EDIT:


Modding frequently requires closing and opening the game to test the changes you have made. Therefore, the amount of time it takes to start up the game has a massive effect on how long modding takes.

For Sims 2, I can find a lot tutorials about the game being slow to start up deal with Loading Screens and the effect of Custom Content. But for me, I find that specifically the time from when I double click the icon to launch the game and the game window actually appearing is upwards of a minute and 30 seconds every time. This is slower than many games from around the same time or older in my collection.
As far as I know, the game doesn't load the custom content until the loading screen with the title, and I only have a single mod, namely the one I'm working on at the time, downloaded. I also experience similar load times for Life Stories and Pet Stories which are much smaller games both in terms of the objects.package file and the .exe files.

I am curious if anybody knows the particulars of what is going on here. What is the program doing in the time between when you launch it in your OS and the Game Window is shown? Why does it take the amount of time it takes? How does the launch time compare to when the game originally came out on computers at the time? And why does it seemingly reliably launch 20 seconds faster with lazyduchess' RPC launcher than without it?

Of course, if there are actually ways to make it launch even faster, I would also love to hear them. But I would be satisfied to just know more about this, or knowing how someone would investigate further.

A minute and a half? And you think that's slow? I've seen people have loading times so long that they start the game and have time to do chores before it's ready. XD

My game takes at least 15 mins to load. Maybe 5 without CC.

I wish my game only took a minute and a half to load!

That sounds intolerable!

Are you sure you are talking about the startup and not the loading screen? I am talking about the time before the intro movie. I have heard that the loading screen with the logo can take a fair while with CC.

Assuming you are talking about the launch and not loading neighborhood selection, this only makes me even more confused. Unless we have vastly different specs, why does it take almost 4 times as long for you to start up the game without CC?

My Specs:
OS: Windows 10 Home
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with Radeon Graphics, 1801 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
Total Physical Memory: 15,4 GB



I can't imagine modding with a 5 minute latency between tests. What are your specs?

It seems like LazyDuchess hasn't posted in a while. I imagine she'd have good ideas on what affects launch time and why RCP makes it faster.

Ah, I meant loading from clicking on the Sims 2 icon to the neighbourhood selection screen coming up.

Mine is a bit slow in the upstart, too. Somewhere around that timeframe (as in, before the game window pops up on the screen - the actual loading from loading screen pops up to NH screen or done loading lot takes longer). Bodyshop is even slower, but I think it does a lot of the loading while it's not on screen.

Could depend on how much CC you've got, or other things. Loading time (and launch time) gets slower the more CC and other stuff the game has to locate.

The game is slow the first time, but does generally load faster during the same computer start cycle. It's possible the game would be faster if you keep the cache files, but if you're modding/editing files, you probably don't want those to create trouble.

If you use a lot of CC and that's the reason the game is slow (both pre-loading and actual loading), one option is to make an extra save folder folder with just what you need to test stuff, preferably also empty hoods apart from the one/s you're using for testing. You can switch between the folders by renaming them. Alternatively use Simnopke's method here: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=690254 or the "Anygame starter". This can significantly reduce the loading time

(I curently have a neighborhood with a lot of CC I'm setting up which probably will be around an hour of loading time judging from how things are going, while my testing game, which is slightly fuller than it should be because I'm also using it for some photoshoots right now, takes roughly 5-10 minutes to load - but it's roughly 5 minutes from clicking the button when I haven't stuffed it with all the extras).

Okay, I counted from pressing the button to when the loading screen first pops up and I got 1 minute, ten seconds.

That's the same time it takes for me when using the RPC Launcher. Do you use that too?

I can see LazyDuchess has a discord, I will ask there and maybe somebody can shine a light on the mechanics behind this

Do you have an SSD? If you have a hard disk, make sure it is defragmented.

A minute and a half?! I wish. I think my game with its 16 gigs of content take at least 20 minutes. In a folder without CC or very little, I have not checked, pretty quick.

^ We're talking the wait from clicking the game icon until the loading screen pops up, not the full game loading (clicking game icon --> wait for loading screen --> Loading screen --> welcome/NH screen).

If it took 20 minutes before your loading screen showed up, something would definitely be wrong somewhere

(My current wait until the loading screen/movie/etc. shows up is +/- 1 minute, but the full loading time until neighborhood screen is available varies with computer and how much CC I use. I've had anything from ~5 minutes to 3+ hours).

I keep Track.
Start Button, through 'movie' to Sims 2 (Apt. Life words) is always 4 min.
Start to Game screen Loading is either side of 15 Mi.
Opening Neighborhoods depends on Age and Size, 4 to 15 min.
Windows 10, HP PC, 20,000 cc downloads.

okay, fair enough.

I would say the loading screens pops up after a few seconds. Probably faster as I removed the music.

I have a PC from around 2007.

