Quoting Derek Paxton, reply 1We save over 200 meg by having them disabled. I don't think it would be very good for general players to have them create a tile design with pedestrians and then not see them in their game. And for most people I think we are better off removing the option so they cant turn it on and run into memory issues/crashes rather than giving it to them (even defaulting to disabled with a big disclaimer on it) and having the game crash.
Seriously. ^This is not a very strong case for restricting the user from deciding for themselves: based on the specifics of their system, size of their game, and as we see - whether or not they are designing tiles with the intent of sharing them. For this game, my 32-bit laptop with a gig of video memory and 4 gigs of ram provides a much more pleasurable gaming experience than any of the beefy machines in my labs. However the game is actually a lot less fun without those lil people, I cannot stress enough how much immersion and game appeal is lost with their removal.
End of cardinaldirection's quote
Yeah, I hear you. My first priority is to make the game stable. If the game ran slower with those options on i would do it. If it warned you that memory was running low and it would have to hide the pedestrians I would do it. Its more complicated than it may seem*. It also doesn't matter how good your 32 bit system is or how much ram it has. Any single application is still only to access the 32bit limit, you may have 4Gb in your 32bit system, but your apps can't use it (it will make running multiple apps running at once better though). So the options are to allow 32bit players to turn it on and run into game crashes, or to disable it for those players so the game is stable. I opted for stability.
I didnt think about sharing the tile designs for other players. I can see how it would be frustrating for a player to make a tile design with pedestrians and not be able to use it himself, or even test it in the game and see what it would really look like. But I can see how it would be nice to be able to create them and share them with others. Being able to put pedestrians in those tiles is pretty cool. I'll think about it.
* extra material at no cost for my fellow nerds: Hiding the pedestrians once the game has started doesnt help because the pedestrians are merged into the tile designs on load. Even though the editor lets you work with the pieces as seperate blocks, we merge them on load so that we arent drawing/lightning/rotating thousands of different pieces in real time. With a merged tile design we have 1 3d object to manipulate. So the memory for that object is already consumed. For example that memory is being used even if you are in the cloth map, that memory is used even if you never zoom in close enough to see them, having them "hidden" if you are over x amount of memory doesnt help.
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) RAM sitting around. I for one just restart the application every 2-4 hrs (dependant on how much saving/loading/ctrl-Ning I do).