I don't know if it is allowed to discuss furture EP's here. I know there are a Season discussion thread in the Discussion forum, but that is Season in general and my question is more CAW related, I think.

I read this thread regarding the Subway system, http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=429561 and how NPC's won't use the Subway. I'm pretty sure that I have read a post (here at MTS) about isolated islands and that they should be painted non-routeable, otherwise NPC's will spawn there and can't leave the island unless the island is connected to a bridge going to the mainland.

And with Seasons, sims will be able to swim in the ocean - to the end of the world, they say - so what are the end of the world, the camera non-routeable paint or the sims non-routable paint ?

Will EA re-paint the routepaint on the worlds that came with the other EP's or will sims not be able to swim to isolated islands ... will they ignore non-routeable paint in the sea and will we then have stuck NPC's or will non playable also swim in the ocean.

Well obviously I don't asking for an answer since the EP isn't out and you can not give such an answer, more your thoughts on the subject.

My guess is it will depend on the sim-non-routable paint. That seems to me to be the most logical. But with these games, you never know of course

I think it's safe to say it depends on the camera paint. If the camera can't go too far out, neither can the sims. If it relied on unroutable paint, they wouldn't be able to get into the ocean.

But that would mean we would have no way of telling the game where we *don't* want them to swim... Isn't there a difference between water + non routing paint and water without non-routing paint? It would make more sense if they just made it so that water didn't automatically make an area non-routing. (I don't think all water in the existing worlds has non routing paint underneath it either, but I would have to check)

Unless they add a new 3rd routing paint type? Dun dun dun!

Might be why I saw some holes in Lucky Palms' rivers...hmmm. I bet Seasons is gonna mess up the world fixes big time, if they're gonna update the .world files with new routing. Sigh.

there are not non-routeable paint in the water. Not everywhere at least. Where there are paint in the water, sims can not fish.

I asked Graham Nardone about this, it was one of my first questions. His response was that blue paint has no affect on Sims in the water, they can swim right through it. They cannot swim through yellow camera paint.

That's not good... Ah well, I never worry and just assume that Twallan will fix everything in 2 days anyway, and I've never been wrong. I wish I could hire him to fix my life :p

That's good then, I've been painting my water with the blue to stop routing (as per the 'help' file that EA made for the CAW tool) so I was hoping this wouldn't foul things up. The only problem I can forsee is if I've managed to put the paint on the coast at all, as the sims will probably foot stamp when they can't get into the sea!

Anyone know if NPC's and townies will swim or if it is only the sims we play ?

I bet that will be tunable- so even if they make it so that NPCs don't swim on a route, we'll most likely be able to mod that.

Just like the subway routing, where we can mod it to allow NPCs to use them.

Why would it matter if NPC's swim to islands? They won't get stuck as they can swim back. I think it's only when they spawn on an island with no way off that they get stuck, with swimming they will be able to get off.

The blue sim unroutable paint was never necessary for under water as Sims couldn't walk across water anyway, it was unroutable by default.

Now that sims can swim, it would be cool if we could make islands that sims could swim to ... but not if that will allow NPC's to spawn at those islands and leave them stomping on the beach, unable to reach the mainland

EA recommended that water be painted unroutable in one of the help guides that they made for CAW.

Pets are the main problem for islands. They're incapable of swimming through oceans.

Oh, did not know that! Why ever not- dogs can swim in pools, anyway.

I have a fix for getting rid of blue and yellow non-routable areas that have been applied as paint. I don't think it addresses all types of unroutableness, but those ones it does. http://www.den.simlogical.com/denfo...hp?topic=1207.0

Oh no It could have been fun to have sims throwing sticks in the water and have the doggie go out and get it ... it is silly, most animals can swim ... even cats. jeez



How is that affecting the routing data ... does it get rebuild somehow ?

Well there is almost certainly some rerouting-remapping capability in-game, since it needs doing in the normal course of events when you place new lots and large world deco objects. I found that provided you keep that edit and leave all the terrain unlocked the sims route perfectly intelligently as if it was always like that - though I would assume that you do actually need to have placed something in Edit Town after doing the modification in order for the rerouting process to take place - even if you delete it after.

If you remove the modification after placing the lots, then you do lose the ability to interact with the terrain in those spots, and the sims find it harder to route to the things you placed in unreachable areas. So for this reason I would recommend that you don't put places they need to go on previously unroutable terrain and then switch out the mod. I just keep mine unlocked. I don't care if the camera goes off the edge

Thanks for the information, Inge- it's clear now!

Ever tried to make a cat swim ?? not gonna be easy i can tell yah that much, same goes for horses although they tend to not be afraid of the water they can at least stand in.

As for the on-topic part .... hmmm i dunno i feel lot a new patches comming, and the swim true routing painted sea thing being changed to a 3rd routing paint called "routable water" orso. Would make more sense that way as well, i can see how in some worlds the areas are designed around not being able to look around/walk around the corner, so it would be a issue if you could just swim around that corner.

EA is silly enough not to think of that tho, and just move along as planned.

I think they just tend to develop each EP to work with the basegame, and not integrating them with other EPs.

Does anyone know how seasons will affect the "heatwave" resource when imported from Egypt? Will it still show in winter? In the trailer, you can see SV with a heatwave in the summer.. I wonder if that will be a seperate resource

I think we can only speculate until we get the files to look at, unfortunately. I'm hoping that they will have the heatwave turn off during cold weather, though.

I suspect the problems caused by Seasons will go beyond routing problems. For example, there is the problem of snow. How does one get snow to appear on the ground?

It strikes me t hat the easiest way of doing this is to create an overlay layer. That is, there is a separate snow image which is superimposed over the normal ground terrain. When it snows, that layer is activated, when the snow melts, the snow layer is deactived. I susupect it will be similar in design to the overlays that we have in other objects. It seems that these overlays would primarily go on ground terrain and on roofs. Snow really does not accumulate many other places. (Trees, which come from the speedtree program, present a different problem.) I guess, I can see some outdoor objects, like benches, and perhaps even cars, accumulating snow -- but I don't know if EA will be so diligent as to deal with them.

If there is a separate snow overlay, will it be part of our terrain paints? Or will it be a whole new layer of terrain paints? Will worlds created in CAW be able to use this? Will all of those custom terrain paints suddenly become unusable?

What if EA decides to have different terrain paints for different seasons? For example, spring grass in spring, summer grass in summer, autumn grass in autumn? Does this mean that we need several terrain paints in our worlds to accomodate each season? A few places, like Sunset Valley really don't have seasons, so it is not a problem there. But it could be a big problem in other worlds.

I just have this sneaking feeling that a lot of pre-Seasons worlds are going to become obsolete overnight.