Tuesday 14 August 2007

Pic of the day: Nuclear family back in Sims 2. Actually I made this family when the only expansion pack was University, spring 2005.

Imaginary 2014

For each day since August 8, my imagination moves one year forward in time. Obviously we are in the realm of sheer fantasy here, and I'm really telling much more about my present than my future self.

Fiction starts here:

14 August 2014: Freesim killed my Windows!

I think I have been pretty forthright about this from the start: The reasons why I bought Windows with the Beast of Revolution (my expandable PC) was mainly Sims 3, and to some degree the integrated speech recognition (based on my old favorite, Dragon NaturallySpeaking). By now, Linux already supports Natural Language Interface much better than Windows. Most notably, it allows you to use pretty much any language at any time, and switch between them with a verbal command. Windows has yet to incorporate New Norwegian language recognition or even reading. While this is not a big deal to me - I think mostly in English these days - it is still a mark of infamy. So there was only the Sims left. Well, not anymore.

Due to the ever more fiendish copy protection systems, it is pretty much illegal to run The Sims 3 or 4 under Linux. Not that this stops everyone. But more important, The Sims 4 was a disappointment. While 3 did show some evolution from its predecessor, 4 is mostly just prettied up as an excuse to gauge more money for the same thing. This is as expected from Electronic Arts, but their Sims franchise has in the past had its own life with some degree of creative freedom. OK, there may be a sliver of that yet. But a sliver does not stand up to the creative dam-breaking that is Freesim.

"Freesim: Because sims want to be free." The name and the slogan are lifted from the earlier project Freeciv ("Because civilizations want to be free"), the name changed from FreeSims after legal threats from EA. The game was developed in close cooperation with players and modders (people who make stuff that goes into the game, like new clothes or hairstyle or furniture). Freesim is designed to be even more expandable than the commercial game; in particular it is easier to assign behavior changes. Small attitude changes can be assigned to objects, so that sims who wear certain clothes feel sexier for instance, or more affluent, and this influences their priorities.

The original Freesim was fairly simple when compared to Sims 3. It was more similar to the original game from 2000, which even I must admit is a while ago. Young players probably don't even remember it. The only thing Freesim had going for it was that it was free, it was new, and it ran under other operating systems. (Linux has been eating into the Windows market at ever greater speed, to the point where Windows is now officially holding less than 50% of the market. At least this should keep them safe from monopoly lawsuits.)

One of the greatest features of the Freesim concept is the Migration Ladder, a series of upgrade programs that will take your sims to the next level whenever there is a major upgrade. The graphics now a lot more detailed, so you run all your sims and your clothes and your houses through the upgrade and they get converted to the new level of detail. Of course some of the original sims look rather weird in that much detail, but that's why we have makeover tools! Of course you can continue to play on a lower resolution if your video card is really old, and still get the behavior upgrades and new interface features. The Migration Ladder works both ways, so you can take content for the highest resolution and drab it down to an earlier resolution. (Of course you won't get the same result if you later migrate it up when you get a new card!)

I am not quite the heavy gamer I was in the early days of my journal, but to paraphrase Dr Manhattan from Watchmen: I have regained my interest in humans; perhaps I'll create some. And I would still rather do that on my computer than biologically. For one thing, the computer has an "off" switch, babies don't. The mute button is also a great invention.

Anyway, Freesim has pretty much rendered Sims 4 irrelevant. I am sure a lot of people keep buying it out of some sense of loyalty, but frankly there are so many things you only get in Freesim. And my favorite among these is the PON - Persistent Online Neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, I run one myself, imaginatively called Itlandview. (In honor of Pleasantview, the starter neighborhood in Sims 2, which featured a family with the surname Pleasant, as well as some other sims.) Itlandview has my self!sim and his now fairly extensive family. Self!sim and wife are both flagged as immortal adults and avatars, but their children are all dead from old age. The Itland family is now in the 5th generation, and has bred with both townies and playables. It is actually getting pretty diluted, perhaps it is time for some new small Itlands to enter the neighborhood?