About 0:23 to the loading squares, 0:44 to the neighborhood and 1:38 to a small lot. This is from cold start without cache. FreeTime which is noticeably smaller than Mansion. I have many packages but few new graphics.

The modding process is indeed quite delayed by loading times. Would be neat if we could reload a package on the fly.

I think mine is about 1 minute but I have had a computer that took at least 10 minutes.

Don't complain-it could be worse. The amount of CC you have in the game can affect the load time as well as your drive size, processor and memory.

I just officially timed mine from loading screen to neighborhood : under a minute.

I have an SSD with a 1 T drive and 16 gigs memory.

That does make a huge difference in how fast my game loads.

No, I don't have the RPC Launcher.

Yeah that's why I tried to approach it from a curiosity standpoint, rather than a frustration standpoint. But I wish I had chosen a better title, a lot of people seem confused at first.

I have tested a bit more. I am no longer sure if the RPCLauncher actually has an effect. I also tried deleting all objects.package but the Mansion Garden one, and all Sounds folders. At first I thought it helped, but there's just too much variance. I also cannot tell if the game launches faster if it's the first thing I launch after restarting my PC or not.

Looking in the Task Manager details, in the time from launch 'til window appearance, the Sims2 process seems to load up something in the neighborhood of 160.000-200.000 K (I assume KB) in active memory, then it drops just before the window appears.

Only thing I can tell for sure is that the game launches twice as slow when my laptop is on battery mode.

The time taken to load completely is a popular joking complain, so that's probably why people (including me) misread it at first. I consider the time before the game screen shows up as just part of the overall loading time. Why is it specifically that part of loading that bothers you?

I really would not delete your objects.package. Messing with those is how you corrupt the game!

Thinking about it. Other games take about the same amount of time to preload for me. Minecraft will sit on its ass for a while. So will FFXIV. Bodyshop we won't mention lol.

Do you use the 4GB patch?

If you really want to know what is happening- then the game is reading all of the game installation files, and putting them into memory. Then it's reading all of your userdata (custom content and neighbourhoods) and putting that into memory. Some of that stuff overrides the stuff already in memory. If there is more stuff loaded into memory than your computer has free, then the computer will access scratch memory (your hard drives). If you have your Operating system on disc C, your game installed on disc F and your Documents folder on disc G then the computer will access all three of those locations to load the game (so the slowest of those will affect the load speed).

Your memory speed, hard drive caches, processor speed, graphics card size/ speed and the condition of your Operating system and hardware all affect this. As will your game cache sizes. Yes, if your computer is on a battery saving mode then this will make things slower. If you have problems waiting a minute and thirty seconds then I can recommend Ice pops, a cup of tea or a good book as ways to pass the time.

I don't know if this will help, but here goes:

The accessory and cache files can get huge. In order to keep them from reaching that stage, you can set them to 'read only' and also put in blank files that you can set to that before you load up the game. If they do reach those huge numbers, you just delete them and replace them with the blank files, with the 'read only' option checked off.

Here is the file for the blank "Groups.cache" file: https://www.mediafire.com/file/admh...yhda4/Groups.7z

In another thread, there is a tutorial on how to create your own blank cache files:
https://modthesims.info/t/586650

I compressorize the character files in the neighborhood and also the thumbnails in the game folder. In the thumbnail folders you can delete all but the object thumbnails because they also add to the load time. The object thumbnails are the largest, being the ones the game loads so they show up without having to refresh them for browsing-generally I leave those alone, not wanting to have to endure a long scroll through them to find things. (The thumbnails will be reloaded when you run the game. No harm at all deleting them.)

Also-run the Hoodchecker every single time after you run your game. While memories and other garbage don't slow down the game intrinsically, they can become burdensome when loading characters.

Do not delete the Objects files. They are critical to the game and it can corrupt them if you do it.

But it would definitely help to have a larger drive, more memory and a better processor and graphics card. I still do all of those steps even now because I believe in keeping my game as smoothly as possible. It was the only way I was able to keep it in the old computer running half the time!

I do have RPC but I don't believe it adds but a few seconds before the game loads.


That is most of the problem. I'm running a desktop and while many people swear laptops will do gaming just as well, desktops do have the added advantage of being able to run a game as complex as Sims 2 without battery or memory/size issues.

I'll look into this, thanks.


Hmm, surely it doesn't load every lot and sim in every neighborhood before you even enter a neighborhood?

In fact, let me do some checking here...
Okay, so I am getting (minutes:seconds):
Launch to window with black screen: 1:25
black screen to neighborhood selection: 0:37
creating or loading a blank or nearly blank neighborhood (no stealth hoods): 0:04
Entering a lot (No generating strays and apartment townies): 0:15

It makes sense that lots are the heaviest in game because of all the objects with all their attributes (even an empty lot has a hundred and something global objects loaded in from the beginning)

My first guess would have been that during launch and black screen, it loads the stuff in TSBin (binaries, dlls etc.)... maybe during black screen it would load stuff from TSData, because it needs to get the logo and intro vids and whatnot. For the actual visual loading screen I would have guessed the user data, downloads, maybe the rest of what it needs from TSData.

