Free Candy For Everyone

For many long months, I have been the only source of Sims 3 information on the internet. Totally crazy, I know, but I saw a talk at an AI conference and apparently they weren’t really ready for that info to go to the press. I’m not really the press, so there you go, my info was out there for some of you to find.

Today the news embargo was lifted and the official site went live. In addition there are previews at 1up, IGN, and a little bit on Gamespot. I’m sure there’s more info out there but I saw enough to know that it looks kinda interesting and that it’s not coming out for a good long while. One of the sites has the date as 12/15/2009. I can’t even begin to think that far into the future of my game purchasing plans!

I never really played the Sims 2. I got it when it first came out and it blue-screened my PC. I tried it about 3 times then gave up forever. I was kinda busy at the time. When the first Sims came out I actually played it a lot. I got really really into it for a few weeks. Maybe months even. Then I realized I was dirty and neglecting my real friends in favor of keeping my sim clean and happy. That was the end of that.

Back in 2001 I had the experience of doing some work on the path finding system for the Sims 2. I don’t know if the code I wrote for Maxis ever ended up in the shipping project but it was a great learning experience. I got to work on getting the Sims to navigate around their houses better and to deal with imminent collisions with each other as well. It was quite challenging but rather cool. But that was way early in development and I’m sure that they changed things a lot before actually shipping it out the door.

Anyways, we’ll see what more info they reveal. For now I guess everyone will have many other outlets for their Sims 3 curiosity!

I know it’s been quite some time since my last post, but I’ve actually been experimenting with web layouts for my site. There’s a whole new look coming to Free Candy, and this one is going to be a custom theme that I created (with a little help from my friends). Should be just a few more days now and then I’ll be able to stop mucking around in CSS and start talking to all you folks out there again.

And welcome Snooty Sims readers! I don’t actually have more information about Sims 3 then that one talk I saw several months ago, but feel free to ask for any questions or clarifications, I’m happy to provide more info where possible.

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.

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