A lot of people seem to be vehemently oppesed to loading screens without taking into account the benefit they would provide. If the loading screens are short anyway, why not just make them invisible?
Basically, all buildings will be empty and only the outside is visible. When zois enter a building, the game will take a moment to load and the walls will come when the game loads. That way, the loading screen is invisible and players are none the wiser that it even happened. Thats basically the sims 3 approach.
Meanwhile, offscreen, the rest of the town could be simulated via strings of code instead of zois physically moving from point A to to point B and will take priority appearing in peoxomity to the lot the player is currently at to make the town seem more populated
yup in The Sims 3, you couldn’t see inside houses . Only the outer shell was visible. and if you passe by a house, it would vanish entirely. To view the interior, you had to meet the owner and go through a few interactions, which is actually a hidden loading process
But in Inzoi just walking down the street lets you see eight random zois’ sleeping, going to the bathroom, fighting, and watching TV. It’s a huge performance drain, not fun at all, and I honestly don’t understand why Kjun made it this way.
Because of this system, only one active lot exists per district, and fake buildings pop up in front of my house. It’s just not fun. I think it would be way more rewarding to see the zois I created actually living next door.
All of that is fine — but this isn’t the case, and it’s not the method described in the AMA. The loading screen is the least significant part compared to what’s actually proposed.
A: We’re currently exploring a major structural change to how cities function in inZOI.
From the beginning, we set out to deliver a full, open-world experience. However, maintaining high graphical fidelity while simulating across the entire map has proven to be a significant performance challenge(=they’re abandoning the Sims 3 simulation model in favor of Sims 4’s isolated lot simulation model). Even six months after our Early Access release, we still find ourselves struggling to make meaningful improvements in this area.
One of our core goals is to ensure a smooth, enjoyable experience for as many players as possible. Recently, we’ve started considering options outside our original design scope to achieve that. Specifically, we’re looking at replacing key locations with separate instances(this is the key term in Sims 4’s model) that players would enter through a short loading screen. The remaining parts of the map, to be used for travel and exploration, would remain open world.
We expect this approach to significantly reduce the computational load across cities, allowing us to deliver smoother performance across a wider range of hardware. It would also enable us to populate each instanced location with more NPC Zois (this is the key approach in Sims 4’s closed model), creating livelier and more immersive spaces.
The trade-off is that inZOI would shift from its current fully open-world structure to a partially open-world one. We want to know what you think: Is this trade-off worth it? If we decide to move forward, implementation would begin with the December update.
We’re also exploring other solutions, including utilizing the recently added City Travel feature to expand on that. But for now, please share your thoughts on today’s proposal in the comments—we’d love to hear your feedback!
I’d just like to interject that this method did not work in TS4 in terms of making lots feel populated and alive. One of the things I dislike about that game is that any lot I have sims load into is totally empty, as is the world around it, and no npc’s even spawn in unless I remain there for quite some time, and even then there are very few sims appear and no lot is ever vibrant and busy.
Just to be clear though, even if “instanced” locations did work in this sense in Inzoi I am still opposed to the idea, as they interrupt both the open world and continual world progression, as has been mentioned in other threads. A Sims 3 approach would not break either of these, but a Sims 4 solution is what is being proposed. NO THANKS.
This topic has already been extensively covered here. Perhaps instead of starting new posts, we could add to existing ones, it would be easier. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m old and have started discussing things online on forums, which I find to be a very useful tool, but only if you don’t open too many threads on the same topic.
