"jackjack_k;15221185" wrote:
"XopaxPax;15219451" wrote:
I have no clue why they don't just give us CAW already. If they can do it, then obviously we can too. They must think we will find it too hard to make worlds, but i'm like "plum plz, if you can do it, we can do it 10x better".
Because the Sims 3 worlds were simplistic. They were built using easy tools.
The Sims 4 worlds are built from the ground up. Unless you have background in game development, you won't be able to.
The Sims 4 worlds are built like GTA worlds but on a smaller scale. They don't use a tool, they build from the ground up.
That doesn't mean they can't make a tool. All a tool like that does is provides a more user-friendly interface to allow the user to design the world how they would like, and builds the world from the ground up based on the user's input.
For an example of this, in the Cognitive Musicology class I took last semester, we had to program the songs we wrote in Clay (a simplistic language designed by the professor). Rather than just entering the notes we wanted, we had to enter commands to raise or lower the pitch, change note durations, etc. All notes were simply played with the "PLAY" command, which would play a note at whatever pitch and duration it was currently set to.
Figuring out the necessary pitch changes and keeping track of the current pitch and duration at all times was tedious, and reading Clay programs to figure out where a mistake had been made was even more tedious. I got tired of this and wrote a Java program that allowed me to directly enter note names and durations, and it generated a Clay program as output. That was my tool.
If it's a bit confusing what I'm saying, here's an example of how much simpler this tool made my work.
Line of code in Clay: FIGURE1 >> X2 PLAY S2 3RP PLAY X2 LP PLAY S2 2LP PLAY X2 PLAY S2 LP PLAY X3 RP PLAY S3
Input my program would require to generate the above code: E1 A1/2 G1 E1/2 E1 D1/2 E3/2
In a previous programming course I took, we each had to maintain our own worksite where we posted our assignments. Each page had to be formatted a certain way, and we were required to write the HTML file for each page from scratch. Later on in the course, one of our assignments was to write a program that would generate these pages for us. That was also a tool, one to create webpages.
My point is this: just because TS4 worlds were not build using tools like they used in TS3 doesn't mean that such tools cannot be created. TS3 worlds were no simpler than TS4 worlds, either; the CAW tool just gave the illusion of simplicity by taking relatively simple input and creating complex output - much like how my program I wrote for Cognitive Musicology took input in a simple notation to generate Clay code that was textually much more lengthy and complex.
EDIT: I'd also like to add that technically nothing in the game was made "from the ground up". The developers coded the game in Python, and the Python interpreter (along with any interpreter or compiler for any language) could also be considered a tool, as it allows programmers to write code not in 1s and 0s but in a human-readable language that is several layers of abstraction away from computer-readable binary code.
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