For over a year now, I have been working on The Sims 1 Console neighborhood, but in a TS1 PC save file! This neighborhood has every sim in it that was featured in the console version! The only sims that are not featured are the premade sims that you can choose as a premade to play as in the Challenge (2 Player) mode. But every sim from both Play the Sims, Get a Life, and even some sims featured solely in the 2 player modes are featured.
For the Play the Sims mode families, I have went ahead and moved in 3 families that were featured in the Sims 1 (Console), which are: The Newbies at Sim Lane 7, the Goths at Sim Lane 5, and The Roomies at Sim Lane 3. The Pleasant and Bachelor families are still in the family bin!
For the Get a Life families, most of them are still in the family bin. Some of the families I did take the liberty of moving into their own house. I placed Mom in her house Money from Mom, Dudley and Mimi are living together at Party Animals, Malcolm Landgrabb is living in The Last Simoleon, and Roxy Hottie is currently living in the Dream Mansion (Randy Hottie is living in the Party Guys household, but that's up to the player if they want to move him in with Roxy Hottie). The rest of the families such as Foofaraw, Thimblewitt, Peacock, Cheeky, etc. are still in the family bin. *I also want to add that Betty Roomies is absent from the Roomies household from the Get a Life family, and instead she is only present in the Newbie household.
For the 2 player mode families, the only ones I moved in was the Handyman's family and the Maid's family in their respective houses. I did also feature some Townie families that have appeared in different levels, such as the sims that appeared at The Park, as well as the "messy neighbors" from the Maid and Handyman scenarios.
I kept this neighborhood 99% CC free. The only CC I would highly recommend that you grab is the Fran Foofaraw head and body which was shared on MadRayne's discord.
6 months later and I have another bit of fun about The Sims for Console! And with a weird title to boot!
If you want to see more, read below!
In my previous post I had mentioned that I was able to open the .IFF files for the sims themselves. The reason that I was able to do that in the first place was because the console version and the PC version are, for all intents and purposes, the same game!
In fact, you can take sim .IFF files from the console version, plop them into the PC version, and they will function flawlessly! Except for their appearances…
In the PC version of Create-A-Sim, you were only able to change the whole head and whole body. But the console version featured a much more elaborate system, with the player being able to change the sim’s hair, face, and clothing independently, as well as do other things like change the color, as well as add and remove accessories at will.
The PC version uses a resource within a sim’s .IFF to keep track of their appearance, these are called bodystrings.
Sims from the console version still have this resource within their .IFF as well! However because the sims’ appearances are vastly different between the two versions, the bodystrings inside a console sim’s .IFF go unseen. However when a sim from the console version is forcibly brought into the PC version, these previously unseen bodystrings can be seen! But most sims, like the GOTH family pictured above, use a set of default heads and bodies for their respective age groups, see below.
However! There are a few exceptions to this rule, and a handful of sims have uniquely defined appearances in their body strings, despite never being used by the game. So… here they are!
Freeplay Sims:
Interestingly enough, only the unused sims get to have unused unique PC bodystrings. Not even Betty Newbie!
Get a Life Sims:
Some interesting notes and observations about these appearances though:
They don't correlate to their proper appearances within the console version, like at all. They also only use light skin for whatever reason, not sure why. I do think it's a little funny that BETTY ROOMIES ended up with the same head that Betty Newbie from the PC version uses though! I also find it to be rather interesting that several sims use heads or bodies from the House Party Expansion Pack, what, if anything, that means though, I don't know.
As mentioned before, every other sim, apart from these select 17 sims use the same bodystrings. Even the duplicates of the Get a Life sims that exist within the neighborhood used for Bonus Game lots don't have this quirk.
I'm honestly not sure why these are even a thing. They could potentially be early development leftovers, but what purpose they served, if any at all, is a mystery to me.
The Sims for Console has always been a particularly fascinating game, to me at least, for how well it captures the gameplay and feel of the original PC Version. After reading through Drew1440’s exploits with looking through the data and managing to convert aspects of the original console version with ease, I decided to take a look for myself!
And to spare people from an (un)necessarily long post, the rest of it is below the cut!
After some trial and error and lots of searching, I managed to find out that they were using files that originate from the GameCube version of Bustin’ Out (something that they never mentioned, mind you!). Which somehow contains nearly everything from the original console version! The original freeplay neighborhood, the neighborhood used for Get a Life, the neighborhood used for the 2-Player PVP minigames, even the .IFF files for the objects! It was all present within the files of Bustin’ Out, and easily accessible too!
I poked around the UserData folder, which contained the lots and sims for the freeplay neighborhood from the original console version, and saw that there was a total of 23 User files, but the neighborhood only had 12 playable sims by default, which of course begged the question of: Who are these 11 extra sims?
I opened each of the User files one by one in IFFPencil2, a program that lets you open and edit .IFF files from The Sims 1. By looking at their OBJD and their CTSS entries, I was able to determine exactly who was who, and charted them out using a very professional looking spreadsheet, featuring comic sans:
Now I had a list of all the sims in the neighborhood, I could easily tell who was likely to be unused because in the original console version, sims could only have their names WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. Sadly two of the User files were completely blank and had no extant information, but that still left exactly 9 sims with extant information.
The thing about these sims is that we don’t have any information as to what their purpose was exactly, they could have been created as a cast of original sims to populate the freeplay neighborhood before Edge of Reality ultimately ported the population of the PC neighborhood over. They could have also been created as a means of testing the new Create-A-Sim system. They could have even been created purely for fun with no intention of including them in the game to begin with. We may never know the answer behind why they are present, but nevertheless, they are here.
Another interesting note about these User files, they are otherwise blank! With no careers, personality, skills, or interests to speak of! They also don’t have any family assigned to them either, meaning that their family names are also unknown.
One of the files that eventually piqued my interest was ALLCHARACTERS.rsp (the caps are important!). This file contains the data that determines what a sim looks like in-game by defining the upper and lower bodies that they use, along with face type, hair, skin tone, among other things. And this file just so happens to contain a lot of entries for sims from the original console version, including the freeplay sims. In fact this file is almost made up entirely of entries for sims from the original console version.
But one of the most interesting aspects of this file is that there are entries for sims that don’t exist in the final game, including 8 of the 9 unused sims from the freeplay neighborhood! So not only was there further information on their existence, but also the exact data needed to recreate their appearances, so that is exactly what I have done!
Alicia
Ariel
Ol' Joe
Jeffy
Laurie
Fred
Dez
Danielle
Sadly Michael (not to be confused with MICHAEL BACHELOR, who is present in normal gameplay and playable) did not have an entry in ALLCHARACTERS.rsp to facilitate a recreation. :(
The process of doing this was actually pretty straight-forward once I had everything laid out. By looking at the freeplay sims in-game alongside their entries in ALLCHARACTERS.rsp, I was able to determine the the mesh indexes (upper body, lower body, face style, etc.) started at 0, while anything to do with color, except for skin tones, started at 1. Using that information and just counting along as I scrolled through items in Create-A-Sim, I could chart out exactly which items corresponded with their respective mesh index, which I double-checked against existing in-game sims for the sake of accuracy.
There are plenty of other sims with entries in ALLCHARCTERS.rsp who seem to be leftover from the original console game and also seemingly unused, and I do want to recreate them as well, but for right now at least, it’s just the sims from the freeplay neighborhood.
