I looked through this forum and found several discussion but at least two of them ended by saying the cause of lag in the custom worlds had been discovered but none of them said exactly what had been discovered! Very frustrating especially since its impossible to use search to find out what I am missing.

I tested my world as I built it and it was fine but now when I finally get to play it for any length of time I am getting choppiness. Every five seconds or so the sims just pause for a second before going on with their business. I checked my routing, can't find anything obvious wrong but plan to check it again. However, I was hoping to find this 'secret' that is hidden somewhere in these forums.

Thanks!

This choppy gameplay is usually down to routing, as the game will try to recalculate a route and, when it fails, will recalculate over and over.

What you should look for are:
Tiny missed patches in your 'sims non-routable' paint (sims can get stuck in silly places, especially when they return from vacation);
Unroutable lots (for example, lots accessible only by dive wells or subway, or perhaps hidden under a geodome). Mark these 'No Visitors' so that the whole neighbourhood isn't trying to get to them autonomously!
Roads without intersections- if you have a 'dead end' road you must have an intersection to finish it;
Overlapped roads- it's easy to place a road over another without realising;
Inaccesible areas or bottleneck paths- make sure you have more than one route to get to busy areas- so if you have a single path to a rabbithole, place another path too!
Schools and busy rabbitholes- you can have more than one of each, so if you have more than say 10 kids, you may want two schools! Rabbitholes can be quite a bottleneck.

You can check whether routing is the cause of your problems by using the cheat 'resetsim *' to reset all sims; you can also use Twallan's master controller if you have that to do the same thing. If the jerking stops after you reset, then it's a routing problem.

Hey simsample - regarding overlapping roads, does that mean that something like this:

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosti...underbridge.jpg

... wouldn't work and would cause lagging, even if everything else is done properly? If so, I haz a sad, because I love that bit, but if it's going to screw up performance, I may as well go ahead and change it now.

(That's a shadow on the road, not a break, it's a continuous stretch.)

No, I meant when you click the road tool and you forget that it's still active, and you accidentally click and place a road under another one, but in-line with it. If there's a slight kink there you can get places where sims double back on themselves, or do stuff like get out of the car, run a few meters and then get back in the car!

For your image, you have two routes crossing- so when you send a car under the bridge it may actually leap over the bridge instead of driving under it. When I tried that I didn't notice any lag (although it looks a bit daft), but if you have a populated world it may not be desirable as I'm not sure how something going under the bridge will affect what's going over.

Hmm, okay. Thanks! I guess I'll have to toss a test version in-game and move enough sims in to get some traffic going and see what happens.

I haven't tested with that Bridgeport bridge, but with the other bridges it's quite amusing as a car going beneath will snap to the top of the bridge momentarily. It'll be good if you can get it to work, though!

Thanks. I check my routing pretty carefully so no overlapping roads, no kinks or roads without intersections. The town is pretty spread out except for one small area that is more like a downtown but no huge lots or skyscrapers. There may be some isolated patches but nothing that I could find. The lots all looked good though and the roads were drivable without issues at all. So far, all rabbitholes look good although I don't have any kids in the hood so not sure about the school. I could always add another rural school if I need to do so.

I used process monitor and found a bad package and removed that but it didn't totally eliminate the lag. I did go in and organize the layers so there were fewer of them. I also deleted some of the rapids thinking maybe the animations might cause lag. I then exported the world and started a new game without any CC except for a few things and Twallans three main mods. It didn't lag! I am going to try adding a wee bit more custom content and see if that creates lag. I wonder if it was just too many layers and too many rapids that caused the problem.

So I guess I figured out the problem even without the secret information about lag! LOL Thanks though for the information. Its a great checklist for CAW builders.

Glad it's working now!

I added back in my custom content and still no lag. I guess it was the clean up in CAW that helped. Thanks again for all your help!

I've been playing a custom neighborhood for about two weeks with 3 overpasses, and 2 overlapping suspension bridges. The routing appears to be normal (aside from the strange bug Simsample mentioned).




Sometimes it looks like cars are about to collide, because cars on the upper level will drop down to the lower bridge instead of driving all the way in town and making a U-Turn. Kinda nifty, but strange O.o It looks hilarious from a distance, too lol First time I saw it was watching my sim on her computer and saw this mess happening outside her big apartment window.

Thanks for the info and pictures, Jasumi! That world looks amazing!

Thanks, I think the game considers overlapping roads/bridges to be just like road intersections. Or at least that's what I've been seeing so far...

Nice info! Those pics just cracked me up! XDXDXD poor cars!

Jasumi, that world looks awesome. I would love to see more pictures of it. Same with yours HP!

Ok the post is 4 years old, but i have just seen it and got soooooo crazy about the overpass...!
Unfortunately, I have huge problem with CAW not running, so i can't create or edit a world myself.
Anyone knows about the creator of this world, or any other with bridges overpass??

If I understand correctly, you are looking a world to play. Questions like this are usually posted to the WCIF section: http://www.modthesims.info/forumdisplay.php?f=559