@Jaline33, I've read elsewhere that although the new requirement for the Writer's aspiration says to read a book in the library, it is actually still to overcome writer's block. I think if you search writer's block, you'll find some threads where people explain how to do that.
Yes, but she didn't have writer's block - she wasn't even writing during the two Sim days that this was going on. Thank you for the suggestion, though
My apologies, MVWdeZT - you were right! She had never gotten Writer's Block because I had her writing books except for the first round of "Practice Writing" where Writer's Block didn't happen for her. I purposely made her get Writer's Block by having her "Practice Writing" for several hours (even though she is a level 10 Writer - lol) and then I had her watch TV for a while, then I sent her to the Library where she played Chess for awhile - and somehow this fulfilled the "false goal" of going to the Library to read 1 book. Holy. That was complicated.
Now I need help to figure out how to get rid of the mailbox from my own little Library venue.
1. Whenever I tell my Sim to use the computer he automatically goes to the nearest computer even if I’ve selected the action at another computer. This is annoying because I may have set up “inspirational” items around one computer and “focused” items around another to boost different activities, but the Sim often winds up at the wrong computer because he just uses the closest one. Is this intentional design? When I tell them to use the toilet or sit on a chair, it seems object specific. Why not the computer?
2. Are doors sided? My Sims will sometimes knock on the outside of a door as they’re supposed to. If no one answers after a while they leave. But, sometimes guests will show up, walk inside the house, knock on the inside of the door, and then if nobody answers, they make themselves at home playing chess or using the computer. What’s going on?
3. Unlike in previous games, Sims don’t mind the dark. Is this intentional? I deleted all the lighting from the house and they don’t care. It seems like they should get a ‘too dark’ or ‘eerie’ moodlet. They seem insensitive to their environment this way.
Thanks in advance.
1) This sounds like an issue with tuning. Does it affect all computer interactions or just certain ones? My guess would be the latter - there was a (overly) complex and finicky tuning structure for telling an interaction what objects are involved. We have sophisticated systems for finding objects to interact with in many cases like finding an oven to use when you click on the fridge and a chair to use to eat food. In both of those cases, the oven and the chair were not clicked on. In cases where the target of the click also wants to be the target of the interaction, there is a field that must be filled in to tell the system what role that object will take in the animation suite. It is likely that this field was mistuned for one or more computer interactions based on what you are saying. We knew this was an issue so we are working on making this system have better defaults and be more easily understood in the future.
2) Doors are sided. We calculate which side of the door is outside and which is inside and thats how we determine locking and lot-greet status. Are you seeing both cases happening with the same door/lot without changes? That would be odd as I think that calculation is only done once when you exit build-buy (we do a lot of meta-data processing when you exit build-buy so we can be lazier later). That said, knocking on the door uses a cone constraint relative to the facing of the door, so it is possible that there is a bug where the orientation of the door matters when it should be using the calculated value based on inside/outside. This is just a taste of how complex something as simple as a door is in The Sims.
3) We redesigned the environment score system from the ground-up for this game and not everything was included that had been in the past. I would expect to see new environment score features in the future but Sims not minding the dark was "intentional," I suppose, in the sense that we were aware that we weren't shipping with it.
Is it hard to do horses and cars with animations for The Sims 4?
Horses and cars are very different animals. In fact, cars aren't even animals (see what I did there?).
Let's start with Cars because they are simpler. The main problem with cars is making room for them in the world - parking, driveways, garages, streets, routes. This is also a problem for horses, but we can re-use some amount of the solution for both. The main issues relate to the layout of the player's lot, the lot boundary with the street, and how to standardize parking spaces both on-lot and along the street so cars don't clip into each other or the ambient traffic. There is additionally some animation cost to animate Sims getting in and out of cars, but thats not too bad. We also need to animate the cars driving, but that is also not too bad since wheels turning and rotating is very simple.
