Game Engines - some information, please

Those games are not simulation game. You can jump into GTA V and have 100 pedestrians walking around, they won't do much to performance because their code is simply looping animations, basic pathfinding and playing audio. Same for MMOs, other players are simply feeding a server that is not run on your PC their actions and you see them on your client. Those type of games are worlds apart from simulation games.

That's not the case in The Sims. Each sim that is loaded per instance has a vast atray of data to cycle through. Inventory, traits, relationships, hundreds of autonomy options, dozens of interactive items to cycle through, etc. Which sims get pushed per zone and why. How much data is stored in your current save. This is all being processed and calculated at all times.

Granted optimization and bug fixing has been quite rough ever since The Sims 3 so that adds the icing on the cake for performance issues.

"mirta000;c-16979136" wrote:

"Archieonic;c-16979025" wrote:
Those games are not simulation game. You can jump into GTA V and have 100 pedestrians walking around, they won't do much to performance because their code is simply looping animations, basic pathfinding and playing audio. Same for MMOs, other players are simply feeding a server that is not run on your PC their actions and you see them on your client. Those type of games are worlds apart from simulation games.

That's not the case in The Sims. Each sim that is loaded per instance has a vast atray of data to cycle through. Inventory, traits, relationships, hundreds of autonomy options, dozens of interactive items to cycle through, etc. Which sims get pushed per zone and why. How much data is stored in your current save. This is all being processed and calculated at all times.

Granted optimization and bug fixing has been quite rough ever since The Sims 3 so that adds the icing on the cake for performance issues.

erm, The Sims 4 ignores all that. The Sims 2 handled all that and didn't crumble away like that.

Inventory and relationships non player controlable sims most definitely ignore, as they will easily have the interactions to hug, chat, kiss, or fight, no matter your relationship level. Worst enemies will try to autonomously make friends with you. I don't think that it also does any elimination process which sims to push to a zone, heck it can't even keep service sims consistent and it seems like it lacks the care whether or not vampires should be out in daylight, so I'm pretty sure that there's 0 consideration there.

I think a city sim has more consideration for a single person than The Sims 4 really lol. And yeah, I'm curious what kind of monstrocity they built this on too.

No, it doesn't. It's all in the code. Starting by TS2 not having a mechanic that pushes several sims, up to and beyond 10 around the neighborhood.

The fact that they ignore their inventory does not mean the game is not loading it in the background. The fact that enemies may autonomously be friendly is irrelevant to my point that the game per sim calculates tons of autonomous possibilities. Inconsistencies are a result of poorly coded autonomy, which again irrelevant to my point of how autonomy lists and processes affect performance in simulation games.

I'm going by what others report too, since with my specs I run TS4 with 35 mods and all packs at 100-120 FPS most of the time unless I do social events with 40 sims or something like that which breaks the vanilla limit.

Wanna talk monstrocities? Check TS3's engine and code. Spaggheti code is an understatement.

"mirta000;c-16979255" wrote:

"Archieonic;c-16979170" wrote:

No, it doesn't. It's all in the code. Starting by TS2 not having a mechanic that pushes several sims, up to and beyond 10 around the neighborhood.

The fact that they ignore their inventory does not mean the game is not loading it in the background. The fact that enemies may autonomously be friendly is irrelevant to my point that the game per sim calculates tons of autonomous possibilities. Inconsistencies are a result of poorly coded autonomy, which again irrelevant to my point of how autonomy lists and processes affect performance in simulation games.

I'm going by what others report too, since with my specs I run TS4 with 35 mods and all packs at 100-120 FPS most of the time unless I do social events with 40 sims or something like that which breaks the vanilla limit.

Wanna talk monstrocities? Check TS3's engine and code. Spaggheti code is an understatement.

Sims 2 has people walking by your lot all the time. And community lots remember their workers. The Sims 3 works based on actual scheduling.

Do you have some sort of insider info on how The Sims 4 was coded that you know that inventories are taken into account in the background? Because if any sim buys anything, unlike in The Sims 2, once you switch to them it WON'T be in their inventory and they WON'T be in that spot. Meaning for all purposes the inventory is switched off.

I run The Sims 4 with no mods and simulation lag plagues me. The game seems to kill itself in one generation's time. Which is once again why I'm wondering what they made this on.

Walkbys in TS2 are not the same as those rendered to utilize the common areas in TS4, which can escalate to several sims loaded. I.E San Myshuno, where there can be 12 sims in the common areas using the grills, talking, ordering food, etc. There are no such areas in TS2, and as such, walkbys are only loaded into your lot itself and just stroll across.

The functionality for retail is not what I'm talking about. That does not mean inventories are switched off, it means items are set to not be added to inventories in the retail event. A very good thing when you have people buying from big malls and then end up with 50 TVs. Your active sims, or sims that you have actively filled their inventories carry that data whenever they are spawned. You can find the code within the snippet/tuning files for inventory management. I.E sims can access their inventories at all times including NPCs, which is expressed as
True
True




Actor
within the inventory tuning files. However, that's just the surface, the game has over 30 tuning files referencing inventory handling. So no, it's not as simple as "It's switched off" for all sims that are not your active household. No insider info needed, anyone can find that out.

