Can i divide a room without walls?

[lilteddy]

I want to divide a whole room into different areas but without actually creating walls. Is it possible? I just want to make all lights in auto-lighting. My plan is that i want the lights in my kitchen to light up only when someone goes to this (kitchen) area, but without having to set up walls.

thank you!

[Brian_Z]

Maybe someone has a trick for this, and if they do I'd love to hear it too.  But as soon as you open up even one grid space gap in a wall, suddenly the two rooms it separated become one.  This suddenly matters now, because lights use power, and the game greatly exaggerates how much power a light uses.

[Entropic]

You can by replacing the walls with spandrels. If you got Vampires or Outdoor Retreat and I believe also Pets, they come with spandrel types that are less intrusive than the other types and fit in better with your environment, depending on the style you're going for. The special spandrel decorative only shows if you connect the spandrels to pillars, otherwise it's just a wooden railing in your ceiling.


You can see how Marmelad uses the way spandrels create their own rooms when designing this kitchen in this video: https://youtu.be/ZTPNmGD6G74?t=284

Click the link as it links to the time stamp.

Outside of using spandrels that are the least intrusive way of doing it, you can also use the invisible fence that came with Get Famous or City Living, I believe. The downside is that Sims will react to the fence being there and path around it, but depending on how you design the room, this may not be an issue anyhow. They will not react to spandrels.

[TomasGrizzly]

Maybe someone has a trick for this, and if they do I'd love to hear it too.  But as soon as you open up even one grid space gap in a wall, suddenly the two rooms it separated become one.  This suddenly matters now, because lights use power, and the game greatly exaggerates how much power a light uses.

Yeah, the power consumption of lights is silly. They're all at 10 with no regard whatsoever to what type of light they are (and thus their actual power efficiency). Not the only problem with the system, though - for example, flatscreen TVs (or PC with flat screen) in TS4 have a higher power consumption than the CRT counterparts - which makes no sense whatsoever.
The secondary issue is that pets trigger auto-lights, which I think shouldn't be the case.

Now, back to the walls issue: If you build two rooms, click one, and click 'remove wall', will the game snap them together right away, or will they stay separate rooms?