Insanely High Poly Counts - now you KNOW what to trash!

[J00wish]

*stares in awe at Yakov*

I LOVE threads like these. Quackers and Diana brought half the battle to the table and Yakov the other half. So many people (like myself) buy a game without the slightest idea of how it works. Understanding polycount and animations are very important for those who have older computers and those who have large lots with tons of CC in it. I created a HUGE house (IE: square) with reflective flooring and paintings to cover every inch. Then the furniture, etc... Talk about choppy! Now I have smaller homes with just enough to keep the sim happy and my game runs soooo much better. I removed a lot of the flower beds, etc... and the difference was amazing. You'd think it was a small detail... but plants suck up a lot of ram. I notice the lag when a lot of people Smustle too.

Thanks to everyone for their great hints and tricks. I look forward to reading others.

[quackers1226]

Updated at Sims Cave (too big now to post everything here).  Updates include more Vita Sims, Elize 37@TSR, Huabanana (or whatever his name is ) and Wall Sims (shocker, I tell you).  Thanks.  http://www.simscave.com/ferris/index.php?topic=1181.0

[hardwaretoad]

While I meant no malice by my post either, Odessa brings up a painfully obvious point. Alot of people pay zero attention to recommended computer requirements that most game manufacturers print on their boxes, they only look at the minumum requirements that're there (indeed, if at all) and say "I can run this on my 7 year old Pentium3". Well, the fact is that you can, but you're going to have to do without seeing things like high polycount hair, cars, mansions, etc. and a large share of the CC that's out there, or play it as a choppy, frustrating pain-in-the-neck. Minimum requirements are just that, there's no way that a min. spec machine will play this game any way, shape, or form that most people like to play it at.

[veggiespork]

My old computer that I used to play the Sims 2 on hardly had the minimum requirements so I never bothered to try downloading anything else or getting too many eps. The water flashed red, and when I tried pets the walls flashed red but the water was at least gray. Yuck. I'm so happy with my new lappy.

[quackers1226]

MCPuffs was checking out the polys on that counter for you Pegasus.

Here is what she found... "As for the Caravan Campagne Kitchen, I believe I've figured out what the problem is.

The person on the other site is comparing two different files - hence the two different poly counts.

She's comparing the object:
 Set_Campagne_Frances_MeubleHautTiroirs_Cuisine.package, which has a poly count of V 4474 F 3884
with the object listed directly above it in my screenie:
Set_Campagne_Frances_MeubleHautPortesTiroirs_Cuisine.package, which does have a poly count of V 10494 F 10094

And for the second one she questioned - about the counter - she has opened the Campagne bathroom counter in SimPE and is looking at it's poly count thinking it's one of the Campagne Kitchen counters. The proof is in her screenie, in the file name. It says [sdb] in it. That stands for Salle De Bain, bathroom in French. Where as both of the Campagane Kitchen counters contain "Set_Campagne_Frances_MeubleBas0*_Cuisine". "

That explains it!  MCPuffs added screen shots to the posting also.  You just had the wrong counter is all.  

[PegasusDiana]

Ok that explains it better I was like what?? lol I think I sat on this thread while I went on to sleep. I still had SimPE and this thread still opened this morning! I narrowed my CC down to about a gig and a half and thought that was nothing. It still takes a long time to look at it all in SimPE, and get all those poly counts. So I hope people with older PC's appreciates what your doing. I sent my son your link.

Hardwaretoad: I understand what your saying. My son plays on bare min. requirements. So I told him he better watch what CC he adds or don't come crying to me. He only keeps about 5 hairs and few extra things he likes. I think he told me when I asked this morning that he took his CC from about 50 megs down to about 25 megs. He also had to go back to Season's because he just couldn't run them all. So I told him pick and choose and let go of the rest till he's working again. He's back to just the Sims and Season's, then he downloaded the Mustang and driveway. Everything else is gone. And your right people with older PC's that are bare/close to bare requirements shouldn't be downloading a ton of stuff, hard as that is.

[BeosBoxBoy]

In truth, I blame EA for a number of the problems The Sims 2 has with custom content (regardless of poly-count); the game generally red-lines the VPU (video processor) for no reason other than crappy coding by EA/Maxis.  This leads to artefacts (visual irregularities like triangles popping up in the display) even on great systems.  EA/Maxis made a fast render engine for The Sims 2 that definitely shows the handiwork of unskilled coders on lots of levels; they basically recreated the wheel and cut-corners in the development of the fast render engine just like they did with every other aspect of The Sims 2.  EA patently DID NOT do adequate QA testing or do anything but the barest necessity of debugging to get the product shipped to market.

There was a The Sims 2 version we never saw as consumers, it was markedly different in character and traces of it can be seen in the guts of the files, chiefly in the animation.  It is obvious that two different methods of animation have been poorly merged into a deeply flawed and "unique" novel version that has held-back and complicated the development of new animations and animation tools for the custom content creating community.

