Hey all!
As the title says. I know you are all very busy and I wouldn't ask for any of you to repeat yourself, but I've read through pretty much every discussion I could find on this topic, and I was hoping if I could ask some further clarifying questions.

First, a maybe dumb question: for CC, does it matter if there are instances of the CC in the world or not? Or does just being in the catalogue already tax the game? I'm asking because I have loads in there that I haven't used (yet), but I didn't know if just having it sitting in the catalogue matters much. If it does I will delete.

Then, on to the more "personal" questions

Igazor: I'm particularly interested in your game since you seem to be playing in the same way as I do: with a huge and complicated population. Could you please tell me what you use for your main world? And if it's one of the base game worlds: how do you find the space to keep all these people around? I know you move them out to other worlds, but I'm talking about the world that has the biggest population. Can you handle any mods on top of that besides the NRAAS ones?

C_Dark: I read somewhere that you play with a lot of scripting mods, the consort grow one among them, which seems particularly demanding. Can you please tell me what your population is, and also, which world you are playing?

I am trying to figure out which elements of my game to let go of, since the two things I am married to (big custom world + lots of sims) put such high demands on it.

I don't really get to play TS3 anymore these days, but when I return to it yes I will still be playing my ongoing since late 2011 game. It's centered around Riverview, which is very easy to build on especially if one uses smaller residential lot sizes. Current resident population is around 240. I've let it go higher, never over 300, but performance does begin to suffer before reaching that point. How much so depends on which household I am playing in rotation. For the "main" overstuffed one, I do need to keep SP down at Slow or Snail speeds and and keep some of the built-in game's graphics options on medium to lower levels, but not to the point where things look too ugly to cope with, in order to avoid RAM usage overrun and sims' autonomy not really working.

I guess Twinbrook comes in second for resident population at just over 180. I find that map much more complicated to build on and actually started reducing its population a bit to help things along. My other connected worlds, all EA's, are usually around 150.

Not sure I really want to list the 350 or so non-NRaas mods I have in play,. Consort's Age is among them, but not Grow. Some, as expected, have no measurable impact on game performance, some like More Entry Points actually help it run better. For me the heavier ones like XCAS, Age, and Animated Woohoo (this is an older version of Passion that still works) are each carefully considered tradeoffs on benefits vs. potential performance hits.

Am not a huge CC user. My total Mods folder weighs in at just under 1.6 GB, inclusive of everything.

Trillz0r post_id=101104 time=1714046144 user_id=24368 wrote:I read somewhere that you play with a lot of scripting mods, the consort grow one among them,

I don't know which post you mean, but besides a lot of tuning mods from other creators, and my own + a lot from Nraas
- I don't use Consorts Grow mod. I use his hair colour and Aging mod + Dresscode Sign.

I actually play in a world I created on my own in CAW. It's a medium world (maybe small, I need to review). When I zoom out I can overview nearly everything. It's a pretty flat island with water all around. Some houseboats.
I think my population is around 110. But will not go beyond 150.
​​​​​I also use Nraas Homeopener, so not going too high is better for performance.
I don't move with my active household, I arranged and placed all houses for my population which I extremely track and manipulate, careers and weddings and births.
I sometimes create new sims, if I need fresh genealogy
I also have a homeworld university.
If my world begins lagging after many weeks of play and regular cleaning and town resetting won't help anymore, I porter all to a new fresh instance of my world. I don't travel and would never move my sims out somewhere else.

I in-between work on a new world in CAW and also on a UI recolor, but have a pause time at the moment, I have constructions going on in my apartment.

I prefer small and medium worlds, but no custom worlds met my expectations so far and EA worlds are too big for my liking, so creating one in CAW is very challenging and fun.

I have around 2,7 GB CC including mods. I use CCMagic, only install EA original stuff via launcher, but everything else as packages.

Aww thank you so much for taking the time to reply!

igazor post_id=101105 time=1714057673 user_id=6716 wrote: 350 or so non-NRaas mods

=> This I absolutely did not expect! This means I have to be able to get maybe 20-40 essential mods (which, most of them are tuning mods - nothing too fancy) to work alongside Nraas.

C-Dark post_id=101106 time=1714063530 user_id=236 wrote: - I don't use Consorts Grow mod.

