Merry Christmas everyone! You’ve noticed the snowstorms, but you probably haven’t noticed the Christmas Tree in your inventory! Place it on your lot to celebrate!

Each day you’ll be able to open a present from the tree – since it isn’t close to christmas yet you’ll be getting a variant of a “common” present, but in the 6 days leading up to christmas you’ll get some rare objects you can’t get anywhere else!

“But my tree only starts with 2 presents!” you say. Well, rumor has it that your tree has a designated delivery man who comes every night, really likes cookies and doesn’t like to be seen by other sims, because he’s ashamed of his facial hair or something. Your tree can hold up to 4 presents, though even if it’s full he’s likely to show up for the cookies anyways. You can find cookies in the “miscellaneous” section of the catalog.

I’d recommend setting out some cookies next to a fireplace (preferably off… but that won’t stop him) and letting him do his job in peace. Christmas is effort enough without all these early deliveries to worry about!

However, that’s not all we’ve got in store… we have new catalog items and a crafting event powered by CC created by the community!

Crafting Event

On Tuesday morning, the Mountaintop DADDI & MOMI Hospital System (MDMHS) issued a public health alert:

For reasons unknown, an epidemic of “the giggles” has been aggressively moving through the communities of Santa’s elves, rendering them all but paralyzed with laughter in a time when they are accustomed to keeping those tiny little noses to the grindstones for the final 11th hour push to finish their gifts before Christmas day. MDMHS is working around the clock to monitor the symptoms and attempt to provide remedy to the unknown ailment as soon as possible. These include holding one’s breath, thinking about something sad, drinking a giant glass of water, and so forth. We will provide further information as we progress toward a cure—or at least any success toward curbing the symptoms.

In a rare public statement, Governor Burglar Cop has responded to the halt of Christmas gift creation, and issued a plea to the citizens of Sunrise Crater: “We need every able citizen and nimble pair of hands to get themselves down to the Winter Workshop of Wonders to help with the work stoppage. We must finish the work in time for Santa to deliver the gifts to every household in Sunrise Crater. Drop in regularly to receive the new shipments of materials and build, build, build! I will not go down in history as the first governor of Sunrise Crater to have failed Santa Claus!!”

When asked about the growing pressure he’s received as of late to break each neighborhood into its own governing body, led by locally elected mayors, Governor Cop responded with “tf” and left the press conference.

Credits

This year’s holiday event would not have been possible without the fabulous work of:

• @Andrew (AOG / Sir Andrew) (3D and 2D art)
• @S.Q.U.A.S.H. Miha (3D and 2D art)
• @˙ʎɹɔ oʇ ʇɟǝl sɹɐǝʇ ou (3D and 2D art)
• @B.A.B.I. BrandonSJ ((3D and 2D art)
• @jwofles (3D and 2D art)
• @D.A.D.D.I. S1ndle (3D and 2D art, Putting it all together)
• @M.O.M.I. Raeven (Putting it all together, Event planning)
• @D.U.C.K.I. Fawn (Catalog strings, Lot design, Lot description/name, Event planning)
• @D.A.D.D.I. dotequals (Lot design, testing, Event planning)
• @rip in peri peri ( ,  )

I’m excited to announce that after months of development, we are finally ready to reveal our next core feature, Neighbourhoods! ..but not like you might have expected! There is still a little while before we can release the feature fully, but we are revealing it early because we need your input!

Neighbourhoods in the original TSO were very simple – any property could subscribe to any neighbourhood regardless of location, and they didn’t have any gameplay effect. While this allowed a lot of freedom, you often had neighbours whose lots were all in different neighbourhoods. There wasn’t even a way to list all houses in a neighbourhood – they were simply an afterthought to add a slither of community interaction to the original’s rather uninteresting city view.

I’ve built a system entirely from the ground up that aims to bring living, active neighbourhoods to FreeSO, while adding new community elements, a lot more interactivity, and new competitive goals for sims to strive for.

FreeSO’s neighbourhoods are fixed regions in city view that have a name and description that lets people know what that neighbourhood is all about. They’re centered on key features of the city’s landscape, giving each neighbourhood a unique identity. Interaction with neighbourhoods starts when you’re choosing the location for your lot – move next to your friends, in a community that you like, or just because you like the view. Neighbourhoods show up in far zoom when you hover them – clicking zooms in on them and opens their page, which highlights the top 10 properties and sims in that area among other things.

