it is definitely against tos and we'd would definitely get in mega trouble for it LOL Especially because it could be considered getting around paying for items they would get pretty mad about it.
fun to think about though!
As for 'making it more optimized' though, theres a few things to understand -
I'm not sure what engine they're using, some googling earlier leads me to believe its unreal with someone on reddit saying it's a mobile optimized version of unreal. The engine being used would say a significant amount about how the game itself is made and whether more optimizations could even be made.
outside of changing thing like fixing the issue with them fully clearing the clothing cache on updates, poorly handling image caches such as comp avatars, and lingering event assets, there's not actually a lot we could do to improve the games performance. These things suck, and they definitely contribute but the real reason the game's performance is rough is -
The main draw of Shining Nikki is also its downfall - its the 3D models themselves that cause such a performance loss. The fact they were able to manage to get a 3D dress up game at this quality on mobile in any form is honestly really impressive. Unfortunately, due to being a dressup game they have thousand of models your device has to store information for and load on command.
I would honestly hazard a guess that its the textures and effects even more than the base models. Texture assets can get quite heavy, and 3D models typically have several different ones that tie together to get the amazing fabric effects we see in SN. The textures they create are also detailed and crisp, even close up, which means these images must be pretty huge.
For comparison, the Sims 4's texture for (at least modded) CAS items is 1024x2028 - this file overlaps every texture used on a sim so when you create one, the sim only ever has to reference the final layered version of all of the textures it uses, keeping file sizes relatively small and meaning the texture for individual items are always much smaller. You can't get extremely detailed for most items without additional mods that increase the texture size, but it means any CAS pieces ,from hair, to clothing, to eye colors, etc always remain relatively light on the texture side. On top of all this, Sims 4 is a computer game and SN is a phone game - most computers are expected to run applications with a lot of heavy assets no sweat
Shining Nikki clothing items are expected to be heavily detailed and high quality both due to it being a dressup game (meaning clothing is the main focus) as well as the Nikki games general aesthetic style being extravagant and high quality. Shining Nikki is also not tied to the limits that Sims 4 is tied to despite being mobile, so they may not have textures and models optimized to use the same UV. I would be able to say more on the subject if I looked at model rips, but TBH I'm not a 3D modeler. I've dabbled in it between required college classes and some game modding.
An additional point of quality/performance issues is also the number of particle effects and animations. Particle effects are often a major cause of performance drops in any game. I don't know much about 3D animation specifically but given my game literally always freezes when I try to use an animated pose (and half the time I use a static one) they definitely used some method of animating that suffers performance drops on loading the animation file.
Overall, It's hard to say everything we could fix if we were able to in the first place without seeing the code or the processes for creating assets.
I have made simple 2D dress up games in Unity before and I can say at least that making one is very simplistic! The major time sink after you've made the base game is really just creating more clothing pieces. It would definitely be a fun project to tackle - I had a lot of ideas for one that didnt suffer from Love Nikki's skintone stupidity but haven't had the motivation or time to continue designing it (and then more recently Unity's company did a fuck up so I wasn't even sure on using the engine at all until they figured their shit out)
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