Hello! I've made this account because i have a problem with the story progression mod and that is that it makes my game freeze and stutter all over the place. the game is playable without it although still choppy(it's to be expected, i gues), it's even playable when i run just the main mod of story progression but when i try to add more modules it just won't work. Some usefull things to know: i have many other mods, the vast majority being xml tweaks and i have the whole collection of nraas mods(including the performance ones); i'm running version 1.67 with all expansions and stuff packs; i have about 17 gb of cc but it's well managed(6 package files and 9 dbc); playing on monte vista world; both the game itself and the documents part are installed on a PCIe x4 ssd; PC specs are: Ryzen 7 2700x stock clocks, 16 gb ram, gtx 1080; game is running at 0.58 normal speed via relativity; i've already tried resetting the whole town with master controller, cleaning up all homeless sims and setting the sp speed to slow; i use riva tuner to cap fps to 60; windows 10. The same thing used to happen a few years back when i was using and i5 4690 and gtx 770, i always thought that the lag was caused by me running a highly modded game off an hdd but the ssd only makes a difference in load times. the game still lags just as bad. oh, and the more modules i have the slower the story progression starts when i launch the game, it can take up to 80 to 90 seconds just to initialize.

Here is an example of the stutter(just watch the in-game clock): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Dp-jm ... e=youtu.be i'm even struggling to control the camera a few times because of the slowness of the game.

If anyone knows a way to at least mitigate this, it would be much appreciated because i've been searching since 2014 and i couldn't find anything to help me. I have tried playing the sims 4 for a while but it's just not the same, it can't compete with the freedom of the sims 3.... when it runs properly that is.

Hi there. There's a few things I can suggest to check on regarding the pulse-lag we are seeing there. Could be something world-specific like overactive spawners, but it seems more like game engine overload to me at least at first.

1 - What is the resident population of this world? To get a quick reading, on City Hall or an in-game computer, NRaas > MC > Demographics > Population > "X" to dismiss the filter. The important stat there is Residents, although Homeless and Service might be interesting to note as well.

2 - SP runs a series of different Managers with all different cycle speeds. The one that typically contributes the most to SP-induced lag is the Careers Manager. If you aren't getting significant relief by setting the overall speed of SP to Slow (but things work better on Snail or with progression off entirely), perhaps try slowing down the Careers Manager independently of the others.

NRaas > SP > General Options > Options: Careers > Speed. The default value (but this is on Normal, not Slow) is 500, which is how many sim minutes between each Manager cycle so higher is slower. Perhaps try a really high value there like 3000 or 5000 to see what happens after half a sim day or so.

3 - You appear to be running many non-NRaas mods (judging from the interaction menus on sims) that might be taking more of the game's attention and resources away from other things than they really should such as Dramatic-Gamer's mods and the results combined with SP and its modules might not be great. As a test, how do things run with only NRaas mods, the Scriptcache.package file cleared, and SP on Normal or Slow? If you are using the SP Personality modules (lovers, meanies, cops, etc.), as a further test perhaps try a session without those in play.

4 - If the issue really is world-specific, how does a newly started test game in a gentle to play world (Sunset Valley, Riverview, Twinbrook) play for a while?

Ty for the reply! After a bit of testing here's what i've concluded:

First of all, my main town's demographics: https://imgur.com/ElaYkEL

I tried setting the career progression to 4000 and the results were somewhat inconclusive. Just after i did it it seemed to be improving the situation a bit but after playing for a whole sim day i couldn't really tell if it actually helped, the stutter still occurred.

Then i tried removing all other mods, i remember doing this before and nothing changed. same now(deleted the cache as well).

As for the personality modules, i took them all out and it made minimal impact.

I tried starting a brand new game in roaring heights (demographics:https://imgur.com/RSlr1sL) and this made the biggest difference. the game was actually playable with everything i was using before. i could move my camera without loosing control for 10 seconds, animations were smoother and the gameplay was overall less jittery. there was still a bit of the lag but i think that's just the game runs, idk. i didn't get to play for too long to see how things progressed in the new save file but at least in the starter stage it was playable.

What could be the problem in my main world?

Also i want to thank you, @igazor, you've helped me, and i'm sure a lot of other simmers trough your advice and technical knowledge. a lot of times i would be searching for a fix to an issue or random info regarding the game just to find a thread about the same thing where you've already helped the OP find the solution.

Thanks for the kind words.The only odd thing I see about the demographics in your progressed Monte Vista world is that it's a bit heavy on elders relative to the total population, but these things can happen over time and certainly the numbers of sims/households are not out of line. To be honest I was hoping to see something absurd like 450 residents crammed in there so I could yell at you (good-naturedly of course) about practicing poor town management, but that is not the case.

Given that things work so much better in a new world, I think we have to conclude that the issue is not expected with your mod and feature set but there is something about the progressed one that is making SP tip things over the edge.

