Spring Cleaning Your Downloads: tips!
Personally I try to keep the amount of CC I have in my Downloads under 6Gb, currently it’s hovering somewhere around 5.2 and I don’t feel like my game is particularly lacking in anything. I haven’t timed it but my TS2 loads into the neighborhood view in 5-10 minutes and having to wait only a little is a delight every time.
I like organizing junk, uncluttered menus, maintaining playability and quick load times. I don’t like having to wade through recolors endlessly just to find the handful I actually use. I don’t bundle anything, as I prefer to keep the option to as easily as possible delete things over the pros of merged content. I thought I’d share some things that for me have proven to improve the game and experiencé.
- This post by sushigal: The duplicate file finder linked in this has removed the option for mass deleting files from the free version, and I don’t know of any similar program with the feature, but other than that, A++ very useful tutorial, required reading!
- Hoarding! Ask yourself: Do I use this thing? Do I use it a lot/right now/is there something about it that stops me from using it? Toss it out into your backups or trashbin if you have to think about the answer longer than a few seconds. This goes for meshes, sets, single lipstick colors, everything. Konmari without mercy, see if you’ll actually miss that bedding you never used. Let it go.*
- Classic move: If you use Bodyshop a lot, separate the cc into folders by non-bodyshop and bodyshop content: that way you can easily take out the NBS stuff when running it. Faster and lighter load! Just plop the rest back in when you run the game.
- Filenames: All special characters, spaces, and even hyphens seem to give the game hiccups, and make it load slower. Regular letters and underscore are fine. Bulk Rename Utility is a lifesaver so you don’t have to rename everything by hand. I’ve run all my downloads through it removing everything I mentioned and replacing all the -s with _s. Doing that reduced loading times considerably.
- Combination of the above two: Minimizing the amount of subfoldering and length of filenames didn’t hurt either.
- The Compressorizer: I’ve noticed people have stopped using it? Did I miss something? I run everything I make and download through it to get rid of unnecessary bloat. As far as I know, nothing gets broken if you compress a file more than once.
(*Mandatory footnote: of course, people are different, and some use all of the recolors they have. I’m not telling you can’t do that or how to play your game. You do you. Just saying if you never use something, why keep it?)
That time of year again! Hyphens and spaces are bad! Source: trust me dude
Also just want to add: I see people occasionally complaining the compressorizer doesn’t work for them, but afaik no one’s followed that with investigating if it’s a Win(10) incompatibility or what exactly, just stopped using it. I don’t use 10 so I can’t work that angle with testing personally, but would love to solve this. Why should we settle for wasting bandwidth with bigger files than necessary going up and down, and slowing down games when we really don’t need to? Yes I pulled the first person plural community card
Personally I have had zero issues in the 11 years of using the compressorizer (download page), happily shaving extra off the same files several times after making tiny edits or by accident. No issues, no danger. Personal experience. But to be safe and certain, absolutely do make backups of your files if you need to before compressing them!