In popular neighbourhoods, resident Sims can compete in monthly elections to become its Mayor! Currently, Mayors are rewarded with three special powers that normal sims only dream of. Mayors have control over an additional lot over their normal residence – they can place and build the Town Hall lot for that neighbourhood without having to move out of their existing property! The Mayor’s ability to add objects and architecture to the Town Hall can also be shared with Sims they trust, by adding up to 100 “donators”. They also get priority on that neighbourhood’s bulletin board, and a special badge whenever they visit a lot in that neighbourhood. More details on these features will come on release!

Name our Neighbourhoods!

We’re posting this now because we need your help – we need names and descriptions for the neighborhoods in Sunrise Crater! This will be a lot less formal than the object descriptions – there will be no voting, we will be taking the best suggestions, and encourage you to work together with the people who live in that region (or want to) to pick the best.

For more information, see this section on the forums:
http://forum.freeso.org/forums/neighbourhood-suggestions.41/

You can either post in the main stickied thread for small suggestions, or post your own thread for larger ones or co-ordinated efforts. These suggestions will define the state of Sunrise Crater for many years to come, so please give it a shot!

The feature is still under heavy development, and since it has a large number of new systems it requires a lot of indepth private testing before we can introduce it on the public servers. You might not even see it this month, since its progress relies entirely on when I can work on it. But I guarantee it will be worth the wait!

Note that because of our rather low playerbase and the scale of this feature, only the two most popular neighbourhoods will have elections and a Town Hall on the first month. This feature is designed for a large number of players in each city – I’m hoping we will see its full potential when we finally launch. If you want to be the first mayor of a Neighbourhood, consider moving where the most activity is!

I hope you guys are as excited as I am about this feature – I’ll keep developing it over the weeks to come! In the mean time, get to suggesting!

– Rhys

Easy-Peasy

Almost 9 months ago a simple idea for our very first custom content object brought S1ndle, Raeven, and I into a light-hearted but mutually motivating partnership that has evolved into a monster production line of creativity, ingenuity, and tenacity…

Oh how wrong I was…it would not be easy, but would take almost 9 months!

Of course at the time, little did I know that this “blackjack” object had absolutely NOTHING done to it and that even creating BlackjackEOD would essentially be like creating custom content from scratch. But that would be a pleasant surprise for me later when I finally got around to opening the blackjack.iff and blackjacksemiglobal.iff in Volcanic…Nonetheless, this relatively new master remesher S1ndle guy delivered some amazing artwork faster than I could have imagined.

S1ndle literally turns it around in a week and a half…

That artwork would remain untouched for months, since after finishing the massive effort of RouletteEOD I would discover that the blackjack object resembled that roulette object quite a lot. Way too much…wow in fact it was just roulette.iff copied over with a few graphical and string/subroutine name changes. Crap.

Continue reading “So You Want to Make an EOD?” →

Further Plans

A variant of maze will be introduced in future with the Gameplay rethought to be more resilient against modern tech, as I have stated in the past. We’ve dubbed this “Maze 2.0”, and will be revealing more details in the future. The money group object rectangle will be complete!

Additionally, for Maze and our next feature, you will be able to toggle their new and old behaviour on a server level some time in the future. If someone capable were to take the game in a different direction, and even just go full vanilla, they should be able to do that by the time we launch. This is a re-implementation project first and foremost, after all. This distinction will let us go our own way with game changes, as we have been, to freshen things up and try our new ideas that TSO/EA Land never would had the chance to.

I think I’ve spoiled enough about what I’m still working on, so I’m going to leave you hanging there. I will end with two extra announcements: the first is that we will be moving the server software to .NET Core rather than Mono, which should provide more reliable memory usage and performance in line with what we test on our Windows development machines.

The second announcement is that you can now choose your reaction to player interactions before they occur. Now you can finally hot kiss 100 times without even pausing for a moment.

– Rhys

Surprise! We have a special update for you – and it’s not even what we were teasing in the last blog post! It will release in a few hours, along with the announcement of a whole new class of object and a long awaited one. A blog will follow shortly after explaining everything – so stay put… in the meanwhile, we can go into a bit of detail about how this crazy project came about, the effort that went into it, and how the game actually works.

