How to speed up SimCity 4, if I have many mods installed?

[MichaelJBull769 55]

With buildings, CAM and NAM, etc.

Just wondering... how to do that.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

That depends what you mean by speeding up - the in-game performance or the loading times?

As far as the later is concerned, one of the good oldies is to remove all of the readmes and promotional pics from your "Plugins" folder.

The game usually "sniffs" the entire plugins folder, regardless if a file is indeed something functional or just a picture or document that doesn't play any in-game role. So when you remove all of these unnecessary files, the chances are you will be able to launch your game somewhat faster.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,444]

If you use too many mods the only solution is datpacking

 

NAM Datpacking 

General guide on DATPACKING

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

1 hour ago, ulisse said:

If you use too many mods the only solution is datpacking

That also makes me wonder how many mods are "too many". I have recently downloaded quite many dependencies and reached the 1,2GB mark in my "Plugins" folder.

Are there any telltale signs that SC4 is having trouble loading or managing the content?  Some point upon which one has to take action?

[CorinaMarie 29,856]

50 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Are there any telltale signs that SC4 is having trouble loading or managing the content?  Some point upon which one has to take action?

Yes.

Use a stopwatch and time how long it takes to get to the region screen. Then also how long it takes to get into your most complex city. For me with 757 MB of plugins, it's 24.15 seconds to the region screen for the first time of the day. Then an additional 20.28 seconds to get into my city tile. If you have to measure either of those with a calendar, that's a sign that doing tweaks for speed is a really good idea.

Then, with a city tile loaded, zoom all the way out and rotate the world. See how long it takes for everything to redraw.

And finally, click your Parks menu. If that feels sluggish when opening it's another indication DatPacking is a good plan.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

Measuring with a calendar... 

That's good to know. I was wondering, because I have recently noticed that my game sometimes does freeze up when I go into data layer view and then switch directly to some building menu. It does not happen all the time though and usually just after I power up the computer.

However, I made an interesting observation (which I have actually made with other programs too) in which the first SC4 run during the boot takes:

61 seconds (region screen)
82 seconds (most complex city)

However! If the game is run the second time during the same boot, the loading times drop considerably to the following values:

12 seconds (region screen)
46 seconds (most complex city)

I have experienced this before with GTA for example where the second launch of the game on the day has always been faster than the initial run.

[CorinaMarie 29,856]

2 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

However! If the game is run the second time during the same boot, the loading times drop considerably...

Indeed. Windoze keeps a considerable amount in memory even after quitting the game.

My times don't change quite as much as yours. 2nd region load is 16.67 seconds and into the same city is 18.53 seconds. (I have not DatPacked anything.)

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

Just to add which I figure to mention...

Region loading times also depend on the actual measured size of the region. For instance a 12 x 12 region (144 total large tiles) it had a few extra seconds I find for a delay. This is even with using an SSD as I got for my new computer last year. This loading delay is due to the game parsing all tiles like jigsaw pieces into the overall picture, which is the region as a whole. I don't have the benefit of a stopwatch handy (only a calendar!), but the delay for this seems consistent even switching between regions. It might suggest this is processed each time, and so that then doesn't get stored in the memory, unlike Plugins and actual cities when loading them individually.