Sims Tools Sources: Now Open!

ChEeTaH — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:04:59 +0000

It's been a very long time since the Sims community was very active with the Sims 1. At the time I developed two applications for the game: The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler. Almost three years ago I decided to make the source code of these two available under the GPL2 license. Time has passed and although the source was publicly available online, it was never really announced. Time to change that, so here's the announcement (and more)!

The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler are now Open Source software! I must say I haven't properly cleaned up the code or anything: it's basically nothing but a dump of the code I wrote all those years ago. As I was still learning at the time, I bet it's full of bugs, crappy ("WTF") code and other nightmares. Yet if anyone is willing to pick up and improve (or rewrite) one or two of these projects, you now can. If you just want to take a peek: you can do that too.

As for The Neighborhood Handler: I've made a minor restart for a brand new version (still C++, but using the Qt toolkit for UI). Although I haven't had the time to put any work in it, that source is also available for anyone to work with.

There's one more thing Sims 2 content creators may find useful: I've put quite some work into a Sims 2 Packer, which allows custom packaging of the famous .package files for the Sims 2 (into .Sims2Pack files). In fact, this project may serve as a nice base for custom Sims 3 packages as well, since the file format for The Sims 3 is quite similar. I never got around to actually finishing up and publishing this, but it may still be useful to someone.

For all my open code, which also includes Drupal projects, other tools I wrote way back and more, see my public git repositories. If you're just looking for the projects mentioned above, go to:

TheNeighborhoodHandler repository (see 4.1 branch for the old version, or the master branch for the new almost-nothing-done version)
TheAddonHandler repository
libSims2Pack repository
Sims2PackerUI repository (depends on libSims2Pack)

Note that the old software requires Borland C++ Builder to build. The newer stuff (the new version of The Neighborhood Handler, libSims2Pack and Sims2PackerUI) uses CMake as build system, and depends on Qt (both are freely available). You can use the Qt Creator to build and debug all that code.

Also note that all of this is to little or no use if you're just a user of these tools, and have no interest in the actual source code. I currently have no (recent) binaries/installers available, although you may still find The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler at The Sims Zone.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the code or if you'd like to continue development of one or more of these projects: I can give you write permissions to the repositories if you're serious about taking these projects to a new level. It is unlikely that I'll be touching this code anytime soon.

All in all this is mostly legacy stuff, but nevertheless I hope someone will find it useful!

Where have you been?

ChEeTaH — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:57:35 +0000

It's been a long time again, very long. A lot has changed too, so here goes...

First of all: I got a job in February. It's not the greatest thing, but getting something really nice is hard right now. At least it relieves us a bit from the huge financial burden we'd otherwise have. Another small job at my university, where I worked for only 4 hours each week, is ending this month. I'll have my last paycheck from there soon, unfortunately.

I've also prepared the tContact Drupal module for release. The code has been slightly improved, which is always good. There's also another mini-module for Drupal which allows you to add CSS classes to menu links. This makes it easier for a theme to turn a menu into a series of buttons, similar to the menu at the top of this site (Home/About/Contact). Right now this site uses the menu item's ID number, which is somewhat random. With this module such menus are just a little harder to break :) I hope both modules will land on Drupal.org soon.

What else? KidDraw of course. A few months ago already, I've cleaned up a lot of code, made it a little bit themeable (which resulted in removing a whole lot of code). I've also changed the file loading/saving structures around so that the files KidDraw produces are nice straightforward XML files. They're compressed to save some disk space, but it means that compatibility with future and past versions is much easier. Still, a release is not in sight right now, and I'll stop predicting/hoping anything right now. First I've got some other stuff to finish and wrap up, before I can focus on KidDraw a little more again.

I'm also working on some supersecret projects with Rosana, which has taken some time off of other projects. It has inspired me to write the menu CSS classes module mentioned above though.

Another technical bit I worked on this past weekend is merging all the (5) Drupal installations on this webserver to a single centralized installation. Before, a new version of Drupal would mean updating each site separately: putting the site in maintenance mode, uploading files, updating the database and turning the site back online. Times 5. Right now: Put all sites in maintenance mode, upload files, update all databases, put them all back online. I've set up bookmark folders in Firefox so I can put all sites into maintenance mode with just a few clicks. Same goes for updating and bringing them back online. A similar amount of effort is saved for updates of common modules among various sites. All in all: maintaining the sites is less painful - especially as the amount of Drupal sites we're running will soon grow.

That does mean that if you spot any errors (missing/broken images, links, etc): please contact me! I think I've most of them covered though.

And then there's University of course. It's taking a lot of my time right now, with this year's last set of exams just around the corner. Together with some more deadlines, it's a busy time right now.

The Sims 3 is also out, I've been playing it for a bit. Not much yet - too little time. The (Collector's Edition) box is shiny though.

Spore Galactic Adventures, the first real expansion for Spore, is due next week, and Thursday (18th) me and Rosana will be checking it out at EA Netherlands. A bit late for a preview, but it may just be early enough to get me excited about the game once again. I don't know all too much about it right now, so Wednesday evening I'll have to do some reading to catch up on it.

Finally: I'll be getting a new laptop this summer. After saving up for a long time, the €1000 offer from university (for a HP Elitebook 8530w) is in. I've filled in the form saying I want it, I'll have to pay up soon. I should be getting it around August. My current laptop (6 years old) just doesn't cut it anymore...

That's it for this rough summary of the past couple of months (project/work wise anyway). Until next time!

ChEeTaH's - Sims

Sims Tools Sources: Now Open!

Where have you been?