Larger Save File Help and Tips Wanted

[Chuckles_82]

Perhaps your games can't handle as many sims? You could try removing some of the households and empty houses before you start the game. The game needs a small percent of empty houses all the time, so if you get rid too many, more sims will move away to balance it.

[LivvieLove]

I did some tests but I think I figured out my issue... I don't have a good graphics card.
I upgraded to the best one my personalized HP could offer but it isn't an NVidia card, and even though it's powerful, having an AMD Card is usually better for running normal videos/computing but not necessarily games. I'll likely be switching Video cards here in the next month (it's a mess figuring out power supply and all that jazz, but I'm hoping I'll gain a lot more flexibility with sims).

Anyways, I'm trying out almost all of these tips to keep my game running while I can, I'll let you know if I see improvement.
My newest file I started I aimed for a large-file type. I started a Townie Decadynasty in Moonlight Falls and am very, very careful about alt-tabbing (I just don't) and I'm not using CC or Mods (which is very hard to deal with). And I'm hoping with the open but sparsely populated town that I'll be able to go to at least generation 4. Generation two is a toddler still. Fingers crossed for results!

[Angélique]

So you've been able to convince yourself to play without mods altogether then? I've heard some people claim that it's totally impossible to play this game without mods, but that can't be true, because I've never had any mods or 3d party CC, only EA made things, and I can still play it. Of course I experience some lag and freezing now and then, but for the most part it's okay.

Anyway, good luck with your new Moonlight Falls attempt!

[LivvieLove]

So you've been able to convince yourself to play without mods altogether then? I've heard some people claim that it's totally impossible to play this game without mods, but that can't be true, because I've never had any mods or 3d party CC, only EA made things, and I can still play it. Of course I experience some lag and freezing now and then, but for the most part it's okay.

Anyway, good luck with your new Moonlight Falls attempt!

It isn't an easy task. No, it's not impossible... but have you ever played the Sims 2?
For me, when I was first introduced to the Sims it was to the Sims 2, and I played that like crazy and saw ads for the Sims 3. I remember thinking: I'll never play that, it's practically the same thing!
Well, when I did end up trying the Sims 3, I just couldn't play the Sims 2 again because the Sims 3 was all the improvements I had wanted to see in the Sims 2.
Mods are the same way for most people. It introduces gameplay aspects that people desired to see in the game to begin with (or fixes issues that people didn't want to see) which is why so many say it's impossible.
I did stop using mods and CC (which made me cringe to get on and see all the damage of "replaced" items) and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a difference in my files. It's almost disappointing because now, instead of automatically resetting Sims that are having problems, the game just has them sit there. The freezing occurs a little more now, but it always corrects itself after a few minutes of waiting instead of just running smooth like I'm used to. I'll try a brand-spanking-new file and see if the speed/everything else improved overall and if not then I'll probably crack and put my mods back in because if my game isn't improving from them NOT being there then my resolve breaks a little bit.

[Angélique]

Yes, I have played Sims 2, but only for a very brief period of time. That's because I bought the base game of both S2 and S3 at the same time, and tried S3 first for a while, and after that I tried S2. I'm sure you can imagine what happened!

After having played S3 there was absolutely no way of going back to S2. It is so primitive and the sims look like poor drawn cartoons compared to S3. I also think S2 resembles Sims 1 too much, with all those needs meters bouncing up and down like crazy all the time. It took most of the day to just keep them reasonably green, and there wasn't much time left to do anything else. S3 is a million times better than the other two, even though it causes quite a lot of trouble and technical problems for many players.

If you feel that Nraas mods improve your gameplay, how come that you decided to suddenly start playing without them? If they work fine for you I don't see any reason to quit using them.

[LivvieLove]

I could see alt-tab being a problem if the computer doesn't have enough RAM, since it might start freeing up the RAM that game was using to do other things, and that could lead to problems I suppose. Normally the problem is that not every game will actually run again once tabbed out. Skyrim is like that for me. If your computer isn't using the RAM though, I can't see the issue. I have the sims tabbed out right now, and because I hibernate instead of shut down, it's been running for a few days (in terms of up time, maybe 20 hours combined background and actually running) and it doesn't seem to care. At 650mb, I'd probably be seeing any ill effects right now.

The Alt-Tabbing thing isn't about how LONG the game is Alt-Tabbed but rather how many times you do it in one sitting.
Like I would Alt-Tab at least 10-15 times on one save going back and forth to type messages to people or look something up or watch videos.
It's the constant loading and closing and loading again that causes the objects to glitch and have error logs.

[Angélique]

It will be very interesting to see if your current save file will work okay, now that you've quit using both mods and Alt+Tab to leave/return to game. I really hope that you'll keep us posted about your findings.

[LivvieLove]

Absolutely! My boyfriend dissected my computer while he was here this last weekend and gave it the clean of it's life (he opened it up and dusted it... and did something special with having the hard drive figure out if any pieces of it were "bad" - don't ask, I'm not THAT much of a computer person. He finished with a Disk Cleanup and Defragging). He examined all of the codes and error logs I got and also helped come to the conclusion that removing mods/CC in the middle of the game will cause severe errors to occur as well. He uses this special program to examine the error logs and lay them out in a really easy to show manner and he showed me this huge list of errors that were happening all over the town that involved the removal of CC/Mods messing up interactions between Sims and Objects. It was intense. So after all that improved he also changed my hard drive to dynamic, or something like that.
That was the gist of it at least. Things are running absolutely smoothly though. I'll definitely see how far this goes with no mods/alt-tabbing and precautions on the saving.