Hey all, new runner here.
I'm actually quite tempted to try to speedrun The Sims 3, but I have an issue. The loading times on my computer are way longer than on the current record, and since the category I try to beat is a 3minutes record, I fear that I can never achieve a good record if my loading times are taking 3 times longer.
How do I solve this ?
Best bet is to set as many settings to minimal as possible, as well as running the least amount of background tasks as possible. Make sure to also ask in the forums here https://www.speedrun.com/ts3 for more specific information on what tools may be allowed to decrease load times
Unfortunately the only simple way is just getting better hardware, I don't know what you currently have but it could be as simple as getting yourself a fast SSD. Such is the main issue with most PC games that do not have load removal, it's simply pay to win with a layer of hidden knowledge and sometimes luck as well.
The other solution being bringing up the issue to the mod / mods and trying to find a compromise for load removal, though don't expect a positive outcome especially if it's a big leaderboard, manually removing load times is a pain in the ass, if you're halfway competent in programming try your hand at making an autosplitter with load removal, though then you do still have to come to an agreement with the mod team as they will have to do the work in updating the leaderboards to make it fair for preexisting runs and that's not exactly always easy.
To give you a point of comparison I do run a game where this is also the case, and on top off that the game in question (EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5) has some absolutely ludicrous loadtime issues that are PC exclusive, long story short when I wanna speedrun that game I have to boot my PC with a specially tweaked BIOS profile in a specially tweaked install of Win10 that also has a tweaked graphic driver install, plug a controller (no I'm not using it but loads are shorter if one is plugged, don't ask why I do not know), run the game off a RAMdisk and reboot the game every single reset, if I don't do that I get beat by console loads, oh an on top of that if I do the main category of the game I have to reset the game multiple times throughout the run as well because if I don't that's 45 minutes of loads throughout the run instead of about 10-15 minutes.
