Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Scholar
Original Poster
#1 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 2:50 PM Last edited by Squidconqueror : 31st Mar 2018 at 3:08 PM.
Default Why do you think that this game takes so long to load up a town or city and why does it crash after playing it for a while?
Does anybody else has this problem where towns or cities take forever to load up and what do you do to shorten it? I'm still waiting for mine to finally load up after what seems like an eternity (over 5-10 minutes) and when it gets done loading I sometimes wonder if it's worth waiting for that long just to play my sims. The worst part is that it crashes after playing the city for a little while which is why i'm not able to enjoy this game as much as i'm supposed to.
Advertisement
Mad Poster
#2 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 3:14 PM
Because the optimization is shit. The engine can't adequately access (and subsequently process) the available computing power, thus you get bottlenecks in that process.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Scholar
Original Poster
#3 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 3:27 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
Because the optimization is shit. The engine can't adequately access (and subsequently process) the available computing power, thus you get bottlenecks in that process.

I couldn't agree more about that. EA doesn't care about making a good quality game just as long as they get your money. I guess that means that I would have to downgrade to a smaller town or city.
Mad Poster
#4 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 3:44 PM
That is one way to keep the game running nicely, yeah. A good one, too.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Space Pony
#5 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 4:02 PM
Ways to alleviate the problem...

1. Cut down on CC and or store content.
2. Get more/faster RAM
3. Get a newer GPU.
4. Get an SSD.

I know suggestions 2~4 are quite impractical though.
Scholar
Original Poster
#6 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 4:16 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
That is one way to keep the game running nicely, yeah. A good one, too.

Yeah that and turning my graphic settings down made the world ran a lot smoother now which is called Setra.
Mad Poster
#7 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 6:33 PM
Setra is known for being borderline unplayable for many. There are quite a few popular but really too large and complex for the game engine to handle well worlds like that. Alpine County is another that comes to mind. Yes, the game is not optimized well and left lacking in many capacity related regards like this, but it's not like EA sold us Setra together with a game engine that couldn't run it.

By the way, of course no one wants to play a game that keeps crashing (I suspect RAM and video memory usage overload in this case, if it's not crashes it would be Error 12s). But for those of us not playing on SSDs, 5-10 mins is not an eternity to startup a complicated or long running saved game. When playing in the world central to my six year old ongoing game, I can expect it to take as long as 18-20 mins to load, travel transitions can take even longer. Any more than that and I start looking for maintenance tasks to perform because trouble might be brewing somewhere in the game save, but that's not really a long time to me. I don't sit there and watch the startup, I surf the web off to the side maybe on another device, respond to emails and forum posts, do the dishes, etc. Admittedly though, I do have the cleanest dishes in town now.
Scholar
#8 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 6:38 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CRV13
Ways to alleviate the problem...

1. Cut down on CC and or store content.
2. Get more/faster RAM
3. Get a newer GPU.
4. Get an SSD.


I upgraded from 4 to 16 RAM, and I can't say I have noticed much of a difference.
Mad Poster
#9 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 6:47 PM
I've been told turning graphics settings down helps with game performance....which you'd think is mostly simulation-related.
Speaking from experience:

Quote:
1. Cut down on CC and or store content.

Depends on how much you had, but if you had, say, the entire Store in your game, then you'd get A LOT of improvement out of getting rid of it. Though the game should not even be slightly playable at that point, calling it a slideshow would be an understatement.
Quote:
2. Get more/faster RAM

Useful, to a point. If you have 4 gigs and you're upgrading to 8, you're getting a good bit of extra stability. If you're upgrading from 8 to 16, the improvement is very minor (almost negligble). Anything more is unnecessary. While I can't speak for newer or faster RAM it should stand to reason that there may be minor improvements to be found here.

Quote:
3. Get a newer GPU.

It depends on what you're trying to do but I've found that each of my graphics cards over the last 7 or 8 years has definitely gotten more out of TS3 than the ones before them. I'm running 1 (soon 2) GTX 1070(s) now and I'm a lot closer to being able to build a lot made entirely out of mirrors than I was on my GTX 960 and my GTX 650 before it. If you're a bit of megalomaniac and you really want your game to look pretty, a beefy GPU will definitely make a big difference. Especially if you like using Reshade which is another resource drain entirely.

Quote:
4. Get an SSD.

Moving my game documents onto an SSD decreased loading times by roughly 30%. But if you can, move the entire game and all its dependences onto SSD. Or multiple ones, in my case. 7 minute loading times were once the custom for me, now they're virtually unthinkable. 2 minutes on a good day, maybe 4 on a bad one.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Scholar
Original Poster
#10 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 8:31 PM
Quote: Originally posted by igazor
Setra is known for being borderline unplayable for many. There are quite a few popular but really too large and complex for the game engine to handle well worlds like that. Alpine County is another that comes to mind. Yes, the game is not optimized well and left lacking in many capacity related regards like this, but it's not like EA sold us Setra together with a game engine that couldn't run it.

