plug ins folder feeling heavy

[pcmcd 0]

Oh my God, my plug ins folder now has HUNDREDS of plug ins....there must be a limit to how many of these things i can put in the folder and also have displayed in the menu in game.

Will it eventually slow down?? is there a limit?? I'm wondering if anyone thinks so...before i have a crash or something.

I don't post much here but Hi all, and welcome from Queensland Australia.

pcmcd

[Tolomar 5]

theres no limit on how many plugins you can have in your folder.  There maybe a limit in which your computer may run effiecently, depends on your computer stats, and what you be willing to wait as the game loads and plays...the more you add...the better chance of long loading times and possible game lag. 

[bergadario 0]

Hi pcmcd...well as far as i know there's no limit on how many plugin you can put in your plugin folder: i don't know about you but i'm over 1,5 Gb of plugins! For sure i noticed that when you have really big menu, like the parks one that i think is the biggest for everybody, unless you have a quite high performance processor you notice a slow down on loading speed of the menu...i have an Athlon XP 2000+ and actually it takes a while even if now i have 1gb and 768mb of RAM. But i never experienced any crash due to my plugins .

Bye bye

[freedo50 1]

dont talk about hundereds of files, my plugins folder weighs a massive 1.92GB! yet the game still runs ok, but takes about 10 mins to load and 5 mins to load a city

so no there is no limit

[simoplis_mayor 3]

im close to 1GB but yes the game lags at start up consetaberly but durning building its just fine.

you can have as many pulg-ins as your syster can handle

[amdinside 2]

I have not checked the size of my plugins folder recently but the more you add the longer it takes the game to load (longer time before the EA games logo appears). The menus (parks especially) are longer and take a lot of scrolling but the game itself does not slow down, only initial game load time.

[Shinnie02 17]

yeh...my load time for the EA games logo takes around..uhhh...5 -8 seconds? lol when i took all the plugins out it went instantly but now the plugins festoon my park list and are slowing the loading

[Drederick_Tatum 0]

In the Broome County CJ, the author described a way to organize plugins by numbered folder so that they load in a certain order. Does that really help with load times/stability?

[T Wrecks 10,209]

My guess is: No. If A+B+C=D, then C+B+A=D. 350 megabytes of plugins to load into the computer's memory is 350 megabytes of plugins to load into the computer's memory, whether you load plugins alphabetically or against the alphabet or sorted by name or sorted by author or not sorted at all.

What it will do is ensure that certain plugins that override others (like the Euro Road textures, which override any other road textures, or PEG's red brick facelift mod, which overrides the game's standard brick base texture) work properly by being loaded last.

Another advantage it does have is that it can help to sort, find and identify downloads. For example, my plugins folder's subfolders begin with the numbers 0 for mods & bugfixes, 1 for residential, 2 for commercial, 3 for industrial, 4 for civic buildings, 5 for parks and recreation, 6 for transport, and 7 for landmarks.

This way, I have the stuff neatly sorted, and it takes me seconds to take out e.g. that annoying, recently downloaded fast-food restaurant that keeps bugging me, or to get an overvie as to how many mid-rise commercial buildings I have installed currently (yes, I sort by building size as well, which can also be done by naming folders correspondingly).

One folder name in my plugins folder, for example, would be 1Res[2-RH]NYBrownstones(SimGoober), and I know I have a building of category 1 (residential), sub-category 2 (rowhouses) that's called "NY Brownstones" and has been made by SimGoober. I will find this sub-folder in a continuous row of similarly named folders so that I see immediately what other rowhouses I have installed. They are not scattered all over my plugins folder. Likewise, I will find all small single-family homes before and all medium-sized apartment blocks after the rowhouses; and the highrises after the apartment blocks. Then the same story starts for commercials etc.

[plan9 6]

My plugin- folder looks like this at the moment:



That's 3,11GB - 14596 files in 3293 folders ... and that's only the MyDocs one.

