This "Smooth Patch" is a hot topic over at tumblr and it appears to be the miracle we've all been waiting for. Now, before you all start thinking "Oh, is this a new patch from EA?", let me put that rumour to rest before it starts - no, it most certainly is NOT a patch from EA.

It's a mod made by lazyduchess at tumblr:-
"This mod makes the game’s logic threads run faster, speeding up loading of Buy/Build and CASt, smoother UI elements, smoother CAS, fixes CAS music randomly stopping. Can also speed up live mode and loading, it’s essentially a general improvement."

Take a look at the following link for more details and the download.
https://lazyduchess.tumblr.com/post/657 ... h-patch-10

If you are a bit lost on what to do with the downloaded files, here's another link with detailed instructions from the always helpful mspoodle at tumblr.
https://mspoodle1.tumblr.com/post/65778 ... igin-users
Within the link above, there's another link to a discussion on MTS about the effects of this mod, which I highly encourage you to read as well, in order to understand exactly what this mod is doing.
Here's a direct link to the MTS discussion: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=658607

Please read all the information carefully before trying this mod, as it will probably affect the temperature of your computer's processor. In case you need a program to monitor it, here's a link to a portable program I use for this purpose.
https://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonit ... r_1.44.zip

I have been trying this mod for a few days now and I must say, I have been blown away by how 'smooth' the game feels now! For reference, I'm running a system with an Intel i7 7700K processor and the maximum temperature has reached 89*C on one of the cores, which is below the throttle threshold of 100*C for an Intel CPU. This is with the TPS set to 1000.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask although I don't know all the details of how the mod works, I can help with setting it up for your system if needed.

Thanks so much for posting this. I hadn't seen anything about the mod, but I tried it tonight, and it was fantastic. I feel like I need to Photoshop one of the "beautiful vista" moodlets to read "This... mod... is... incredible! Someone really knows how to code."

The first thing I noticed was how quickly the Main Menu popped up. My game already loads extremely quickly, but this was enough of a difference that my head snapped around like there was something wrong with my game. The load times for outfits and CASt patterns were impressive as well.

One thing I noticed that I didn't specifically see mentioned is that this tool eliminated some relatively low framerates I'd been seeing due to what I assumed were stupid TS3 reasons. Most blatantly, I played the Delaney household in Dragon Valley for a bit, and when I panned the camera over the pond in the front yard, I'd get stutter and fps drops of about 20% below my set limit, so the actual effect was probably a lot higher considering how out of control my framerates are with no cap. With this tool in place, I got one small stutter when I first moved the camera to the water, but then nothing, on the two highest water settings and with the other graphics settings maxed out, aside from high-detail lots. That doesn't mean that the fps drop was actually gone—I still had the limit in place—just that it wasn't nearly as dire.

I did briefly run the game with no fps cap in Isla Paradiso, just to see what would happen, and my CPU was working pretty hard, or at least two cores were. (That would be the large number of extra draw calls.) With the cap in place though, the load was totally reasonable and the temps weren't noticeably higher than normal.

One issue I saw was that when I'd selected the CASt tool in Buy mode and was waving my mouse around, there was a sometimes significant delay in highlighting each item the cursor passed over. At one point, it took 10-15 seconds to register that my mouse was in fact hovering over an item I wanted to style, although the typical delay was more like a second. It's not a big deal, just interesting.

And for anyone wondering, I have a Steam install, I unzipped the files and dropped them into the Bin folder, and I launched as usual from my TS3W.exe shortcut, no need to do anything else.

I installed the Origin version and it is working so well! There is such a huge difference in how it runs now.

I've been running it for about 5 days, but set to only 500 there hasn't been a significant increase in smoothness. Things in my game already ran pretty smooth in general, and I've seen no improvement at all in CAS, CASt, build/buy, or game load time.

But in live mode I have seen a couple of improvements, mostly UI stuff, like how clicking on portraits to switch sims, or clicking on tabs to switch panels, is seamless. I'd thought it was instant before the mod, never noticed any click latency, but it just goes to show how things can always be faster and smoother in a game. That's the most noticeable change, but I'm here for it. Camera movement seems smoother, but the world I've been playing isn't a good test for something like that, because it's small enough to not have issues in any case.

I've been monitoring temps and I haven't seen an increase at all, so I'm going to bump the mod up to 1000, (which I probably should have done from the get-go, but I was worried about overheating). Since 1000 was the original recommended value (I think), that's probably going to make a big difference. But the faster UI alone makes me pretty happy.

puzzlezaddict & vienibenmio,
You're both welcome! It really is amazing, isn't it?. My jaw dropped open when I went into Buy Mode and saw how fast the little preview icons were spinning! It's a real pleasure to play the game now. I also noticed a vast improvement when re-arranging items in collections within Build/Buy Mode. I hope more people get to hear about this and try it out soon. It's hard to believe those three tiny files make such a difference to the game.

indignantgirl,
Yes, the original recommended value was 1000 but I believe Lazyduchess reduced it down to 500 to account for people on less than optimal systems. If your system is fairly decent, it should have no problems running at 1000 TPS. Let us know if you notice any difference in Build/Buy Mode after you've bumped it up.

I found amusing how timer in main menu from automatic save loading mod works with this patch.
Can anyone please explain how this works? What are "ticks per second" in singleplayer game? Is it related to FPS and is it a kind of DirectX based speedhack? And lastly, is it fully safe for hardware?

Sarah_Sims wrote: ↑

July 29th, 2021, 4:59 pm

indignantgirl,
Yes, the original recommended value was 1000 but I believe Lazyduchess reduced it down to 500 to account for people on less than optimal systems. If your system is fairly decent, it should have no problems running at 1000 TPS. Let us know if you notice any difference in Build/Buy Mode after you've bumped it up.

Yeah, I think I'll have a more accurate assessment after the next time I play. I have a gaming laptop and I had no reason to think there would be problems running the mod at full speed, except that at the time I just wanted to pop the mod in and play without having to watch temps too closely. I'm really excited to see how things go at 1000, especially when I hear how impressive it is in other people's games.

No noticeable difference when I increased the TPS from 500 to 1000, except for CPU temps. I'll probably kick it back down to 500 so I can keep the faster UI with no temp increase.

I thought maybe I didn't know what kind of changes I was looking for, so I watched every video I could find of people demonstrating the patch in their games. The thing is, it all looks like how my game normally runs (with the exception of dragging the preset bar in CASt, which is never very smooth in my game). So that's probably why I'm not seeing any kind of significant improvement with CAS and build/buy and all that. I only keep what I consider to be a moderate amount of CC, so that might be a factor as well.

I'm going to have my daughter try the mod in her game. She CASts everything and it takes her forever. This could actually make her love playing again.

@Sarah_Sims Thank you for sharing this! I actually saw this on YouTube a few days ago, KenziiSims was reviewing it and I just had to try it. Glad to see the community forums are now aware of it.

@indignantgirl I haven't changed the TPS to 1000 so I'll have to try it out and see how it goes...

Also, when I extracted the files from the zip folder, I extracted them to 'ld_TS3Patch10' and placed that folder in the Bin file. Is this fine or do I have to put them directly into the file without any sub folder?

95mmaa wrote: ↑

July 30th, 2021, 10:08 am

@Sarah_Sims Thank you for sharing this!

You're welcome!

95mmaa wrote: ↑

July 30th, 2021, 10:08 am

when I extracted the files from the zip folder, I extracted them to 'ld_TS3Patch10' and placed that folder in the Bin file. Is this fine or do I have to put them directly into the file without any sub folder?

I don't think they will work in a sub-folder so just put the three files directly into the Bin folder.