More Awesome Than You!

What is the matter with these ghastly pixel people?  I have a sim who insists on ignoring the door from the hall where he is standing into the kitchen where he wants to go.  He will go into the living room through the *same* type of door, then out through the living room french door, then in through the back door to the kitchen taking 20 mins instead of going straight into the kitchen the obvious way.   I could understand maybe if it was different doors with different route penalties, but at least one door of the same GUID is involved in both these journeys!

Yeah, routing sucks wind.

I have similar problems with bathrooms.  Sims will always choose the closest bathroom, but not necessarily the one that they can get to fastest.  They will ignore a bathroom 3 squares away, 3 steps away, and will tromp across the house a bathroom 2 squares away, but 20 steps away.  I also think they will see bathrooms above and below as preferred to "farther away" ones on the same floor.

Seems to me that at one time there was a fix for that and I had it installed, but apparently not anymore.

Sim-pathfinding always has a tendency to be obstacle-ignoring. There may also be an invisible obstacle in the way that has a large routing penalty attached.

I've also found that sometime the Sims don't particularly like the direction a door is facing. I had Sims in one house go out the kitchen door to the back porch to grill. But after the food was done, they would go around to the front of the house, routing through 2 other rooms to get back into the kitchen to put it on the counter.

Changing the way the door faced fixed the problem. I've looked over the area and can't figure out why though. Either way they should have been be able to navigate it.

Route blockers don't always work the way you think they should. Inge, you should know that.  ;D

This can happen if the act of opening the door would cause the doorflap to block the passage. Sims do not understand how to pull doors, they can only push doors. Doors, for their part, seem indifferent to being pushed or pulled and can open in both directions, which is extremely unnatural if you think about it hard enough.

The maid at one of my lots always walks around the house and enters a back door leading into the master bedroom.  She leaves through the front door.  Everyone else enters the house through the front. 

In one of my houses I had to put a fence with no gate around the entire backyard, because for some idiotic reason sims insisted on walking out the backdoor and around the humongous pool to get to the carpool or school bus, even though the straightest and shortest path was out the freakin' front door!

I also had a house where sims who were sent to the garage from the second floor would go down the stairs, then the opposite way from where the door to the garage was, through the kitchen and through a bathroom, then back to the same hallway they had been in when they came down the stairs.... I deleted that house very quickly.

Anyway... routing is so screwy that in some houses I tend to give a lot of "Run here" commands before actually giving a command to do something or interract with an object.

I just built a house where the Sim will insists on going through the garage to get outside instead of using the front door.

The sims just bring out the murderous instincts in me.  Just as I have managed to count to ten over some stubborn routing ritual they turn round and pull stupid faces at me.  It's the smirk that really does my head in.

In Sims 3, I want them to understand reward and punishment and learn from it.  I want them on their knees begging for mercy when I teach them they went the wrong way or into someone else's bed - and I want them to be grateful when I put the pool ladder back, not just go and do it again.

Ah yes, the 'god syndrome'. :)

In Sims 3, my wish is for Edith to be a bad dream.  :P

Did you ever play any of the Creatures  (http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/creatures_index.php) games? That was pretty much the entire basis of them. If your Norn (Or Grendel, or Ettin, or BONEY GRENDEL [which was by far the best species]) was good you scritched its head and if it was bad you could slap it. You could also type commands into a line and then if your Norn did what you wanted it to do, you rewarded it. If you didn't like your Norn, you could shoot it up with arsenic and it would die. Or you could let a Grendel kill it. Some Norns were really effing stupid, but eventually you breed all the stupid genes out and have smart Norns. Creatures 2 was pretty much my favorite computer game ever. (Of course, there weren't routing issues in Creatures because it was 2-d, hah!)

I agree with Inge.. I want to slap my sims silly with a rolled up newspaper, a la Black & White when they misbehave.

They sure can be spooky.  Funny as hell, but still spooky.

Probably a good thing they speak only Simlish or they'd be hurling insults at us.  On the other hand, maybe they are.

Ok. That helps quite a bit to understand a few routing issues. All doors are being treated as swinging doors, but Sims will only push them.

But then what is the arrow for that shows up while placing a door?

But then what is the arrow for that shows up while placing a door?
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   thank you for asking that, i've wondered the same thing myself (and the same question goes for windows also).

With windows, it helps you line them all up the same way.

To make all the windows with the keystones on the outside only, you put all the arrows pointing into the house.

I nearly always put in two doors right next to each other. One with the arrow pointing in and the other out.

The "arrow" that shows up on doors and windows is completely meaningless. All Sims objects have a direction designated by the game as "front", and that is which way the arrow points, but the arrow itself is independently meaningless, and there is no established convention of which way the arrow should point to when placing an object. In the case of doors and windows, it does nothing, although bloody wars have been fought between the "arrows-in" and "arrows-out" factions that have caused the deaths of thousands of sims.

