I don't know if this is connected, but "Free the Sims" was also the name of a very interesting web browser plugin, an ActiveX plugin, created by Don Hopkins.



If they used this plugin on the website at the time of this marketing event, than that would explain why there is no record of it, and the Internet Archive was not able to capture anything substantial from this event. Plugin-based components of web pages, and those plugins, are now long dead -- as the web moved to completely open technologies around 2010, and abandoned the use of proprietary plugins. Microsoft's ActiveX was a technology tied to the Internet Explorer web browser, and to Windows itself -- later deemed dangerous for the computer, as hackers could exploit it.

Edit:

On closer investigation, thesims.com doesn't seem to have even existed before October 1999, and maxis.com was still redirecting simcity.com in April 1999. The "Free the Sims" April Fools marketing event actually took place on the simcity.com website:

https://web.archive.org/web/1999050...000/letter.html

I'm not sure if it included the ActiveX plugin, or if it was simply a web page created, linked from the homepage with a graphic title. Unfortunately it changed too fast for the Wayback Machine to archive it.

Seeing as this was still so early in the public life of the game, I think the ActiveX plugin was created later, and named after this marketing event, possibly. Or they may not be related.

A bit on the topic of this post in particular, but this whole thread, combined with falling into the TCRF rabbithole and actually playing around in the Steering Committee build, had me get bit by the object-making bug and decide I was going to do so by poring over the scenarios in Steering Committee's Edith windows and attempting to port them into the final game. Ambitious, but it felt simple since it'd just be staring at the code in one version and trying to write the same code or similarly-functioning code for the other!

It should be noted I've never successfully created an object with steps to creation more complex than cloning with tmog/making in Rug-O-Matic. (My last attempt was 2009 or so. A nanny NPC that, in practice, did nothing more than sliding veeery slowly toward the baby and then just standing there (and throwing lots of errors, if I was in debug mode). Then I gave up, because I was a teenager with homework or something. Probably. ...She's still in my game, I think--she's a borked object, but she's MY borked object, lol.)

I reached a similar impasse with this foray into object creation, because I'm just awful (at least for now) at properly assigning stack objects, but this time I think I'm less likely to give up as fast. XP At least the memes that popped into my head when I didn't understand why it was picking a tree instead of my Ross guinea pig Sim were funny (at least to me ).

(I understand better what's actually happening now but am still at the impasse for now. Well. As long as I'm having fun. XD)

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to all who have posted here for such an informational thread filled with so many historical goodies! Got me back into "Sims brain" for the first time in awhile! Thank you!

Hi @purplewowies; !




Ha! That's a simple, but very clever solution, actually. The mechanical nature of the task maybe puts people off, but since it seems to be the only option to this date (...or so the legends have it), this could be the perfect trick! I've been wanting/meaning to do something similar, and it's going to come in extremely handy, especially since I know that importing the proto sprites into the objects as they behave in the final build will be the convenient, but not ideal solution. I think your way of porting codes will be helpful. You're welcome to collaborate once I get to rip all the proto sprites — and make 'em as TMOG-friendly as they can be — and compile them somewhere on this forum!



How on earth did you make it pick a pinetree LOL. Most of the times the bugs are as hard to find as they are ridiculously simple. Bob Newbie is "user00000.iff", what if you can trick the script into making it try to find him this way?

Preview of the week

GAMESTAR - JANUARY 2000

Guess the reviewers were already being presented alpha CD's to test the game with, hence the original screen prints we have here. In actuality they're so close to how everything looks in the final product that only SimDorks will tell what's different between one revision and another!

I always love seeing this pic of Will Wright used in these articles:


Because of seeing this image in early promo, it influenced the way I perceive the sims. I always think of them as living in another universe, and imagine that if we could bring them into our reality then they could fit into our pockets.

The simple but repetitive/mechanical nature of it was actually part of why I think trying to port the logic appealed to me, because looking at the nodes I went "if I can read this code--which I can, and I even understand what it's doing--I should be able to copy it exactly or with just minor tweaks... right? And maybe if I have the exact code I need to exactly replicate right there then I can just take a deep breath and not give up when things go wrong!"

