Question for more experienced Sims modmakers/developers:

Is there any actual practical advantage to packaging object files into a FAR archive, or was this done solely as a control/distribution practice by Maxis for the original game?

Supposedly it is good practice for people who are at or close to the limit for how much CC the game can handle. I'm not there (yet...lol) so have no personal experience with it, but it's supposed to lead to faster loading screens.

Thanks, that is what I have been wondering. I'm not sure if the game is counting the IFF files (object files), or if animations and other files also count into that absolute limit -- in which case FAR archives would cut down the amount of files needed to load.

Not sure if it makes sense that the loading time would be faster with the FAR archives, since the game needs to unpack them real-time before it can use them, right? But maybe because there are less number of files, the loading time is faster? 🤔

There is a VERY in depth discussion of it at the SimEnhancer site http://simenhancer.com/Guides/CauseAndEffect.aspx but it actually looks like the beneficial effect may have been diminished or negated after the Unleashed expansion due to some technical changes. I am very much not an under-the-hood understander of the game so I can't comment further.

Thank you so much, @EphemeralToast! 🤗 This is perfect!

It looks like there is a benefit to using FAR files pre-Unleashed because of the file locking system that the game used, where it needs to go through all the files and lock them during the loading process. It also seems like the game can read FAR archives without unpacking them -- which, together with having less files to lock on load, explains the performance benefit.

But this performance benefit is generally negligible these days. Unless you are dealing with thousands of mods in your game, it's not going to make a big difference at all -- maybe half a second. 😆

Computers got a lot faster since. 🤭 What used to be minutes is now seconds.

But if we want to do the proper thing, then yeah, object mods should still be archived in a FAR archive before being distributed. ✅

And if you have a lot of object mods, it helps to bundle them together in one or a few FAR archives for your own game, as Maxis did with the expansions -- and putting that/those archive(s) in the GameData/UserObjects folder. It'll improve game loading/performance, and make it lighter on your hard drive and computer to load the game.

‼️I found a big catch with FAR archives! They should be approached with caution, as packaging the wrong files into a FAR archive can actually crash your game:

Source: http://w.simania.nl/simania/ssp/simahck5.htm

The benefit to using FAR file just easy for user manage their downloads, I FARed all the Maxis download folders into one far file, intead of showing 70 folders which user normally won't touch them, now only download files shown in my download folder


Just an additional note, normally cmx without related skn file will crash your game, but the cmx can actually read skn files which packed inside far file in all ExpansionPack folders (not sure about deluxe and download folder, I haven't try it before), so when you want to convert some NPC skins for own use, you need only to extract and rename the BMP files, then create a cmx file unless that mesh got only bmf instead of skn file.

I'm using FARx, it can work like IFF Pencil 2 by just double click the file to open it, but found nowhere to download this program, and don't know who created it, since I didn't keep the original zip file and mess up with my other sims programs in one folder, no idea it got readme.txt or not? will plan to upload into my site if no one upload it before.

This is such a great idea! ❤️ Having the Downloads folder empty/free to contain only your latest downloaded objects helps to keep this well organised, and clear to manage. Love it!