A weird thing about the neighborhoods and the closed world

thatpinkcoconut

So when I flew away from my lot to take a view of the entire neighborhood, I noticed something about the inactive (neighbor) lots. With TAB mode activated, I zoomed inside one of the houses... literally inside... through the wall. To my surprise, I found out that all objects inside all houses, and outside on the lots, in the entire neighborhood/district are fully loaded and rendered!

But why? Since they made it this way, why didn't they instead make it so that there's open world, at least, per neighborhood? I don't get it.

I feel like this is some waste of resources and opportunity. They could've just made it so that the interior objects in inactive neighbor lots are not rendered. This way, more processing power can be squeezed out for the active lot and its objects (something really important for low end players like myself) and there will be even shorter loading times! OR, they could've just made it so that there's, yes, neighborhood open world at least.

At this point, I think the best way for them to make use of the wasted potential here is to add an option to enable/disable neighborhood open world. It's already there! The world itself. They can do it this way because this does not make it look like they're ignoring the low end players (because they really don't, like what they always try to show) since it'd be a toggleable option.

sry for the bad english. not my first language

thatpinkcoconut

Trust me, I'm NOT one of those noisy people who can never recover from the old days of TS3 open world. In fact, I didn't care at all about all these open-world blah blah's UNTIL THIS discovery.

LiELF

I think it's because there is a lot more to open world than rendering. Full activity, autonomy and capability is a factor with each Sim too. And those Sims have to be able to interact with every rendered object, and those objects need to become "active". I don't think the visuals alone mean open world is capable. It's possible that the ability to see everything that has been placed are merely visual "placeholders" for the game to know where things are and identify them. It doesn't make them fully active.

I don't know if that makes any sense, or even if it's entirely correct, as I'm not a game developer. But from what I've read about development of Sims games, open world has a lot of layers to it. The devs have said that an open world is just not something that they can do in sims 4 because the engine was not built for it. It was designed to be a closed world/openish neighborhood per lot.