Pool Ladders and Pathing Errors: The Sims Thread

If we could get the base game completeness and creativity of 1, open world, customization of sims and items, and complex individualized gameplay from 3, the AI, expanded gender options, and aesthetics of 4, and the cohesive sense of worldbuilding, total in-game neighborhood creation and customization, and excellent music of 2, I would buy so much Sims. It would astonish you how much Sims I’d buy. I’d go hog wild. Nobody would know what I was doing. I’d be an unstoppable force of games consumerism. EA would wheeze for me to please stop giving them so much money as they drowned in a torrent of endless quarters. If all this awesome means it takes half an hour for the game to boot, SO BE IT.

 

I was on YouTube for an hour and came back to 9 alerts

Was like, ah, @Verily is awake

Edit: I mostly agree to your post except i would not play a sims game that took a half hour to boot up. Maybe a more immersive game like the elder scrolls

 

I am okay with simpler graphics and only running one house at a time, but there's stuff from the games past 2 that I'd want

 

yeah it doesn't need to be open world generally, although maybe having small "vacation worlds" that were open-world and had many systems pared down would work? (like most of the NPCs would be really simple minimal-AI)

also: multithreaded AI and making the game lag if there's a lot of simulation lag despite that, i have heard so many horror stories about sims 4 simulation lag (eg trying to get a sim to do something, it doesn't react, pausing the game and half the sim's needs bottom out while the game is paused and the sim drowns in a puddle they made because the simulation lag was that bad and backlogged stuff continues processing until it catches up when the game is paused)

 

Yeah for whatever reason the sims 4 kinda runs like shit, considering how pared down it is.

 

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Sims 3 with all the expansions and my DLC and CC used to take a good 15 minutes or more to start if you include loading a save. On my current hardware it only takes a few minutes. It was truly very annoying when it took that long, but the costs of making it load significantly faster were things I mostly wasn’t willing to give up.

I don’t have nearly that much stuff for Sims 4, and I do have to say it runs like a dream for me. But damn, those are some truly strange and upsetting bugs.

I have no idea if it’s related, but one thing that really saddens me with Sims 4 vs Sims 3 is the way the simulation and the game’s clock are tied in 4. One of my absolute must haves for 3 is Twallan’s Relativity mod. (I think his stuff is listed under NRAAS Industries? I don’t feel like searching to check.) For 4, many of the gameplay features of his various mods and some other things were recreated by Deaderpool in the single MCCC mod. Relativity is one of those, but it doesn’t quite exactly work?

Relativity in 3 changed the relative speed of the game’s clock, like how long it thought a minute was. It was literally a life saver for sims because I did have significant lag sometimes with the simulation or when pausing. The clock would just keep spinning even though the sim was lagging out or the game was negotiating a pause. Just the amazing amount of lag between queuing an action and the sim actually starting it could ruin their little simulated lives as they missed work, lost their friends, starved to death, peed their pants, etc. With Relativity the sim could take their sweet time standing dead still in a corridor between tasks for as long as they needed. It wasn’t a huge deal. The clock was spinning much slower while they did that, and then they wouldn’t be taking seven months to negotiate a flight of stairs, so there was a lot more leeway in their day anyway.

I came for the lag compensation, but I stayed for the effect on the gameplay. Playable careers became less pressed for time and more fun imo. I could have my bartender sim, whose lifetime goal was to master mixology and own her own establishment, go to her part time job at the spa, then moonlight around town in the evenings working on her mixology and making extra cash. It wasn’t hectic. She could get to a bar, wait for the amount of time the auto-tender took to move out of the way, and serve more than one or two drinks before everything closed for the night. She could spend some time on the dance floor and serve drinks for a while in the same evening without me accidentally destroying the pause button and also myself.

Even though that’s technically a thing in MCCC for 4, apparently the game ties the amount of time for the simulation/animation to the clock? It might actually still be able to compensate for queuing and pausing lag in the same way it did for 3. That really shouldn’t be tied to the clock, but who knows. I don’t have any way to test that theory. I’m just sad that I can’t make days super long without also making the sims themselves slower, though I do feel that the amount of time in a day is fairly well balanced if I’m being fair. (I try to use Relativity anyway because I’m a sad potato with so many pipe dreams, so I suppose it’s distantly possible that my game would be lagging a bit except I don’t notice because everything runs a little slower by default?)

