Hey everyone! While I’ve been busy working on a large feature myself, the rest of the team (mainly The Architect, S1ndle and Raeven) added two large features without my input at all - and they are absolutely wonderful! I didn’t want to delay these features, so they have been slowly been developed and refined in our GitHub repository on top of the last master build and thus can be released before I’m finished my own work, which still might take a while! Fawn has also partially joined the team to help with writing ingame dialogs, news posts, blog posts and is also helping out over on http://tsomania.net. Check out her new guide on building a successful house!

The second large feature we’re adding this patch is really the start of something new: Group Skilling Objects. While earning money in The Sims Online has always given players a choice in how active or passive they want to make cash, skilling has always been passive regardless. While veteran players, many newer players interested in group money or jobs were forced to skill passively, when they wanted a more active game experience more of the time.

With Group Skilling Objects, we’re offering the same passive/active choice that money has had since the start of FreeSO - with a twist giving it a key use in the late game for players with high skill, but wanting to reach their maximum payout potential. This should finally bridge this gap that more active players have been looking for, while allowing players who enjoy single money and skill to continue doing as they do. Everyone wins!

The first of these objects is none other than Maze, which has been converted from a money object for important reasons we’ll go into later in this post.

Group skills work as follows:

• A base level skill speed that works identically to normal skill objects. Skill speed is shared between group and single sims doing the same skill. (so single objects contribute to group, and vice versa)
• Motives decay much faster, but each “win” will reward your motives back.
• Success will give you a constant skill bonus of around .02 skill. At lower levels this doesn’t mean much, but at high skill levels .02 could take 10 minutes to obtain normally. This is on top of the base skill level, so you’ll always gain at least as much as a normal skill object, even if you fail or lose to the other player (eg. in wargame).

These benefits are an upgrade over single player skilling objects, but similar to group money, they are not a replacement. The decision is up to the player - a more active, focused experience for a quicker skilling path for more active players, or a more passive experience for players who just want to gain skills while chatting, working in the background or hanging out.

We’re launching group skill with two objects:

• Maze 1.0. This follows the old maze rules from the tso money object, but with random mazes and a better distribution of path lengths. Skills Logic/Charisma.
• Wargame. This object now follows our group skill rules and skills Creativity/Creativity. This was always a group skill object, but it didn’t have the thought put into it that our new system does.

Where’s money object maze?

Due to one of the many technical developments since 2003 (screenshots being easy to share, which does not make the game any easier but can make it essentially 1 player), Maze’s original game design can be broken even easier than is was back then, where they used preset mazes that could be macro’d. Our maze implementation generates entirely random mazes every time, with the exit a guaranteed and known distance range away from the start point. While our changes to maze to generate random mazes mitigate some of these issues, the original maze design is still too breakable to award something as permanent as money.

However, we’re a re-implementation project, and the original maze didn’t deserve to die any more than TSO did. Due to skill and motive decay making the benefits of group skill objects transient, a group money object awarding these benefits sits a lot better than one that could be abused for a permanent advantage. While the abuse might be minimal due to maze still being as difficult, it’s more a factor of its affect on player morale more than anything.

Further Plans

A variant of maze will be introduced in future with the Gameplay rethought to be more resilient against modern tech, as I have stated in the past. We’ve dubbed this “Maze 2.0”, and will be revealing more details in the future. The money group object rectangle will be complete!

Additionally, for Maze and our next feature, you will be able to toggle their new and old behaviour on a server level some time in the future. If someone capable were to take the game in a different direction, and even just go full vanilla, they should be able to do that by the time we launch. This is a re-implementation project first and foremost, after all. This distinction will let us go our own way with game changes, as we have been, to freshen things up and try our new ideas that TSO/EA Land never would had the chance to.

I think I’ve spoiled enough about what I’m still working on, so I’m going to leave you hanging there. I will end with two extra announcements: the first is that we will be moving the server software to .NET Core rather than Mono, which should provide more reliable memory usage and performance in line with what we test on our Windows development machines.

The second announcement is that you can now choose your reaction to player interactions before they occur. Now you can finally hot kiss 100 times without even pausing for a moment.

Rhys

Surprise! We have a special update for you - and it’s not even what we were teasing in the last blog post! It will release in a few hours, along with the announcement of a whole new class of object and a long awaited one. A blog will follow shortly after explaining everything - so stay put… in the meanwhile, we can go into a bit of detail about how this crazy project came about, the effort that went into it, and how the game actually works.

