Is this as good as it gets more or less?

There's always room for some improvement, but there's also only so far one can push the game engine of a 32-bit game designed in 2008-09. At the level you have reached, it sounds like just about the only major thing left to try is running the game on a RAM Disk. Nothing is faster than RAM access. But as you are already using SSDs and top-notch hardware, the benefit gained from that effort may be minimal.

Bootcamp is a means of installing Windows on an Intel-chipped Mac. Not a means of installing the macOS on a PC that shipped with Windows. Maybe I got confused by that paragraph. But however one gets to it, the new 64-bit Mac version of TS3 has plenty of its own problems and it still uses exactly the same game engine (Patch level is 1.70). It doesn't really perform remarkably better just because the RAM limit has been lifted, the game would have to have been re-engineered to take advantage of 64-bit programming in order for that to happen. Instead, EA kind of forced the game to run, somehow, as it was, in a 64-bit only environment. I find it unplayable because elements that I didn't realize were so important to my gameplay like interacting with the open water (oceans) and terrain paints, among others, turned out to be more important than I thought. And I still can't say that version of the game is bastion of reliability and stability, but EA never proclaimed it to be either. :/

Others are thrilled to have it because for them, on their existing hardware, there was/is no other way for them to run the game.

Everything just adds up. Most mods don't matter for loading times though (they may influence perfomance though, depending on the mod), unless you are talking about custom content. Loading and save times will get longer the longer you play a town, which is the main issue. Sims collect stuff, connections to other sims, get tons of skills etc., you probably add stuff to lots. It's nearly impossible (igazor may object :wink: ) to play towns forever. At some point, I use NRaas Porter to pack the whole town up and move them to either a new town or a fresh version of the old one.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any other way to stop Showtime careers than switching off Showtime in the launcher (I'm on 1.69). I won't do that because I use several of the items from the pack all the time. Stuck proprietors is mostly fixable though. Usually it's the visitor tables or some clutter objects that cause the proprietor to get stuck, and re-arranging those tables with seats may fix it. For example, Flying V's Coffeehouse that came with the pack often has this issue.

Regarding your stuck service sims, do you mean role sims that fail to age up? At least that's a common thing in my games. I may just reset their age to 0 days in their age span (Master Controller>Intermediate>Age absolute (or similar)) or remove them by Total Annihilation, if the reset or "trigger age transition" won't work. I don't experience any stuck service sims.

They way I'd get rid of proprietors would be to not have venues that will generate them. Or at least reduce the number of those venues. But I haven't noticed that problem in my games. I do get sims that get stuck though. I think it's mostly puppies and kittens for me though.

In one of the Savvy Seller stores I built, in one game only, there was a sim who constantly got stuck. I finally watched her getting stuck and she wanted to walk the wrong way around a table so I removed the table and she never got stuck again. That table in that store had been in numerous previous games and later games too without a single other sim noticing that table or getting stuck.

I just removed a few GB of custom content from my mods folder and it made a difference. I was surprised when I launched the game I was playing that I didn't get a missing objects notification.

Try to keep inventories close to empty. I recently had a world with not many townies in it and it was grinding to a halt so I decided to do an audit of their inventories and they were bursting so I moved all that stuff out of there and the game ran much better after that. I mentioned doing that on here and others said that is something they do in their games on a regular basis. I usually only do it for the sims in my own household.

I can bring my game to a screaming halt by using the tractor to harvest (or the green dragon). This is because I don't realise how many harvestables go into the active sim's inventory. I've timed my sim taking a literal 5 minutes real time to take each and every step when trying to walk. But when an inventory gets that full it can be really painful to empty it as it counts down each and every single item in the inventory. The countdown does speed up after a while as the inventory gets empties. In the worst case I've managed to have so far I think there multiple thousands of several of the harvestables.

Another way I managed to seize up the game to a similar processing speed was trying to make a rainforest on an island and hide my casino inside it. All those trees and bushes waving in the wind stopped my sims walking again. So I removed the plants and the game ran beautifully again.

There are limitless ways we can slow down or speed up a game. I'm learning new ones all the time. One of my current favourites is to have about 30 sims in the household. Then I start removing them one at a time until the game becomes playable again.

I hope you sort out your issues and get the performance you need.

Happy Simming

"Turjan;c-17928519" wrote:
Everything just adds up. Most mods don't matter for loading times though (they may influence perfomance though, depending on the mod), unless you are talking about custom content. Loading and save times will get longer the longer you play a town, which is the main issue. Sims collect stuff, connections to other sims, get tons of skills etc., you probably add stuff to lots. It's nearly impossible (igazor may object :wink: ) to play towns forever. At some point, I use NRaas Porter to pack the whole town up and move them to either a new town or a fresh version of the old one.

Well, since I am expected to raise objections here...okay. HOW DARE YOU--wait a minute, this isn't where I want to go. When have I ever done exactly what I am "expected" to do?! :p

But seriously, it is possible to play and progress a game/town forever with the help of the mods, theoretically. But it can't keep expanding "naturally" and the player does have to keep a close eye on things like population growth, ever growing household inventories, age-stuck Role Sims, and keep such under control. After a while even I have to imagine that a world will become more work than fun to play, family trees are not going reflect an infinite number of generations properly if they even still work in-game, and it might time to uproot things to keep playing forward just to recapture the sheer enjoyment of the game and those sims and their descendants even if one doesn't really HAVE to. Or, heavens forbid, just start over? :)

All really good comments here though, that seem to more or less agree with the above.

The thing that is so engaging about TS3 though is not its native ability to keep running forever. It's really the very nature of that much maligned and limited game engine that also keeps us happy and delighted as fun, expected, and unexpected things keep happening from one generation to the next, and nothing else I've seen (for whatever that's worth) beats the open world simulations even if they do bog down and sometimes lead to performance issues and more game file maintenance tasks.

I know most of us know this by now but with the Sims 3 "less is more". Fewer venues and the world runs so much better. You have fuller venues too. But its so hard! We want our sims to experience so much.

And even when we do keep things at a minimum, sims still can get stuck. Especially horses in my game.

"jaletu2005;c-17928728" wrote:
I know most of us know this by now but with the Sims 3 "less is more". Fewer venues and the world runs so much better. You have fuller venues too. But its so hard! We want our sims to experience so much.

And even when we do keep things at a minimum, sims still can get stuck. Especially horses in my game.

Horses are very good at getting stuck.

But I'm glad that we can talk about horses getting stuck (and NRaas fixing that), rather than wondering what TS3 would be like if it had horses. "Good as it gets" in TS3 is vastly superior to TS4. So much superior that I just uninstalled my fairly complete version of TS4. It was wasting space on my computer, nagging me to download the latest patch before it would even allow me to start the game. Enough of that nonsense.

best advice i ever got was to play on smaller worlds with less in them but use nraas traveller more to have interconnected destinations for your sim to enjoy everything

Maybe its time I consider not running it with all the content all the time.
What makes the biggest differences in load time, expansion packs, store content, or mods? I mean, it probably depends on how much of any of those.
My sims 3 folder in documents is like 23.8gb which is less than my 32.2gb of the main sims folder.

I think one thing that slows my game down, according to nraas, proprietors get stuck all the time, doesn't seem to matter if its a maxis or custom performance lot. If I don't care about the performer careers, and related events, is there an easy way to turn that whole system off?

And also, often get wacky issues with service sims getting stuck, and overwatch not unstucking them, and resetting them seems like a very brief fix.