Hi,

I'm trying to increase the maximum amount of lots the game will load at any one time. I play in a pretty dense world where, when I'm taking screenshots, I'll often run into clearly visible lots that aren't loading in at full detail. This is unwanted of course, since the low detail lot models are butt ugly. I know that the setting was limited to 16 at some point, but EA turned it down to 8 in a patch - presumably to increase game stability. I've tried changing all the relevant values in the GraphicsRules.sgr file, but I don't think that did anything but make my Options menu inaccessible.

I'm well aware that loading in 20 or so lots at a time might crash my game, but that's a risk worth taking.

~ Pi

There's a text file in the My Documents installation folder, called DeviceConfig. From what I've seen, two variables affect active lots:
MaxActiveLots (the number of lots loaded at one time)
NumMaxActiveLotOptions (the maximum number of lots that can be loaded at one time)

Theoretically, you could try editing the values next to them and increasing the second.
However I have no clue whether or not it works and would advise caution when testing it.

Edit: disproved by igazor below, lol.

I've tried editing GraphicsRules in the past, but that made the Options menu inaccessible.

This is a different file.

Shame - even my best attempts have yielded no results other than a game freeze. So it crashed once and when I tried again in a different world, nothing happened. It was just the 8 lots, no more. I'll have to try it again later, because clearly I've been changing the wrong values.

(tiptoes timidly into dangerous looking thread) Just in case this was still part of the question, DeviceConfig is an output file, not input. The game produces it on launch, it doesn't read it so changing its displayed values isn't going to accomplish anything. It's a log file.
(tiptoes back out again)

Ah, that was my suspicion. Certainly explains the hardware information and the .log extension. But what the hell, thought I'd give it a shot anyway. Anything to propose instead?

You could try editing your Options.ini file in a text editor in the same way players manage to do to give their sims non-standard very long lifespans in case you haven't already tried that (kind of assumed you had by now); that file is actually input (not output) and the number of high detail lots must be in there someplace. But based on what you have said, I suspect that either the game won't accept the higher value here or you will get instability and crashes. This might well be uncharted territory, at least under current patch levels.

I believe that settings any of the Options.ini values to outside the allowed ranges simply means that the game won't do anything with it except refuse to comply when you want to go into the Options menu.

This doesn't seem to be true for the age ranges. It may well be for the others that are specifically capped a different way. Not near enough to my game to verify right now, but you're probably right.