Sims 2 Slower Catalog
#1 17-01-2017 
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Ever since updating to Windows 10 (I had Windows 7 before as well as 8.1, both ran absolutely flawless) Sims 2s catalog has been behaving slower than before. Every category I open a load time appears the loading icon spins for a few secs, same happens with opening the subcategories and flipping to another page or enlarging the page. I thought this was because I had CC at first so I found this site's help about this problem. I did everything from enabling my graphics card, removing all cc and mods, enabling compatibility mode, completely removing securom and allowing Sims 2 to use beyond 2gb of ram. Neither of these were meant with an improvement with the catalog or when switching between sims which sometimes is fine but sometimes also met with a load time of few secs. Neighborhoods however (main page too) have begun loading considerably faster and without issues, same with loading a household. I know Windows 10 is the absolute worst for the older games (Fallout fan here too) but I was wondering could there something I have missed or didn't try that could boost the catalog load.

Attached File(s)
.txt  PUNCHYY-config-log.txt (Size: 10.26 KB / Downloads: 419)

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#2 17-01-2017 
@PanAm117

You've done all the standard things that would normally improve things. So lets work through this together, and maybe we can find something else. I've been helping someone else on another forum and we ended up finding a place where things had gotten bloated, and when we fixed that, it fixed her game. So my suspicion is that if we work through a similiar process we may be able to find the problem.

1. First up - can you do me a dxdiag - I need to know what your 'Total Memory Display' is.

2. You haven't mentioned whether you have UC or the DVDs. That does make a difference. Can you let me know?

3. In your game that has the CC and Mods, can you do a screenshot of your thumbnails folder and attach it to the post?

4. Can you let me know how much CC and Mods you have.

5. Are you using Full Screen mode or Windowed Mode. Swapping window sizes in windowed mode does take time and has the wait, so we won't include that in our worries.

6. When you removed securom, did you change to a noCD hack?

These are the first places I think we can look at.

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#3 18-01-2017 
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(17-01-2017 11:57 PM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  @PanAm117

You've done all the standard things that would normally improve things. So lets work through this together, and maybe we can find something else. I've been helping someone else on another forum and we ended up finding a place where things had gotten bloated, and when we fixed that, it fixed her game. So my suspicion is that if we work through a similiar process we may be able to find the problem.

1. First up - can you do me a dxdiag - I need to know what your 'Total Memory Display' is.

2. You haven't mentioned whether you have UC or the DVDs. That does make a difference. Can you let me know?

3. In your game that has the CC and Mods, can you do a screenshot of your thumbnails folder and attach it to the post?

4. Can you let me know how much CC and Mods you have.

5. Are you using Full Screen mode or Windowed Mode. Swapping window sizes in windowed mode does take time and has the wait, so we won't include that in our worries.

6. When you removed securom, did you change to a noCD hack?

These are the first places I think we can look at.

1. Here is the dxdiag, I added the file to the post.

2. I have Ultimate Collection, got it from EA when it first launched.

3. Added.

4. I have 1.09 GB of downloads currently, but even without them the game still runs the same. I added my mods folder screen just in case it could be one of those that mess with it.

5. Full Screen.

6. Yes I followed the procedure on this forum and after removing it completely with the license I applied the M&G nocd hack.

Attached File(s) Thumbnail(s)
       

.txt  DxDiag.txt (Size: 66.7 KB / Downloads: 490)

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#4 18-01-2017 
@PanAm117

Fabulous! There is nothing in your mods that would be causing lag. Your dxDiag lets me know that you need to increase your texture memory, and the thumbnails folder lets me know that your thumbnails have bloated.

OK - a couple of things to do -

1. Go to your Graphic Rules.sgr and find the lines that says

# Kiri - manually setting texture memory
seti textureMemory 1744

and change 1744 to 3828

This is your actual texture memory (1744 was the texture memory on my old graphics card).

That will give you some more room to load textures. 3828 is your display memory - you can find it in your dxdiag.txt on the line under the Display Devices heading that says
Display Memory: 3828 MB

2. Regenerate the files in your thumbnails folder.
If you have a look, your thumbnails are 125Mb for CAS and 120Mb for Design Mode. This is a texture bloat. There's a very good chance that the thumbnails packages have some corruption. (So for example, I have a friend with 6Gig in their game, and a design mode thumbnail package of 53Mb.

So to regenerate the thumbnails - delete all the files in thumbnails folder. Then go into the game, and forward through all the catalogs in buy and build mode. The first time you do this it will be regenerating thumbnails, so it will be slow. If you see any with a blue flashing, do an extra regenerate on that thumbnail by Ctrl+RightClick on the thumbnail (or Alt+RightClick, I don't remember whiich).

