Would all the undressable clothing items lag the game less if they where each put inside a .package file instead of just put into ordinary folders?

[Lordsyke]

Would that help the game engine start up and load between homes better at all? or not enough to be worth the difference?

[davisev5225]

I don't play the Sims games, but gut feeling tells me it won't help and might actually hurt.  .package files are just archives, meaning the engine has to unpack them into resident memory before it can do anything with them, so you're actually adding an extra step which requires extra CPU time.  The only reason developers like using archives is because they can compress the on-disk storage requirements to make the game install smaller.

[Lordsyke]

2 hours ago, davisev5225 said:

I don't play the Sims games, but gut feeling tells me it won't help and might actually hurt.  .package files are just archives, meaning the engine has to unpack them into resident memory before it can do anything with them, so you're actually adding an extra step which requires extra CPU time.  The only reason developers like using archives is because they can compress the on-disk storage requirements to make the game install smaller. Good word. But what if the undressable had 4 parts, and you could just name the files, 1, 2 ,3 ,4 and just have a simple script inside that package, maybe named 0, that just tells them to cycle through the objects. Wouldn't this simplfied process make the file smaller and more efficient?

 

[LittleRedSonja]

4 hours ago, Lordsyke said:

Would that help the game engine start up and load between homes better at all? or not enough to be worth the difference?

I am a bit confused. What undressables do you have that are not in a .package file? Every single piece of custom content for the sims 4 must be inside a .package file to be functional. If you have clothing that for some reason is not in a .package file it is not going to be functional. 

If your question is if it would work better if you merge all the versions of an undressable inside a single package file instead of having 2-3 packages one for every "version" then the answer is no. 

[Lordsyke]

Yes that was my question. So you're sure having multiple versions concentrated into one package wouldn't make any difference, Then again at that rate it sounds like maybe the answer would be to just use a folder with the clothing item name, and have each item in there named a number from 1 to 3

[LittleRedSonja]

2 hours ago, Lordsyke said:

Yes that was my question. So you're sure having multiple versions concentrated into one package wouldn't make any difference, Then again at that rate it sounds like maybe the answer would be to just use a folder with the clothing item name, and have each item in there named a number from 1 to 3

People have done intensive tests about performance difference between merged packages and individual packages, and you can read very different opinions all over the internet over the last years, but the fact is that very serious people have properly tested it and it makes absolutely no difference at all, unless you have an immense amount of cc AND a computer that should not be running the sims 4 in the first place. 

Then, placebo effect is a thing, and i am sure some people will claim that it makes a difference. It does not. 

If you want to improve performance changing things in your custom content collection, things that actually have an effect are: 

1- Delete duplicates. 

2- If there is a HQ version and a non HQ version of a custom content do not use the HQ versions if you do not plan to use HQ mod. 

3- Check for conflicts (mods editing the same instances). 

4- Delete outdated/broken content or update/patch it (for example with sims 4 studio).

5- Remove content you no longer like/use.

Edited February 16, 2023 by LittleRedSonja
typos

[Lordsyke]

Okay what about keeping the filename under 9 letters? and not having spaces or odd characters in it?

[davisev5225]

15 hours ago, Lordsyke said:

Okay what about keeping the filename under 9 letters? and not having spaces or odd characters in it?

 

Irrelevant.  That's a limitation of early FAT file systems for DOS, not modern operating systems and file systems.

[LittleRedSonja]

15 hours ago, Lordsyke said:

Okay what about keeping the filename under 9 letters? and not having spaces or odd characters in it?

Short file name was a thing in older sims games and old systems, it makes no difference in sims 4. 

The spaces and odd characters is a tricky question:

What i have learned is that theoretically yes, it matters and it could actually take longer time to "read" those files including blank spaces, and that is one of the reasons the vast majority of modders do not use spaces when naming mods (that and because the name looks "cleaner" or better that way), with some remarkable exceptions such as the awesome Kuttoe, Zerbu, and a few others.

BUT:

The reality it is that could matter but only at a very very large scale, like tens and tens of gb of custom content named with blank spaces. If you only have a few pieces of cc you will not be able to feel the difference. If you have tens of gigabytes of "bad named" custom content then yes, it might make a difference? specially if your computer is old. Now, will the gain in performance be worth the time and effort to rename all that custom content? I do not know, maybe if you can rename it with a tool to automate the task? it might be worth the try, but otherwise i would not bother. This is not only my opinion, but very awesome people such as frankk has explained this many times. Personally i avoid spaces in mods names, but only because i learned that way and i am very new in programming. Blank spaces are evil ?

I hope the explanation is simple and clear enough, the short answer is "Unlikely" ?

Edited February 17, 2023 by LittleRedSonja
typos

[Lordsyke]

What about characters such as "_" or "-" Do they increase the loading time to start up the game?

[LittleRedSonja]

10 hours ago, Lordsyke said:

What about characters such as "_" or "-" Do they increase the loading time to start up the game?

No, those characters are perfectly fine.