An ancient world, revived from dusty files lying dormant and entombed within a mega-corp's forgotten server: FreeSO (for “Free Simulator Online”) is a project from "Rhys", a full-time student and semi-anonymous developer, who's created a way to make Electronic Arts' long-discontinued Sims Online MMO re-playable once again:
First, you need to install the original game. This is still available from EA’s servers at http://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/misc/tso/ (though it may not be for long!) After this, you should download the latest build from our buildbot at http://servo.freeso.org...
On its own, the FreeSO client does not display any copyrighted material, and is not distributed with it. The game files are provided by the user, and the client simply reads the files the user provides. In this sense, our replacement client is essentially a glorified The Sims Online™ file reader, as all original graphics, sounds, UI layouts and game objects are simply read and simulated by the client. The game server transmits metadata generated from the execution of these scripts (avatar money values, lot/object state, avatar appearances, hash of game files for version identification) but does not transmit any copyrighted material either.
You might think there would be little or no interest in a virtual world which had its heyday some 15 years ago (it was on the cover of Newsweek in 2002), but you'd be wrong -- the game has crashed from overwhelming interest:
With over 1000 people, we would not even be able to get everyone in the building, and having all new users play at exactly the same time without lots to split everyone into would be a recipe for disaster. Picking a server configuration to allow this many users to play would be a complete shot in the dark – and we wouldn’t know the root cause or true capacity of a server configuration if we were way over it (it would just crash immediately)
More here on next steps for FreeSO. Interestingly, Rhys reports that half the user traffic is coming from Brazilians... which suggests a future for FreeSO. I bet a localized version of the reader, optimized for Android smartphones popular in Brazil and the rest of the developing world, could be quite successful. If EA was smart, they'd hire Rhys to try and do just that.
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The Sims Online going down is how we got some of our greatest talent in Second Life. I once interviewed Lexi Morgan, and found that she and many of her friends had all come from there, and had made themselves a home in Second Life, so I am glad it went down, but glad that it is back for many :)
Posted by: Sasy Scarborough | Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 03:18 PM