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Sim City Inside The Sims - Russian Doll Effect?
Ant writes "According to Wired News: 'It was bound to happen. First there was SimCity. Then there was The Sims. And then came a series of highly successful expansion packs like Hot Date, Livin' Large, House Party and others. Now comes a fan-made plug-in that allows Sims characters to effectively play SimCity inside The Sims. The Sims franchise has gone meta.'"
Ok... so the Sims sit in their little homes and play Sim City, what if those Sims within the Sims Sim City started developing a plug in to play the Sims? Then those Sims Sim City Sims Sims started playing Sim City after using the Sims Sim City Sims Sims Sims plug-in... then Maxis does a Cybernet and takes over...
Hmm... my brain hurts, more than an intravenous injection gallon of blueberry squishee
does this mean the matrix is real now?
Hmmm... sort of like a low tech Thirteenth Floor
Have you tried Linux yet?
How disconnected from the real world is my life if I have to play a video game whose players I watch play a video game?
...The Sims play YOU!
They maybe able to build an interesting Sim plugin, but sure can't build a website!
Someone needs to teach these people some basic HTML and site design skills. This hurts my eyes almost as bad as the Slashdot Games color scheme!
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Nothing screams "I need to get a life!" more than roleplaying somebody who roleplays somebody else (and thus also needs to get a life).
In a similar way, some Second Life users decided that they wanted to be able to play a traditional RPG within Second Life. The result of their creation was Dark Life, captured in SL's New World Notes. The Dark Lifers have been quite successful and have drawn many players into their game, including many new users. In addition to the usual creature killing, magic spells, healing and leveling, they have also introduced some very interesting twists on traditional RPG gameplay.
before the sims are polluting the sim earth and stepping on sim ants "All I caught while fishing was this tin can, old boot, and book of cliches"
I hate my sig
LucasArts's Day of the Tentacle is the sequel to the classic Maniac Mansion, and if you go into Weird Ed's room (in Tentacle) and use his computer, you're presented with a 100% complete version of Maniac Mansion. So, Weird Ed plays Maniac Mansion on his computer.
...seriously.
What we have here is a game that has been merchandised and capitalised almost to death (how many expansion packs are out again? 4?) and now they have been crossing the borderline from gaming to metagaming. I'm pretty sure a lot of those who metaplay would make interesting vic... patients for modern psychologists.
In Yu Suzuki's masterpieces Shenmue and Shenmue 2, hero Ryo Hazuki can play Yu Suzuki's early arcades: Hang On, Space Harrier, Out Run, and After Burner 2. Also, he can buy collectibles based on other Sega games, such as Sonic, NiGHTS, and 18 Wheeler.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Anyone else remember the games Streets of Sim City, where you could import your SimCity save files then drive/walk around in the city you made. This game was way ahead of it's time...think VIce City/GTA3 except it game out in 1997 so the graphics weren't quite up to par but the gameplay was quite similar. There was also SimCopter where you got to fly helipoter missions around in SimCities you built and imported.
Way before The Sims. I thought it would be cool if all of the sim games were integrated into one big one. Needless to say, that idea was unfeasible and is now downright impossible.
That page had a flash ad WITH SOUND! And I though FireFox's popup blocking was enough...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Start from the first comic
and
End
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Dammit people, this is probably how The Matrix starts...
I'm sure there was something even before my example here.. but in Day of the Tentacle you could play the prequal game, Maniac Mansion on a computer inside the game.
-Mikey
I always considered it a wake up call, but in retrospect maybe it was just jealousy.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
"...houses an interesting store in which this guidebook and many other useful and curious items may be obtained. (Notice that this book is in the shop, which itself is in the book -- an infinite progression)."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Sims Proposals
Here are some proposals and documents I've written, describing the work I've done and projects I've proposed with The Sims character animation system, plug-in objects and tools. After four years, a great deal of useful information has been reverse-engineered by independent third-party developers and open source projects like The Sims Technical Library. I hope these ideas will inspire more tool developers to contribute their programming skills to the Sims community.
Will Wright's original vision was enabling creative storytelling, by allowing players to add their own characters and objects to the game, and encouraging developers to program new objects and create tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic. Before The Sims was even released, Luc Barthelet sewed the seeds of its success by providing fans with content and tools like SimShow, so they could start making web sites and character skins. By the time it was released, you could already download a wide range of skins from many different web sites!
Four years later, Sims Object hackers have taken it much further than anyone ever imagined. A third-party tool called "iffpencil 2" has taken the place of Edith (Maxis's visual Sims object programming environment) in the Sims object hacking community.
One mind-blowing example is Slice City, which is an amazing game within a game: SimCity within The Sims! Your Sims can walk around and interact with a live, growing city like a Lilliputian scene from Gulliver's Travels. I'm not making this up: this actually runs INSIDE The Sims, and is ingeniously implemented by plug-in objects!