Needless to say, the game takes about 20-25 minutes to load up to the region view on my 2GHz / 1GB RAM. And once in building mode, it takes about 10-15 seconds for a menu to open up (don't get me started on scrolling through it). So, like already stated, the question is rather how long you're willing to wait for the game to load .

Now I havent had much time to root out duplicate files yet, and I have a couple of questions about that: 

Am I right in assuming that there can only be one file of any unique name?

To clarify: if i have 3 files named "ftexture.dat", all of different sizes and all created on different dates, will the game simply load the ftexture.dat that is located last in the load order and forget about the other ones? Or, will all of them be loaded simultaneously?

If it is like I suspect, there really should be a tool that will search your plugin folders for duplicate files and either delete them autmatically, or give you a list of them for you to delete yourself.

[DJGspinNhitz 7]

The game can handle quite a bit more than my computers for sure. I am up to 3.5 gigs or more between the 2 plugin folders. My game take 20 mins to load, 5 minutes to save, 10 minutes to shut down, and 5-10 minute to load a city. The S.U.M. has helped allot. I just wish it would work with sub-folders too. I sort my file to death but I didn't start that till last year and so I have 1.0 gig folder of call All Un-Sorted Plugins, that I am weeding through.

GQ

[soldyne 111]

I have to ask if everyone with gigabyte plugins folders has any readmes or jpgs in those folders. the game will load EVERYTHING in your plugins folders including files that have nothing to do with the game. if you have a long load time then perhaps you guys need to clean out all the .txt, .doc, .rtf, .jpg and other files. I did that recently and cut my plugins folder size down by 100 MB. I only started with 700 MB (now 600 MB) but it made a noticeable difference.

not only that, I have to ask, how much of your downloads do you all use? I only download what I know I will use. if I find that I have no use for a certain bat or lot anymore, i delete it. I may have a small plugins folder, but, I know that every single file in there is being used to a decent degree.  I dont download and install every mod, bat, lot or file just because it looks cool.  My menues are big enough as it is.  just wondering.

on a side note, there is a way to organize your menus. It requires some fancy work with ILives Reader program and a lot of time and patience and planning. I completely reorganized my parks and transportation menus and I am much happier for it. Basically I moved all the lots that I use all the time to the top of the menu and the lots I use less (but still use) to the bottom. If anyone wishes to know what I did then I can post the steps later.

[Kippis05 2]

Yeah, My plugins folder is gettin kinda chunky too, about 844 MB of files to be exact. soldyne, you make a very good point. If you clear all of the useless .txt, jpeg and picture files sometimes associated with the plugins, you may cut off a considerable size of your plugin folder's load on your system. I'm going to try that, thanks

edit: soldyne, I'd really like to know how you organize your menus, it would be a life-saver

[T Wrecks 10,209]

plan9: It actually depends on what's inside the three files. For SimCity4, file names and extensions don't matter at all. Technically, the files are all mere file containers, and the extensions like sc4desc, sc4model and sc4lot are only for the users' convenience.

The actual files are inside - they are exemplar files (sets of data with prop, building, or lot information), LTEXT files (text), S3D and FSH files (textures), LUA files (scripts), PNG files (icons and preview thumbnails) etc, all with their own unique ID.

And it's these IDs that matter, nothing else. If you have a texture FSH file with the ID 0x12345678 in a file called "a-textures.dat" and another texture FSH file with the same ID in the file "z-textures.dat", the latter one will override the former one because it is loaded afterwards - unless, of course, you have structured your folders in a way to reverse this.

On the other hand, if you have hundreds of files called ftextures.dat which all contain different textures with different IDs, nothing will override anything else, and loading order will not matter at all.

In this particular case, if you suspect that all the files come from the same author and are actually revisions of the same collection, I'd try keeping the latest (and probably biggest) file and moving all other ones outside temporarily. If you don't see an error, you have probably gotten rid of some obsolete revisions.

