They were fun. They could order room service as I recall?

Yes! So awesome. And you could make them anywhere in whatever neighborhood you wanted if I recall correctly - it might have been a mod I was using, but I don't think so.

It's got nothing to do with the engine, and everything to do with the cost for the extra animations - that's it. They don't have the resources to get the animations for kid spellcasters done. Hilariously tragic.

We do know that game engine limitations and the desire to gear this game to players who play on a potato have an effect on this game and what it has in it. They limit things so the engine and more players can handle what there is. They said the smaller world sizes now will be due to not overloading some players. And that is also a good excuse for not including things when we know also that resources available and many other factors play a major part regarding what is done and what is not done.

That still has nothing to do with them not including more animations for more ages. It's only a cost thing. I fail to see how the engine could be so utterly fucked up so that it's forced to load every animation possible while you're doing another animation.

Anything an adult can do, a child can do. They just don’t do it. We get floating familiars and a useless residential town, though.

maybe the modder who made child vampires will make a mod for child spellcasters

I am pretty sure the Magical Bloodline trait is not selectable in CAS, its most likely a hidden/special trait given to children who's parent(s) is/are spellcasters, or if the family line has several generations of spellcasters or something. Does not sound like a CAS trait to me, so I'm betting on the latter. Also, it's true that making child casters would take more effort to create a second set of animations for their models and its probably easier to just have teen/adult+ spellcasters since they share the same model. I don't really mind or care about the lack of child magic users to be honest, besides Makin' Magic we've never had children have full access to spellcasting so eh, not too bothered. I just hope you can actually interact/talk/pet those familiars and they're not just reskinned Get Famous drones as they have been described as by a guru.

https://twitter.com/SimGuruNinja/st...011171465805824

I really don't think engine limitations would prevent them from making a few animations for kids. World size, textures, graphics and AI are usually the stuff affected by engine limitations. A few animations? I don't think so. Sure it requires extra effort for more animations but that is regardless of the engine.

My point was more that I expect them to not bother with ANY details if extra work is involved for some of the details. Like yknow, the team sits down, considers kids doing magic, someone mentions it's extra work because they've never coded for life state powers for kids in the past, and the moment the team realizes it's extra work, they just categorically refuse all details or work involved with the feature instead of doing anything at all.


Seperate topic: it's strange but at the moment the most concerning thing I find is....they confirmed no hats, no cloaks, no capes and no facial hair in this pack. In Vampires they kinda made it a goal to provide tools for people to make anything from a Twilight vampire to Nosferatu, simply giving the player the tools to make vampires how they please. Here? It feels super odd to leave out witch hats, wizard bears and all forms of cloaks and capes. Like instead of giving us Harry Potter, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Wizard of Oz, Lord or the Rings and Dr. Strange levels of wizardry, they just said "nah lol fuck that" and excluded all of them this time.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to embrace their own style of spellcaster, but still has me a little on-guard since this studio's main export is disappointment and the decision to exclude all those certainly feels odd. I mean just google "wizard" or "witch" or "spellcaster" and go through google images, counting all the examples you can find that lack a beard, a hat, AND a cloak/cape. I actually legitimately can't find any.

I know exactly what you're talking about and I was thinking the same.

https://twitter.com/SimGuruRomeo/st...839694259384320 His reply to 5 people.
https://twitter.com/Cinderellimouse...840338877960202 Screenshot of the question (because it doesn't show up at Romeo's replies)

They might just mean some new recolored stairs

I took that answer as that we will be getting them sometime, so not in this pack as otherwise they would have said yes. It's so difficult trying to read between the lines.

https://twitter.com/SimGuruNinja/st...011171465805824

And familiars can/do need to use stairs to get around levels, unless his implying our cat/dog is capable of floating... still, they will need a place to climb through levels indoors.

Sorry, here at maxis apparently we couldn't invest 5 years to work on bringing your spiraling wish. Thank u, next thank u, next

Some things, we shouldn’t have to beg for. We only have a set of friggin stairs to get from one floor to another. It’s been five years.

It’s not “hard,” they just won’t make them do it. TS1, TS2, and TS3 all had spiral stairs. If they have a teleport command, someone who makes animations, someone who makes models, the means to create a floor cutout or delete floor pieces, they can make spiral stairs, or any kind of stairs.

