By: Joni Brown

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By Joni Brown Jen Denicola

• COSC 471 Spring 2007
• Professor Jeff Schmitt
• March 13, 2007

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Abstract

• The Sims is a a strategic life simulation
  computer game where you develop a person and/or
  environment from the ground up.
• In order to keep up the world, the user needs to
  do basic things like controlling the bathing,
  feeding, and social interaction of the people.
• The Sims was programmed in an object programming
  language called Edith.
• Behaviors involve a large number of intermediate
  objects.
• It is the best selling PC game in history

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Outline

• A. Overview
• Creator
• Origin
• B. Gameplay
• 1. User Input
• 2. Computer Requirements
• C. Design
• 1. Programming Language
• 2. Procedures
• 3. Objects
• D. Conclusion
• E. References

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The Sims

• The Sims is a strategic life simulation computer
  game.
• The game is a simulation of the day-to-day
  activities of one or more virtual people (named
  "Sims") in a suburban household located near
  SimCity.
• It was first released on January 31, 2000

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Will Wright

• The Sims was created by Will Wright
• He is the co-founder of the game development
  company, Maxis.
• He is best known as the original designer of
  groundbreaking computer games such as SimCity,
  The Sims and Spore.

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Origin of The Sims

• The idea for The Sims is thought to be drawn
  from Will Wright's experience in the 1991 Oakland
  firestorm, when his house and many of his
  possessions were burned down in the fire.
• As such, Wright was required to move his family
  elsewhere and rebuild his life.
• These events led to Will's inspiration of
  creating a simulated game about life.

Wikipedia - http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims
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The Sims

• Mr. Wright got the idea about this game from his
  development work on SimCity and spent 4.5 years
  working on it.
• It is distributed by EA Games (which originally
  named it Project X in 1997).

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The Sims

• The Sims was published by Maxis and distributed
  by Electronic Arts.
• It was initially geared towards teenagers.
• However, over the years, it has become popular
  with kids and adults of all ages.
• It is also described as a Life Simulation Game,
  or a God Game.

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The Sims Gameplay

• Everything from the hairstyle, gender, race,
  style, mood, personality, and location is up to
  the user.
• The user can also choose what type of environment
  the people are in, such as furniture, paint,
  walls, yard, background, etc. basically, the
  entire world.
• In order to keep up the world, the user will need
  to do basic things like controlling the bathing,
  feeding, and social interaction of the people.

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The Sims Gameplay

• The Sims is so advanced that it is possible for
  the people in the game to deal with floods,
  earthquakes, and even death.
• To make things interesting, users can exchange
  sims online and watch them interact.

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The Sims Gameplay

• Every now and then, sims may go off and do their
  own activities without user input.
• The major negative about this game is that is a
  single user game. However, EA Games does plan on
  coming out with a multiplayer version of the game
  (if they havent already).

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The Sims Gameplay

• The Sims can also be used to make your own Sim.

Brokeback Mountain Sims
Sim of Britney Spears
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The Sims

• The Sims follows in the footsteps of the
  long-running series of "Sim" games developed by
  Maxis in the last decade of the 1990s. It takes
  the idea and concept to the next evolutionary
  phase -- controlling actual Sim characters down
  to the lowest level of detail, and their
  interaction with others and their surroundings.
  Michael L. House, All Game Guide

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Computer Requirements

• Hard drive with 350 MB min free space
• 8X CD-ROM (16X recommended)
• OpenGL v1.1.2 or later (included)
• Quicktime 4.0 (included)
• G3 at 233Mhz or faster
• 64 MB RAM of space
• MacOS 8.1 or later

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The Sims Design

• The Sims was programmed in an object programming
  language called Edith. This language provides a
  virtual machine plus a development environment
  for that virtual machine. This is a screen shot
  of the behavior of turning on a lava lamp

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The Sims Design

• Every object has a set of local data and a set of
  behaviors. The local data provides the parameters
  of an object, including pointers (or indexes) to
  other objects it is related to.
• The set of behaviors consist of a procedure that
  implements it, a procedure that checks to see
  whether or not it is possible, and a set of
  advertisements that describe its properties in
  terms of what need(s) of a Sim it will satisfy.