Horses are much harder and get into why Pets is often the third or fourth expansion. Horses have an actual walk cycle. They need to plant their feet and turn realistically as they follow routes. If we just animated a horse doing a walkstyle and then lerped it (linear interpolation) across the path, it would look extremely bad going around even slight corners due to foot sliding and the horse rotating around a pivot point in the center. Also, it would clip like crazy through everything because our entire routing system is based on Sim size and turning radius. The routing system needs to be expanded to account for something large and/or oblong like a horse or a dog. The main sticking point is that we have a much higher standard for animation quality on the Sims than most games do - we take things like foot planting vs. sliding very seriously and we wouldn't want to ship the version of horses that most games ship with. Just look at the rampant foot sliding and glitchiness of the equines in a game like Red Dead Redemption if you want to know what I mean.
Edit to mention that some of the issues with sliding that plague horses would also be an issue with Cars. We have to be careful when authoring their route splines to make the corners shallow to avoid sliding. This also further complicates the boundary between the lot and the street as it might take weird curves to get the car joined in with the street waypoints.
I don't know if this falls in the realm of simulation tech talk, so if it does not please forgive me. Also, apologies if this has been addressed. I try to keep up, but ...
Anyway: If you save a household that has a pregnant Sim and go to play another household, the baby is born in your absence, regardless of the ageing setting. Does it need to be this way? Personally, I just make it a rule not to switch households until after the baby is born, problem averted, but some rotational players have their knickers in a twist about this one.
Was that necessary? This does not happen in the TS2 because there isn't any real story progression per se in that game, however, by this happening in the TS4 it reminds us of the story progression in TS3. If rotational play is supported like they say it is, then this should not happen to many of us long time rotational players. Thank you SGMax if you can answer.
Also, while I'm here, can you answer why a Sim cancels out finishing their food (they waste a lot of food) if we queue up other things to do like 'go weed' the plants or something? This was huge problem in past games not being able to queue up commands until the games were patched.
The story progression + pregnancy is not something I feel equipped to address. It is something I hope one of the other Gurus can speak to.
The finishing food thing sounds like a bug, but I have heard conflicting reports about this. The bottom line is Sims should always finish their food before doing something incompatible with eating. This is part of the multitasking engine that I have described previously in much more detail. The quick version is every interaction has a "guaranteed" phase and an "inertial" phase. Interactions that are guaranteed will block other incompatible interactions in the queue while interactions that are inertial will allow incompatible interactions in the queue to run and will be canceled as part of that process. Eat should be guaranteed as long as there is quantity left in the plate.
Others have mentioned a bug specifically with gardening - you mentioned Weeding which is why I bring this up - where Sims think that eating is compatible with gardening. The kicker, though, is that it IS compatible - Sims will happily weed and water while eating, which looks very bizarre and something we should have disabled through tuning. The baseline system for determining compatibility between interactions only takes into account their basic constraints and animation requirements. If Eat can be done anywhere and needs one hand to hold the foot and the other only intermittently to take bites and Weed also only needs one hand and requires you stand next to the plant, the Sim can stand next to the plant while holding the food in one hand and eating in the other. In cases like this, we had to explicitly tune those interactions to be incompatible with each other because it is a weird, mostly unrealistic scenario to find your Sim in.
Will sims walking through each other ever be fixed? I noticed this on the video yesterday showing us how to play ghost. Also notice a fork stuck to a sims hand.
Dancing through each other is another problem related to this one. The Sims guru should find answers to such question, if he himself does not know. We come here because we need answers and fixes
I have covered the answers to these questions already if you go back and read earlier responses. Quick answer is we relaxed our tolerance for clipping to create a smoother gameplay experience. The fallout from this decision is often way more noticeable than the benefits since the benefit is getting rid of a bunch of horrific stuff that you just aren't seeing anymore (like foot-tapping). Unfortunately, this is one of those things where when we did our job right, our players never notice because things are going smoothly. People often only notice things consciously when they are bad and stand out as such. Building gameplay systems is tough for this reason. I stand by our policy of relaxed clipping tolerance, but I know there will be players out there who disagree, whether due to being naive to the missing problems or having different values.
Edited to mention that the props stuck to Sims hands is just a bug and has nothing to do with our clipping policy. We hate that bug as much as you do.
@SimGuruMax, would you consider sticking a link to this thread somewhere in the Modding forum (in case it stays open)? I'm finding a lot of your posts really interesting since they offer a more "high level" perspective/background on why things work the way they do (compared to just looking at the files I mean) .. but I guess many of the modders/creators might not use the social forums and thus not be aware of these threads at all.
