December 4, 2015 Patch Notes

Release Notes Continued


General (Create A Sim)

• Changing the hair color of an alien child will no longer also change their eye color.
  
  
  
  • I suppose, being a color, one might be confused as to the intent of the desired outcome. After all, being an alien, it is hard to determine the motivations behind the color change… perhaps the desire was indeed to change all colors to be uniformed. Well, we’ll never know now, will we?
    
  
  
• We fixed an issue, whereupon resizing the male Aliens feet, their pinky toe would not resize.
  
  
  
  • Not kidding… their pinky toe would not resize.
    
  
  
• Randomizing your Sims sleepwear will no longer add a hat (or cap) to your Sims sleeping attire.
  
  
  
  • We will also not be applying a kerchief to your mother no matter how quickly you throw up the sash.
    
  
  
• The yfTop_BlazerRound is once again tucked in.
  
• cfHair_longStraight is now available for male and female children.
  
• Randomizing Sims from the gallery should no longer result in a baby being added to the household… surprise!
  

General (Gallery)

• Uploading a room to the gallery with a raised foundation will no longer cause the foundation pattern to appear floating in the preview image.
  
• We fixed an issue with objects outside of a room, being uploaded to the Gallery as part of the room if the MOO (MO?) cheat had been used.
  
• You will no longer be able to upload a lot to the Gallery if it is on fire.
  
  
  
  • For your safety while using the Gallery, please keep your flames and embers inside your game at all times. Young children should not be playing with burning lots, unless accompanied by an adult. Please honor curated content. Also, for the comfort of those who seek to download your lot, we request that there be no flash photography, eating, or drinking while uploading. Thank you, and enjoy your game.
    
  
  
• In the case that a player replaces a Sim in a household with a gallery Sim, or randomizes a Sim from the gallery into their household, and then re-uploads the household the original ‘created by’ data will be remembered.
  
• Shared items with Custom Content will now show in the Player Profile.
  
• Lots will no longer be allowed to be saved as rooms.
  
  
  
  • Turns out there is a difference between a room and a lot… and in California that is small fortune.
    
  
  
• Rooms cannot be placed from the Gallery if created using MOO (MO!) when wall height is set to short and the cheat is not enabled.
  
  
  
  • This change fixes a general issue where users could not place a room whenever a parent object would be suppressed. An example being, windows are not allowed on exterior walls of a basement room. If you attempted to place a room in the basement with windows and curtains, you would find you were unable to do so – because the curtain’s parent object (the window) was being suppressed.
    
  
  
• Players will no longer become stuck in Create A Sim, when downloading Sims from the Gallery who have traits that are not present in that player’s game.
  

General (Interface)

• Adding custom mp3 music files will now properly display in and play from the options panel.
  
• Exiting the game without closing the Game Options panel after applying changes, will no longer not apply the changes upon restart.
  
• You will no longer need to zoom all the way out in order to use the Design Tool on the rocket ship.
  
• We now allow edge scrolling along ALL of the edges!
  
  
  
  • Discriminatory bottom edge practices have been outlawed, and those practicing the practices shall find no safe haven within our borders.
    
  
  
• The cursor shall no longer flicker when you hover over the Play with Genetics button in Create A Sim.
  
• The Reset Tutorial option has been moved from the Gameplay tab to the Other tab. Why?
  
  
  
  • A fundamental question posed to development… are tutorials gameplay? or are they interruptions prior to gameplay? As you can tell we are still in debate over this one... however the result of the latest internal debate has given victory to the Not-Gameplayers Party, and has pushed their agenda to the forefront. Thus the shift in the options panel. Ultimately we are lucky the Marketeers Party (an independent third faction) didn't get ahold of the victory, or this would be a modal interruption upon relaunch, asking "What are your thoughts of the tutorial system?" with a 5 part multiple choice question, and optional essay.
    
  
  
• We have made various updates to the lessons in the Lessons panel.
  
• You will no longer be informed that "A maid cleaned your house while you were away…" when your hired NPC was the repair service.
  

The Sims 4 Get to Work

• Alien mannequins now also have access to the styled looks… just like their human counterparts.
  
• Downloading a retail room from The Gallery, with mannequins placed inside, will no longer have a chance to crash your game.
  
  
  
  • Mannequins in a retail space… how absurd!
    
  
  
• We have addressed several issues when placing hats (or helmets) on the mannequins that could result in transparency or missing texture issues.
  
  
  
  • It’s odd that every time I write hat (or lid), I feel compelled to offer an alternate form of the word.
    
  
  
• Doctors that are at work, will no longer leave work to go to work, preventing others at work from asking the Doctor to take care of their patient because they aren't at work.
  
  
  
  • Aka: If you were unable to transfer a patient to a doctor, you should no longer run into this issue.
    
  
  
• We fixed an issue that could prevent the user from entering Build Mode, or saving their game, if they had 11 or more mannequins on their lot, and had deleted several of them with the Sledgehammer Tool.
  
  
  
  • That’ll teach you to sledgehammer a mannequin… everyone knows you are supposed to take them to your nearest nuclear test facility for set dressing… or was that just the 1950s?
    
    
    
    • …I’ve been playing too much in the post-apocalyptic wasteland…
      
    
    
  
  
• The "For Your Protection Chain Link Fence” no longer has a reversed texture on one end.
  
• Sims in the Science Career will now find they can properly order their co-workers to invent, rather than the coworker having the option to ignore the issued directive.
  