Simulation lag is a rather simple (or simpler than EAxis makes it out to be) issue. In fact it is something disgruntling that a whole dev team hasn't even addressed a little bit to remedy it. It's an issue tied with how the in-game clock interacts with the simulation, and the multitasking "breaks" that multitasking-enabled interactions have.

So by targetting:



and


17

Along with modifying the vanilla standards for interactions via a script mod you get a game that has roughly 75% less simulation lag or better.

Don't get me wrong though, the fact that they haven't done anything about it yet is ridiculous.

So the engine isn't the issue. I've been running my current save for a whooping 375 sim-days with no issues other than the bugs that plague everyone. And of course, if the issue was the engine itself, no amount of mods would work at all since mods either rewrite tuning files or scripts write their own code that utilize the engine.

"mirta000;c-16979494" wrote:

"Archieonic;c-16979399" wrote:

Walkbys in TS2 are not the same as those rendered to utilize the common areas in TS4, which can escalate to several sims loaded. I.E San Myshuno, where there can be 12 sims in the common areas using the grills, talking, ordering food, etc. There are no such areas in TS2, and as such, walkbys are only loaded into your lot itself and just stroll across.

They would be in apartment building common areas and university lots.

And if inventory use is disabled, why even load it?

You could, and even then it would be one single lot, no areas other than that lot were enabled. In TS4 it's constant, all the time. The single algorithm that determines the walkbys is constantly being run 24/7 on any lot. Go to a nightclub? Well, that's, say, 10 sims there + 5+ walkbys. I find the 20 sim limit per zone arbitrary, it should be a setting. I get up to 40 sims in one lot with acceptable performance loss (from 100-120 FPS to 50-80 FPS) That's why I removed it. The devs seem hard bent on deciding for us if our rigs can handle more or not, we can choose that ourselves IMO. In TS2 that algorithm is much simpler and easier on processing power.

Inventory is tied in with Sim Data. It's part of a sim. To separate specific parts of a sim's data you have to build the data structure to support that, which is why the approach to retail is to instead make items marked for sale as non-valid for being input in a sim's inventory. An odd thing is that in theory, in the code, there is the ability for NPC sims to use items from their inventories, but it set as "allow_autonomous false". I'm guessing that is to prevent your other played sims from using up whatever items they have in their inventory that you'd not want them to consume. But it is entirely possible to open that door and you'd have your NPC sims consuming fruits and reading books from their own inventories.

"HannaZoja;c-16980603" wrote:
Very informative, thank you.
It may be OT, but which Mod or Mods are you using to prevent the idle animation bug?

And does it mean, if I run a large Sims 3 word without sims AND switch of story progession, the performance of the game increases greatly?

I think Sims 4 produces large numbers of NPCs, far more than the official number of inhabitants. Sims 3 without Story progression should not do such a thing... Am I right there?

Right. TS2 and TS3 are different because the game only created townies/NPCs when necessary (if you played one, or died etc.) TS3's story progression culls (moves out Sims) or moves them around when it's on. It also has to keep up with every Sim in the world, so turning it off reduces some lag on lower end machines. But that isn't the reason to turn it off, the reason is so you can keep the same Sims in the world without seeing new ones, but the Sim next door may grow up but never move out of Mama's basement. So, it's up to you of what you want to control, let the game move him or her out or turn it off so you never see new townies for awhile, but good thing is you can turn it off and on whenever you want. (Was not in original base).

TS4 culls just to be culling, to make the towns feel more transient. But I think that breaks immersion. It happens every Sunday in your game. A new townie replaces one already there simply to make you think the games has more depth and vibrant, when all it does is ruin your stories, ruin your plans, and ruin the performance.

"HannaZoja;c-16980603" wrote:
Very informative, thank you.
It may be OT, but which Mod or Mods are you using to prevent the idle animation bug?

And does it mean, if I run a large Sims 3 word without sims AND switch of story progession, the performance of the game increases greatly?

I think Sims 4 produces large numbers of NPCs, far more than the official number of inhabitants. Sims 3 without Story progression should not do such a thing... Am I right there?

http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=617117&c=1&goto=newpost
Go to post #282, that is the latest updated version working with the latest patch. Drop it in your mods folder and fire up the game. Get into your save and you'll immediately notice your sims will respond to your commands immediately.

In theory, yes, but keep in mind TS3 will generate townies for use in venues that require them such as baristas, consignment store cashier, bouncers, paparazzi, maids, gardeners, etc. But even so, if you load an empty world and fill it with 10 of your sims and nothing else, switch off SP, performance will be immensely faster. TS3 works on a push system based on scheduling like mirta mentioned. The more sims you have the harder the game is calculating who to push to each location. You know that saying that TS3 community lots were empty or had 2-3 sims? Well, you have a world of, say, 100 lots with 25 of them being community lots and 150 residents. The game pushes each sim between work, home and whether they should be pushed elsewhere. NRaas would alleviate this by pushing sims to go to the venue your active sim was at.

