The 4x4 Challenge for Sims 3

"BSIRegina;14278165" wrote:
Oh no, these aren't mods, they're fixes for the broken worlds Maxis designers created and turned loose on us poor unsuspecting souls. The problem is most of the worlds have routing problems that can cause serious lag and instability in a map. It will probably help if I explain how routing works. Each Sim has to decide a path before they head off anywhere. Any destination a Sim seeks must be reachable, aka "routeable". If the destination isn't routeable the Sim will get set in a loop of failed attempts trying to get to that destination. This happened in my game when I had sent a family to "Egypt". Three of the explorers ended up stuck on a bridge trying to get somewhere completely inaccessible. Try as I might with having my active Sim talk to them, I could never get them out of that loop. They'd stop for the conversation then go straight back into the loop. I finally used Master Controller to reset them.

Some causes are on the lot level and easy to fix, like an object behind a locked door or in a room without a door. In those cases a little construction work fixes them right up. The fixes that EllaCharmed has made are for routing problems on the world level. When a world is built there is what in the game is an invisible layer of "routing paint" put over places the world builder doesn't think a Sim should go. Without the routing paint Sims would just be able to walk up the sides of sheer cliffs and get into a number of places that just wouldn't be good for a Sim to get into. The problem is, it's actually fairly easy to leave holes in that routing paint while applying it to the world. Any hole leaves a place that a Sim could potentially try to get to but can't because it's essentially a hole in the middle of no-Sim's-land with no path to it. Also, it's possible for Sims returning from vacations to end up stuck in one of these places when they return home. This actually happened in a custom-made world my sister was using. She'd sent her Sims on a honeymoon and they came back and ended up stuck clear out beyond camera view (that is applied with another paint and stops the camera from going beyond its borders) in an area that hadn't had any no-routing paint applied to it. Her game froze when it happened so she exited without saving and tried to go back into it in hopes of getting her Sims back home safely only the save would never load again.

When it comes down to what we commonly refer to as mods, that's a very personal choice the player has to make because only they can decide what about the game they would like changed with one, but when it comes to the so-called mods like Overwatch and Error Trap that fix problems in the game, everyone should be using those.

I've actually looked into CAW, so I know about the routing paints, I would love to create my own world one day, though I hear it is a time consuming, difficult task. Could you just use resetsim to get them out of the routing issues, I do it all the time when I find someone stuck in the bushes by the science center (I now just delete those darn bushes when I start up a new Sunset) or anywhere else the little dingbats get stuck.

I save my families to the library regularly just incase something drastic happens like getting stuck at university (happened once to my sim Dylan) and having Egypt glitch out on me, I avoid Egypt...