#jake simpson

A presentation at the 2005 Game Developer Conference by Jake Simpson. He was the lead engineer on simulation and tools for The Sims 2.

The presentation covers the following topics:

Definition of the concept of an "object" in Sims 2.

The process of determining what an object will be.

Tools used in object creation, including the Edith Object/Scripting/Debugging Tool.

Discussion of alternative approaches to script creation.

Demonstration of the object creation process. (not saved)

Acknowledgments to the object engineering team in Sims 2.

Description of the core content of objects in Sims 2.

The process of object creation, including design requirements, technical meetings, scheduling of models, animations, textures, and sounds.

Tools and processes used in object creation.

Exploration of the Simantics language used for object script development.

Pros and cons of Edith/Simantics in the object creation process.

Discussion of scripting approaches.

Specifics of object construction, including hierarchical script construction and exporting/importing settings for external modification.

The importance of profiling and debugging in the object creation process.

Demonstration of object creation using the Sims 2 object pipeline. (not saved)

Additionally, the presentation includes mentions of developers, acknowledgments, and the opportunity for questions.

Slides from the presentation:

Audio recording of Jake Simpson's speech:

Transcription of the audio recording - to read if it is difficult to perceive by ear, and to quickly find information from the speech. Only the answers to the questions turned out to be incomplete:

На русском языке:

Further to this, if I recall correctly, part of the original intent was to have some of the known Sims be replaced by alien duplicates, and it was up to the player to figure that out. I don’t think that made it in cos of the huge cost of programming for the social game.

Source:

https://twitter.com/JustJakeSimpson/status/1387856866881937413?s=20&t=KvGwOEY9dr9DKHTGekIWew

For some reason Strangetown comes immediately to mind. Most likely, alien copies of the Sims must have been there.

На русском языке:

Other than the technical debt that TS1 brought, were there any requirements in terms of keeping the lore of TS1 and/or references to other Maxis games?

Not at my level of dev, but there may well have been at the content production level. There were lots of in-jokes though. Many of the objects were named after people on the team. The Bachman Bar was named after Melissa Bachman Wood, a producer who had a full bar in her cube.

Перевод на русский язык:

Sims 2 Dev Thread.

I'm going to do several of these, all will be prefaced by this title, so those of you interested can find them easily.

I'm just putting stories and details in haphazardly, as I recall them, so don't expect these to be too organized:)

So firstly, who am I, and how come I can talk about this? Well, I'm Jake. I was hired by EA in Nov '01, right after 9/11. That actually impacted my ability to go to interviews at EA in SF at the time. But I was determined to get the job, and so I persevered.

Previous to this, I worked at Raven, on titles like Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek : Elite Force and Jedi Knight II. Before that I was at Midway, making Arcade games like NBA Jam, Revolution X and WWF Wrestlemania.

I was actually hired by my friend Jonathan Knight @jk00 - who was a producer on Sims 2 (and also a bunch of the Sims 1 expansion packs) - to work on Sim City 4, but before I ever started, the job was switched across to Sims 2, which I was extremely happy about.

I was the lead simulation and tools engineer for Sims 2, and was with it from about 3 months from inception to shipping, two and bit years later. When I arrived, there were about 10 people on the project. When we shipped, there was about 250 FTE's and contractors working on it.

I worked for the lead engineer, one David Gregory @dgregryc who was and is a terrific engineer, manager and tech director, who has gone on to great things since EA and remains a good friend to this day.

I also ended up EA's first release engineer for Sims 2, and at one point had about 20 object engineers reporting to me, who actually built all the objects for Sims 2.

So yeah, I can talk about development since I was there for pretty much all of it, deep in the inner circle of people making stuff.

So, where to start telling stories?

Sims2 was built on top of Sims1, unlike Sims3, which was a complete re-write from scratch (undoubtedly the right decision, since we inherited a bunch of tech debt from Sims1, and Sims3 could never have done what they did sitting on our code.)

As a result, we inherited the Sims1 tools for building worlds and those had to be rebuilt completely, since the plans for Sims2 were so much bigger than Sims1. Will Wrights tagline for Sims2 was "A more bitchin' human simulator'.

Now, I'm not going to reference Will too much in these stories because while Will is considered The Father of The Sims, he wasn't actually around that much. Will is very much 'been there, done that', and while he was available for consultation, he was already off in Spore Land.

I asked him a few times for advice when I was changing his base algorithms - and he's so smart that when I proposed things that wouldn't work, he could ask just one question for me to see where it would fall dow. Truly an incredibly smart dude.

But other than that, he was very hands off of his baby. He watched from afar but wasn't in many meetings, unless I made a point of pushing him to come because I was changing root functionality of the simulator.

We knew we wanted to make Sims 2 basically Sims 1, but with everything turned up to 11, particularly the rendering. We actually had two pHD coders in that area. We had specialist coders for the animation system, and another for path planning.

We had a huge production team and we actually tried 10-15 new game features in Sims2 that actually worked, but ultimately got cut for either UI reasons or because they just weren't fun, just tedious time sucks.

