=== Rating info ===
GPU: 1 GPU Memory: 2 CPU: 3 RAM: 2 CPU Speed: 2400 Threading: 3
Adjusted CPU: 2800 RAM: 2047 Adjusted RAM: 1535 Cores: 2

Well I'll be darned. Despite my MacBook barely meeting the system requirements posted on the box, it should be able to handle around 13 sims? I thought that many sims at once would make it overheat, crash and/or explode. Even before LN I've never had that many sims on a community lot at once. Heck...from what I remember I don't think I've seen more than 8 when I was playing on my Windows PC with the same 2 GB of ram, but with the nvidia geforce 7300LE graphics card which isn't great but still better than my Macbook's X3100.

If this is really a bug then I've had it for a while and on two different systems! lol I don't think I could really get away with even getting into the double digits.

Just posting a request for players to post their packed clubs and bar screenshots. I want to see how it looks because it isn't working for me yet...

An update on the empty bars: I've followed some people's suggestions and I'm seeing significant improvement! I went to Eugie's bar and there were 6 sims already there, not including staff, plus my group of 5!!!! Afraid it was just a fluke, I took the group to Plasma 101 and again, there were 5 sims already there and more arrived after our group. And they were all doing their own thing: some were dancing, some drinking, some playing games, you get the idea. These were hotspots on the night, mind. I then went to the Brightmore, which wasn't a hotspot that night and no one was there, even though we stayed for a while.

You can look at my earlier post on page 2 for my computer's rating info - nothing special but certainly more than adequate to run the game.

So here's what I did:

1. Lowered all graphics to the lowest possible rating. I thought I would hate playing like this, but the difference in detail doesn't affect me nearly as bad as I thought it would.

2. Went to edit town and clicked on each and every disco/bar and removed the velvet ropes. When you're living in a ghost town, you really can't be too choosy about who can and can't get into a club. As my population grows by adding more lots, etc., I may put these back.

3. Moved random sims from my sim bin into all the empty lots in town, leaving only 1 empty apartment and 1 empty house in all of Bridgeport. This made a big difference because it's these sims I'm now seeing in the bars. (One family of roommates I made for Twinbrooks has 10 people in it and I moved them into the one bedroom cottage on the edge of town in Bridgeport! I don't plan on playing them, so whatever.)

4. And probably the most significant change of all - I installed Twallan's Relativity Mod (you'll want phase 2, version 5). You know how in Late Night you'd get to spend maybe an hour in a club before closing time because of all the time wasted getting to the club and swarming the elevators? Well with this mod, it slows down time on the sim clock. So sims move about as normal, but instead of taking several hours just to get into a club, it now takes about 30 sim minutes. I have the mod set to move the sim clock at half speed. Without this mod, I would never have been able to visit three bars all in one night like I just did. And not only did I visit three bars with my group, but we were there long enough for even more sims to arrive (if it was a hot spot).

There is a massive swarm at the elevators at closing time in these busy clubs and that is unbelievably frustrating, so I've learned to keep my eye on the clock and about 15 minutes before closing time, I teleport my sim out onto the street.

Forgot to add that I also use the fps limiter from MATY. This stops my graphics card from going mental and overheating when I run the game. I don't really know if this changes the performance in any way, but my laptop is cooler since running the limiter with the game.

I placed some venues in Sunset Valley and removed all the velvet ropes. I am still seeing at most 2 other sims. I've stopped playing it now because it's completely sucked the fun out of it for me. Very disappointed

I don't understand why my CPU rating is 1 because like I said before, I have no problems with sims showing up at parties or protests; I easily get around 15 sims at each, so I don't think that theory holds water. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with 3 GB of RAM.

My Halle Berry sim (center, in the white top and short black skirt) is just arriving at the Prosper Room hot spot with three other girls in her group. It's not exactly packed, but more sims are arriving from the elevator and two more are waiting downstairs, and as I said, my sim just got there. After taking this screenshot, the bar closed a little while later and two sims came from upstairs and headed to the elevator. I didn't see anyone up there when I looked, but they could've been on the terrace, I didn't bother to check there.

Note: Now that my clubs are nicely populated, my celebrity Halle Berry sim can't enjoy her outings anymore! Every action she does is cancelled when someone asks for an autograph! I can cancel the autograph request, but if I had a lot of actions queued up, I have to do them all over again! I'm having second thoughts about removing those velvet ropes.
Oh the trials of stardom...

Thanks everyone! I too had very few to no Sims in the bars and clubs so I did bulldozed and put back in all the lots from the bin and I also removed all the velvet ropes. Now I get lots more people when I go to them! Game's much better now that I have a decent sized crowd!