It can be stuff pack content. “Home Improvement Stuff.” Throw in new build mode assets, counters, plumbing, and some new stairs of all styles with a variety of meshes. It’s overdue. I’m honestly waiting for them to make improvements with modular stairs that we can manipulate to make new shapes with landings (which exist), but I feel like unless someone fights for a featured, no one does it.

Also, I want to clarify an earlier point about children. I meant that anything an adult object can do, a child object is able to do, but the Sims teams won’t give them the ability to.

Hardest workers, but it ("Spiral / any different stairs").... it scares me!


Or they fired someone that do some of these, thus trying hard but can't figure out of to do it themselves and give up

I have no idea how this game is even running if something so simple as creating spiral stairs is too hard for them.

It's most likely another lie.

I mean, we can make them special kinds of stairs, just not indoors. They also make it an absolute pain in the ass to do so. I say if they wanted us to have stairs, they'd have given them to us. We really have been asking for several years.

When I read these Twitter threads, I find it really sad how hard people work to interpret a non-answer into a "possibly next time" and then flail about in anticipation of something no one has actually announced or even hinted at.

Says toddlers are too difficult... releases toddlers in a free update. Same with pools (probably other things as well).
Can't make spiral stairs... but still has working rockets, slides for kids/toddlers, and toddlers walking in stairs.
Can't make proper genetics or even CASt for sims... But still has custom coats for pets.
Makes neighborhoods with 5 lots.... New magical neighborhood only has one customizable lot.

And so many other weird inconsistencies I keep wondering if the gurus have the faintest clue what the actual game developers are doing, or if they even talk to each other

If they made the game engine, they should know what it's capable of, right? And if the TS2/TS3 creators could manage things 10+ years ago, these trolls should be able to do it now, and they should also manage to do it much better and in a more potato-friendly way.

And I'd argue TS4 isn't as potato-friendly as they make it out to be. My old laptop could run TS2 with all expansion packs and CC fine (graphics on high), even TS3 on a good day (all EPs except the last, minimum CC, and graphics maybe turned a little bit down - even managed the IP neighborhood without too big a struggle), but TS4 was jumpy and ran it very hot (one EP, no CC, graphics a little over medium) even in laptop mode - and that laptop is by no means a potato . My new laptop runs rather warm when playing TS4 with 2 EPs and medium-to-high graphics, and often turns the fans up to jet-motor mode, and that one is about as close as you can get to a gaming stationary in a laptop format (with TS2 UC and most other programs so far it barely changes temperature at all). I think TS4 even seemed to run a bit better out of the laptop mode, which is a bit weird

There's still people that can't read between the lines of "we might do that" on the topic of swimmable oceans in every world and actually think that's going to happen.

My First Ocean Anywhere SP.

Not trying to defend EA here but as someone who makes CC I would assume that the "difficulties" in creating spiral stairs comes from being able to switch the wall height of a floor on a building. With regular stairs the engine just pushes the bottom a few steps forward or back when height is changed but it wouldn't be able to do that with spiral stairs. If it did just add or subtract steps then the access points would need to be moved with each different height version as well.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been done by now (it should) but I'm just trying to say that it isn't always as clean cut as people think.
I wanted to move a Sim further away from an object when they use it for a recent project of mine. There was no simple way to do that. I either had to create an entirely new animation or set up some convoluted tuning to alter the animation start point. And they were the official options given by one of the official gurus when I asked for help. In either case, as we only have access to community made creation tools both methods end up breaking the IK targets and FX.
Sorry. I kind of ended up going off-topic there.

That's a good point though. Does require math and animation readjustment based on those three mathematical variations. Though, there are three options for wall height so... Though, I can see that if stairs is suppose to span through multiple floors (when there's flooring support in between) it would require way more extensive work.

I'd say when the floor height changes, they should just delete the entire spiral staircase like they do for many other objects. Honestly, players would need to rebuild the entire geometry of the room to account for the new shape of their staircase anyway. Ideally, for each style of staircase, you'd need three floor heights for each style if they choose to only have stairs in one direction. I don't know what expectations they have for creating spiral staircases, but they should just keep it as simple as possible.