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.
How are they gonna simulate repeat stories?
The Sims Online is arguably not even a game, just a large virtual world chat system. Your typical gamer won't "get it", but the public is going to eat it up. EA's got a money printing machine on their hands with this one.
A traditional online game has a goals of sorts - to adventure, to kill monsters, to work as a team, to compete against other teams, to acquire wealth and status etc.
I should answer RTFA.... They addressed this problem quite clearly, by dividing the players in different categories which like the game for a specific aspect (building, getting rich, socializing...) and trying to include elements which guarantee long playability for all of them.
Personally, I'll never play it (I may try if they give out a couple of months and the program for free), and some of the comments on the sims newsgroup are very negative (they say it's boring), but there will be certainly tons of people ready to pay for the game just because it's "The Sims" and probably a fair amount of them will appreciate the "glorified chat room" idea and stick around even at $10/month (which seems to be quite a lot of money to me).
Beside the nice graphics with the "create your own objects" possibility (which will be added later - and will pose lots of troubles, I think), I don't see any advantage over a good old text MUD.
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.
"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!"