For example, we had a memory mechanism, where one sim who witnessed something first hand could actually communicate memories to another Sim. So if Sim A saw you pee yourself, Sim A could tell Sim B about it, and Sim B would react to you as though he'd seen it.

The problem was, Sim B would start laughing at you the moment he saw you, but you'd have no clue why - there was no easy UI way (without words) to tell the player why that sim knew something they'd never seen. So that idea got scrapped. We had lots of blind alleys like that.

Incidentally, The Sims as a franchise tries never to use words in UI, in order that there is little to no localization requirements for the game itself. In fact, that's where Simlish - the made up language for the Sims - came from.

Funnily enough, the number one bug report The Sims gets from non English speaking lands is that "I can't set the Sims language from English to my language". People who can't speak English think the Sims are speaking English!

We had about 8 people we used to generate that language, the same people used on Sims 1. They would literally sit in a booth and watch the animations the sims would do for interactions and then generate sounds to go with it.

Note, there is NO linguistic background for Simlish. All those websites that claim there is are absolutely wrong. It was entirely made up, of gibberish sounds, that was made up on the spot by the voice actors.

We were constantly amazed at people who felt they could see patterns where there were none. We'd pass round links to websites where people claimed to have 'worked out the language'. I guess you'll see what you really want to see...

The house construction tools for Sims 2 were rebuilt from scratch and at about half way through production, they were considered finished and then a lot of the Assistant Producers would spend days playing with them.

EA use to have small competitions to make the most amazing house on a lot using these tools, just to really test them and the rendering, so that not only could they be built, but they would also render at a decent frame rate.

Some of what they built were truly amazing, and I'm really sad none of these shipped. I remember one incredible castle structure one of the guys built, with torches and flickering lights everywhere. It was truly stunning.

Originally Sims 2 was supposed to ship with 5 neighborhoods. About halfway through production we began to realize that constructing a neighborhood took on the order of 2-3 weeks, and we were constantly having to dump what we'd built and start again, due to file format changes.

So this was pared down to 1 neighborhood, until I realised that all the design was being done in Excel, in a spreadsheet, and the painstakingly copied across, value by value, into dialogs in the tools in Sims 2.

I ended up building a Spread Sheet importer into the Sims 2 tools, and boom, three weeks work done in one key press. This is what enabled Sims 2 to ship with the three neighborhoods it did. At that point, we were limited by physical house construction time, which still took days.

The objects for Sims 2 (and Sims 1) are built by a new kind of content creator - Object Engineers. They would work meetings to work out what a new object would be, get some concept art, work out what Sim animations would be required, what sim requirements they would fufil etc.

Then they'd gather the art generated (3d models, with various states of completeness and brokenness) and also the animations the sims would require, plus sounds, and then they'd go away and write the scripts required for the Sims to be able to use this new object.

The scripting system was called SimAntics (there was some tortuous acronym for this, which I've quite forgotten, thankfully) and it was built into a tool that was built into the engine itself, so we could write and change scripts as the game was running.

We had about 20 object engineers on Sims 2, all producing content flat out. At one point, we worked out that given how much Sims 1 had earned to date, each object that an object engineer created was worth about $500k to EA. They took, on average, about 2 weeks to make.

Talk about a return on investment!

I built all the tools these guys used and the simulation stuff behind what the scripts did and how they interacted with the main game.

So because we'd had the experience of making Sims 1, and seeing all the expansion packs they'd made, we were in a much better position to build in stuff we knew we'd not use till those expansion packs came along.

For example, all the pet stuff was actually built and coded before the initial launch of Sims 2. We had pets in there, to test it, just we didn't build any. When the expansion came along, it was mostly just content creation (scripts, animations, models), not engine code.

Similarly, lots of the infrastructure for Open For Business was also there, ready to be used, when the expansion pack came along. That's not to say there weren't code changes, just the infrastructure to handle this stuff already existed.

There were LOTS of conversations internally about what we should ship with, feature wise, so we could leave ourselves space to make expansion packs down the line, because these were So Profitable for EA. The problem was, we were Sims 2, so more would be expected than in Sims 1.

But... we couldn't just load the game with all the expansion pack stuff from Sims 1 on launch. We couldn't have made all that content anyway, but still, it was a hard line to maneuver.

One thing that not many people know is that The Sims 1 was doing game analytics way before Analytics was A Thing. When you upload a lot to the web site, to share with others, you are actually uploading a bunch more data than you think.

Inside the house upload is also a bunch of information about your playing habits in The Sims. None of this information is identifiable to individual players - EA was way ahead of the curve in terms of player privacy - it was just data that indicated how people were playing.

Will was fascinated by this data. Real live big game playing data. He used to write lots of database queries to work out player trends and so on. This is actually where Spore came from; the idea that something you do, on your machine, can affect how others are playing their game.

The idea that you playing your single player game could affect someone else playing their single player game, by changing their environment in response to what you did in yours was like catnip to Will.