After you've done that, going through the catalog should occur without extra lag.

have a look at the thumbnails folder again, and have a look at the size of your CAS and Design Mode thumbnails. All being well, they should be much less.

Let me know how you go.

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#5 19-01-2017 
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(18-01-2017 03:29 PM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  @PanAm117

Fabulous! There is nothing in your mods that would be causing lag. Your dxDiag lets me know that you need to increase your texture memory, and the thumbnails folder lets me know that your thumbnails have bloated.

OK - a couple of things to do -

1. Go to your Graphic Rules.sgr and find the lines that says

# Kiri - manually setting texture memory
seti textureMemory 1744

and change 1744 to 3828

This is your actual texture memory (1744 was the texture memory on my old graphics card).

That will give you some more room to load textures. 3828 is your display memory - you can find it in your dxdiag.txt on the line under the Display Devices heading that says
Display Memory: 3828 MB

2. Regenerate the files in your thumbnails folder.
If you have a look, your thumbnails are 125Mb for CAS and 120Mb for Design Mode. This is a texture bloat. There's a very good chance that the thumbnails packages have some corruption. (So for example, I have a friend with 6Gig in their game, and a design mode thumbnail package of 53Mb.

So to regenerate the thumbnails - delete all the files in thumbnails folder. Then go into the game, and forward through all the catalogs in buy and build mode. The first time you do this it will be regenerating thumbnails, so it will be slow. If you see any with a blue flashing, do an extra regenerate on that thumbnail by Ctrl+RightClick on the thumbnail (or Alt+RightClick, I don't remember whiich).

After you've done that, going through the catalog should occur without extra lag.

have a look at the thumbnails folder again, and have a look at the size of your CAS and Design Mode thumbnails. All being well, they should be much less.

Let me know how you go.

1. I've done it and now it shows correctly as 3828 in the logs too.

2. The game generated new thumbnails, and I went trough the folders but the problem continued. If I have loaded everything in kitchen category the category works as normal Sims 2 should, no problem but going to for example bath category and loading all that will once again need to load kitchen category when going back to it. I have also noticed that after 4 pages of content and if I'm on the 5th page in all in one section the game will load the 1st page but the 2nd, 3rd and 4th will be normal. The thumbnails are much less now and the game does load faster than it did but still no improvements on the build/buy section. Sad

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#6 20-01-2017 
@PanAm117

I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying there regarding your catalogs.

When you went through the catalog, was that the first time after deleting the thumbnails, or afterwards?

Do I have this right? the catalog loads slowly for the first page, but pages 2,3,4 load normal speed?

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#7 20-01-2017 
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(20-01-2017 08:11 AM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  @PanAm117

I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying there regarding your catalogs.

When you went through the catalog, was that the first time after deleting the thumbnails, or afterwards?

Do I have this right? the catalog loads slowly for the first page, but pages 2,3,4 load normal speed?


First time after deleting the thumbnails. No, it's very odd the way it does it. It loads all 4 pages with delay, all those 4 pages after loading work normally without any delay and works just like it should, but when loading page 5, the game loads pages 2,3,4 and now 5 normal speed with no delay but will have to start loading the thumbnails in page 1 again. It's like the game keeps regenerating thumbnails. Same thing happens when switching to different category even if I have already loaded it, the game once again needs to regenerate all the thumbnails. It's awfully confusing to explain I know :/

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#8 15-02-2017 
@PanAm117

Sorry I haven't gotten back to you - I've been distracted and it dropped off my radar.

What should happen is that when the thumbnails are deleted, when you go back into your game and into the buy catalog, there is a delay as the thumbnails are re-generated.
That includes when you go into recolours for an object.

If you don't go through all your catalog, it will only regenerate the thumbnails that you see.

It does sound like it's constantly regenerating your thumbnails. I'm not sure why though.

Can you package up your thumbnail folder, and send it to me at celebkiriedhel at yahoo dot com. I want to see what's in the thumbnail folder that could be causing this, or whether it's a program issue.

If it's a program issue there's not a lot I can do to fix it unfortunately.

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#9 17-06-2017 
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Sorry I haven't been able to reply earlier due to certain laptop problems and school needs but I have finally worked it out. I recently performed a fresh install of Windows 10 so Sims 2 UC was pretty fresh too but still including my old families and cc so I decided to redo all the steps to make it work better with Win10 and generally... and it worked! In game catalog is as fast as it should be without any delay plus the game runs so much smoother than it did before. Thank you all for your help Heart

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