This is a Sims 3 building topic. If you want to skip to the point, my question is below in bold type.

After searching the forums for 'maximum' no results matched my question. First, please let me vent. I have just lost two hours of work and the best color scheme I have ever created. After saving a copy of the house to my library I quit the game and went out to get a large Diet Coke.

When I returned and loaded the house onto an empty lot in a new game ( I save many copies and know that the latest copy is the leftmost one ) it was the old one. My only conclusion is that the Save Copy did not work and I had loaded the previous one.

The only reason I can think of why it didn't save is because the house is a 60x60 lot where 80% of the area is indoors. There are many, many, many items I have placed and a lot of them were custom colored. So far the item count is more than the combined amount of four complete houses and the project goal is to the amount of at least six houses.

My other explanation is that I had too many copies, my bar slides for a mile to the left. Can anyone tell me the maximum number of objects allowed on a lot, or the number of house saves allowed on the bar?

Last edited by Shoosh Malooka : 1st Jul 2009 at 09:46 AM. Reason: grammar

I'll go ahead and answer my own topic. In short, my problem was that I had been getting slowdowns and crashes to desktop from a 60x60 lot I was working on which contained a vast structure filled to its upper reaches with a staggering army of custom colored items. It has not yet become clear to me how many objects the game will allow, but I would say it is quite high.

I contacted some experts, who told me that it could be a video ram issue or even bad optimization preventing the game from running so many things. As recommended, I lowered graphic intensive settings but kept texture resolution high. I am glad to say that it improved the situation to such a degree that I can continue to add objects. In fact, it was as if Odin himself had endowed my comp with the abject force of the gods.

To finish the topic, my conclusion is that even an already mighty ATI Radeon HD 3870 may simply not be powerful enough to render huge castles, estates, mansions, etc., created by the talented artists on this site.

This truly concerns me, as even if my lot is approved, it may spitefully bite the downloaders of it in the hand. I will have to simply upload, warn profusely of slowdowns on average comps, and hope for the best. Thank you for reading, and I hope my problem is an isolated case.

Last edited by Shoosh Malooka : 5th Jul 2009 at 05:31 PM. Reason: Grammar and Language

I don't know if there is a max limit on objects in the game, but there may be a max for your computer. It may just depend on how old your computer is and how much memory you have or how fast your processor is. My desktop runs the sims really slow...like it takes 10 minutes to load. On my new laptop it loads in seconds. I think the more objects you have the slower it will be depending on your pc.

Yeah most of it is all technical computer stuff like processor and BUS speeds which I don't really get either... my desktop is 5 years old and can't even run Sims 2, my laptop is new, a Toshiba, and runs sims 3 quite well. I don't think the game has a limit because it just gets saved to the sims 3 folder anyway and takes up memory on the computer itself, not the game.

I know that your computer will only run as fast as the lowest speed or something... for example, having a really good graphics card won't matter if you don't have enough RAM and vice versa.

Actually there will be a limit at which point the game will just not run - there certainly was with TS1 and with TS2 I had to limit meshes to 10,000 or less packages and recolour packages had a limit of around 17,000 or so. Anymore than that and the game would crash.

As soon as I start playing TS3 again I am sure to figure it out once I start downloading custom content

Another way to regain some fps is to decrease (in game) the distance of objects appearing ( can't remember what its called and dont have 2 or 3 installed atm)

Would a thousand little objects do as much damage as a thousand bigger objects? Light fixtures vs. a huge fountain

Probably not. But as others have already said: there is no hard limit, it depends on how much your computer can handle. From my own experience, 60x60 lots seem to be just as useless as they were in TS2 – I have a relatively nice machine (4GB RAM, 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8600M GT) and can play small-to-medium lots with zero lag, but whenever I tried to install a 60x60 or thereabouts (with a building that actually fills the lot), it either never loads or is so laggy it's no fun to play it.

Lots that are *just* large, with a small/medium building on it, seem to be unproblematic though, so that's a step forward from TS2 .. at least under OS X (which doesn't have to mean much, seeing as the OS X TS2 was *much* buggier and laggier than the Windows one).

Well, if you're talking about game performance and fps and lag (to loverat) then there's this website: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/G...ms3performance/

That would probably help to decrease lag and hopefully people's games crashing. I usually run mine in a window and then make the window very small, less than 800x600 pixels but I play on a laptop. Probably not good for my laptop.