You start with a power plant, which gradually grows a whole city populated by swarms of insect-sized people. As the city grows, it spawns new objects including buildings (reprogrammed houseplants that the gardener still waters), crowds of people (reprogrammed cockroaches that you can still stomp to death), parks, marinas and monuments. You can go into build mode and rearrange them however you like, place roads (that get extremely busy at rush hour), and interact with the buildings through pie menus in play mode. There's even a tornado that comes through and knocks down your buildings. And you can download add-ons and pre-made cities!
Nothing like SimSlice was in the original design plan, but Will Wright credits all the creative players as the primary reason The Sims has become the #1 selling game of all time.
I believe the starkly contrasting failure of The Sims Online has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't support player created content like the original Sims. One of the fundamental reasons that original Sims players have been disappointed with The Sims Online, is that Maxis never executed on the original plan to let online players upload and exchange their own skins and objects.
In order to help more fully realize Will's original plan, I wrote these proposals and documents to support the community of Sims artists, tool developers and object programmers like Bil Simser, Judson Hudson, Michael Watson, Rick Halle, Tom van Dijk
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
This is a propsal I wrote to Maxis after The Sims was released in March 2000, outlining some of my ideas for third party content authoring tools that I could develop. This led to The Sims Transmogrifier, but it touches on several other interesting tools and projects that Maxis never got around to.
A Proposal to Develop Third Party Content Authoring Tools for The Sims
by Don Hopkins, March 2000
Problem Definition:
There is a strong demand many from third parties who want to develop their own custom content for The Sims, including characters and objects.
Proposed Solution:
Update, clean up and document the content creation tools, so third parties can make their own characters and objects for The Sims.
Port the tools to the latest version of 3D Studio Max.
Make the tools self contained so they can be run stand-alone, by removing all dependencies on the Maxis environment and expensive software packages: Character Studio (Biped, Physique), Access, SourceSafe, MKS Toolkit (Korn Shell).
Document the content creation tools with an overview, examples, tutorials, and a reference manual. Write down the folklore that has been passed by word of mouth. Read over the code and document how it actually behaves.
Provide consulting, training and content creation services to third parties who want custom content authored for The Sims, but don't want or know how to do it themselves.
Develop a Sims Content Authoring SDK, so it's possible for third parties to create specialized content creation tools, like FaceLift.
Goals:
Third Party Character Creation and Customization:
Characters include virtual people who the user can play with, as well as autonomous non-player characters with programmed behaviors. Characters consist of bodies, heads and hands of 3D polygonal meshes with texture mapped bitmap skins.
Characters are created at Maxis by highly skilled artists using expensive tools like 3D Studio Max, Character Studio, the CMX exporter, and Photoshop.
Simplify the content creation tools and make them run stand-alone, so third party artists and designers can create their own characters and objects.
Maxis' expert 2D character artists currently use Photoshop to paint body textures in layers, then flatten and dither them into 256 color bitmap files.
"Flesh out" the process of applying layered clothing to naked bodies and dithering to 8 bits, so anyone can dress up their characters in all kinds of clothes.
Maxis' expert 3D modeling artists create textured low-poly rigid meshes (like heads, hands and accessories) attached to individual bones, and the CMX exporter creates rigid suits.
Make the CMX exporter easy for third parties to use, so many proficient 3D artists will be able to make their own textured heads, accessories, selected character pointers, and carried objects.
Maxis' expert 3D character modeling artists attach textured low-poly deformable meshes (like bodies) to skeletons using Character Studio Physique and Biped, and the CMX exporter reads out the weighted vertex/bone bindings and creates deformable suits for the game.
Character Studio is an expensive plug-in that enables a skilled artist to bind deformable meshes to skeletons, but there are other ways to do that with 3D Studio Max and other 3D tools.
Enhance the CMX exporter to support Max's new way of attaching deformable meshes to skeletons, so third party 3D artists can create bodies.
Maxis designers and programmers use the Edith tool to configure the behavior of characters and objects.
Clean up and document Edith, so third party designers and programmers can program and modify their own characters and objects.
Third Party Object Creation and Customization:
Objects consist of pre-rendered z-buffered sprites, packaged together with character
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
By a large factor, players have created far more custom objects for The Sims, than the 1500 or so that Maxis has produced in 7 expansion packs. It's hard to estimate the exact number of player created objects, but it's interesting to note the number of "magic cookies" registered:
The free Transmogrifier program enables players to create their own objects for The Sims. Anyone who downloads Transmogrifier may optionally register to get a free "magic cookie" (a unique 16 bit number) that distinguishes the objects they create, so the IDs of the objects created by different players won't collide.
Ultimately, the 16 bit magic cookie wasn't big enough: In four years, I've given out 127,031 magic cookies (so the 16 bit counter is about to wrap around a second time), so there are at least that many people interested in making their own objects for The Sims.
Players have created and published so many objects for downloading, that you can buy third party utilities to help categorize all your object downloads, and renumber object id collisions.
Assuming conservatively that each player who bothered to register a Transmogrifier magic cookie made only two objects (and ignoring everyone who didn't register), and assuming generously that Maxis made 1500 objects in all 7 expansion packs (by my count there are 1461 objects, including official Maxis downloads, excluding characters and special invisible objects), that's a User:Maxis ratio of 169:1 -- a factor of a couple orders of magnitude.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com