Now let's assume that these files do contain textures with the same ID numbers. In this case, if you have the latest one in a folder called "A" and the oldest, (maybe buggy) one in a folder called "Z", the old textures will override the new and improved ones because they share the same ID and get loaded last, and for any ID the game picks the item that's loaded last. Then again, probably the bigger files contain the same old textures (will be overriden) plus some new ones (will be added, since they also have new IDs).

Many mods work this way, e.g. the Euro Road Textures Mod: It contains textures with the same ID as the game's default road textures. Now at startup, SC4 loads the default textures from the file SimCity_1.dat, which gets loaded first. Then, the games\SC4 plugins folder gets loaded A-Z. Finally, your my docs/plugins folder gets loaded A-Z. There, the game will find another set of road textures with the same IDs. Being loaded afterwards, the new (Euro) textures will 'kick out' the default ones, since for one ID only one texture is kept - the last one.

I hope this was understandable...

[greyveil 37]

soldyne, I just want to correct a little misconception, the game does not "load" .txt files, jpgs or htmls, in to the game, the game does not "load" anything it does not recognize as a game file, however, it does "scan" or read the files to see if it recognizes it, so you are correct that removing these files increases load time.

hope this helps...

[Pixelrage 34]

that's insane, I can't even imagine having to wait 20 minutes just to load a game, or 5 minutes to save it. I probably wouldn't even bother playing SC4 anymore at that point

Does anyone here have a real top of the line PC? I'm talking about dual core/3-4 gigs of ram? I'm really curious to see how much different it would be.

[soldyne 111]

Thanks greyveil, that does clear things up. I have been telling people that it "loads" so I have to watch what I say from now on.

Kippis05 - I will post my method for reorganizing the menus eventually. I am at work right now and dont have access to my SC4 tool box (folder with all my lot manipulation programs). when I get home I can get a precise step by step procedure for reorganization. I may even make a seperate thread on it as I am sure others will want to know as well.

[plan9 6]

many thanks T_Wrecks!

I guess the only files i can safely delete without investigating further than a quick search with windows explorer, are the ones with identical names, sizes and creation dates.

[soldyne 111]

I have posted a topic with my "menu organization" tutorial. It is also pending a review for omnibus submission. give it look and let me know what you think.

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=77896&enterthread=y

[hamsterTK 93]

Mine gets really laggy after about 500 megs. what i do is have different folders for different cities and switch them out when i load that particular city. it lets me have thousands of plugins without having to worry about performance. Plus its uber organized and at a glance i can see which props packs and other dependencies and stuff like that etc etc.

[Kippis05 2]

Yeah, I actually took someone's advice and weeded thru my plugins folder today (431 FILES!!) and actually cut my tax load on my system from 844 MB to about 712MB... (Hey, I think it's an accomplishment )

Thanks for adding the thread to the forum, soldyne. I'll check it out as soon as I can (but these finals! Can anyone say "last day of school tomorrow"?)

[pcmcd 0]

Wow I started a bit of a discussion and btw I have nothing to worry about, lol, didnt realize some of you had up to 3gigs in your plugins folder. I only have about 600mg and an amd 3200 with 700+ram. I dont think i have to worry bout my folder exploding in the next year or so by then new sim city game version anyway I guess, and I'll put all my hard work to an old hard drive and start again ! thanks for your replies to my questions.

pcmcd Ozzie

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I guess I am a chicken, or very careful depending on how you look at it.  My plugins size is 311 MB, which is nothing compared to 3 GB.  On the other hand, it doesn't contain any more junk than I can help.  I use a download cache, and only copy files into the plugins folders that contain lots, models, descriptors or .dat files. 

Lately, I have been using Ilive's files2dat program to condense things as well.  Works just fine. Thank you, Ilive

[yoder7652 21]

I have 3 GB of stuff from the STEX on my machine, but I don't load all of it for any one session. I only load what I'm going to want to incorporate into the city that I'm working on. The only files that are always loaded are the prop packs, airport packs, mods, custom transportation crap. For any one city I probably don't load but 1 GB of stuff. I don't notice much lag...I have a P4 with 2.8 ghz and 1.5 GB RAM.