Posts Tagged ‘sim objects’

Hi guys. Over this week I mentioned Simposium a couple of times and the great work Clive has been doing. Another excellent effort is from Tom van Dijk (Mazelord) who’s been working on some great Sim programs. He just released his newest program, Script Station. Script Station is basically a script editor for The Sims, like Edith. It is still in beta phase and a lot of so-called primitives and parameters haven’t been decoded yet. There’s also a guide to SimAntics and how Sim objects work here, in early stages of course. It’s a good effort so feel free to try it out and help Tom along if you can. As to where Simposium fits in all this, with Script Station it would be possible to edit the animation names so you can swap out animations in the game. It’s not 100% user friendly so if you’re looking for a simple solution, this might not be the answer but it’s a step in the right direction.

Also an update on the email news posts. I checked the Yahoo groups online and it looks like the messages are coming through fine. They’re completely intact on the website so they were sent out that way. Mine are just getting cut off in Outlook Express for some reason. Also I’m a little offline for the next couple of days. I had to do my 6 month re-install Windows maneuver yesterday so I’m still hunting down software and re-installing everything. It’s the necessary evil when running Microsloth Winblows and having as many reboots/reinstalls as I do.

Seeya!

Evening! No Sim news today but a couple of notes from the 3D world.

As some of you might be aware, Discreet, the makers of 3D Studio MAX, released a free version of their modeler called gmax. Unfortunately if you’re looking for a free modeler to create Sim objects, this doesn’t cut it. There is no exporting or loading/saving of files in anything but a propriatary .gmax format and regular 3DS plug-ins don’t work. You have to get a gmax game kit from a publisher to create content.

Well, Alias has jumped on the bandwagon for free 3D software and will be offering up a free personal edition of their great Maya software. This is the same software that is used in most movies for special effects (even more so than 3D Studio is) and was recently used for most of the effects in Lord of The Rings. Again, this is a non-commerical edition and will save in a special format. You can sign up for the free edition here (available in February).

However if you’re looking to get your 3D feet wet, both products are great examples of high-quality professional 3D packages so if you’re interested give them a try. The new blueprint isn’t Maya or 3DS but it will offer a lot of great 3D type features like vertex/face level editing, spline and patch based modeling, NURBS surfaces and other good stuff.

Greets!

I just released the new utility ObjectViewer. ObjectViewer is a simple viewing utility to view object files. Similar to SimExplorer, it lets you browse all object files in the game, from various angles and optionally export the images to standard graphic file formats.

Features include:

• View objects quickly and easily
• Automatically detects and locates your Sim objects
• Displays full filename where object is located to view duplicate objects
• Supports multi-tile objects and assembles the images together
• Unique rotation control to view objects from 4 different angles
• Select near, medium or far zoom levels
• Customizable background color
• Export to standard graphic file formats
• Supports The Sims, Living Large and House Party objects

Below is the screenshot from the final version. Enjoy. Note: If you downloaded it before midnight and get a message about a missing DLL file, grab it again. It’s fixed (duh!)