Regarding your latest answer about optimizing games. Can you elaborate more on how the optimization gets to happen? Like ofcourse they do want to make their npcs look as good as they planned to so how do they optimize without reducing quality in general?

Optimization tends to be tailored to the specific tasks at hand. Programmers on large projects often build or use out-of-the-box tools called profilers that measure performance in specific areas of the code. Based on the profiler reports, the engineers can see where the majority of processing time is being spent and then consider looking into optimizing the heaviest offenders.

If we're optimizing the visuals specifically, then it's a question of what saves the most processing time. The best optimization is often not to render anything at all. If the hardware doesn't have to render and animate a thing, it saves a lot of processing time. We do this by not rendering models that the player can't see (e.g. stuff off-camera, stuff behind walls, stuff too far off in the distance, etc.), and also by not rendering the parts of the model that the player can't see (e.g. if you're looking at the front of a building, you can't see the back of the building at the same time without a mirror or something behind it).

That's only one example of optimizations we make. We load cheaper models and/or textures for things that are far away (LODs), we can reduce the frequency of animation updates for characters in the background or on the peripheral edges of the camera that players aren't focusing on, and so on. There are as many ways to save processing time as there are ways to spend it. If you have the time and interest, I suggest looking at the #game optimization tag on this blog, since I've written at length about various means of optimization in past posts.

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Spent an hour today joining all my incredibly dense world chunk geometry and exporting it as individual objects. It was really boring.

Nothing functionally has changed and all the geo still looks the same BUT because of the sheer number of individual models I was using now rendering the entire scene only takes ~4ms instead of 16ms as it was previously. Everything is super smooth now!

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Just curious: Your Downloads and Mods folders are huge! How long does the game load for you?

hi @cas-sims!

I have not played Sims 3 in a regular world for years, mainly because I also had trouble with heavy lag and it ruined the fun 😥 If I actually want to play, I need to do a lot of optimization beforehand! My test save that I use for testing and making screenshots for my CC is on a CAS world which has only 4 lots on it and loads pretty quickly. The drawback is that there is no scenery at all for outdoor pics and it does look very bland. It's just a flat green grass area with a road on it, that's it. It takes just under 5 minutes to load the game and the save (I actually timed it). My game runs on a PCIE4 M.2 SSD, I bet this definitely helps with the loading times! I also have a good chunk of CC as merged packages. I also use the HQ mod for my screenshots, and because of it, my game is lagging very badly, especially when applying CASt patterns to objects (which makes actually decorating/making the previews for my patterns a game of patience). I do have the smooth patch, but I think my game has a lot of optimization potential still.

stead of having 3x the amount of CC installed in one game.

I know from some gameplay simmers that they often get rid of store stuff they do not use and disable some EP's and SP's they rarely use (like ITF and Island Paradise, which are known to be especially laggy). I'm sure you know this, but in case people read this who are new to TS3, the AnyGameStarter tool at MTS has this functionality and can create profiles so you can have several "separate" games with different mods and CC. Gameplay simmers tend to pay attention to how CC performs in-game/they look at polycounts beforehand, and also reduce their amount of mods. They also tend to play in worlds that have optimized routing. Also, merging CC is a must. It might also be a good idea to make 2 or 3 different profiles with AnyGameStarter and play with different CC in all of them and if you get bored, you can switch over to another profile and play a different save with different CC. My game is definitely overdue for a refresh, and I plan on using the Sims 3 Performance Guide on Steam to get it into a more playable state. It is one of the best performance guides I have come across, so maybe it will help your game too?

