To respond to your honest concerns about my absence, the state of affairs for Niotso is fine.
The Sims Online sprite reading is here. This means we can look at any image in the game now. Objects, floors, walls, roofs, catalog thumbnails, menu controls, faces and body textures, the relationship +/- icons and the skilling meter, and recently, the lighting and shadow textures in lightmap.dat.
This extends the fact that we can play any of the game’s sounds and music (WAV, MP3, XA, and UTK files) ingame in Niotso Client and render, and animate, any character models and body accessories.
IFF chunk format support
As of now, FileHandler’s iff library fully supports all of the game’s chunk formats except for those that are involved with the SimAntics VM. Much of this support comes with Propeng’s analysis of all of the chunks in the game and his generous additions to the wiki.
Chunk Documentation Support BCON 100% 100% BHAV 90% 100% BMP_ 100% 100% CATS 100% 100% CST 100% 100% CTSS 100% 100% DGRP 90% 100% FBMP 100% 100% FCNS 100% 100% FWAV 100% 100% GLOB 100% 100% OBJD 10% 0% OBJf 100% 100% Optn 5% 0% PALT 100% 100% Rcon 50% 0% SLOT 0% 0% SPR# 100% 100% SPR2 100% 100% STR# 100% 100% TMPL 100% 100% TPRP 50% 0% TRCN 100% 100% TTAB 75% 0% TTAs 100% 100%
Not only can these chunks can be read; they can be displayed in a web page by iff2html. For a read-only viewer, this has a few benefits over a “proper” GUI. It’s cross-platform, everything can be quickly displayed in tables, you can select and copy both text and images, you can do ctrl+f, and it can all be archived online somewhere if somebody wanted to do that. There is almost no point in coding all of these basic features in a tool or app.
Roadmap
Nearly everything in The Sims Online’s game files but the SimAntics VM, the HIT VM, the city rendering, the texture rendering (yes, grass is rendered), and the EA server (tsomarimba1) configuration can be explored. The remainder of our format research lies in these last tricky subject areas.
That’s not to say that format research is enough to understand how all of these files piece together. That’s actually an interesting puzzle, and thanks to the comments and IFF chunk labels I don’t think it will severely bog us down.
Before hitting any of this stuff, it’s a little more important to set up a primitive lot to supply some visual progress. And I want to clone the user experience leading up to the lot: the log-in screen, create-a-sim tool, and so on, leaving out the city map rendering due to our current lack of understanding of how the game does it.
This involves the following tasks:
- Set up the audio engine to supply contexts for sounds with an upper barrier of say 16 playable sounds at a time, with some reserved for background music and stinger music. Each game tick, the volumes of all sounds are updated, and if a sound has finished fading out, it will be destroyed and have its handle distributed back into the pool.
- Set up the OpenGL windowing system. I cannot stress enough how much of a chore this is for OpenGL ES if we want to support smartphones.
- Set up the UIS parser and start implementing support for all controls; the toughest one is going to be the selectable text box.
- Transition from the login screen to the select-a-sim screen, and fully replicate the create-a-sim tool, with a rendering of the Sim on the left panel. It is known that the create-a-sim tool in The Sims 1 and The Sims Online does not make use of scene lighting (discovered after altering the light files in The Sims 1 and experimenting).
- Read all of the necessary data from the original game installation, rather than in the temporary pre-extracted form.
- Port the frontend to X11 for complete support for Linux. The frontend is very separate from the internals of the game engine, so this should not be an issue. Mac is a different story because it’s hard to set it up in a virtual machine.
- Release Niotso Technical Preview 1, and transition into the Pre-Alpha development phase (yes, right now we are still in Planning).
This is my overall plan for the rest of this development phase.
Great update. Don’t know what half of it means but it still sounds great. Keep up the great work. Hope you did good on your AP tests. Full steam ahead!!
Me too!
I’m waiting and very excited for the AP tests!
Great!Great!Great!Great!Great!Great!Great!Great!Great!
You’re amazing and thanks for posting this and you can make favor for all TSO fans?
You can post updates when your finish all this plans?
“Set up the audio engine to supply contexts for sounds with an upper barrier of say 16 playable sounds at a time, with some reserved for background music and stinger music. Each game tick, the volumes of all sounds are updated, and if a sound has finished fading out, it will be destroyed and have its handle distributed back into the pool.
Set up the OpenGL windowing system. I cannot stress enough how much of a chore this is for OpenGL ES if we want to support smartphones.
Set up the UIS parser and start implementing support for all controls; the toughest one is going to be the selectable text box.
Transition from the login screen to the select-a-sim screen, and fully replicate the create-a-sim tool, with a rendering of the Sim on the left panel. It is known that the create-a-sim tool in The Sims 1 and The Sims Online does not make use of scene lighting (discovered after altering the light files in The Sims 1 and experimenting).
Read all of the necessary data from the original game installation, rather than in the temporary pre-extracted form.
Port the frontend to X11 for complete support for Linux. The frontend is very separate from the internals of the game engine, so this should not be an issue. Mac is a different story because it’s hard to set it up in a virtual machine.
Release Niotso Technical Preview 1, and transition into the Pre-Alpha development phase (yes, right now we are still in Planning).”
Thanks!
I’m waiting for AP test xD
You bet, and when the Alpha 1 release is approaching, I’ll send out a mass email informing people to register for their free beta account, which comes in a very limited quantity.
Fatbag you know when is release date? More and less…
Nope, it’s impossible to predict.
Nice Update, i can’t waiting to plat this game
*play
Nice work, great update! Good to see continued progress. BTW, Captain Smith, that avatar is the best in-game, always been my favorite head. Cheers.
Niotso team, you are freakin awesome
awesome update looking forward to pictures showing off the game.
Hello, i’m therunesnake a big sims fan.
I have a question, can i start a niotso forum?
TR
You can, but there is not much to talk about.
I think about it long ago!
If you want to help is so to speak!
We can talk about our memories of the sims online, what we would first like to do as NIOTSO playable and discuss the progress of NIOTSO. It certainly does not a great forum, but to me it seems very useful.
TR
a beta’s being released soon? oh yess yessssss!
OH! I cant wait!
This is the best thing i’ve ever read. Thank you so much for working on this and making this a possibility!
Wow, it seems awsome. I wish we could play it in future. And smartphone/tablet support – it would be great!!
This is exciting news. I’ll definitely sign up for the beta account when the time comes. Wow, I still can’t believe how diligent you are with this game. Your dedication is impressive. Even though the release is far away, it will be worth the wait when the time comes. I believe there are enough fans who really want this game revived.
Hey,
Is there any way I can drop you an email, i’m very interested and would be willing to help out. I’m a web designer / 3D artist. More than happy to contribute to this project for free of course!
Or simply drop me an email,
Cheers.
Yes, see: http://wiki.niotso.org/User:Fatbag
I am going to create a Niotso promo lot on http://www.tirnua.com I will post updates there. In the mean time it is the closest thing to the sims online that is fun
The lot link will be in a comment.