Outfit Change Delay: Completely Unplayable

[obeyelisia]

My sims and all townies are encountering a delay when it comes to changing clothing. This can be related to showering, going to work, using athletic equipment, etc.

When it was only happening to my sim I didn't care. I would simply pause the game for 30 seconds and then my sim would change clothing. 

Unfortunately, on lots where other sims are present, (i.e. the gym) this only works half the time. Some sims will change clothes after 30 seconds of waiting, and other will continue standing there mindlessly. This also caused issues with gigs, as the sims performing would never get changed. 

Dorms are a nightmare. Roommates would stand in front of their beds for hours and not go to sleep.

This is making the game completely unplayable. Because sims are getting stuck changing clothes, sometimes I can't perform certain interactions with them, and have to reset them via console. I have tested this in various neighborhoods and it still remains a problem. I also have NRAAS mods, such as Mastercontroller, Overwatch, ErrorTrap, etc.

I do have a small amount of clothing CC, which was been cleaned, compressed and merged.

With CC removed, I am still experiencing the delay with changing outfits.

I have all expansions and stuff packs, minus Movie Stuff. I am suspecting that the issue is that there are too many outfits in CAS from all expansions+stuff packs. Should I uninstall some expansions and stuff packs? (I really don't want to lol) I wish there was some way to remove unwanted clothing from the game.

I have been playing the sims 3 for years and am familiar with troubleshooting problems. I have cleared the .cache files in the Sims 3 folder.

PC specs:

Windows 10

GTX 1080ti

i7 7700k

16GB RAM

3TB HD

256GB SSD

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 

[puzzlezaddict]

@obeyelisia  There's no reason you should have to uninstall any packs, or play on less than the highest graphics settings.  The exception is high-detail lots, which is stressful enough on the game engine to cause problems.  (I keep this on 2, but 3 is also fine.)  Please check though how much free storage you have on both hard drives.

I take it you're not getting any unusual scripterrors from ErrorTrap or any other mod?  If so, you can take them to nraas.net and ask that they be interpreted.  If you can't drag and drop them directly into a post, zip them up and link them.

Otherwise, try doing a MasterController reset of the town.  Click on City Hall and select NRaas > MC > Town Options > Reset Everything.  (If you don't want your own sims reset, you can prevent it in settings: City Hall > NRaas > MC > Settings> Include active lot in reset everything > false.)  This might take a few minutes to run, depending on how many objects need to get reset.  Don't be surprised if it's in the range of 20,000 or so.

DebugEnabler also has an option to fix invisible sims, which really fixes broken outfit assignments.  If you don't have it already, there's no harm in adding it—the mod doesn't do anything unless you run a command.  I can't find the exact path right now (and I'm not in-game to check), but you should be able to run it from City Hall or an in-game computer.

If these steps don't help, try removing all of your cc, clearing your cache files, reloading, and running the commands again.  If you don't like the results, you don't have to save, but it's at the very least a useful test.  And if it doesn't work, that's good to know too.

A couple of final things:  How many sims are currently in your active household, which world(s) are you playing in, and how much RAM does the save use, both when it first loads and after you've played for a while?  (Half an hour should do it.)  I used to have this problem all the time in overstuffed households, although I was playing in macOS with its 2 GB RAM limit, so I'm not entirely sure what the cause was.

By the way, the cheat console reset doesn't do anything except clear a sim's action queue and send them home.  It won't fix any corruption of a sim or outfit.

There are ways to blacklist individual articles of clothing, or the CAS items from entire packs.  That's a bit above my skill level though, and also not really the purview of this site.  (You know, EA doesn't endorse the use of mods, add them at your own risk, etc.)  But you can ask at NRaas; I'm sure someone will have suggestions.

https://www.nraas.net/community/chatterbox

[obeyelisia]

@puzzlezaddict  Thank you for the response!

LOL I have almost everything set to the highest, I'll try turning down high-detail lots.

SSD: 151 GB free

HD: 2.23 TB free

Any errors that pop up usually are with animals/sims getting stuck, and notifications that cars have been removed. 

I'm not getting any unusual errors. 

This happens on brand new saves with only one sim in the family. I can't have long play sessions because I get so frustrated. I have tested in a small, unpopulated custom world, and still had to pause the game for my one sim to get changed. (Although the game did start spawning tourists and stuff)

The issue has been the worst when I go to lots with large amounts of sims, like in the worlds for University Life or Showtimes. Oddly, I didn't experience too much trouble in Bridgeport.

I also save frequently in new saves, and then delete the old ones. 

I will test out what you have suggested. I'll keep task manager open so I can watch the memory usage.

Fingers crossed.

[obeyelisia]

@puzzlezaddict 

Unfortunately the problem still remains. 

Memory usage is at around 1730 MB when I just start playing and 2200 MB after 45 minutes. (in University world)

Starts off about the same and then goes up to 1920 MB in Showtimes world. 

Removing CC and deleting .cache files didn't make a difference. I did notice that the problem was less severe (some sims in my dorm could change clothing without me pausing, but most outfit changes still required me to pause and wait).

I noticed in Bridgeport there are less objects (11,000) to be reset with MC than in the University Life world (13,000), and the problem was more prevalent at the university.

Now it is slightly more playable, but I still have to pause the game maybe for 5 minutes for other sims on the lot and around 10-30 seconds for my controlled sim. 

Happily there are some improvements, but pausing the game every couple minutes for random sims is kind of annoying. 

[puzzlezaddict]

@obeyelisia  Yeah, that's still far from ideal, even if better than before.  Just to be completely thorough, and to set a baseline of sorts, try testing with a new save in a completely clean game folder.  Drag your existing one out of Documents\EA and onto your desktop, start a fresh save, and send your sim to the pool or gym or something.  When you have an idea of how things are working, you can add your NRaas mods into the new game folder and test again.

I suggest this because there are a lot of files in a game folder that can become corrupt, more if you use cc, and it's a pain to try to sort through all of them if clearing the caches alone doesn't help.  (For example, custom worlds cache data differently than EA ones.)  But if the outfit changing is still slow, then I don't really know what else to suggest.  Someone at NRaas might though.  Aside from mod support, there are people on the site that know TS3 very well and have been managing the game on all kinds of systems for years.  If there is a good solution, someone there has probably heard of it.