Texas Hold-em is coming to FreeSO, thanks to the efforts of everyone on the team! We’re also releasing a new set of objects tailored to casino environments, as you can see above, which you can get from the in-game catalog. You can even get virtually plastered at the bar - a perfect casino experience.

Origins

Long, long ago in the far off time of October 2017, after a joking back and forth with one of the admins I was recruited for an extra special secret project.

The extra special secret project was a collaboration between The Architect, M.O.M.I. Raeven, and myself, we were going to create a clone of the unused Blackjack table, give it new art assets and gameplay, and turn it into Texas hold ‘em. My task was to create the art assets necessary for the object while Architect and Raeven worked on the underlying code to make the object actually function.

Since the object was to be a clone of the Blackjack table and would recycle the animations and much of the code I had to keep the new Texas hold ‘em table within the same basic blueprint to make it work with the animations better. I had originally had it set at a normal table’s height since I did not know how tall the actual Blackjack table was. And overtime you can see how it morphed into its final form.

However it was decided that the original Blackjack table would be a higher priority since it was missing much of the code needed to make it work, and so efforts were shifted to that, in fact it was missing so much that the table had to essentially be remade from scratch, which Architect and Raeven did so very beautifully. At the same time it was also decided that in order to get some Custom Content out faster the Texas hold ‘em table would be shelved for the time being, this lead to the creation of two new slot machines, two taxis, christmas pudding, and a few other miscellaneous objects.

Back in January I came up with the idea of releasing several objects alongside the Texas hold em table, in a set I referred to as ‘High Roller Stuff’. This set was set to be expansive, with tables, chairs, and many other objects. However most of them ended up being cut to save on work time, gone was the coffee table, end table, buffet table, dining table, shrimp platter, dining chair, bench, tip jar, and trash bin, and alongside work on this set I set out to revise the original Texas hold ‘em table since at this point I had changed the techniques I used for modeling and texture painting, and ended up with the version seen in-game.

The whole point of this set of objects as decided by Architect, was to show to the community at large that custom content was indeed possible with a little bit work and some elbow grease, and alongside the release of the set came a guide on creating your own custom content for FreeSO written by the amazingly fantastic M.O.M.I. Raeven, and a guide on creating EODs written by the also amazingly fantastic Architect.

How to Play (written by Fawn)

Similar to poker, the goal of Texas hold ‘em is to have the best poker hand on the table. However, in Hold’em Casino all you need to have is a better poker hand than the MOMI dealer. This means your friends can stay your friends, and you will not have to worry about practising your poker face in the bathroom mirror. A poker hand is a set of 5 cards that contain combinations, for example pairs, four of a kind or a royal flush (a list of these can be viewed on the items “Learn to Use.. Payout” option). In hold ‘em there are up to 7 cards that your poker hand will be selected from.

Start off by choosing your betting amounts. There are two kinds of bets you can make in hold ‘em. Firstly, is an “Ante” bet. This is your mandatory bet towards having a winning poker hand. Think carefully about how much you want to bet as if you decide to “call” (explained later) you will have to pay twice the amount of your Ante bet, on top of your initial bet. You can also play an optional “Side bet which we will discuss in a moment.

After placing your bet, the first round of cards will be dealt out. All players (including the dealer) will receive 2 cards. Next, 3 community cards will be placed in the centre of the table. The dealer’s cards will not yet be revealed, so you will have no idea what their poker hand will consist of. If you initially placed a side bet and your 2 cards plus the 3 community cards contain any poker hands (this will be automatically calculated and must be a pair of aces or higher), then you will instantly win that bet!

Now comes the tough decision, do you fold or call? If you think your hand could be an even bigger winner, you can call. This will force you to pay double on top of your initial Ante bet, however the 2 final community cards will be flipped over, meaning out of the 7 available cards your chances of having a poker hand are much higher. Any winning hands are automatically calculated and paid out. If you do not want to risk calling because your hand is terrible, you can fold, which removes you from that round and your ante bet will be lost.

So put on your cowboy hats and smash your piggy banks! The real question is, are you feeling lucky?

To Conclude…

And now all is said and done, the Texas hold ‘em set has been released into the wild for all to enjoy. But what comes next? Well…

Who’s to say?