OK, that last paragraph probably did not make sense to non-players. A bit about PON. It is a neighborhood that is shared on the Internet. It runs on your own computer or a server, and the creator decides who to share it with. You may allow only your brother to log in except yourself, to take an extreme case. Or you may leave it open to just anyone, but that is just asking for trouble. I have a bunch of longtime online sim-friends, so any of those has only to ask. Any other friends are also welcome, even if you have never played a sims game before. I'll be happy to help you get started by giving you a starter house and any gifts you may need to get running. Long-time players normally prefer to do everything themselves, of course.

The Persistent Online Neighborhood has (like any neighborhood) two basic types of sims: Playable and townie. The playables are controlled by their owner, and the townies are controlled by the computer. The difference is that in an offline neighborhood the current player controls all the playable sims. In a PON, you cannot play someone else's sim (unless they have set you as co-player, or you are the owner of the neighborhood; but it is not polite even for neighborhood owners). Other people's sims will still be out and about, but they will act like townies. Depending on what flags are set, they can usually not be killed (and it would anyway be very bad form) or get pregnant, be married or fall in love without the consent of their owner. If both of the players are online at the same time, this is easily negotiated, as you get a popup concerning your sim. If you are logged off, your sim will still remember the attempt. So you may log in and one of your sims may tell you that they met this cute sim and they consider going steady for instance, and you can tell them to do so or not. And so on with a bunch of things. Normal socializing is on by default, so if someone invites your sims they will show up (if they know and like the host, or if they are very social).

As long as at least one player is logged in, time passes, even for the other playables. Most Americans play when it is night here in Norway, so each morning when I log on, my sims are a bit older and normally a bit richer, since they go to work as usual (or paint, or write novels or articles or craft stuff to sell on SimBay). This is a good time to help them with major life decisions, such as setting breeding permits, education choices etc. For instance, Darius Itland and his wife are not getting any younger. They have three children, but the wife is a gene sim (roughly like family sims in the Maxis game) and would much like to have more children, so I increase their breeding permit to 10. It is highly unlikely they'll get that many before menopause, but on the other hand fulfilled wishes slow aging, so you never know. I bet they will have a couple toddlers at least by tomorrow. I have set the education permit for their existing kids to Ph.D. , which they can easily afford, but of course the kids will have some say in it. Ernst and Edith are probably going to take it up, but I'm not so sure about Everett. He seems to tend toward social (former popularity) and may have a hard time advancing in tertiary education since he will likely have a lot of other things on his plate.

I hope you see how it works. Basically when I am not there, the sims act according to their personality (nature and nurture) and within my permits, which tend to be pretty wide. I regulated my founder and his wife pretty strictly, to make sure they act in character. But at generation D and E, they pretty much get to do what they will. Generation D were allowed to marry townies without asking me first, and I'll allow most of generation E to marry playables and move out, although I will keep at least a heir in each household for now. Of course, when I come home from work, most Americans are at work or school, so I am often alone and I control one of my sim families while every other sim is going about their life using their own personality (and their owners' permits, if they are playable).

The townies also age, so the kids that Ernst played with after school are probably also going to college with him. But apart from that we know less about them, and the computer spends fairly few resources on them until they get involved more closely with a playable. I am pretty sure the computer just pulls some stuff out of the air, but as long as it looks realistic, who cares?

Anyway, that's how the PON system works, the big triumph of Freesim in my opinion. The other players don't need to have the same level of detail as I have, even. If they have less detail, they just don't see everything. (They don't have more, because I am at the cutting edge, for as long as that lasts.) Itlandview was a fairly early PON and is actually pretty popular, probably because I interfere so little and have established several themed subhoods so there is something for everyone. It is not like my computer is doing much else anyway, so it can easily handle the load.

Speaking of which, I have written a load again, haven't I? I tend to get carried away when writing about my favorite game. Anyway, if any of you want to try logging on Itlandview, drop me a line and tell me where I know you from, and you should get a reply. Perhaps not immediately, but at least sometime in 2014! ^_^