Conference at Electronic Arts Redwood Shores Part 3 Part 3 our continuing coverage starts off by reviewing some interesting new design features that takes advantage of modern technology. First off is the graphics. The graphics are so stunning that the core engine takes advantage of DirectX 9 abilities. We are talking about realism that is so stunning it blows every previous Maxis game ever released. What about the sound? We are talking about Dolby Digital 5.1 sound support. That means you have full positional sound support from various directions. That means you'll hear various sound effects coming from the direction they are coming from. Other nifty gameplay features that I didn't cover yesterday was carpools for people to get to other homes. That means they share a ridepool to get to another home however, this idea is most likely going to be expanded in the near future. Another aspect of The Sims is we still having the ability to visit other parts of the community. Nothing new there, but thought you would like to know. Our main highlight of this issue is the Importance of Community, discussed by Luc Barthelet. We have all reached level 1, and that is getting the attention of what we have here available and trying to bring a community together and offer information and content to the community. Congratulations to one and all! Its time to move on to Level 2. What is on Level 2? 1) Complexity 2) Roles in the Community 3) Sims 2 @ Launch 4) Costs Complexity: Level 2 is one of the most intriguing stages you can look at. We are looking at the designing and creating of custom content to a whole new degree and skill level. We are looking at not 2D objects in a 3D enviornment. Rather we are looking at true 3D Enviornment with true 3D Graphics. With this new design, we are able to have a more detailed animation and objects. This raises the skill degree to a whole new level. We also now have Bump Maps that gives the effects of 3D objects. That means using bump maps we can finally give the look of a watch being worn on a sim or some other accessory we want our sim to wear. What about customizing objects? Selected artists will be allowed to use the famed Edith, however Maxis has yet to decide whether they will be allowing the usage of this famed program. Edith is a very linear tool powered by the SimAntics Programming Language. Using simple drag and drop method, you can create very complex objects and design variables. I'll explain a little more about Edith and how it comes to play in an upcoming article. Sounds complex already right? Yep it does. What is Maxis going to do about it? Everything possible! We are looking at easier tools to create custom content. No more banging our heads on the Transmorgrifer trying to figure out how to make things work. Conflicting object ID? Can't get the sims to work because we downloaded an object and can't figure that out? That's a thing of the past now with Maxis helping object creators with Unique 128bit IDs for each item that chances are so slim, it will be six to ten people over a course in a lifetime that will experience this problem. Packaging files are now offered to help make things more organized. We are looking at these files like FAR files, except more concentrated on everything rather than just skins. What are the roles you can play? There are several roles. -Help -Tutorials --Game Tutorial --Tools Tutorial -Tools -Content Databases (eg. downloads) -Collections -News --Chats --Forums/BBS -Media (eg. video) "It is best that we as a community to focus on a particular area and be great at it rather than focus on everything and just be okay at it," Luc said at the conference. "We all have our fortes and it is also best that we work together as a community rather than we competiting against each other" I will have to agree with Luc on that seeing how we are always fighting for visitors and thinking of ourselves rather than others. We all have our fortes and weaknesses and those who are strong in our weaknesses help take the strain off us to help better the community. Perhaps it is time to consolidate forces rather than struggling to maintain our own independent sites, we combine forces to make one strong site. How about The Sims 2 @ Launch? Well, the vision of Luc's is to have MORE custom content on the same day The Sims 2 goes public and starts selling on shelves than all of the custom content available currently on The Sims. Sounds like a daunting task right? Wrong. Here's a simple forumla to help you understand Luc's vision. For Objects, we follow the mathematical formula N/3 This means that for every 10 Textures, we have 30 Objects For every 100 Textures, we have 3000 objects If you aren't familar with textures in The Sims 2, Objects are composed of two parts. A core and texture. Textures are used to create a feel in the game to give you multiple colors without designing a brand new game. For example, if you have a sim who's a baby and you buy him a bed, and gave him airplanes as his sheets, you can change the sheets down the line without replacing the bed and at no cost, and give him stripes. The sheet changes are all textures. What about clothes/skins? It is actually called clothes, but here's the formula: (# of Tops) x (# of Bottoms) x (# of Heads) = Number of Clothes So this means if you want 50,000 clothes for your sims, you would only need 37 Heads 37 Tops 37 Bottoms And of course, the biggest thing that makes this all possible is Organization. As Luc said, Organization is Key. Because of the expanded functionality and custom content, we are looking at a ton of custom content that will increase costs in operating a site. The biggest concerns from most sites is storage and bandwith and they are both important needs. We are looking at huge rise in custom content from Skins, Objects, Design Mode, Mesh Scripting and Authoring. Maxis has plans to help beginning and current sites with their hosting concerns, which I will be addressing in an another issue. Level 3 Level 3 isn't off in the distance like ten years from now, but it will happen faster than you can believe. We are looking at Next Generation Consoles with the ability to connect to the internet and download items for their games. There is expected to be twenty times more users and that users will now be able to create custom content without even knowing it. Details on level 3 are sketchy at the moment, however our primary focus is Level 2, which should be addressed first before moving onto Level 3 Stay tune for our next issue