I like the rabbit holes. I don't need every single building in my neighborhood to load, ESPECIALLY if it's to be something big and crowded, such as the theater and the hospital.

There's a book cash register in WA too. What books does that offer on the mainland?

Well, maybe if you got them to volunteer as MY SLAVES, you wouldn't have this problem. I mean, you can't get better than my enlightened and unrestrictive policy of "Meh".

I'd be fine with rabbit hole objects that are tiny and unobtrusive, and building the rabbit hole buildings as simply a shell. For a school you don't need 20 classrooms or whatever - just the outside well decorated with a few things placed right inside the windows so it looks realistic.

Maybe not the school, But you could do for like city hall, police department, Like at the two eating places, I want my sims to be social to each other, So i usually have to sit them outside.

Also, The grave yard tomb thingy should be turned into a basement area like in WA, And have zombies and stuff

It sells the same books you can get in the book store rabbit hole. So you can use that register to make your own custom book store.

Well other than the bus boy, I can pretty much garentee than the rest will come in an EP. They are not gonna give us something that they can charge for, for free..

Last edited by chellemh : 29th Dec 2009 at 02:36 PM.

There are 5 registers, you can use them or the ones unlocked by Fluttereyes which appear under computers as buyable (don't need to use buydebug cheat), together with her buygoods anywhere mod. (they are posted on this site, or can be got from prettysims. With these you can build open shops in any world, including riverview and sunset. You can have a bookstore, foodstore where you can buy and sell produce and prepared food (so you can have a cafe), nectary buy or sell nectar and the nectar making bits, relic store - buy and sell relics, gems etc and a general store where you can buy adventure supples plus cameras and best of all scooters. All are non rabbit hole shops. You can't work in them, the registers are manned by random sims from the world you are in, need to give them a few minutes to show up when you first use the shop. pretty sims has one or two shop lots for download.

Yeah, we need Open For Business already.

I totally agree with you HP. I find the concept of rabbit holes convenient, not to mention the fact it saves on system resources. If I could create my own I would do exactly what you describe, a few objects and such just inside to keep realism and decorate the exterior accordingly.

To me, I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little bit of rendering speed to have a fully-functional game....

Wouldn't be sacrificing a little bit of render speed. Would be making the game barely playable on fast computers, and unplayable on slow ones. Every time you up the performance requirements, you slice off a whole segment of Sims players.

There is another solution though. That would be to have rabbit hole interiors load separately from their exteriors, like lots of RPGs do for the insides of houses, caves and so on. They do that for this exact reason: it improves performance. You get a brief loading screen when you enter the building, but with good design that can be negligable. *shrug*

Of course, supporting that would probably require big changes to the game engine, but it does seem to me like the way to go if they ever do try the "opening up the rabbit holes" thing.

Another point to keep in mind is that it is CONSIDERABLY MORE COMPUTATIONALLY INTENSIVE, not to mention labor intensive, to create a business as a non-rabbithole. If a business function is a rabbithole, it will always reliably work. Sim goes into the rabbithole, he performs his function, he exits the rabbithole. Drawback: You don't get to see it happen.

On the other hand, making it a NON-RABBITHOLE now means that sim actually has to go inside and DO those things. Now you need objects, animations, and lots and lots of code to cover all the potential corner cases and failures that can result, if, say, someone isn't where he's supposed to be, or never existed in the first place, so now you have to create an entirely new sim, or find the sim that is AWOL, and try to make him get his ass back to work, and then what do if something has happened to him, blah, blah, blah. It's several orders of magnitude more labor intensive to create a live-action version of a rabbithole, and also costs a lot more in computation to operate, as now you have one or more sims which must be simulated. Plus, service reliability goes way down, given that any of the core NPCs going AWOL breaks your chain (and now you have to write code to cover what happens when a chain break occurs). So you weigh that against "And is this actually cool to watch, or will it get repetitive after the umpteenth time you've seen it"? For instance, shopping rabbitholes. Cute...but look at how many times in TS2 we tried to skip the entire starship-docking-sequence of parking at a register, waiting for the NPC to finally acknowledge your presence...or even show up, etc., etc. Tons of hacks were made to allow this entire rigamarole to be dodged, and ultimately we only REALLY wanted it when playing it from the other side! There is just so much more room to work if you embrace Rabbitholism and create more NEW rabbitholes with unique functions.