~S1ndle

Play

Hey everyone! I’d like to announce a quick side project I made to bring back long lost servers for another online Sims game: The Sims: Bustin’ Out! (PS2)

Thanks to the reverse engineering efforts of the Need for Speed community (in like, 2003!), Blayer from our own community, and a day implementing everything from scratch from me, we have our own lobby server called “Breakin’ In”. With these servers, you can now play one on one sessions in the Bustin’ Out challenge mode with players you find via an online lobby. All of the server code is open source, and more details on how to connect are available here:

The server is hosted here on freeso.org! If you want to know how to connect, or all of the juicy details of how this got going, check out the description on GitHub!

NOTE: You need The Sims Bustin’ Out for PS2, and the PCSX2 emulator set up. This isn’t exactly easy, so it probably won’t be worth setting up if you have trouble with this kind of thing. (it’s more a nostalgia trip than anything you can play for weeks)

If you have some friends interested in playing Bustin’ Out’s story mode or checking out this obscure online mode, go right ahead!

Destiny Bond

The Sims Online and The Sims: Bustin Out Online Weekend are the only two online multiplayer modes ever implemented in full scale The Sims games. Their online code is surprisingly similar - the lot data is uploaded from the host to the client, both start simulating the lot at the same time, then the client simply runs the same commands (interactions, go here, cancel interactions) as the server at the exact same time, with the exact same random number seed. Since the simulation is deterministic, both the client and host should be synced up the entire time the game is running.

There are a few key differences, though. The first is the architecture of the games - TSO’s host simulator is run on our MMO server, so that it can access our database and so that every action that occurs is “trusted”… eg. you can’t cheat your funds to 1 million by hacking your client’s simulator. Bustin Out, like most PS2 games, achieves online multiplayer by connecting directly to the other player (Peer to Peer Networking), the host being whoever invited the other sim to play.

The second is the gameplay: The Sims Online is an MMO with persistent money, skills and lot data, where the player controls one sim and interacts with up to 24 (normally) on the same property. The goal is to build yourself and your property up in a sandbox world filled with many people.

The Sims Bustin’ Out simply connects two players and starts the host’s Single Player save file, which lets them hang out in their current challenge mode house. The host can play any other sims in the family (such as Mimi at Mimi’s House) and invite anyone over from the neighbourhood. The invited player plays their own sim as a visitor at the property, and can interact with all the objects and sims on the property. Unfortunately, this interaction is only limited to two players, build/buy is disabled, and you cannot progress with the single player mode. However, it is cool to show off your challenge mode progression, mess around with the Bustin’ Out game objects, and hang around with your friend the Bustin’ Out characters. If you want to have the most fun, the best way is honestly to cheat and build your own house in challenge mode.

The Wikipedia page for The Sims Online says that Bustin’ Out’s Online Weekend mode shut down on August 1st 2008 alongside The Sims Online, though I can’t find any sources to confirm this. Either way, by that date no online variants of The Sims remained - the online modes of The Sims shelved forever. 10 years later, we have both back, hopefully forever! Mission accomplished, the SO is now Free. 2 Free Sims Online. Free Sims 2 Online? No.

What about FreeSO???

Relax, relax. The Bustin’ Out project is pretty much complete as is - it was only a weekend project anyways (some might say. an online weekend). I’m still heads down working on the next feature for FreeSO, which is going to be absolutely huge.

The latest updates added a fully 3D city view - but I didn’t have time to write a blog for that, then the blog I was writing for that got lost somehow. I’ll probably try again some time later, as there are some interesting technical details for generating 3d lot thumbnails that are low poly enough to be rendered at this grand a scale. If you want the full details, check the #announcements channel on discord

I also posted a (very small) leak on discord. Of what is to come. Maybe I will post more in the future? Maybe I’m posting one… right now..

Rhys

Hey folks, it has been a long time since a blog post, but the game has still been receiving regular changes and updates. If you want to keep the most up to date, you should be on our Discord server at https://discord.gg/xveESFj. Raw game changelogs are also available on http://tsomania.net! (and a great set of guides for new players)

Introducing the Nightclub Job

Online Jobs are a big part of TSO’s gameplay, as they are the most interactive (and highest paying!) way to make money. Two of these, the diner and robot factory jobs, have been in the game since we launched the beta, but the Nightclub jobs have been notably missing. The diner and robot factory jobs started working as a byproduct of our SimAntics interpreter being able to run more of the original game’s scripts - not much effort needed to be rebuilding their functionality specifically, just “fixing” what was already there and the problems with our interpreter.

