Re: [FIXED] Open staircase cause routing failures

@Thats_Me_Madz@PenguinFoop Thank you both! After a few days of this, it seems to have gone away on its own? I can't explain it! But thanks for the advice!

I hate that this thread is marked as solved. It is far from solved. I've done every single work around this thread has to offer and still I can't get my sims up the stairs. It is maddening and this game is absolutely not playable!

So I learned my particular problem is actually the shape of the stairs. Due to this exact same problem everyone is having, the work around wouldn't work for me because I had the stairs completely wrapped around itself. It used to work, but with this recent update, the stairs being shaped like that conflicts with the ceiling and all work arounds people have come up with. The infuriating thing about this is that it won't be fixed. I won't be able to use those stairs ever again. I'm regretting more and more ever paying money for this glitch of a game.

Why are you sure, they will not patch this?

Okay, I have not had this issue with stairs except for the one time when it turned out that I had placed a low-hanging light (using bb.moveobjects) so that if it had happened in real life, as you walked up the stairs, you would hit your head on the light since it is a physical object.  In the game world, as the game tried to plot the path from downstairs to upstairs, the path was blocked by the light.  I moved that light and the path was cleared and the stairs were accessible.  

Using bb.moveobjects can make things tricky for this reason.  Because it removes that visual warning that one object is interfering with another and thus may cause issues for your sim's path routing abilities.  So the best thing I can suggest is if you placed objects using bb.moveobjects, try removing those objects and see if the sim can use the stairs.  If they can, you'll know the issue.  If they can't, then you'll know there is an object with the stairs themselves.  

As for making the assumption about what EA cares about, I can only say this.  It's triage.  As was stated a couple of posts ago, the gurus release patches that fix the game when it truly becomes unplayable.  Not being able to use stairs in a specific way hardly makes the whole game un-playable.  Therefore, this stairs issue would be low ranked in triage.  To put it in perspective, let's say you have two issues that you have to deal with:

1. The vast majority of users have game crashes while saving
2. A small number (by comparison) have problems using stairs

Obviously the save issue needs to be addressed first.  For that matter even if both issues affected the same number of players, the save issue would make the game un-playable while the stairs issue would simply have to be done without until the save is fixed.  Add to that the growing list of bugs and glitches and honestly, the stairs really aren't that high of a priority for most gamers.  It's unfortunate that it's an issue for any gamer because it does need fixed but again, there are much higher issues that need to be dealt with first.

Of course I don't work for EA (yet but hopefully one day) so I can't speak specifically to their process but making disparaging comments about them or any other gaming company not caring about the players and only caring about the money does not help the issue.  I felt your frustration when I had the error 22 bug that truly did make the game un-playable since it did cause save issues and thus there was no way to continue that game.  So I do feel your frustration and irritation. 

Also, if you think about it.  If the company only cared about the money, wouldn't they want to fix everything so that the gamers would start giving them more of it?  After all, if the game gets a bad reputation, sales fall and the game dies.  And after reading many threads and viewing/participating in many polls, I can tell you that the support for this game is overwhelming within the community.  This means that EA is focused on the gamer and therefore giving a triple A quality game that the vast majority of us love and play.  Bugs happen, glitches happen, things get broken and need fixing.  This is called life.  So let's just try to keep things in perspective.  AND keep your passion about the game!  That fact that you are frustrated about it means that on some level you do still love it so want to see it better.  Keep that passion just keep the perspective too.  🙂

I think there are a bunch of different stair-related problems being conflated here, thanks to different bug report threads getting combined. The one I'm here for is the one where stairs become unusable if they go through a room where the floor has been deleted, ie, the upper half of a double-height room. Build the floor again, or explode the room so it no longer counts as a room, and functionality returns. As someone further up the thread observed, this seems to affect a number of pre-made lots as well, including the Partihaus lot in Windenburg. (If it still seems to work, check that the room isn't exploded: can you select the whole floorless space as a room, or are each of its walls registering as independent, freestanding entities? I think that's how the Spencer-Kim-Lewis house in Willow Creek works.)

This used to not be a problem. The assumption, therefore, is that it should be an easy fix -- though the reality might be that the development team will have to redo most of their last patch from scratch, which would be anything but easy. My personal suspicion is that two lines of code got switched around so that instead of dealing with the "create opening for stair headroom" question first and then the "floor has been deleted" question after, the game now goes, "Floor has been deleted. Therefore, as there is no floor above the stair to delete, no opening has been made. Since no opening has been made over the stairs, there is no headroom and the stairs cannot be used."

For myself, I think most of my builds are affected. In some cases, the room with the deleted floor is no more than a single square larger than the natural opening made by the stair going through a floor -- perhaps I wanted to maintain a clean rectangular opening for an L-shaped stair, or perhaps I wanted to get rid of an extraneous bit of floor that no one could use. But the point is that this bug would mean me having to do a full audit of all the builds in my game before I can play it again, and then repeat that audit to change things back when the bug is fixed. And then, of course, there are all the builds I've already put on the gallery.