Texas Hold-em is coming to FreeSO, thanks to the efforts of everyone on the team! We’re also releasing a new set of objects tailored to casino environments, as you can see above, which you can get from the in-game catalog. You can even get virtually plastered at the bar – a perfect casino experience.

Origins

Long, long ago in the far off time of October 2017, after a joking back and forth with one of the admins I was recruited for an extra special secret project.

The Exchange that started it all.

The extra special secret project was a collaboration between The Architect, M.O.M.I. Raeven, and myself, we were going to create a clone of the unused Blackjack table, give it new art assets and gameplay, and turn it into Texas hold ‘em. My task was to create the art assets necessary for the object while Architect and Raeven worked on the underlying code to make the object actually function.

A brief timeline of the creation of the Texas hold ‘em table, from early conception to first version.

Since the object was to be a clone of the Blackjack table and would recycle the animations and much of the code I had to keep the new Texas hold ‘em table within the same basic blueprint to make it work with the animations better. I had originally had it set at a normal table’s height since I did not know how tall the actual Blackjack table was. And overtime you can see how it morphed into its final form.

However it was decided that the original Blackjack table would be a higher priority since it was missing much of the code needed to make it work, and so efforts were shifted to that, in fact it was missing so much that the table had to essentially be remade from scratch, which Architect and Raeven did so very beautifully. At the same time it was also decided that in order to get some Custom Content out faster the Texas hold ‘em table would be shelved for the time being, this lead to the creation of two new slot machines, two taxis, christmas pudding, and a few other miscellaneous objects.

Back in January I came up with the idea of releasing several objects alongside the Texas hold ‘em table, in a set I referred to as ‘High Roller Stuff.’ This set was set to be expansive, with tables, chairs, and many other objects. However most of them ended up being cut to save on work time, gone was the coffee table, end table, buffet table, dining table, shrimp platter, dining chair, bench, tip jar, and trash bin, and alongside work on this set I set out to revise the original Texas hold ‘em table since at this point I had changed the techniques I used for modeling and texture painting, and ended up with the version seen in-game.

The final version.

The whole point of this set of objects as decided by Architect, was to show to the community at large that custom content was indeed possible with a little bit work and some elbow grease, and alongside the release of the set came a guide on creating your own custom content for FreeSO written by the amazingly fantastic M.O.M.I. Raeven, and a guide on creating EODs written by the also amazingly fantastic Architect.

How to Play (written by Fawn)

Similar to poker, the goal of Texas hold ’em is to have the best poker hand on the table. However, in Hold’em Casino all you need to have is a better poker hand than the MOMI dealer. This means your friends can stay your friends, and you will not have to worry about practising your poker face in the bathroom mirror. A poker hand is a set of 5 cards that contain combinations, for example pairs, four of a kind or a royal flush (a list of these can be viewed on the items “Learn to Use.. Payout” option). In hold ’em there are up to 7 cards that your poker hand will be selected from.

Start off by choosing your betting amounts. There are two kinds of bets you can make in hold ’em. Firstly, is an “Ante” bet. This is your mandatory bet towards having a winning poker hand. Think carefully about how much you want to bet as if you decide to “call” (explained later) you will have to pay twice the amount of your Ante bet, on top of your initial bet. You can also play an optional “Side” bet which we will discuss in a moment.

After placing your bet, the first round of cards will be dealt out. All players (including the dealer) will receive 2 cards. Next, 3 community cards will be placed in the centre of the table. The dealer’s cards will not yet be revealed, so you will have no idea what their poker hand will consist of. If you initially placed a side bet and your 2 cards plus the 3 community cards contain any poker hands (this will be automatically calculated and must be a pair of aces or higher), then you will instantly win that bet!

Now comes the tough decision, do you fold or call? If you think your hand could be an even bigger winner, you can call. This will force you to pay double on top of your initial Ante bet, however the 2 final community cards will be flipped over, meaning out of the 7 available cards your chances of having a poker hand are much higher. Any winning hands are automatically calculated and paid out. If you do not want to risk calling because your hand is terrible, you can fold, which removes you from that round and your ante bet will be lost.

So put on your cowboy hats and smash your piggy banks! The real question is, are you feeling lucky?

To Conclude…

And now all is said and done, the Texas hold ‘em set has been released into the wild for all to enjoy. But what comes next? Well…
Who’s to say?

~S1ndle