[..] when we did our job right, our players never notice because things are going smoothly.
So true.
(I just stumbled upon the gardening interactions/jazz this weekend -- absolutely no surprise that one small thing (like the weeding vs. eating mentioned above) was missed. It is mindboggingly detailed and it's really rather impressive how everything else .. just works o.O)
> Others have mentioned a bug specifically with gardening - you mentioned Weeding which is why I bring this up - where Sims think that eating is compatible with gardening. The kicker, though, is that it IS compatible - Sims will happily weed and water while eating, which looks very bizarre and something we should have disabled through tuning. The baseline system for determining compatibility between interactions only takes into account their basic constraints and animation requirements. If Eat can be done anywhere and needs one hand to hold the foot and the other only intermittently to take bites and Weed also only needs one hand and requires you stand next to the plant, the Sim can stand next to the plant while holding the food in one hand and eating in the other. In cases like this, we had to explicitly tune those interactions to be incompatible with each other because it is a weird, mostly unrealistic scenario to find your Sim in.
Since you brought up gardening and multitasking, I always wonder why Sims can't water and weed and chat at the same time. It would be the most natural thing to do. I've noticed neighbors stopping by to chat while my Sims are gardening and they'll stand there forever waiting for my Sim to finish weeding or watering. Unless I cancel it out of my Sims que.
I am hoping the move objects on cheat makes a quick return (I know you cannot discuss future features), but here's why.
One of my sims was drinking orange juice, then I had her chat with a sim who was outside, but outside the perimeters of her home lot. As long as you don't have a sim try to enter a building, sims 4 functions much like an open world. So, she walks over to the other sim, still drinking her orange juice, and proceeds to chat. Then, she finishes her orange juice, puts the orange juice glass down on the ground outside, and continues chatting with the other sim. I tried placing a trash can on the corner of the played sim's lot in hopes that it would enable her to throw away the used orange juice glass, but no luck. Because the orange juice glass was placed down on the ground outside the playable sim's home lot there is no way to remove it. Because it is outdoors, there is no nearby sink. Because it is on another lot, no trash can. And because there is no move objects cheat, there is no way to move it back on to the home lot outside the playable sim's home, drag it to the sim's inventory, or drag it to a trash can placed on that lot.
I have been playing The Sims since 2001, when Livin Large came out. My avatar deliberately looks like Chris Roomies from TS1.
I'm sure they'll add them in where applicable, I read in another section a mod talking about the floor height cheat and hoping to add it in soon (as an example). They weren't taken away, just probably not prioritized in development and a few got left out.
I'd expect the majority of their customers don't even enable cheats - I didn't for the most part in the Sims 3 - only did so recently when I spotted a few tricks I could use with building houses - so I'm not surprised it wasn't prioritized.
I'm sure they'll add them in where applicable, I read in another section a mod talking about the floor height cheat and hoping to add it in soon (as an example). They weren't taken away, just probably not prioritized in development and a few got left out.<br />
<br />
I'd expect the majority of their customers don't even enable cheats - I didn't for the most part in the Sims 3 - only did so recently when I spotted a few tricks I could use with building houses - so I'm not surprised it wasn't prioritized.
I wanted to live the fantasy of having a harem and I can't!!! One man in a household of two women DOESN'T WORK because the women become sad and jealous. THAT IS NOT COOL!!!! If I want to live the fantasy of having a harem in Sims 4 I should be allowed to have that fantasy fulfilled!!! We need a cheat to make the entire household INSTANTLY HAPPY!!!
C'mon. Sims 4 is supposed to be a fantasy world of our making. It's not right that I can't have a harem if I want one!!
I think you really need is a Polygamy mod. I want to do other unconventional things with my title too, but I plan to use or write my own modifications for that.
Will sims walking through each other ever be fixed? I noticed this on the video yesterday showing us how to play ghost. Also notice a fork stuck to a sims hand.