AHAHAHAHAHA thats hilarious!!! I would love to be your slave and help but i suck at programming, but im happy to test?????

I personally like rabbitholes. I cant be following all my simmies into work and school and actually try and get them to perform whatever tasks! I love work and school i get a few minutes to breathe before they all come home and its back into action!!! maybe if they want to "open the rabbitholes" as they have called it, they could offer it as an optional EP or something so that those of us that like em could keep em. But then thats probably not really a viable option! (as i said, i suck at programming!) EA cant please everyone can they?

OH and i signed ya petition BTW cos i think having a lil rabbithole we can then make lil custom buildings. I have already been making my lil country hometown with the previously mentioned rabbitholes that are smaller objects, with a doctors office instead of a big hospital, a lil country school with a playing field and court to be the "athletics", a lil mall which has the bookstore, paper, gorcery store, and the business career, and a park with a "drive in movie" (theatre) etc. Its much more quaint and suits me better!!!!

I don't need testers for a product that doesn't exist and I don't need programmers. I need meshers and artists. I have the programming covered. And why are you people bothering with worthless petitions? Petitions have been firmly debunked as useless. Want to actually have an effect? Sign yourself up as SLAVE LABOR for ME.

Pescado, it's really difficult and long-term making a skin for a rabbithole that looks good and has the same definition as a real lot (get that wrong and the thing will look like it was photoshopped into the scene lol).

Why don't you do a version like the Melissa ones so people can make their own buildings? You will definitely get meshing volunteers for those.

If I wanted to make ugly crap with low-to-no standards of quality, I'd have done that already. Even if I were going to make a mini-rabbithole, it would be done to higher standards than that.

Well you have more hope of someone doing a rabbithole marker object to a high quality than a whole ploppable building, IMHO.

You still going on about that? You know anything you manage to convince someone else to mesh for you still isn't going to be suitable because it will only fit one type of neighborhood - your own. Anyone who wants a medieval or victorian, or space theme still isn't going to be able to use it, and there will always be someone who wants it bigger or smaller, or a different color. And if you're really that picky, who's to say that you would like anything someone else did for you anyway? That's exactly why what Inge suggested is still a good idea.

Placing a rabbithole object inside a custom made building, even one that's a shell, fits much better. And really, there are a massive number of really nice houses on this site, meaning there are a lot of people capable of designing amazing "shells". You could even download an existing house with a design you like, empty it out, and stick a rabbithole object inside of it.

And the best thing about it is if you decide you want to change something about the design of the "shell", you can. Or if an upgrade to the rabbithole object is made you don't have to bulldoze your "shell" to change out the object.

Obviously, I'm not going to convince anyone to change their mind, I just want to offer up a different point of view.

I fail to see how opening the rabbit holes will impact the game any differently than do the community lots we have now (namely the markets in WA). One of the great aspects of the Sims 3 engine (despite it's many other flaws), is that it only computes data which is currently visible to the user. As you suggested, when entering a lot the engine can call upon a prefab which will then render the interior. I believe lots already do this, and I've read in interviews that EA plans to eventually open up all the rabbitholes with the addition of new EPs....

Have you actually started a thread regarding this?
I'm pretty sure if people know the offer is there you'd get loads of offers.

Back on topic, theres buckets of building meshes on the google earth warehouse site, I'm surprised there isn't multiple different stadiums and town halls out yet.
Imagine this as a downloadable replacement:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwareho...894&prevstart=0

I want to be able to watch my sim actually playing football!

Yeah, I've pondered on that. But it would involve at least 12 sims, all with co-ordinated animations. With EA at the helm, a huge ask.

But tennis, boxing, weight-lifting, high-jump and the like are entirely feasible. Get onto it EA. I wonder if they would be apprehensive to do that because of girls being less fanatical about sports than boys, but I don't see a huge barrier.
There should be a sports EP. Said that back in ye olde days of TS2.

tizerist - You could say Freetime had a sporty 'theme' to it. I know it was more about hobbies, but they added football strips for clothing, a basket ball net and a football net in buy mode.