Slashdot Mirror
In-Depth Sims Online Development Story
Nicholas Palmer writes "GameSpot has a really
in-depth feature story on the development process behind The Sims Online.
It gets into things like how the team had to refactor the game's 3 million lines
of code last year. Will Wright mentions his desire to see TSO to grow into
a community similar to
Slashdot's." Great game - although the latest wipe of the game means all Blockstackers' hard work on our house will be gone. Still, the social dynamics, IMHO, are much more interesting in TSO, because it enforces cooperation.
for all of us having to pull the Friday after thanksgiving!
I couldn't figure out why they had invented the game. Now I know. Check out the serial killer: http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/simsonlin e/wright_hand.html
At least TRY ! damnit
slashdot
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
You mean there will be simtrolls?
The will be sim gnu/hippies?
sim linux zealots (running simlinux)
Sim janitors (and their dupes)
And the abillity to sim-mod simtrolls to -1?
So do you have to find the red pill to leave the game?
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/simsonlin e/wright_hand.html
..and make some real friends!! Leave these Sims alone.
Now, excuse me while I go play some Metriod Prime.
Enters dark room, all alone with only some Diet Rite and some leftover turkey Ahh, sweet sweet bliss.
What, me Tweet?
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/simsonlin e/wright_hand.html
Take out the space before the e of online.
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/simsonlin e/wright_hand.html
when playing the sims, i find that i spend alot of time 1. designing the house 2. then watching the sims walk around. then repeat steps 1 and 2 again.
was just wondering whether there is some tool out there that has such simulations of people walking around objects. something like air flow dynamics, except it is people flow.
c0
How are they gonna simulate repeat stories?
better is which?
This is real!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/29/131120 1&mode=nested&tid=172
There was an article about thwarting viral infection and now it's gone! Did a /. Virus get it?
They are at least linking to a different article, however close the subject may be.
Will Wright mentions his desire to see TSO to grow into a community similar to Slashdot's."
...
What? A community where everyone goes around saying "IANAL, but "?
Not sure I want to play this
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
How long before ..TSO has its 1st divorce in game ...is cited in a real divorce case when the TSO players other half, can't play the latest doom/quake/enter generic fps online, because their missus spends all day gossiping on TSO. .. bill gates, global corporations, the illuminanti, aliens, hyperintelligent mice, the masons etc secretly control the lives of your sims online
He must be thinking of Kuro5hin...
*ducks*
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
If The Sims Online is going to be anything like Slashdot, it's going to have the following things:
1. Duplicate Everything.
2. Cheesey polls with the ever-present CowboyNeal option.
3. Trolls.
4. Anonymous Sims who think they're smarter than everyone else, but afraid to reveal their true selves.
5. CmdrTaco's Anime Hut (to me, that'd be a plus)
6. A Town Hall where geeks with no lives can bitch about Farscape and Firefly being cancled.
7. Computers that boot into Linux, run WINE, and then play The Sims Online.
8. Insert Rip on JonKatz Here.
9. A graveyard with tombstones that read MINIX, FreeBSD, and other OSs people are fond of calling "dead."
10. UFOs and subsequent Government Cover-Ups.
11. A Babylon 5 Shrine.
12. The city of Torvalds, CA.
What I'd really like to see in TSO would be a hidden Middle Earth landscape, in which case I'd hustle in and set up shop at either Eisengard or Mordor (preferably Mordor). Sim LotR, Sim Hobbits, Sim Uruk-Hai, Sim Rangers, wouldn't that be grand?
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Not a bad idea - Then slashdot readers will know how social interaction works :)
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
There's like an odor of duplicate story floating ...
Does that mean there will be a Sim Natalie Portman?
Now where have I seen that style before....
... that they will have CowboyNeal Sim?
Like Slashdot?
.
You mean fractured down opinionated economic, moral and technology fault lines?MS-bashers/Linux-bashers, Linus lovers/Linus haters, ecofreak/technojunkies, libertarians/communists, 'information wants to be free' swappers/ 'theft is theft' moralists and JonKatz fans/foes
I can just imagine it, your choice of spouse is decided by the ominous by BSD/Red hat question? Or even worse, Star Trek/Lord of the Rings?