Dancing through each other is another problem related to this one. The Sims guru should find answers to such question, if he himself does not know. We come here because we need answers and fixes
I have covered the answers to these questions already if you go back and read earlier responses. Quick answer is we relaxed our tolerance for clipping to create a smoother gameplay experience. The fallout from this decision is often way more noticeable than the benefits since the benefit is getting rid of a bunch of horrific stuff that you just aren't seeing anymore (like foot-tapping). Unfortunately, this is one of those things where when we did our job right, our players never notice because things are going smoothly. People often only notice things consciously when they are bad and stand out as such. Building gameplay systems is tough for this reason. I stand by our policy of relaxed clipping tolerance, but I know there will be players out there who disagree, whether due to being naive to the missing problems or having different values.
Edited to mention that the props stuck to Sims hands is just a bug and has nothing to do with our clipping policy. We hate that bug as much as you do.
I appreciate you answered me concerning the weed/eat debacle. However, these statements here make me scratch my head. I may be one of those who disagree that clipping is o.k. Because let me explain something from a lot of Simmers perspectives. Clipping when dancing etc. and or toe tapping didn't happen in the TS2. Toe tapping was a feature of the TS1 and TS3, I often wondered why you guys went back to TS1 style toe tapping when Sims couldn't get around each other? Sims in TS2 are able to 'dance together, and even line dance (many different type dances) without clipping. And most of the time walking around other Sims in that game is very smooth, even in a tight situation. No clipping. It only seems to be (me being naïve) it only became a problem during the creation of the TS3 and later that Sims were no longer able to get around each other smoothly and or without clipping. I don't know a lot of how a game is technically created, and I do thank you for answering but while creating this game, you may have overlooked one of it's stronger points. The visuals in The Sims have always been extremely important to the most of us. Like not seeing clipping. Because many, many Simmers take pictures, tell stories and create videos to share with friends and YouTube, now, and those visuals matter. And so does the immersion. So, by saying it's o.k. this is par for the course in this game is somewhat naïve when considering the long time players of these games. And I say that will all respect.
Edited typos
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
Hello, Is it possible to have sims open/close windows and curtains?
There was a mod for it in The Sims 3, but just thought I'd ask.
I was just thinking about that the other day! How if my Sims could open the window, they could talk with a neighbour (or sneaky boyfriend!) through the window, but especially they could hear the crickets at night, and that would be lovely.
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Is it possible to link the tall pantry upper cabinets to the floor and not the wall because at outside walls up only, they disappear on an inside wall? Thanx.
1. Whenever I tell my Sim to use the computer he automatically goes to the nearest computer even if I’ve selected the action at another computer. This is annoying because I may have set up “inspirational” items around one computer and “focused” items around another to boost different activities, but the Sim often winds up at the wrong computer because he just uses the closest one. Is this intentional design? When I tell them to use the toilet or sit on a chair, it seems object specific. Why not the computer?
2. Are doors sided? My Sims will sometimes knock on the outside of a door as they’re supposed to. If no one answers after a while they leave. But, sometimes guests will show up, walk inside the house, knock on the inside of the door, and then if nobody answers, they make themselves at home playing chess or using the computer. What’s going on?
3. Unlike in previous games, Sims don’t mind the dark. Is this intentional? I deleted all the lighting from the house and they don’t care. It seems like they should get a ‘too dark’ or ‘eerie’ moodlet. They seem insensitive to their environment this way.
Thanks in advance.
1) This sounds like an issue with tuning. Does it affect all computer interactions or just certain ones? My guess would be the latter - there was a (overly) complex and finicky tuning structure for telling an interaction what objects are involved. We have sophisticated systems for finding objects to interact with in many cases like finding an oven to use when you click on the fridge and a chair to use to eat food. In both of those cases, the oven and the chair were not clicked on. In cases where the target of the click also wants to be the target of the interaction, there is a field that must be filled in to tell the system what role that object will take in the animation suite. It is likely that this field was mistuned for one or more computer interactions based on what you are saying. We knew this was an issue so we are working on making this system have better defaults and be more easily understood in the future.
2) Doors are sided. We calculate which side of the door is outside and which is inside and thats how we determine locking and lot-greet status. Are you seeing both cases happening with the same door/lot without changes? That would be odd as I think that calculation is only done once when you exit build-buy (we do a lot of meta-data processing when you exit build-buy so we can be lazier later). That said, knocking on the door uses a cone constraint relative to the facing of the door, so it is possible that there is a bug where the orientation of the door matters when it should be using the calculated value based on inside/outside. This is just a taste of how complex something as simple as a door is in The Sims.
