Inefficiency in TS4 Swatches
TS4 uses a premade swatches system instead of having a colorwheel or Create a Style for the sake of performance since it 's supposed to require less memory since if you used CASt, every texture you created would have to be loaded by the game so you could potentially end up with hundreds of them if you do it enough. Using premade swatches means there's a limit to how much resources texture files use up. However, their swatch system is very inefficient and I would argue actually makes the game slower and far less customizeable than it could be.
There are many, many, many swatches that I really dislike so I don't use them, however, the game still has to load them into the game. Thus there are a lot of bloating textures in the game that do nothing except take up space. If I had the ability to create ones I like using a colorwheel or CASt, then the game would only load the ones I use instead of wasting memory on unsused swatches which would increase performance.
Moreover, if CASt was definitely not an option, TS4's system is still vastly inferior to TS2's swatch system. In TS2, object swatches come in parts so that you can choose the colors of different parts of an object individually between different swatches. For example, you can choose a bed frame color swatch and a bedding color swatch independently from a premade pool of swatches. This is highly efficient since, for example, 5 bed frame swatches and 5 bedding swatches would lead to 25 different combinations. If each of those texture files was 250kb (a ts4 texture size), then for 25 options only 2.5mb of memory would be required. Meanwhile, in TS4 texture images apply to the whole object, therefore to have the same 25 options for the same image size 6.25 mb would be required. That is 2.6 times as much memory.
It gets worse as you increase the number of options. Let's say that you also wanted different options for the pillowcase. For 5 pillow options that would lead to 125 different combination options, which would be great for the player. Image if we had that much customizability for each object. In TS2, such a bed would only take up 3.75mb, while in ts4 that would require 31.25mb or 8.3 times as much memory. This is also assuming that each texture size for ts2 and ts4 would be the same size, while since ts2 texture images have less data they'd acutally be lighter and would require even less resources.
What this means is that TS4, a game released a 10 years after TS2 is much less efficient in its use of memory which means it has to sacrifice customizability for performance -- something that TS2 did not have to sacrifice due to clever design. It's just another way that we're constrained by the developers which lead TS4 to feel like we're playing someone else's game and can never make it our own.
There are many, many, many swatches that I really dislike so I don't use them, however, the game still has to load them into the game. Thus there are a lot of bloating textures in the game that do nothing except take up space. If I had the ability to create ones I like using a colorwheel or CASt, then the game would only load the ones I use instead of wasting memory on unsused swatches which would increase performance.
Moreover, if CASt was definitely not an option, TS4's system is still vastly inferior to TS2's swatch system. In TS2, object swatches come in parts so that you can choose the colors of different parts of an object individually between different swatches. For example, you can choose a bed frame color swatch and a bedding color swatch independently from a premade pool of swatches. This is highly efficient since, for example, 5 bed frame swatches and 5 bedding swatches would lead to 25 different combinations. If each of those texture files was 250kb (a ts4 texture size), then for 25 options only 2.5mb of memory would be required. Meanwhile, in TS4 texture images apply to the whole object, therefore to have the same 25 options for the same image size 6.25 mb would be required. That is 2.6 times as much memory.
It gets worse as you increase the number of options. Let's say that you also wanted different options for the pillowcase. For 5 pillow options that would lead to 125 different combination options, which would be great for the player. Image if we had that much customizability for each object. In TS2, such a bed would only take up 3.75mb, while in ts4 that would require 31.25mb or 8.3 times as much memory. This is also assuming that each texture size for ts2 and ts4 would be the same size, while since ts2 texture images have less data they'd acutally be lighter and would require even less resources.
What this means is that TS4, a game released a 10 years after TS2 is much less efficient in its use of memory which means it has to sacrifice customizability for performance -- something that TS2 did not have to sacrifice due to clever design. It's just another way that we're constrained by the developers which lead TS4 to feel like we're playing someone else's game and can never make it our own.
