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I have wasted many days in an old version of SimPE exploring parts that it didn't yet "support". As a result I no longer see people and characters, but instead objects that run code.
I've looked mostly into the Sims 2, giving a little time to the first installment. At first, I was disappointed at the lack of options in the basegame, when the original Sims had already received numerous expansion packs. But after seeing the realism and as the first expansions appeared, I never returned to the first game. It doesn't even provide sound on my new computer.
My Wishes about how The Sims should have been improved
I wish the sims world had much more depth to explore, that characters were more developed and interconnected, with memories and similar facial features. From these examples, a player could learn how to expand and build further. Characteristics such as skin color or ugliness should have been functionally defined and have a meaning while calculating attraction or constructing neighborhoods in different locales. A player must still imagine a great part of the story, which the simulation fails to visualize or even while it presents a conflicting picture.
I also wish the game had a separate Creation mode without restrictions, and a Scenario mode that ran a previously created scenario and required to obey the rules to play out specific challenges. Right now, the game awkwardly switches between these two modes, pulling control out of the user's hands at unexpected moments.
My last but not least important criticism is efficiency, and the product could without much doubt be described as bloatware. The first and second installments waste disk space and memory in every part. The user feels this in lengthy loading times that increase as neighborhoods grow. Reviewers have also criticised the slow performance, but it couldn't be simply patched as they expected; the game must have been rebuilt from scratch.
Most people in a neighborhood have faces taken from less than 30 templates. Yet each person has their face saved in its character file, using more than 100 kB.
A copy of many graphic and text resources exists in each expansion pack, installing all of them creates more than 10 copies of each affected resource.
They use "self-commenting" scripts and unnecessary sub calls in them. They set bits in a flag field one by one, instead of writing the whole word or dword with AND/OR operators. They make calls such as: "am I adult", which calls "is sim adult (me)", which then calls "is neighbor adult (nid)", which then compares "neighbor in object" person age.
Text strings contain unused translations, or ones that are identical to the original line in English, they contain comments that are also repeated in each translation.
When the player signs up for magazines in FreeTime, a phone call object, of over 50 kB, is loaded for each individual magazine and the fact that a subscription exists is recorded with a memory which is several bytes long, when one call and one data word for all magazines, each using one bit of data, would suffice. An object related to each magazine is created and deleted every time the player clicks on a sim. All magazines are treated and do behave exactly the same.
The full 3D object is sometimes created just to display it's icon.
Most packages are compressed, which does not fully negate the wasted space, but still causes additional load on the CPU and uses memory for the full decompressed copy. If the resources were not wasted, compression would do little and would be unnecessary, except for most graphics. The list of examples could go on.
The almighty Random Number Generator decides all that happens in the Sims world. I wish it was scenarios and the player's action.
