I want to criticize this game and here you go... I am disappointed. The game presents you with a very very beautiful scnery of "Pleasantview" town with gorgeous landscape, houses, roads, vehicles and even a railroad bridge crossing a mountain. After I have created a sim, I went off to choose a house fo him. And when that's done, the scene transits to another screen where it only displays the selected house and the house alone!? All the other houses, green lawns, roads in its vincinity are all gone. And about the house, it is like a broken piece of engineering work. The walls are pulled down. And as the sim walks from one spot to another inside the house, somehow the view is blocked by walls and other objects. I mean can all these be done more thoughtfully?
It is normal for the house being played not to show the neighbors or the rest of the neighborhood (except for the underlying grassy terrain.) This is instead of showing that area as just grey, which is what TS1 had. Unfortunately, to have the neighborhood visible from the lot being played would take a computer far more powerful than the ones that most people currently play on. It takes a considerable amount of processing/RAM ability to be able to show that sort of detail. I'm not sure what it is you're describing with the second problem. When the walls are down to play, there isn't any wall in the way. Even the stair cases and ceiling lights go transparent as you get close to them. The wall paintings don't even show up if you have the walls down. Some furniture (such as the big wardrobes and the mirrors) don't go away when you get close. By the way, your post is really a rant and will need to go to that forum. I'll leave a "sign" pointing the way, however.
Kat is correct. If you have a good high spec computer the neighborhood screen can be zoomed in so close that you can use the camera controls to simulate a drive past of your sims' houses. If you were really determined I think it is probably possible to take a selection of screenshots from the neighborhood screen and use them (suitably de-focussed) as backdrops to the wider angled shots taken on the lot. Besides ... I suspect more than a touch of tongue in cheek ... hongkong backwards?
Join the club. Click the mouse while this is happening to get on with it. It's cute the first time, it gets old fast. Yeah, it's kind of jarring like that. They should have just gone with the old TS1 gray. Rendering the other neighboring houses, for obvious reasons, would have chewed up a TON more memory, drastically increased the loading time as loading a single lot for play would require MULTIPLE lots to be loaded and processed, AFTER determining which ones were and were not visible....and would basically contribute nothing to gameplay. This is your fault for choosing the walls down view. If you don't like it, you can try playing with everything visible, and see how impossible it is to click on anything. Nyeah. What did you expect, Superman Xray Vision Mode? I've always wondered how the hell you can see ANYTHING with Xray vision, given that you see through everything, which would mean you see nothing. No, I think that while this game is certainly lacking in many things, such as testing, I can't really think of a significantly more elegant way of doing things. I would have gone with the gray void of TS1, rather than rendering blank green lots and street which should be occupied by other houses, though. I don't think you'd REALLY want to do this, there seem to be a number of rendering glitches associated with the neighborhood view. Has anyone noticed the "disappearing windows and doors and sometimes even walls", "sinkhole", "hovering gabled roofs", and "protruding bits" glitches, among other things? None of these glitches will show up when you're viewing the house from the lot, but when you view it from the neighborhood view, you'll see things like intersecting walls and objects poking through the other wall, leaving a stub visible from the neighborhood, a gabled roof that will appear to hover a few millimeters above the supports, allowing you see through a little gap into the house, and the "sinkhole" effect where the ground will appear to be getting sucked into a sinkhole of a house with a basement, leaving the house either floating on blackness, or leaving stairs leading up to the house showing a "recessed gumline" effect.
Another thing I would like to criticize is the language they speak. It is not English!? Why on earth would they like to do that? If they are in English, the game will be more immersive. Also, the icons they pop up above their heads are not documented in the manual. And by way of guessing, it is really hard to make them out. Anyone who would suggest an url which points to a site that provide such information.
Because if it is in English, it means people will demand that they convert the game into different languages. This is highly inefficent and not efficent in terms of production time. By converting it into simlish, it can appease all language groups.
Also I think it would soon get very tiresome hearing the same few jokes and conversations over and over ... in Simlish you can make up your own stories. "A toodie pleep" Means whatever I want it to mean.
LOL. I play with the sound totally off (except for when I'm trying to hear the little bit of lullaby after "try for baby" that tells you it was a successful try.) I've never cared for the sounds that any of the computer games make (and I don't hear well, so I find them particularly irritating.) The icons seem to be representative of memories for the most part and are actually pretty easy to figure out. You can look at your Sim's memories under Simology to see what it is they might be talking about. The ones that aren't in the memories are usually just the kinds of topics you'd find under their interests (which you can also find out from the Simology section.) I've never seen a "complete listing" of the icons anywhere. Even the Prima Guide didn't find it important enough to list.
