Posted by adventfear
In my opinion, The Sims 3 is a good game with a bad bug. One that cannot be fixed in a patch. You see, from what I gather, the entire town is loaded up from the start, every Sim is programmed in one big “shell” and the game runs each of these Sims at the same time.
While TS2 had one house/area per loading screen, and the visiting Sim teleported to the end of the street and walked in, that’s not what the developers should go back to when making The Sims 4.
Many open world games get away with what they do by hiding the rest of the world behind hidden loading screens. The game loads these areas silently when you move the character into the next area. Skyrim does it a lot, and there’s even a loading screen when fast traveling.
What The Sims 4 should do is exactly that. Each area of the open neighborhood should be within these “cells” and when you move the camera, the other cell that you move it into loads silently, so the entire neighborhood doesn’t have to load at the same time. Sims you don’t play would be loaded doing random things to give the illusion that they’ve been living their life.
When you select another Sim, the game would simply load back around them no matter what “cell” they’re in and where the camera is.
This pic is just a visual reference to how the neighborhood would be split up into different areas.
![[IMG]](https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/1529717_577581098985357_626296663_o.jpg)
Posted by Anavastia
I agree Cell loading is more advanced these days and much better for loading large amounts of information. Many advanced games do this now.
Skyrim does have a lot of loading for dungeons, towns, and homes and Sims 4 doesn’t have to load in this same manner. To do cell loading you don’t have to revert back to single lot loading. However the map needs to cut down on how much it’s loading. Even with advanced computer systems they can only load so much in a given amount of time. Too much information coming is a problem and it creates bigger problems. So finding a smoother way of running an open neighborhood is important. Especially since sims is the only simulator game that’s really running everything all at once.
Second sims 3 does some form of cell loading but on a mass scale. Basically the map is divided into large zones. The zone that is active is what actually loads up as the player moves through the map the zone activates and loads. However it’s loading too much at once and so players a lot of times will be waiting for the meshes to load their textures, animations to load, etc. These can cause a lot of lag in some areas. Many times it’s not just the open map that’s the problem. Corrupted sims can cause issues in the map or spawning items as well. The car spawn bug is a problem as well.
Anyway i agree with what your saying the one big thing about sims was having a lot of sims in a map. I love having a lot of sims in one lot and i had that problem where most of my town venue’s are empty. (again i think a design flow with the community lots themselves and the traits). So the more people in a town the better. I’m hoping the sims team found better solutions to make the maps more enjoyable and playable for users.
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