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Did you know that expanding and adding more neighborhoods to existing worlds is possible?
Karon
Posts: 2,332 Member
The Sims 4 Producer Grant Rodiek said on The Sims Official Forums, around the time SIms 4 was released, that expanding Neighborhoods and adding more of them in a single World is a possible thing!
Larryad: Is it possible to at least open up the neighborhoods, so that you don’t have to incur a loading screen every time you enter a building within the neighborhood? I know that this has been stated before, but the worlds do need to be bigger. They’re tiny. Overall a great job on the Sims themselves though. I’d also like to see a Sim be able to flop down on a couch, the way they did in Sims 2. Also body hair for men please.
SimGuruGrant: We can potentially make the individual neighborhoods larger. We can also potentially add more neighborhoods to each world. The loading at this point is a fundamental part of our architecture and is unlikely to change.
How this could improve the game and why we should be asking for this?
- If you own Get To Work: Every world (or most of them), including DLC worlds, would be updated to have a shopping district with their own editable police station, science lab and hospital + lots with stores/empty for you to build stores. Example: Most simmers don't use Magnolia Promenade due to its size and lack of uniqueness. It feels like it should be either part of Willow Creek or Oasis Springs. Willow Creek would have Magnolia Promenade on its map, while all the others would have a whole new shopping district added to them.
- If you own City Living: Every world (or most of them), including DLC worlds, would be updated to have a neighborhood with apartments and/or penthouses. Example: Those decorative skyscrapers from Newcrest could be a visual reference to an actual neighborhood filled with apartments for you to live.
- If you own Island Living: Every world (or most of them), including DLC worlds, would be updated to have swimmable water (lakes, rivers, oceans) or have a whole new neighborhood with such thing. Example: The beach with pier in Del Sol Valley could be an actuall neighborhood with beach houses and swimmable beach.
- If you own Discover University: Every world (or most of them), including DLC worlds, would be updated to have its own matching university neighborhood.
- If you own Vampires/Realm of Magic: New packs with occult creatures would expand those worlds with new neighborhoods matching the scenery and the new occult.
- If you own Jungle Adventures: Every world (or most of them), including DLC worlds, would be updated to have a new neighborhood with explorable tombs. Example: Ancient castle ruins in Windenburg, haunted celebrity mansion in Del Sol Valley, and so on and so forth...
What are your thoughts on that?
Source: https://simscommunity.info/2014/09/07/sims-4-expanding-adding-neighborhoods-possible/
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Comments
However, I'd like to point out that Grant only talks about lots/neighborhoods within a world. And that was back before specific functionality within worlds (university buildings, apartment buildings, etc) was in the game. cross-pack compatibility tends to complicate things when it comes to coding.
It's one thing to take a world, add a neighborhood or a few extra lots to it, change the map accordingly and be done. It's a whole different thing to make those changes conditional on a player owning a specific DLC or more.
I would absolutely love if they added new lots and neighborhoods to the worlds though. Especially DSV or Magnolia Promenade.
1. That does not really go well with their current business model with separate packs, separate worlds, and that the game can run with any different number of packs.
2. That requires you to go back into older packs and change the coding, and I also assume that the amount of lots are decided based on how many they think the game can handle or that they had time to make with their budget. Those money and those people are no longer working on that, so people would have to go back and change things that they made a couple of years ago.
I would really like if that could be possible though. I'm not sure what that would fit in...a free update or an expansion pack? I don't think many packs have required them to change all the worlds except seasons.
I was still new to all this when Island Living went down, so I doubt I could find it, but I seem to remember reading something about how that was the plan - that all water would be swimmable - but adding deep water swimming (as opposed to just wading) to the other worlds broke existing saves, which is why they didn't include it even though they wanted to.
Also it's possible that they discovered back when they were working on Get To Work and intending to add Magnolia Promenade to Willow Creek - only to find it also broke existing saves. Which is why it's a tiny separate lot and the area where the police station and the Hospital is looks like it could house another lot, and why the police station, hospital, and Lab aren't casually visit-able, despite apparently being set up for it.
If I'm following the Sims 4 timeline correctly, then Grant's statement in that quote may well have been before they realized that while, yes, adding new neighborhoods for new saves was possible, it broke existing ones. Assuming, of course, that such is the case, for which I only have some educated speculation.
I would love shopping districts and a downtown sort of area for all neighbourhoods. Windenburg has a sort of downtown but it's very modern unlike the rest of the neighbourhood. There is generally a lack of space for community lots, a space where you can add restaurants or shops, bars and cafes, specific to the area. Sulani would do great with a seafood restaurant, a Tiki bar, a spa, a swimsuit shop and a souvenir store but there's no place to fit them unless you scatter them all over the map. Would be nice to have areas that are more compact and with suitably sized lots for such venues.
