What is lagging? What does it consist of?

[Janna]

We have all experienced problems in games, lagging and freezing are the two most common ones I read.

My son and I were discussing a couple of days ago and it has me wondering if what is seen as lagging here is different from what he thinks it is.

To me, lagging has been when my sim suddenly stops moving, they could be walking across the yard and just stop dead, frozen in that spot.  The branches of trees are moving in the breeze but my sim isn't at all.  Time is froze also.
Then, just as suddenly, she starts to move again, as if nothing has happened.  When this starts it is a constant event that can last for over an hour (real time, maybe just a couple of minutes sim time). 
Sim takes a step, freezes, move and takes another step, freezes, one second, sim time has gone by.  Real time is that there could  have been one, two, five or even 15 minutes pass before my sim starts to move.

I don't remember exact times, but it can be a sim moves fine for five minutes sim time and then freeze for one minute real time.  Freeze again three minutes later sim time and for half an hour real time.

I don't dare save when this is happening, I'm not sure if I am worried this will happen (or if it did some time back in the past) that my sims will remain stuck and I have to go to a precious save to continue playing. 
When this happens all sims in the area are froze.  I can't move my cursor either.  Everything is stuck except the trees branches, I'm not sure if the butterflies and other insects are frozen. 


Reset sim does not work

So, is this lagging and if not lagging, then what exactly is lagging? 
And if it isn't lagging, then what is it?

[Janna]

I asked this in misc help, but no response.

I want to know somewhat for curiosity, but also for correct description.  I don't want to call something A when it is B which give me the wrong information of what to do. 

To me, lagging has been when my sim is moving around and she (or he) just stops and freezes.  There is no movement of any sim or I think pets when I had pets;  except branches, or water in fountains and such.  I honestly can't remember if things such as butterflies or fish jumping still is happening or if they are also frozen.

This can last as long as one second real time and then do the stop and start for anywhere from several seconds to several minutes.  The time span from action to action of my sim can vary from one second to several minutes.

Example:  Sim is walking across up the gangplank to get on boat.  She take a step and freezes for one second, real time.  Another step, freezes real time, another step, freezes for 10 seconds real time.  For sim time it would be one second also.  Then she will walk for three seconds of sim time and freeze again for one to several minutes. 
It could take as long as fifthteen minutes of real time for her to walk 10 second sim time. 
I can't save during such incidents because my game can be stuck in such a state and not unfreeze on me.  If I stop just as my sim dives and is stuck in the air and save, then when I go to restart the game she will be stuck that way and I can not play on. Will just have to go to an earlier save. 

It happens bad in IP, but some in other towns, but nearly as much or as often for the time spans.  In an hour of real time stops one time for a couple of seconds real time. 

Is this lagging, freezing or something else? 


Reset sim does not work

[simaholic^]

For me lagging is when the fps drop and the sims take forever to do stuff. Like cooking or change clothes. I don't see freezing as lagging.

[Janna]

I'm not sure what you mean by "fps drops".  Could you explain it better?  It is a new term for me, one of many that I need to learn.   

[Seabody]

I merged your topics and am moving this to Technical Help.

[Janna]

Thanks Seabody,  I didn't think of it as technical help, but I guess it does fit there. 

[simaholic^]

I'm not sure what you mean by "fps drops".  Could you explain it better?  It is a new term for me, one of many that I need to learn.   

Fps stands for 'framerate per second' it shows how well your game is running. Type fps in the cheat console and numbers will appear in the upper right corner. 30 is a good number. If it drop below 10, it is getting very slow. On my old graphic card is was sometimes 3 or 4, a nightmare! Freezing can happen if sims are stuck. I get it in Starlight Shores and Isla Paradiso. I think in Starlight Shores it is the proprietors fault lol. So I moved my acrobat to Sunset Valley, problem solved.

[Pam]

@Janna:

What does your son think lagging is?  I'm just curious.

[Janna]

He says laggings is when my sim would stop and then start back up but jump further ahead.  example : my sim she would be frozen at the door, unfreeze and take one or more steps and then freeze again.  She would unfreeze and walk down the steps and at the bottom, a foot in the air freeze again.  It could be several seconds real time, or five minutes, I never know how long it will last, she will unfreeze and walk to the pool, jump in and freeze as she dives and have her hanging in the air. 
As he would see it, she would be stepping out the door freeze, unfreeze and be at the bottom of the steps--freeze, unfreeze and be at the pool--go to dive and freeze and then unfreeze and she would be swimming across the pool. 

He plays pretty much only role playing games, I don't know if that would be a factor in how he sees problems that we would have here.  Sims is boring, he played a doctor reached the LTW and that to him was the end of the game, he accomplished the goal and there is no need to continue.

