Some Sims 4 "Modding" News You May Have Missed

Under-reported news relating to modding and the future of the game!

First off, EA_Cade soft-deconfirmed that The Sims 4 is ending, by noting that they are making changes to "continue delivering content for years to come".

The changes announced are to the way the UI team has shifted from Adobe Flash to what is, essentially, its sequel- Adobe Animate. What does this actually mean? It's unclear. Modder-side speculation includes that it means they can offer some sort of means for modded UI elements to no longer cause such big issues with patches, or perhaps new UI elements will be handled differently in a way that does the same. Until it happens, we don't know- but it indicates interesting changes are happening under the hood.

A few of us have some suspicion that the game will likely also be updating to a different version of Python. Think of Python as sort of the "operating system" The Sims 4 runs on. It's on a rather outdated version and will probably be updating in some way- It's updated the Python once before, resulting in a script mod apocalypse for a short time, but script mods largely just needed to be recompiled, which isn't a big deal. Another update may be much bigger...especially if rumors of a core game rework are true.

If the Python is updating, and we know the UI development pipeline is updating, it's possible some major changes are in the works.

Cade's statement here doesn't deconfirm any rumors of a "remaster", but it does at least confirm development on the game has not, according to other completely and utterly unfounded "trust me bro" rumors, begun to sunset. It's still going!

For the modders, and mod-users by extension,

The devs do intend to improve their communication with modders on things that help get things updated. They used to provide more technical information for major changes, and seem to want to do that some more. I asked (several...several times) about the recent laundry lists/blogs that declare that they're helping modders update mods faster.

To me, I think it is insulting and unfair to say that they've done that when, frankly, they have not. If anything, saying such things makes it worse for modders. Not for me- none of yall give me any shit ever on anything actually- but in general, modders are under a lot of stress with patches, and "Hey guys we gave modders tools and resources to make updating even easier so look forward to faster updates!!!" posted 19 hours before a patch goes live is a bunch of BS, and really not cool.

But luckily I did get a response on that:

Again, it's unclear what they mean by this- and it's unfortunate that they've been claiming to have been helping modders with patches for a few months when they have not been doing that- but they do seem to have something in the works.

What they have been providing recently are the TDESCs- or Tuning Descriptions. These CAN be helpful for learning about major feature changes, speculation of new features, updating mods that rely on the specific tunings that have changed, etc, but they are largely useless for the bulk of mod updating.

For example a mod that has a specific interaction type in it may need an update if that interaction type's core behind-the-scenes functionality is altered, and having the information that it was altered and how will facilitate updating it, or at least let you know you need to be ready to update something. That's what the TDESC provides- "This specific type of tuning has changed in some way."

But when it comes to most mod updates, you need more concrete information only available on patch day- for example that same interaction mod may use an existing piece of EA code inthat gets changed, and now the mod is broken, but you don't know until you see which EA files changed and figure out how they changed.

The most recent TDESCs, for another example, include information about something changing with live drag components...seems that items that you can drag will soon be able to cause "something to happen to" things you drag them on, and also cause something to happen when dragged back off. Currently we have things like crystals -> dragged onto crystal charging grid -> crystal enters a charging state. But this would be crystal -> drag onto crystal charging grid -> something happens to the grid it's slotted into. That's an example of what a TDESC tells us...and it doesn't really mean a damn thing for updating mods in that example lol.

On patch day we can pull up a list of all the XMLs that changed- and compare to all the mods we have that either use, or override, those XMLs. Then we can compare the old/new or modded/new files and see what changes were made. I suggested that they provide us with a list of which existing tuning XMLs have changed- then we can at least set mods aside before a patch to know which ones will definitely need to be updated. If they changed the crystal charging state so that it has a new feature, and simply told us the crystal charging state XML changed, and you have a mod that already overrides the crystal charging state XML...you now know to put that mod aside and check on it when the patch comes out, so you can make sure your version also has that feature, or if it needs changes at all. That'd be a start!

Personally I think calling this some sort of special super cool help for modders to update is off the mark, so I'm excited they have something more planned.

I can't imagine the Sims news sources- whatever they are, I don't pay attention to any of them, it's all clickbait- would comment on these two specific bits of information, so here you go!