That could be quite a few things. How many generations has this world seen, are scrapbook memories disallowed or controlled by a mod, is the size of the nhd file (in MBs) within your game save overly large, meaning over let's say 200 MB, has this save ever been Save Cleaned? Are schools and other rabbithole lots over-crowded and over-subscribed, is there a shopping mall type of lot that has too many rabbit holes and too many other attractions pulling in too much of the population all at once? There might be routing issues or spawner things going on that until SP's modules are added the game is able to absorb without balking but again it's just too much for the game to handle smoothly all added together. Are you routinely playing online, meaning logged in at the Launcher or in-game levels and is the TS3 Store shopping experience switched on from within Game Options -- these can unduly add to the stress of any world's operations. The Demographics do not show the pet population, as by default it wouldn't, but perhaps you have too many animals or stray horses in the world getting into trouble or stuck in goofy places; or if not stuck with no Overwatch reports, maybe just too many for the game to push around well.

I'm in a position to claim that the mods themselves almost never cause performance issues on suitable hardware and in worlds that are taken care of well unless some brand new conflict with tons of script errors starts showing up. I've had and seen them deployed on low, middle, and high end hardware in small through somewhat large (but not obnoxiously large) worlds too many times for that to be the case, so for me they are more of an indicator that something else is going wrong. Then it becomes a puzzle, or part of the game if you will, to figure out what's happening to game performance and why.

One option to consider if this is indeed a well progressed instance of MV is to Porter up the sims you care about and deploy what I call "Operation Get Them Out of There," even if it means placing them into another instance of the same world and reorganizing the households as you see fit once they all arrive and are unpacked safely. Another is to deploy Traveler to shift your primary gameplay out of MV while still keeping the world in play as a source of incoming sims and even a travel destination -- I've had worlds fall apart on me that became playable again after beginning such a procedure and still keep them around even if I don't wish to actively play residents there any longer. Or you could spend more time figuring out what is going on townwide to cause such stress to the game, guess it depends on which strategy would be more fun for you to work through.

This is the end of the first generation in the town, hence there are so many elders. in real life hours it's older than it might seem because i've played with half clock and aging turned off for a portion of it.
It does give me a few stuck sims reports and stuck aging reports whatever that means but it's not too frequent. at times they happen more but performance doesn't change, it's freezing no matter what. Oh and error trap might throw an error or two sometimes but i's pretty rare. My save is just 90 mb and i have online options turned off including the store scrapbooks are disabled too. there are some pets in my world but not an excessive amount. they're limited to 25 cats 25 dogs 13 horses. there are 4 rabbitholes in the town that cover 2 roles like hospital and spa for example the rest are normal locations. I don't know how to check where my sims are getting sent by sp to find out if there is overcrowding going on but i haven't seen more than 10 to 12 sims in the same spot during normal gameplay.
i'm still trying to figure out what is the cause of this. Part from curiosity and another part because i'm scared that it might happen again on another town but eventually i might have to bite the bullet and just execute "Operation Get Them Out of There," like you said.

A stuck aging report means that sims are overdue for aging up. If you were to find them and run a MC > Status > Personal report on them, you may see that they have a negative number of days left in their current age stage (which again means overdue). This is low-hanging fruit and should be fixed. Some sims, Role Sims in particular, will freeze on the map if they are being pushed to age up and perform some other task like run a cash register at the same time and that can have a very negative impact on game performance.

This is more prone to happen with Role Sims because they are required to staff their positions for such a high percentage of game time and possibly all of the time that they appear on-screen. They can't age up while doing so because they try to go off the map to do that in private, and thus can become "stuck" not able to do either. Can't say that is the entire cause of the lag issues you are facing, but it can't be ruled out either if you have sims in such a situation. A short-term solution is to use MC to shove their ages back down so they are not due to age up yet, or if you have no affection for these NPCs you might want to TA them so that replacements will spawn. This is why many players do not allow aging on certain classes of NPC sims, even though that ends up not looking very realistic over time if the bartender serving your drink is the same one who served your great great grandparent long ago.

Quick update: maybe i have a bit too many pets in my world 83 seems like a hefty amount. is it too much? i tried TA on all the animals and it didn't really make a visible difference.

After that i tried TA on the whole population and after the game repopulated the world with about 80 sims and SP did it's thing(assigning careers, selecting the actors for scenarios, etc) the lag calmed down and it was a noticeable improvement in performance, still choppier than the new game in roaring heights but playable by my standards.

Does this confirm that the problem is with the world itself?

The main two things that bug me so much are the big freezes and the camera unresponsiveness. if only i could just mitigate those two without doing something drastic like nuking the whole town or changing worlds....

It depends on how those animals were being counted. If they were resident pets, that does sound like a bit much for 38 households. That's over 2 pets per household on average, meaning some might have 0 or 1 while others will have more than 2. But if the number included those in the pet adoption and horse breeding pools, which never appear on screen so are not subjected to progression, and strays who are really Service Sims and not consistently being simulated, then it would be too inflated to be a meaningful reading.

I'm not aware of severe routing issues with Monte Vista in particular, but my sims have only ever vacationed there and I've never played it as a homeworld. There could be world lot issues that have escaped my notice on those relatively brief visits. Perhaps the important thing is that it's not playing out well for you, right now, for whatever reason. EllaCharmed's fixed version of the underlying .world file might help if you aren't already using it (sorry if this has already been mentioned), but deploying her fixed version would require starting over or Portering your sims into a new MV for further play.