I made an unusual change to the Date Simulator, it has been on the online version for a while, thought I’d release the changes to the offline version.
I added “On mouse over” and “On mouse out” text to every link on the pictures which displays either an action (in italics) or a quote (not in italics) underneath what Ariane says. The idea is to give it a more comic book feel, while also making things easier to read and navigate on small browser windows (i.e. mobile phones). Some mobile browsers still don’t work, unfortunately, but it works well anyways.
You may notice that sometimes the text below and the text on the link does not match, this is intentional. In some places the text below is random which you can change by moving your mouse over the link, the text on the link remains generic. If the text below does not make sense, look at the link text.
Except for a couple of minor bug fixes, there is no change to game play from version 6.0.
I decided I have done enough tweaking and released Dating Sim 6.0 as a download. I was going to release it as 5.9 and then have 6.0 be the “bug free” version of 5.9, but being bug free is likely an impossibility anyways.
Since version 5.0 I have looked over all the “places”, especially the older ones, and I have enhanced them all in some way. I took a look at version 5.8 and decided the weakest parts were the non-romantic lake beach, the boat, and the home improvement store. There were also some bugs in the nightclub that could not be fixed without a complete code rewrite.
The other enhancement I had made since 5.8 is to organize my rendering files better. The Ariane model has changed here and there over the years, and some of the older pictures did not look as good as the later ones. So I went and re-rendered a bunch of the older pics using the newer Ariane models. These pictures are “cleaner” looking and actually compress into smaller jpg files. Even though there is more content, version 6.0 is actually a smaller download than version 5.8.
Two of the games I spend a lot of time on both recently announced major upgrades.
Second Life 2.0
The recent Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) had some presentations from Linden Labs with demonstrations of upcoming upgrades. Among them a much better organized viewer, much requested mesh imports (not till 2010), reflective surfaces (also not till 2010), and a bunch of other features.
More info on the new viewer can be found here. Here is a video. We could see the new viewer later this fall.
Guild Wars 2
There are new MMORPG’s coming out that have tempted me to get back into online role play games. Aion, Champions Online, and Fallen Earth are three new ones for fantasy, comic book, and post apocalypse fans.
But now word comes that Guild Wars 2 is coming out maybe as early as the end of this year. Which is surprising, since I was hearing possibly 2011 before. This is the one I am most looking forward to. In Guild Wars 1 you always played as a human. In Guild Wars 2, there are five races to choose from, and I plan to have characters in all five.
I have mentioned before that a lot of the early beta members of There came from the now defunct The Sims Online. We found in There many of the things we wished we could do in The Sims Online but could not due to the 2.5D nature of TSO. There were a few things we missed from TSO though, the most common requested was a two person hug emote.
That was five years ago, today we finally have it!
So, how do you hug in There? Well first you and the person you want to hug have to install the updated client. Don’t try updating your old client to the new one, that is generally just asking for trouble in There.
Next you have to be in the same chat group, so talk to one another until you join the group. Then you have to look at each other. Then you both have to say ‘hug within five seconds of each other. I’m not sure why it is so short. If you plan on giving lots of hugs, you better make a macro.
The video below shows hugs are useable in all gender combinations, and they are even different depending on the gender.
