Here’s my suggestion that will hopefully satisfy everyone…divide Dowon and bliss bay into sub sections allowing the player to still drive to different stores within the sub area or visit their next door neighbor! No loading screens required for sub sections or visiting others/stores but…a loading screen once you pass that subsection divided by the blue wall. What do y’all think!
Please leave the main cities alone. I believe loading screens should completely disappear as a trade-off.
In Sims 3 back in 2009, on the relic single‑threaded x86 RenderWare (GTA 3, VC, SA engine) with full city simulation, the devs managed to avoid them. In Paralives they don’t exist, and in Project X they’re not planned either for now. Same as no game in the adjacent genre has had it since 2016-2018.
And then inZOI, being almost more expensive than those games on the most advanced engine of all time with built-in world streaming, ends up an out‑of‑trend, behind‑the‑curve fifth wheel.
If Canvastowns / Small Cities can serve as a “transitional” stage while people get used to next‑gen era and to the fact that inZOI is worth upgrading PCs – so be it.
Fully agree @GDfromRivendell
It would be a major step back. Imagine you have one of your Zois fishing at the beach, the other is meeting friends in the park and the third is at home doing homework or whatever. And with this suggestion it might happen that the 3 Zois are in 3 different subsections. You want to switch between the 3 Zois doing their stuff and to add new tasks to them and then would have a loading screen every time you would be switching between them.
This would be as bad as it is with Sims 4. And already in Sims 3 it was possible to manage all of your Sims being at different places in the city without loading screens. I think this is one of the reasons why many people never really adopted to Sims 4 as it already felt as a step back already in 2014.
Yes, and in Sims 4 this happened not at all intentionally, but because The Sims 4 Engine was originally a multiplayer engine, and neighborhoods/lots in it were parts of the server split (hub world and client instances) just like in SimCity 2013 (map/hub, project - 2x2 city plots).
It’s still unclear what this kind of partitioning would actually achieve, since your PC would physically still have to render even the unloaded area, and clustering, where lightweight NPCs exist in spawn areas by roles and in free roaming within the player’s visibility range, is already implemented in its early phase.
Admittedly, this approach is still questionable, because it simplifies the simulation outside the player’s control area, but just imagine if in those unloaded sub areas they actually disable simulation! You switch to your character at the beach, and he hasn’t done anything at all (isn’t that exactly what happens in Sims 4 in such a case?).
@GDfromRivendell you are completely right!
This is exactly what happens in Sims 4 as far as I remember. And I also remember how annoying this is. When you switch from the Sim in the park to the one at home and tell him to learn a skill or do homework or tend the garden, you can be 99% sure that nothing will have happened when you come back to check 1 hour later. The moment you switch to the other place the Sims in the “not active” area do nothing meaningful except maybe the needs are somehow managed. And even these are not taken care of by really performing the relevant actions but rather by just bringing the needs bars up.
@EllaEstella
Yes, this is simple background progression, because in the world instance that is created every time you move into a neighborhood/lot, sim doesn’t exist until he actually appears on that lot through “Bring here” etc. What exists is only a modest set of numbers and flags that can be changed for sim in that instance, but not actions, states, or anything more complex.
@GDfromRivendell thanks for explaining!
And exactly this is my problem with divided towns in subsections similar to Sims 4. This completely breaks the immersion and you end up just playing on one lot with the entire family or send all to a specific lot as otherwise the rest of the family is just losing their day doing nothing.
And even if the subsection would be open (different as Sims 4) you would be very limited as you would always have to plan for the entire family to be in the same subsection at the same time.
I’m fine with Canvas Towns, but I do NOT want them to change the existing cities or abandon large cities altogether. Having a large open city to roam around is a good thing in itself. If they have to keep down the number of lots on the main city for the sake of performance, and add some smaller Canvas Town ‘suburbs’ with extra lots and more detail, so be it.
I think if canvas towns are easier to handle for lower spec PC’s, and will be the place where multiplayer takes place, they will unevitably make bigger cities less attractive to develop (since they are also more expensive to build anyway) ![]()
Mid to high end PC’s, who can handle these cities well, are the minority (I guess)
I agree with the others who wrote here. It might be acceptable if you’re playing with a single Zoi, but for those playing with one or more families, it’s terrible!
@LennyOgg did a great job explaining why the “offer‑you‑can’t‑refuse” actually carries a ticking time bomb. I was skeptical from the start and went to the chat with the question of what compensation there would be, but many people don’t like to ask questions, they immediately insist there’s no problem. And Kjun just directly formulated the proposal.
I’m not against Canvastown, if a city the size of Dowon (or Dowon itself) could become a Canvastown (either as an option or, as I described, by giving players the ability to remove the pre-baked building shells/fences/props/vegetation themselves and build their own instead). But for now that’s not the case, and I’m still waiting for an answer.
Loading screens are not okay. And not sure why anyone want that. Inzoi runs on low end PCs. Yes I play on one.