• Replacing the rounded fence portion of the rounded fence deck with the “Be Prepared Security Fencing” will now appear as expected.
  
• Out of stock objects will no longer cast a shadow.
  
  
  
  • The Shadow will still cast a shadow however.
    
  • However it should be noted that only The Shadow knows why The Shadow casts a shadow.
    
  
  
• We have added the alien plants as additional collectibles to the gardening collection.
  
• Visual effects will no longer persist for the following objects after they have been sold: Stereo, Bonfire, Fireplace, Dartboard, Frogs, Butterflies, Tiki bar, Cloning machine, Waterfall, and the Arcade machine.
  
  
  
  • It should be noted that one of the above items exists in the game. As well as the other items. In fact, all of the above items exist in the game. There is no item above that doesn’t exist in the game. If there were an item above that didn’t exist in the game, then it wouldn’t be there… as it doesn’t exist.
    
  
  
• Sims tending bar will no longer be allowed to use the Sim Ray on the bar…
  
  
  
  • If you didn't like tending bar, you could just walk away… you don’t have to ruin it for the rest of us.
    
  
  
• It will now cost you 875 Simoleons to purchase the Crime Map.
  
• We fixed an issue that could result in the APB guilty Sim not matching the Sim described in the notebook.
  

The Sims 4 Outdoor Retreat

• Sims should now be able to join a game of horseshoes when attempting to Join a Game… of horseshoes.
  
• The Bee, Walking Stick, and Blue Morpho Butterfly insects can now be found.
  

The Sims 4 Spooky Stuff

• Light Candle and Extinguish actions on a pumpkin worn by a ghost are now available Everywhere.*
  
  
  
  • *Everywhere is limited to places the ghost can actually travel, walk, or otherwise route to. Everywhere is exclusive to locations within The Sims. Everywhere does not include different game modes, such as Create A Sim, Build Mode, or the Gallery. Everywhere is a trademark of the Everywhere for All and All for Everywhere slogan corporation.
    
  
  
• Skeleton face paint will no longer paint on top of a Sims beard.
  
• Sims should find themselves to be far more comfortable in the hot tub once they have situated themselves, and will decide to reposition themselves far more infrequently.
  
• The Spooky Party will now count towards the Throw 3 Parties objective of the Welcoming Host milestone for Party Animal aspiration.
  

MAC

• Fixed several lot seam issues when on low graphic quality setting.
  
  
  
  • It may seem odd, but if you leave a seam un-seamed, it is unseemly, and it seems, can allow a Sim to fall through the seam, into a seemingly endless void. Seems like a good stitch.
    
  
  

Well, that’s about it for now… I hope that you have a wonderful December.

Remember that it is better to give than to receive. Go out and give.

Thank you for your time and attention… and Happy Holidays to you!
-SimGuruGnome



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Oops, I guess there is more… some post Release Notes notes…


Hey folks,

I wanted to take a moment to speak directly to one of our most important issues.

We have listened to your feedback on culling and performance. And we have been, and will continue to address these issues, and have a group dedicated to them.

Some of the work they have been doing recently has been focused on optimizing load times, reducing memory usage, and increasing performance… but what about culling? Well, it turns out culling happens because of the need of those three items: load times, memory usage, and performance.

• Outdoor Retreat was over using our compatibility region filters (when a Sim is requested for a “thing” we use a filter to determine who). Such that when the filter failed to find someone that fit the requirements exactly (male, bartending skill 5, young adult), it created a new Sim to fit the role rather than allowing for some flexibility (bartending 4 or 6 is probably just as well).
  
  
  
  • Along the same lines, we took the above fix and made it general – rather than always creating exactly what was requested by the game, we allow flexibility. Reducing the number of new Sims being created, that more often than not, would just come and go without the player realizing.
    
  
  
• Get to Work added aliens, and one of the requests of the spawning system was to create disguised aliens. Turns out we were creating A LOT of disguised aliens. Not on purpose, but there was a cool down assigned to the spawned Sim that would then prevent them from spawning again in a given period of time. Sadly, the system was requesting ‘in disguise’ aliens more frequently than the cooldown’s timer… and thus creating brand new Sims on each request. We adjusted the tuning, and saw an increase in performance.
  
• We have spent some time optimizing lighting draw calls, to assist with framerate issues while in Build Mode.
  
• We removed some data duplication between the game side code and Create A Sim code, saving around 50kb per Sim data (also known as SimInfos).
  
  
  
  • The smaller the size of a SimInfo, the faster it is to load a given Sims information.
    
  
  
• We discovered a large memory and performance spike as a result of inventories. Turns out that NPCs, who don’t need to know exactly what is in their inventory when they are an NPC, were carrying around large amounts of data and in some cases could have many hundreds of inventory objects, resulting in slow load times, and memory/performance spikes when the NPC was created.
  
  
  
  • Now NPCs do not instantiate most of the objects in their inventories until needed. This provides a much needed relief in the runtime performance spikes in our test environment.
    
  
  

These are some of the specific issues we have addressed recently, all with the goal of making the game stable, performant, and enjoyable. Please know that we are always looking at performance, culling, memory, and load time optimization issues among our highest priority issues. And while we can’t always speak to them, we are always appreciative of your feedback.

Thank you,
SimGuruGnome

Posted on behalf of SimGuruGnome who went on vacation to Windenburg to check out the new sites.