More Awesome Than You!

I have been running a vanilla TS3 game from opening day until this morning, and I have a continued problem with sims finding routes to walk.  They get stuck.  Yes, I know they are often slow and stupid, but my game seems particularly bad at this.  I have AwesomeMod now, but it doesn't document any changes in this nor have I noticed any in the ~5 hours of gameplay I had with it in.  My issue is: when two sims are anywhere within 15 grid tiles of each other, walking towards each other, they stop walking if the area they wish to pass each other in is 6 tiles wide or less.  Now, if one went and then the other that would be fine with me.  But they have been known to "stick", for hours on end, tapping their feet and making false starts every hour or so in which they both decide they can't walk.  Further actions queue but do not work, even if they direct the sim to turn around and go back the way they came.  I end up just having to wait it out, since I am a bit phobic of resetting sims.  And it sucks.

Does this happen to anyone else?  And if it does, is there any way to fix this?  It seems like "your turn, my turn" would be pretty easy to code, but this is EAxis, I guess.  :/  Can any modders help?

[I apologize in advance, I know this post doesn't flow well, but I haven't gotten any sleep and I'm afraid my brain just isn't up to the task of smoothing this out.  I've read it over a few times and it does, at least, seem intelligible.]

The Gray Fatness found an XML tuning that may address it and is experimenting with it. Since it appears to be an XML function, it will not be addressed in as part of AwesomeMod.

In the meantime, manual navigation seems to work.  Get one sim to walk around using "go here" steps.

I had one family where the toddler was headed for the potty, dad was going for a shower, and mum wanted to feed the toddler.  They all stopped in the middle of a room and looked at each other for half a sim hour before I broke them out of it.  When I moved the dad manually, the toddler immediately went off to the potty and mum's "feed toddler" action fell out of the queue.

I have to say I'm surprised at how poorly the sims are able to maneuver in this game. Although they now can get past some items that in previous games blocked off a whole damned square of space even though the item should have been small enough to be easily gotten around, they are also piss poor at path finding and getting around each other in this game. In some ways it seems a step back even from the past games.

Odd. My sims always neatly manouvre around eachother when posed with space problems. There's a bit of 'after you, no, after you' going on at first, but they resolve it pretty fast in my game.

In TS2 it took me a while to figure out that sims could walk between a sofa and a bed, and that a dining chair that was tucked away could still be in front of a counter that was in use and work. For TS3 I can have two sims in the park between each other "you are standing in my way" glare repeatedly even though there is a LOT of space! It happens less now with awesomemod, seems to resolve faster still makes no sense why they have this animation at all. They should have made them able to walk past each other regardless if they step on their feet. (Though that might have lead to a more annoying animation with EA's sense of humor)

Games I was playing a decade ago had better AI than TS3.

*chaos hiss at EA

Yeah, and I especially love it when two sims actually merge with one another and THEN both stop and give the "why are you blocking my way" expression--and just stand there like a two-headed four-armed monster for the next few moments.  They've already walked halfway through one another, why not just keep on going? Honestly, rather than the way it is NOW, I'd prefer it if sims did just walk through one another without hesitation.  Cars and bicycles can do it, why not sims?

Have you noticed the following:

Two Sims want to have a conversation so they walk all around the house to find a place to face each other?
You tell a Sim to call someone and they walk through 3 rooms to find a place to use their cellphone or better yet always go in the bathroom to use the cellphone?

And don't even get me started on more than one Sim using a flight of stairs.

But all in all in my game they do work it out everytime without getting stuck, just the useless running all over the place to get in position.

Yep. It's irritating. And really, how difficult is it to find a spot to stand and talk? Or hell they can sit for all I care.


They've done 3 games now and it's been nearly 10 years and yet still somehow the bathroom remains a place of choice to do socializing.  ::)


I've gone over to having them teleport to get upstairs and teleport home to go downstairs. The stairs irritate me to no end! I just wish the damned sims would autonomously teleport.

The worst pathing I experienced was having a toddler in this house.  Any attempt to have his parents interact with him anywhere inside the house would result in him traipsing outside (the door is to the right of the large window on the first story), into the fenced area, and setting himself in the corner next to the playscape.  He did this for bottles, for learn to walk/talk, to be picked up, etc.  The stupidest part was that if I canceled his pathing, he'd stop where he was and the Sim would interact with him normally.  

(http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/521/screenshot7wuy.jpg)

While the routing does seem to, eventually, resolve itself in TS3, I do find I regularly have to cancel and re-queue interactions just to keep Sims from wasting hours of Sim-time. So, yeah, I guess it's better than the total route failure of previous versions, but why does it sometimes take so frickin' long for the game's AI to figure out? Even at the fastest route clash, it takes about 5-10 Sim minutes for two of them to work out who goes first. I know there is a massive amount of simulation (at varying levels of detail) going on behind the scenes, with vanilla Story Mode enabled (I still haven't started a fresh town yet so no AM for me), but couldn't they at least have the game clock pause while calculating route adjustments?

And I feel your pain, Roflganger. Not with an obstinate toddler, though, and it doesn't seem to be a routing issue, actually: every time one of my guitarist Sims wants to play at home, he or she invariable traipses out to the mailbox. WTF?

My god, I forgot all about the toddlers.  My toddlers enjoy crawling all the way around the house and into the back bedroom in order to be picked up... even to go to the potty, when the mother/father has to bring the damned brat all the way back again.  RAEG.   >:(

YES. The stupid toddlers in my legacy family are always going outside, and since the mother just popped out freaking triplets, I often wind up with the following scenario:
Mom picks up toddler #1, walks towards door.
Dad picks up toddler #2, walks towards door.
Toddler #3, for whatever reason, decides to plant his lazy ass right in front of the door.
Instead of stepping over him, Mom and Dad instead decide to collide with each other and Toddler #3, and by the time they sort themselves out the toddlers have all crapped themselves and are in too bad a mood to learn anything anyway.

EDIT: Here we have a classic. Dad comes home from work, moves to take toddler upstairs for bedtime. Toddler psychically senses he is going to be moved, and starts to crawl outside. Dad and toddler stare idiotically at each other across the one-tile door for as long as I allow. The maid looks on, disgusted.

(http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/1568/stupidq.th.jpg)

Maybe they are looking for better reception... lol

Don't even get me started on the routefailure at parties! For at least half the party time, they stand outside the front door, waiting for someone to move. I've tried picking them up with moveobjects, and they just snap back where they were. Getting a slice of cake takes FOREVER.

Maybe if I had a faster computer, they wouldn't stand around like zombies  :-\

No, they do the same thing with me, and I have a very fast computer.

And yet every time a sim rides a bike, they get run over several times  ::)

Yeah, that's why I call it CSMA/CD. This is exactly what Ethernet does to resolve collisions, but in Ethernet, the waiting is in only a few microseconds!

They do that with my game as well, it's frustrating as heck.  If you call them in for a meal they all stand around getting annoyed with each other and dropping plates everywhere.. at the end of it all thanks to 'Legendary Host Status' of my sims they say that had an epic time and leave.  Easily impressed Sims they are.  LOL