Most of the behaviour for the nightclub jobs was actually split across 4 plugins rather than in SimAntics scripts, causing a few issues that delayed its development. The first was the need for plugins to be supported in the first place - these are hardcoded “server in a server” setups that allow complex interactions and UI interaction directly from players, such as the pizza maker and code job objects. The problem is that these do not have scripts that can be interpreted and run to mimick the original game exactly, they must be recreated from scratch as hardcoded plugins within our engine. This plugin system did not get implemented until much later in development - months after the robot factory and diner jobs were playable in sandbox instances.

The second biggest problem was that no footage of this job exists. None - it is completely lost to time, and until someone emulates the original game, nobody will know exactly how it played in the first place. This was compounded by the fact that nobody knew how the original worked, since it gave very little feedback about how good you were doing your job… Therefore, it was up to me to define my own scoring mechanisms, and my own way for the dance floor to behave (to hopefully give people a better idea of how they are playing the game).

So I finally decided to put the effort in, and the result is something that’s both incredibly unique and different from the other jobs, and a lot more playable than the original in the eyes of our testers. The original required a ton of shots in the dark, but our gameplay rewards careful attention to the dancers (dancer job) or dance floor (dj job) with a large number of simoleons. There is a lot more risk vs reward in this job since you can get paid very little with poor performance, and compete directly with other players at your job lot, but the result can be a much greater payout than the other jobs offer.

Check out the guides for more information: http://www.tsomania.net/gameguides/jobs.php

Annual FreeSO Awards

Last month was the years anniversary of the official launch of our beta server, and a lot has changed since then! We hosted a pretty crazy event where community members could nominate each other for awards - for categories such as Party Animal, Tombstone Generator (won by “Die”, fittingly), Best Hostess and more. We even created a set of special lot miniature awards, for the best voted lot in each property category. Campaigns were run, casinos went to war, and Chompers was robbed, but all in all it was a ton of fun running the event and we hope to do more like it in the future.

The event was hosted in our Town Hall lot in the middle of sunrise crater, and had 128 players present for the majority of the time! Apart from some initial server issues when everyone was mass joining, which we hoped to find with this event, the event ran well. These issues have hopefully been fixed - we’ll be hosting another large scale event soon to confirm that the issues have been addressed. Of course, the town hall is a special kind of lot that can be opened by anyone, so feel free to use it for your own large scale events - you can even advertise them in our discord if you like.

We don’t have much footage of this due to a tragic OBS accident, but we have a few clips that sum up the gist of the action:

Play

Best Casino Award: https://clips.twitch.tv/TemperedBombasticTilde4Head

My greatest moment, a 3 in one: https://clips.twitch.tv/AgitatedColdVanillaSmoocherZ

Chat Makeover

Chat is arguably the biggest aspect of the game. It allows communication and interaction between roommates and visitors, co-ordination of group job objects, and casual conversation. It has never been perfect, though - normal gameplay with the pizza and maze objects involves sending a ton of messages in the chat, which would make the chat history a lot harder to use for people to just hold a conversation. To avoid this problem, people would open up a ton of private conversations to the other players and send messages to everyone individually.

To solve this problem, I added “Chat Channels”, which will allow you to create additional chat channels with different colours, optional text to speech, send and view permissions, and the ability to hide their messages at will. For pizza and code, you can send your messages to a dedicated channel that is hidden by default for everyone else - that way you can coordinate pizza easy and everyone else can chat!

This also solves another problem - large scale events. If you have a lot full of say, 128 people, and there’s one important speaker running the event, chat channels can allow you to separate these important messages from the reactions of the 128 players. An event chat channel could be visible to everyone, with a special chat colour and tts, but messages in it can only be sent by Roommates. That way, the important messages are a lot easier to find (users can hide default chat), and the chat still remains unrestricted to everyone else.

It’s also 2018, and everyone talks in emojis. Now you can even talk using emojis in your 2003 video game, creating the largest time rift known to man. 💯

Blackjack Object

In a really surprising twist, our recent contributor The Architect has created an entirely new casino object and UI, that only existed in the original game as some unused object sprites and animations. The UI and functionality are entirely designed and implemented from scratch - with no reference to follow from the original TSO - and it plays brilliantly. Get down to a casino lot to try it yourself, and make sure that you double down whenever you hit 18 or over. It’s always a great idea.

Amazing Community Contributions

As mentioned in the last post, 3D remeshing is a large scale community effort aimed at remaking 3D objects from scratch, either by using the original sprites as a texture or entirely custom ones. This results in a much cleaner look than the generated meshes provide, pushing the mode way past just being a technical proof of concept or ease of use feature, and more like a polished, natively 3D game. This above remesh is by one of our most active community members, Alex, though many other contributions have been made or are in progress since the last post. Check up on http://forum.freeso.org/forums/3d-remeshing.40/ every once in a while to see the latest models, though our discord is usually a lot more popular. You can now also download these remeshes directly from the launcher!

Personally, I can’t wait for the future here. 3D mode is still being actively improved every update, with some large scale changes planned in the next few months that should really complete the experience.

Our more recent moderators, S1ndle and Raeven, have been designing and scripting a ton of original objects for the game, even including an NPC for our community lots. We’re rebooting translations to get the game accessible in more languages and there have been a ton of contributors - though we still need a few extra systems in place before translations become entirely painless. There will be more on this later!

A year in MMO server, a longer legacy

FreeSO was in development for a rather long time before our beta testing server launched, and was even played by a tight-knit community in a “sandbox” mode, used to test the game’s objects and base systems. First implemented in July of last year, the networked sandbox mode let people connect directly to other players (given manual port forwarding) to test out interactions, and chat on the same property. Over time this expanded to include build/buy, permissions, an entirely new routing system, a ton of bugfixes and “plugin” objects such as signs and the pizza maker.

The game had a gradual development, but also a steady community of players to test and enjoy the game as it was at the time. After our initial playtest, users began hosting sandbox servers of their own - the first few being individual meetups, though later developments would allow the hosting of “headless” servers that ran without the UI and renderer. One such server was named “FreeSO ml”, and was hosted by a user named “Sim”, who was later joined by a moderation team consisting of Vimpsee, Hillary Benson (Alex) and Maria, who is an admin on the current server. This server hosted the same lot for a long period of time, and allowed players to build their own additions and decorate however they pleased. The original forum thread is an interesting look into the past: http://forum.freeso.org/threads/offline-freeso-ml.1281/

The freeso ml team not only hosted the longest running always-on sandbox server, they also engaged and entertained a community of players for a game that was not even close to completion. The players contributed an invaluable number of bug reports, feature suggestions, and made several great properties that tested the absolute limits of the engine.

Therefore, our first anniversary object was a 2x2 tile replica of FreeSO ml’s longest running map, the “v2” iteration. This property showcases a variety of houses built by regular players, as well as a few apartment and community buildings that were populated with players who played for shorter bursts of times. This representation is rendered directly from the game client using our new lot facade generator, which can generate low poly and texture models for any lot in the game on demand. This object is not tradable, and will carry over into the release server through a migration process. It will be available from the 8th February through the 15th.

Regarding sim birthday gifts, these can be implemented too in the future, not right now… though rest assured when they are, gifts for birthdays that have already passed will not be missed.

Where are we going from here?

A lot of things are wrapping up quite nicely. All of the online jobs are now complete, and maze is really the last thing from the original that needs to be implemented. I should have another blog post for you about this in the coming weeks (since this is already really stretching it for one blog post), but note that maze isn’t the only thing I have up my sleeve. I have some really exciting plans for city view, with some crazy experiments and tests in FreeSO and Simitone working right now. Here’s a peek at those:

Rhys

After last night’s flash snowstorm, weather forecasters in Sunrise Crater have been predicting persistent snowfall for the entirety of December, and a large part of January. Unfortunately, this means that residents may be unable to collect their annual christmas trees from the City Hall atop the mountain, and Christmas may be ruined for good. However! The Sunrise Crater government never backs down from a challenge, and has instead delivered all Christmas trees directly to your inboxes, free of charge. These special trees come retrofitted with (refilling???) presents beneath them - 3 of which are sweet treats, and one of which is a special gift for each day… You’ll have to find out for yourself what’s in each box!

Festvities aren’t the only thing we’re bringing to the table this update. Though not much development work has been going on from my side, our community and other developers have been pushing to push the game further to being functionally complete, and even beyond. Here’s a list of all the stuff we have going now, newest first:

Intoducing Motive Overfill

Visiting some types of lots will now allow you to fill your motives for a lot longer than other lots. These “overfills” will persist as you move across lots, so are perfect before you run a job, group money, single money or skill. To obtain overfills, go visit a lot from that type and green up in their overfill category. If a lot doesn’t exist for that overfill category, why not make it yourself?