3) We redesigned the environment score system from the ground-up for this game and not everything was included that had been in the past. I would expect to see new environment score features in the future but Sims not minding the dark was "intentional," I suppose, in the sense that we were aware that we weren't shipping with it.
Thanks again for the answers.
1. I didn't test all computer interactions, but I have had it happen with the "write genre book", "play game/enter tournament", and "program game" options. It seemed to be across the board, but maybe it was just those particular ones.
What is going on with the computers sounds similar to what is happening now for the beds for me and some other Simmers. Since the last patch, when selecting the "woohoo" option the Sims may go to a bed other than the one selected. The change makes me wonder were you, by any chance, working on a bed selection system similar to the one @IngeJonesmentioned earlier in this thread?
2. Yes, I have doors that Sims will sometimes choose to knock on the inside of and sometimes choose to knock on the outside of. I've tried switching the door around and deleting and using different doors, but it seems to keep happening. Selection seems to be happening somewhere or at sometime other than exiting build mode.
Hi, again, I'm going to ask a silly question but was curious. Is the world map or at least some of it below ground? water levels? Because sometimes depending on where I try to build a house I will the 'can't place the roof moldings message' it says the room has to be above ground. Well it is, it has the same wall height as the rest of the house and is on the same size foundation since we can't change those to one section of height to another. I was just curious why this doesn't always work? especially if it is an added on room. Which is by all means the same level and height as the rest of the house or building.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
SimGurus, please say " noted" when you have read this and noticed my suggestions:
- Could you PLEASE add models/supermodel career AND rock stars/ability to sing other music than pop too to The Sims 4 Fame and Fortune expansion pack if you will make it in the near future? I LOVED the supermodel career in the Sims 1 Superstar!
- I would LOVE shopping malls/centers in that Town Life expansion pack if you will make it!
- Could you make bigger neighborhoods in the future? Or enlarge
- More color options, possibly even CAST-ish tool but make it only if you can! And try to make it please!
- Toddlers in a free patch, because then MANY people will forgive you the time you had to sacrifice for the toddlers and anyway!
- Could you do City Living EP's with the ability to add singers from Fame and Fortune EP to bands in City Living EP? PLEASE!
- Freetime EP could be nice.
- Farm Life EP too, please!
- Please add Apartments to the City Living EP! And maybe more like TS2 Apartment Life's ones
- Ability to make more than 3 floors to houses would be very nice.
- Basements back, I would like to make them to my houses.
- Horses back, please!
Thank you for noticing my suggestions!
Hello SimGuruMax! I am really delighted that you actually get to answer our questions in a technical, yet comprehensive manner! Since I'm studying Information Technology, I would like to know what exactly happens during the loading process in traveling between locations. Rendering is one thing for sure but I would like some more detail. Thank you!
SimGurus, please say " noted" when you have read this and noticed my suggestions:
- Could you PLEASE add models/supermodel career AND rock stars/ability to sing other music than pop too to The Sims 4 Fame and Fortune expansion pack if you will make it in the near future? I LOVED the supermodel career in the Sims 1 Superstar!
- I would LOVE shopping malls/centers in that Town Life expansion pack if you will make it!
- Could you make bigger neighborhoods in the future? Or enlarge
- More color options, possibly even CAST-ish tool but make it only if you can! And try to make it please!
- Toddlers in a free patch, because then MANY people will forgive you the time you had to sacrifice for the toddlers and anyway!
- Could you do City Living EP's with the ability to add singers from Fame and Fortune EP to bands in City Living EP? PLEASE!
- Freetime EP could be nice.
- Farm Life EP too, please!
- Please add Apartments to the City Living EP! And maybe more like TS2 Apartment Life's ones
- Ability to make more than 3 floors to houses would be very nice.
- Basements back, I would like to make them to my houses.
- Horses back, please!
Thank you for noticing my suggestions!
Asking many, many different questions on one topic thread does not seem to be solving much. ONE TOPIC THREAD FOR ONE QUESTION makes it much easier for new people to find answers. Are we supposed to go through all the friggin pages here to, hopefully, find an answer to ONE SPECIFIC QUESTION? Apparently, that is what is expected of us. Go through 20 pages HOPING you will find an answer to one specific question. Ridiculous!
