[PSA] On Social Menu Performance: Effect of Mods, Packs & Patches (Patreon)

Here, I am defining 'social menu performance' as in, speed / quickness between you clicking another sim and the pie menus opening.

Note that I am making simplifications here and am not a computer engineer or the best person to talk about this. But because of a lot of posts and questions about this especially since the pre-Crystal Creations PATCH, I will explain it as well as I can and as far as it is relevant to my craft of making mods and relevant to your results in game re. slowness of menus.

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When and what can make TS4 social menu performance worse:

• At every new EA patch, performance might get worse, because of the added running simulation features.

• At every new pack or expansion you install, workload WILL get worse, because of the added running simulation features AND interactions - then potentially causing performance to get worse.

• At every mod with Sim interactions that you add, workload WILL get worse, because of the added running simulation features AND interactions. - then potentially causing performance to get worse.
  

Whether you NOTICE those performance changes or NOT depends on:

• How powerful your machine is.
  If I am performant enough to make 10 pizzas an hour, and you used to ask me to make 1 an hour, but now ask me to make 3 an hour, I'll still be able to make all of them in the same time frame. Hence, the workload change is NOT visible on performance, no delay happens.

• How many other demands exist on performance (number of packs, number of heavy mods, number of running programs).
  If there are increasing amounts of clients asking me to make more and more pizzas in that same hour, eventually I won't be able to do it in an hour and it'll spill over because workload is more than my possible hourly performance. A delay is suddenly visible.

So what can modders do to help performance?:

Not much!

* limit the amount of interactions they add in the game and be wise about their tests, by considering what's worth a feature and what's not (that's a tough compromise always!);

• limit the amount of background running Simulation features (which is basically counter productive half the time... we observe this in EA's stuff too, where they have to very strictly limit it, such as milestones tracking only for the current played household)

* make their bigger mods modular so people can delete the parts they don't want;

* attach interactions as much as possible to contextual elements that come and go on Sims according to relevancy of context (for example if Sims who just got divorced have an interaction to talk about it, it should be placed on a moodlet relative to the event, not injected to all Sims at all times).

* try to design mods, code and feature in efficient ways; be on top of it when there's issues legitimately reported

I ALREADY try and do these things. I can't do anything to help that I'm not already doing. Most modders do most of these things, we just about all try our best.

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SO YOU'RE SAYING IF MY MENUS ARE SLOW, IT'S NOT A BUG?

Exactly. There are no social-menu performance-related BUGS that anyone knows of (if anyone figures one out I sure will fix it) in my mods or anyone else's (there can be bugs because every program has them but they 99.9% likely or 99.9% don't have to do with your social menu delays). 

SO WHY DO PEOPLE MAKE A CORRELATION?:

My mods DO add a lot of interactions and running features to the game. In that regard, they add to the demands on performance in terms of loading social menus (the amount of pizzas to make per hours). ANY mod with a lot of interactions and / or simulation features would do the exact same. Because RPO Collection is 19-20 mods and people tend to install them all at once, ofc that's a more obvious increase on performance strain than when installing one mod at a time.

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What YOU can do:

- be SELECTIVE about what you put in your game, be it mods or packs.  Be picky with your mods AND your packs. For an example of realism: Growing Together was a massive resource hog in my game and my computer was weak, so I used to play with it deactivated. RPO Collection is 19 mods. You can delete the ones you don't use and keep only the ones you do, for example.

- be REALISTIC about the abilities of your computer. If you play with a weak computer, upgrading is the most effective solution. That said -

• be REALISTIC about the Sims performance abilities. The Sims is bottle-necked by its foundations ("It's single-thread bottlenecked" as said by ThePancake1). At some point, due to that, even a state-of-the-art gaming computer will notice lag if you the player are not selective about the packs and mods you put in your game.

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WHAT IF THERE IS A SPECIAL CASE / AN EXCEPTION? DOES THAT EXIST?

There was ONCE a situation of - seemingly - cache problems, which happened for A FEW people switching from rpo 2.8 to 2.9, which caused extremely abnormal and extreme menu delays. There are workarounds to that cache issue and it is now off the table because this happened like a year ago. Completely irrelevant now.

I have never seen or heard any other such case and any struggles on social menu performance in your game is 99.9% likely to be due to the simple math mentioned above. It's cumulative workload demanded of your processor.

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THIS TALK ABOUT PIZZA IS FINE AND ALL,
BUT I WANT AN EXAMPLE THAT'S ABOUT SIMS AND NOT FOOD PLEASE :)

Here is an example of how it is on my computer. I have mentioned it often because it illustrates well the concepts discussed here.

• running BG alone with all my mods there is NO social menu delay.

• Running all packs without any mods has 1 sec delay

• and all packs plus all my mods and some others has a nearly 2 sec delay.

  That is a simple example of a performance situation. It doesn't care about what mods or files or even EA packs add the resources. If resources are added to calculate for, performance is reduced. If your machine can't handle the combined performance drain, then it shows. If your machine can handle it but the Sims 4 foundations can't, then it shows.

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ARE YOU JUST SAYING THIS BECAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO FIX BUGS?

Someone accused me of that today, so let's be clear. Hm, no. Nope. Not at all.

I am doing support on Discord and patreon constantly, I stand behind my mods, I do my best to keep them bug free. I check on every legitimate bug report. I Love PROPER bug reports. Because I LOVE for my work to be as bug free and smooth as possible. Reports tell me where problems are so I can fix them as instantly as possible. If there was a problem I knew of, I'd admit to it and say so outright and work my butt off to fix it.
With the time and effort I DO spend on bugs (checking on reports is literally the first thing I do every day and yes I do it throughout the day too), this accusation is rather funny.

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Questions welcome.

Thanks everyone. And thanks for your support. I do this whole modding thing thanks to you, with you and in big part for you.

Much love