The "original" version of The Sims 2 was "RTM" in 2003, but, in the eleventh hour, a decision was made to change the meshing system, animations, and fast render engine that delayed release of TS2 for more than a year as EA/Maxis went into crisis mode and re-wrote large sections of the the code and created a the new fast render engine we saw in the final release.  During this re-write a great deal of community made items that had been originally solicited by EA/Maxis for inclusion in TS2 were discarded since the game no longer would support the format in which these community-made items had been created.

The beta version I saw in late 2003 bears little in common with the beta version I saw in early 2004.  The CAS for instance in Body Shop still includes some tools that were left out of the final game.  Looking through the game's core files with SimPE you run across lots of relics of things that were stripped out - like an alternate high-tech/industrial theme CAS screen, roof skylight windows, stubs of life-stage ages and stubs of additional aspirations.  Some of this content has be "found" and made available by Numenor and others.

Sims were supposed to have seven life stages (the elder we now see was originally meant to be the oldest, one of the most telling stages that we lost was a real middle-aged stage that stood between prime of life and decrepitude), they were supposed to have actual growth during their youth so a teen started at stretch 0.94 and then would grow to stretch 1.0, age transitions were to be more subtle rather than the Pokemon fireworks transition we now see, there was supposed to be an actual fit morph with a distinct shape... most of these things were hacked out of the game in a sloppy manner and the code covering their operation poorly removed or terminated leading to wasted CPU cycles that do not improve the performance of the game.

Then we should consider the known randomly occurring catalogue bug that afflicts all players with significant amounts of downloads.  The catalogue function collapses and loses data constantly because EA simply didn't even try to make it work well or properly.  You can see plenty of help threads on InSIM asking about custom content not displaying in even the Base Game and University before the appearances of the "disable" feature in Nightlife.

The crappy coding, the last minute re-write, the cobbled-together fast render engine, etc - these all add to the general malaise of the game in a much more detrimental way than poly-counts.  If you want to blame someone for the problem The Sims 2 has with high-poly items, then look no farther than the branding on the package: EA.  They designed the game to be usable on the widest number of systems so they could maximise profits and this contains the unspoken lie that it will support custom content even on the most antiquated system that barely meets the game's low-end requirements.

I would prefer to see the tone in this undertaking of posting high-poly items to address the real culprits, rather than heap scorn and blame on custom content creators.  In the final analysis, no one is being forced to download custom content, however they are being persuaded by EA/Maxis to believe they need this game and therefore being forced to suffer the crap coding of lacklustre, lowest-bidder software development.

[PegasusDiana]

I would never blame the creators. I didn't get that impression for this thread. I hope that wasn't the intention. I thought it was just to help those with older PC's having problems. I think or I should say I hope most of us know from our experience with EA know that they have the shoddiest programmers around and are responsible for 99.9 percent of the problems we have in our games. Or why else would it be that I can run Oblivion and their massive poly count meshes with 0 problems. I try downloading a large house on a large lot and I have lag even with 8 gigs of Ram and a 1 gig video card. They couldn't convince me in a 100 years that people don't experience these problems in Beta testing, they just all of a sudden appear to the millions of users after they install the game. Almost every single one of their EP's has at least 2 patches, on top of that most the time those patches don't fix a lot of the issues. Look at the freetime patch TwoJeffs already did a critical fix for the aspirations. EA did nothing. They still haven't addressed the phone call issue, other than magazine subscriptions. Besides, as I said I looked at almost all my CC I'd say at least 80 to 85 percent of it. Those are about the averages for most of the CC and I think I showed that EA with their 800 per tile didn't even stick to that spec. on a lot of their CC, other than the smaller items. Besides EA knew full good and well about CC and that it would take more than 256 megs of video to run this game smoothly once people added all the EP's even without any CC. It's all about the money.

[quackers1226]

Updated Vita Sims, Wall Sims, MTS2...

Jonesi has updated her Sept. Sofa Set in response to this list!  WOOHOO!

[Theraven]

read bbb's message

well, if EA had bohered to throughly test their games before releasing them, they wouldn't even have needed to make patches. and for the patches to be bugged :smt120? I say, Better shape up EA. from what Beosboxboy says, the earlier version sounds much better. I really hope EA puts in growing/more + betetr lifestages in sims3. I love making stories, but it's really annoying when all the characters have to be a certain age for it to look natural according to the height)

:blob6: EA!

on another note: I just found a funny message about downtime over at the official site. in case it's gone when you go to see, here's a screenshot

[jadesstar]

I have my Sims2 game installed on two different laptops and the way they run on each is sooooo different you wouldn't even think it's the same game. I have only a handful of mods (two dozen at most) and almost no CC. My laptop is a Compaq Presario 2000. The memory and processor are good, but my video card isn't the best. I only have until Seasons installed. It runs a little choppy, depending on the lot size, decorations, number of Sims etc. My husband's computer is a HP Pavilion Entertainment PC. I have up to Bon Voyage on his and will eventually install FreeTime. Things run so much better on his computer, but oh well.

One reason I don't plan on ever playing Sims 3 because I just don't have the means (or inclination) to go and buy a new laptop to play it. I know my computer won't be able to handle it and even hubby's might not.