Posts Tagged ‘hot date’

Hi my dear friends,

I’m sorry for having forgotten that I started working on The Sims and these file formats exactly one year ago, May 1st 2001. I didn’t keep notes at that time so I don’t remember well how it all started…. but the first program I then wrote was IFFEdit. Probably most people don’t remember that program well. After all, it was a real programmer’s program, designed for myself and not very well suitable for people who didn’t program it (you know, 10 buttons at a row and some vague descriptions no-one understands anyway). Ever since, a lot of things have happened. I created the IFF Explorer packet containing add-ons like Career Edit (yes, there was a Career editing program after all!), Object Edit (VERY basic), Neighborhood Edit and Expert Edit. Might have been more programs, I’m not sure since I’m at a friend’s right now. All these programs were of course only working with pre-Hot Date programs. After a while I started programming SimFlux and Career Creator. I also made File Archive Reader and Script Station. I made a backup at September 10th of all programs before SimFlux. Unfortunately my computer crashed while backupping in January, causing me to lose all source code I made after that date. I’ve been programming ever since to restore the old “glory”. At this moment, Career Creator 2 is almost done, File Archive Reader 2 is finished and most technology of that time is restored and even improved.

Looking back at the previous year, it’s been a year full of surprises on the one hand and problems every now and then on the other hand. Your feedback, thank-you messages and the fact that you actually downloaded my things have been inspiring and motivated me to continue. It will keep inspriring me. You’ve always been patience when things went wrong. There have been some periods while I wasn’t having much luck: I even took a break of about a month somewhere mid-2001. But right now, things are going well. I hope to finish Career Creator 2 soon. I hope to start writing other tools as well. I hope to be able to help you on new things and allow you to extend the possibilities…. remember: your imagination (and the SIMS.EXE file) is the limit!

Greets,

Tom.

Well it seems to a bit of bruhaha in the Sims community tonight, and perhaps I’m partially to blame.

For SimDay this week, Maxis released a patch for Hot Date. The patch, among other things, removes the ability to have visitor-enabled objects in the downtown section. Okay, take a step back. Awhile ago (pre-Hot Date) I released a program called MenuEditor that I thought was a nice addition to your Sims toolset. This was an enhancement over the “official” Maxis menu editor as it supported the various languages, advertisement values for objects (how loud an object asked Sims to come do something with it) and extra flags. Among these flags was the ability to enable visitors to interact with the object. At the time, nobody from Maxis said anything (and hasn’t yet to me) about it so who am I to know what was to come?

Skip ahead to the release of Hot Date. Most user created objects don’t show up in the downtown area (or more specifically they can’t be used by your Sims). Someone (not me) comes up with the idea to use the visitor flag on the objects and voila, objects work downtown. Of course with the release of Hot Date, Maxis made a slight adjustment to their file formats and the saving of objects through the menu editor didn’t always work and could potentially lead to errors in the game. At the time I had two options. First I could remove the functionality and put the new version up on the site but the damage would be done and people could get the old version from other sites or users. Second I could get more information about what changes happened and update the program so objects edited with it could be more “safe” for the game. Basically I did neither because the program was already out there and I couldn’t find out what changes were made to the file formats and didn’t have time to walk through them byte by byte and figure it out (call me lazy if you want).

So now the lastest patch from Maxis removes this functionality completely. Apparently (and this is second or third hand info so take it as you will) Maxis removed the ability for several reasons. The next expansion pack, The Sims Vacation, will allow most of this and they believe enabling it now will cause problems when folks go to install and run the pack. They also said that visitor enabled objects might cause runtime errors so removing it should solve most problems.

What this means. It means anything you downloaded or cloned previously that was visitor-enable will a) not show up at all or b) it will be there but you can’t do anything with it, you can’t even “View” the object. This includes Toliets, sinks, flowers, chairs, tables, beds, showers, etc.

