Thought I’d bump our thread by posting some info from a conversation I had yesterday...
I live with a computer programmer – she writes code for websites, not for games, and she is not a Sims player. But she knows about the problems I’ve been having with the game and I told her about crinricts’s tests as well. She says that the problem sounds to her like “memory leak”.
From what I understand (which maybe isn’t much!), and to take the excessive car issue as an example, each car is an object in the game consisting of a chunk of data with an “address”. So the game might create the chunk and something is supposed to happen to it. This fails somehow, the game forgets the “address” and then creates another chunk. Hence we get tonnes of the wretched cars appearing all over the place and then not disappearing. Eventually of course this consumes too many resources and the game gets slow and glitchy. Overwatch clears out all these failed objects, thus tidying up the game and freeing up resources so it runs properly. Nicki is doing this too, but by manually deleting the cars.
I understand that the cars are not the only issue, and not the only thing that Overwatch is fixing, but other elements of the game, including the sims themselves, are also objects or chunks of data and the same thing can happen to them. She was pretty appalled that this has not been fixed and she said that memory leak is a basic thing that game programmers should test for. But then we have found that EA depends on the players to do most of their testing! I found it interesting to try to understand what’s happening and thought I’d share it here.