Or you meet a new neighbour and you wonder whether their game house or the computer that they're running it from is more modded?
Or that neighbour constantly comes round your house asking if you've heard of a free sofa that is also a fridge and a multimedia centre (must play OGGs) and a PDA. And is a eco friendly. And open-source. Or when they should start teaching their kids how to code, at 2, 3 or in the womb?
I also wonder how many CowboyNeal based aliases there will be on-line.
Then again, since it'll be a Windows game, I don't think 'all' the Slashdot community will take it up.
Since sometime around Sep. 11, kuro5hin has devolved into a cesspool of terrorist sympathizers, conspiracy theorist nuts(you thought /. was bad?, heh...), etc.
It's a good site to participate in if you're intentionally trying to get an FBI file, and honestly with good reason IMO. And this, coming from me, a serious privacy nut/Libertarian/keep the f*ckin' govt' out of my life/etc.
Just recently there was a piece about how it's the fault of the Miss Universe Pageant people that Muslims are slaughtering people in whatever backasswards country the pageant was supposed to be held in. Sure, they were pretty stupid to cause such a culture clash, but that justifies Muslims slaughtering people? It got pretty torn up in the comments, but still, it made it to the front page...
Bleh... Sorry for the rant.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
How does the Sims Online correspond to that model? This might seem a jaded view, but it looks from the article as if you build houses and wander around. What else is there to do? Do they expect people to 'make their own fun' so to speak or is there actual advancement and tasks that give a point to the thing?
There is no way you can really simulate a bitch slap from your girlfriend 'cause she found out you were screwing her sister...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
It allows someone without a real life to simulate one.
"And like that
...I will be hunkered over my Visor playing Sim City Classic!
IMOHO Maxis Jumped the Shark with SimEarth. The original game is still the best!
Do you want me to come and Bitch Slap you??? The post is ontopic and relaets directly to the post.
13. An ability to make Beowulf cluster of virtually anything.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Will we be able to build sim dungeons to hold victims before harvesting their skins into sim women suits?
The article mentions that Will Wright has talked stuff over with Neal Stephenson, and that in some ways TSO will be similar to the "Metaverse", as described in Snow Crash. One thing I'd like to see in TSO is the ability for characters to share non-TSO "objects" with other characters. For example, I'd like my character to hand another character a "file" and have a real file transfered from my hard drive to the other character's drive.
There are a lot of technical issues involved with this sort of stuff -- and some legal ones as well (think MP3s). However, this feature would bring TSO a lot closer to the Metaverse, uh, universe.
I wish I could metamoderate the moderation to +1, Funny.
stories of the development process. This really gives an in-depth view of the ordeal that the developers go through like the problems they face and the solutions they come up with. Besides being an interesting read, these articles give the players an appreciation of the hard work done by the coders/designers. Geoff has done such Behind The Games articles on other games including Black&White. I was so impressed by efforts of the developers and the main designer Peter Molyneux, that although I had a warez copy of the game, I went ahead and bought the game. Being a developer myself, I really wanted to see these guy's hard work pay off.
Again, thanks to Geoff for bringing these interesting articles to the public without which no one would have had a chance to appreciate the games in a different way.
What ever happened to Dungeon Keeper III anyway?
That's sim-1.
from a bit in the gamespot article about Gordon Walton, former Ultima Online employee and now executive producer of Sims Online....
"The emotions you can feel in these online games are real," he explains one Wednesday morning in his office, flanked by a rocket launcher, which was a gift from a former employee.
This guy has a rocket launcher in his office? Is that legal?
From the article:
For instance, in order to prevent a griefer from standing in a doorway to block a sim from leaving a house, the characters in the game are able to walk through each other.
Then how they will make babies?