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The Sims Design

• Sims (not under direct player control) choose
  what to do by selecting, from all of the possible
  behaviors in all of the objects, the behavior
  that maximizes their current happiness.
• Once they choose a behavior, the procedure for
  that behavior (which is part of the object) is
  then run in the thread of the Sim itself, so that
  it has access to that Sims parameters in
  addition to those of its defining environment
  (the object the behavior is from).

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The Sims Design

• All interactions between objects occur in this
  way. Sims themselves are just a somewhat more
  elaborate object.
• Sometimes there are a number of intermediate
  objects to implement behaviors.
• For instance, Social Interaction is an object
  that is created and used when two Sims interact.

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The Sims Design

• Each Sim contains behavior calls for each of the
  possible social interactions (flirt, kiss, etc).
• When SimSam decides to run the kiss behavior
  (which is in SimMary) an invisible social
  interaction object is created.
• The execution of SimSams thread is then passed
  into this object (as is SimMarys if shes not
  busy).
• (Access to the parameters
• of the chosen Sim is
• provided through a
• pointer in the Social
• Interaction object.)

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The Sims Design

• Eating is another example of a behavior that
  involves a large number of intermediate objects,
  basically one per step.
• Notice that this means objects can be dynamically
  created and destroyed during the execution of a
  behavior.

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The Sims Design

• Although the object updates happen in a single
  (underlying processor) thread, animations and
  sounds are executed in another thread,
  asynchronously with Edith-level operations.
• That is what provides the illusion of
  simultaneous activity in the simulated world.
• This is also why there is a fair amount of setup
  that must be done when entering a routine that
  uses animation, and careful checking on exit.

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The Sims Design

• There are a number of subtleties with animations.
  For instance, when a Sim is taking a shower, it
  doesnt actually enter the shower. Instead, it is
  added to a routing slot of the shower, which
  offsets the location of the animation so that it
  seems that the Sim is in the shower. (Try
  executing another behavior when the Sim is in the
  shower, by editing the Shower Core procedure, and
  youll see teleportation in action.)

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The Sims Design

• Implementing a realistic simulated world is far
  from easy.
• Behaviors are implemented in terms of procedures,
  called trees because of the visual programming
  language that Edith uses.
• The intent of the visual programming language is
  to make it easier for content developers to
  create objects, and perhaps someday support
  end-user programming.
• Statements in this visual language are
  represented by boxes.

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The Sims Design

• Primitive expressions enable the Edith programmer
  to test, set, and mutate parameters, to run
  animations and play sounds, and do various other
  things. Integer ids are used to refer to
  objects.

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Conclusion

• The Sims game has now evolved into many spin offs
  such as The Sims 2, The Sims Life Stories, and
  Sims 2 Pets. In all, the original game has sold
  more than 6.3 million copies, making it the best
  selling PC game in history, and all sim games
  together (7 expansion packs and a sequel) have
  sold more than 70 million copies worldwide.

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Any Questions?
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References

• Forbus, Kenneth D Qualitative Reasoning Group
  Northwestern University . Some Notes on
  Programming Objects in The Sims. From
  http//www.qrg.northwestern.edu/papers/Files/Progr
  amming_Objects_in_The_Sims.pdf
• Eep2 The Sims. From http//www.tnlc.com/eep/sim
  s/
• The Sims. From http//sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims
  
• The Sims Center. From http//thesimscenter.com/sim
  s/gameinfofor.php?bgkb_id1
• Peck, Dave. Review The Sims. From
  http//www.macgamer.com/reviews/thesims/thesims.ht
  ml
• The Sims. From http//thesims.ea.com/us/index.html
  ?menuaboutcontentabout/index.html
• Wikipedia
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims