Dear Maxis/EA If we can be so bold and presumptious may I request that you start work now on some important elements for the next incarnation of the Sims franchise. Much is and has been made of the fantastic contributions to the game that have been made by the community of players. But I wonder why you actually make life so difficult for those unsung geeky-heroes with a game structure which is designed to make modding and customisation as difficult as possible. Firstly. Please let The Sims 3 be designed so that a Color Enabler hack is not needed just so the community can apply recolors to game objects. The more so because the invaluable CEP in use by hundreds of thousands of players has to be upgraded after each expansion pack. This seems to be perverse and should be avoided at all costs. Secondly. Custom objects should be forward compatible. If a creator clones a fridge and makes a shiny new fridge to math his jazzy new kitchen then that custom object should call and load a generic "fridge menu", so that if later expansion add new functionality to an object, all existing objects (both "official" and custom are upgraded equally by the new menu without the need for the creator to return to the drawing board. Attention to these two items would have immeasurable benefits to the community of players and creators and modders. You know that modding and hacking is going to occur and you make no bones about your company's benevolent feelings toward those whose work makes the game so flexible and expandable. Please don't make TS3 as much of a dog's breakfast of coding so that every expansion pack results in a flood of broken objects ... and we both know that it is not just custom content that gets broken by expansion packs. You actually manage to break your own objects because, it seems, that every object is as individually crafted in code as it is in vectors and faces and bump maps. I'll end with a simple plea. How about some sanity in the free will department? Please try to program the game so the time it takes for a sim to stop reading the paper and greet the passer-by is not one second more than the time it takes the passer by to stop waiting to be greeted. You know what I mean. It is an example of what I call cheating by the programmer ... using a blatant deus ex machina of code to substitute for a reasonable and believable situational level of game-play challenge.
Nice points. I especially agree with you about the CEP and the paragraph that comes after "secondly" D). It is SO annoying that you have to upgrade the CEP every time you install a new EP, and the whole enabling custom content after each EP annoys me too. Especially since my game takes such a long time to load in the beginning.
