"logion;c-17909138" wrote:
"Jyotai;c-17909132" wrote:
"dearie_blossom;c-17907331" wrote:
Yeah, I don‘t understand why the worlds are so ridiculously small neither. It‘s not like the entire map gets loaded at once. There is a loading screen everywhere we go. Big-ish Windenburg doesn’t perform any worse than small Del Sol Valley.
While someone shared the video with the reasoning above, they shared it as a twitter post of a 30 minute video.
Here's the exact video, forwarded to the point where they say why:
https://youtu.be/SKzjiiox0Fk?t=496
Watch that from :8:16 to 11:00
(YouTube's embed system is messing with me, and seems to insist on playing that back at a random incorrect point in time, if it does that for you - forward to EXACTLY 8:16 and watch until 11:00)
It's a performance trade off made for some specific reasons:
1. The game is one of the few modern games that will run on some rather old hardware, and they still value keeping those customers.
2. Even if they wanted to say, toss every customer who didn't have a 20xx nVidea CPU and AMD 2xxx or 3xxx CPU... They recall Sims 3 at this point in it's lifecycle where even on the top end machines they had to tell customers to pick and choose which packs to have enabled in any play session because the game had become 'too heavy'. A lot of the 'limits' of Sims 4 were made to allow the game to age well.
My thought. At 5 years in, Sims 3 was no longer a game capable of stability on even that year's newest hardware if one ran the whole game. It was rapidly spinning out of control with excessive load on a machine's hardware. Yet Sims 4 is now 6 or 7 years old, and still rock stable on even less than current PCs.
This is almost certainly due to the lack of an open world, the small size of the worlds, and all the loading screens - which is where you would push things into and out of memory.
Much as I want a pack with 537 new lots... I understand why I'm not getting it, and they made the right call.
I'd rather have a game I can play at all, than a game that checks every dream item on my wishlist but can't even run.
I wonder if there is a limit on how many more packs and worlds the sims4 can handle.
Probably.
But the 'closed world' with each world and then each house requiring a loading screen means there is an opportunity there to 'dump memory' on each screen transition.
That allows the game to be very stable (which btw, is about crashes, not about bugs - so yes, Sims 4 is 'rock stable' as someone else attempted to disagree on by citing the wrong metric).
I notice that as I obtain more and more packs my 'lag' in the game doesn't move that much. What does cause it to slow down is a lot of relationships and a lot of sims in the open around around the current lot or in that lot itself - things which I can use MCCC to dial up ay above Maxis' default values. For example I often have it set to allow 50 sims on a lot - and when I actually get 50, things get slow.
A healthy use of MCCC's relationship culling is advised if you've got a set of very social sims hanging out on a lot with 50 other sims... ;)
But as long as we're making good use of transitions and if they're properly dumping memory in those, then stability can remain even as we get more world. Bigger worlds though - means more things in memory at the same time. And that's where stability starts to get complicated.