Here’s a list of the tunings we’re demoing this feature with:

• Service Lot: 50% overfill on hunger, energy, hygiene and bladder.
• Entertainment Lot: 100% overfill on fun and social.
• Romance: 100% overfill on social. (pending additional feature)

Note that this is not all we have planned for other lot types. Several additional systems are in the works to make these categories more appealing or have more of a purpose.

Custom Content within official release

A full serverside infrastructure for uploading, managing and selling custom content may be a long way off, but that hasn’t stopped our community from getting their hands dirty! Using our object development tool, Volcanic, not only have we patched new functionality and translations into existing objects, but users have already created entirely new objects from scratch. These include entirely new slot machines with custom UI graphics (and a themed painting for the newest one!), as well as objects that you might find under your Christmas tree…

This Halloween, I created an NPC with Volcanic which would serve as a proof of concept for the kind of complex NPC and object functionality we could potentially add to the game. This mainly existed for fun, but the object itself was promising - the skeleton drove its own AI for detecting certain classes of game object and performing interactions with them, without using the normal Free Will system which limits sims to doing rather normal actions. More complex creations could be coming in the future - either from me, or anyone else willing to try out SimAntics scripting.

3D Remeshing Team

In the last post, I outlined some issues with our automated mesh generation that you probably noticed yourself looking at the video or playing the game. These meshes typically also consisted of many different parts with textures from different rotations, so they take many more draw calls to render than models in typical 3D games. One of the solutions to this problem was for users to recreate the meshes of the objects in the game from scratch, either by using the game sprites to supply texture to their custom meshes or by drawing their own textures from scratch.

The response from the community has been fantastic, multiple users have started remeshing game objects that the reconstruction didn’t do justice - sometimes even entire object sets. Object reconstruction is usually discussed in our Discord server, where we’re more than happy to help you get started with meshing if you’re interested in helping.

Roulette Table Plugin

Developer The Architect has struck again, with an incredibly clean implementation of one of TSO’s most complex plugins. This object lets you play roulette with a few other sims at entertainment lots, and gives casinos a lot of character. Bet you can’t wait to see what he has next in the pipeline! 😱

Simitone for Windows Updates

If you’ve been keeping track on the discord, Simitone for Windows has recently updated to support Build and Buy mode (including simless build/buy) and a work in progress CAS (can’t save families). In a short while the game should also support saving, though it might still be fun to check out if you want to mess around with building TS1 lots in 3D. (note that builds of the game will never be available on iOS)

Advanced Shadows using 3D Models

3D mode was not only developed for the promise of playing TSO in 3D - if the reconstruction proved to be inaccurate or too ugly for the game to be playable in that state, then the 3D meshes could be used for another purpose - detailed sun and point shadows. The results are really cool, and people have been really putting the lighting to use giving their lots some real atmosphere.

The advanced lighting works in 2D and 3D, but the clean look you get in 2D is rather hard to beat here. Maybe with more remeshed objects, 3D can come close to comparing with the original 2D sprites.

FreeSO for Windows… on mac

A few weeks ago, I discovered that it is actually possible to run our windows builds on mac, so long as you aren’t afraid of using the terminal to run Mono, and manually extracting some replacement libraries. However, the solution works even with game updates, which means that once you set it up you’re good to go!

Note that this is not an official mac release, this is simply a rather complex way of getting the Windows build of the game to work on another operating system by utilising Mono. The game now also works on linux, though I haven’t tested a methodology to that myself.

Coming soon…

With this update to FreeSO, we have enabled two new experimental features. The first is a transaction logging system, which should log recent transactions from payout objects and from sim to sim, for analytic purposes. The second is a dynamic tuning system, which pulls tuning values from our database when lots are opened, and sends them out to players without them having to update their client. This second feature is currently mainly being used for motive overfill tuning, though it can actually be used for any tuning value in any existing object, including payouts for single and group money objects. We can even set up a system to dynamically vary tuning like this based on the transaction data we have collected, making less appealing skills pay out more money to make up for it. After we’ve collected some data, you should see this system rolling out, alongside more quality of life changes for unpopular lot types. Stay tuned!

Rhys