Sims Medieval Won't Crash Like Sims 3
The game's producer talks about crashing issues and possibly porting it to consoles.
If you've booted up The Sims 3 on your PC at any point since its June 2009 release, you might've noticed that it crashes. A lot.
At an Electronic Arts preview event in New York this month for the new Sims standalone game The Sims Medieval, I asked executive producer Rachel Bernstein about the crashing issue, and if the developers were working to address it for both The Sims 3 and Medieval.
"We've been making a lot of changes for better performance to try and make (The Sims Medieval) run smoothly," Bernstein said. "We're making a denser, visual world. The world looks really rich, but it's really dense which could put a big hit on performance, so we're working on performance all the time. Hopefully those changes would address (those issues)."
Bernstein explained they get feedback from registered users, including information about what hardware they have. "What's supposed to happen is we get to test it enough with enough different types of hardware to find errors that would be causing it to crash on your machine," she said. "When you just hear that someone's computer crashed, you don't necessarily know how to fix it."
However, Bernstein did say that the Medieval team was working closely with the Sims 3 team to resolve the problem. "We do talk a lot to the Sims 3 (executive producers) and what they're learning from people. They put out updates to their game to fix a lot of issues. And our technical director was their technical director, so we're constantly getting improvements, and we're making our own."
"Does that guarantee it'll run on your machine? No, but I certainly hope so," she added. "It's really hard on the PC because there are so many variables, but we should be able to make it work on a very wide range."
When asked, Bernstein said it was too soon to talk about the system requirements for the game, but that the developers had "a pretty good sense" of what hardware the Sims community has. "A lot of them don't have really high-end machines, and we want to make sure they have a good experience," she said. "I think we're raising the basic RAM that you'd have to have on your video card from 128 megabytes to 256. It seems most of our players would be fine with that."
Hopefully, the new Sims games can avoid crashing issues on the console versions. The Sims 3 console game, which was also being previewed at the EA event, is in stores next week.
"We definitely talked about it," Bernstein said of making Medieval for console. "We're still working out the timeline. The console game would take longer. When you make a console game, to do it right, you have to take a look at everything and question every fundamental assumption. What's fun on the console and what's not? How does it have to change? Does the pacing have to change? What are player expectations? How long do they play in a sitting? It'll take a while to get all of that pulled together, longer than it would take us to get out an expansion."
Although Bernstein maintained that she had nothing new to announce, she said, "Medieval is obviously a great fit (for consoles). It's something we are talking about for the future."
Bron: UGO
! Ik zat op school dus dan gaat dat wat lastiger 
