SimlingtonToday
TS3-News-Downloads-More!
What You Could Expect
These are some of the things you can expect that might be in the game.
-No Lot Restrictions
-Your house goes through a house building process
-More light effects
-More Decorative than the Sims 2
CAS (Create A Sim )
-More realistic than Sims 2
-Choose the style like you can choose the shoes
Life
-You get Cars in Base Game (Yay!)
-You can walk to the park, center of town, drive to where ever ETC
- More Social
-(?) Open a Store in Base Game
Making Objects
The news provided us something that said that you wouldn't have to use big softwares to create things for your game. As in recolors, making a new objects, ETC.
SimsLAndHomes Old News
CLOSE UP PICTURE OF PLEASANTVILLE or VIEW.
A. Town Hall
B. Better Tree or Plant Life
C. Office Building?
D. Science Lab?
E. Simple Homes
F. Drive Way?
G. Realistic Park and Lake
H. Better Natural Trees
I. More Better Shadowing
More Article and E-MAIL Stuff
A Article I found. - 3/9/08
By popular demand (well, one request), I’m writing up my notes on Richard Evans’ talk from AIIDE. Richard Evans is currently working at EA/Maxis on the Sims 3. He talked about how the work they’re doing to make each Sim unique and distinct. They’re goal is to make them more individual and more social at the same time.
They have a large pool of discrete traits. Each Sim gets a selection of about five from the pool of traits. Some traits are mutually exclusive, for example, a Sim can be modest or have a big ego. A Sim can hate TV or love TV.
They’re doing their work on the game mechanics in a 2D prototype. It’s a simple sprite world with box graphics, but the simulation it’s running is complete. Richard showed us several demos of the topics he was discussing in action. He had a Sim that hated TV and one that loved TV. It resulted in a funny setup where one Sim would turn on the TV and the other would promptly turn it off.
Besides individual traits, another big addition is that the Sims actually do long term planning. He created a Sim and gave it the workaholic trait. Then he got the Sim a job as a waiter, which is on the restaurant track. The Sim then independently went off to try to level his cooking skill. It bought a cookbook and read it, it bought ingredients and started cooking. It called his boss and invited him over because becoming friends with your boss will get you promoted.
Their second main goal is to make the Sims more socially aware. Richard previously worked at Lionhead Studios on the creature AI for Black & White. A problem in both Black & White and the Sims that Richard found was where the creature/the Sim will interrupt a social situation, for example, attending to a bodily function in the middle of a conversation. This is because they had no awareness that doing so was interrupting something.
The Sims 3 adds social situations. Some examples he gave were visiting (what to do while over at another Sims), mealtime, bedtime and dates. He showed a demo where the Sims recognized the situation and knew what was appropriate or inappropriate. For example, it’s inappropriate for a visiting Sim to watch TV, take food, or sit on the bed of the host. This actually allows for more interesting interactions where you can force you Sims to violate social norms and the other Sims will recognize this and react. It is fun to be naughty but you can only be naught if people know what’s appropriate.
Richard then talked about Garfinkel’s breaching experiments where students were instructed to purposefully break social norms.
He showed how the actions available to the Sim depend on context. At any moment there are many competing contexts scored and sorted by saliency. There is also some amount of memory of past events. If a Sim violates a social norm, they’ll later have the option to apologize for it.
In addition to the larger prototype, they make a lot of smaller standalone prototypes. If they find one of them successful, they’ll roll it into the larger prototype. He showed a couple of these prototypes. One was a diary generator which takes a given set of events and then spits out a journal of it. They had knobs to tune how formal or informal it was, and how truthful as well. It was neat, though not sure how much gameplay there is in something like that.
The talk was about a month ago now, so unfortunately I’ve forgotten some of the details of the talk. It was quite interesting and I love seeing how other companies do things. The prototype was a great tool. While it was in no way something you could give to the public to have fun with it had everything the game designers needed to figure out how to make the mechanics of social interaction work.
The Letter from the Executive Producer of TS3
Source: TheSims2.com
Welcome to The Sims 3!By Benjamin Bell
Hello,
My name is Ben and I’m an Executive Producer on The Sims 3. The last few years have been exciting for me personally. Since joining The Sims Label at EA, I’ve had the opportunity to work on dream projects such as The Sims 2 Pets, and The Sims 2 Castaway. However, things are about to get very exciting and I’m so happy to be sharing this news with you.
In the very near future, we are going to announce the first details of The Sims 3. As you can imagine, The Sims 3 development team is very excited because we have been working on the game for the past few years. Like you, we are all fans of The Sims and we can’t wait to talk to you about the innovations in The Sims 3. We know that there are so many expectations for this game. The Sims 3 team has been quietly listening to the community and incorporating suggestions to make this the best possible game. Many of our team members worked on The Sims and The Sims 2, so trust me, you are in good hands. We hope that you’ll be impressed by what we’re working on for The Sims 3.
What is The Sims 3? Very shortly, you’ll see magazine articles, websites and interviews on this subject. However, we want to share the announcement news with you first.
When the team first started thinking about what The Sims 3 could be, we asked ourselves the following question. What if you had to live your whole life in one location … and then one day, suddenly, you could step outside and go anywhere in the whole neighborhood?
The first thing you’ll notice about The Sims 3 is that the Sims now live in a completely seamless, living neighborhood. This means that they can walk next door, walk down the street, drive to the center of town, stroll through the park, and explore everything without ever encountering a load screen. Wherever you go in your town, you will see other Sims going about their daily lives. You’ll discover new things about the community that your Sims live in, and you will have the chance to participate whenever and wherever you like. As a player, this is an incredible innovation for me because now I can see what my neighbors are up to all of the time and go interact with them. Or if I am feeling devious I can peek through the window and spy on their every move. I can even shoot across town to see what the other families in my town are doing, any time of day or night. It’s an entirely new way to play with your Sims!
The second aspect of The Sims 3 that always impresses me is our completely reinvented and realistic Create a Sim. In The Sims 3, you have so much freedom to create the Sims that you want to make, yet it’s easy and fun. In the coming weeks, we will have some screenshots on our website that show you a small glimpse of what is possible with Create a Sim. The Sims can look like anyone you imagine. I’ve made my friends, my great grandpa, and many other important people from my life. We also have a new realistic personality system called Traits that allows you to determine the personality of every Sim. There are dozens of Traits that you can assign to your Sims. Every Trait will change the way that your Sims feel, think and behave in the game. You can choose several traits for your Sims, so it’s really possible to make any character that you can imagine and they will come to life in The Sims 3. Now imagine placing these unique personalities into your very own “Petri-dish” that is the new seamless, living neighborhood.
The third thing that I really want to share with you about The Sims 3 is that everyone will be able to customize the appearance of everything, right in the game: This is true for furniture, walls, floors, fashion, hair, and so much more. You will be able to customize the colors or patterns and apply them to everything (this is great for me in particular, as I am colorblind). You can make everything match, clash, or coordinate. It is so easy and fast, and it is incredibly powerful. What is really exciting is that you won’t need developer tools to make big visual changes to the game. We will be giving you a small taste of how this works on the website. However, I cannot wait to show you how fun this feature is when we have the final user interface in the game. The real power of this feature will be obvious when you get your hands on it. Fans of The Sims already make amazing things, and now it will be so much easier for to make and share creations.
While I have met many of you at fan events, I look forward to sharing more with you about The Sims 3 as we develop the game leading up to launch.
There is so much more that I would love to tell you about but we’ll save that for future emails. Please stay tuned.
Talk to you soon!
Ben Bell
Executive Producer
Electronic Arts