I think the arrow basically means "South" FWIW.

Let's not go there. This is one of those holy wars of simkind, much like Windows vs. Mac, Little-End vs. Big-End, etc., etc.

It does matter with dorm doors, but for everything else I think it's just a way for you to know which side the doorhandle is on whithout zooming that close.

It can matter for openable windows, and windows with shutters. These should normally point outwards.

There aren't any openable windows by default, and Maxian windows do not adhere to any rigid convention of pointingness, so the arrow is not the indicator of which way a window should be facing.

When I place two single doors side by side, the arrow helps me get it so the door handles are both in the middle. Otherwise I have to zoom in close, and in tight corridors this doesn't work very well with walls up.

Anyway, back to routing.... How hard would it be for Maxis to at least change the code so that sims would quit going up or down stairs to use the same object that is also available on the same floor? I mean, how hard is it for them to code sims to know which floor they are on? To me, it seems like it should be fairly simple, and Maxis is just lazy.

Gwill!  Your avatar!  I think you have just surpassed Motoki there in horrific old ladies :0

I finally found a good use for Exnem's realskins:
She's my neigbourhood's telescope shover and resident crazy cat-lady. :D

Pretty tricky, actually. Pathfinding, while a fairly trivial exercise to a human, or even a rat, is something which stymies computers. Just the simple change you propose is likely to render many otherwise functional buildings nonrouteable. Picture a castle with multiple towers. If you start in top of tower A and want to go to tower B, you're going to have to climb down to the bottom of A, walk across to B, and then climb up B....something which is not allowed by your rule. Like I said, nontrivial. Most creatures can instinctively understand this, mostly because those that couldn't got stuck on trees and were eaten by tigers.

Yeah, unfortunately, the lack of learning behavior being passed to future generations of Sims negates the possibility of evolution in the game. 
I would gladly have my Sims be eaten by tigers if that would make future Sims smarter.

   The one draw-back to having our sims learn from their mistakes, is that eventually, they would get too smart, and start ordering US around.   ;)

We have many hacks to prevent that nonsense now. I am sure those hacks could be upgraded for the evolution of sims.

Because in Soviet Russia, you do not play game, game plays YOU!

Quick and easy fix for routing....don't use doors that open. Archways are good enough for "privacy", but as they don't swing, my sims don't do stupid "what is the longest route from A to B" tricks.

Just a thought.

'Fraid not, Elfpuddle.  The sim that prompted me to post in the first place had just also walked from the corridor into the front vestibule via an arch and back into the corridor through the matching arch the other side of the stairs, all the way round the stairs to about one square away from where he started, before going out the back door and in the living room garden door.

Drat. Well, sorry, Inge. They always behave for me with the arches.

I actually find it kind of fun.. I see them going the long way round and build them a rat maze..

I open build mode and start plunking random furniture in their way till they give up or change directions.

I do that too!  I made a dorm where the students had to get a lift to the ground floor from their bedrooms, go all the way through the communal rooms, up another lift to the one single bathroom, and their bedrooms were equipped with PYplants set to fill the bladder of anyone in the room.   So they'd go to bed, jump up bursting to pee, have to wait for the lift another student had just dashed into, and then finally make it to the bathroom which was now occupied.

The funny thing is, that only my controllable sim actually stayed and put up with the consequences.  The dormies used to actually leave the lot with shower icons over them, only to be immediately regenerated nice and clean.

OOoooooo.. I have a dorm I'd love to do that to.. -grin-

Where might I find the PYPlant?

Someone updated it to work with robots.  Dolphin[numbers] at MTS2 I think.   Or you can get the non-updated one from my site.

You know I thought of this thread as my dogs were going around through the back bedroom and into the small bath off the kitchen to run into the backdoor, which blocks the door into the bathroom when opened, on their way outside this morning, instead of simply going through the kitchen for a clear unobstructed path to the back door.

Does that mean Dogs are dumb as Sims or Sims are as smart as Dogs?

I choose to believe that the dogs are still learning their way around the house we've only lived in for a couple of weeks.

You use an arch on a vestibule? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?

Maybe when Seasons comes out I will have to get some double-glazed doors fitted, but in the eternal summertime we've been enjoying up till now it's not a problem :)

One thing I've noticed about routing and doors is that it makes a difference which side of the door the hinge is on - like left- or right- opening.

If you've ever played the Grunt house in Strangetown you'd know what I mean.  The downstairs bathroom has a door to a one-tile wide hallway.  I couldn't figure out why they would come out of the bathroom, then walk through the bedroom and living room to get to the kitchen, when it's a straight shot from the bathroom to the kitchen.

It turned out that the bathroom door's hinges are on the side of the door that is closest to the kitchen.  So when they exit the bathroom, the door blocks their passage in that direction.  They therefore HAVE to go the other way, since they don't close the door themselves.

Could there be something about the way the door is facing or where it's positioned on the wall that is making your sim do the walkabout?