Anyway, Will identified four distinct player types for The Sims. The Maximizer, the Social Player, the Sadist and the Builder.

The Maximizer was someone who wanted to max out the Sims potentials. Top Job Track, best social interactions, biggest house, most money, etc.

The Social player wanted to explore the social interactions - see what The Sim would do in different contrived social situations. Lots of people saw a lot more in those interactions than there actually was code to drive!

The Sadist just wanted to find new ways to cause the Sim pain or kill them. Taking the exits away in a pool etc. On Sims 2, we added a bunch of random ways to kill a sim for this kind of player. E.g.

The builder was more interested in the house builder aspects of the game, often trying to build their own house, or their dream house inside the sims, using it more as an architectural tool than anything.

Incidentally, that's where The Sims came from initially. The original game Will set out to make was called DollHouse, and it was on a Mac. You had the house construction facilities, and the sims existed purely to come into the house and judge your efforts.

There was some rudimentary Sim controls, but it soon became clear that it was more fun to control the sims than to just build, and that's when it moved to the PC and became a 'real' product.

Worth also pointing out that Sims 1 had been in development for about a year at Maxis when EA bought them, and the number one thing that EA tried to do, several times, was cancel The Sims, because they had no clue what the game really was, or who the audience would be.

Anyway, back to the player tropes. What was interesting was that the 4 player types were split fairly evenly across all players, and even more interesting was that of the 4 types, they were split evenly between male and female players.

So, most sadists and maximizers were male and the social and builders were female. A fairly terrible indictment of the way the world is today, but also not terribly surprising.

Right, so lunch is over, and I'm going to get back to work now. I'll add to this thread periodically when I think of new stuff to say.

Oh wait! Before I go, one more story that is just too fun not to repeat.

During Sims 1 development, after EA had purchased Maxis, they really did NOT like the 'bathroom' need inside the Sims, where they had to hit the toilet.

They felt it was pretty revolting when the Sims failed to meet the need, and they wanted it OUT. Will, however, pushed back. "No", he'd say, "You can't have a human simulator without it." But EA was relentless on putting on the pressure on Will to pull it out.

Eventually, one Friday, Will buckled to the pressure, and said, last thing in the afternoon, "OK, I'll take it out."

Now, at this point, the bathroom system was in place and Will had populated the data values with stuff 'pulled out of his ass' (see what I did there?:) )

So, how many times a Sim would need the bathroom, how long they'd spend on it, etc, all of these values were just eyeballed by Will.

That weekend, there was a big article in the color supplement of the New York Times, talking about a bathroom Time and Motion study.

It turns out that the NYT article had all the details on the average visit, how many times a day, etc. And it also turned out that Will was ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON WITH ALL HIS BULLSHIT DATA. He was right on the money.

So that Monday morning, he went into work, faxed a copy of this article to EA, with an extra page on the end with the words "BATHROOM NEEDS STAY!" scrawled on it, sent that off, and EA never ever said another word about the Bathroom needs in The Sims:)

The End.

I was just thinking about both path finding and also how The Sims works, and thought I'd share some of those reminisces.

One situation that occurred with pathfinding is, do we let the Sims try and route to an object that they can't actually get to?

We actually planned out the entire route once a Sim decided to go use an object, so we could know "No, there are obstacles in the way, you can't get there", but we'd still let the Sims try, because otherwise they just looked precognitive.

Another problem we had was the Sims determining what next action to do. They knew their requirements and what objects are offering interactions that fulfill those needs. The issue was that if they took the best interaction, you ended up with the worlds greatest screen saver.

In the end, we basically randomized which interaction they would do, out of the top best 10 interactions they might possibly do. The function to do this was pretty intensive, and took a LOT of CPU time. We usually saw spikes when this function was run.

Oh, and one other thing that should be addressed. One of the surprising-initially things about the Sims 1 and Sims 2 team was that it was about 50% female. Now this, particularly at that time, was a Big Deal.

I very much attribute a lot of The Sims whimsy and fun to this fact.

The women who drove a lot of production and design carry most of the responsibility for how great The Sims, both 1 and 2, turned out.

More teams need more women on them, leading them, etc, because the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and The Sims is proof of that.

So the pee color story is absolutely true. We actually put in yellow as the color for the pee puddle and it was just SO gross, so our exec producer, Tim LeTourneau (one of nicest people alive), held a meeting where we sat and debated colors and how much gross we were OK with.

Just got home, had a cup of tea, and thought I might add to this.

So another feature we tried, that while it kinda made it to the final game, wasn't as we imagined it, was interruptable/add to interactions.

So with Sims 1, when you started an interaction, that's what the sim did, and that was that. With Sims 2, we added a queue, so you could queue up interactions. That was one of the first things I did.

Then we wanted interactions to be interruptable, so the Sim might start, oh, sitting in the hottub with friends. But then you could instruct them to go get drinks for friends, so they'd get out, go get drinks, serve them to the friends, then resume sitting in the hottub.

