There's so much discussion. Less conversation, more action. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease... .

If I read this correctly, it's finally confirmation that SimGuruGraham is the official beta tester for the series! So they really do have a tester on staff!

I may be reading into things a bit, but hanging the official EA game "simulator" for 10 seconds must have been a sign of something really bad. But then, why do they use a simulator to test a game that's a simulation itself? I guess if it can happen in the simulator, I might have to stop complaining when my actual game freezes for 10 seconds now and then.

Still, it's nice to know they can successfully dock the boat, for now at least. Hate to have been left adrift, route failing the whole way across the ocean.

I certainly hope he isn't the only one testing the game.

I'm not a tester, but one of the roles of producers is to ultimately be responsible for approving both individual features and the overall product to ensure they're at the quality level we intend to ship at. As such, part of my job is watching my features as they come in not only to check for bugs, but to approach it from a player's perspective and make sure it's as fun and polished as it can be. I talk to our designers, programmers, artists, etc daily to help guide a feature in the right direction overall. As with any sizable video game, we have a dedicated QA team. Without them, nobody would be playing the game.

The simulator is what we call the gameplay code written in C#. The engine on the other hand is done in C++. The simulator can hang without the game having crashed... for example when you see things like ripples on water still moving or trees still waving in the wind, but all Sims are frozen and the game clock doesn't progress.

To try and explain it simply (and I wouldn't be the best person to fully break down what's happening)... path planning can be a heavy performance hit (even more so when we're talking about new tech that hasn't been tested yet and unfinished worlds), so when we're trying to route something somewhere and the simulator hangs for a chunk of time, it's a sign that it's trying to calculate a lot of things that it shouldn't be. The root cause of that can be any number of things though, which is why we're seeing rapid improvement on houseboats right now... they're still in the middle of implementing them and nothing is finished yet.

So if we get newspaper delivery to our houseboats, does that mean we'll have an ice cream boat floating outside our houseboat at 3am too?

I'd like to see a world like Saaqartoq updated with IP innovations once IP comes out.

There's no escaping it. You can run, but you can't hide.

I want some Sims 1-esque sinister music, then for the water bubbles up and the truck slowly rises with some horrific sound. Then comes that spine tingling jingle music playing as it calls for us, lulling us out to our deaths like sirens luring horny sailors onto rocks.

ROFL, this is just too funny.

I was just thinking about this tonight while playingmy sim family. I am still having the ice cream truck haunting my sim home, but only in the afternoon, it leaves in the evening. I just moved my family into a larger lot so I don't notice it anymore.

It's better to be slaked and to not want it than to be given the silent treatment when you really want your dairy fix.

And it's odd having Graham stalk the forum now. What if he read the first post is going "That's wrong... that's wrong... that's wrong...".

Well, after a plethora of patches released, your team still missed a spot.

Sim guru on MTS, how do we know its for real

Two things... One, I would think if someone were going to bother impersonating a SimGuru, they'd have more than 5 posts in three months time. What fun is impersonation if you don't throw your assumed weight around? Two, I don't think an impersonator would keep giving links to twitter... unless we assume that's an impersonator on Twitter as well...

Haha, probably. I'm just surprised to see!

I, for one, welcome our new guru overlords.

No surfing added? Oh well, I'm still excited for this and University

I'm still holding out hope for a Sports and Hobbies EP, similar to Freetime, where they'll add in surfing as well as tons of other cool stuff. :D

I'm not sure if you were referring to my post when you posted that, but I totally do, too. I just would never kiss his/her ass the way many posters do on the official forum. If I have an issue with the game, I will be blunt about it. But yeah, it is nice to see Graham on here. I at least do appreciate the fact that he posts as much as he does about the games he works on. In fact, he and Sarah are both awesome. However, that still doesn't mean that I will be happy about certain bugs never being fixed, and that still doesn't change my stance on EA and what have you. But... meh... what can you do, you know?

