Crinrict - that is a great idea for people who like to come back to it. I know once you know some of the things you know what to look for and how to prevent others.
Amjoie - it breaks routing - which is not exactly the same thing as routing failure. Routing failure is when a sim refuses to go somewhere and does that little fit they do and gets the crossed out thought bubble. I wish it was that as that is fixable just by getting things out of the way causing the problem. But what I am talking about is breaking the routing where little hole show up all over the map that become traps for tourists and sims of all type - you know you have it because the game will get little freezes for no reason - I call them hiccups and hesitations - but it will be all over the map with no pinpointable area of problem. But when routing breaks, it cannot be fixed in a save - all you can do is go back to a earlier save before the routing broke and try not to repeat what you did to break it. I encounter it a lot in testing worlds for mainly new creaters that did not reset the routing after they finished working on their world - as working on a world breaks the routing, but in CAW they just basically push one little button and it totally resets the routing in the whole world so it run smooth and doesn't have this constant freezing all over creation.
When the world editor first came out routing never broke - you could add lots through out an empty world, but it is as if the editor was never updated with each EP or something because every single ep since we started getting the routing to break after extensively using that editor. I found it right after Late night when I downloaded a totally empty world. All went well for the first 2 dozen lots i added, but then I started getting those indications of broken routing. Being a world tester i had learned to look for this, so i know what it is when I see it. After the first indication I did continue to add lots but it got progressively worse. So I went back and started over again. I did this 3 times and everytime I got around 28-30 lots added routing got broken.
Anyway I dealt with it all week, and it was the largest world size - so I thought maybe it just was not a stable world - like I said we did not used to be able to break routing in saves - so it was not making a lot of sense to me. But then I ended up trying to add lots to several other large world -these by top CAW creator that I had played the worlds many times before with no problem, and again it happened about lot 28 or so. So perplexed i turned to the creator - a dear friend as well, and eventually we figured out it was not the worlds but the editor doing it. I brought my info to the forum I hung on and shared it. So plenty of top testers - several of which thought I was nuts probably - finally found out what I was saying was true. But we all agreed well being able to do over two dozen lots would be okay in worlds that had lots already - as who usually adds that many anyway? But we learned with each new ep the number before that breakage has occurred has steadily declined. It is all a matter of luck if you can even get away with 10 lots - you can if you keep them small and are really lucky. But most people add the big lots, and the editor just does not seem to handle that well. But all you look for is steady hesitations all over the hood. Like a sim may freeze in mid jog run some more, freeze, run some more, freeze. Constantly. it is not a periodic little freeze every now and then - that is generally something else. It is a steady constant thing - it never last but a second but it is constant and almost impossible to play a game because sims all over the hood do this eventually and it will steadily get worse and spread.
But it used to only happen with new, generally a creators first world, where they don't realize they need to reset routing after they are through doing anything to the world. It is the last step they need to do before uploading or making it availiable for othrs to test the world. Then when they make any corrections in the world they have to again reset the routing. But you can't do anything about it at play level - or if you can I have yet to find a way to do it. So I was going nuts trying to figure out how game play can break a basically sealed worlds routing. Well it was not actually hurting the world technically - it was only breaking the routing in the save - so no one can fix it. But EA needs to figure out why laying a half dozen lots will break the routing and turn that editor to not do it or update it or something. But if you are lucky you might get in a hand ful of lots. If it starts that hesitating - which you best way to see it is put a sim on one of the new lots and send them jogging and bicycling. If you are getting the problem you will see it.
