The Sims 4 will continue into 2018!

"Erpe;c-15721498" wrote:

"Neia;c-15721490" wrote:
@Erpe
That's also true for digital designs (like movies or books). Modern tools aren't magically producing content, they are tools, not a creative AI, they aren't "making graphics", no more than your Word is writing your texts, there's work to be done, and there's just no reason to produce high quality assets to use in a mockup (which is basically a draft, something you put together to show how it could work, the sequences of actions in the UI), it's not supposed to reflect the end result and things are highly likely to change at this point (because it's still pre-prod).

This isn't true for three reasons:
1. One of the producers actually showed us earlier in a video how he could walk around in a funny way and the computer then used its camera to create animations for the sims such that walked around in the same way. That was how they created such animations.
2. New tools probably can't even create animations in old outdated graphics because new tools are made mainly to just work with new improved graphics.
3. Creating animations in old outdated graphics wouldn't help them at all when they consider how to make them in new current graphics.

1. If you think of motion capture, that's not how it was done for TS4. The animations were hand made, based on a video reference, that's what SimGuruMarion explained in an interview :

We have a standard Sim in Maya® (a female in a skin tight suit) with 100+ animatable controls. The animator will load the Sims and objects needed (in this case one Sim and the exercise machine). Then he or she creates poses for the Sim that are loosely based on the reference. We don’t usually copy the video, instead we use it as inspiration and general reference. The animator will start with a rough sketch of the motion, just a few poses and very rough timing. The animation is refined gradually over several days with regular feedback from the animation director. Depending on how complicated the interaction is and how many variations we need to create, an interaction can take anywhere from three days to over 100 days to complete.

2. Launch your Photoshop, and I bet you'll manage to do an awful human shape with a brush in one color, the new tool won't stop you ;)

3. Creating animations isn't this guy's job. He is working on UI/UX. He just needed some scene with a couple of Sims to illustrate how the user could interact with the UI and how that could work. It's like lorem ipsum. There's even dummy text in this video (they most likely didn't plan to have only interactions about hating soap in TS4 or called "Interaction Name").

"Erpe;c-15721498" wrote:

"Neia;c-15721490" wrote:

If you want to pitch me an idea for a story, you won't spend ages carefully putting a cover together to illustrate it, and the fact that Photoshop or InDesign are far more advanced than the tools we had 10-15 years ago don't change that. You just have no reason to spend time on something that just isn't that useful at that point. Why wait for high quality assets when all you want is to illustrate how the UI could work ?

They don't use such primitive tools to make the animations and making a Sims game isn't about making a story. It is instead about designing sims, clothes, furniture, building tools, houses and neighborhoods and about designing all the animations and interactions.

Making a story is an example, because I thought writing is something that is a bit more familiar to most people than making a game. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by primitive tools though. Do you consider Photoshop and InDesign to be primitive tools ?