I have read conflicting reports on the benefits of "bundling " or merging TS2 custom content. Basically some Simmers say that it doesn't make a difference for their loading times, or that it even makes the time wait even worse.

Personally, I had a ridiculous amount of CC (something like 30.000 packages between meshes and recolors - but mostly maxis recolors, which made the game painfully slow to load; say around 20 minutes to half and hour.) which I managed to "bundle" into 12.000+ packages, both meshes and bundled recolors. My game usually loads in 7 minutes total (from launch - to a Sim house.).

So for me it made a huge time difference. I haven't had any particular abnormal issue with crashing or strange things in-game (so far). The only drawback that I can see is that it is not particularly simple to bundle/merge packages in TS2 compared with TS3/TS4. In TS2 it involves far more clicking and SimPE often gets crashy, so for each big bundle package I wanted to create I had to close SimPE and run it again (which takes some time.) - when I compare it with TS4 or TS3 that with certain tools (for example CC Magic) demand so little user-input, it is far more time-consuming to bundle/merge packages in TS2 that in the newer Sims games.

I also don't know if bundling in TS2 affects the Sims or Houses that you create and then perhaps want to share with others. Perhaps all the recolors get packed with the Sims2Pack, bloating the file size? That would be a drawback, although maybe the unneeded files could be removed with the clean installer, but I do not know that since I don't share houses/Sims.

I've had much worse loading times than 20-30 minutes...

I don't bundle files. I prefer being able to move out or edit files, and bundling makes that difficult. The issue with houses and sims would aso bug me (pretty sure the bundled files would follow the sims2pack files).

There are other things you can do to shorten loading times, like less subfoldering, compressing, removing non-package files, file naming (no special characters), and similar.

I have combined PACKAGE files into 1 file a number of times. mostly sim parts.
have not compared load times.

30 K of packages is average for around here and 7 minutes is extremely good. My 10 gigs takes 20 just to hood view. If I could get 7 minutes I'd be dancing.

I get the impression (and might be wrong) that bundling most helps Mac players as it allows them to get around the file limit.

Lol I have no idea how to do that. But my loading time is about 7-10 in my fully loaded game.

20 minutes, Jo?! Adasghshshav

Yeah. I've applied the file limit fixes, but don't really care for the prospect of having random sims going missing if I got it wrong (or if the next Apple OS update breaks the fix again).

And in 13 years of playing I've never deleted anything from in-game, but always closed the Sims and yanked directly from my download folder. So I've been bundling and compressing like crazy since I got a new Mac a few months back, gradually converting the stuff I already had and downloading and bundling a whole load more. Now, for instance, 150 bedding recolours takes up a grand total of 12 files. I should add that I've also been merrily renaming everything at the same time, to a system that makes sense to me and helps me identify what the original file was and who made it, since that helps me reduce the file count even more by using less subfolders. I now separate out to build, buy, mods, etc, with just one subfolder level below that.

Rules I work by:

• Only recolours get bundled. Meshes stay separate. That way I can change the price, the description, the room sort if I decide I want to.

• Recolours get broken up into sets that belong together, where I'm likely to want to keep all of them or none.

• I test in game after bundling, then go back and ruthlessly purge duplicates. That glass recolour that comes with each of six different window frame recolours? I'm going to be deleting five of the six times it shows up.

• All original packages get kept, along with images and zipped copies of my bundles, in a separate but identical folder hierarchy elsewhere on my hard drive. That way I can revert to the original and unbundle (or rebundle differently) if the need arises.

I can't really comment on load speeds, as I have an SSD and only 500 MB/1000 files so far (bundling takes time). But I'm definitely starting to notice that the 7 year old machine I'm phasing out loads a little faster as I gradually reduce its file count by swapping out the old individual files for their bundled replacements.

@DezzyBoo My computer is 8 years old and we are planning on getting a new one made soon. Right now I am not loading my main game at all since last time it had a graphics card crash with spikes coming out of sims. o.O

I'm with simmer22 on this for all the reasons they said. I make a lot of sims for sharing, and bundling would make it impossible to share them without removing all the cc that I use on them. To me it just sounds like it'd be more trouble than it's worth.

I would use AGS for projects, I find building and testing in there much better for the ease and speed.