Heck, I actually should have most or all of the code from the Maxis-coded/Steering Committee level 1 in my object at this point IIRC... I just can't test if it's working because I haven't hammered out the stack object issue quite yet. (I can't imagine why it might not work, but then, I wrote half the stack object stuff with the thought that I couldn't imagine it picking something like a tree, and yet here we are. XP)



As far as I can tell by reading the error files, what made it pick the pine tree is that the cannibalized tutorial code, copied exactly, was set up to store the neighbor ID as the stack object (which it correctly found for Ross Guineapig) but then the rest of the object was using it as an object ID (which pointed to Trees - Pine Rear). I actually made some headway into getting it to not do that (i.e. it was correctly using Ross Guineapig as the actual stack object SOMEtimes)... and then decided maybe the object would have wider utility outside its specific intended scenario if it allowed for manually assigning who the person it should look for is via a pie menu option (so it could work just as well in the "intended" situation of a guy named Ross as it might if it used a girl named Amanda, for instance).

...I think after I tried pivoting to that, I got into a situation where my problem might have just been staring-at-it-too-long-itis (and thus maybe making a simple, silly mistake somewhere) because it seemed like everything I tried after that didn't do what I was expecting it to, including a brief attempt at finding him directly a la the userXXXXX.iff (which seems to be how the Steering Committee version finds Ross, as in it looks for an object of the type "Ross"). (The Ross I'm "alpha testing" with is user00018, though the "real" Ross (the one I have in a closely-replicated house and who I've directly modified to have personality/skill/etc. points closely replicated to Steering Committee Ross) is user00030.)

I bet if I look at it later today or this weekend or something I'll at the very least see something that makes me go "OH!" even if I don't get any version of it (the version that deduces who he is, the manual assignment, or the directly telling it "this is Ross, use him") working. XD

Ah, LOOK , SIMSAMPLE, the Sim character 3D render is reflected on Will's eyeglass lens, and it's not just a silly copy paste of their counterpart that is standing on his hand! I've never spotted this before and this is so cute.

LOL I can 100% picture the struggle. I'm so looking forward to solving this enigma with you from now on. I'll further examine it in my own files. Even for an old game, I think it's healthy for the creative sphere of the fandom to see that recreating scripted demo scenarios from the ground up can open doors to many different experimentations, even if just the fun involved. That's so funny, 'cause the scripting trees for the objects in the proto otherwise is as straightforwad --- and should I say, pathetic --- as it gets. Specially motive-delta-wise, when one single interaction benefits the Sims' bladder from 0 to 1 before you can even blink the eye, and there's this super weird sleeping system where they'll only find themselves fully slept post break of dawn.

I know! They are real! (I have proof, sometimes they leave crumbs on my keyboard in the night... )

Oh I wanted to ask this for some time now, but always keep forgetting. Anyone knows this roof of the house with the blue roof? I'm trying to find it, but I can't. Is it something that is missing from the Complete Collection? Anyone knows? Or is an old roof they had in beta? Or pre release?

ah they didn't make the final cut. It's a little bit of a shame — they're all lively and made the hood more diverse. in the base game, we're stuck with only these four unfunny and unsaturated options.

Hi hi I am sorry for touching upon this again, but the image reminded me of something else---even if, at first, it seemed like a prankish Mandela effect.


(sauce)

have a good weekend-end

Yeah seems like only if someone has a mod or something, what a shame. I did made that house (I dont think its as accurate tho.) And I couldn't find the roof and I was wondering. Thanks Lucpix

It's very easy to create new roofs for the game. They're just small BMP texture files that you can edit in any graphics editor, including Paint. That's why Maxis never bothered much with creating more roofs -- except for ones they used for buildings they added to the game. They figured that the players/community can easily create more roofs (and we did).

You can use Photoshop, GIMP, or Krita to easily recolour the existing roof textures to different colours and add them to the game. Just make sure to save them as an 8-bit BMP. (Back then we didn't need to worry about that, because that was the latest colour depth in images.) So you can easily recreate that roof by sampling its colour from the picture.

There are additional roofs with later expansion pack installed, but still limited colour choices, later I found out bunch of roofs included in The Sims Online, also being converted for offline game usage, I still consider they are official roofs since the graphics and file names are all same, make impossible having duplicate roofs if got more than one creator convert and upload them, I don't have complete TSO objects and skins, but the roofs are yes for me , here is download link for TSO roofs.

https://web.archive.org/web/2018031...tsomemorial.htm

You may remove these 4 TSO roofs asphaltshingle1, blacktile1, slate1 and terracotta1 to prevent duplication, they are same as base game's r1, r3, r2 and r4.

Here you go:



File attached. (It was literally a 1-minute job to create.)

Edit:

Here's a more colour-accurate, authentic version of it, too (rev2).

You are the best for this, thanks Kenoi.