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WENT INTO A STARDEW FUGUE STATE LADS ITS FOUR THIRTY AM MY SLEEP SCHEDULE IS FUCKED GOOD NIGHT

Zagreus

not as a boss fight ❌

not as a boon giver ❌

not as a companion summon ❌

but as Mel's incredibly proud narrator exaggerating all his little sister's accomplishments as she fails over and over again ✔

case study of the self-identified god

joker & the animal parade (or: my main p5r party)

i hope they rerun childe every single patch in snezhnaya, in both halves. second character banner permanently becomes farewell of snezhnaya. they revamp his kit everytime the banner refreshes. you get delusion childe, abyss creature childe, primordial sea thing version childe, foul legacy childe. there's childe in a knight outfit weilding a longsword, childe in official fatui regalia using a polearm, childe in an agent uniform with a catalyst and a set of daggers. little ajax with a wooden sword and no vision, with barely any dmg but he is literally incapable of dying. 1 hp forever. use him for three months and the next time he dies, the party automatically replaces him with foul legacy version. at the end of the third patch you have to pull at least one of his official weapons or you're locked out of progressing the story. you can't talk to npcs or open chests if you don't do it as childe.

Neil as a team captain is positively delightful, because making him captain is both absolutely insane and absolutely brilliant. It capitalizes on the passive effect of having one (1) Neil Josten (god knows the world couldn’t handle if there were more of him) on the team in the most efficient way. Like. I’m 90% sure that after spending some time around him on the same team, most people will look up to him completely awestruck for how much he has impacted their lives, but that’s just not what is actually happening here. I feel like what’s going on is this:

Neil is a terribly amazing choice for team captain entirely because Neil is a meddlesome little asshole who will forcibly fix all of his teammates’ personal problems and improve their entire lives for literally no other reason than that he needs them to be able to focus on fucking ball so he can win at sports. It’s not even that he genuinely cares about people and their well-being (apart from his original foxes). He just gets pissed when things aren’t working properly because it makes Exy annoying when the lineup can’t communicate. Exy isn’t supposed to be annoying. Exy is life. He’d meddle whether he is captain or not, but by making him captain, he has so much more official executive power at his hands. It’s like people are explicitly asking for him to do his worst. So, fueled by his own competitiveness and love for the sport, off he goes.

Neil is just as bad as Kevin when it comes to his Exy obsession. The major difference between them is that Kevin is endlessly tactical and he runs Exy with a focus on a technical and physical level entirely, whereas Neil’s approach is to look beyond a lack of practice and basically psychoanalyzing people on why they are not doing 110% for Exy. Kevin says “let’s run this drill 500 times, then we will inevitably be better”. Meanwhile Neil is scheming how to coerce and bribe people into life-changing decisions and long-needed healing, entirely because he wants to optimize playing a sport. Exy is a team sport, which is why this is the most logical approach his little Exy brain comes up with rather than minding his own fucking business. He looks at the team and is like “is anyone gonna whip this into shape? No?? I’ll fucking do it then cowards” and goes and does exactly that. It’s like he’s fixing the equipment so he can play.

I don’t think anyone except for Andrew is really aware that Neil really isn’t doing this out of the innate goodness of his heart, but because his personal brand of practicality involves the most convoluted and creative kind of scheming. I feel like Neil is a lot more selfish than people give him credit for. Sure, there’s people he cares deeply and unconditionally for, but that’s really not everyone. It’s fascinating to watch, especially because it’s not like he ever hides that he doesn’t particularly care, but people kinda assume he does, because why else would he put in this much effort?

Exy. The answer is Exy.

Tell me you don't play indie games without telling me you don't play indie games.

It's honestly so scary how much peters story is kind of paralleling his otto's story in the first game with the descent into rage, violence and possibly evil due to an obsession over a goal coupled with a really unfortunate personality altering external force that they still want to keep because of the power and assurance it gives them.. and then also their mentees will have to fight them because there's no way miles isn't going to have to battle peter with his electric powers at some point and it's gonna be such an INSANE parallel I will start crying and afterwards what's gonna happen how's peter gonna deal with that huh. If he realises the parallel and what he just did do you get it do y-

guys don’t worry

i have it on good sources that dnp haven’t uploaded in a while because dan has to skim frame by frame to make sure he doesn’t show hole in their month-late easter baking video!

mayhap you've yet to realize this, but you have me wrapped around your little finger. the question is, what do you intend to do about it ?

WILHELMINA & THE ARISEN in DRAGON'S DOGMA II.