Looking for a pair of lost men's boots

@pax1sw The problem is that no matter how much RAM you have, a 32 bit game can only use 4 GB of it.

@pax1sw The point igazor was making (or one of them, anyway) is that TS3 as currently built is inherently limited and close to its breaking point partly because it is 32-bit by nature (also because bugs, glitches, lack of optimization of various functions, etc.). No matter what the specs of your computer, any 32-bit program can by definition only utilize 4 GB RAM at any given time. (32-bit: 2^32 addresses, or 4,294,967,296) Furthermore, the game doesn't release all the RAM that it's done using as you play, so it hits the limit even sooner. In practice, TS3 can only get up to ~3.5 GB before it becomes unstable and is in danger of crashing from lack of RAM, which leads to an Error 12 (out of resources). Adding more EPs would probably push the game so close to the RAM limit on startup that it would be essentially unplayable for any meaningful length of time. A 64-bit program is not limited in this way, as 2^64 is obviously a much larger number of addresses.

In theory, TS3 could be remade into a 64-bit game. Exactly how much work this would require seems to be at least partly a matter of debate, but what is clear is that it would take more resources than EA has shown any interest in investing. This is one of the things that's so frustrating to many TS3 fans—that instead of taking the time to optimize a wonderful game, EA decided to make TS4 as it is. Without taking any unnecessary shots at the newer game (we do that enough around here already), TS4 represents a decision to make a new imperfect product to sell instead of fixing an older one that's still popular but in need of some serious work to function as it should. But that's the kind of discussion that brings out anger and bitterness and gets threads closed all the time.

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.

"IreneSwift;c-16420588" wrote:
@pax1sw The problem is that no matter how much RAM you have, a 32 bit game can only use 4 GB of it.

True, but average RAM is 2013 was 4GB, and what I was trying to say is I definitely have that. My son told me I could have a throughput problem with a 32-bit game, since it couldn't address more than 4GB, so the extra RAM was useless for TS3.

"puzzlezaddict;c-16420604" wrote:
@pax1sw The point igazor was making (or one of them, anyway) is that TS3 as currently built is inherently limited and close to its breaking point partly because it is 32-bit by nature (also because bugs, glitches, lack of optimization of various functions, etc.). No matter what the specs of your computer, any 32-bit program can by definition only utilize 4 GB RAM at any given time. (32-bit: 2^32 addresses, or 4,294,967,296) Furthermore, the game doesn't release all the RAM that it's done using as you play, so it hits the limit even sooner. In practice, TS3 can only get up to ~3.5 GB before it becomes unstable and is in danger of crashing from lack of RAM, which leads to an Error 12 (out of resources). Adding more EPs would probably push the game so close to the RAM limit on startup that it would be essentially unplayable for any meaningful length of time. A 64-bit program is not limited in this way, as 2^64 is obviously a much larger number of addresses.

In theory, TS3 could be remade into a 64-bit game. Exactly how much work this would require seems to be at least partly a matter of debate, but what is clear is that it would take more resources than EA has shown any interest in investing. This is one of the things that's so frustrating to many TS3 fans—that instead of taking the time to optimize a wonderful game, EA decided to make TS4 as it is. Without taking any unnecessary shots at the newer game (we do that enough around here already), TS4 represents a decision to make a new imperfect product to sell instead of fixing an older one that's still popular but in need of some serious work to function as it should. But that's the kind of discussion that brings out anger and bitterness and gets threads closed all the time.

That was amazingly informative, thank you!

I certainly wasn't questioning Igazor's superior knowledge on the subject! Though I did understand what he was saying, I was questioning the inability to salvage it (my "planned obsolescence" query). Like Star Trek, some things just won't die easily, the fan base is too large and, well... fanatical. :wink: TS3 is in that fandom category. Logic is suspended.

Wish they'd pay a team of people who knew TS3's guts (like NRaas) to fix the darned thing. It's not like the upgrade wouldn't pay for itself with dividends. Of course, it would probably drive a stake through TS4's heart when it went public.

igazor, First, let me apologize if I gave the impression I was disagreeing with you, I certainly wasn't! It's just I'm rather Sim-blah-Sim-blah-blah deprived, so too many unanswered questions got dumped on you at once. Realizing Error Code 12 limited the size of my neighborhoods frustrated me, I have a LOT of great houses I'd like to include, but they're really heavy and a neighborhood won't handle over 2 safely, with 3 the Saves take forever, sweating it all the way. At that point with my current game.

