Height
Can changing a Sim’s height please be a thing?
Forum Discussion
Hi @SheriGR As @Trismagistos mentioned, there are mods that already add height sliders and the various clothing items seem to adjust just fine. The biggest problem is the animations for some of the social interactions like hugging and kissing seem off. I know that not everyone wants mods in their games anyway so I am going to Me Too this as well. I would love to see this added and maybe not even a true slider but a few presets like short and extra short to average to tall and extra tall. This might make it easier to adjust the animations for those social interactions than if they went with a true slider.
@RandomBuzziness That's about it. Thousands of animations in the game would have to be expanded exponentially. There would have to be thousands of new animations at least. Even only 10 differences in height would mean 100 new animations for a single animation like kissing. Some might be kept single like getting a book from a bookshelf, but ones that regard two sims, it's talking about 10^2 for each one.
If they do that, I hope people have BIG hard drives.
If they do that, I hope people have BIG hard drives.
@Psychotps I think you make a good point about the need to adjust so many things for a new height animation. I'm not familiar with game code, but I'm guessing the fact that since animations are in place for the 'teen' height that adding a 2nd adult height that's the same as the teen height would take far less adjustment to have things interact properly?
The way I see it is like this...
Imagine there is a "height" slider in CAS. You click on it to drag it up. It goes up a notch. How many notches are there total? 5? 10? Let's say there are only TWO. Two different heights for your sim.
Let's say Sim1 and Sim2 are both at height "1" (of 2) The animation would not need one sim to "bend" over to align the kiss properly.(Edit: Oh, now that's interesting. Would two sims at height "1" use the same animation as two sims at height "2"???)
If Sim1 is at height 1 and Sim2 is at height 2, the animation would need to be adjusted so a height 1 sim can properly tilt their head back to properly align with a height 2 sim. And vice-versa the height 2 sim tilts their head down to meet the height 1 sim.
That would require 4 animations.1->1, 1->2, 2->1, 2->2
With 10 different "notches" on the slider, you'd need 100 animations for each different height to match properly. You might be able to get away with fobbing it down a little and say like heights 1-3 use one animation, 4-6 use a second one... but you're still talking a LOT more animations.
I didn't even think about teens. Are teens the same height? If not, If you want teens/young adults to be included, then double the number of animations. Adults too? Holy cow... I'll need a calculator to figure that one out. I think it'd be something like (10^2)^3 animations?I suppose it depends on if Teens/Young Adults/Adults are the exact same height as far as animation alignment is concerned. If they are the same height, then it would only be 10^2 animations total per. It would also depend on how different the actual height is per "notch". If it's not very much, then you may only need 1 new animation per 2-3 "notches". That would bring it down to something like 5^2 or 4^2. But given the number of total animations in the game, even 3 additional animations per animation (2^2) may end up being hundreds of thousands of new animations...
PS... I hope I didn't get too "technical"... I tried to simplify...
@Psychotps No, what I mean is teens are slightly shorter than adults, if I remember correctly, so there should already be interactions in place for that one additional height that they could attach to the one additional adult height. No worries about 'technical'. I do code, but mine is web design, not game code. 😉
It will not so much depend on bigger hard drives @Psychotps. It will probably ask a lot of computing power i.e. processor speed and Random Acces Memory. When you want to have the infinite numbers your calculated you will need something like a super or a quantum computer. But it is not purely the difference in height. When you look at the animation programs which you can use to make your own cc there is the possibility to install extra bones and rigs, thus you will be able to bend a neck a little bit extra. This results in not creating that much extra animation interactions. The Sims in CAS will look more lifelike as well, when there is the possibility of height sliders. I suggest that they could start with for instance 2 different body lengths for each cohort.
When they would also start sliding the legs or arms your initial calculations will be definitely more correct.
By the way, in a number of occasions i noticed that kids of let say 5-12 years seem to stretch more than would be "humanly' possible in their hugging interactions with older, grown-up sims. I never heard any one on any forum complain about these 'glitches'- @Trismagistos I highly doubt it would take more CPU power. It's not like it will be running MORE animations at the same time, or even more complex ones, more bones, points, etc. It will just be a larger selection (a MUCH larger selection) of animations to choose from.
Instead of playing a single animation, it will have to choose from a library of 100 animation variants of that one animation depending on sim heights and play the one single animation it selected. It's not going to play all 100 at the same time. And the library of 99 additional animations will take disk space. (Granted, I have no idea how MUCH disk space a single animation takes... I imagine it will be quite a lot since there are likely thousands of existing animations, all multiplied by 100...)
The reason the kids stretch (This will undoubtedly get technical) is that the animations depend on the vertex points to be in a certain position so it can run the animation. If the animation is for a young adult, and for some reason it gets mistakenly used on a toddler, the toddler will appear to "stretch" to accommodate the incorrect animation.
Toddlers should always have their own library of animations. Somehow an animation for a larger sim was mistakenly used on a smaller sim it wasn't designed for.Sorry @Psychotps, but i totally disagree with you. I just checked your statement and made a screenshot of the task manager and checked my Sims 4 folder twice. My Sims 4 folder contains round about 10 GB. almost 1.5 GB is custom music and over 2.2 GB of the space is taken up by al sorts of mods and scripting etc. That boils down to 6.3 GB for all the Sims 4 expansion packs etc.
I have a self/homemade gaming PC (Windows 10 pro) with an i9 processor and 32 Gig RAM, I use one of the newest Nvidia graphic cards: GeForce RTX 2080 Super. The rest of the specs are not needed in this discussion but i am willing to give them if you want them.
When i start up the Sims 4 it initially takes up 10% of the processor and almost half of the RAM. Agreed i also run a couple of other programs simultaneously which will make up for the rest of the usage.Just check the screenshot i attached. I also attached a second screenshot to show you how much everything uses when the game is in full swing.
In the past, for Sims 3, i made some mods myself including a couple of animations. Okay i think they sucked that is why i stopped making them. I leave that task to the more nerdy brains. Nowadays i just enjoy playing Sims 4.
