
Sul Sul, MySimmers!
We are extremely excited to bring you this update today – some things we have been working on for a long time are finally ready! This update is truly made by a dedicated team of fans, for our dedicated community. Happy playing!
- The MySims Team
For the most current bug updates, please visit the Forum.
New Features*:
Thank you as always for playing our beloved game and being a part of our community. We appreciate you for continuing to share and report issues and don’t forget to join the MySims section on our official Discord!
*Why did these features take so long?
These games are very old, built using old or custom systems that break if you look at them the wrong way. We are a small team working on these ports and patches, and wanted to bring you the games first…knowing to make these features actually feel worthwhile, they would take some time to perfect.
The Garden was not zoned at all to handle NPCs. Making it so you could move in a Sim was the easy part. But, as you know if you are a long-time MySimmer, the Sims had a tendency to vanish in the original version. So when we opened up the Garden to residents, suddenly, those Sims were at risk of just disappearing. We also knew we couldn't just have sims move in. We had to make the Garden alive, allow for NPC routing and activities. Adding all of this to a place that wasn’t set up to handle those events caused crashes, loading issues, stutters, all which we needed to remedy before releasing to you!
It also sounds simple to add skin tones to the game but, the way the game handles outfits is that each one is baked down into a texture. Meaning - each individual outfit isn't just an asset on top of a Sim body. It's actually got the skin tones baked into it. As such, adding 4 new skin tones turns into creating over 1000 new assets for all the outfits. Which - how textures are compiled - would have made the game over double in size!! This would have completely changed how much memory it needed on PC which isn’t ideal. So, we had to invent a different way to solve for this! The way we managed to approach skin tones now simplifies how the games differentiates between skin and outfits. By using mask textures, we are able to isolate the skin parts and apply any RGB color we want. Not only is it way more scalable, but also it avoids generating a new outfit texture for a new skin tone.