I've noticed that when I first start a game in IP it goes fine.  But the longer I play, the bigger the file becomes, that is when I seen what I think of as lagging starts up. 

Hardly even happens in the other towns, usually when I have a good size file; eight family members of grandparents, parents, three offspring and one who is married.   

[simaholic^]

I get what your son mean Janna. It happen when a sim go though a door. And yes, that is lagging. It happened with my old card. Turn down graphics in game options may help and also disable memories completely.

[Janna]

I get confused easily,    is what I describe lagging or what he describes lagging? 

It happens any time, I never know when it is going to start.  As soon as I start the game, after I have played for an hour, there is no set location or action that seems to cause it.  Cooking a meal, playing on the computer, swimming, diving, making whoopie, it doesn't matter what they are doing, although it can be kinda funny at times.
 
Mainly it is just frustrating and ruins the fun of playing of that town.  If you have to spend 15 minutes just to have her walk up the gangplank, that isn't fun, it's irritation. 

Why just IP?  Why not other towns?  The only other town that comes from an expansion pack is Moonlight Falls from Supernatural and it doesn't have this problem, or so rare it doesn't matter.  My store worlds may have it happen occasionally, but none to the extent to IP. 

I have the graphics down and memories off, find them frustrating, so that can't be part of the problem. 
I think it is just IP, the only explanation, since it hardly happen elsewhere.   

[simaholic^]

Janna, read this article. She explain the whole Isla Paradiso issue very well and have great tips to reduce lagging http://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2014/02/lags-in-islo-paradiso.html.  Take a look at this link as well, I think this is what you're looking for.  http://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/04/bug-lags-intermittent-freezes.html

[Janna]

thanks for the links, I did most of that, deleted the Scotts, the Hideout, went around and deleted any cars that I found at businesses and even removed the park spot so a car couldn't be put there.  Took a couple out of houses. 
Moved some of the townies off their boats and put them in houses, delete from edit town any empty houseboats and checked out the Ichtaca castle but didn't find any routing issues, played the family and took them all over the house, up and down stairs, down hallways, into rooms, outside and didn't have any routing problems.

Didn't do the show the hidden islands though.

I am going to go and create a blank town and redo all this, adding in the resetsim * to make sure that none are stuck.  Went to the resorts and removed any walls around them, or put in openings in case of routing problems for townies who wanted to walk on the grounds, be guests at the resort.
Also move Rubisel out of his boat and see if that will help.  When he died in my game the intensity of the problems slowed down, so not sure if he could have been a routing problem. 
Also noted that when a game gets too big, have played with my family from birth to the children reaching YA, the problems get worse the longer I play. 

I do add to the town the elixir store and a garden that I have created, either the chef garden or the elixir garden.

Think I will remove a couple more of the families or single sims that I will never play, the artist, the insane guy that lives alone.

[simaholic^]

In Isla Paradiso I resetsim * at the end of every sim day.

[Randox]

Since it seems like you might be interested in the term itself, lag is used as a blanket term for pretty much any phenomenon where you have any kind of pause, jump, or freeze on screen. The term comes from online games where the users computer (client) is in the past relative to the game server because computer data takes time to move around the world and be processed. So it describes how much you are 'lagging' behind reality.


As to why the game stutters or hangs (those are the terms I like. Just replace them with "lag" when you read this if you like), two fronts on that issue as far as I can tell.

The first problem is memory access speed. Hard Drives are slow, and because this game is much larger than the amount of memory (RAM) it can use, it has to juggle a lot of information. Sometimes the game is going to pause simply because it's waiting for an asset to load into RAM. There is no easy way to address that other than going out and buying a solid state drive, which has a much faster access time.

The other problem is path finding. Because this game is single threaded, if a process gets stuck, the whole thing has to wait for the problem to be resolved before it can move on. If the game in unable to find a path for someone, it can cause the game to hang anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds while it tries to find a route. Until the computer finds a path or decides there isn't one, the game has to pause. If a sim is stuck someplace, especially if they keep trying to move someplace they can't, your game is going to run like garbage because the path finding keeps causing the game to hang. That's why resetsim * helps. It moves everyone out of tight spaces and interrupts the task of trying to go someplace they can't.

Fortunately, this is probably the bigger and more annoying issue, and it can be addressed with mods. The link simaholic posted lists good mods. I forget which one is which, but one of them will automatically detect when a sim has gotten stuck and reset just them. I think it's overwatch that among other things will detect when a sim is stuck and reset them, and error trap attempts to deal with the garden variety bugs (which includes potentially resetting you if has to). They'll also do things like clean up abandoned cars and other stuff that just sits there eating up processor power without doing anything. The third is a map with a lot of the fixes already applied for you. Since the mods tell you who the problem people are, you can sometimes observe them and see what the problem is and address it.