As I mentioned in the first part, I had to split the original extras chapter into two parts. In this part I go over the lag I was getting in Riverview and why, how I plan to prevent it in Twinbrook, and the changes I made to Twinbrook.
(I apologize in advance for how confusing this lag section is. Feel free to skip it if you aren’t interested in the weird cause of my lag near the end of their time in Riverview.)
The Lag…
I did touch on lag a little in various chapters but what I didn’t say was that near the end the lag was so annoying I almost left Riverview early.
Unrelated to the actual cause, but still a cause for lag, is NPCs trying to age up but also needing to do their jobs so they’re just stuck standing there. I haven’t found a good fix for this other than looking for them and manually aging them up myself.
Another unrelated cause but still extremely annoying to me, sims and pets crowding lots at all hours of the night even when businesses are closed. I was resetting the lots to send them home but in some cases sims went right back! I found a setting in the Go-Here mod… something like “push to visit lots at night- false.”
No, I don’t think it was the festival tickets but I wanted to show how I got rid of them which was in the place where I also fixed the problem(s). I was searching the internet for causes of random unexplained lag when I saw a post about a person who accidentally put a car parking spot in the middle of a tree (cause trees disappear when the camera’s close up) and had horrendous lag until they found it.
So, I tried to remember what had I done when it started. Did I place something new? Why yes, I did. It was around the same time I’d added onto the house. It took me forever to remember that I’d placed the boy’s umbrella’s on the ground to copy them and they’d disappeared. *poof* But, they were still there. In pretty much the main entryway of the house where everyone went to when they came home and where the cats were constantly playing. Yet another search led me to a fix. “click on the ground then MC- object stats- not inventory.” It lists everything (not in the inventory) on the lot. Find the umbrellas and flush them. This is how, using the inventory search, I also deleted the multiplying festival tickets.
Something else I found in the non-inventory search were all of these cat “jigs” and two more from when they adopted the boys. I did yet another search and found the above info. So, those could have been a problem as well.
An example of the ones you never want to delete for reference… from a community lot.
Where I was gleefully “flushing” leaf piles!
Another cause for lag is stuck animals. My dogs, when they arrived in Sunset Valley, were ported into this flowerbed which they couldn’t escape from! Without Overwatch, if this wasn’t your own played family you’d never know. This is why resetting everyone in town usually fixes lag. It puts everyone inside their houses away from wherever they’re trapped.
Twinbrook Preventative Measures…
I’ve been working on Twinbook for weeks. First and foremost, I wanted to prevent lag as much as possible. In Llandro’s Ultimate Sim let’s play, it got so bad in Twinbrook he had to leave early!
- Ellacharmed’s Twinbrook world with fixes applied fixes all the routing issues and such. As far as I know, she has one for all of the worlds. I actually thought I had installed them all when I did the one for Moonlight Falls earlier this year but apparently not.
- I changed the Options.ini file to 0 for puppies and kittens so that they age after a day. They cause terrible lag because they can’t get up/down stairs but keep trying. (I also doubled their default adult lifestage.)
- Wild horses and strays are gone. Horses are the worst. They go places they shouldn’t and get stuck. (This is done in Register.)
I’ve always said Sims 3 just takes a bit of finesse. It’s not a game you can just sit back and play and expect no problems. You have to be proactive. I did start a post on making the game run smoother a few weeks ago, just haven’t worked on it since then.
Keep in mind, when I complain about lag it’s because I’m a big baby. If I turned my graphics settings down or took out the store content and mods it would probably run way better. Instead, I have the settings as high as they go and almost every item from the store. And yet the slightest hesitation drives me nuts, c’est la vie… at least for me!
New Twinbrook…
Welcome to New Twinbrook. Mostly thanks to Comet65’s Twinbrook Reimagined pictured above.
“Twinbrook has an amazingly nice, blue-collar map, but it just lacked that ’50s Main Street Feel that it was trying to portray. I’ve made a set of eight community lots that give Twinbrook that vibe while opening up 10 lots for others to do with as they please like building Penthouses, Clubs, or other types of community lots!”
The criminal hideout lot was actually the one that originally intrigued me. I’m really glad I decided to look at the rest of the lots in the set!
This is the city center previously the central park.
Replacing the central park also meant I had no festival lot. I tried to find one that fit this park lot they’d made but couldn’t.
Still, I think that park was a much better use of space than the previously huge city hall. I put Scrumptious Nibbles Cafe on the empty lot behind the new one.
The festival lot I found is very small and I might have to delete those trees. We’ll see how it goes. You can download it here by Pink Rabbit. They had other cool lots I really wanted but couldn’t get the download links to work.
This is the new school/stadium. This one I’ll definitely have to keep my eye on since kids crowding trying to get into school buildings is another cause of lag.
Llandros has a set of videos on his channel where he goes through the different worlds and makes additions to existing lots. I watched it and in a few cases, like the public pool here, copied his. As far as I know, he’s never put his versions up for download anywhere so this was the best I could do.
