Looking for a pair of lost men's boots
A few months ago I began playing The Sims 3 in earnest again and, to my dismay, my favorite pair of men's boots had vanished! Since I have all the Expansion/Stuff Packs installed that I had before as ...
Forum Discussion
Yes, the others have summarized what I was saying quite well. TS3, the entire game with all EPs, does not run better on older hardware, it was nearing its breaking point even before the final two EPs were released. There were actually supposed to be 14 EPs at one point, or at least we can see evidence of the patches "making room" for that many EP slots, but the development cycle didn't pan out that way. The major problem is the lack of optimization. The EPs were designed by teams working independently of each other and do not fit entirely well together, there's memory leaks all over the place, etc. And the ~3.7 GB RAM limit (should be 4 GB, but there is some overhead to account for there) before the game crashes or Error 12s upon trying to save was fine to work around for a while, but by 2013 became absurd and today would be an unthinkable restriction on a game as far reaching and complex as this one became while still under development.
It would at least be nice if the game were to tap us on the shoulder before it for any reason tries to reach for more RAM than it can possibly use without losing its mind, and warn us that something bad is about to happen if we don't save (as) now, quit, and scale things back on the next session. But no, instead it just reaches for more RAM and then goes belly up. Have you ever tried to do 12- or 16-digit arithmetic on an 8-digit calculator? As long as one doesn't divide by zero, the overflow errors can be suppressed but the answers displayed will never make any sense. That's kind of what happens to the RAM registers when the 32-bit imposed limit is reached and the game goes into the crash or Error 12 danger zone.
Also, for the sake of accuracy -- none of the other sims games had an Open World. At least, not anything even close to what TS3 has. This was a bold and innovative step in the game's development but also contributed heavily to its breaking point. The way the game was originally designed and released, you can still see this if you install an original retail store disc of the base game only with no patches or use the NRaas HomeOpener mod, all of the households in town were in high degrees of simulation all of the time. Sims were cooking their own meals, doing family related stuff, arguing, playing games, showering, cleaning the house, tending to the kids, sleeping, woohooing, working on their own skills, etc. all of the time and you could see them doing these things if you looked inside their homes. Unless your world had a population of about ten households or fewer, that would have been a recipe for disaster if they kept it in. Instead, as of a patch that was released before the first EP came out, they slapped a bandage on the whole thing by making most inactive households go into semi-hibernation mode when they were home and not being visited by the active household with the game itself taking care of inactive resident sims' needs for them. If you look inside their homes now, most (not all) of them will be invisible or just standing there staring at their own walls.
Also at the time the game was not yet Large Address Aware (LAA), this didn't happen until Patch 1.17 that was released alongside of LateNite, so even on Windows the game could only recognize and work with 2 GB of RAM no matter how much the player had installed. Players on the Mac version of the game still have this restriction in place, there was no LAA patch for them and due to the goofy way the game was ported into OS X, there coudn't have been one. Had the developers not changed direction with total world simulation at all times and across all households, the game would have become unplayable very quickly along its evolution route on either operating system.
Don't get me wrong, I love TS3, am still totally fascinated by it and the creativity that went into the game's design that I am now complaining about, and won't even play its successor because that one, a very different game, just does not interest me. So no, whatever the question was, for many of us TS4 was certainly not the answer. But I do wish they had kept going in the direction they started, found a way to make the Open World work properly as systems available to us players became more and more sophisticated, while still accounting for players on more mid-range computers. But apparently rebuilding the game engine and continuing on in the path that TS3 could have started was not cost-effective nor an enticing enough direction to have taken. Maybe we'll see an about-face with TS5 or the one that comes after that, there is no way of knowing yet, or maybe TS3 is really the best that we who love it for the Open World and the flexibility it has as a story telling and creation platform are going to get (much as what happened with prior versions of SimCity).