We actually got this working, but the problem was indicating to the player what was going on at any given time. The sim might be making dinner right now, but, what was his main interaction? How do we indicate that?

And was an interrupted interaction interruptable itself? If you were sitting the hottub, then going to make drinks, then some one rings the doorbell, are we still, in the original interaction? It all got very complicated very quickly.

One of the object engineers, using this system while it was still in place, built an incredible job simulation system. While the Sim was at work, in the "at Work" interaction, other sub tasks would show up in the task list on the side of the screen.

You'd have to respond to these sub tasks - e.g. "Got get paper", "Write a report" or "Arrest perps" or whatever was appropriate for the sims job. You didn't have to, but if you didn't respond to the individual prompts in time, the sims job performance would go down.

It was REALLY clever and really used the new system well, but because it was just so open ended and we couldn't work out how to limit it correctly, it got pared down dramatically in the final product.

The first object we built- and the one that was used as a test bed for almost everything new the simulator could do -was the hottub. It had multiple sims interacting with each other, it could offer interruptable interactions, it had everything we needed for test of all systems.

Right at the end of the project, I added a bug into the bug database that "When Sims are making Whoope (Sim Sex, basically), there was no 'invite' interaction". This was a joke - I was making a bug out of the fact that the Sims couldn't have threesomes.

This bug went all the way up the chain to the executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, who marked it "Will not fix", with the comment "Not enough time for animations" :)

Maxis didn't say no to threesomes, just, they didn't have time to make the animations and scripts:)

Source:

Weird West is a game that follows the "immersive sim" gameplay philosophy, with an overhead view from Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio.

Here is a video in which Raphaël Colantonio talks about the difficulty and risk of developing "immersive sims":

Weird West Developer Opens Up about the Complexity & Risk of Designing Immersive Sims

On March 29, 2022, the game's lead engineer, Borut Pfeifer, shared on Twitter an episode from the developers' diaries that was about how players' actions affect the people and places around them and commented that:

"This one features a little sneak peak of some of the procedural story and AI..."

Here's the episode: "Weird West | Road to Weird West: Episode 5"

Jake Simpson, lead modeling and tools engineer for Sims 2, commented on this tweet as follows:

Wow, this is almost exactly what I pitched EA about eighteen years ago, using The Sims 2 codebase.

Well, good ideas occur to more than one person.

One of the goals during the development of The Sims 2 was to make the environment adaptive based on player decisions. Mike Sellers, the game's game designer, talked about this. Here's what he wrote about it, answering a question about the goals that they wanted to implement in the game:

Make the environment adaptive based on the player's decisions. This is probably my favorite thing that didn't make it in: we wanted to vary the lighting, camera angles used, and music based on the kinds of objects the players purchased -- so if you bought a bunch of creepy things vs. hearts and flowers, we'd use lighting/sound/view angles corresponding more to a horror movie vs. a romance. Among other things we were able to show that the same animation of two Sims kissing looked and felt very different when set to romantic violin music vs. smoky sexy jazz music (one exec who watched the two sequences said the jazz one had a lot better resolution -- but it was literally the same video of an animation in both cases).

In the context of procedurally generated story, AI and the reaction of the game to the player's actions, it is necessary to talk about the system of generating personalized player's game reality in The Sims 2, which was described by Vadim Sims, one of the researchers of the history of game development on The Sims Creative Club forum.

How does the system behave?

The most obvious manifestation of the system are the tutorial messages that appear during the game.

I quote Vadim from the topic "Life stories of your families, scenarios, plots":

What did I write in my time? That the game, which is not really a game at all, but a graphical superstructure over the artificial intelligence, "reads" the player's personality by his first actions and begins to form an PERSONALIZED game reality for him, right? But as soon as the game is able to "read" the player's psychotype, what prevents it from trying to predict the development of the story, which the player would wish?

The fact that the game tracks the player's actions doesn't even need proof. An example - "tips". The fact that we first turn them off, saves us only from the pop-up with tips. The tracking of the player's actions does NOT stop, and it is disabled only when free will is turned off, and in this case, it is not certain that it will be fully disabled.

Sims themselves can change their behavior depending on the actions of the player. And even their aspiration is not an obstacle to change. Vadim Sims from "Don Lothario" thread:

First of all it is necessary once and for all to put an end to the myth that everything that happens in the game is random, because the game "mechanics" is MUCH more complicated than we imagine it and can imagine in principle. The fact is that we are dealing with a real artificial intelligence, hastily disguised as "Dollhouse and Dice", which, for example, knows such concepts as "empathy" and which " read" on the first actions of the player his "personality" begins to form for him an PERSONALIZED game reality, and this, including, applies to (attention!) and the "story" part of the game too. For example, someone doesn't like such "heartbreakers" as Don seems to be at first sight, so he or she will have a " lewd and horny Don who won't rest until he dies," and the scripts will work accordingly. And for me, who knows the true history of its historical prototype, and, of course, a little bit of the history of its creation, and, in connection with all this relating to Don, despite all his faults, with sympathy and Don will be "different" and the scripts associated with it will work differently. Exactly for these reasons, even when playing on the same "collection" that I play, no one can reproduce one-to-one what happens in my game, and I, accordingly, cannot reproduce what happens to a person who plays "with soul" (the game of such a player knows how to "determine"), and not "just plays to kill time". By the way, the game is able to "read" the mood of the player and "adapt" to his mood. If a player has a heavy heart, the game will be "gloomy and gothic" (c) for him. He's having fun - there's going to be a lot of hilarious thrashing going on in the game. And if the player is in love during the game, but is not even aware of it, the game manages to " read" it - and "gives" him such a Love Story that everything becomes clear without words...