=> I'm sorry I got that mixed up, but thanks anyway for your detailed reply!

These responses definitely give me hope. I guess it's back to weeding out my mods and CC one by one, but at least I know it won't be for nothing.

This leaves just the question about the CC - will deleting it from the game do anything for my performance even if it's not placed in the world?

On the CC question, it depends. If we are talking about hairs and other CAS parts, then unless they are specifically set to not be valid for random, they may get used on sims that you never to rarely see on-screen without your knowing about it.

But if we're talking about patterns, furniture, appliances, electronics, landscaping items, and other such objects that are standalone rather than replacements for already in-game assets, then having an overabundance might have an impact on startup/load times and travel transitions. But I don't see why the game would perform any differently otherwise just by virtue of having an overly full catalog of these things that aren't really in use, except maybe when it comes to building catalogs in Build/Buy, CASt, and such interfaces.

My game used to take up to 20 minutes to load with the content and mods I do carry, but that was on a 2011-era machine with mid-range (by TS3 standards, not anyone else's) processor and graphics card and a standard HDD. Now on a more powerful machine with an SSD, and with my simpler content merged, when I actually do get to play I just check the news while it's starting up rather than have time to do the dishes, clean my kitchen, and sort my laundry each time. I feel better informed on current events this way, but can no longer claim to have the cleanest kitchen and most promptly washed clothes in town. Life is all about tradeoffs, you know.

But I can't say that the CC I do have in play, again other than fancy or high-res/poly count CAS parts, really has any impact on game performance one way or the other.

Thanks again. I can focus on cleaning up my mods then, and maybe emptying out the houses that aren't currently inhabited. See if that can get the base memory load down.

Fwiw I did some testing last night with a timer set to 15 minutes, and every time I went to save, my RAM usage had gone up by 0.2 gb or so, starting at 2.4 upon loading (so trying to get that initial number down, since that's due to my huge cluttered world I suspect). I got from 2.4 up to 3.1 that way, and discovered that going into edit town and moving the camera all the way to the edge of the map can instantly take off 0.3 gb before saving, so that's good practice. Then I crashed when clicking too fast in CAS. Lol.
Anyway just leaving this here in case someone else goes looking for data.

Trillz0r wrote: ↑

April 26th, 2024, 12:17 am

and discovered that going into edit town and moving the camera all the way to the edge of the map can instantly take off 0.3 gb before saving, so that's good practice.

A weird little habit I have in the same vein is to zoom right into the floor of the home lot and save there- I've never looked at the RAM usage but if you have the FPS counter on it will flick up to 60 when you do this. I always find saving faster and more reliable this way- not for Error 12 myself, but I'm often testing my own CC and the saving can get a bit weird after you've been in and out of CAS a few times. Maybe it will do something in regards to the error, too?

Another theoretical question, if I may:

A person in another thread posted about replacing their role sims with residents, to cut back on the number of sims. I have done so partially in my town, but have also read that towards game performance, only the resident population counts, which would lead me to believe that the opposite would be better (ie kick the residents out so that they become homeless service/role sims). Anyone take a guess?

It might be more performance efficient, as far as the benefits of homeless sims hibernating off-screen in their off-hours and largely not participating in StoryProgression go, but players generally use these options for more than pure performance gains. The OP in that thread also isn't using NRaas SP, so I imagine there would be minimal benefit for their case.

The idea of assigning residents is to repurpose existing unemployed for these roles, which will always be a net positive given that those sims were already around. Many prefer to use residents simply because they are more integrated into the world and will progress like everyone else, while homeless sims don't really exist for anything but their assignment.

The resident population is the more relevant number when judging the health of a player's world given that there's nearly 30 types of service sim across all expansions, most with pool sizes higher than 1, plus the homeless role sims who only work certain hours- that makes for a huge portion of sims who aren't being simulated 90% of the time.

But all types of sims technically contribute to general overhead, whether it's the simulation or their physical presence being rendered, when they are in the world. Especially if they have CC on them. There are also some 24-hour roles, like tending most registers, which make it a little redundant what type of sim happen to be filling them.

Thank you!

What I was doing was actually give the register/bartenders/paparazzi etc a house so the neighbourhood feels more "lived in", but reading all this, it doesn't sound like the best idea. Homeless they shall remain!