This is realy old news and I have same problem as OP. Th one reason i bouth LN was that I would go to clubs have some fun, and well its not really fun when you go to clubs and even the hotspots and its no on there. I stay at this clubs from apening till closing time but nobady shows up. :/

It's not a theory. It's right there in the core script. Obviously, though, your processor rating isn't the only thing that'll regulate the number of sims that'll show up to a particular venue. And I also wouldn't rule out at this point that there could be bugs that are keeping as many sims from showing up to certain venues as are supposed to.

But, one of the things the game does use to determine the desired number of sims for a lot is a number (4, 9, 13, or 20) based on your CPU rating. I've altered my GraphicsRules file to tell the game that my CPU should be rated at 2 and I've seen more sims on every lot I've visited (though I haven't had a chance to visit any high-end venues yet).

So, while I wouldn't rule out bugs keeping some venue populations down, it is worth keeping in mind that if you are running the game on a low-end machine you aren't going to see tons of sims anywhere. Obviously, if you get huge crowds in some venues but others which should be crowded remain empty, there's likely something else going on.


They're CPU-intensive enough that my machine takes a noticeable performance hit when I get more than 6 or 7 of them on a lot together. But, as usual, I think EA is probably too conservative when it comes to deciding what your game can handle.


It won't limit the number of sims that show up to a party. And probably not a protest either (I've always seen more sims at protests than anywhere else in my games). I'm not even sure that it acts as an absolute hard cap on the number of sims that can show up to a lot, but it is used to in the math to determine how many sims will swarm to a lot. Each type of venue has a number of desired sims it wants (based on time and day). This number is compared to the number derived from your DeviceConfig rating, and the lowest of the two is used, the end result being that sims won't swarm lots as aggressively on low-end machines.

Yea, again I don't think it is the CPU that is the main factor of low population of sims, when I was playing Ambitions on the same computer I would play guitar outside the theatre to crowds of 10-20 people regularly, something was patched that is creating this effect. That or the actual coding of sims visiting various clubs is a little buggy and the velvet ropes may bouncers may be glitching out sims.

>performance hit when I get more than 6 or 7 of them on a lot together.
I've never seen any difference on my computer when there are tons of sims in the same place, only when trying to load the locations and buildings.

So I think it is misleading to throw out the CPU factor as the main factor.

My sim visited Plasma 501 while it was supposed to be a hot spot and there were 6 other sims there (not counting the bouncers and bartenders). One of the sims was a celeb and she was inside the lounge, the other 5, all non-celebs, were hanging around on the ground floor drooling on themselves for a while before most of them left. So, yeah, one issue seems to be that the game is bringing sims to the lot without checking whether or not they can actually use it (i.e., have the celeb status to get past the ropes). (Also, has anyone else noticed that the sneak-in and ask-to-be-let-in interactions on roped off doors seem to be mixed up? The interactions on the bouncers seem to be fine.)


Well, I play on a real turd of a machine.

I can tell you now it can't just be the CPU because I have a pretty powerful hunk of machine here and no one ever goes to the high end clubs, but I'm going to remove the velvet rope of doom and get the relativity mod and see how that goes, I have been going to the more low end bars and I get about 6 people which I'm not too happy with but it was actually nice to just have people there for a change! If it is a CPU thing thats just ridiculous but I wouldn't be surprised

How exactley do you find this file? I cant seem to look in the right place. Im on a Vista machine if that helps.

It's in C:\Users\Luke\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3. It's called "DeviceConfig."

Fernweather--thanks for this. Like many other folks I have logged a good chunk of time playing late night and never saw more than 3 sims at any low end bar/club (eugi's, waylon's, the grind) and always zero non-staff sims at any of the other locations, even going at hotspot and peak times/days. I even tried other suggestions from the forum such as deleting and replacing community lots from the bin and deleting bouncer ropes (even though it took out the fun) and had no improvement.

Looking at my DeviceConfig file I had the CPU: 1 rating even though I don't think it should be that low, I use a Dell Studio laptop with a Quad Core Pentium i7 @ 1.73 ghz with 4 gb of ram. I edited my GraphicsRules file to force a 2 rating and immediately going back into the game saw instant difference after only playing for about 20 minutes: 3 celebs at the Prosper Room (hotspot night at 8 pm) and then approximately 10-11 sims that same night at Eugi's (non-hotspot). In fact, my sim went to Eugi's after she successfully snuck in to the Prosper Room only to get ratted on by Aria Trill and then kicked out, lol. Screenshots of full Eugi's below. Can't say this will work for everyone but it certainly has made my game instantly much better!!!

Keep the bouncer rope for the VIP rooms but lower it to one-star so any celebrity can get in. The in-game Lessons will explain how.