As for the NRaas contributions, well like so many other TS3 mods out there some of them extend gameplay in ways that the developers never really intended. That's part of the nature of game modding, giving players some new choices and ways to extend and control their games as they wish. But the mods that are meant strictly to help solve the game's issues and actually keep things playable as part of or their entire purview -- that would be Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Register, Traffic, Traveler, to an extent GoHere, and StoryProgression for those who embrace it, that all could have been done by EA had they chosen to invest more resources into their own product. The mods are amazing, couldn't imagine wanting to play in the manner that I do or being able to keep an ongoing game moving forward for many generations while staying in the same world(s) without them now, but a lot of what they take care of for us in an otherwise perfect world (HA!) really shouldn't have been necessary.
It would at least be nice if the game were to tap us on the shoulder before it for any reason tries to reach for more RAM than it can possibly use without losing its mind, and warn us that something bad is about to happen if we don't save (as) now, quit, and scale things back on the next session. But no, instead it just reaches for more RAM and then goes belly up. Have you ever tried to do 12- or 16-digit arithmetic on an 8-digit calculator? As long as one doesn't divide by zero, the overflow errors can be suppressed but the answers displayed will never make any sense. That's kind of what happens to the RAM registers when the 32-bit imposed limit is reached and the game goes into the crash or Error 12 danger zone.
Also, for the sake of accuracy -- none of the other sims games had an Open World. At least, not anything even close to what TS3 has. This was a bold and innovative step in the game's development but also contributed heavily to its breaking point. The way the game was originally designed and released, you can still see this if you install an original retail store disc of the base game only with no patches or use the NRaas HomeOpener mod, all of the households in town were in high degrees of simulation all of the time. Sims were cooking their own meals, doing family related stuff, arguing, playing games, showering, cleaning the house, tending to the kids, sleeping, woohooing, working on their own skills, etc. all of the time and you could see them doing these things if you looked inside their homes. Unless your world had a population of about ten households or fewer, that would have been a recipe for disaster if they kept it in. Instead, as of a patch that was released before the first EP came out, they slapped a bandage on the whole thing by making most inactive households go into semi-hibernation mode when they were home and not being visited by the active household with the game itself taking care of inactive resident sims' needs for them. If you look inside their homes now, most (not all) of them will be invisible or just standing there staring at their own walls.
Also at the time the game was not yet Large Address Aware (LAA), this didn't happen until Patch 1.17 that was released alongside of LateNite, so even on Windows the game could only recognize and work with 2 GB of RAM no matter how much the player had installed. Players on the Mac version of the game still have this restriction in place, there was no LAA patch for them and due to the goofy way the game was ported into OS X, there coudn't have been one. Had the developers not changed direction with total world simulation at all times and across all households, the game would have become unplayable very quickly along its evolution route on either operating system.
Don't get me wrong, I love TS3, am still totally fascinated by it and the creativity that went into the game's design that I am now complaining about, and won't even play its successor because that one, a very different game, just does not interest me. So no, whatever the question was, for many of us TS4 was certainly not the answer. But I do wish they had kept going in the direction they started, found a way to make the Open World work properly as systems available to us players became more and more sophisticated, while still accounting for players on more mid-range computers. But apparently rebuilding the game engine and continuing on in the path that TS3 could have started was not cost-effective nor an enticing enough direction to have taken. Maybe we'll see an about-face with TS5 or the one that comes after that, there is no way of knowing yet, or maybe TS3 is really the best that we who love it for the Open World and the flexibility it has as a story telling and creation platform are going to get (much as what happened with prior versions of SimCity).
As for the NRaas contributions, well like so many other TS3 mods out there some of them extend gameplay in ways that the developers never really intended. That's part of the nature of game modding, giving players some new choices and ways to extend and control their games as they wish. But the mods that are meant strictly to help solve the game's issues and actually keep things playable as part of or their entire purview -- that would be Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Register, Traffic, Traveler, to an extent GoHere, and StoryProgression for those who embrace it, that all could have been done by EA had they chosen to invest more resources into their own product. The mods are amazing, couldn't imagine wanting to play in the manner that I do or being able to keep an ongoing game moving forward for many generations while staying in the same world(s) without them now, but a lot of what they take care of for us in an otherwise perfect world (HA!) really shouldn't have been necessary.