According to some posts on the forums, you have a few options:

1. Don’t install the patch

2. Install the patch and do without custom objects downtown

3. Install the patch but remove from your downloads all clones of the pool cabana, eating booths and tables, clothing racks, food carts, Hot Date windows (like the bay window, that some had prior to this patch)

Feel free to vent your anger towards me if you choose. Originally the menu editor was never meant for what people were using it for (enabling objects downtown) because there was no downtown area when I created it. However it would be nice to update it to be compatible with Hot Date so I’ll see if I have time for this. With the patch I’m not sure if it’s worth the time and effort. Also please note, the Maxis object organizer lets you make objects available for purchase in the downtown area, but doesn’t enable the visitor flag so your cloned objects still cannot be used.

In any case, a bit of a mess and some people are screaming about it (rightly so if you spent hours and hours editing objects only to have all that wiped away). Well, I’ll leave it at that and let you be the judge.

Happy downloading…err, happy new year that is. So first post of 2002 and we have a download for you!

SimExplorer 2.0 is now available. This is a major update to the previous version so you should uninstall that version before installing this one. This new version will let you browse inside Sims files both on your hard drive and inside Far files. Some of the new features are all the cool resource types you can view. Images can be exported in BMP, TGA, TIF and JPEG format.

I’ve been hacking away at this all day but didn’t have time to complete everything I wanted however I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible. The Far creation hasn’t been completly tested but will be in the next release. I’m also still working out an archiving/unarchiving scheme and backup feature so you can take entire directories and zip them up and store them away (yet still browse the resources in them). So that’s coming shortly as well. File deletion has the option to go to the recycle bin or not (your choice) and there’s the simple/advanced object viewers that should be pretty slick.

I haven’t extensively bug tested it with every object file or every resource so there may be some quirks. This is most noticed with Hot Date objects as they seem to have changed a few rules with the new expansion pack. For example, when viewing walls and floors from Hot Date, the distance is screwed up. I only noticed this when I made the new screenshot so I’ll put it on my list of TODOs.

If you have any suggestions feel free to leave them in the forums. I’ll be mostly in blueprint mode in the next week or two to get that release out to you, but they’ll be SimExplorer and other program updates in the interim. Enjoy!

Hey guys. It’s update day today. I’ve uploaded the new ObjectEditor program for you to use. It’s a stand-alone version of the ObjectEditor that will come with blueprint 2 (and basically the same as the one from blueprint 1). This gives you a preview of the object while you’re editing it and lets you edit most properties of an object. Remember the object must be a writable IFF file on your hard drive. It cannot edit files that are embedded in Far files. Use Far Edit to extract them first. The program will support loading and saving Hot Date objects but does not edit the categories or downtown flags. I’m still testing that part (and there are other programs out there to do that). I’ll be updating some other programs today if I get a chance to be HD compatible, like the cloner and viewer.

Please note that when you install this program it defaults to a new directory (not the blueprint one). These programs need to be installed to a separate directory as they’re all using various versions of the same DLL files. Welcome to DLL hell. At some point they’ll all be the same version and there won’t be any issues, but for now just install them to their own directories. Thanks.

Enjoy!

Just a quick note here. Patrick Barrett from Maxis posted a message on the TSR forums about an “official” Maxis tool that’s coming out to handle sub-categories and flagging objects for downtown. Unfortunately there was some mixup at Maxis so it’s not available for this SimDay but watch for it. He also mentioned about not using MenuEditor to flag objects as being available for visitors (like some people are doing). On this point I have to agree with him. MenuEditor was written pre-Hot Date and there have been some changes in their file formats since then. You may not see problems with changing Hot Date objects immediately but over time this could change (some people report an error message when they save the menu). I’m working on updated versions of everything right now and a new version MenuEditor is part of this update. So for Hot Date users, I would suggest not using MenuEditor for now, pre-HD users are fine (this would be true for the official Maxis menu editor as well since it was built pre-Hot Date too).