It depends. Sometimes I'd see 8-12 Sims in venues, sometimes none. Depends on the town, what kind of venue, population density, personality traits, etc. There were a lot of factors that could keep Sims from populating venues. I believe it was more of a tuning issue than anything.

Indeed. it was my impression too that the grocery works the best. Though the bookstore also seems to get some visitors. So probably if you want to have one bar that's always full of life, plopping the two together might just do the trick.

Who said anything about magic? Of course, bogging a system down with a billion mods will cause problems. But my point is, my Sims 3 game has problems even without a bad cache or bad CC or any CC at all. Meanwhile, Sims 2 on my system runs fine even with a ridiculous amount of CC. And I never said the problems with long loading times were going to disappear completely with Sims 4, only that with better optimization, the problems shouldn't be quite as extreme.

Completely agree with this. The mechanic was there - still is - but the tuning was major fail. .... IS major fail.
(I edited the Venues XML heavily to make my com-lots TS2-like, i.e. alive and populated. And they are, but only after the edit and now I know what exactly should I expect to see on each of them. "Hangout" especially was tuned poorly - almost no visitors were meant to visit there, in case you were wondering...)

It bothers me very much that now, after this iteration, they are trash-talking their own product, which, even now, with a little work, could be so well optimized to run open worlds as easily as you can say "64-bit".

So, say it with me, please: 64-bit patch for TS3, EA!
I believe that this would go a long way toward returning the lost trust of EA's once-customers.

(That was some wishful thinking on my part, I'm aware... :giggler

40 seconds each with a Solid State Drive and a powerful rig? Pure hyperbole. I have a normal seagate HDD and an 8 year old rig and my loading times are 15 seconds at worst. The only long loading time is the initial one and even that doesn't come close to a minute.

Have you watched the LGR video? He actually has a timer going on the screen.

However, to be fair that's Sims 3 WITH a bunch of EP's installed. I remember running base game TS3 on my 80 gig HD comp with 1 gig of RAM and playing in Sunset Valley. My first Sims 3 Sim worked at the theater in the music career because she had the life time wish to reach the top of it, so she always went to work right across from the park in SV. Whenever I saw her go into work and leave work, there would be a bunch of Sims at the park. That's how she met her future husband, was by being able to socialize at the park with the Sims that hung out there. Base game Sims 3 always had full community lots.

As a matter of fact, due to this in-game feature in the base game, Pescado put an option in awesome mod to not allow the Sims in town to come to the community lots when your Sim was there for people who didn't like the crowds, since, yes, it was at times quite crowded.

Is there a guide how to tune your XML for more visitors on community lots in The Sims 3?
or some kind of mod?

In all fairness, though... Sims 2 is a 2004 game, Sims 3 is a 2009 game. That's a bit over 3 Moore cycles there. (Moore's law: computers get twice as powerful every approximately 1.5 years. I.e., 3 cycles means TS3 was made for computers 8 times more powerful.) It's not entirely surprising that a computer that runs Sims 2 well could choke on Sims 3. I'm equally sure there are computers out there that can run, say, Oblivion just fine, but choke on Skyrim; and doubly so if you install the high-res mods.

Especially since you mention a business computer, well, I don't know the exact details of yours, but generally they tend to have really underpowered graphics cards, if they have a separate graphics card at all. Probably most have the cheapest onboard graphics that money can buy. Video memory is often undersized even for their generation, as is the video memory bus. And in some cases (e.g., onboard graphics), it's even shared with the main system RAM.

Yes. In Twallan's story progression mod, the settings are there to get more Sims go visit lots. One can pick and choose when, which Sims among other options.

Edit: Oops, I forgot to mention that also, Shimrod made such a mod that can be found here: http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php...ut-on-the-town/ One does have to sign up on that site to download things, however, it is free to join just as this site.

BTW, at the moment parks don't seem to have a problem in my game. I count 8 sims at the park in the attached picture. It's not tuned, and most of those people don't seem to be there for the fortune-teller caravan or arboretum rabbitholes.



What I did do, though, was change the lot type from Small Park to Big Park. (It was enlarged to 30x30, after all) This actually affects how many people the game sends there.

That is if, of course, your town's sims are the kind who'd go to a park in the first place. Loners, Hates The Outdoors, and such, don't tend to.