Now that I think about it, I could check which parts are loaded when by removing them and checking when the application crashes during startup


Well, when I have fully loaded into a lot with an active Sim, the Sims 2 is using about 375 MB of Memory. By comparison, Firefox is right now using 3.4 GB, so almost 10 times that of Sims 2. Task Manager is reporting that I am only using 48% of memory. So I find it hard to believe that I am running out of memory; Sims 2 seems to just load whatever it is loading really slowly, or, as I think(?) you are implying, it is doing a huuuge amount of redundant work.

But the redundant work doesn't really seem like the answer either because the Stories games are just as slow to start as the Ultimate Collection, and they don't have all those Expansion Pack directories to search through. And as I said, The Sims 2 games are the slowest in my collection to launch (well, that I've played recently. I would suspect Sims 3 is slower, but I don't have it installed. I should try that out, actually...


Because I thought if I just asked if the game can be made faster and the answer was "no" then it would be a short and useless thread. But if I asked why there are two separate parts of loading into the game, then maybe we can find out together what they are


Haha, this ain't my first rodeo. I have previously tested how many game files I could delete before the game would stop loading.
The game only has one objects.package loaded at a time, the one from the most recent EP. But I agree, it's obviously a "don't try this at home" kind of thing, and I can't use AnyGameStarter if I only have one objects.package in my game install.

Anyway, I haven't actually had any proper neighborhoods for years, so I am not worried about corruption. In this period of my life, what brings me joy is modding Sims 2. Which is why the long wait time bothers me so much; I already don't have much time to set aside my studies, so it really limits how much enjoyment I can get out of this.



Well for my case, Warcraft 3 (2002) takes 10 seconds to get to main menu the first time I run it after restarting, and 3 seconds the second time. Spore, also by Maxis, takes a whopping 7 seconds to launch the window, and 5 seconds until intro movies start. Something about Sims 2 seems poorly optimized. I have heard somewhere that Sims games had problems with multi-core computers, I'll see if that does anything.


The RPC Launcher applies the 4GB patch, so at least when using that I do.

Well, Sims 2 was released before multi-core processors were widely available (the early ones were marketed at server/ workstation use). And EA developed Sims 2 for the lowest performance computers, as that's what most of the target demographic were using.

Okay, so I tested on Sims Life Stories so I only had to delete from one folder instead of several expansions worth of folders.

You are able to get all the way to the neighborhood without crashing on a game that only has:
The game executable in TSBin
control0.dat and control1.dat in TSData/Control
Sys (If not present, the game crashes when the game window would appear, so did not check specific files)
Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr in TSData/Res/Config
ui.package and Fonts in TSData/Res/UI

Even in this state, the game takes a minute and a half to launch.

If we use Process Explorer from sysinternals, we can observe some things:

During launch there is little to no I/O, so the application is seemingly NOT loading files. Strangely, there are regular spikes when on the neighborhood selection, possibly from the video neighborhood thumbnails.
The CPU usage is very low, with 1.3% spikes when loading the neighborhood screen
Memory Usage climbs slowly during launch, then drops when the window is about to appear, goes back up during the loading screen and stays at the same level during.

On the GPU side, things are VERY strange.
The GPU Memory is very active during launch, as in before the game window and any graphics have even APPEARED.
The used memory seems to grow over about 35 seconds, then drop to zero and start growing again, and does so until the game window appears.
The Dedicated, System and Committed GPU memory grow up to approx. 260 MB, 3 GB and 3.5 GB respectively.
GPU usage itself is somewhat consistent, only Dedicated GPU memory is in use when on the Neighborhood selection screen.

So the game is doing... SOMETHING with the GPU during startup. A GPU is designed to do thousands of SIMPLE calculations at the same time, so if the game is running some sequential process through it, that is bound to take some time.

So multithreading does not seem to be the issue. Maybe Sims 2 is testing video cards every time it starts up? I have a strong suspicion that it could be starting much faster than it currently is.

Apart from stepping through the actual assembly, the next step could be to ask somebody code savvy like LD or Reddit (perish the thought) what they think this looks like.

That looks to me like you have something bottlenecking. We don't know anything about your hardware or your system setup- all of those things affect your game performance, if you're going to analyse things in such depth you need to be shutting down background tasks etc., etc., and also what setup works for one game will not be optimal for another.

I think you said this time was all before the intro movie so this won't help reduce that, but you can remove both the intro movie and the ealogo movies so they don't play to reduce overall load time.