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? And yet this is exactly how the game works, believe us, who had their own eyes widened when we finally realized that in the case of the The Sims 2, we are dealing not even with "what" but with WHOM.

Also, the operation of the system may be different in The Sims 2 from, for example, The Sims Life Stories:

This post from Diana-sima, @diana-sim-sima , member of forum:

If I play a The Sims 2, then I have all-most of the characters frivolous ) It doesn't even depend on aspiration ) In the The Sims Stories, no matter The Sims Pets Stories or The Sims Life Stories, many characters are prudes and show feelings only if there is any relationship above friendship (e.g., sympathy). As it is, most of them are bitchy and mean :)

If unlock the ability to sims themselves to look for work, then they will look for themselves and change it:

This post from Vadim Sims:

Shortly before the "war" between the fans of The Sims in 2009, a group of guys from among those who are interested in the game, but not in their role in the "near-game" crowd, deeply involved in what we, by trial and error, only now are trying to do, namely - porting objects from the later expansion packs to the earlier. Let me say at once that they achieved a lot of success in this task, but then the "war" and the 10th "stagnation" that followed it began.

Among other things they ported was a "reward" computer from The Sims Life Stories. The "strangeness" of this computer - that any change in it, such as allowing children and teenagers to write novels, begins to act "globally", affecting all computers - we will not now consider, for much more interesting was another...

As I have already written (and more than once) that I am a novice and inexperienced simmer, for I have been seriously engaged in the game in recent years. So the way I once managed to get the Sims to start looking for jobs AUTOMATICALLY was pure chance. And that's where the most interesting part began...

The fact that after the activation of the "autonomous system", Kaylynn, Nina, Dina or Bella (Bella - even during a date, before moving in) who were moved to Don's house, already began to look for a job themselves - it's understandable, just as it's understandable that decisions will be made whether they were for the proposed vacancy or not, I had to, because they themselves, of course, could not click on the sign for "Next".

With Kaylynn was the easiest, because, according to the script, she was given the job she wanted in security (read: the ability to get a scanner to explore the house and the need to increase her login skills by using the "same"🛸 telescope) immediately. But with Nina and Bella it was more complicated. The thing is, the job vacancy in the slacker field appeared after midnight, and they started looking for work before. If they were employed for something more or less tolerable from THEIR point of view, everything was like with Kaylyn. If they were not employed anywhere, they dutifully waited until the next day, and then went back to the computer to look for job. But the situation was even more interesting if they were hired at the first job they could find, because the next day they came back from work... they'd go to the computer and look for a new job. But there was a nuance. If they managed to get promotions in an " unwanted" job, they sort of agreed to "tolerate"... for a while, but until the first "screw-up", after which they would not "get off the computer" until they were offered a job that was acceptable to them. By the way, if it so happened that they had three promotions in a row, they sort of "got involved" and their attempts to change jobs began not with the first, but with the second and sometimes even the third "screw-up". And, by the way, if after getting promoted in a "unwanted" job and getting a bonus, I would fire them from there myself, then for a few days, depending on the size of the bonus, they would not try to look for a new job, even if they had a desire to find a job.

Don, by the way, was also trying to "get out" of his job, but it was Dina who was the most brainwashed in this respect. When she started looking for a job on her own, she seemed to want to get a job as a politician, for example, in addition to being a doctor. You do. She seems to be working. But the first screw-up happened - and she went to look for a new job. She had a desire for a promotion, and it wasn't satisfied in the foreseeable future - slammed the door again. And if you make her a doctor - no matter what happens, she does not change her job, even if she is a nurse up to her gray hair, and even with a lot of reprimands in the work history and a stack of orders to deprive her of premiums, because, apparently, this is her calling 👩🏼‍⚕️.

The fact that the above-described behavior of the sims is HUMAN behavior, not the behavior of pre-programmed "dummies" is obvious. It is also obvious that when faced with something that was not foreseen (or was...once upon a time 🤔), the game engine was capable of a kind of "self-learning" or of... or to make SELF-DECISIONS, which in both cases is a clear sign of having intelligence.

Dina had a desire to "Reach the pinnacle of her medical career. But not right away, and only if she had a more or less successful career, I mean, she was advancing up the career ladder.

But the desire to "Get a job in medicine" was initially "nailed down" to her, just as, say, for Kaylynn, the desire to get a job in security was nailed down to her.