- Do you want to touch my transparent monkey?
as a slashdot reader for 3/4 years this would be my first post.I just want to point out how I find it funny how i was nieve to think a cooperation would get in the way of my Daily routins. i'm just going to sum this up by a letter i got. Notice, I'm a Huge FAN that plays sim's online 24 hours. I don't know if i'm part of the demo-graphic, but i'm in utter shock right now. If the Sim's Want to become a community like ours. Then how are we suppose to express our views. Saying nigga'(and yes i added a Hiphin to show he was my friend/bro) is wrong, but NOT ENUF TO GET BANNED OVER. Imagin if EA were to censore flashdot. You'll need a whole new server and enuf space for a huge database. I also wanna point out how limited sim's system fliter yes. We all(seasoned comp freak) what "WTF" stand for, they deem that as unapproit(sp) along with countless other. i'm going to end my rant. TO finish it would take a day or two.
e ment.jsp
.
START
Hello,
This letter is to notify you that your account has been temporarily suspended
for 72 hours for Terms of Service violations.
Specifically:
Racial Harassment. nigga' 03:53:08 Master Bishop
After this suspension, you will be able to rejoin TSO without further
consequence. However, if you are found to be breaking any of the Terms of
Service again, your TSO account will be permanently closed.
Please review the following policies with regards to this issue posted at:
Terms of Service http://www.ea.com/global/legal/tos.jsp
User Agreement: http://player.thesimsonline.ea.com/home/user_agre
Please take the time to review these documents. Although we would regret the
closure of your account, we feel that it would be in the best interest of the
service and community as a whole. This notice serves as your final warning in
this matter.
EA.com Customer Relations
We request that you review our EA.com Terms of Services by going to
http://www.ea.com and clicking on the "Terms of Service" link at the bottom
of the page.
If you have any questions about this, please direct your inquiry to TOS@ea.com
end
this Makes AOL look good.
One thing I object to after reading the article. During development, they used the character Daria Morgendorffer to represent the people who enjoy torturing their Sims. I would think that Daria, if she even played The Sims, wouldn't torture her characters. That's what "Black And White" is for. :-) Although every indication of Daria's taste in games in the 5 years of the show's run suggest she's more a First-Person Shooter fan.
I think "The Sims" and "The Sims Online" are more the province of her sister Quinn, though. Manipulation of people's lives is definitely something she'd dig on. I suspect that the entire Fashion Club (except Tiffany, she's too slow to use a computer) might develop a "TSO" addiction.
Interestingly enough, there are lots of "Daria"-related skins for "The Sims" floating around the Internet. You can basically replicate Daria's Lawndale house, complete with her family and the plastic replicas of brains, bones and cheese that are in Daria's padded room.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Then again, since it'll be a Windows game, I don't think 'all' the Slashdot community will take it up.
Yeah, just 90%. You know, that 90% of the Slashdot community that raves about how great Linux is and how much Microsoft from the saftey of Internet Explorer on Windows? Slashdot: you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and hypocrisy.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I liked the original sims... I even bought two of the expansion packs.
I would have bought their plans for the expansion pack that turned everyone's house into a server, but...
There's no way I'll pay $9.95 per month to subscribe... I play something like 1 day every three months.
$40 would be worth it for me for the lifetime of the game...
$9.95 per month just isn't right when you only play for four days a year.
Oh well.. there goes another customer.
This reminds me strangely of the PKD novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Specifically the sims being much like perky pat and her world. If only there was some Cand-E for us to live in our sims world :)
Close the world.
While it is true that Daria prefers games like Zombie Fragfest (on CDROM), I think she would give The Sims a try, and she would tiorture her Sims, especially the Sims based on Quinn, Kevin, et al. She probably wouldn't play iit for more than a few weeks, or until she had discovered every possible way of killing off the wee little beasties.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Personally, I'll never play it (I may try if they give out a couple of months and the program for free)
Does this mean that if TSO is not doing well and needs to register more users we will be inundated with millions of CDs entitled
"TSO 7.0 - Now Better Than Ever!"
Shoot me now.
Refactoring, a programming term, refers to the process of pulling the game's underlying architecture apart and figuring out the most efficient way to reconnect each individual part.
That definition is way off. Refactoring is the a process for improving code design by making small incremental changes which are supported by extensive automated testing.