To Graham: what I definitely want to know is... when can my Late Night bars play custom music through the wall speaker instead of that station still being muted via wall speakers? Oddly enough, out of the many bugs that are still overlooked, that is one of the most annoying ones for me, since I'm very musical with the game. I'm just curious about this; that';s all.

It's funny, I was just thinking about a Freetime EP they could possibly later on make in the future. Now that could also be expected. And if they did, they could add skateboarding and surfing as hobbies ^.^

Well maybe he'll help us out...

Warm...warm... cold... hot... hot... hot... wow that one's burning up... No, cold... cold... cold...

What make Graham's appearance a surprise is there was a time when you couldn't post any links to MTS on the forums, you could get a 72 hr. ban. Wonder if posting MATY links is still a no-no? Yeah, might be.

That'd be splendiferous.

OK, I'm impressed.

Now I also (kind of) understand what those freezes are coming from, where the world appears to still be rendering, but the game can't advance.

I am just curious about the houseboat issue. While IRL, a boat might be able to take an infinite variety of paths through the water from point A to point B, there are still restrictions based on boat design (turn radius, etc.). While the EA ocean might be a wide open expanse, I would think that the "water lot" (my technical jargon for the water area) would still have routes plotted for an object to follow, needing only to allow for collision detection and avoidance, just as there are preferred routes for navigating across a "land lot". Wouldn't that simplify route calculations, while still allowing for the appearance of freedom of movement through the space?

And seriously, it is nice to know that as a producer, you are testing the code as it's developed, while there are still opportunities to make changes before everything is too far advanced along to go back and make adjustments in play. I also think that if you spend time reading stuff here, and can get past the snarky comments (remember, it's nothing personal), you can find some pretty good insights regarding technical and game play issues that can be helpful for your team.

There was one other issue raised above that I would really like to know about. Will there really be ice cream boats, too?

Hi Graham! Is there any news on fixing/patching the Mac issues because I would really like to get Island Paradise and University but won't if these problems continue. Thanks! :D

frankie and eskie227, I prefer to lurk more here for some of the exact reasons you both mentioned. I really don't want to interfere with the nice community built up here or the way people post/express themselves. I enjoy coming here for the honest feedback, the criticisms, and because a good chunk of people here have a better technical understanding of what's going on when they run into a problem. I find it to be an informative resource. It's a little tricky though... sometimes reading here requires digging through the white noise to differentiate between problems caused by mods/CC or actual issues with the game.

I wouldn't take me posting here as any change in the rules of posting on the official forums though. I don't really have any involvement in the rules or moderation there. I keep tabs on a variety of Sims sites in the community though as I feel there's a lot to learn from our players, and it helps me be a better producer.

I also think I can safely confirm that there won't be an Ice Cream Boat visiting your houseboat, although as a fan of Sweet Tooth I love pirate_wolf's idea

As for the wall speaker/custom music thing... I haven't heard of that issue before myself. I'll take a look in our database and see if it's already logged, and throw something in if not. I'll be honest in that it'd be lower on the priority list of back things to get to though.




Unfortunately I don't work on the mac version of the game; it's difficult to comment on it when I'm ignorant of what's going on there. I sympathize with the issues people are having though. From what I've overheard we've had a difficult time reproducing some of the reported mac issues, which makes it harder to address if we can't see it happening internally. I know they're still looking into things in that area though, so hopefully we'll see some movement on that in the future.

No way I would think you have any influence on the forums and it's rules, just that I felt MTS was the stepchild of the Sims community, especially putting them in the same bad category as MATY. I welcome any feedback from you being so close to the game's development and I come here for the same reason, getting more technical reasoning when my game goes KaBoom!

Please by any means necessary can you look into the problems with playing custom music before the series is closed. I would love to listen to the music I choose from my own music folder. I have used every means to get that station to play, with each new EP or SP the ability to hear the custom station gets worst.