Does anyone know of a decent tutorial of how to combine CC package files in S3PE? I'm trying to skip CC magic because I'm doing this on my husband's laptop that cannot really run sims 3 (technically it can run the base game for all of 30 minutes before it has an error code 12). I am running it on my mac, so all the programs to help make my sims run better are on his laptop with windows 10, which can I just say is another can of worms trying to get .net 4.0 programs to work with windows 10. *sorry for the small rant*

Anyhow, I am just having trouble trying to figure out if I just drag and drop all the packages I want to combine into s3pe, then combine or if I need to do something special. When I tried the first time to import them into s3pe and then just saved the package file (then installed packages in my mods folder), my game started acting funny and started crashing, which could just be an out of memory issue or I didn't something wrong.

I have found lots of CC I need for littlelambsy's UC lots that I'd like to install, but I think my game will just run slow if I don't combine all of them.

When I first started combining package files with S3PE I used the tutorial on this page (first link):

https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/04/t ... e-lag.html

There was a recent discussion about combining files on the official forums and apparently a lot of people use import>from package instead. None of us could figure out the difference. I've never tried dragging and dropping files into S3PE.

I didn't know if importing it as a .dbc or .package mattered when importing them in order to combine them into a package. Looks like it's ok to do. Thank you!

I wonder if I had some bad CC causing my game to act funny. Perhaps I need to go back and check it all again before combining them.

Chain explained this to us once before and it's import as dbc that is the preferred method. Now I forget the exact reason, but I think it has to do with the number of resources brought in with each package (dbc lowers the total item size within the merged end-product?). Or I'm not quite remembering that correctly, but there was some compelling reason to choose that method.

I've merged .package files by dragging and dropping them into S3PE without problems.

I'm very intrigued by the rumored advantages of importing as dbc...

Thank you! I really appreciate the explanation. I thought I had remembered something about importing and combing being preferred, but was scratching my head if this was correct or not. Thank you for clearing it up. I need all I can to prevent choking of any sort when memory is involved since my mac doesn't like hardly any CC to begin with.

Oh, how I miss a good or even a decent PC that could handle sims 3.

Thanks for the link Chain. I also appreciate knowing the difference.

@Chain_Reaction - Thanks for the info. Just to clarify, so importing as .dbc and as .package are the same, except for the flushing of each file to disk?

Judging from the linked thread's description of what happens when the different import mechanisms are invoked, it seems that drag & drop triggers import as .dbc, since it brings up the "save after each package?" dialog.