For me, the open world is definitely one of my top priorities. I would even deeply resent playing 3 without awesomemod’s quick household switching, where you don’t have to exit to the world menu to change households. You can hop around during gameplay by clicking on a house (or shift clicking or whatever, I forget) and selecting the switch household option from the interaction menu. 4’s middle ground with the open world, where you can at least move around beyond the property line and into adjacent community lots, is a compromise I can live with, but it feels so much less like a neighborhood to me. I’m the kind of player who slowly collects snapshots of my two dozen favorite families in the bin, then moves everyone into a massive unpopulated neighborhood so I can enjoy playing with all of them at the same time. It’s a lot harder for me to get that feeling in 4, though the game itself is fucking gorgeous and I do love all my sims.

 

I only have the sims so i can take screenshots of the fake people i create. i would be fine with sims 4 if there was a create a world tool like in sims 3, so i could have the fantasy worlds i want to put my fantasy sims in. i am absolute shit at building but it was my favorite thing in sims 3.

 

Psst hey

That vampire mommy from resident evil that the internet is thirsting over? In some of the fan art she's wearing a dress very similar to the one from the fancy party stuff pack. We also have floppy sun hats.

Do what you will with that information...

 

Is there a mod/trick that lets you significantly adjust scale?

 

There are modded height sliders if that's what you're asking

 

i am leary of watching footage because i am a big baby (my limit is like...some dead space, and half life. i was better at watching dead space because instead of youtube i was watching my big brother play in person and he protected me from the scary screen monsters) BUT i require information on the these daughters i have heard reference to

i need information on the monster fam, i cannot make Just The Mommy

i have faith in myself, i think i can manage to watch the trailer and some of the game footage when it comes out later. i will do it for the love of Fancy Monster Ladies

 

anyone know a safe place to get the sims 2, preferably with expansions but i'd be ok with base. i dont like these 'safe' sites with a dozen pop-ups

i would give the sims 3 a try but i have a hard enough time getting the sims 4 to run

edit: fear not, i have received help. maybe soon i can share screenies of townies that dont look like ass

as the graphics get better, the people they put in charge of making sims get worse.

 

also does anyone else think the skin tones managed to get worse after the big update? who on earth has these skintones, they are disgusting XD i was used to using the same like, 8 we used to have and i dont know where they went now. any what if i get a weird colored baby? ea why

 

They seem kind of weird in a vacuum, but I noticed that when I went and looked at one of those Pantone-arranged pictures of real people, a lot of those 'weird' skintones showed up. I don't think they got worse... I think we're just used seeing a very small variety of skintones in games that are almost always skewed toward warm undertones.

 

I am suddenly eleven years old again, watching the sims 2 load up. Thank you, @Wingyl

 

@bornofthesea670 Make sure to get some anti-corruption mods, like No Unlink On Delete and the cleaned up Maxis neighbourhoods!

 

origin has a 50 percent off sale on sims 3 eps so im giving it a shot

am i evil for not wanting generations

i dont care about sims children. they are annoying an the less amount of time i have to spend with them the better XD

 

I also don’t love sims children. They’re a bit dull and needy. Generations did make them a little more interesting, and teens as well. Still, I was iffy about it too. That’s not something I was aching to have more of, certainly not if I had to pay for it. But I did decide to get it after looking into it a bit more. I remember feeling very pleasantly surprised.

I’m sure there are still trailers and reviews, especially reviews from players, out there. I think that’s probably the best way to look into whether you want Generations, because while there’s kid stuff, a lot of it is about making the gameplay feel more robust and connected in every life stage.

(Among the features it does have a couple boarding school options iirc, so if you would like to see less of the kids you can. XD)

I’m pretty sure it’s the source of bachelor/bachelorette parties, which are one of my favorite things in the whole game because they’re just ridiculous in all the best ways. It’s a great combination of life milestone and social event, which is something this expansion would be focused on. The guests go wild and literally party until they drop. My mixologist sim, whose very sizable income came mostly from her nectar making skills, had the best ever bachelorette party.

This is not to say you should buy it. Definitely not if it doesn’t add to the things you care about. It’s been long enough that I’m not the most trustworthy source of information out there. But based on what I remember, I think it may be the most difficult expansion to judge by appearance or impressions based on its advertisement. A lot of what it actually does is more subtle than the things it says it does.

 

Oooh I'd forgotten about boarding school...its only 10 dollars right now so I'll probably grab it

My internet is real slow but I want to buy everything now in case EA stops offering it later like they did sims 2

 

I downloaded the handful of packs id gotten, and now im in Bridgeport trying to figure out the singing career

Is there a singing skill? I have a guitar. Will check Carls sims guide later

I'll probably get more packs if they do another sale, I've gotten most of the ones I wanted (uni, late night, supernatural, a few others)