By the way, Dina is a real sly one. She doesn't have a strong desire to move up the career ladder. And when it does, she often wants to have a baby along with it.

From a human point of view - both logical and vital. "Grabbing" before the maternity kicked out a promotion, " locomotive" and, accordingly, increased payments on the maternity will receive. Plus a bonus as a "safety cushion".

And sims can also cancel their own actions. In this case, its icon will be crossed out, as if the player himself canceled it.

The conditions for the best manifestation of the work of this system

I understand that you need to play as a sim as if you yourself were in his place and interact with other sims as if they were real people - that is, immerse yourself in the role. Play with "soul", don't be a "puppeteer" for sims.

Where to start to explore this system?

I think the research can start from how data about a player's playing habits are stored within the lot. Here is my post in which I described this idea in Russian language:

This is the English translation of this post:

If anyone is interested in figuring out how the game generates "personalized game reality," there's an idea of where to start "digging".

Jake Simpson, a lead simulation and tools engineer for Sims 2, wrote in The Sims 2 Dev Twitter Thread Part 1 that collecting and analyzing player play habits was still in Sims 1 and gave the example of uploading a lot to the site, and that the lots stored data on player play habits:

One thing that not many people know is that The Sims 1 was doing game analytics way before Analytics was A Thing. When you upload a lot to the web site, to share with others, you are actually uploading a bunch more data than you think.

Inside the house upload is also a bunch of information about your playing habits in The Sims. None of this information is identifiable to individual players - EA was way ahead of the curve in terms of player privacy - it was just data that indicated how people were playing.

Will (Will Wright) was fascinated by this data. Real live big game playing data. He used to write lots of database queries to work out player trends and so on. This is actually where Spore came from; the idea that something you do, on your machine, can affect how others are playing their game.

The idea that you playing your single player game could affect someone else playing their single player game, by changing their environment in response to what you did in yours was like catnip to Will.

In The Sims 2 an option to upload the lot to the site available too:

"Package Lot to TheSims2.com"

And it most likely works identically in The Sims 2, since The Sims 2 is based on The Sims 1. From Jake Simpson's The Sims 2 Dev Twitter Thread, you can understand that:

So, where to start telling stories?

Sims2 was built on top of Sims1, unlike Sims3, which was a complete re-write from scratch (undoubtedly the right decision, since we inherited a bunch of tech debt from Sims1, and Sims3 could never have done what they did sitting on our code.)

As a result, we inherited the Sims1 tools for building worlds and those had to be rebuilt completely, since the plans for Sims2 were so much bigger than Sims1. Will Wrights tagline for Sims2 was "A more bitchin' human simulator'.

So, from the research of how the data about the player's playing habits are stored inside the lot you can start, gradually then diving into the depths of the code and SIMPE.

Vadim Sims was not the only one who noticed this system working. Here is a message from another player who noticed that the game is trying to hint to the player to implement his idea in the story of the lives of the sims whom he plays:

Post in the forum thread 'Life stories of your families, scenarios, plots':

I don't know in which thread to share this. This is not a story or even a sketch. Just want to tell you a little bit about my favorite and only family in Sims 2, thanks to which I rediscovered the game. It just so happens that I can't play it anymore, and I think after this post I should put a fat end to it and maybe start over from scratch) A total of 24 generations I have played, explored everything possible, unlocked all the career rewards, built a huge house (more precisely, the family mansion)) ), and the sims themselves in each generation of scientists - skills pumped to the maximum + all the books are studied. Sometimes I even envy people who get tired of playing as a family somewhere after the second generation - at least you don't get very attached.)) And for me, each new generation is already a completely different family, with its own characteristics, stories, and aspirations. There is no point in telling about each generation, let alone about each family member. And much has already been forgotten.)

Screenshots are unavailable.

Well, in general, the game often surprised me with unexpected plot twists: once it was not in my favor, but basically I liked it, I love The Sims 2 for it) It also happened that you were going to do some trick in this very "plot", but you were afraid of the consequences, and then - the game itself hints at it! Someday, maybe I'll think of writing a story)

And according to Vadim Sims, a close research of such stories is a good way to understand how this intelligence works, the system of generating of personalized game reality of the player:

What did I write in my time? That the game, which is not really a game at all, but a graphical superstructure over the artificial intelligence, "reads" the player's personality by his first actions and begins to form an PERSONALIZED game reality for him, right? But as soon as the game is able to "read" the player's psychotype, what prevents it from trying to predict the development of the story, which the player would wish?

The fact that the game tracks the player's actions doesn't even need proof. An example - "tips". The fact that we first turn them off, saves us only from the pop-up with tips. The tracking of the player's actions does NOT stop, and it is disabled only when free will is turned off, and in this case, it is not certain that it will be fully disabled.

That is why a close research of such stories is a good way to understand how this intelligence works.

I totally agree with that.

Original (на русском языке):

The article discusses the evolution of game engines since Doom and their impact on game development. It explores the concept of game engines and their role in creating new games with customizable features. It mentions popular games like CounterStrike and Team Fortress built on iD's Quake engines. The article also introduces a guided tour of game engine internals, with a focus on Quake engines.

