Caw and the first world

[PoisonFrog]

I'm a couple weeks into my first world, most of which was spent edumacating myself on various topics. I'm most impressed with the height map import/export...the Photoshop pen tool is awesome in conjunction with this feature. I also tried out World Machine after seeing a related tutorial for it on MTS. I may not use it on my current world as I'm somewhat constrained on Terra forming, but definitely on the next.

Anyway, I do have a few questions...one problem I'm having is with heights. I put a few mesa's in and went in game and experienced camera height jumping. Is there a mod or fix to minimize this, or do I need to be more elevation-ally restrained? I've seen Maxis have problems with this also...specifically I'm thinking of that Aerie house in the swamps of Twinbrook, next to the tall dam.

I've also seen posts in various forums saying you have to leave gaps in your streets where the intersections go. I haven't done this, but I've put this world into play 3 times and not experienced a problem. Did EA resolve this or am I missing something?

Last thing... getting some jumpiness(frame rates?) when I lock the camera on one of my sims in a taxi. I'm running a full world 2048^2 x 300, but it's fairly barren at this point, except for streets and one family for testing. I'm not sure why this should be occurring and wondering if it will get worse as the world becomes more densely populated and constructed... :turtle:

[simsample]

For the camera question, you'd need some kind of camera mod to deal with that. There's a videocamera.ini file in [Game Install Location]\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\Ini, not sure if that contains anything to help or whether it's elsewhere. Have you checked our mods section to see if anyone has any camera mods?

For the road question, what do you mean by gaps? If you mean 'do you need to have road intersections' then the answer is apparently no. If you open Egypt in CAW you can see that there are several places where road junctions have been made by just overlapping roads, without actually using an intersection. You need to check your routing data if you do this though, to make sure it all looks regular and smooth. Also test to check that the sim doesn't get trapped or double back on himself!

For the jumpiness thing, probably what you're experiencing is the game populating the world. So, creating NPCs, trying to move in families, creating grim reaper and animals and all sorts of 'extras'. Also, I've found that the taxis and cars can run quite fast, so you might get some slight lag as the game builds the world caches- remember that for a custom world the game has to build the caches from scratch, whereas in the EA worlds they are already built and sitting in the game data folders.