By the way, of course no one wants to play a game that keeps crashing (I suspect RAM and video memory usage overload in this case, if it's not crashes it would be Error 12s). But for those of us not playing on SSDs, 5-10 mins is not an eternity to startup a complicated or long running saved game. When playing in the world central to my six year old ongoing game, I can expect it to take as long as 18-20 mins to load, travel transitions can take even longer. Any more than that and I start looking for maintenance tasks to perform because trouble might be brewing somewhere in the game save, but that's not really a long time to me. I don't sit there and watch the startup, I surf the web off to the side maybe on another device, respond to emails and forum posts, do the dishes, etc. Admittedly though, I do have the cleanest dishes in town now.

5-10 minutes is quite a long time just to load up a game though. Other times it takes even longer then that.
Mad Poster
#11 Old 31st Mar 2018 at 10:31 PM
I had loading times of 5 minutes when my old computer fan died and I've got a game loaded with tons of content including CC and I even made new CC to test which should've slowed the game down though it did take the better part of an hour to play through two days with constant pausing to take breaks and saving as my town is coming up due for an MC reset.It only took less than two minutes to open my game and start playing though.This is from somebody playing with thousands of package files of CC who's got the entire TS3 collection installed and uses over 700 Mod files.
Forum Resident
#12 Old 1st Apr 2018 at 5:00 AM
If I remember correctly, with no mods in my game it can load a new world anywhere from 2-3 minutes, all EP's/SP's/the whole store and this is with a 1 TB HDD. With mods plus long going saves it can take 5-12 minutes for a world to load. Everyone's experience with loading times will depend on several factors and it has nothing to do with TS3 shortcomings as all the official worlds are within the game's engine capability as already mentioned.

As far as owning the whole store and having it all installed plus all EP's/SP's does not cause my gameplay any noticeable difference except in buy/build/CAS modes. LIVE mode, especially without mods or very little, still plays minimal to no lag with my gaming desktop and gaming laptop. And I do play with settings maxed out except for high detail lots. But like I said before, everyone has different computer configurations, therefore, will have different experiences which is not the blame of the game itself. And for some reason some just ignore that 3rd party content can play a role in TS3 running less than great based on their computer's capability.

From my personal experience, TS3 is not that bad where it is unplayable or game breaking. I highly doubt it would be as popular as it is if that were the case as far as its success. However, many do spread misconceptions about issues that are not the fault of the game. Which causes others to believe whatever. All I know is my research paid off well when building my first gaming desktop which plays TS3 flawlessly excluding leftover glitches. Got 99 problems but the computer ain't one.
Scholar
Original Poster
#13 Old 1st Apr 2018 at 5:47 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Deshong
If I remember correctly, with no mods in my game it can load a new world anywhere from 2-3 minutes, all EP's/SP's/the whole store and this is with a 1 TB HDD. With mods plus long going saves it can take 5-12 minutes for a world to load. Everyone's experience with loading times will depend on several factors and it has nothing to do with TS3 shortcomings as all the official worlds are within the game's engine capability as already mentioned.

As far as owning the whole store and having it all installed plus all EP's/SP's does not cause my gameplay any noticeable difference except in buy/build/CAS modes. LIVE mode, especially without mods or very little, still plays minimal to no lag with my gaming desktop and gaming laptop. And I do play with settings maxed out except for high detail lots. But like I said before, everyone has different computer configurations, therefore, will have different experiences which is not the blame of the game itself. And for some reason some just ignore that 3rd party content can play a role in TS3 running less than great based on their computer's capability.

From my personal experience, TS3 is not that bad where it is unplayable or game breaking. I highly doubt it would be as popular as it is if that were the case as far as its success. However, many do spread misconceptions about issues that are not the fault of the game. Which causes others to believe whatever. All I know is my research paid off well when building my first gaming desktop which plays TS3 flawlessly excluding leftover glitches. Got 99 problems but the computer ain't one.

You must of have an high end pc because TS3 lags and freezes on my pc but then again i'm playing in a world called Setra which is a huge world which the game is not designed to handle. I've saw that a lot of people prefer Sims 2 over 3 for reasons like this as well as plenty of others on the Sims 2 vs 3 threads despite the game's huge success. Anyways what kind of pc that you're running the game on?
Forum Resident
#14 Old 1st Apr 2018 at 6:40 PM
My computer specs, as of what's available today, is nothing new. However, I do consider it high-end for TS3 based on its performance. The larger worlds probably can be played with minimal to no lag but everyone's computer has its limit to what it can and cannot handle. It's easy to blame the game without a care at looking at the problem from a standpoint that PC games usually requires PC upgrades because of improvements and advancements to a growing foundation within a game series. That's how it's always been with PC gaming. It's a hobby and hobbies can be expensive. So it's not surprising that some would favor TS2 over TS3 because they cannot or will not upgrade. Though I'm sure there are many other reasons as well.

