Traveler Worlds

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Paisley17
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Traveler Worlds

Post by Paisley17 » May 19th, 2019, 4:13 pm

I know custom content can slow your game down considerably, but how about the number of worlds you add to the game? Does that increase the startup loading times or cause any sort of lag? I have found numerous worlds I would love to add for traveling later and would like to attach those worlds to my homeworld so it appears I have a larger population. Should I limit the number of worlds I add or is the sky's the limit?

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igazor
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Traveler Worlds

Post by igazor » May 19th, 2019, 10:30 pm

Adding Traveler mod connected worlds to an ongoing game will cause the overall size of the save to increase since it will include more world nhd files, as well as the size of the TravelDB file. The inactive worlds and the TravelDB are not loaded into or offloaded from RAM at startup and during saves like the actively being played world is, they just come along for the ride and for reference. Thus the added worlds may add a small amount to the startup, save, and quit times but it shouldn't be an astronomically high addition. Since these worlds are not simulated when active play is elsewhere, unlike so many other things we add to our games they do not cause lag. The game is only capable of simulating one world at a time, the one where our actively played sims currently are.

There is no strict limit on the number of worlds we may add to our games but there probably is one that no one has ever reached and reported upon. I have 16 in my long-running ongoing game and everything has been fine including when I played (up until a few weeks ago) on a mid-range at best system from 2011. I would be hesitant to try playing an ongoing game with 50 or more connected worlds, there may be a limit before then as to the amount of foreign sim data that the TravelDB can handle well.

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Sara_Darkees
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Traveler Worlds

Post by Sara_Darkees » May 20th, 2019, 2:17 am

igazor wrote:
May 19th, 2019, 10:30 pm
I have 16 in my long-running ongoing game and everything has been fine including when I played (up until a few weeks ago) on a mid-range at best system from 2011.
I remember you said earlier that your game is alive and well functioning for several years. But how long does it take to load a save, if you don't mind my asking?

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igazor
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Traveler Worlds

Post by igazor » May 20th, 2019, 3:17 am

Sara_Darkees post_id=66303 time=1558333041 user_id=18005 wrote: But how long does it take to load a save, if you don't mind my asking?
Around three weeks or so. I'm very patient. :)

Just kidding. It totally depends on which is the actively being played world at the time and how long it's been since the most recent MC Reset Everything there. On my 2011 mid-range system with a standard HDD that is just now being retired, the range went from 5-18 minutes, the lower end being vacation worlds having seen only occasional play where not really much has progressed in all those years, the upper end being Riverview, overpopulated and stuffed full of multi-generational families.

On my new 2019 system with an SSD and stronger components, I haven't had a chance to load up more than a couple of the worlds yet but I would say around 1/2 of the above ranges or maybe a little longer. Am sure I could do much better if I were more strict about population caps.

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Traveler Worlds

Post by bekkasan » May 20th, 2019, 7:19 am

Just butting in here to say.....Congrats on the new system Igazor!

and to stay on topic I've found if I add really large simmer made worlds and they are a active world, I do have much longer load times so, I've banned them as much as I love them until I get a new system.

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igazor
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Traveler Worlds

Post by igazor » May 20th, 2019, 7:52 am

bekkasan - thanks! :)

Really large simmer made worlds, depending on how large and intricate we are talking about, can do much more than add to the load times. Some of them, including the more famous ones like Alpine County and Setra among others, are very pretty to look at but they just do not tend to perform well even on high-end systems. That's the 32-bit limitations of TS3 coming into play, once we actually get them loaded.

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Traveler Worlds

Post by Paisley17 » May 20th, 2019, 11:53 pm

This all has been incredibly helpful, thank you! I would love to have a world that I'm able to keep going for years and have it as a work in progress, at least that's my goal. I'm trying to make sure I at least set everything up correctly so it has a chance. Very impressive to have loading times being kept at a reasonable rate considering the age of the game and on an older computer. Congrats on the new one. I would love to hear how your world is doing when you get it all set up.

Well that's disappointing. Alpine and Serta were on my list of worlds to add, thanks for the heads-up. Do you happen to know of any other popular worlds to avoid especially ones with routing issues?

I read somewhere about removing snap files is that necessary? Is there a way to clean up the traveler worlds and if so can save cleaner help with that?

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Traveler Worlds

Post by igazor » May 21st, 2019, 1:33 am

On the custom worlds, there's a version or two of New York City out there that are reportedly as impossible to play for very long as the ones mentioned but I forget what they are called, and a much newer one called Boroughsburg that takes an entirely different approach to its usage and development that is meant to be much gentler to play. There are a few others, I vaguely recall something about Miami or Vice City. Then there are custom worlds that are not uniquely ID'ed in the best way possible with the result that they can be successfully played as standalones but will never work with Traveler correctly in that either new instances of them or players' other worlds keep spawning when they are traveled to and away from and sims keep ending up stranded in foreign world instances that are no longer reachable. If a world were really to have severe routing issues, then I don't think it would be deemed very popular for just that reason.

Best practice is to try worlds like these off to the side, away from one's ongoing game, to see how well they play for a while, how much RAM usage they are leveling off at as a few sim weeks go by, and to test for Traveler compliance. And read up on other players' experiences with them. As it so happens, all of the worlds in my above-mentioned structure are EA worlds or at most Ellacharmed's fixed versions of EA worlds, but I'm not averse to adding some known to be okay custom worlds to it someday, again after sufficient testing. Some of Rflong's worlds in particular have been calling out to me for years to give them a try as they have reputations for being so well made and fun to play.

I hadn't mentioned Save Cleaning or SNAP file cleanup, they are really both the same thing with different means to get there, but yes that is essential as well in much the same way that MC Reset Everythings every few sims weeks are. I also kind of assumed it would go without saying, but none of this longterm play would be/would have been possible without the cleanup and corrections that ErrorTrap, Overwatch, Register, Traffic, and to an extent GoHere consistently add to the mix. If those mods together with Traveler had not been made and kept maintained as well as they have, I would have to dump my connected worlds and start over in new ones as routinely as others tend to do and quite frankly might have lost interest in having to keep doing that and might have wandered away from the game entirely by now. Or at the very least have radically changed the way in which I play it.

A single instance of my ongoing save is currently 2.3 GB. It would be much larger if I didn't keep the individual nhd files within it Save Cleaned and it wouldn't be quite that large if I tended to the TravelDB file as often as I probably should as that one alone right now is over 900 MB. But once we start talking about let's say 10 connected worlds, the overall save instances are going to be over 1 GB each. This is not a problem to the game as again only the actively being played nhd file is the one being loaded into and offloaded out of RAM during routine play, saves, quits, and travel transitions. It only becomes an issue if one has limited drive space to manage the saves and various backed up copies of it on one's local drives as needed.

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