He turned this area into a wedding venue but while doing so mentioned he’s put the broom arena there before. It’s nothing fancy but really the lot was useless so anything’s an improvement.
So, here I was with all this extra space but what to put on it? I went into some of the custom worlds in my search for lots. I downloaded a ton of lots but most didn’t fit. These are the worlds that I grabbed lots from… Rflong’s Pangea and Legacy Island III. My Sim Realty’s Meadow Glen and Storybrook Country. Heaven’s Greymont Bay.
This one is a favorite of mine from Rflong’s Pangea. I replaced one of the fishing lots with it.
This cute bowling alley and the stylist building to the rear right were from a Rflong world too. I’m not sure about the disco to the rear left.
I was trying to find something to fit that long lot so I put in this pet park. Not sure where I got it. I mostly disassembled it and replaced all the trees.
This building’s next to that. Uh, I forget what it is or where I got it. It fit. LOL
This is all in kinda an industrial area across the water from the main town. This lot is amazing. It looks like an abandoned warehouse but there’s a whole underground club in the basement.
Some lots I downloaded. Like this elixir store.
This lot Carl’s Cajun Catfish Cookout was categorized as residential but built like a restaurant. It needs some work but it looks so darned cool I couldn’t resist!
The swamp area is my favorite. I wanted to live there. Unfortunately, the houses look neat but they’re all tiny. This left me searching online for houses, which is really how I found a lot of this stuff. I ended up replacing most of the swamp lots with ones I found. This one is Juiceshiners. It has a whole “moonshine” speakeasy-type area in the basement.
This one, Fen Lodge, I had to download a few pieces of CC for but it looked too cool to resist. Sadly, too small for what I need as well.
Random Notes…
If you decide to use Ellacharmed’s fixed worlds be warned you can not add lots. Never. Don’t try it. You will fail. Even if it’s a lot of the same exact size as the lot you bulldozed. Just stay out of freaking world editor. Why? Weird-as-hell graphical issue in which grass flickers and moves over the road. I did a lot of experimenting. No matter what I tried if I placed a new lot anywhere, even where a lot used to be, this happened. So, be warned and save yourself the headache. From what little I could find regarding this glitch, it’s from placing lots too close to the road. I didn’t find that to be so. It happened every single time I tried to place a lot with the world editor.
I don’t know if these weird lot issues were here in the original version and I don’t care enough to switch back to it just to see. At first, I thought it was the lots I replaced these with that caused it.
But no, going to a clean save with no changes by me still showed them here.
Oddly, sims continue walking as if it’s not even there.
Which I find extremely strange considering the number of routing issues sims have in these games. Also, what’s the deal with that tree? LOL! I’ll just have to avoid the road when taking pics of these two lots.
Note: Yes, I am aware that adding these new lots to Twinbrook may cause some sort of lag. Especially with extra NPCs needing to work at them. If it ends up being a problem I’ll disable NPC assignments and/or mark the problem lots no visitors allowed. Fingers crossed that won’t be necessary.
Thanks for all the lag talk. I’ll save this page for when/if I reach Twinbrook. I hate lag but I think most of mine is due to Story Progression. (I’m really looking forward to Twinbrook, never played there and I’ve never played a Witch before.)
On another note: I love how you incorporate the ghosts into your game, although it’s sad to see Ransom will no longer be in play..
Sooner or later I’ll finish that Sims 3 tips chapter I started working on.
Maybe try slowing down SP if it’s causing lag? I think I have it at snail pace right now. I really need to speed it back up actually since it’s a new town. You can also just change the individual settings for how many sim minutes before it does them.
So far, I’m loving the witch. Thanks, I have a slight obsession with ghosts. LOL I feel bad about Ransom but it just didn’t work out. I’m sure we’ll see him again at some point.
I had some of the personalities enabled. I love drama! I disabled them and performance is better but I’ll definitely try the speed thing. Thanks. I only have 2 weeks left in Sunset Valley so I’ll sort it all out properly when I’ve moved. I’m bored now. Just waiting around as most things are completed
I know exactly what you mean about being bored! You could always start learning one of the instruments. In one of his later videos, Llandros said if he could do it again he’d learn an instrument each town.
Also, if you have Overwatch, you can save your settings for all of the Nraas mods so you don’t have to do it all over again in Riverview. I think it’s something like immediate- export settings and then you get there import settings.
Ah thankyou! I knew I could do that before when I played but couldn’t remember how and hadn’t got around to looking it up. I swear I spend more time learning new things about this game than I do actually playing it!
You’re welcome. I’m the same way, constantly searching how to do this or that. LOL!
You just perfectly described why my level of patience would never suffice for a serious adventure into The Sims 3 – Yes, it’s a marvellous game with tons of stuff to do but no… just no! 😀
For some insane reason, I enjoy it… for the most part. I do usually hit a wall when I can’t figure something out and quit for months at a time.