Good lord. I used to run a major Simgaming (SimCity, The Sims, etc.) web site (SimEden.com) and we didn't have *nearly* the rate of news posts about a single title as /. has been posting over the last week or so.
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
Next thing you'll know we'll be crying for an open source API, so that we can link in with the game and create our own UI.
Or maybe a scripting language that allows one to create a program for building a house, rather than saving the house data itself.
Mmmmm, scripting... (drool)
A game where people with no life can createa and control fictional characters with no life either.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
...you are being asked to take the red pill to enter the game.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
This is the third Sims Online article I've seen posted to the front-page in recent memory (and I can't remember that for back, trust me, puff puff). Is this really "Stuff that matters" so much as to warrant this much advertising? Most of the posts are people saying the beta sucks, or they won't play it, etc... Why so much free advertising for them, then?
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Love your work.
Btw, you are a brave man to participate in this discussion while being logged in. You'll leave at least 2 points of Karma.
It's OK, I have a life.
"So Barthelet introduced measurable goals and objectives for each programmer. Everything would be tracked, including the number of lines programmers were writing each day."
Tracking the lines of code written? Talk about an invitation to bloat! Having been on large commerical software projects before, sitting with other developers reviewing code submissions, I can say that one would get laughed out of the room if they merely wrote with a "number of lines submitted" mentality.
Unasked-for advice to would-be project managers: It's the quality of the code, not the number of lines it takes to make things happen. Experienced developers know what I'm talking about. Number of features implemented, and number of bugs squished, are far more reliable indicators of ones' contribution.
"Mongo write 500 lines today! Mongo allocate gigabyte! Memory smoke! Computer crash! Mongo sad!"
and I thought the real thing was bad.
Howlong till the first sim_survivor show that becomes a top story for discussion on slashdot ?
On the other hand I am a pretty big fan of online gaming ideas. I look forward to the day when someone takes the reality and community building aspects that are so much a part of this game and tie it into an adventure game.
I'll see your Sim_Middle_Earth and raise you a Sim_Starwars_Galaxy complete with a a Jar Jar Binks to kill whenever you like.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
You wrote *ducks*. The asterisk words always slay me.
No.
I do not want to hear, "SimElendil! O, SimElbereth!"
"SimAnduril! The simsword that was once broken has gone to simwar again!"
I had a really low UID on kuro5hin, but while I wouldn't say it got taken over by terroris sympathisers, it definetly got boring.
I still stop buy once in a while. The diary section is always a good place to get tech answers, I've found.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Peek on over at tsoj.com for a nice, simple slash site for The Sims Online stuff.
I am a meat popsicle.
The Sims online isn't exactly as original as this article makes it out to be.
i ssue9/lessons.html) had also developed simular multiuser worlds even before that, beginning with the C64.
Fujitsu developed a 2D avatar world back in the early to mid 90s. It was called Habitat. An english version of it became available to Compuserve users some time in 1995 called WorldsAway. There was also a smaller version for gays,lesbians, and bis called Pride. While it may have appeared to be a glorified chatroom it was alot more closer to the Sims Online. While you didn't have a house, you could rent apartments and decorate them.
There was a virtual "economy." You got 60 tokens for every hour you where logged on (when it cost $4+ an hour to be online, this was alot.) You could buy from vending machines. Some machines where seasonal, so items from these machines became "rare." People would pay thousands of tokens for "rare" items, and once internet access went to a flat rate it escalated to hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens.
And that was not the beginning. Habitat and Lucasfilm (http://imaginaryrealities.imaginary.com/volume2/
I've read Snow Crash (as well as almost every other book by Neal Stephenson), and the idea of multiuser worlds greatly interest me.
I would imagine Will Wright researched some of these pre-existing worlds but I haven't heard anything of it.
By the way, WorldsAway still exists, in a much different form than what it used to be - vzones.com. They even ventured to create an adult world called Seducity - which I dont understand how anyone can take seriously with its cartoony avatars (kind of like hentai since most of the artwork came from the japanese version.)
I'm excited to see how the Sims Online will turn out, but I don't think I'll the have time to become a member myself. Worldsaway took up far too much of my time and money.
The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back,
which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at
least 5000 years old."
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