Hello Blazing Falls Residents!
Here at Free My Land we let you use multiple sims at the same time, otherwise known as “multi-boxing.” This is useful for getting your skills up or making some sweet cash on single person objects. but it can be somewhat resource intensive without taking some precautions. So I’d like to make somewhat of a guide to help those without high-end gaming computers or those who just want their computers to run cooler.
1st step: Lowering the settings as-needed.
Generally, when you want to run multiple programs on your computer, they are all share the resources in your computer. This concept usually works without issue, but when your computer is older or slower, all your running programs will want to compete for what’s left of these resources, resulting in problems. In the case of FML-BF we can lower the settings and make up-to 6 times the difference in one easy step.
To do this:
Go ahead and open one instance of the FML-BF Client, log in with your FML-BF account, and choose a Sim.
Once you reach the city screen (pictured above), click the three dots to open the Options Menu, and then the Monitor Icon to access the Graphics Options.
This will bring up a bunch of settings to adjust the graphics quality of the game.
This list is from greatest impact to least, you should start with options on the top first for the best improvement:
- Turning down the “Advanced lighting” Slider (number 10) to “Off, this defaults to “FSO”, but FSO lighting can be quite CPU intensive, this is the single biggest difference you can make.
- Setting the “Surrounding Lots” (number 8) toggle to low, normally on high this loads a static copy of the 8 lots surrounding the lot you are visiting.
- Disabling the “Weather” option (number 3), this will show occasional rain, but can be strenuous on older GPUs.
- Disabling “Anti-Aliasing” (option 1) can drastically speed up the game on slower GPUs and lessen the load on newer GPUs.
- Enabling “Texture Compression” (option 6) can help on systems with less RAM, but it comes at the cost of CPU usage to compress them. It is a trade off but if you play with this option you can find out what works best for you.
- Disabling “Directional Lighting (3D only)” (option 7), this option applies some lighting effects to Sims and objects they hold.
Once you adjust the settings to your liking you should close and then re-open the game. This is to ensure the settings you’ve changed are saved!
2nd Step:
Now that you’ve optimized the game, go ahead and open one instance of FML-BF log in as normal, find a lot and get your Sim skilling or making money when you land.
As soon as you click on an object and your Sim is has things to do, minimize the game.
Now that you have one instance of FML-BF fully loaded, you are now free to start the process above again until you have all this sims you want open.
Once you have all the Sims you want open, keep all but one window minimized to the task-bar when you are able to, this dramatically reduces the resources the game take making your computer run much better.
NOTE: Always make sure you are fully in the lot before launching the next client to avoid file permission errors that can crash the game.