I would imagine ANY SimsGuru who comes to this topic thread feels as though he is drowning. Well, at least you can't blame me because your questions are being ignored, right? All my other posts were deleted.
There are too many people getting desperate for answers from SimsGurus around here. That much is for certain
Hey, If you only want technical responses then keep a technical topic thread in the technical forum!
That's what the search is for. If you have a question, search for it and see if someone else has asked already and if they haven't, then you can ask. If they have, read all the posts and see if anyone came up with a solution for your problem.
The whole point of this is to have all of our questions in one spot so the SimGurus don't have to go through every single post in the forum. No one but you seems to have a problem with this.
So, everyone is supposed to go through all 20 pages HOPING they can find an answer to a question of theirs so the SimsGurus don't have to go out of their way? Is that the strategy? Make it easier for the SimsGurus and difficult for us?
Comments
My apologies, MVWdeZT - you were right! She had never gotten Writer's Block because I had her writing books except for the first round of "Practice Writing" where Writer's Block didn't happen for her. I purposely made her get Writer's Block by having her "Practice Writing" for several hours (even though she is a level 10 Writer - lol) and then I had her watch TV for a while, then I sent her to the Library where she played Chess for awhile - and somehow this fulfilled the "false goal" of going to the Library to read 1 book. Holy. That was complicated.
Now I need help to figure out how to get rid of the mailbox from my own little Library venue.
Thanks again, MVWdeZT!!
1) This sounds like an issue with tuning. Does it affect all computer interactions or just certain ones? My guess would be the latter - there was a (overly) complex and finicky tuning structure for telling an interaction what objects are involved. We have sophisticated systems for finding objects to interact with in many cases like finding an oven to use when you click on the fridge and a chair to use to eat food. In both of those cases, the oven and the chair were not clicked on. In cases where the target of the click also wants to be the target of the interaction, there is a field that must be filled in to tell the system what role that object will take in the animation suite. It is likely that this field was mistuned for one or more computer interactions based on what you are saying. We knew this was an issue so we are working on making this system have better defaults and be more easily understood in the future.
2) Doors are sided. We calculate which side of the door is outside and which is inside and thats how we determine locking and lot-greet status. Are you seeing both cases happening with the same door/lot without changes? That would be odd as I think that calculation is only done once when you exit build-buy (we do a lot of meta-data processing when you exit build-buy so we can be lazier later). That said, knocking on the door uses a cone constraint relative to the facing of the door, so it is possible that there is a bug where the orientation of the door matters when it should be using the calculated value based on inside/outside. This is just a taste of how complex something as simple as a door is in The Sims.
3) We redesigned the environment score system from the ground-up for this game and not everything was included that had been in the past. I would expect to see new environment score features in the future but Sims not minding the dark was "intentional," I suppose, in the sense that we were aware that we weren't shipping with it.
Horses and cars are very different animals. In fact, cars aren't even animals (see what I did there?).
Let's start with Cars because they are simpler. The main problem with cars is making room for them in the world - parking, driveways, garages, streets, routes. This is also a problem for horses, but we can re-use some amount of the solution for both. The main issues relate to the layout of the player's lot, the lot boundary with the street, and how to standardize parking spaces both on-lot and along the street so cars don't clip into each other or the ambient traffic. There is additionally some animation cost to animate Sims getting in and out of cars, but thats not too bad. We also need to animate the cars driving, but that is also not too bad since wheels turning and rotating is very simple.
Horses are much harder and get into why Pets is often the third or fourth expansion. Horses have an actual walk cycle. They need to plant their feet and turn realistically as they follow routes. If we just animated a horse doing a walkstyle and then lerped it (linear interpolation) across the path, it would look extremely bad going around even slight corners due to foot sliding and the horse rotating around a pivot point in the center. Also, it would clip like crazy through everything because our entire routing system is based on Sim size and turning radius. The routing system needs to be expanded to account for something large and/or oblong like a horse or a dog. The main sticking point is that we have a much higher standard for animation quality on the Sims than most games do - we take things like foot planting vs. sliding very seriously and we wouldn't want to ship the version of horses that most games ship with. Just look at the rampant foot sliding and glitchiness of the equines in a game like Red Dead Redemption if you want to know what I mean.