Written by Jake Simpson. He was the lead simulation and tools engineer for The Sims 2.

Sims 2 Dev thread 3

This one has other stories in it, and also how EA managed to piss off the entire Sims 2 Dev team, so beware.

While I wasn't around for development of the original Sims 1 game, I did hear a couple of stories of the designers that I might share. Some of these are... less savory and wholesome, so be warned.

Apparently, there was a quartet of designers on Sims 1 who used to go down to the parking lot under the building where Maxis was located (the same building that holds the world headquarters of Jaccuzi, in fact) every day, at 4pm, and then sit in car and get stoned.

I can't name names but this group use to get baked at 4pm almost every day, for an hour, then head back up to work. Everyone knew what was going on but no one said anything because usually there was a design session after the bake session that used to drop all sorts of new ideas.

Since it was done off premises, the company had nothing to say about it, and like I said, some great idea's came out of it. Needless to say, this all stopped once EA took over and there was Zero Tolerance for that sort of thing.

This next story does not paint me in the best light either, but I thought it was funny at the time, and even more so later.

When the Sims 2 was officially announced in PC Gamer, the PC Gamer editorial team showed up at Maxis and interviewed the dev team leads.

Now, I had a bet with one of the EA producers that I could get the word "Lesbian" into the review, in a non offensive way, somehow.

When my turn cam to be interviewed, Rob Smith, Editor of PC Gamer at the time, asked me to "Sum up Sims 2 in one sentence".

Remembering Will's development tag line of "A more bitchin' human simulator", I replied "A more bitchin' Lesbian Simulator". The EA press person spat their coffee across the table and Rob Smith went "And THERE'S OUR BYLINE!"

Now, to understand why I said that, you have to understand that in Sims1 has the capability to upload a prebuilt lot, full of sims with established relationships, that others could download and play.

By FAR (and I mean a factor of about 10), the #1 uploaded lot was full of women who were all in same sex relationships. The Lesbian Bordello's, as we called them. The team responsible for curating what was downloadable was full time weeding these upload types out.

Hence my statement about "A more bitchin' Lesbian Simulator".

I was never allowed to talk to the press after that. I wonder why.

So here's how EA managed to piss off the entire Sims 2 team. To understand how, you have to understand the EA bonus scheme at the time. EA would give you a one time bonus in the year you shipped a product, 6 months after ship.

So, if you only ship once every three years, you'd get a bonus at the end of the third year. That bonus would be a complicated formula of how well the game did, time spent on the project itself, and also years at EA, plus a manager recommendation.

Now the Sim 1 expansion pack teams shipped twice a year, every year. So they'd get two bonuses a year, right? Given how profitable those expansion packs were, then that would be only right, yes?

Well no. EA didn't get to be rich by handing out bonus money willy nilly. So even though the expansion pack teams were under pressure to ship twice a year, constant crunch, they got one bonus every three years. Which sucks and is wrong, but that's EA for you.

But to make matter worse, when Sims 2 shipped, we had ridiculous sales targets to hit (at the time, EA basically made sales targets of 'whatever the game cost to make, plus 50%', regardless of what they though the game would _actually_ sell.

Sims 2 was an expensive project, and our sales requirements reflected that. And no one was more surprised than the team when Sims 2 SMASHED those projections - we made 33% more sales than even the ludicrous sales targets hoped we would.

So, we'd get a bigger bonus right? After all, we'd killed ourselves to make the best possible game, we'd succeeded beyond even what EA required and EA would reward us properly, correct?

Well, no. This is EA, after all.

At the time, EA had another cash sink of a project, called The GodFather. This was hoovering up cash at a huge rate, was wildly over budget and over time, and all the Sims 2 money earned went to propping up development of that project.

EA quite literally said "No bonus for Sims 2 team, we'll get you next year."

So, instead of a "Job well done, here's some $ for you", we got told that EA wouldn't be giving us anything.

I remember sitting in the GM's office at Redwood Shores explaining that this move basically told all EA teams "It doesn't matter how hard you work, we won't be rewarding it."

He just couldn't see that. Or maybe he could and didn't care. Hard to know for sure.

And to make matters worse, before there ever was a Sims 2 bonus, EA fired 900 people in one go (yours truly among them) as a cost cutting exercise, thereby ensuring that a lot of the Sims 2 would never need to be given a bonus.

And that, folks, is why I'll never work for EA again, because they have a habit of doing this; expecting you to bust your ass to make a great product and then screwing you on the back end.

I was tremendously proud of the work I did on The Sims, but EA as a company can just FOAD.

Can you tell I'm still salty over this, after all these years? Sorry for the downer at the end, but I'm trying to be complete in the stories I tell, the good and the bad.

Source:

Sims 2 Dev Thread, part 4.

