Day: October 15, 2000

A few more notes on Simplorer before I hit the sack for some much needed rest. A few people have reported it doesn’t work. Lots of info there. Of course it took a few emails to find out they are running the [insert your favorite country here] version. Since I don’t have every version of The Sims, I can’t guarentee that it will work with whatever language version you have. I know the German version doesn’t have FAR files so there are differences between versions. Perhaps the international versions don’t use the same Registry key to tell where The Sims is installed (which is how Simplorer finds the root directory). I don’t know anything about these versions so, unfortunately I cannot say anything I write will work or not with them. If you can tell me details on your Sims setup I might be able to help, but messages like “it doesnt work!” don’t help anyone. Otherwise things should be pretty easy and they have been for most people and there seems to be few problems with the software (or at least the hate messages haven’t started to pour in yet). G’night!

Just a quick update on the release of Simplorer. I forgot to refresh the display when you switch the ID or Index of some objects so you might not see the image change when flipping between them. Just grab the window and resize it a nudge to force a repaint. I’ve fixed it for a future release but it might cause some people to not see certain images in some files. That’s what you get for coding at 2AM. I think my supply of tic-tacs ran out about then.

Johannes Wallroth over at his programming page here, has released his PacWorld shareware game as freeware and published the source code under a public domain license. The game is written with CDX (of course!) and features several worlds and levels, beautiful graphics and sound effects, bonus items, offscreen tunnels, locked rooms and highscores. So check it out!

Well, after a few dozen hours of debugging, orange tic-tacs, cheesies and a few slurpies, Simplorer is available here. Simplorer lets you view IFF, SPR, WLR and FLR files outside of The Sims. You can preview the images and perform file maintenance on the files by deleting them. As this is a .0 version, there might be some shortcomings. No drag and drop right now but I’ll add that so you can move files around. I didn’t see a tremendous need for it as The Sims keeps all walls and floors in one directory.

A few outstanding issues with this initial release:

• Some IFF files do not display their descriptions (mainly multi-tile objects)
• Multi-tile objects draw the various sprites separately, not combined like in Tmog (not yet anyways)
• You cannot run this program while The Sims is running. The Sims locks its files and there’s no way around this, sorry.
• This will only browse files in The Sims directory and below, it’s not for hunting for files on your drive so copy everything into the appropriate Sims directory first
• You cannot edit values with this program, that’s not what it’s meant for!

Offhand that’s about it but I might have missed something. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please see the contact page for information on the mailing lists and email support. Please forward any bug reports to me directly and not to the list. Alternately, you can post something on the message board here. Enjoy and I hope this helps viewing and organizing your Sims collection. Watch for more updates soon!