For City Living would have been nice to have TS2 style apartments, so we could build our own apartment unites wherever we pleased. I don't want penthouses everywhere because they don't fit with the style of all the neighbourhoods.
Swimmable water should have been available in all neighbourhoods where sufficiently deep bodies of water are present.
I don't want more University campuses, as sims could live in their whatever neighbourhood, but maybe they could add more to the curriculum, more classes, more degrees, more activities, etc.
I don't want explorable tombs in all neighbourhoods, I think Jungle Adventure is fine as it is. Would have liked for it to add maybe new pets like parakeets, budgies, snakes, turtles, etc.
I don't really think they'd need to expand every single world with shopping areas or campus areas or such
what i'd have interest in is giving more lots in neighborhoods that have frustrating amount of shells
such as del sol starter area or sulani village (definition being there is way more shells than actual lots)
or even just toggles to simply turn on/off viewing the house shells in neighborhoods like newcrest ones
so they just kinda disappear and you just see some mmm green lawn/trees and stuff there like good old ts2
like there is plenty good lots there but i absolutely hate the house shells in that world so i never use it
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I suppose if it's possible, they'll get to it. The reason it'll take a while is because it means going back to old Worlds, potentially damaging people's saves, like Swimmable Water might have. At least half of all players would have to be okay with losing saves (but not their galleries).
So if we want bigger former lots, we need to step up and tell the Gurus that we really want bigger worlds.
Why would it damage saves if they open up previously shell buildings?
I don't know, because I'm not a Sims 4 programmer, but that's what a Guru said when asked some time ago. So we need to reassure them that we want these things enough to take that risk. Terrain editing was a huge thing for them to add to all worlds.
Because the shell isn't actually on a lot, so opening it up means adding a lot and then replacing the shell with an actual build. And while I'm only speculating, I'm guessing they discovered that adding lots to existing worlds broke old saves.
@logion Well, if they can add new worlds with new lots, I guess adding new neighborhoods is easier. They were asking us which packs we thought would be interesting to see having updates/additional content back in january... anyway, I don't think they would add that to the base game (unless they added the worlds without lots and having a pack automatically adds the respective lots).
@Simmingal I think they can't have toggles for decorative buildings, cuz they are usually "sculpted" within the world.
@Loanet so... I don't understand how it works, but maybe they could add a copy of the worlds fixed + swimmable water + more neighborhoods, and the original ones. Then, when you create new saves the game will automatically pick the new version, but the older version would still exist for those who still want to have their saves. Maybe it's a lot of extra memory usage, but they could warn people for like a year or so that at some point those older save files would be broken.
Also, if one of their problems is the budget to make brand new 2D maps everytime they expanded a world to add a neighborhood, then maybe they should scrap the 2D map altogether... The new thing could be that you click on the world bubble and you get a list of neighborhoods that belong to that world and when you choose the neighborhood, it takes you to a 3D version of the neighborhood to choose the lot you want to play in. AND, when they are finally ready for sims 5, they could wrap up each world with a big massive unique and pretty looking 2D map (as they won't edit them anymore).
Wild guess since I'm not on the dev team:
The old saves include the original routing and code for usable space. Including the last known position of any played and unplayed Sims at the time of saving.
If they were to change the base of those, included more routes for Sims to go to, the older saves wouldn't recognize those at loading. And say, a Sim was in a place that has changed with the addition, then the old save would have a code conflict with the new parts and either get corrupted or crash.
The true reason might be different but this is one issue I can see happening. Since they don't have the ability to edit/fix the saves that we have on our own devices, any change to the core of the game risks causing those saves to be damaged.
I wonder if that could be another reason why, who knows lol. Wish I could understand coding better!
Well, I've talked about that before @ManakoHime They can solve this problem adding a button were you could add and remove worlds from your save file. Like... If you only wanted to have Willow Creek in your save file, you could. If you only wanted a BIG BEAUTIFUL Del Sol Valley, we could... The devs wouldn't have excuses to add small worlds over and over again.
I don't think worlds would be bigger than Windenburg, but at least that size would be amazing.
However, my NEXT challenge is to see what it would take to modify the World Maps (circle maps) so that each copied version of a world could have a different map image. Problem is figuring out
- How the game references the maps-to-core world, and
- How it references the maps to copied world, and
- Determining whether there is any way to access that and
- Adjust the code to accept different maps.
Any ideas? I'd make a separate post, but per the rule of this forum, it will take me a couple of weeks to earn the 50 points needed to be able to post my own thread. . . Sorry. . . :0(