I'm not really a PC enthusiast or much of a PC gamer as of now but The Sims 3 is definitely worth it to me in order to get the best possible gaming experience. And I would have upgraded whatever had TS4 been a true sequel. Otherwise, I'm really a video game console player. Off topic but I'm having so much fun with Horizon: Zero Dawn. Such a beautiful and well done game so far.

My PC Specs

Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz
Graphics Card: EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 660 2GB
Memory: G. SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB
Mad Poster
#15 Old 1st Apr 2018 at 10:34 PM
I am not going to read all of this as there have been so many threads about this in the past, but as I am sure as said it depends on your hardware, CC, etc,. My game plays well on my i7. It took me 20 minutes to load in 2 as I had so much CC. So the load times in 3 do not bother me. I would rather have a bit slower load time and all we have in 3 than the faster one in 4, which is IMO an empty game in comparison.
Scholar
Original Poster
#16 Old 2nd Apr 2018 at 7:10 AM
Quote: Originally posted by daisylee
I am not going to read all of this as there have been so many threads about this in the past, but as I am sure as said it depends on your hardware, CC, etc,. My game plays well on my i7. It took me 20 minutes to load in 2 as I had so much CC. So the load times in 3 do not bother me. I would rather have a bit slower load time and all we have in 3 than the faster one in 4, which is IMO an empty game in comparison.

That's funny Sims 2 loads up way quicker than that on my laptop which is an i5 with 8gbs of ram and the graphics card is just a cheap Intel chip yet it only takes less then then 5 minutes to load up maybe even quicker if I clear my caches. Did you ever clean up your caches on Sims 2?
Mad Poster
#17 Old 2nd Apr 2018 at 7:18 AM
I had 40000 CC items for 2 so that is what slowed me down, and I was on my Pentium 4 back then. It probably would be faster on my laptop or desktop now but I no longer play 2.
Mad Poster
#18 Old 2nd Apr 2018 at 11:13 PM
Quote: Originally posted by HarVee
Why? Because EA didn't put the required effort into this game. They used a shitty 32 bit engine, and put features in the game that clog up memory and cause leaks. This game was designed by amateurs masquerading as professionals.

Just curious here since I am very much not an avid gamer outside of TS3 and the game I was playing much of the time prior to this one was not at all graphics intensive, it was more number crunching and processor (CPU) heavy than anything else.

But were there really a lot of 64-bit games designed in 2007-09 when the TS3 base game was still on the drawing board? I don't think I had any 64-bit programs at all back then and many on the Windows side (many more than today, anyway) were still running 32-bit operating systems. The shame of it is, to me, that EA never bothered to produce a 64-bit version later on even if a total revamp of the game engine would have been required, not so much that the first released effort was total garbage that couldn't be salvaged.
Field Researcher
#19 Old 2nd Apr 2018 at 11:28 PM
There was a time I had to wait 11 minutes for my game to open. It was always worth it, 11 minutes meant nothing in relation to the hours of fun following.
(it's 4 minutes now which I consider very fast)
Mad Poster
#20 Old 3rd Apr 2018 at 1:01 AM
Quote: Originally posted by igazor
But were there really a lot of 64-bit games designed in 2007-09 when the TS3 base game was still on the drawing board? I don't think I had any 64-bit programs at all back then and many on the Windows side (many more than today, anyway) were still running 32-bit operating systems.

That's certainly true. When TS3 came out it was clear that 64 bit would be the standard going forward, but it wasn't the standard yet. But TS3 was their main Sims product until late 2013. I can understand that they weren't inclined to patch TS3 after it's run ended, but during? That's just naive.
Personally, I believe the computer I got during 2008 was my first 64 bit machine. It had 4 gigs of RAM so it wasn't really making much use of all that newfound breathing room but it's certainly been useful down the line. It somehow got borked (I suspect TS3 may have had something to do with it, actually) and I sold it to a family member, but I believe it's still in working order and tolerable enough for semi-regular use 10 years later.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Scholar
#22 Old 3rd Apr 2018 at 12:29 PM
I love Isla Paradiso, but it's one of those worlds that's just... close to unplayable. (Even with Ellacharmed's fixed version) Everything takes too long for the sim to even react. Even loading it up took 10 mins, minimum. I didn't pay much attention.
#23 Old 4th Apr 2018 at 1:28 AM
Well to be fair, Isla Paradiso is nearly unplayable anyway because it takes forever to get anywhere.

Are there any mods to streamline the loading? Get rid of those bottlenecks?
Back to top