Game Engines - some information, please

"Writin_Reg;c-16981005" wrote:
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 or content not made by EA that the AI does not 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 -

All engines can be limitless, specially in-house engines. They can be upgraded, rewritten, expanded. In almost every scenario, this is not advisable. Altering an engine entails revisiting every piece of content already released depending on what exactly was changed.

They cannot literally make endless content for TS4 if the intention is for players to own all of those packs. There are already side-effects of having a lot of packs, there are side-effects of having decently sized lots because of the way interactive objects affect the lot. To put it into perspective, my sim lives in a $250,000 50x50 lot, and with no one other than 5 walkbys loaded, I go from a constant 120 FPS down to 30-50 FPS if I zoom out a bit, or FPS get more unstable when it's raining. If I throw a party of 15 sims, same thing. So with such performance issues already present, what would happen if they kept releasing more and more content for, say, 6 years? What type of rig would you need to have and how much would performance be tied in to PC specs and how much would be tied to engine limitations if left as is? My rig is composed of a GTX 1080ti, i5 9600k @ 4.4 GHz, 16GB DDR4 2666MHz, running the game off an SSD. It should by no means bounce that much.

Not to mention without them officially getting rid of simulation lag, the more data that gets added, the bigger the problem will become. If 3+ years have gone by without them targeting that single issue when there's a widely known mod that vastly remedies it, then what are the realistic chances of them adding on more and more while preserving performance and stability? IMO, below 10%. The main issue that causes simulation lag is autonomy, the game slows down because of how many outputs there are and how many sims are present which mean the algorithm for autonomy is running over and over on each one of them against every interactive object. More content added to that, well, the outcome won't be good.