Edit to mention that some of the issues with sliding that plague horses would also be an issue with Cars. We have to be careful when authoring their route splines to make the corners shallow to avoid sliding. This also further complicates the boundary between the lot and the street as it might take weird curves to get the car joined in with the street waypoints.
The story progression + pregnancy is not something I feel equipped to address. It is something I hope one of the other Gurus can speak to.
The finishing food thing sounds like a bug, but I have heard conflicting reports about this. The bottom line is Sims should always finish their food before doing something incompatible with eating. This is part of the multitasking engine that I have described previously in much more detail. The quick version is every interaction has a "guaranteed" phase and an "inertial" phase. Interactions that are guaranteed will block other incompatible interactions in the queue while interactions that are inertial will allow incompatible interactions in the queue to run and will be canceled as part of that process. Eat should be guaranteed as long as there is quantity left in the plate.
Others have mentioned a bug specifically with gardening - you mentioned Weeding which is why I bring this up - where Sims think that eating is compatible with gardening. The kicker, though, is that it IS compatible - Sims will happily weed and water while eating, which looks very bizarre and something we should have disabled through tuning. The baseline system for determining compatibility between interactions only takes into account their basic constraints and animation requirements. If Eat can be done anywhere and needs one hand to hold the foot and the other only intermittently to take bites and Weed also only needs one hand and requires you stand next to the plant, the Sim can stand next to the plant while holding the food in one hand and eating in the other. In cases like this, we had to explicitly tune those interactions to be incompatible with each other because it is a weird, mostly unrealistic scenario to find your Sim in.
I have covered the answers to these questions already if you go back and read earlier responses. Quick answer is we relaxed our tolerance for clipping to create a smoother gameplay experience. The fallout from this decision is often way more noticeable than the benefits since the benefit is getting rid of a bunch of horrific stuff that you just aren't seeing anymore (like foot-tapping). Unfortunately, this is one of those things where when we did our job right, our players never notice because things are going smoothly. People often only notice things consciously when they are bad and stand out as such. Building gameplay systems is tough for this reason. I stand by our policy of relaxed clipping tolerance, but I know there will be players out there who disagree, whether due to being naive to the missing problems or having different values.
Edited to mention that the props stuck to Sims hands is just a bug and has nothing to do with our clipping policy. We hate that bug as much as you do.
Also, this:
So true.
(I just stumbled upon the gardening interactions/jazz this weekend -- absolutely no surprise that one small thing (like the weeding vs. eating mentioned above) was missed. It is mindboggingly detailed and it's really rather impressive how everything else .. just works o.O)
> Others have mentioned a bug specifically with gardening - you mentioned Weeding which is why I bring this up - where Sims think that eating is compatible with gardening. The kicker, though, is that it IS compatible - Sims will happily weed and water while eating, which looks very bizarre and something we should have disabled through tuning. The baseline system for determining compatibility between interactions only takes into account their basic constraints and animation requirements. If Eat can be done anywhere and needs one hand to hold the foot and the other only intermittently to take bites and Weed also only needs one hand and requires you stand next to the plant, the Sim can stand next to the plant while holding the food in one hand and eating in the other. In cases like this, we had to explicitly tune those interactions to be incompatible with each other because it is a weird, mostly unrealistic scenario to find your Sim in.
Since you brought up gardening and multitasking, I always wonder why Sims can't water and weed and chat at the same time. It would be the most natural thing to do. I've noticed neighbors stopping by to chat while my Sims are gardening and they'll stand there forever waiting for my Sim to finish weeding or watering. Unless I cancel it out of my Sims que.
One of my sims was drinking orange juice, then I had her chat with a sim who was outside, but outside the perimeters of her home lot. As long as you don't have a sim try to enter a building, sims 4 functions much like an open world. So, she walks over to the other sim, still drinking her orange juice, and proceeds to chat. Then, she finishes her orange juice, puts the orange juice glass down on the ground outside, and continues chatting with the other sim. I tried placing a trash can on the corner of the played sim's lot in hopes that it would enable her to throw away the used orange juice glass, but no luck. Because the orange juice glass was placed down on the ground outside the playable sim's home lot there is no way to remove it. Because it is outdoors, there is no nearby sink. Because it is on another lot, no trash can. And because there is no move objects cheat, there is no way to move it back on to the home lot outside the playable sim's home, drag it to the sim's inventory, or drag it to a trash can placed on that lot.
