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Forum Resident
Original Poster
#1 Old 10th Aug 2020 at 8:15 AM
Default The speed of loading CAST patterns is tied to the system clock.
Just for fun, I tried speedhacking the game. It lets the game think the system clock is going way faster than it's supposed to.

Here's what it looks like on normal speed.

And on a ridiculous 500x multiplier, loading CAST patterns became a lot more bearable.


If the game really was using all of its CPU power, then there should be no difference. It wasn't the first time entering CAST when I recorded both gifs, too.
Am I an idiot and this is commonly known, or does nobody really know about this?
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Inventor
#2 Old 10th Aug 2020 at 8:56 AM Last edited by Naus Allien : 10th Aug 2020 at 9:35 AM.
The way CASt loads patterns is really weird. It's almost like it has to dynamically generate the thumbnails everytime it loads. I don't understand how it can be tied to your system's clock speed. That doesn't make any sense to me. But I can tell by your GIF it's not the only thing affected by the change in speed.

On my new PC (Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM clocked at 3200 Mhz, GTX 1060 6GB GPU, Samsung Evo SSD), I can USE the patterns INSTANTLY, way before the game actually loads the thumbnails for them. It has definitely improved my experience using Create-A-Style tenfold. I'm still using the same GPU and SSD, I was using two months ago, but my new CPU and way faster RAM seem to finally do the trick and allow me to use Create-A-Style the way I always wanted, even if the game still takes a while to load the thumbnails. It has also practically eliminated the lag I used to experience dragging the design from one object to another.



EDIT: And this is how fast it works on objects. I'm quite shook it runs so well. I was not expecting that. The fact I can change the pattern of an object instantly before all the thumbnails load is great. And there's practically no lag when dragging the design from one object to another. That has always been such a massive issue.



EDIT 2: Okay, one more time. This time I try to use it as fast as possible to test its responsiveness. Good Lord, I never thought the Create-A-Style tool would run like this. I cannot believe it.
Mad Poster
#3 Old 10th Aug 2020 at 12:44 PM
Interesting... if such a value exists in the game engine, I wonder if it’s utilized as some sort of throttle, maybe as a expectation that TS3 would have overpowered the computers of the day it was running on?
Top Secret Researcher
#4 Old 10th Aug 2020 at 3:15 PM
Naus Allien - your video's make me jealous. I could never use CaS that quickly. It doesn't look like you have any custom or saved patterns. Wonder if that makes any difference in performance?
Inventor
#6 Old 10th Aug 2020 at 9:54 PM
Quote: Originally posted by KatyFernlily
Naus Allien - your video's make me jealous. I could never use CaS that quickly. It doesn't look like you have any custom or saved patterns. Wonder if that makes any difference in performance?


I just tested with every pattern by Simlicious (610 in total) and it didn't affect performance at all. It took longer for the game to load the thumbnails of a given category, but I could still use it immediately without having to wait for the thumbnails to load. I wouldn't play with that many patterns any way, but it's good to know I can add a good amount of patterns without affecting perormance.
Mad Poster
#7 Old 11th Aug 2020 at 2:01 AM
I just explained this problem to some non-Sims players and they were like "how can they be this bad at programming holy shit" so I think we've found a real specimen of EA's craftsmanship here.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Mad Poster
#8 Old 11th Aug 2020 at 3:48 AM
I have not played in a while and need to check this, but as I recall, my patterns have always loaded well, but when I have custom CC in CAS that is when they can load slow as molasses.
Mad Poster
#10 Old 11th Aug 2020 at 8:10 AM
I just looked. On this laptop C is miniscule so the game is in D which is HDD. CC is in Docs on C which is SSD. Do not remember now but that was the only way to set it up and get it to run when I installed on this thing. The tiny C is a major PITA IMO. I now have to use an external drive just to install a Windows update.
Mad Poster
#11 Old 14th Aug 2020 at 3:07 PM
Proofs once again TS3 elements can work just fine if you pick the right computer to play it on. I'll use Naul's videos for posting reference.

P.S. Sorry for my bad english.
Lab Assistant
#13 Old 15th Aug 2020 at 12:08 AM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
I'm still waiting for someone with 64GB RAM that would put the whole game on a ramdisk and see how that performs.


Damn it...literally, this is the only time I have ever regretted having a fallout with my dad. You couldn't pay me to play kiss up just so I can get the chance to steal his ram sticks or his entire desktop, though.

Oh c'mon. There better be a point to all this stress I'm under.
Mad Poster
#15 Old 16th Aug 2020 at 8:40 AM
I just played a little while for the first time in ages and my game loads the patterns fast enough that there is no problem for me. In all fairness though, I do have just a few CC ones in the game now. This is on my laptop. And I just recolored a few things and had no lag in CASt thank goodness.
Scholar
#16 Old 17th Aug 2020 at 2:45 AM
For me the CASt patterns load fast in CAS. I agree that having a SSD makes a lot of difference here.
But when using the CASt pattern tool in build mode, it can become very slow at times. It always starts out fast but at some point (I still don't know what triggers this), it just starts to lag to an unworkable slowdown when moving the pattern tool around. This stays the same until i switch back to live and then back to build mode.
Inventor
#18 Old 12th Sep 2020 at 8:18 PM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
Well, being very impressed by Naus' videos, I finally got a mSATA and put TS3 on it.... and.... nothing changed, no improvement.

Why?

I forgot I'm using eBoostr, which loads all the thumbnails and essentials of TS3 directly into RAM, so I already have most of the commonly used game files on RAM. My cast/cas pattern load is close to his video, but still, there's always a pause/lag when switching from different types. What I'm most disappointed is I cannot drag the pattern from cas on to a furniture seamlessly like in his video, there'll always be a slight delay before the furniture takes the patterns. It's small, but it is noticeable.

I think at this point, my 8 yr old i7 is just outdated, the ssd/hdd is no longer the slowing factor, but the CPU is. I'm quite surprised b/c I thought the cpu is still good for this era.


Yes, at that point the CPU is bottlenecking performance. Think of the way Create-A-Style works. The game has to dynamically generate the textures of our objects reading a bunch of data from an XML-type file:

For example:


So the game has to read all that information and piece everything together on the fly: patterns, colors, tiling, rotation, stencils, the location of multiplier, specular and RGB masks, and the data for every patterns. It takes a lot of computational power to process so much data, composite the texture, load it into VRAM and store them in the cache files (not sure which of these two does first). So no matter how fast the game can read all the necessary files, it still needs to piece everything together and create the texture. I'm still using the same SSD I was using in July, but it's my CPU what's making a difference now, which proves CPU performance is also really important when it comes to CASt.

PS: I find it RAM disks pointless if you have an SSD.
Scholar
#20 Old 16th Sep 2020 at 3:53 PM
Blah, blah inside



favorite quote: "When ElaineNualla is posting..I always read..Nutella. I am sorry" by Rosebine
self-claimed "lower-spec simmer"
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