The Chocolate Chip Experiment -
 Phase 1 : Preparation


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Phase 1
STEP 1

Step 1: Find out what the Base Load time is

OK - for the experiment, I've got all the expansion packs (up to Free Time) and stuff packs (up to Teen Time) installed. I have no hacks, custom content or even Maxis downloads in the game as yet. So lets see what we have to play with:

There are 88 Collections

5 Neighbourhoods excluding the Tutorial hood. The neighbourhoods have the following information:
Desiderata Valley (FT)  168 Sims, 24 Lots,  81 story telling pictures
River Blossom (Seasons)  157 Sims,  23 Lots,  81 story telling pictures
Pleasantview (Original)  662 Sims,  179 Lots,  180 story telling pictures
Strangetown (Original)  179 Sims,  11 Lots, 0 story telling pictures
Veronaville (Original)  181 Sims,  26 Lots,  0 story telling pictures


That's a lot of Sims lots and story telling pictures esp. if we don't use any of them!! It's 786 Mb. That's a lot of space too.

To test the load time, I'm recording the start time, and the time that the hoods come up on the main screen as 1st time, the time it takes to load Pleasantview as the 2nd time, and the time it takes to load the Caliente House 3rd time. (I've chosen Pleasantview and the Caliente House because everyone has that, so you can do it yourself if you want)

Why? Because we want to limit all 3 load times, not just the one into the game. We need to know where we start, to know if the changes are good or not. This is an experiment, remember - I don't know the answers to the questions until I find out.

We also want to know what happens if we add in the Maxis-add on downloads (that's all the stuff from Maxis on the exchange(73 Objects) then re-test the load time.

We also want to know how long a game with custom content will take.

 

Vanilla Add-Ons

With 1Gig Custom Content
Initial Load

4:11 minutes    

 3:20 minutes   11:45 minutes
Neighbourhood Load 55 seconds       29 seconds 1:15 minutes
House Load 55 seconds       35 seconds 1:00 minutes

Note: Vanilla is larger than the add-on. I think this has something to do with when it is loaded - Vanilla was loaded first from the unused system and I think there were background tasks still going on. Add-ons was loaded after the Vanilla test had been run. If I was being completely thorough I'd run it around the other way to make sure. However, I'm not THAT thorough. So maybe later.

OK - so we've got our benchmark.

That lets us answer our first question: Is this Do-able? YES

It also gives us our next step, and our next question, for next time - Can we improve the base load times?