I'd expect the majority of their customers don't even enable cheats - I didn't for the most part in the Sims 3 - only did so recently when I spotted a few tricks I could use with building houses - so I'm not surprised it wasn't prioritized.
Hah.
Serial Romantic Aspiration.
Player Trait.
Harem.
Players: Check out my Sims 4 Room Challenge.
Devs & Players: Check out my Archaeology Career Idea
I want to do other unconventional things with my title too, but I plan to use or write my own modifications for that.
I appreciate you answered me concerning the weed/eat debacle. However, these statements here make me scratch my head. I may be one of those who disagree that clipping is o.k. Because let me explain something from a lot of Simmers perspectives. Clipping when dancing etc. and or toe tapping didn't happen in the TS2. Toe tapping was a feature of the TS1 and TS3, I often wondered why you guys went back to TS1 style toe tapping when Sims couldn't get around each other? Sims in TS2 are able to 'dance together, and even line dance (many different type dances) without clipping. And most of the time walking around other Sims in that game is very smooth, even in a tight situation. No clipping. It only seems to be (me being naïve) it only became a problem during the creation of the TS3 and later that Sims were no longer able to get around each other smoothly and or without clipping. I don't know a lot of how a game is technically created, and I do thank you for answering but while creating this game, you may have overlooked one of it's stronger points. The visuals in The Sims have always been extremely important to the most of us. Like not seeing clipping. Because many, many Simmers take pictures, tell stories and create videos to share with friends and YouTube, now, and those visuals matter. And so does the immersion. So, by saying it's o.k. this is par for the course in this game is somewhat naïve when considering the long time players of these games. And I say that will all respect.
Edited typos
There was a mod for it in The Sims 3, but just thought I'd ask.
I was just thinking about that the other day! How if my Sims could open the window, they could talk with a neighbour (or sneaky boyfriend!) through the window, but especially they could hear the crickets at night, and that would be lovely.
Thanks again for the answers.
1. I didn't test all computer interactions, but I have had it happen with the "write genre book", "play game/enter tournament", and "program game" options. It seemed to be across the board, but maybe it was just those particular ones.
What is going on with the computers sounds similar to what is happening now for the beds for me and some other Simmers. Since the last patch, when selecting the "woohoo" option the Sims may go to a bed other than the one selected. The change makes me wonder were you, by any chance, working on a bed selection system similar to the one @IngeJones mentioned earlier in this thread?
2. Yes, I have doors that Sims will sometimes choose to knock on the inside of and sometimes choose to knock on the outside of. I've tried switching the door around and deleting and using different doors, but it seems to keep happening. Selection seems to be happening somewhere or at sometime other than exiting build mode.
- Could you PLEASE add models/supermodel career AND rock stars/ability to sing other music than pop too to The Sims 4 Fame and Fortune expansion pack if you will make it in the near future? I LOVED the supermodel career in the Sims 1 Superstar!
- I would LOVE shopping malls/centers in that Town Life expansion pack if you will make it!
- Could you make bigger neighborhoods in the future? Or enlarge
- More color options, possibly even CAST-ish tool but make it only if you can! And try to make it please!
- Toddlers in a free patch, because then MANY people will forgive you the time you had to sacrifice for the toddlers and anyway!
- Could you do City Living EP's with the ability to add singers from Fame and Fortune EP to bands in City Living EP? PLEASE!
- Freetime EP could be nice.
- Farm Life EP too, please!
- Please add Apartments to the City Living EP! And maybe more like TS2 Apartment Life's ones
- Ability to make more than 3 floors to houses would be very nice.
- Basements back, I would like to make them to my houses.
- Horses back, please!
Thank you for noticing my suggestions!
Sorry SimGurus, I posted this to a wrong thread!
That's what the search is for. If you have a question, search for it and see if someone else has asked already and if they haven't, then you can ask. If they have, read all the posts and see if anyone came up with a solution for your problem.
The whole point of this is to have all of our questions in one spot so the SimGurus don't have to go through every single post in the forum. No one but you seems to have a problem with this.