say that renaming helps: it helped in my case.

Here's a creators name that I was thinking of, mustluvcatz. Instead of having mustluvcatz on a folder I shorten it to MLC. Same with HugeLunitic, that becomes HL.

I always see everyone talking about how large their CC folder is by the file size, but it's really the number of files that's the problem. Having 100 files that come out to 2 GB would make the game load faster as opposed to having 10,000 files that only come out to 500 MB. I've been slowly bundling all my files, starting with genetics, makeup, accessories, etc., and they've worked perfectly fine. I can have 30 recolors of one hairstyle bundled down to just one file. It's just something you have to try to believe.

Right - so I thought I'd try an experiment with my files and game because some of those names have been annoying me for a while. I removed all spaces in names and some of the odd characters, especially [ and ] (and other brackets) and ' and some other stuff.

My result is that it took about 5 minutes (a bit over) for the game to load. Ah. Well, that's an issue because since the rebuild (lovely new rig) it's been taking 2 1/2 to 3 minutes to load.

I was surprised actually. I believe you when you say it helped your game. I'm wondering if, for someone like me with a fairly high-powered rig, it doesn't make as much difference as you might think (I'm prepared to put that difference down to the computer warming up or something - or maybe just indiscriminately renaming everything in the DL folders). So I removed the altered files and put back the originals, ran the game and, yeah, 3 minutes - just over. Hmmm.

I'm also reminded I have an awful lot of stuff in my game and it really is about time I worked through it (been saying that for about 5 years now I think).

@joandsarah77 - I haz a folder?!?! You can name that sucker anything you want!!

@maxon - It took longer to load the first time I loaded the game from what I can remember. (Thinking "Yeah, sure that helps" or something like that sounds familiar to me.) So maybe try it again? Since you put the unaltered files back you might want to try it twice.

@mustluvcatz Well of course you haz many folders!

@maxon Try loading it again and see if it's shorter now, the first time could be longer since the game if coping with a change. I can say it helped my load times go from about 10 to 7 minutes. This is on my 'light' cc game. My old one winch is chaos takes an hour and I don't load that very often.

I did - tried the experiment again after I signed off last night. Loaded it a couple of times. Just the same. What you might have run into was the game rewriting groups.cache - I deleted it both times before running the game which accounts for the slightly longer load with my original files. Even so, the technique is making little or no difference (in fact, slightly worse under observation) than my original loading time.

I'm afraid I stick by my original observation: I don't imagine, UNLESS YOU HAVE PILES OF THE THINGS, that removing spaces and odd characters will make much difference' and would also add 'and be aware that there are reported cases where it makes loading a little worse'.

I think the problem with a blanket statement about this technique helping is that we know very well that every person's game, every person's rig, responds differently to loading demands. I'm lucky, my loading times are short compared to most people's (and always have been rather on the short side). That's possibly because I manage my files quite carefully, testing and so on and weeding out stuff I really don't want before I release them to the wild of the Downloads folder. I do, as a matter of routine, change the really silly names and also rename stuff (the long indecipherable) willy-nilly to something I will remember and recognise. I've been collecting CC for a long time though and there are quite a few files in my DL folder which have spaces and odd characters. However, not as many as others I suspect. So it didn't make much difference and, tbh, I'm going to stick with the unaltered files and work on them as I usually do - when I come across stuff, I'll alter names and manage the input of new names as I have been doing.

If you can run the game with the cache files in, do so. The game will load faster. Someone experimented with an empty cache file, but I don't know if that helped.

I, for one, would never say that renaming files will help decrease everyone's load times. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't - just like a lot of other stuff you can do. I know it helped in -my- case so I would recommend trying it at least. That said, there were a ton of files with special characters in them. And I mean a TON. (I automatically rename files now!)

Re cache files- I always delete the group.cache. And I mean always. There have been too many times my game got hung up loading so, yeah. Delete! (I used to have the empty group.cache you can download but it tended to get corrupted.) I know it can take the game a little longer to load but I can put up with an extra minute or two. I have 3 games ranging from "all the cc I could ever want in game (12gb)" to "just enough to take a pretty picture(3gb)" and I can be in any of them in 20 minutes or less - and it used to take almost an hour for the biggest game. So I iz a happy cat.

If you put the empty 'group.cache' on "read only" status in the file, it will never corrupt-or should never. Mine hasn't, yet.

Oh-another thing to remember-make sure all the files you do have are "read only", because that way they won't get corrupted, either.