I'd forgotten how exciting it was to hear about TS3's Open World format, but TS2 was great in its day, and I don't remember it being as restricted as TS4. I actually made objects for TS1, that was really fun. Back then TS1 was at the top of graphics. With each new version the graphics got better and the Sims became less human, guess a beautiful zombie TS4 as the last version is appropriate. When I first started playing TS3 I remember lamenting how much of the humanity of the TS2 simmies had been lost.

Thank you so much for replying to me, you are a fun read on top of being informative. Wish your revelations had a bit more hope for TS3 in them though. LOL You and puzzleaddict have given me some info I'd hunted all over for but couldn't find, cleared up a lot of mud. I've saved copies of both your replies.

@pax1sw - No worries and no disagreements detected. Thought this was just a fun conversation about a game about which we are all passionate, maybe a bit too much for our own mental health in some cases, but there we have it. ;)

In all fairness I should point out that I was a relative latecomer to the game, relative to my colleagues at NRaas and some players here anyway. I didn't install and begin playing it until the end of 2011. And although I remember TS1 fondly I never played TS2, so much of my historical ramblings about that one and the earlier days of TS3 are based on what I have since learned from others.

But was TS2 not restricted in that the entire world was not really simulated at the same time and wasn't it impossible to see and travel through all of it without loading screens along the way, or am I misunderstanding its structure? I also thought it was not possible to visit other sims in their own homes for whatever reason as the inactive households were really frozen in time and their own progression when not being played.

igazor, SO glad you weren't insulted! Being addicted to The Sims is a definite problem, but at least you don't have to make a level, get to a safe space or finish a crawl to pause it or even save where you are and quit, that's a BIG plus.

You know... I can't answer you without being afraid I'm lying! Ashamed to admit it, but TS1 and TS2 were too long ago for me to talk with certainty about them without playing them again for a quick reminder, right now they mix together with a spill-over of TS3. I have both of them installed, though. Think I'll take a trip down Simmie Lane and remember what I'd chosen to forget. Bet I'm going to be sorry I stopped playing TS2 all over again when I fire it up, those simmies were the peak of Simdom for personality realism... if memory serves... Took months to settle into TS3 and appreciate it fully, missed the TS2-style sims so much. One clear memory snippet I've held onto from TS2 is 2 of my simmies walking up to a street corner, think they were about to cross the street. That's it right now. I'll boot up TS1 and TS2, see what I remember and get back to you. :blush:

OK, igazor, I've played TS2 for a couple of days, can anybody say "TOTAL memory failure"?! It's embarrassing how much NOTHING I remember about TS2! It's not ANYthing like I remember it being, in fact, it's an awful lot like TS4 as far as game format. On top of it all, the CAS sucks in comparison to TS3 (but everybody knows that). To give it its due, it was the best for its time. Also, I lost ALL my previous content when my power supply blew and fried everything, all my old saved games are long gone, so couldn't refresh my memory with any of them. To top it off, I lost all the discs (and I once had them all) when our house flooded, so had to rely on what EA thinks I had, which is not anywhere near everything I'd registered with them (same EA memory-hole with TS3).

Too late to make a long story short, but the end line is: TS3 blows away TS2. TS2's house designing graphics held up well, though, and even with a limited object catalog... (no big bathtub or hot tub, and I'd played with them forever, whatever EP they came with)... the number of objects is impressive. Otherwise, those are some severely socially needy sims, SHEESH! Wish EA remembered I had Making Magic... wait, maybe they do and I just haven't stumbled over the objects for that EP yet. Too bad, I see now it was only my intransigence that made it so hard for me to transition to TS3.

Now I'm insecure... could I be doing the same thing to TS4? Nope. That little "I found a treasure chest" dance is enough to make me nix the entire game. LOL But TS4 does have some good points, so I'm going to lay off it from now on. It's not TS3, but then nothing is, TS3 is the epitome of Sim perfection. Like the '76 Chevy Impala my grandparents had, it's more than the sum of its parts.

@pax1sw - If you contact EA Customer Support and prove that you have purchased/registered/own even one tiny bit of TS2, or if you are lucky and get a sympathetic support agent and just say "TS2" or prove that you know how to spell it, they may give you the TS2 Ultimate Collection free of (further) charge to run by way of Origin.

I keep meaning to do this myself to finally give that iteration a try and see what all the fuss was about, but since I honestly never owned TS2 it never seemed quite proper to ask. Maybe one of these days. :)