TS4 does create a lot of useless NPCs. It also tends to favor creating new service NPCs instead of reusing the current ones. If you use MCCC you can check your entire total population, in my game it's 308 sims, out of which 235 are out of world townies. I cull them manually. A good combo I use is MCCC to set homeless population to 0 and another mod that reduces random townie generation (broken as of latest patch, mod author will be back mid March) and forces the game to use your sims as baristas, bouncers, etc. A few homeless sims get generated here and there but for the most part it reduces it greatly.

"friendlysimmers;c-16980926" wrote:
i have to disagree with everything mention in this thread i see nothing wrong with how the sims4 is and there is nothing wrong with how npc aregenerated in the game the more the higher the chance for the sims we play to make friends

for some people this is a problem, including me since that means there are no storyprogression and you're worlds sims story doesn't continue. U just get new townies replaced by old ones. So you cant see like Bella goth having kids and grown or any other townies. I did have one sims i played who's best friend was some townie, my sims get kids, got old and kids grow up but that townie just did get old and die alone. That was so boring. Like in sims 3 we did get townies but they could just marry some random townie, get kids and have jobs etc. I could see my sims grandkids moving out and getting married and having kids and so on. I could just go visit them and see what they look like, and that was so funny haha. I would wish that could be possible in sims 4 too but i guess it's not for everyone so if devs could make it possible also to switch it off so people could choose if they want that or not.

"Charlotta11;c-16980938" wrote:

"friendlysimmers;c-16980926" wrote:
i have to disagree with everything mention in this thread i see nothing wrong with how the sims4 is and there is nothing wrong with how npc aregenerated in the game the more the higher the chance for the sims we play to make friends

for some people this is a problem, including me since that means there are no storyprogression and you're worlds sims story doesn't continue. U just get new townies replaced by old ones. So you cant see like Bella goth having kids and grown or any other townies. I did have one sims i played who's best friend was some townie, my sims get kids, got old and kids grow up but that townie just did get old and die alone. That was so boring. Like in sims 3 we did get townies but they could just marry some random townie, get kids and have jobs etc. I could see my sims grandkids moving out and getting married and having kids and so on. I could just go visit them and see what they look like, and that was so funny haha. I would wish that could be possible in sims 4 too but i guess it's not for everyone so if devs could make it possible also to switch it off so people could choose if they want that or not.

My fear would be if they add a real story progression to TS4 and because how it culls every Sunday in the game, it would cull those of our Sims we did'nt put in a house but allowed SP to move out and grow up and then never see them again. I don't trust them to stop the culling and or touching our Sims' distant relatives.

"Archieonic;c-16979025" wrote:
Those games are not simulation game. You can jump into GTA V and have 100 pedestrians walking around, they won't do much to performance because their code is simply looping animations, basic pathfinding and playing audio. Same for MMOs, other players are simply feeding a server that is not run on your PC their actions and you see them on your client. Those type of games are worlds apart from simulation games.

That's not the case in The Sims. Each sim that is loaded per instance has a vast atray of data to cycle through. Inventory, traits, relationships, hundreds of autonomy options, dozens of interactive items to cycle through, etc. Which sims get pushed per zone and why. How much data is stored in your current save. This is all being processed and calculated at all times.

Granted optimization and bug fixing has been quite rough ever since The Sims 3 so that adds the icing on the cake for performance issues.

Yeah, I want to remind people that games like GTA V and Skyrim have a very shallow AI for its NPCs. As opposed to the Sims games, where every non-controllable sim is as fully-realized as your own, with their own traits, needs, and emotions. Having a crowd of, say, 50 people going through the motions doesn't compare to 25 sims at the same place running their own complex AI based on multiple factors.

That's not to say Maxis should get a free pass for lags and bad optimization. Quite the opposite, really. They need to work harder to optimize their game engine, and we have the right to get our money's worth as customers. But always keep in mind that you can't really compare The Sims to other open world games out there.

I've had this idea for a while where in future Sims games, NPCs should be "empty shells" that lack personality so that you could have bigger crowds where they can serve as set dressing, and they're deleted once you stop seeing them, UNLESS your own sims interact meaningfully with one. And in that case, the NPC becomes fully realized with their own personality. Kind of like how IRL, you won't really meet most of the people you come across day-to-day, and you won't really notice if you never see them again. They only become prominent if you get to know them.

The Sims 4 game engine is nothing like the earlier game engine - for one it is AI driven - smart technology engine. It's design is basically unlimited - where as the three earlier engines were not - what's more the Sims 4 engine can be altered as the game goes along - something unheard of in the three previous game engines.

Also Sims 4 engine uses smart routing so technically sims cannot get stuck - it is why they sometimes walk through things - but if they get stuck in your game usually it is because the player uses certain cheats (dev cheats) or content not made by EA that the AI does not always recognize as well as it does game content from what I saw written about this engine. I do know one thing - as long as they want to make content for this engine - they technically can -