tjstreak wrote:
Now consider:
Bridgeport has significant lag problems.
Los Aniegos, at least when if first came out, had serious lag -- to the point of being unplayable.
We see a lot of posts here about creators having problems with lag. What do these worlds have in common? No custom content.
So, if I am to follow your reasoning: if you want a borked world, you will use one without custom content, because the problem worlds are all devoid of custom content.
Please don't confuse your own reasoning for my reasoning.
Yes, Bridgeport has significant lag problem. I will agree that that is a fact. However, most of this lag is caused by the fact that the world itself has some serious errors. There are documented holes in the unroutable terrain, which can have NPC sims spawning in a place where they can't get to the rest of the world, and then causing serious lag by trying repeatedly to find a route where none exists. Because of that and all of the other world and lot errors in the city, I feel that Bridgeport is the absolute worst world that EA has charged money for.
However, I have found Late Night content works wonderfully when placed in Sunset Valley, Riverview, or even Barnacle Bay. The only real issue I have in this case is actually fitting it all in. Similarly, the problems with Bridgeport can be avoided completely by finding a good user created replacement world. Moon Base Charlie and Harmony has worked well for me in the past for that purpose.
Now let me make this as clear as I can. I don't know of a single custom object, skin, or property downloadable from or uploadable to the exchange that can magically turn Bridgeport, a 300 lot monstrosity, or any world with routing errors into something that's actually playable, let alone lag-free. At best, custom content just looks pretty. At worst, it completely destroys the whole game.
Although I haven't published anything yet, that doesn't mean I haven't been trying to make something of my own. I am not finding my world magically bloating to hundreds of lots simply because I chose not to use custom content. In fact, I have near the opposite problem. I have all the commercial lots and rabbit-holes for a Late Night city and 25 residential lots zoned, and haven't even broken the 75 lot mark in my personal sprawl.
From what I can tell, those 200 lot monstrosities that barely run seem to have a lot of cloned residences. 60 commercial lots is reasonable, and pretty close to healthy for an "everything" world. However 3 or 4 houses cloned 40 times each is just plain overkill and bad design. The obvious trouble here is that the world builder is just putting too many unnecessary lots down. The obvious solution for the world builder to implement is to simply remove some lots. The presence or absence of custom content has nothing to do with either this problem or its solution. Cutting down on lots and adding custom content is not going to run any better than simply cutting down on lots period.
And there is
your elephant in the room. Or maybe I should say your
two elephants in the room.
Custom content causes problems. Intentional or not, bad CC on a lot or sim can break your entire game. It's not talked about much here on the Create a World forum because it isn't an issue with CAW itself, but the way the Sims 3 engine, the Exchange, and Simport handles user CC present on lots and sims. Unfortunately, it's rather impossible to create a usable world without at least one lot attached, so we aren't unaffected. But since is really an issue with the game itself, most of the discussion is on the general and technical forums.
Even without custom content, there are still quite a few amateur mistakes that can really break an otherwise good world, including things like broken or bad routing, badly placed lots, too many lots, too many spawners, and likely a few more things I don't really know about. The list seems to change occasionally. Even EA's world-building teams aren't immune to these errors. The vacation worlds in World Adventures and Late Night's Bridgeport are solid proof of that.
There is no line going between those two dots.
