Kotaku
just published a article about pools and toddlers in The Sims 4, it’s worth the read. Article inside.
isn’t going to launch with pools or toddlers
, and people are pretty upset about that. But you know, toddlers are complicated. Makes sense that the developers might want to put that effort elsewhere. Pools, though? They’re just water. How hard could it be?
I asked producer Graham Nardone why it’s so tough to dig a ditch and fill it with water in
‘s new engine, and he attempted to break it down:
“It’s easy to look at something and think, ‘That looks pretty simple.’ When you think about a feature like pools upfront, it looks like a square box on the ground and you put a shader on the top surface and have Sims jump in.”
“But ultimately, it’s more complexity in terms of what tech’s there and what isn’t there, what we have to build to support this. How do we cut down into the terrain, how do we get Sims going through portals across different levels of pools? There’s so much that’s going on in the background that you don’t end up seeing just to have a Sim go swimming.”
It’s kind of wild that the engine doesn’t easily allow developers to dig down into terrain or let Sims pass between different levels, but I suppose it’s a bit less surprising when you consider that Glassbox, as the engine is known, was originally created with the most recent
SimCity
in mind—not
The Sims
. Very different needs and priorities, for better or worse.
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