Remove Tutorial and Beta Images - To attempt to reduce RAM load (v1.3 update)

I noticed during various testing of system graphics options that gameplay and framerate slowdowns were somewhat proportional to how much RAM that Windows Control Panel showed that the game was using. In detailed worlds the game can hit 2.9 GB RAM use, at which point the game begins struggling more than usual with Error 12, astoundingly long loading/saving times, or simply crashing to desktop.

So I began pondering, how would it be possible to try to reduce the heavy taxing on the RAM allocations? I landed on trying to remove images (by creating 1x1px transparent images to override them) that would be unnecessary for core gameplay by expert Sims 3 players, mostly across 2 categories:

• Images used in the "Tutorials" menu, as they accounted for around 100 MB in total.
• Beta build images and placeholder images for vanilla Sims 3 that were still present in the release version's "FullBuild0" assets. Accounts for around 25 MB.
• (v1.3 onwards) Entirely empty shader DDS files, which accounted for somewhere in excess of 400 MB.

So in theory this would reduce the RAM load by approximately 0.55 GB, whether it'd be to reduce the load outright, or so the game could use the safe-ish 2.8 GB it can use on other aspects of the game.

Will it have any effect on game performance at all? Probably not.

Is it worth trying? Probably.

I tried to pick images based on ones that I felt would be very unlikely to conflict with any other gamemods, though 100.0% guarantee on that is of course hard to give. The total tally ended up on 1,015 emptied images.

The gamemod was worked on for more than 1½ years, as I had to figure out exactly which images to handle and in which ways.

Tested with Patch 67 (along with NVIDIA Control Panel set to "Image Scaling: 100%", and a DX9-to-Vulkan .ini), almost certainly also works with Patch 69. Hard to tell if it would be needed for Patch 70. The gamemod should in theory be able to retroactively function with earlier patches, but anything before approximately Patch 36 would likely end up with strange results.

As of v1.1 of the main file, the full known list of affected image files can be found in a GitHub text file (External link).

————————————————————

Updates:
• 29 March 2026: v1.3 update for the main file. This is a big one. A lot of DDS (_IMG) files turned out to be intended by the game devs to be used as shading, but the files were completely empty. As DDS is also a raw format, they took up sometimes several MB each (Biggest was 5 MB). So I've covered some hundred such empty files, for an increased saving of more than 400 MB.
• 18 February 2026: v1.2 update for the main file. Now also covers a handful of DDS files (including splashes that seemed to be for a cancelled PRC release) and various alpha CAS menus, and saves another 6 MB-ish.
• 15 April 2025: Added an additional add-on package for players who never use interactive loading screens, or who don't mind near-empty loading screens (They still have blue-on-white text, and a few have loading bars). Affects 445 images that measure well over 300 MB combined, though few of them are likely to be loaded during a single play session that'd add to the RAM.
• 29 March 2025: v1.1 update for the main file. Affects an additional 466 images, of which all but 1 are emptied. I honestly lost count of the total filesize of those 466, but I think it's 15 MB, give or take. The 3-row table when starting a new savefile now shows up correctly.
• 9 March 2025: Added an additional add-on package for players who don't use online functions, which accounts for 14.5 MB. Should be used together with the main gamemod package.

Notes:
• I've considered running OptiPNG on other large-size images to see if there were filesize saving potentials for that too, but there generally wasn't: Testing on several occasions with an image batch of approximately 51.2 MB, running OptiPNG on the whole batch only saved around 1.8 MB.
• In certain cases, the game can throw Error 12 even with RAM use as low as 1.6 GB, as I noticed when testing on my 15-years-in-real-time long Sunset Valley savefile. It's apparently possible for gravestones to become corrupted, making them cause noticeable lag and to be unable to be moved or deleted in most ways without throwing the error or crashing to desktop on the spot. It is possible for players to find and delete such gravestones, but it can take more than 10 hours of playtime and cannot even remotely be handled by this gamemod.
• While in theory the mod can be used to overwrite the original image files in the installation folders' "DeltaBuild0.package" and "FullBuild0.package" files to free up hard disk space, it is not something I'd recommend, and only the very bravest daredevils with nothing to lose would be able to consider it.