Feedback "Dag Dag to Lag" Post
As a long-time simmer, your article feels somewhat insulting and implies it's our fault that we use your product. You are obviously indicating it's our fault that we buy your packs, but you don't wan...
Forum Discussion
How are players to know if their builds have exceeded the ideal range for peak performance?
- What constitutes as too many mirrors? 5? 10?
- How many is too many Wallpapers? Windows? Doors?
- What is the ideal variety of DLC that can be used for builds? 10? 20?
Right now, players are left to guess. Players have to hope the gallery build they've downloaded and placed doesn't crash their game.
What if players could better participate in averting negative game performance with a useful build tool:
Performance Rating Meter
A possible solution is to implement a Performance Rating Meter on the Lot Settings panel of Build Mode. This would provide players a tool to monitor and control the game performance of their builds.
Performance Rating impacted when:
- Object Count exceeds ideal range (clutter, mirrors, etc)
- Portal objects exceeds ideal count (doors, stairs, etc)
- Exterior objects exceeds ideal count (landscaping, benches, awnings, etc)
- DLC used (more packs, more variety = less performance)
- Animal, insect, pet objects were added
- Gameplay objects were added (crafting, appliance, interactive, etc)
- Platforms added
- Pool added
- Glass roof added
- Pond size, complexity
- Floor levels, Basement added
Low Performance = poor, more processing needed, more lag, more crash risk
High Performance = good, runs smoothly
Provide a warning if a threshold has been reached, then provide a solution on how to correct it: "Too many mirrors have been placed and may decrease game performance. Consider reducing the amount of mirrors on your lot."
Link the Performance Rating Meter to an in-game Lesson that provides tips and information on managing Game Performance.
Gallery Uploads need to identify:
- Performance Rating
- Object count
- Cheats used
- Live edit objects
- Move objects On
- Build cheats
- Alt-place
- Mods used
- Tool mod
This way players know what they are downloading, what they are uploading, and how it could impact their game performance before making the choice to place a gallery build in their game.
In Sims 3 we had the Fire Meter which stopped us exceeding building limits. I wouldn't want to see a return to that in that form, because it would just stop you adding anything once the meter was full and start fires. But it could always be added as a guide. It might be difficult to implement though. There are so many different platforms and hardware specs to take into consideration.
One thing that could also help players with performance issues would be to introduce a toggle to disable Townie generation. We can't do that ourselves and on console it causes massive problems. I'm on Xbox Series X, with excellent processing power and loads of memory but my game will crash if I don't clear out loads of random Townies daily. It's out of control. I don't need them either because I have enough and the ones I do have, aren't showing up but new ones are. They're also covered in all accessories, which we've reported. So when the advice tells us the Sim household total is a factor in performance, to that point I'd say it makes the need for a Townie toggle even more pressing. I've seen so many players ask for this, it's the number one problem in my game. It used to be a weekly task to delete them but now it's daily. I don't get a lot of crashing but when I do it's down to this.
The game is terrible for this on console, when I had ten saves which is the max number of saves you can have on ps4 (not sure if it's different on xbox) I couldn't even play it the lag was so bad even in the manage worlds screen and I had to figure out a fix so I spent about 6 hours going through my saves, removing items, Townies etc and that sort of helped but the lag was still bad so I eventually decided to delete seven of my saves that I hadn't played for a while and clear out the ones I chose to keep by deleting Townies and emptying their houses of everything but essential items like fridges, sofas etc and after that and to this day I never experience any lag in this save and ive got a big house on a large lot with six sims in it but it's always in the back of my mind not to add too much clutter and to regularly check the unplayed households to delete sims, and I never use the gallery or cheats because I really don't want to be in the lag prison again. It has made me really think about what dlc to buy going forward though, I only get what I really want cause I know my game could go back to being unplayable and I don't want that again. There's so many posts I see of people complaining about lag but they don't listen to any recommendations on how to make their experience better, it's hard being nice when you just want to shout, so maybe thats the reason for the wording? I dunno but I do know we shouldn't have to approach playing the sims in this fashion and fix it ourselves but we have to if we want to enjoy our game we don't really have a choice in the matter and that's sad but it is what it is and it'll be that way until sims gets way to big for it's boots and eventually has to be shut down cause it can't handle itself anymore. I will say though this game is one of the most stressful games I play, no other game makes me nervous when an update comes out or makes me worry when something starts getting weird, even pressing play comes with the trepidation of will it load properly this time without any issues 😔
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