Maybe this helps someone with their parks.

There's also Carrigon's Late Night mod for venues. Just google it, lazy for links.

But you can make many edits what drove me to do it myself in the end. You can for example, edit the traits that are encouraged to visit, the days of week that are encouraged more, the careers you'd like see hanging out where, "hot spot"-ness of a place, as well as "dead zone"-ness , etc. (I know, it's ridiculous what you can do to language and writing *shrugs*)

A guide? Besides the xml itself, you could use any of the above mods as example and learn by it. That's what I do. Be careful to correctly spell the tags, to use the same source the original xml does when citing them, etc. Any fail, except an truly epic one, won't CDT your game. You'll need S3PE and a text editor. That's easy enough to find and use, I guess. Be careful to use a syntax checker too, in your text editor. It will alert you to any overt error. But spelling errors were the most common cause of my own fails.

Good luck!

ETA; Regarding parks , yes, the big one is much more populated by default.

But besides that xml settings themselves, it all really depends on what other lots you have there. For instance, 250 Sims in MV atm, 1 late night venue (pool dance club, modded to receive most of guests after midnight), a coffee shop (not a potential hot spot) gathering them before midnight, a hangout (potential hotspot, similar work hours as the pool club - competition), 1 big and 2 small parks. All rabbit holes lost their visitors in my edit and also the entry "go home to fill quota" was drastically reduced (it was in the hundreds ). There's a nectary there too, which in my edit is not a hot spot zone, and closes at 22.00.
Each lot - including the other lots like beach, pool, etc. - has some visitors at all open hours. In their prime, operating time they have at least 10.

I'm having a Sims 3 open world that is functioning and functional on epic life span for over 30-sim weeks now. Saves - and loads - in under 5 minutes. I had a crash the other day, but only because I was running the game in hibernation for over 3 days - it ate my memory, the shiny coding that it is.

No TS2-styled weeks long hibernation for this beast.

That makes a lot of sense, as the Sim that my very first Sims 3 Sim married loved the outdoors.

Yep. Loves The Outdoors is the best candidate for parks, pools, that kinda thing.

Edit: Oh, btw, speaking of meeting people at the park. That red house placed strategically next to it is where my sim lives. Her bedroom windows are directly towards the park. Thanks to no loading screens, I can just go out and talk to them. Then hit the bar too

@Simsica
Oh, you can mod the opening and closing hours? So I could have a disco that's open 24h a day?

Thanks. It had never occurred to me.

I have one other tip that might be helpful along with all the other good advice you've received. When you use S3PE, you will be editing the actual xml in a text editor, and most use MS Notepad, as you already have it. There's another text editor called Notepad++, which is free, that is really designed for xml use. While MS Notepad will work, the xml text will be unformatted, making reading large chunks of it a bit of a strain, at least for me. In Notepad++, the code is nicely colored and indented, making it much easier to follow what you're doing.

In S3PE, just go to Settings/External Programs/Use an External Text Editor and browse for Notepad++ (in my install, it's found as C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe with a default install). It's not necessary, but I've found it helpful working with xml in TS3, as well as many other areas that require xml coding.

For that, you'll maybe need to look into the Bars xml as well. The bar object (LN) is the main thing in any venue you place it. It takes over and closes/opens the venue using values set in Bars xml. So you'll need to mix and match for the best results. It is actually quite addicting once you get it going. I spent weeks tweaking this. Fun times

And I made my Sims drunk :P

From one of LGR's latest TS4 videos three load screens had different times depending on which lot he visited. The load times were 12 seconds, 17 seconds, and 29 seconds. The 29 second load time was to visit a lot that he'd spent some time playing and building on that had a Duke Nukem sim he'd also spent some time playing. So it looks like the longer a lot is played, modified, stuffed with objects, filled with sims and their inventory and relationships, the longer it takes to load it. I wish my load times were as short as 29 seconds :D

eskie, wrong thread. Though I do appreciate the response

Well damn, that's because by the time I finished typing it up, MTS went down, but I was able to ctrl-C the text before trying to get back onto the site. I thought I posted it in the right thread. Never mind. Now I have to figure out where it's supposed to go...................

Thanks so much for posting this. On an older computer I was editing my Sims 3 packages and then after I got a new computer, I couldn't remember, for the life of me, what I was using to edit before.