Hello folks, it’s been a while since I posted an update. A number of things have happened since the last post, so I’ll go over them quite quickly.
Firstly, a lot of work has been put into our resource editing tool, Volcanic. It is now possible to make, test and debug new objects entirely from scratch within FreeSO! This is the culmination of 6 months work; you are now able to fully modify and create most resource types that TSO uses.
Many object interactions have been fixed - specifically the food counters, beds, campfire and bubble blower. There are a lot of small changes, but the gist of it is that now there are very few objects that do not work correctly. The only remaining main SimAntics VM features are permissions, budget, and the “plugins” system that drove things like “Pizza” and the sign posts. After these, we can get started on the MMO server.
…and of course (due to popular demand), grass and other terrain types are now visible. Here are some screenshots of objects users created with Volcanic as part of its user evaluation, grass included:
We also have a new text logo! This was designed with guidance from some of the members of the community, and resembles more of a modern sims feel than an old one. This was really just to make it go with the icon I already created.
You may have noticed that the forums are currently down. Don’t worry, we haven’t gone anywhere! They should be back up soon, but while you’re waiting here’s a little teaser for what I’ve been working on. ;)
For all you anti-forums folk, a lot has changed since the last update. The change suit primitive now works correctly, TV sounds are half working, and most importantly the game can now serialize and deserialize entire game states, avoiding the huge wait times people were seeing when connecting to servers.
Chat bubbles and chat history have been added, a ton of bugs have been fixed, and work has begun on a full Independent Development Environment for SimAntics to let users create their own objects! (and us modify existing ones ;) ) There will be more on this soon, once it’s in a stable state.
Rather interestingly, a Brazilian community has recently started developing for the game, and they’re dedicated enough to have already translated parts of the game with the rather shoddy multilingual string support! Full translation of all objects is a little while away though (the IDE will provide this), and sprite font text rendering makes it rather hard to translate into certain languages. We’ll be working on this in the coming months, stay tuned!
To better support the objects and environments present in the original game, we had to switch routing algorithm to one which supported more accurate routing without incurring a huge cost. This combination of a rectangular cover algorithm and A* is performant, fit for purpose and seems to be quite similar to the way the original game does things.
As well as this, a large number of related changes have been made to routing, as well as smaller changes to SimAntics which fix objects such as the Whacketball set, computers and job carpool. Things should generally look smoother and work a little better, but I encourage users to look for regressions and bugs in the new code that I haven’t found on my own!
Hey all, the forums are currently down temporarily. Should be back up soon, it’s just the same database problem we had during the first playtest. You can keep track of all immediate developments on GitHub and the build bot primarily, but the new routing is nearing completion, at which point I’ll write a full blog about it. We’ll probably do a similar thing all the way to release, with detailed blog posts about all the important merges into the master branch detailing what specifically has been achieved, usually accompanied by a youtube video.
The new routing is looking phenomenal, but you might need a comparison video to show just how much better. This will come in a few days, directly after the merge. The roadmap is available on the forums, which I’m still going to be following semi-strictly, so next we’ll be clearing up the suit primitive and handling. Hope you guys are OK with barbie doll style naked sims, since the censor effect will not be immediately available. ;)
Since the next update will be a while off (routing refactor), I added a quick change that lets people use custom avatars online. Check it out in the latest build!