WHY DID YOU STEAL MY PROCESSOR?! Seriously though, I wouldn't force just a two rating- I forced four. i7 is a very good processor, even at a low clock rate.

Haha. Thanks for the advice--maybe I will increase the rating again after some a few more hours of play. But for a first try and considering that I wasn't even sure I was doing it correctly, combined with some of the elevator/queue issues that seem to pop up in the game, 2 seemed like a safe bet.

Would one of you care to explain which part can be edited in the GraphicsRules file to make this happen? Is it this bit here:

seti cpuCutoffLow 2500
seti cpuCutoffMed 2900
seti cpuCutoffHigh 3700

Or is it the bit further down, depending on whether I have AMD or Intel? Or in both places?

if (match("${cpu}", "*AuthenticAMD*"))
setb cpuAMD true
seti cpuCutoffLow 2200
seti cpuCutoffMed 2600
seti cpuCutoffHigh 3400
endif
if (match("${cpu}", "*GenuineIntel*"))
setb cpuIntel true
seti cpuCutoffLow 2300
seti cpuCutoffMed 2700
seti cpuCutoffHigh 3600

I also presume it is the cpuCutoffLow that should be changed, to something like 1500, such that my 1599 CPU is rated above this, pushing it up to Level 2?

What is this "GraphicsRules" file of which you speak? I can't find it anywhere on my system.

Probably the easiest way to go about it is to find the following block:

If you want the game to at least treat your CPU as having a rating of 3, for example, you could change it to:

Now, no matter what, GraphicsRules will tell the game that you have a CPU rating of at least 3.

It should be in the game folder for your latest expansion (C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Late Night\Game\Bin if you are running Late Night on Windows XP).

@potatoehead: the GraphicsRules file is located in the c:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game folder (or possibly one folder down in c:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin...I'm not at my laptop right now so can't confirm which of those two locations for certain). It has a .sgr extension so you might try searching for it that way. Also, there is an identical version of this file in all ep folders too--so c:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Late Night\Game, for example. I currently have WA and LN, so I replaced the file in each of the base game and the ep folders.

@Shimrod101: I can't for certain guarantee this is 100% the correct way to do it, but it worked for me. Hopefully the explanation makes sense, apologies that is it somewhat lengthy.

First, I only edited the cutoff settings in the location of the file that is chip specific, so the second part you pasted in your message. For me, this was under "GenuineIntel."

if (match("${cpu}", "*GenuineIntel*"))
setb cpuIntel true
seti cpuCutoffLow 2300
seti cpuCutoffMed 2700
seti cpuCutoffHigh 3600

The DeviceConfig file, which is confusingly under c:\User\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3, will tell you which chip it is identifying.

Second, the number you need to adjust for is actually the "Adjusted CPU:" number...if you read the GraphicsRules file it only sets the cpuCutoff after running a formula to calculate Adjusted CPU. This is also in the DeviceConfig File. So for me, the relevant info was CPU: 1, CPU Speed: 1729, Adjusted CPU: 1905.

Last, you're correct that the formula uses a "less than or equal to" calculation. Therefore I changed "cpuCutoffLow 2300" to "cpuCutoffLow 1900" This forces it to assign cpuCutoffMed because 1905 is greater than or equal to 1900, not less than or equal to 1900.

Some other advice: First, create a backup copy of the original GraphicsRule file before any editing so that if something goes awry, you can copy and paste the pristine backup into the game. Second, I don't know which OS you use, but I use Windows 7 which will not allow direct editing to files in the Program Files directory (even with admin access). So, I copied the GraphicsRule file to my desktop, created a backup copy, and then edited the desktop version, which permitted me to save the new parameter. Then I went and copied and pasted the now edited GraphicsRule file from the desktop back into The Sims 3 folder. I also pasted the edited file into my WA and LN folders.

That was the process that worked for me, hope this makes sense and good luck.

I see the GraphicsRules file now... but how do I edit it?

=== Rating info ===
GPU: 5 GPU Memory: 4 CPU: 3 RAM: 4 CPU Speed: 2999 Threading: 3
Adjusted CPU: 3599 RAM: 4094 Adjusted RAM: 3582 Cores: 2

Is mine, but i still only see a couple of sims. Kind of annoying.

If you are on a windows machine, first save a backup copy wherever you want, then save a copy to the desktop and then select Notepad as the program to open the desktop version of the file. Edit the text, click save, and then copy and paste the now-edited desktop file into the game folders.

Also, Fernweather's edit method is much easier than mine, feel kind of silly for going with the more complicated route, lol.

Heh, I knew it, the game just uses the clock rate! How incredibly stupid of it- clock rate is pretty much useless for comparing CPUs unless they are the same model.