[Mods] Pie Menu Lag Diagnosis + Helpers

With more packs having recently come out, there is a predictable increase in people noticing and asking about pie menu lag.This post is to help you understand and address that.

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Before you read this post, I remind you of the 🔗 previous Public Safety Announcement Post about Pie Menu Lag.

I will summarize here a piece from the old post, as an intro:

WHAT CAUSES PIE MENU LAG?

It's not one mod or one pack making things slow, but the combination of all of them you have installed, equated to the performance of your computer.

More packs installed = more demands on performance

More gameplay mods installed = more demands on performance

More demands on performance = growing strain which at some point the processor 'piece' mobilized by TS4 might not be able to handle well anymore (the stronger your processor, the more such strain it can handle)

That said, mods / packs that add a lot more interactions to sims, and especially those that add them to all Sims at all times instead of more contextually, will have more effect than mods that add only barely any interactions or add many but entirely contextually.

What YOU can do if you experience Pie Menu Lag:

- be SELECTIVE about what you put in your game, be it mods or packs. Be picky with your mods AND your packs. For an example: Growing Together was a massive resource hog in my game and my computer was weak, so I used to play with it deactivated.

- be REALISTIC about the abilities of your computer. If you play with a weak computer, upgrading is the most effective solution. That said -

be REALISTIC about the Sims performance abilities. The Sims is bottle-necked by its foundations ("It's single-thread bottlenecked" as said by ThePancake1). At some point, due to that, even a state-of-the-art gaming computer will notice lag if you the player are not selective about the packs and mods you put in your game.

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That said - I am releasing 3 related features here, about pie menu lag and diagnosing it:

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1: A utility for mod users to diagnose first-hand their Pie Menu Load & Lag

- ADDED TO SIM INFO MANAGER. 

It informs on what in your mods folder is adding what interactions to a given sim at any given precise time (as such things shift constantly). This can help users see what mods add what when, and help modders see where to try to optimize when possible. 

It informs on the time taken for the pie menu to show for a given sims at any given precise time.

It also informs on how long each interaction takes to go through its tests for a given sims at any given precise time. This can help users see what interactions are more strenuous, and help modders see where to try to optimize when possible. 

This information also serves to support educated decisions if needing to remove mods (or packs!) to reduce pie menu lag.

Here's what the full reports look like:

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2: An independent mod to reduce EA pie menu load WITHOUT removing anything: 'Sim Pie Menu Load Helper: EA'

PLEASE UNDERSTAND: once you're in the Lag Zone, you'll STILL be in the Lag Zone until enough has been removed to get out of it. Will this make a perceptible difference to your pie menu lag? Will it help at all? I make NO GUARANTEES because I can't, it depends on the CUMULATIVE effect of everything in your game.

What it does is bring NON-gameplay-altering optimizations to some EA stuff. It reduces the constant interaction load by taking some EA interactions (+=250 of them) that were a little carelessly shoved onto all sims at all times and making them instead load only on the Sims that have a chance to qualify for using them. NOTHING IS REMOVED, NO INTERACTION IS REMOVED FROM ANY CONTEXT, you are losing nothing. The interactions affected are just placed in the 'righter' boxes (which they weren’t), to hopefully improve performance.

3: An independent mod to reduce Pie Menu Delay - with a trade-off:

This one WILL reduce the effort it takes for the pie menu to compute - and therefore, the time. How much? Depends on your lag.

Examples: My lag goes from 0.9s to 0.8s with it; someone with 6 seconds of lag went down to 5 with it.

If you want to calculate your results: - save the game. - Then, use the pie menu load diagnosis tool between two sims - do this TWICE as some variability is normal. - Then exit the game, put this mod in, and do the diagnosis between the same sims at the same save point - twice, this time as well. - Compare the results.

The CAVEAT is that to do so, it makes a change to the pie menu display. It basically has a VISUAL effect similar to the one you get when turning on the EA setting 'Traditional Pie Menu' - but while the EA setting does not improve performance, this mod does.

Here's what that looks like. WITHOUT, contextual actions are shown on front page, before the menus themselves. WITH, the menus are shown without contextual actions on front page.

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REMEMBER: REDUCING YOUR AMOUNT OF GAMEPLAY MODS AND / OR EA PACKS is the MOST EFFECTIVE WAY to reduce your pie menu lag, OTHER THAN UPGRADING your computer if it's weak. Any other measure is, compared to those, measly at best!

DOWNLOAD & Installation:

1 - remove files from previous versions, if any

2 - REQUIRED: Lumpinou's Toolbox Library-Mod.If you don't already have it, grab the REQUIRED "Lumpinou's Toolbox" Library-Mod here (alt: here), and put it into your mods folder or one subfolder, NO DEEPER.

3 - grab the .package file(s) you want from this post (link below), and put it into your mods folder or one subfolder.

************ NEED HELP? Check info & links in this post. If they don't answer your question, contact me on Discord, or here.

Find Index of All Mods here.

1 - Pie menu load diagnosis tool is part of Sim Info Manager, 🔗 here

🔗 2 - Lumpinou_PieMenuLoadHelper_EA.package

🔗 3 - Lumpinou_PieMenuLoadHelper_NoFrontPageSorting.package