I really urge people testing this to test multiple situations in multiple houses of varying sizes and in multiple contextual situations. That is how I discovered that this fix does not work in every case.
Which, to me, means it's still a glitch.
In other words, it doesn't resolve the issue (not to be negative, but to be clear).
As others have pointed out, it seems to lessen the issue, but not at all to eliminate it.
I am getting different results from what others are claiming here about graphics settings.
Bear with me, as it's a bit involved, but I'll describe my testing routine.
So far, I've repeated this process 24 times with 3 different sim families - 1 with 2 sims, 1 with 4, and 1 with 8 - each family has a different house size ranging from pretty small to extremely large. In all cases, every occurrence of the bug (teleporting and/or long simulation delay) that took place on the Ultra setting with my main system also happens on all other presets and on both other systems.
So you'll forgive me, but I have a hard time accepting that graphic settings make a difference, and it's not just "feeling like" it's happening less because it doesn't happen every single time you try to take an action with an unseen sim.
This isn't a knock against anyone making this claim, mind you, I just don't want QA to think this is solved or has a work-around that makes actually fixing it a lower priority.
Your last paragraph is exactly what grew to concern me: I don't want them thinking this is fixed.
Your testing here is so methodical and so thorough that I feel it's sensible, for me personally, to defer to you on this.
Basically, when I tested for this most recently, I was looking for a single instance in which it occurred. I was waiting, in a sense "daring" my system to glitch. It did. And the same glitch (!) ... my two sims started down the staircase after a long delay, and only when I went upstairs and focused on them. To me, that was it, BZZZZT, game over.
To me, the ideal is, this doesn't happen. Like the game used to be. Before this patch. When sims went about their business like normal little citizens and these problems weren't constantly hanging over game play.
Thank you so much for this post.
(This is also not to discourage any other testing from anyone else. I feel some interesting things are being uncovered, and maybe they can help EA with the coding to fix this? ... I don't know.)
There are certainly additional things I should probably be testing, but I haven't been keeping data on all along, so it would mean starting over somewhat. Mainly, what percentage of the time does the bug occur when there's a fully unloaded sim (and is there any commonality to when the action finally triggers, such as specific clock times), and does this percentage somehow change with different graphics presets. Likewise, I haven't gone the other direction in my testing: taking a non-occurrence of the bug from a lower preset and seeing if it happens on ultra.
I kind of suspect this is happening because the simulation thread for that sim goes into a resource saving state when the sim's 3D model becomes unloaded and the teleport and delay is seen when the lower priority members of the simulation finally trigger their event at less frequent intervals and the position is "teleported" over a larger distance as a catch-up for what would have happened during the time their simulation was effectively paused. If that state tends to trigger, say, every 15 sim minutes or something, depending on how things line up in when you queue the action, there might be times this doesn't appear to happen at all since that catch-up triggers almost right away. Note this is a guess, I don't know nearly enough about how the simulation code for the game works to even know if this is what it does.
Can it be that this bug is a collateral damage of their recent fixing of the "loft stair bug" where some stairs didn't work at all? In any case it is gamebreaking.
I could only follow the rudiments of this, and do not understand fully. I got the point very generally. I did my best!
@alanmichael1 I am not sure. Knowing very little about this stuff, I had a personal hunch at one point that it might be related to the new coding for ponds.
As usual (to me) you are the most plausible-sounding.
At any rate.
It's sad; I haven't been having a very nice "summer of sims" at all. I keep thinking, though, that they're waiting to introduce a next new patch that fixes a bunch of these issues.
