⚘ for EF only
⚘ sources: Cirilla's Hair, Saskia's Headband
⚘ slight clipping in the back with bun and ties (might fix later if it ends up bothering me)
download
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notes: This is my first hair mod that I have successfully completed (meaning not having my warden walking around with a missing/invisible scalp and hair)! Super excited to have finally learned how to properly use the Dragon Age Blender plugin. It was quite the learning curve but I am so thankful to all the modders that had put out tutorials - as they were quite honestly lifesavers lol. I would have been completely clueless without them.
Haven’t posted here in a while!! Here’s a piece I’ve drawn for the fanfest art contest! It didn’t get selected but I’m happy to share this nonetheless! 🥰
How to reduce the Sims 2 loading time. Some simple hints.
Few of us can restrain ourselves from downloading more and more custom content for our favorite game. My download folder is constantly growing, which increases the game loading time. And I never stop working to get that loading time down. At least a minute. For now my download folder size is about 12 GB. The game takes 10 minutes to load, another 7-10 minutes is taken by the Hood and CAS/first family loading.
What affects the loading speed. Here are a few hints from my own experience.
1. Length of filenames. I once spent two evenings shortening all the filenames in my downloads folder as much as possible. Game loading time decreased by 4 minutes. Gorgeous, isn't it?
But there are some moments to keep in mind.
By my experience, you can rename hairstyles, clothes and other CAS content as you see fit. For example, I often name recolors of clothes by color or number. Like this:
The same is with wallpapers and floors.
BUT you should be careful with objects from the Buy and Build Mode. Once I couldn't find a bunch of recolors of various objects and couldn't understand where everything gone. I downloaded some of them again, left them under their original names, then checked them in the game. Everything was back.
And so, make sure that recolors of different objects have different names. For example, if you have two mirrors and each of them has a blue recolor, do not call both recolors "blue." The game will read these files one by one, but according to my observations, if there are two recolors with the same name, then the second file will overlap the first. The first file won't be seen in game, and you wonder where all your recolors are. For example, name your mirrors "oldmirror1" and "romanticmirror1". Like this:
Same with Collection File names! All of the collection files must have different names, otherwise in game you will end with bunch of identical collection folders with the same pictures. I have this issue once. A bit confusing you know :)
Anyway though I had no issues with it I still recommend to give all the files unique but still short names to avoid any problems. Thanks @goingsimcrazy and @sushigal007 for remarks.
2. The length of the folder names and the number of subfolders.
Some people just throw all the files into one folder and don't bother. Although I recommend to sort CC by some way.
For example, keep female hairstyles in the "female_hairstyles" subfolder, and male hairstyles in the "male_hairstyles" subfolder. But do not get carried away here too, since the length of the folder names also affects the loading speed of the game. Moreover, the game will read the path to your file, which is hidden in 5 subfolders, as a one string, and if this path is too long, the game may not get to this file. As a result, the new cool bathtub along the path "bathroom / whitebathroom / superdupercoolbathroom / blablablablablablablablabla // blablablablablablabla // blablablablablabla / bathblablablabla.package" will never appear in your game.
Bottom line: making a organized directory system in a Downloads folder is quite convenient, you can quickly find any object if you need to delete it. But try to make as few subfolders as possible and give your folders short names.
For example, here's the guide by Pleasantsims how to organize your Downloads folder.
3. Special characters and spaces. When the game reads your Downloads folder, it takes a little longer to read symbols like @ or "[" (I've noticed that some creators have a particularly fond feeling for square brackets 😁) or spaces. If there are 1000 such characters in the file names, the game will load for several minutes more. We don’t need that. It is best to remove all special symbols besides letters and numbers.
I also use underscore "_". And according to my tests the dash “-“ doesn't greatly affect the loading speed. Removing them completely did not affect the loading speed for me.
Here's a great guide by @ilovethesims2cc on how to remove special characters.
4. Pictures. When I download a new set of CC, I make a separate folder with the name of the creator and name of the set, and also throw in a preview picture. Otherwise, I just won't understand what exactly is in this folder. This is especially true for clothes and hairstyles.
The pictures take about 1.5 GB in my downloads folder. Quite a lot.
I read the opinion that the presence of extraneous files such as pictures or texts forces the game to wade through it all, and the loading time increases as a result. So I ran an experiment and deleted all 1.5 GB of pictures.
The loading time has not changed. Perhaps it was 10 seconds faster, but I did not notice it. All the same 10 minutes.
But still that might vary from person to person and you can get some profit from moving pictures. Try it!
5. Files compression. The Compressorizer program.
This is a guaranteed way to save a minute or two of time (or even more). The size of the files is reduced -> the game takes less time to load them. And you also save disk space. Just remember, never compress mods. Mods usually have a small size anyway, and if they are compressed, they will most likely stop working.
Here's the simple video guide by Pleasantsims how to use this program.
Download The Compressorizer
6. Merging files. A method that I have not tried yet, but read that it is also quite effective.
Here's a great guide by @keoni-chan. You also can download that program by @lazyduchess.
Always keep backups of your unmerged files in case you need to make changes or if the merged file doesn’t work for some reason!
Thanks @sushigal007 for advice.
7. The last but maybe the most useful hint. Install Sims 2 on SSD!
Buying SSD was the best thing I do for my game and for my computer in particular! I don't remember how much the loading speed dropped, maybe 2 or 3 times, but I remember how amazed I was. The game itself, among other things, began to work more quickly and smoothly.
Hope you find something helpful in this text! Feel free to ask questions or leave comments.
If you have a conversion that has this problem, don’t panic and don’t use a smooth plugin.
You just have to continue with the conversion as if nothing happened.
You will have to change the opacity number from -1 to 1, as long as you don’t have an inverted mesh that represents the background. If you have a background mesh, you should change the opacity to 0.
The main inspiration for this set were: papercrafts! 🪅
And papercrafts remind me of everything fun and colorful so I had to add some vibrant furniture to the mix. Plus, spring is right around the corner and that is surely something to look forward to. 💐
There is a little bit of everything in this set but I mostly focused on some of the entertaining functionalities these objects could have!
To download everything and get some more info on the items + the monthly gift set, CLICK HERE to visit my Patreon page (the set will be public on 7th March).
📌 ALL the artworks used in this set have been created by REAL ARTISTS and purchased on Canva or Unsplash+! Please always support real artists.
Follow me on Instagram / Patreon / Bluesky
To search for items in game, you can type 'atticwindowatdawn' 'atw' 'paper trails'
Simlish font credit: ajaysims. Texture credits: myshunosun, nucrests, trillyke, helgatisha;
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