Game Engines - some information, please
Dear fellow Simmers and Gurus, I find that I am frequently upset about the lack of features / some malfunction that is probably a result of the game engine. An insufficient game engine seemed to be th...
Forum Discussion
"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.