Probably the last one I'll do for a while - I'm running out of stories:)

One of the things I wanted to add to The Sims 2, that never even got off the drawing board, was to give them super powers - strength, flight, invisibility, etc. I kept on and on about this idea and was greeted with LOTS of eye rolling on this:) Oh well, can't win 'em all:)

We did do lots of experiments with the plumbob though, to use it to indicate stuff that the sim was feeling or wanted to tell you. We even tried replacing it with different objects (a light bulb while the sim was deciding what to do, etc), and none of it really worked.

It just didn't feel "Sim-my" enough. I think we did go with color changes on the plumbob (it's been so long I've forgotten what made it into the final product and what didn't.) but that would have been about it.

Once the game was released, there were various attempts to use the Sims 2 codebase to do different things. Patrick Barret wanted to refactor some of the tools and the game and make a new Adventure Construction Set, using the Sims 2 code.

Will actually gave the content creation tools away to a couple of Universities, so they could use it as examples of how to build stuff for Video Games. EA execs went ballistic when they found out what he'd done.

While I'm there, I should talk about little bit about the policy towards user created content. On balance, EA was approving of this. They were aware that part of what pushed the success of Sims 1 was the huge amount of free user generated content available for it.

They knew that even though 95% of what was user created was utter crap, just the fact that there was so much of it, and some of it was very good, was a huge driver of sales. All games that all user generated content have this extra push, right back to the days of DOOM.

So they wanted to keep that around, BUT, they weren't about to put the content creation tools we used out there, because then other people could create content as good as the expansion packs that EA produced, which was a major source of $.

So what they settled on was a graduating scale of 'easy to produce' content that users could create. So, reskinning an existing object was easy. Creating animations for that object wasn't too hard, assuming you knew the names of the animations that the object required..

... and certain bones that were required so the Sim could stand appropriately infront of the object, and then grasp it, if need be.

Adding Sim animations was nigh on impossible, and there was no way that EA was going to allow people to create their own scripts. Both from a "This takes $ away from us" and also from a "We always want this game to work" point of view.

Allowing users to create scripts invites scripts that crash or are buggy or drag performance down. EA wasn't about to take money out of their own mouths, so this and the object packaging system was never described publicly.

Of course we inside knew this would be reverse engineered within weeks of release, but whatever. Gotta make the suits happy.

One of the biggest PIA was releasing the sim builder tool early, about 2 months before the main game was released. It was a good marketing and business idea, but from a tech point of view, it was incredibly limiting.

We literally could make no changes to the Sims definition at all, once that tool was out. Couldn't fix anything or add anything. It was quite limiting, although, like I said, a great way to boost interest in the game.

Actually generating a release candidate for The Sims 2was not a fun or easy task. It would literally take about a day to preprocess all the art and everything that the Sims 2 would use on release.

We had a system whereby we didn't do full rebuilds of all content very often because it was so expensive time wise. But even just building all the object packages from prebuilt content would take on the order of 2-3 hours.

I remember sitting on the bean bags in the main common area, trying not to fall asleep at 2am because we'd just fired off a new build for QA to test, and I needed to be available in case anything went wrong with the build.

There were constant battles between me and production, because they wanted to 'just stick this new content into the release build' and me refusing to do it until it had been properly QA'd. I remember being overruled more than once by the EP, Lucy Bradshaw on that.

It was the right decision to make things move along, but very much the wrong one to keep the game stable, so it always worked and didn't crash. Still, wasn't my decision to make, so we just muddled on.

Annnnyway. I think that's probably going to be all I'm going to do for a while, unless I remember new stories to tell.

I hope you guys have enjoyed this stroll down memory lane into SimVille:)

OH! So, someone asked about SuperStar and why that was never released for Sims 2. I can talk a little about that. There was quite a lot of internal discussion about expansion packs for Sims 1 and what we'd do for Sims 2, since we were trying to prepare for these at the time.

We knew that some packs would be a 1:1 release - we'd do the exact same themes for some and not others. Pets and Vacation we knew we'd be doing, but for the others, there was a desire to not just regurgitate the same extra content that was created for Sims 1.

Another thing about Superstar was Celebrity involvement and endorsement. It really started with Drew Carey, who was an unabashed fan. They ended up doing a Sims themed episode for The Drew Carey Show, and Patrick Barret coded a bunch of scripts specifically for that.

We did add Drew as a walk on NPC sim, just because he was a decent person, but his interactions were extremely limited. He was just happy he was in there at all, as I recall.

But when Avril Lavigne came along for SuperStar, it turned into quite a lot of back and forth. Her team were really just interested in using this as a vehicle to promote her latest album. There were so many approvals we had to get and so many restrictions...

She couldn't just be "another sim" because there was no way that her team would let a representation of her just pee on the floor, for example. So we had to code a massive amount of specific scripts, just for her.

It upset the social game too, because you weren't allowed to have a relationship with her either. Going forward, the team basically said, "Never again" because of the amount of work required to make this work.

EA kept trying to get the team to use celebrities, but it was just too much work. We always seemed to be a vehicle for them to promote themselves, rather than them promoting The Sims, you know?